Free Fires of Midnight by Jon Land Page B

as late as Sunday morning.

    That fact moved Susan’s focus in another direction. What if, what if …
    She reached for the phone, closed her eyes to remember the number Mulgrew had given her.
    “I need something else,” Susan told him. “The science labs that Joshua Wolfe would routinely have access to—would he be required to check out materials? Would there be a record?”
    “I’m not sure,” the registrar responded, pausing as if expecting her to explain further. “I can find out.”
    “And if such a list does exist, I’d like a copy.”
    “Of course.”
    “As soon as possible.”
    Susan hung up the phone. She settled back in the chair and tried to settle her thinking, focusing on the moves immediately before her. All of the materials in this room had to be impounded and sent to Atlanta for more detailed analysis at Firewatch Command. Once there—
    Susan felt a slight whiff of wind on her back and turned to see the door to Joshua Wolfe’s room opening. A broad, bearded man entered and closed it behind him as she lurched out of her chair.
    “Who are you?”
    “Sorry to interrupt,” said Blaine McCracken.

EIGHT
    “I asked you who you were.” Susan’s voice was calm but her stance remained rigid as she half-eyed the phone.
    McCracken turned his gaze about the room. “You’ve been busy. Accomplished quite a bit, by the look of things.”
    “What are you doing here?”
    “Same thing you are, I suspect.”
    “Who sent you?” Susan asked him. “Washington? Atlanta?”
    He was moving through the room, inspecting and cataloguing everything with his eyes.
    “Well,” he replied, “Atlanta sent you. I think we can call that a fair assumption.” He locked his stare with hers. “You haven’t found the boy, I assume.”
    Susan’s eyes bulged and the red of her cheeks deepened. “ Who are you? What are you doing here?”
    “The name’s McCracken, and maybe I always wanted to see how the CDC, specifically Firewatch Command, operates in a crisis.”
    Susan tried not to show her surprise. “You know an awful lot ordinary people aren’t supposed to.”
    “I’ve never been accused of being ordinary, miss—excuse me, Doctor. I mean, it must be ‘Doctor,’ right?”
    “You seem to know everything else.”

    “Friend of mine who told me what was going on up here didn’t have time to dig that deep.”
    “What did he tell you?”
    “Cambridgeside Galleria. That sufficient?”
    “Plenty, but that doesn’t explain what you’re doing in this room.”
    “Like I said, the same thing you are: looking for the boy who lives here.” Those eyes sweeping again. “Or used to, anyway.”
    “His name. You didn’t use the boy’s name.”
    “Josh. Happy?”
    “Susan Lyle.”
    “What?”
    “ My name. It’s Susan Lyle.”
    Turning his attention to the business at hand, McCracken began going through the desk drawers, barely ruffling the contents as he searched.
    “You’ve been through these.”
    “Not the bottom ones,” she said, not sure why she was telling him.
    Blaine went to work on those.
    “If you do indeed know what I’m doing here,” Susan went on, “it seems only fair that you tell me what you’re doing here.”
    McCracken found what he was looking for and straightened up. “This,” he said, his eyes lingering on a snapshot that showed Harry Lime with his arm around the shoulder of a boy of about fourteen or fifteen. Both were smiling, Harry in a fresh tropical shirt that hung over his belt, the boy wearing his hair long and dark, the smile not looking right on him.
    Blaine didn’t want to let it go, as if doing so would mean letting go of Harry for the second time in twenty-four hours. He studied the boy’s slightly blurred, smiling face. The long hair framed his face well. His eyes, even in the picture, were strangely intense and yet not quite mature. Harry’s crazy, impossible tale suddenly made some kind of sense. Blaine made himself place the snapshot in Susan Lyle’s