Airtight Read Online Free Page B

“The police shot him.”
    It didn’t compute. A drug overdose, that was the most likely cause. Suicide, as horrible as that was to contemplate, was always a possibility, when the pain became too much.
    But shot by the police? How could that be? Steven was completely nonviolent, dangerous to no one but himself. Chris had time to speculate while Laura was crying, and the most likely scenario he could come up with was that Steven had been caught in the middle of a drug shoot-out between the cops and his dealer.
    He wasn’t even close.
    “They shot him in his apartment,” Laura said. “They said he was holding the gun when they came in.”
    They both knew that Steven only had a gun at Chris’s insistence. In the neighborhood that he lived in, Chris felt it was necessary. But it was another example of Chris’s futility in trying to protect his brother; Steven had once admitted that he usually kept it unloaded.
    “Tell me everything you know,” he said.
    “There’s a judge, Judge Brennan, who was murdered; I think just a couple of days ago. He’s the one who was going to sentence Steven. For some reason they thought that Steven committed the murder, so they went to his apartment. The cop who did it said he had the gun, and that he shot Steven in self-defense. They’re calling him a hero. But he’s lying, Chris. The person he’s describing is not Steven.”
    “Let’s go to your apartment.”
    Chris said little during the ride. He had already pushed the pain and sense of loss at least temporarily to the side, as he was trained to do. That training led him to instead plan and focus on the mission, even though he was not yet sure what the mission would be. But one thing was certain; he was not going to simply accept his brother’s death and head back to Afghanistan.
    What he needed was information, much more than Laura could provide. And much easier to gather than most people might realize.
    He had brought a computer with him; it went with him everywhere. His specialty, before he went Force Recon, was in communications, which in the modern military was totally computer driven.
    Gallagher sat down with the computer in front of the TV set in Laura’s apartment and got to work. It was even easier than he thought. Biographical information on Lieutenant Lucas Somers was plentiful; he had won a series of awards and commendations, and each story about them went on at length about his background.
    Within a few minutes Chris knew Lucas Somers’s life story, knew that his parents were deceased, that he had a brother who worked as an investment banker on Wall Street, and a sister-in-law who was a prosecuting attorney. He even had pictures of everyone, and committed them to memory. This was not a time for mistaken identity.
    Amazingly, Somers’s phone number wasn’t even unlisted, so Chris had that as well, though there was no address shown.
    The newscasts left little doubt as to how the police operation took place. Somers led a team into Steven’s apartment and gunned him down. They had little interest in taking him alive; all they wanted was the kill and the subsequent glory, so that they could make their victory tour on television the next day.
    Chris had all he could do not to focus on what must have been going through Steven’s mind as his killers entered the apartment. He knew the intense fear he must have been feeling, with no one, especially not his brother, there to help him.
    Chris had a number of ways to find out where Somers lived, but he didn’t have to utilize them. That’s because the TV coverage included his neighbors being interviewed. One of them referred to Somers living “right next door,” as he pointed to his left from in front of his own house.
    The newscast gave the man’s name, and his address was listed in the phone book, which meant that Chris now had Somers’s address as well.
    He would be paying him a visit, and how Somers answered his questions would determine whether he lived or