ORCHID MARK

Chapter Six — The Orchid

  “Some men are found. Some men are chosen. Derek Moss did not know, as he kicked in that door, that he was about to become both.”

"Copied." Derek moved left, keeping low. "I can hear something."

It was faint the specific quality of distressed breathing, not panic, not screaming, the sound of someone past the point of calling for help and simply enduring. Derek followed it to a door at the hall's end and shouldered through.

A woman. Mid-forties. Secretary clothes, soot-covered. Unconscious near the window.

He got the emergency mask on her, radioed her position, and had her halfway to the landing when she came around disoriented, grabbing his coat, words coming out in fragments.

"Mr. West—" She coughed. "Study. He's in the study. He wouldn't leave—"

Brett's voice: Derek. Out. Now. That structure is seconds from pancaking.

Derek handed the woman to Torres.

He looked at the hallway.

"One more minute," he said into the radio. He clicked off the channel before Brett could respond.

The study door had swollen in the heat. He kicked it twice. On the third kick it gave.

Jacob West was a man of perhaps sixty-five, silver-haired, with the kind of face that had been handsome and had aged into something better authority, and behind it, something that had been worn soft by experience. He was pinned at the legs by a beam that had dropped diagonally across both shin bones, a heavy bookshelf collapsed beside it, his upper body hunched over a scorched photograph he was holding with both hands.

His eyes found Derek immediately.

"Leave me," Jacob said. His voice was steady. A man who had made peace with a decision. "I'm not worth the risk."

"That's not how this works," Derek said. He was already moving, assessing the beam's angle, the bookshelf's weight, the secondary collapse risk from above.

Behind him, the doorway disappeared in a cascade of flaming debris.

No exit that way.

Fine.

He wedged his Halligan bar under the beam's narrow end, fed broken chair legs and shelf planks into the gap as temporary shoring, and worked with the concentrated focus of a man solving an engineering problem with the wrong tools under impossible conditions. His hands moved without hesitation. Pain from the leg was information; he processed it and filed it.

"You don't have to do this," Jacob said.

"I know." Derek braced his back under the beam, legs driving. "Grab the webbing around your chest. When I say pull, you pull."

"What's your name?"

"Derek. Pull."

Jacob pulled. The beam shifted three inches enough. Derek dragged him clear, soot-black hands on soot-black lapels, moving backward toward the window because the window was the only option left. He stripped his last spare mask and pressed it onto Jacob and pressed a wet cloth to his own face.

The jacket had caught on something. A splinter of timber tore the back of Derek's coat in a long diagonal rip across the shoulder blade, peeling the heavy fabric back. Under it: skin. Under the skin: a birthmark. Shaped, distinctly, unmistakably, like an orchid in full bloom, positioned precisely below the left shoulder blade.

Jacob was barely conscious. His eyes were moving in and out of focus. But they moved to Derek's exposed back.

And they stopped.

Jacob West went very still in a way that had nothing to do with the smoke.

"The orchid," he whispered.

"Forget the orchid." Derek was already at the window, testing the frame. "We're going out this way."

"Wait…"

"Later." He smashed the glass. Below: a sloped roof, a terrace, thirty feet of manageable descent. The aerial ladder had retreated when the facade started moving, but the terrace would do.

He got Jacob onto his back in a fireman's carry the man weighed less than expected, or Derek was past the point of registering weight accurately and went out the window.

The flashover hit three seconds later.

It came out the window like a fist a detonation of superheated gas igniting all at once, a wall of thermal force that caught them on the roof's pitch and sent them both tumbling down the slope. Derek did what he always did: he turned his body. He wrapped himself around Jacob West with the practiced geometry of a man who had done this before, taking the fall with his own back and shoulders, protecting the older man completely.

The impact with the terrace edge was final and total.

Derek's vision went white.

Then it went dark.

He came back in increments.

First: the sound of voices, urgent and professional, the vocabulary of emergency medicine.

Second: the ceiling of a room that was not a hospital room he had ever been in. High. Clean. A quality of quiet that cost money.

Third: faces, standing in a loose semicircle at the foot of his bed. Brett. Torres. Two members of his squad who had clearly not slept. And then, beyond them, a group of people he did not recognize men and women in clothes that spoke of staff and legal counsel and the kind of organization that forms around very wealthy or very important individuals.

Derek's hand moved to his own face, checking for the mask that wasn't there anymore.

"He's awake," someone said.

The group stirred. A physician moved forward, checked his eyes, asked him to track a light. Derek tracked it.

"Mr. West?" Derek said. His voice came out rougher than he expected.

"Alive," Brett said. "Burns to the hands. Smoke inhalation. He'll recover." He paused. "Thanks to you."

Derek looked at the ceiling.

The well-dressed strangers had not moved. They were watching him with a quality of attention he couldn't place too intense for curiosity, too controlled for emotion. An attorney type, a physician, two bodyguards maintaining polite distance from a man who looked, despite everything, like he'd earned his position through something other than paperwork.

And in front of them all: an elderly man. Perhaps seventy. Silver hair, a posture that spoke of decades of service to something larger than himself, eyes that were doing an extraordinary amount of work containing, Derek realized slowly, something that had been contained for a very long time.

The old man stepped forward.

His hands, Derek noticed, were trembling slightly.

When he spoke, his voice carried the particular weight of words that have been rehearsed ten thousand times and are still, in the actual moment of saying them, almost too much.

"Young master." He stopped. He breathed. He tried again. "We have been looking for you for twenty-six years."

Derek looked at him.

The room was very quiet.

From the corridor outside the room, muffled by the door but audible, came the sound of a phone ringing. Derek's phone. Someone had retrieved it from his gear.

The screen, visible through the glass panel beside the door, showed a name.

Erin Chase.

Calling for the first time since he had walked out of his own house.

Derek did not move toward it.

He looked at the old man's trembling hands. At the faces arranged around the room. At the weight of whatever had just walked through the door disguised as an ordinary sentence.

He said, very quietly: "Tell me."

Outside, Erin's call went unanswered.

Inside, the old man began.