Jackknife Read online

  Fighting for justice, that’s what.

  He couldn’t let himself forget that. His was the voice of blue-state reason and sanity, crying out in the red-state wilderness.

  When his wife had said that she wanted to move back home, back to Texas, at first he’d said forget it, that he wouldn’t be caught dead in such a backward place. But since she was pregnant, she wanted to be closer to her mama—and that was the way she had phrased it, too, closer to her mama—and Burke supposed he could understand that. So he’d agreed, figuring that as smart as he was, he could run rings around those cracker lawyers down South.

  What he hadn’t reckoned with was the good ol’ boy network that ran from the very bottom to the very top of the Texas legal system. The bastards shut him out because he wasn’t one of them. He couldn’t get the important cases, the cases where he might be able to make an actual difference and do some good for the common man.

  No, he was reduced to taking on personal-injury lawsuits on a contingency basis, and not even the big-money tier of those. He supplemented what he made there with DUI and drug-possession and hot-check defenses, which pretty much assured that he was stuck dealing with world-class bubbas and bubbettes. He told himself that he was doing some good by getting fair settlements for people who deserved them…

  But it was a far cry from saving the world as he’d set out to do, wasn’t it?

  Since the traffic wasn’t moving, he glanced at himself in the rearview mirror. When had his face gotten so broad and red and beefy? When had those lines appeared around his eyes? What the hell was that gray doing in hair that was supposed to be thick and black? He’d been in Texas less than ten years, and already that handsome young liberal firebrand who had come out of law school in New York was gone.

  He never should have listened to Rebecca. He should have insisted that they stay right where they were. If they had, he would have gone into politics by now. He’d be a congressman, or maybe even a senator. He’d be in Washington, where he could really accomplish something, instead of creeping along a crowded interstate north of Fort Worth, just another ambulance-chasing shyster.

  And the thing that really sucked about it was that Rebecca was gone. She’d gotten tired of him and left, taking their daughter with her. Burke had had no shot at getting custody, not with the affairs he’d had and the drunken-driving charge—even though he’d been able to get it dismissed—and all the other crap Rebecca had threatened to dredge up if she had to. He went along with what she wanted, so that Vicky wouldn’t have to be dragged into a nasty court fight.

  And if he wanted to be honest about it, he wouldn’t have had a whole lot of ammunition to use against Rebecca anyway. She was a smart woman…just not smart enough to realize that she shouldn’t have married some handsome young crusading attorney when she went off to New York to study art.

  Burke took both hands off the steering wheel since the car wasn’t moving anyway, spread his fingers, and said, “Where the hell did all these people come from anyway?”

  When he and his wife and daughter had moved north of Fort Worth, this area wasn’t even the suburbs. It was country. So much country that the quiet at night creeped Burke out. But DFW Airport was close, and the cities of Fort Worth and Dallas weren’t much farther away. They called it a megalopolis now, stretching for almost a hundred miles from east to west, and still growing.

  In recent years that growth had exploded northward, taking in Denton, a picturesque little university town. Alliance Airport, a sprawling complex that was an airfreight hub for the entire region, had gobbled up thousands of acres of what had once been farm and ranch land. A NASCAR track was built not far away. Housing and shopping, hotels and restaurants had soon followed.

  Just in the time that Ellis Burke had lived here, the country had disappeared, replaced by mile after mile of the worst urban sprawl. The air pollution and traffic were so bad that people were already starting to call the area Little L.A.—but it didn’t have any of L.A.’s benefits because it was populated by a horde of mouth-breathing rednecks.

  Burke did his best not to let them corrupt him with their racist attitudes and rampant consumerism. He still read the New York Times instead of any of the local rags, and he donated money to the local PBS station every time they had a pledge drive. He listened to NPR. He wished he could drive a more fuel-efficient car, maybe a hybrid, but he’d found that he needed the Caddy for his image. People down here didn’t take a lawyer seriously unless he drove a Cadillac or a Lincoln. But he tried to fight back with bumper stickers that savaged the previous administration and boosted the current one. He’d found that a surprising number of the locals agreed with him, proving that not everybody in Texas was a reactionary, knuckle-dragging conservative.

  Despite everything, though, sometimes you had to just go with the flow. Like today, when he found himself driving around looking for the one thing his daughter wanted most for Christmas, some sort of singing, dancing puppet thing that was overpriced and probably made in Taiwan by slave labor in some sweatshop run by a corrupt dictatorship propped up by American military and financial aid. But Vicky wanted it, so he was going to do his best to find it.

  No luck so far. They hadn’t made enough of the little bastards in that sweatshop. Either that, or the company was holding them back to create more demand so they could jack the price up higher.

  That was the sort of thing companies did all the time, having learned their lesson from Big Oil. It would serve the corporations right, Burke thought, if everybody stopped buying for a while. Just stopped buying everything, to teach the fat cats a lesson. See how long the consumer-driven economy could stand that. The thought made him grin.

  But of course it would never happen, because little girls like his daughter wanted toys. Everybody wanted toys. So the corruption rolled on, and Ellis Burke was part of it whether he wanted to be or not.

