I look around me. The brightly lit glamour of the premiere has been completely destroyed. Ten minutes ago, the square was full of beautiful men and women waving to adoring fans. Now, it looks like the aftermath of a horror movie. Cameras lie on the red carpet, their lenses shattered. Women are hunched together, crying. Nearby, a man lies unconscious on the floor, blood trickling out of his ears.
Nervous-looking paramedics pick through the crowd, bending to talk to people or roll them onto stretchers. The LAPD bomb squad is trawling the area, ushering guests away from whatever’s left of the explosives. Red and blue lights flash over the whole scene, and every minute, more police cars are drawing up in the road.
I watch a kid—a child, probably ten or eleven—get unearthed from a pile of rubble, sobbing. I feel completely empty inside.
This is my fault. I’m the reason this happened. Me. I was the one who hid X’s threat from Briar. I let her slip away in the hotel room.
And now she could be dead. Because of me.
A few feet away, a woman in a diamond-studded dress gets helped onto a stretcher. I’m pretty sure she’s the director of the movie. She’s crying, her makeup running down her cheeks.
Is this all I do? Hurt people?
A hand clamps down on my shoulder. “Stop it,” Kenta snaps. I look up at him. His face is hard. “Stop beating yourself up and focus. You’re not helping anyone like this.”
I nod. He’s right. There’s no time to reflect right now. We have to act.
“Carter.” I turn and see Anfisa waving us over. There’s a whole group of FBI agents here. They’ve set up a quasi-booth on one of the agents’ cars, balancing laptops and equipment on the car boot. “We’ve got CCTV footage,” she says as we approach, stepping back so we can see the laptops. Each screen is split into quarters, showing camera footage the agents are scrolling through. I stoop down to watch over the screens.
Glen, who’s been talking with a member of the bomb squad, comes to join us. “Looked like a mixture of flashbangs and pipe bombs. The pipes were definitely homemade.”
“Any deaths?” Kenta asks.
He shakes his head. “None so far. A couple broken bones, a few injuries from shrapnel, but nothing too severe. Paramedics can’t reach everyone yet, though. They’re only treating people at the edges of the blast zone.”
I tune them out, focussing on the CCTV tapes. So far, I haven’t seen anything useful. Just the odd worker walking around behind the scenes, holding camera equipment or trays of drinks. I zero in on one screen, watching as the explosion starts and a waitress drops her tray, falling to her knees and covering her ears.
There’s a tap on my shoulder. “Excuse me, sir,” a man says politely. I glance across. Paramedic. He smiles at me. “Were you caught in the bombing?”
“Obviously,” I mutter, scrolling through the cameras. I didn’t just roll around in the shrapnel for fun.
“Well, then, if you’d allow me to examine—”
“I’m fine.”
“You may feel fine, sir, but bombs like this can cause internal bleeding from the wave of pressure they emit, rather than the physical—”
“I know how a bloody bomb works,” I snap, “I’ve thrown plenty of them.”
The paramedic looks vaguely concerned.
“We’re former SAS soldiers,” Kenta explains quickly. “We’re currently working, so we really don’t have much time.”
“Th-thank you for your service,” the guy stutters. Anfisa snorts. I ignore them all, leaning in closer to study the footage. There’s a flash of red in one of the cameras, and I stab the space bar, pausing the recording. “This one. Camera six.” I check the tag. “Employee entrance B.”
“I’ll go check it out,” a policeman says, jogging away. I expand the video and watch, my stomach twisting, as a man in a dark grey hoodie strolls to a blue car, carrying a limp blonde woman in his arms. The area is dark, lit by a single streetlamp, but as he turns to check behind him, his face is perfectly illuminated.
It’s him. No doubt about it. Daniel Filch. He looks exactly like his photo; weak-jawed and puffy, his small eyes pale and beady behind his wire-frame glasses.
My throat tightens as he turns back around and opens the car door. Briar comes into view. Her body is as lifeless as a doll’s, and her hair is falling over her face in wild curls. I close my eyes. “Check the license plate,” I mutter.
Kenta’s already tapping at his phone. “It’s a rental. Blue Lotus Car Dispensary.”
“Get them on the phone. Check if they have lojack or GPS tracking.”
“On it.” He puts his phone to his ear and walks away from us.
I keep watching the video. X caresses Briar’s cheeks as he pulls out a rag and ties it around her mouth, then zip-ties her wrists. Fear rolls through me as he reaches into his pocket, pulling something out. The sharp edge of a knife flashes under the streetlamp.
Wetness on me. Wetness down my back. A knife, shining under the light. Kenta’s eyes are terrified.
“Just give us the information. Nothing needs to happen to your friends.”
“Matt.”
The words are on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t say them. I know I can’t say them.
“Matt. Look at me.”
I can’t say them I can’t say them I can’t say them
“Matt, I’m squeezing your arm. You can feel it. C’mon, man, we need you.”
I squeeze my eyes shut. It’s not real, I know it’s not real. I manage to pull myself out of the memory, with a sensation like I’m dragging myself up out of a deep pool of water. Kenta’s dark eyes burn into mine. “It’s good news,” he says. “They do have lojack. Apparently, they were approached today and offered a large amount of money to switch it off.”
I blink hard. “We’ll give them twice as much to turn it back on.”
“Already done,” Anfisa says. She’s looking at me with a soft expression I don’t think I’ve ever seen on her face before. “They’re linking us up to the GPS signal now.” She nods to an agent typing furiously at one of the laptops. As I watch, a map appears on the screen, with a red blinking light to show the car’s position.
I frown. That can’t be right. It’s off any roads, there aren’t any houses nearby.
Glen swears. “Is that—”
“It looks like the middle of the forest.” I can’t breathe. He’s taken her to the middle of a forest. Not his house. A forest. What would he do to her in a forest? Images flash in my mind. Of him cutting her. Stripping her. Killing her.
Kenta clasps my shoulder. “Breathe,” he mutters in my ear. And then, louder, “Are there any properties there?”
Anfisa leans over my shoulder. “The house.”
My head swings around. “What?”
“We went through his mother’s will. It was filed with the probate court, it’s public access. He inherited a small property that looks to be around that area.” She barks some commands into her radio, then rattles off a zip code. Kenta checks it against the GPS coordinates. The two red blips on the map are almost perfectly aligned.
I straighten, relief flooding through me. “Got it. We’ll take our car. Dispatch an ambulance to meet us there.”
Anfisa shakes her head. “You come with us in one of our cars. Yours might have been tampered with, and we don’t want you entering the scene if you get there first.”
I nod impatiently, watching as Kenta sets up his phone GPS.
“It’s a good sign, right?” A nearby policeman asks, his voice nervous. “He’s using his own property, as opposed to some old abandoned barn. Maybe he really does want to just… take her in.”
We all stare at him like he’s an idiot.
He shrugs defensively. “You saw the messages. They say he loves her. He wants her to be his wife, or whatever.”
“He doesn’t love her.” Kenta snaps. “He drugged and kidnapped her. He’s obsessed with her. When she doesn’t play out his fantasies, his entire fake reality will come crashing down around him. And then…” He trails off.
We can all fill in the blank. This is a man who is happy to bomb an event full of strangers. He’s clearly violent.
“She’s an actress, right?” Anfisa asks.
I nod.
She purses her lips. “Well, let’s hope she manages to keep up the act until we get there.”
