The Midnight House Read online

  The third shot tore open his skull and scattered his brains over the Lexus’s smooth leather. The shooter looked down, making sure that Fisher was dead. Unscrewed the silencer and tucked away the pistol. Looked up and down the empty street. Noticed the phone on the passenger seat and, the only unplanned moment in the whole operation, reached across Fisher’s body and grabbed it. Switched it off so it couldn’t be traced. Closed the door of the Lexus and smoothly walked away, to the mountain bike propped against a utility pole a half block down. Start to finish, including all three phone calls, the murder took barely a minute.

  AT 7 : 15 PRECISELY, Rajiv Jyoti walked out of his front gate, tapping away on his iPhone. He reached for the door. Then he looked at Fisher. And screamed and dropped his phone and trotted shakily around the Lexus. He opened the door carefully, even in his distress wanting to be sure that none of Fisher’s blood wound up on his six-hundred-dollar hand-tailored pants.

  Jyoti wasn’t a doctor, but he could see that Fisher was beyond help. He looked at the body and up and down the empty street, wondering why no one had heard the shots, wondering if whoever had killed Fisher would be coming back for him, wondering if he had been the real target. The seconds stretched on and still Jyoti stood motionless, until the drip of blood on the pavement shocked him to life. He ran back into his front yard, slammed the gate shut, and ran into the house.

  Then, finally, he dialed 911.

  2

  MOUNT ADAMS, NEW HAMPSHIRE

  The trail wasn’t much, faded white chevrons every hundred yards, their paint hardly visible in the cloud-beaten light. They beckoned John Wells up the mountain half heartedly, with New England reserve. Come or don’t, it’s all the same to us, they said. Their lack of enthusiasm didn’t bother Wells. He stalked upward, eating ground with long strides, ignoring the mud sucking at his heels. A clot of clouds covered the sky, and a moist wind blew from the north, promising rain or even snow.

  Wells hadn’t dressed for snow. He had deliberately left himself exposed. He wore jeans, Doc Martens, a T-shirt, a light wool sweater. Wool socks were his only concession to the weather. He didn’t mind being cold. In fact, he wanted to be cold. But he didn’t want to lose a toe to frostbite.

  Wells wasn’t properly equipped, either. He was thinking about camping overnight, but he hadn’t brought a sleeping bag or tent, only a cotton sleep sack and a foil blanket. No stove, only a bag of dried fruit and PowerBars. No GPS, only a torn map, a compass, and a pen-light. His gear fit easily into his blue daypack.

  And no gun. Not a sleek black Beretta, not an old pearl-handled Smith & Wesson, not an M-16 or a 12-gauge. No knife, either. No weapons of any kind. His Glock and Makarov were tucked away in a lockbox at his cabin. Since coming to New Hampshire six months before, he’d touched them only twice, to clean them.

  For twenty years, Wells had surrounded himself with guns. He’d put them to use in Afghanistan and Chechnya and China and Russia, Atlanta and New York and Washington. Now he was trying to imagine life as a civilian.

  But he had to admit that more and more he found himself missing the feel of the pistols in his hands, their heft and balance, especially his favorite, the Makarov, an undeniably lousy gun but one that had seen him through any number of tight spots. He understood now why ex-smokers said they missed the physical act of smoking, of flicking lighter to cigarette, as much as the nicotine itself.

  WELLS WASN’ T ALONE on the trail. Trotting three steps ahead was his new companion. Tonka, a lean, agile dog, with a long snout and a thick brown coat. She banged her bushy tail against tree trunks as she climbed, sending Wells a single message: let’s go, let’s go, let’s go. She was part husky, part shepherd. In his too-thin sweater, Wells might have a rough night if the snow came down. Tonka would be fine.

  Wells had rescued her from a shelter in Conway three months before, a couple of days before she was scheduled to be put down. She took a shine to him immediately, jumped onto the bench beside him and nuzzled against his shoulder. Wells had always gotten along with animals. People, not so much.

  “Found her tied to the fence outside, no name tag, no chip,” the woman at the shelter said.

  “Chip?”

  “A lot of them have ID microchips implanted now, under the skin. That way we can trace them to their owners even without their tags. This little lady, she didn’t have a chip.”

