Firestorm: An action-packed terrorism thriller (A Christopher Wren Thriller Book 5) (Christopher Wren Thrillers) by Mike Grist & Michael John Grist

Author:Mike Grist & Michael John Grist [Grist, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mike Grist
Published: 2020-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

28. THE DEAD

Wren hated Manhattan.

Not just because it reminded him of his family. Of that night when he'd come back to himself in a terrified panic, panting with a gun in his hand and the stunned faces of his children staring back at him, his wife screaming at him to get out.

No.

He'd always hated the overwhelming mass of people. There were just too many. Too much money. Too much noise and grime and achievement built atop human blood, sweat and bones. He was a child of the desert, raised in the wilderness, and though he'd adapted to other cities over the years, he'd never gotten used to Manhattan.

Riding in his taxi from LaGuardia along Northern Boulevard toward the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge across the East River, he felt that old sense of unease swelling on all sides.

Manhattan wasn't like the other boroughs. Not like the other cities. As if the weight of humanity crushed on top of each other in cage-like apartments and offices thickened reality like a pestilence, hanging in the air and sucking everything around it in for fuel.

Money. Souls. Decency.

It was a prison for ambition. Skyscrapers rising like fortress walls. Dreams baked into the infrastructure. If you could make it there, you could make it anywhere, so why would you ever want to leave?

Chicago or Atlanta or LA or Minneapolis, there were myriad ways out, visible lines leading out to the sky, to the horizon, to some sense of the world lying beyond. But not in Manhattan. Whole lives were conceived, bounded and snuffed out within its borders.

Wren had dark memories of an undercover sting on a human trafficking group shipping Vietnamese children in, thirteen years back. He'd thought he'd seen bad things back then, having come from the Pyramid.

He'd been wrong.

Either side of the cab the low battlements of Queens bled away as Astoria Park spread her dark arms and the support columns of the Koch Bridge rose up in verdigris-green. Dark sky, no stars, only the salt-fogged lights of Manhattan's eastern wall of buildings forming scattershot constellations.

Wren brought up his phone.

McKenzie Slade. He hadn't spoken to her for thirteen years. Not since the Vietnam trafficking operation had collapsed in on itself, as Wren systematically blew out its supporting columns of money. Not since they'd both stood at the entrance to an off-dock Brooklyn storage yard stacked ten high with thousands of twenty-foot shipping containers, knowing full well dozens of children were trapped in one of them, and not knowing which.

No idea. He'd been hasty back then. Blown the support struts of the operation too quickly, burning through middlemen in his rush to reach the kids in time. Back then he'd thought top dogs had to know the locations of all their cargo. There'd be records. A track back.

There'd been no track.

The East River flew by. Wren made the call. It rang exactly seven times before she answered.

"Slade," she said.

She sounded the same. 3:40 a.m., and maybe she'd been sleeping, maybe not. Strict as a slide rule, hard as graphite slate, she'd never been impressed with his past or his pedigree in the CIA.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.