Chapter One

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 bootsize 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.

"Let’s go, let’s go," Wydell said. "You got
sneakers, something?"

I stopped moving, and the two men commanding me to the door
stumbled into me. "Can you please show me a badge?" I said, though
I pretty much figured.

Wydell’s lips pinched. His hand darted behind his lapel,
withdrew his commission book with its recessed badge. Hunched eagle
and flag, rendered in gold. u.s. secret ser vice. His commission
was behind plastic inside the leather book. joseph wydell, special
agent in charge. He was from the Los Angeles Regional Office, which
meant he wasn’t on the protection detail of a par tic u lar
politician but oversaw general intelligence in Southern California.
Why was the head of the Secret Ser vice L.A. office on site at a
raid instead of waiting back in his air- conditioned office?

"What do you think I did?" I asked.

Someone handed him my sneakers, and he thumped them against my
chest. I took them. He hustled me out into the hall, Sever in front
of us, another agent behind, one at each side. They held the
diamond formation as we barreled toward the stairs.

Mrs. Plotkin stood in her doorway in a white spa bathrobe, her
copper hair heaped high, showing off white roots. She looked
worried --- one of her favorite expressions.

"Get back in your apartment, ma’am," Sever said, the
accent more pronounced now.

We were approaching fast, but she held her ground. "Where are
you taking him?"

"I’m okay, Evelyn," I said, wiping blood from my chin.

"What did he do?"

"Out of the way, now."

We reached her, and Sever straight- armed her back into her
apartment. Her head snapped forward, and the glasses she wore
around her neck on a beaded chain flew up, trailing her fall like
the tail of a kite. As we whisked past, I caught a flash of her
lying shocked on her fuzzy rug, glasses tangled in her hair, the
door pressing against her side. It was just a shove, nothing
drastic, but even a portion of a man’s strength applied
brusquely to a woman in her sixties had a certain grotesqueness to
it.

I tried to stop, but the agents propelled me forward.

"Hey," I said to Sever’s broad back, "let me at least make
sure she’s okay."

The agents kept moving me along. No time for retorts or even
threats. That scared me even more.

I stumbled down the stairs, trying to keep pace, nearly dropping
my sneakers. The lobby was empty save the vinyl couches and smoky
mirrors, and beyond, the street was lit up like day. Police cars,
spotlights, men in dark suits talking into their wrists. A few
spectators, hastily dressed, stood on the opposite sidewalk,
straining on tiptoes, waiting to see who would emerge.

We burst through the doors and stopped. I hopped on one foot,
then the other, pulling on my Pumas.

"Cut the goddamned spotlights," Wydell said. "This isn’t a
fashion shoot." The spotlights clicked off with a bass echo, and
suddenly the night was darker than it should have been. Wydell
grabbed the arm of another agent. "Where is it?"

"Almost here."

"It needs to be here now."

I said, loudly, "Are you gonna tell me what the hell is going
on?"

All of a sudden, a bass thrumming filled the night, as much a
vibration as a sound, and then a Steven Spielberg glow came over
the rooftops, turning the palms a fiery yellow. On the sidewalk a
little girl white- knuckled her father’s hand, her mouth open
in sleepy disbelief.

A Black Hawk loomed into view, massive and somehow futuristic in
this context, on my street. The wind from the rotors buffeted the
crowd, snapped at the bushes, pasted my clothes to me.
Wydell’s tie pulled clear of his jacket and stood on end. The
helicopter banked and set down magisterially on the asphalt. The
spectators stared at me in expectation.

Wydell grabbed my arm in a vise grip and started moving me
toward the The helicopter. The sight of that waiting Black Hawk
finally broke me out of shock, or at least helped me catch up to
myself, to what was happening. I jerked free. "Wait a minute. You
can’t just take me. What’s happening here?"

I had to follow him closely to hear his words over the noise of
the rotors.

He was shouting. "A terrorist has penetrated the nuclear power
plant at San Onofre and is threatening to blow it up."

I felt a sudden hollowness at my core, that rushing emptiness
I’d felt only twice before: clutching stupidly at Frank while
he died and watching live footage as that second plane hit the
tower.

"Okay," I said. "Jesus. But what’s that got to do with
me?"

Wydell stopped, poised, one leg up on the skid of the chopper.
"He says he’ll only talk to you."

Excerpted from TRUST NO ONE © Copyright 2011 by Gregg
Hurwitz. Reprinted with permission by St. Martin's Paperbacks. All
rights reserved.