The Burning Men: A Nathaniel Cade Story by Christopher Farnsworth Read Free Book Online Page B

perspective.
    “What’s he waiting for?” the ERT leader asked. Zach didn’t know if the man meant Cade or Novak.
    Then Zach saw something out of the corner of his eye, in another screen.
    He turned his full attention, but the image was gone. He began pressing buttons, to see if he could get it back. Predictably, the cameras began showing him everything except the view he wanted.
    “What is it?”
    “I thought I saw something,” Zach said, and then ignored the man as he got back to work. It might have been a figment — a case of seeing something he wanted to see instead of what was there — but he had to be sure.
    He could have sworn he glimpsed Adam Thompson heading into the airport.
     
    
     
    Cade was right behind Novak now. He winced as they passed by a large window, looking out over the tarmac, but the sun was still safely low enough to be obscured by the other airport buildings and the fog.
    It would take him only a second to reach out a nd crush Novak’s windpipe. He was still fast enough and strong enough for that.
    He quickened his step, was almost the heel of Novak’s Converse All-Stars.
    Then Novak pulled out his phone and made a call. “Adam?” he said. “You there?”
     
    
     
    Zach clicked through dozens of cameras, trying to track down the face he was less and less sure he’d actually seen. He went backward in the system’s internal memory, trying to get that same image back again.
    Then, from a hidden camera behind one of the American ticket counters, he found him.
    Adam Thompson. Walking right past everyone dropping off their luggage, on his way to security.
    Zach checked the timestamp on the screen. Less than five minutes earlier.
    Thompson was a whole terminal away from Cade and Novak.
    He keyed h is phone to Cade’s earpiece.
    “Cade,” he said. “We’ve got a problem.”
     
    
     
    Cade focused his hearing on Novak’s phone, straining out all the ambient noise, trying to narrow down his perception to just the voice coming through the tiny speaker at Novak’s ear .
    Then his earpiece spat to life and Zach’s voice blared at him: “Cade. We’ve got a problem.”
    Novak kept walking in front of Cade, his step almost jaunty. He was practically vibrating with excitement. They were getting close.
    “Thompson is here,” Zach said, stating the obvious. “He’s in Terminal B, he’s stuck in a long line right now, but he’s here — ”
    “I am aware,” Cade said as quietly as he could, hoping the throat-mike under his collar would pick it up.
    “What was that? Say again?”
    “Shut up,” Cade hissed, a little louder this time.
    Two things happened, almost at once.
    Novak stopped in his tracks, right in front of a Cinnabon kiosk.
    Cade nearly walked into him. They stood for a moment, face-to-face.
    There was a weird moment of what was not recognition, but something quite like it, as the strangeness, the inhuman thing that squatted in both Cade and Novak, resonated.
    Novak’s idiotic smile dimmed a little.
    Then someone shouted at them both.
    “Excuse me! You, right there! Hold it!”
    It was a TSA agent, half-jogging toward them from the checkpoint, his belt and badge rattling on his uniform.
    Cade realized instantly what had happened. The TSA agent had a wallet in one hand. Her face was open and friendly. Novak had left it behind, and she was trying to return it.
    But that’s not what Novak saw.
    He saw the iron fist of the fascist technocracy coming to grab him, to ruin his plans, wrapped in the disguise of a middle-aged woman in an ill-fitting uniform.
    His eyes went wide with fright. And then, Cade saw the fire begin to build in them.
     
    
     
    “Cade, what? What was that?” Cade wasn’t responding now.
    The camera feed from Terminal B showed Thompson waiting patiently, even happily, in the security line. Zach turned to the ERT leader.
    “Get your men. Get them on the other side of that line. Go. Now.”
    The man was speaking into