  “That happen a lot? The abandoning, I mean.”

  “More than you’d think. ’Specially now. People have to choose between their kids and their dog, dog’s gonna lose. You can see she’s been cared for, she’s not afraid of people. She’s a good girl. I don’t think they, the owners, wanted to do this. Though who knows? ”

  “I’ll take her,” Wells said.

  “Just like that? ”

  “Why not? ”

  “Dog’s a commitment. Ever owned one before? ”

  “Growing up.”

  “You live around here?”

  “Berlin.” Berlin was about fifty miles north of Conway. “Moved in a couple months back.”

  “Do you travel a lot? ”

  “Once in a while,” Wells said.

  “And you’re sure you’ll be able to take care of her, Mr. Cant? ”

  Wells’s new driver’s license and credit cards identified him as Clarkson Cant. Every time he had to use them, Wells imagined Ellis Shafer smirking. Shafer, his sort-of boss at the agency, a man with the sense of humor of a not-so-naughty ten-year-old. Wells had almost demanded a less ridiculous alias before deciding not to give Shafer the satisfaction.

  “Yes,” Wells said evenly. He refrained from pointing out that the dog would surely choose him, whatever his flaws, over the alternative.

  The woman looked Wells over, considering his patched-up jeans, shaggy hair, and half-grown beard. Finally she nodded. “Okay. Fill out the papers, pay the fee, she’s yours.”

  Wells and the dog had gotten along fine ever since. She’d been a boon companion during the winter, which had been harsh even by the standards of northern New Hampshire. For two straight weeks in February the temperature stayed below zero, a lung-burning, skin-sloughing cold that kept Wells inside except for runs to the grocery store and stretches of wood chopping. Wells loved working the ax. The sky was bright blue and the air bone-dry, and the logs split easily under the blade. Tonka, no dummy, watched from inside the cabin. He couldn’t pretend he was entirely alone. Trucks rumbled distantly and snowmobiles whined along the creek trail. But Wells didn’t mind. In fact, he liked being reminded that the world was still there, with or without him.

  A YEAR BEFORE, Jennifer Exley, Wells’s fiancée, had almost died in an assassination attempt aimed at Wells. In the aftermath, she’d demanded that he quit the agency. Wells couldn’t. But he couldn’t accept that he’d lost Exley, either. So he’d fled Washington, fled her. Though even Shafer, never known for his tact, was too polite to use that word.

  For months he backpacked through Europe and Asia, bunking in hostels alongside students half his age. Then he rented a cabin in southwest Montana, where he’d grown up. But after a week, he left. Heather and Evan, his ex-wife and son, lived in Missoula with Heather’s second husband. Their proximity disturbed him. He wanted to make amends with Evan, at least announce his presence to the boy. Take him out for pizza. But the simple act of picking up the phone, asking to speak to his son, left him shaking his head.

  Years before, when he’d last talked to Heather, she’d told him she wouldn’t let him parachute in and then disappear again. At the time, Wells understood. The agency had been on the verge of declaring him a terrorist. These days no one would question his loyalty to the United States. His judgment maybe, but not his loyalty. But he knew Heather’s feelings hadn’t changed. Quit the job, she would tell him. Come back to earth and then we’ll talk. Just as Exley had.

  Only Wells couldn’t quit. He wished he could tell himself that his sense of duty and honor wouldn’t let him. And those fine words were part of the reason. But only
part. In truth, he feared being bored. Feared, he supposed, that one day people would ask him, “Didn’t you used to be John Wells? ”

  No, he couldn’t quit. But he wasn’t ready to work again—not yet, anyway. So no to Exley, no to Heather, no to Evan. He would be alone.

  He left Montana, headed east, to the Presidential Mountains of New Hampshire. Wells remembered his surprise when, as a fresh-man at Dartmouth, he’d first seen the Presidentials. He’d imagined that mountains in the East were hummocks. But Mount Washington towered nearly a mile over the valley to its east. And its weather was fierce. The observatory at its peak had measured the highest wind ever recorded, 231 miles an hour. If the Sawtooth Mountains were out, the Presidentials would do.

