The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(27)
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Mike flashed his badge at the uniform sitting by the door of Leshaun’s room. “Agent Rich. Mind if my daughter sits out here for a couple of minutes while I say hey to my partner?”
The uniform, a young Asian kid who looked fresh out of the academy and bored out of his mind at having to sit outside a hospital room all day, looked at Mike’s suit and badge.
“What’s she doing out of school?”
“She had a fever last night. She’s totally fine, but school protocol is for her to be fever-free for twenty-four hours. I’m off today, so we’re trucking around. You know how it is,” Mike said. The cop raised his eyebrows. “No, I guess you probably don’t know how it is. Just part of having kids.”
The cop nodded and motioned to the seat beside him. Annie didn’t even glance up from the game she was playing on Mike’s phone, sliding into the chair and continuing to make her little duck eat pellets or whatever it was the duck was supposed to be doing. The cop looked over Annie’s shoulder and crinkled up his brow. “Hey, how’d you get past level eight?”
Mike stepped into Leshaun’s room and closed the door behind him. He could see Annie through the glass door. He knew the hospital wasn’t the best place to take his daughter, but he also knew that if his partner was up for it, he’d be pleased to see Annie. He wasn’t sure that Leshaun would be up for it, however. Two bullets. One to the vest and the other to his arm.
Mike hovered for a minute, watching Leshaun sleep, and then decided against waking him. The doctors had said Leshaun would be out of the hospital tomorrow, back on the job in a week or two. He was lucky as shit. The first bullet had gone clean through his biceps. Even though it had been a bloody mess, the bullet missed anything of real importance. It was probably going to take Leshaun longer to get over the second bullet, however. He had two broken ribs from where the vest caught the round, and those were going to nag for a while. Mike put the magazines he brought on the nightstand next to Leshaun and pulled out one of his business cards from his suit pocket so he had something to write a note on. As he clicked open his pen there was a loud sound from outside the hospital, a big whomp, and then the floor shook slightly. He looked out the window but couldn’t see anything, so he scrawled a quick note on the back of his card, telling Leshaun to give him a call and that he’d stop back later.
Outside the room, Annie was watching the cop play the duck game on the phone, giving him pointers on how to eat the most pellets.
“You hear that sound, Officer?” The cop looked up from the phone and sheepishly handed it back to Annie.
“No sir. I’ve been stuck on level eight for a while, and your daughter was showing me how to get past it.”
“She’s a smart kid, that one,” Mike said. “Thanks for watching her.” He reached out to take Annie’s hand. “Come on, beautiful. Uncle Leshaun’s still sleeping. I’ll come back later, after I drop you off at your mom’s. What do you say we go get some ice cream, see if it cuts the heat a little?” He shook his head. “Crazy weather for April, isn’t it?”
In the parking garage, he was already starting to back the car out when his phone rang. Annie knew the drill and handed it up front without complaint. Mike didn’t recognize the number, but it was a DC area code, so he picked up.
“Is this Special Agent Rich?”
“Yep, but I’m not on the clock today.”
“You are now. This is the director.”
“The director of what?”
“The director.”
Mike had to stop himself from blurting out, “Bullshit.” Not that Annie had never heard him swear before, but if it was really the director of the agency, it wasn’t in his best interest to sound like a moron.
“There’s been a plane crash,” the director said. “Happened maybe five minutes ago. You’re the closest agent in the vicinity, and we need you there.”
Mike cradled the phone between his shoulder and his ear and shifted the car into drive. “I heard it. Didn’t know what it was.”
“Well, you do now. You know Bill Henderson?”
“Of Henderson Tech?” Mike said. The phone Mike was talking on was an HT model, and the computer he had in his office was an HT as well. And even if Mike hadn’t known what kind of phone or computer he had, there probably wasn’t a single person in the entire country who didn’t know who Bill Henderson was, let alone in Minneapolis, where Henderson was the success story to end all success stories. Henderson employed more than forty thousand people on nine campuses on the western edge of the city. And that was just in Minneapolis. “Yeah, I know Bill Henderson. I mean, I don’t know him personally, but I know who he is. Why?” Mike asked, then immediately said, “Oh.”
“Right now we don’t have any reason to suspect it was anything other than an accident. You’ll get more details on-site, but when a billionaire falls from the sky, particularly a billionaire who was the president’s largest donor during her last campaign, all bets are off. If anything—anything—looks like terrorism or like it was something other than just a plane crash, I’ll expect a phone call directly. And I mean anything. If I find out from the television that there was something suspicious and you haven’t already told me about it, your career will look less promising. You can let the locals set up a perimeter, but we’ve got a team ready to be wheels up within the hour and on the ground by midafternoon. Make no mistake: the agency is going to be on this one. You call this number, the one I called you from. Keep me tight in the loop on this one, Agent Rich. You got it?”