  If worse came to worst, he told himself as he wiped sweat from his forehead, he knew where he could get the thing Vicky wanted.

  They’d have it at the new UltraMegaMart that was about to open just up the road a couple of days from now on Friday. Going to that high temple of American excess would be an ordeal, but he supposed he could do it for his daughter. It would have to be Friday, too, the day after Thanksgiving, because after that they might be sold out of the thing he wanted.

  That eased his mind a little. Sure, he hated the thought of braving a crowd of unwashed rednecks, especially after they’d spent the entire day before stuffing their faces with Thanksgiving dinner and drinking beer and rooting for the damned Dallas Cowboys, but he could do it. For Vicky. For his little girl.

  How bad could it be?

  CHAPTER 10

  Traffic was really backed up in the northbound lanes of the interstate. The southbound lanes were moving a little faster. Hamed was grateful for that. He was anxious to reach his destination. Fort Worth was not far ahead of him now. In fact, as his car topped a long rise, he was able to see the tall buildings jutting up from the prairie ahead of him, still some five or ten miles to the south.

  He took the prepaid cell phone from his pocket. Before he’d ever entered the country, he had been given a phone number to commit to memory. The plan called for him to use it when he reached the destination to which he was summoned when the call to action came. He thought he was close enough now. He hadn’t programmed the number into the phone; that would have been too risky. But he had no trouble thumbing the ten digits and then hitting the connect button while he was driving.

  He heard the phone on the other end ringing. Wherever it was, whoever owned it would see the number of Hamed’s phone and would know who was calling. So he wasn’t surprised when there were no preliminaries, just a neutral-sounding voice that spoke an address when the call was answered. Hamed repeated it back, and the connection was broken. Quickly, so that there was no chance of him forgetting it, he entered the address into the GPS unit mounted on the car’s dashboard. A moment later a map popped up on the unit’s sc
reen.

  Hamed followed the turn-by-turn directions given to him by the computer-generated voice. They led him around Fort Worth on a loop to the east, into the densely packed suburbs between the cities of Dallas and Fort Worth. Everywhere he looked were housing developments, apartment complexes, and shopping centers dominated by the so-called “big box” stores. He saw perhaps a dozen different MegaMarts and grimaced each time he passed one of them. These American cities were nothing like Paris. They had no charm, no grace, and the starkly ugly MegaMarts were the perfect symbols of everything that was wrong with the American infidels and their godless culture.

  The voice from the GPS unit instructed him to leave the highway. He did so, and followed a route of twists and turns into the mazelike apartment complexes. He recognized the name of the street he was on. He had to be close to the address he was given.

  He found it a few minutes later. The apartment complex was not new, not fancy, but it appeared to be fairly well cared for. The parking places were not reserved, so he slid his car into one of them and stopped. He had been on the road for a long time, so his back was stiff when he climbed out of the vehicle. As he stretched, trying to unkink the sore muscles, he was aware of the gun tucked behind his belt at the small of his back, its butt covered by the tails of the loose shirt he wore. He hadn’t carried it there for the whole trip, of course; that would have been too uncomfortable. But as he approached his destination he had taken the weapon from between the car’s bucket seats and concealed it under his shirt. He didn’t know what he was walking into, but he wasn’t going to do it unarmed.

  The apartment number was 427, but the building had only two stories. It was arranged in a square around a central courtyard that contained a swimming pool. Signs were posted on each leg of the square, giving the numbers of the apartments it contained, so Hamed had no trouble finding 427. It was on the second floor, overlooking the pool, which had been drained and stood empty at this time of year. It looked forlorn somehow. Dead leaves from the trees in the courtyard had blown into it.

  Hamed knocked on the door and was surprised when a woman opened it—a very attractive woman at that, although her long, raven-black hair should have been covered instead of displayed so openly and shamelessly. Hamed concealed his reaction and said in English, “Hi. I’m looking for Steve.”

  “Sure, he’s here,” the woman said as she stepped back from the door. “Come in.”

  Hamed did so—then froze as the woman shut the door behind him and pressed what felt like the barrel of a gun against the back of his neck.

  CHAPTER 11

  McCabe was glad to be home. The rest of the run had gone just fine, no problems, after that little fracas a couple of nights earlier at the truck stop. He’d made it on down to Jacksonville, delivered his cargo, and deadheaded back to Fort Worth, something of a rarity in this day and age when every precious drop of fuel had to be used efficiently. Somebody in Transportation up in Kansas City had fouled up, because McCabe wasn’t supposed to pick up another load at the distribution center at Alliance Airport until Monday.

  But that was MegaMart’s problem, not McCabe’s. He was just looking forward to spending the Thanksgiving holiday at home for a change, instead of carrying merchandise across the country. Maybe they would even do some shopping. Seemed fair, when you considered that he spent most of his days delivering things for other people to buy.

  He’d had his own truck and been an independent for a while after retiring from the military, and he’d liked it. After being part of a group for so long, it felt good to be on his own, responsible for nobody but himself.

