Gregg Hurwitz - We Know

I snapped awake at 2:18 A.M., the bloodshot numerals staring at me from the nightstand. For years on end, I woke up at this exact time every night, regardless of what time zone I was in. But after seventeen years I had just started sleeping through the night. I had finally outrun the old fears. Or so I had convinced myself.

Remote sirens warbled in the night. At first I figured they were in my head, the sound track to the dream. But the distant wail got louder instead of fading. I hadn't awakened on my own.

I ran through what I remembered from the previous evening-the presidential debate had closed out prime time, and after the commentariat finished yammering, I'd fallen asleep watching a high-speed chase on the news. A guy in a beat-to-shit Jeep Cherokee, hauling ass down the 405, a legion of black-and-whites drawn behind him like a parachute.

I blinked hard, inhaled, and looked around. Same Lemon Pledge scent of my third-floor condo. My sweat imprint on the sheets and pillow. Breeze rattling palm fronds against my balcony in the next room.

And a watery blue light undulating across the bedroom ceiling.

I sat up.

The TV, across the room on the steamer trunk, was off. But the distant sirens continued.

And then, along with the light on the ceiling, the sirens abruptly stopped.

I threw off the sheets and padded across the carpet, stepping over a discarded Sports Illustrated and sloughed-off dress shirts from the job I'd left a week ago. In my plaid pajama bottoms, I ventured into the all-purpose living room, heading for the balcony. The police lights had flickered through the locked sliding glass door. Halfway to it I froze.

A thick black nylon rope was dangling from the lip of the roof, its end coiled on my balcony. Motionless.

No longer groggy, I opened the sliding glass door and stepped silently out onto the balcony, rolling the screen shut behind me. My balcony with its Brady Bunch-orange tiles overlooked a narrow Santa Monica street populated by other generic apartment buildings. Streetlights were sporadic. I confronted the rope for a quiet moment, then looked around, expecting who knows what.

Bulky shadows of cars lined the gutters. An SUV was double-parked, blocking the street. No headlights, no dome light. Tinted windows. But a huff of smoke from the exhaust pipe. A sedan, dark and silent, wheeled around the turn and halted, idling behind the SUV.

Terror reached through seventeen years and set my nerves tingling.

I squinted to see if I could make out a police light bar mounted on either roof. In my peripheral vision, the tail of the rope twitched. The roof creaked. Before I had a chance to think, a spotlight blazed up from the SUV, blinding me. A zippering sound came from above, so piercing that my teeth vibrated. Then a dark form pendulumed down at me, two boots striking me in the chest. I left my feet, flying back through the screen, which ripped free almost soundlessly. I landed on my shoulder blades, hard, the wind knocked out of me. The black-clad figure, outfitted with a SWAT-like jumpsuit and an assault rifle, filled the screen frame with its bits of torn mesh. Even through the balaclava, the guy looked somehow sheepish-he hadn't seen me beneath the overhang before he'd jumped.

"Shit," he said. "Sorry."

He'd made an expert landing, despite the collision, and was aiming the rifle at my face.

I guppied silently, a knot of cramped muscles still holding my lungs captive, and rolled to my side. He stepped astride me as I curled around the hot pain in my chest.

A hammering of boots in the hall matched my heartbeat, so forceful it jarred my vision, and then the front door flew directly at me, knocked from the hinges and dead bolt as if a hurricane had hit the other side. It skipped on end, landed flat on the carpet with a whump, and slid to within an inch of my nose.

As I writhed between the assailant's boots, fear gave way to panic. Three men flipped me and proned me out, my face mashing carpet, my front tooth driving into my bottom lip. Gloved hands ran up my sides, checking my ankles, my crotch. More black-clad forms hurtled through the doorway, aiming assault rifles in all directions, a few men streaking off to the bedroom. I heard my folding closet doors slam back on their tracks, the shower curtain raked aside. "Nick Horrigan? Are you Nick Horrigan?!" My chest released, and I finally drew in a screeching breath. And another. I rolled onto my back, stared up at the one face not covered by a hood and goggles. Lean, serious features, a slender nose bent left from a break, gray hair shoved back from a side part. The salt-and-pepper stubble darkening the jaw matched neither the neat knot of the standard-issue red tie nor the high and tight haircut.

"Are you Nick Horrigan? " I nodded, still fighting to draw in a proper breath. A warm, salty trickle ran from my split lip down my chin. The other men-fifteen of them? -had spread through the condo, dumping drawers, knifing open the couch cushions, overturning chairs. I heard flatware tumble onto the linoleum. My clock radio blared on-a jingle for antifungal ointment-and then I heard someone curse, and it abruptly cut off.

The gray-haired man frowned at me, then surveyed the others, radiating authority. "The hell's the matter with him, Sever?"

"I hit him in the chest when I rappelled from the roof." A faint southern accent-Maryland or Virginia, maybe. The guy tugged off his hood, revealing a square face further accented by a military-looking flattop. He was much wider than the boss man crouching over me. Younger, too- probably in his mid-forties, though his creased tan aged him up a bit. His bearing suggested he was the alpha dog among the jumpsuits.

The boss returned his gaze to me. "Nick Horrigan, born 6/12/73? Son of Agent Frank Durant?"

"Stepson," I managed.

He shoved a photograph in my face. A man shown from the chest up, wearing a blue blazer and the scowl of the unphotogenic. A wide mouth and slack lips lent him a slightly wild quality. His blond hair was slicked back, the camera catching furrows left by the comb.

"What's the last contact you had with this man?"

"I don't know this guy," I said.

"Then you've been in phone or e-mail contact with him."

I caught a worm's-eye view of a man with tactical goggles peering into the empty Cup o' Noodles I'd left on the kitchen counter. The photo moved abruptly in front of my nose again. "I told you," I said. "I don't know who the hell he is."

The boss grabbed my arms and tugged me to a sitting position. Over his shoulder I could see my framed Warner Bros, still, sitting shattered at the base of the wall. Yosemite Sam was looking back at me with an expression of matching bewilderment. Glancing down, I stared numbly at the boot-size red marks on my bare chest. "Who are you?" the man asked, pulling my focus back to him.

My voice still sounded tight. "You already know. I'm Nick Horrigan."

"No, I mean what do you do?"

"I just left a job at a charity group," I said.

One of the guys behind me guffawed.

Another appeared in the doorway of my bedroom, holding my now-empty nightstand drawer by the handle. "I got nothing."

The boss swiveled to face a guy wanding the kitchen with a magnetometer. The guy shook his head. "Sorry, Mr. Wydell."

"Okay." Wydell ran a hand through his gray hair. It fell back precisely into the side part. His exacting demeanor fit his professional bearing- the sole suit among rugged operators. "Okay. Get him a shirt."

A T-shirt flew from the vicinity of my bedroom, hitting me in the head.

"Put this on. Let's go."

My Pac-Man shirt. Great. I tugged it on, and two guys hoisted me to my feet. Figuring I'd want ID wherever I was going, I grabbed my money clip from the kitchen counter and stuffed it into the floppy pocket of my drawstring pajama pants.