  Wells rented a two-room cabin on a gravel road in Berlin, a little town just north of Mount Washington. He had twelve acres to himself and a woodstove for heat. The place also came with DirecTV, and Wells had to admit that he watched more television than he’d planned. Still, he plowed through a couple books a week, mainly biographies. Jackson, Lincoln, Rockefeller, Churchill, great men facing great obstacles. War, slavery, depressions global and personal. No women, and no religion. Not the Bible, not the New Testament, not the Quran. In his cabin, alone, he wanted the tangible consolations of the world as it was, not the uncertain promises of paradise.

  For the same reason, he worked out incessantly. He turned the cabin’s second room into a miniature gym. Every weekday afternoon he turned on the television—okay, he’d admit it, he watched General Hospital and then Oprah; he wasn’t proud of himself, but the truth was the truth—and spent an hour running and an hour lifting. On Saturdays, before the winter got too nasty, he hiked Mount Washington, carrying a frame pack loaded with twenty-pound bags of dog food. In the winter he substituted a three-hour climb on the treadmill, eight thousand vertical feet.

  A mental renaissance came along with the physical. In his first months without Exley, he’d awoken more than once certain that she was beside him. When he reached for her and didn’t find her, his mind refused to accept her absence. He told himself that his fingers were lying, that she really was with him. As though he were an amputee insisting on the presence of a lost arm or leg. Then he would wake fully and feel the same emptiness he’d felt when he’d learned his mother had died and been buried while he was eight thousand miles away.

  Slowly, though, his dislocation and loneliness faded. He still missed Exley badly, but part of him was happy that he was no longer hurting her. She’d made him choose, her or the job, and he’d chosen. One day, if they were meant to be, they would be.

  As the days got longer and the worst of the winter faded, Wells felt his thirst for action returning. Hard as the job had been, it had given him the chance to see worlds most people couldn’t even imagine. Years before, during the worst sickness of his life, he’d had a dream—a vision, really—that the guns he carried were part of his body. He couldn’t put them down even at the cost of losing his chance at Heaven. Wells was no fan of tarot cards or psychics, but he had never forgotten that dream, or doubted its truth. He couldn’t stay in New Hampshire forever. Soon enough, the call would come, and he’d have to answer.

  But for now he was free. And so this morning, with clouds hiding the sun and the wind whistling from the north, he had decided to brace himself with his first big hike of the new year. He hedged his bets slightly, choosing to go up Mount Adams, slightly lower and easier than Mount Washington. He packed his daypack and offered Tonka two cans of her favorite high-protein food. She knew where they were going without being told. When he opened the cabin door, she headed straight for his Subaru WRX, her tail wagging wildly. Then she stood against the front door and tried to open it herself.

  NOW HE WAS CLOSING on the peak of Mount Adams, scrambling over trees that the winter’s winds had torn down. He hopped over an iced-over stream and landed in a thick patch of muddy snow that dirtied his jeans. As he reached the final stretch, a cold drizzle began, matting down his unkempt hair. Tonka had changed her mind. She looked up at him, asking wordlessly why he’d brought her out in such weather.

  “You wanted to come. I warned you.”

  The last half mile the trail turned to scree, loose rocks and boulders. Wells pulled his gloves from his pack and climbed hand over hand. He was cold now, cold through and through, and he loved the gray sky above and gray rock below, loved everything around him. He was free. If he slipped and broke a leg on this mountain, if the weather turned ugly and somehow he died up here, the earth wouldn’t care. He was in a mortal battle, and yet he didn’t have to hurt anyone to win. He needed only to survive.

  His legs chilled and lungs aching, he reached the summit and surveyed the mountains around him. To the south, the mass of Mount Washington dominated. To the north, the range fell off sharply, and the narrow path of a river, probably the Upper Ammonoosuc, was just visible through the brown bark below. The trees had not yet budded for spring, and the valleys beneath Wells were almost monochrome, a mix of gray and white and flat dark green from the pines and firs, the only flashes of color coming from the cars and trucks rolling on Highway 2.

  Tonka bumped against his legs and whined quietly, telling him that he might be enjoying this communion with nature, but she was cold and wet and wanted off the mountain.