  Problem was, he wasn’t responsible just for himself. He had a wife and a daughter to take care of, too. And he felt like Terry and Ronnie deserved the best possible life he could give them, since they had spent so many years pretty much taking care of themselves on various military bases around the country, while he was off on the missions that had taken him around the world, to some of the most hellish spots on the face of the earth.

  But they’d had it rough sometimes, too. Low pay, endless red tape, frequent moves…Terry and Ronnie had had to deal with most of it alone. They had always come through, though. His guys, he called them because of their masculine nicknames. They didn’t want to be Theresa and Veronica. They preferred Terry and Ronnie.

  Not that there was anything remotely masculine about them except their nicknames. At thirty-eight, Terry still had the same earthy, cowgirl-type beauty as the coltish twenty-year-old that McCabe had fallen in love with when he first saw her. She wore her blond hair a little shorter these days, but there was no gray in it and her body was almost as lithe and supple as it had ever been.

  Ronnie had inherited her father’s darker looks—and darker moods, if the truth be known—and at sixteen she was turning into a lovely young woman. McCabe had already had to put the fear of God and the Special Forces into a couple of boys that Ronnie had dated. They’d seemed like good kids, so he hadn’t tried to scare them off entirely, but he’d made sure they knew he had been trained to kill with his bare hands, in any number of lethal ways. After Ronnie had gone off with her dates, McCabe and Terry had shared some good laughs at the way the boys’ eyes had widened while he was talking to them.

  It was because of the two of them, the two most precious people in the world to him, that he had gone to work for MegaMart. As an independent trucker, he’d had to be on the road too much just to make a living. Terry and Ronnie had spent enough time alone while he was in the military. True, as a driver for MegaMart, he was still gone quite a bit, but at least his schedule wasn’t as erratic and he was usually able to get home several days each week. Sometimes he even managed to be home for four or five days in a row, like now.

  He was in the living room of their house in River Oaks, one of Fort Worth’s older suburbs, with his feet up, the newspaper in his lap, and his eyelids getting heavy. It was Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving. Ronnie was out of school today—when McCabe was a kid they had gotten Thanksgiving Day and the Friday after it off from school, but never Wednesday—but she and Terry had been busy all day on some sort of project that was due right after the holiday in Ronnie’s biology class. McCabe was willing to help out, but Terry was better at that sort of stuff. She’d been a teacher herself at one time, although at the elementary level, not high school biology.

  McCabe gave up on trying to hold his drowsiness at bay and closed his eyes. They had been shut for only a few moments, though, when Ronnie came into the room and said, “Daddy, we’re going shopping on Friday. You wanna come with?”

  McCabe tried not to grimace. Since when did kids who lived in Texas talk like streetwise New Yorkers? Of course, Ronnie had lived in lots of different places, on lots of different bases. It wasn’t like she’d been raised here in Texas. But McCabe, himself a Texan, born, bred, and forever, had heard kids who had lived here all their lives talking the same way.

  It was because of all the TV and movies they watched and all the time they spent on the Internet, he supposed. American culture was blending together, with the distinctive pockets of how people in different parts of the country spoke and acted slowly fading away. That was good in its own way, he supposed, but regrettable, too. Like the seasons, the differences in people made for welcome changes.

  He opened his eyes and repeated, “Shopping? On Friday? Black Friday? The busiest shopping day of the year?”

  Ronnie nodded. “Yeah. We thought we’d go to the grand opening of that new UltraMegaMart.”

  McCabe bit back a groan. He saw enough MegaMarts in his line of work. “You and your mother can go and have a great time,” he said. “I think I’ll pass.”

  “You sure? It’s supposed to be the biggest MegaMart in the world. It’s as big as a mall all by itself.”

  “If you’re trying to convince me, you’re going about it the wrong way,” McCabe said, but he grinned to take any sting out of the words. “Besides, I’ve seen the place. I know how big it is. I even delivered a
truckload of stock there a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Ronnie said with a grin of her own. “You work for MegaMart. I forgot.”

  “Sure you did.”

  Ronnie grew more serious. “I need some stuff for my project. You think they’ll have it?”

  McCabe didn’t bother asking what sort of “stuff” she needed. If the world’s first UltraMegaMart lived up to all of its hype, it would have what Ronnie needed, whatever that might be.

  “Don’t worry about that,” McCabe told her. “I’m sure you’ll find just what you’re looking for.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Parker saw the lights of Islamabad ahead of him as the ancient Volkswagen bug bounced along the potholed road that passed for a highway here in Pakistan. He tried to miss the worst of the craters for fear that they’d knock the car’s suspension out. If he’d been in America, he would have said that a vehicle this old was held together with spit, baling wire, and bubble gum, but he didn’t know what the Pakistani equivalent of that phrase was.

  All he knew was that he had to get to the American embassy, and get that document in the hands of people who could do something about it, before it was too late.

  It might be too late already. Here in Pakistan the hour was just after midnight. That made it Thursday. Thanksgiving. Although to the Pakistanis it was just another day. Pilgrims and parades, turkey and pumpkin pie didn’t mean a damn thing to them.

  What it meant to Parker was that he had somewhere between thirty-six and forty-eight hours to prevent mass murder. In this age of instant communication, that was an eternity. Plenty of time to do what needed to be done.