  “I thought you were tougher than this, bud,” he said. “You’re the one with the fur coat.”

  He reached into his jacket for a PowerBar, gave half to her, swallowed the other half in two ungraceful bites. Still the dog’s tail drooped.

  “All right,” he said. “I get it.”

  Wells took a final survey of the land. And realized he wasn’t alone. Several paths climbed Mount Adams. Wells had come up the west face, the main trail for day hikers. But the mountain could also be reached from the northeast or the south, on a path that was part of the Appalachian Trail. A hiker had just popped out from a ridge on the northeast side of the mountain, a couple of hundred yards away.

  “Just a sec,” Wells said to Tonka. “Let’s see.”

  He was surprised anyone else had braved the weather, more surprised when the hiker turned out to be a woman. She was much better equipped than he was. She carried a solid frame pack with a tent attached and wore a red jacket and jeans and boots and a floppy hat to keep the rain away. She was tall and solidly built and moved confidently up the mountain. When she got close, she waved and gave him a friendly gap-toothed smile. He wouldn’t have guessed a woman alone up here would be so confident meeting a strange man and a strange dog. Then he saw the pistol holstered on her hip, half hidden under her jacket.

  “Nice day for a hike,” he said.

  “Isn’t it, though? ”

  “Least you dressed for it,” Wells said. “I was gonna stay out overnight, but the dog says no.”

  “You blame the dog? ”

  “For everything.”

  She reached out a hand and they shook through the gloves. “I’m Anne.”

  “John,” he said, using his real name for the first time in months. He nodded to the dog. “This is Tonka.”

  She smiled again. Despite the frigid rain, Wells felt a sudden warmth in his groin. He kept holding her hand until finally she let go.

  “Hi, Anne.”

  “What’s a nice flatlander like you doing in a place like this? ”

  “Is it that obvious? ”

  “You have all your teeth.”

  “Is that joke allowed? ”

  “For me.”

  “I’ve been living in Berlin the last few months, but I’m from D.C.”

  “And came to New Hampshire for the winter. Bold. Stupid, but bold.”

  “I got a great deal on a cabin. Frostbite included.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  She smiled, and Wells realized he wanted very badly to keep the conversation going. “How about you?” he said. “I take it you’re a native.”

  “Conway.” Conway was about forty miles south of Berlin. “I like being up here wh
en it’s quiet. No city slickers to spoil the view.”

  Wells nodded at her pistol. “Looks to me you could clear the trail whenever you wanted.”

  “I don’t shoot anyone who doesn’t deserve it.”

  “Fortunately, that leaves plenty of targets.”

  “My ex-husband, for one.”

  Now they were flirting, Wells thought. A deliberate mention of an ex-husband had to count as flirting. Though he wasn’t totally sure. He hadn’t flirted in a long time. Tonka let out a growl that turned into a deep bark, and he decided to quit while he was ahead. “She has better sense than I do,” he said. “We should get going.”

  “Sure.”

  “Maybe I could take you for a hike sometime.”

  She laughed.

  “I’m sorry. Too cheesy? ”

  “Much, much too cheesy. How about this? I had a reservation tonight at a cabin past Mount Washington. But the weather’s so crummy I might change my mind. You know Fagin’s Pub? ”

  “In Berlin.”

  “None other. I might stop by tonight.”

  “You might.”

  “I might. You should, too.”

  “I’ll do that,” Wells said. “On one condition.”

  “What’s that? ”

  “You leave your gun at home.”

  3

  LOS ANGELES

  The Accord was hidden behind a Silverado. It backed out fast, its driver as anxious to get home as everyone else, and Mike Wyly almost bashed it. He jammed his brakes and horn, and jolted to a stop a foot from its trunk. Its driver waved, a half hearted apology, and went back to her cell phone. Wyly had half a mind to give her a talking-to, but he’d been speeding, too. And she was cute.

  Instead, he waved back and followed her down the ramps of the giant employee parking garage at Universal Studios, six levels of concrete, thousands of cars. He wondered if he’d ever get a pass to park on the lot. These endless left turns were a pain. Especially in a ’67 Mustang convertible without power steering.