"Claire?"
She opened her eyes. Slowly. It was warm and bright. She was in her room, in her bed, and it were his father's eyes, sparkling behind his horn-rimmed glasses, that welcomed her.
"Wake up, honey," he whispered, stroking her hair softly.
"You're back from your trip!" Claire said with a huge grin, jumping up to give him a hug.
"Yes, I got back earlier," he said, holding her tight to his chest. "You're mother is making pancakes and Jackie came by about some school project."
They went downstairs together, Claire not bothering to change out of her pink pajamas. The smell that greeted them on the stairs was incredible.
Her mom stood in the kitchen flipping pancakes with the warmest smile on her face.
"Claire?"
She turned around to find Jackie standing in the doorframe. But, no, this wasn't right… blood was trickling down her forehead from a thin gash that ran across her brow. It dripped on her cheerleading outfit and left small red droplets on her mother's flawless parquet floor. And her eyes… Claire had never seen somebody look so scared, so terrified.
"Honestly, do I have to check the back of your head?
Claire's head snapped up, her whole body jolting as if zapped. She gasped for air. The dream had been so real.
"Good morning, sleepy head," Sylar said, handing her a plastic cup of coffee, "we're here."
Claire looked outside. The car had stopped on a suburban street that would have looked completely normal if not for the empty site of the explosion. The only thing that was left of the residence was the chimney that was blackened by the fire but had somehow withstood the blast.
Detective Brooks, their contact in the Boston Police Department, who had been driving the car, turned around to make sure his companions were ready to go. "There shouldn't be anybody on the scene, but if we run into someone, I made you documentation that confirms you're private consultants," he said in a nervous voice, handing each of them a plastic card.
Brooks possessed no special powers himself, but he was very interested in the bribe the Company was paying him to "help out a little". Tracy Strauss's communications campaign had achieved success within legal limits, but the ice queen had simultaneously built a foundation to an extremely convenient web of informants and snitches that was at least as lucrative.
Claire climbed out from the back seat with difficulty. The sleep that the half an hour long drive from the airport had permitted her had been refreshing but the dream that had accompanied it had been not. She took a long sip of her coffee, trying to hold her eyes open.
Do you know that we don't really need sleep? It must have been a damn hard habit to kick, Claire caught herself thinking when they approached the ruins of the house. The area was cut off by yellow police tape, but detective Brooks had been right there wasn't a soul to be seen.
Sylar looked more like his old self than ever. He was wearing a black shirt and the stubble on his cheeks he hadn't had the time to shave in the early morning hours somehow made him look more menacing. He circled the scene, picking up random things and closing his eyes to concentrate on their history. Most of them were merely little more than ashes, turned black from the fire that had consumed the house. He threw them aside, one by one, muttering about "not getting a thing".
Claire sat on a stone block that must have been left of the building's substructure. The morning was bleak and the air was chilly, the sky above them monotonously grey, threatening to rain at any moment.
Sylar crouched in front of the chimney, sliding his palms along the mouth of the fireplace. Finally he stopped, his eyes shut. "It was him," he said, turning to Claire. "It was Kenrick. Apparently he has the ability to blow himself up." His last sentence was dripping with sarcasm.
"Kenrick blew up his own house?" Claire asked incredulously. They had considered it as a possible scenario, but such a course of events had seemed a little unrealistic to her.
"Yes, the guy went all Armageddon on his own house. Call the nearest psychiatric hospital! Can we go home now?" Sylar whined. The other agents hadn't lied, the man really hated doing the Company's bidding which explained the lack of enthusiasm and his general grumpiness.
"Why?" she formed her main question.
"I don't know. I'm not a mind reader. I can't see what was going on in his head, but what I did see was him exploding," he explained as if to a child.
"Well, you can start by telling me what he did right before the blast," Claire said forcing her voice to be calm when in reality she just wanted to snap and tell Sylar to get over himself.
He sighed with frustration but crouched down again to lay his hand against the fireplace once more. His forehead wrinkled with concentration before he started speaking again. "He was angry. Furious… desperate. A call, there was a phone call," he said continuing with a whole description.
Fire was crackling merrily, casting warm light to the dark room. The only other source of light in the living-room was the TV, playing on mute. Corey Kenrick, a tall brown-haired man, sat on the couch, fiddling nervously with his fingers.
A phone ring startled him and he dug out his cell with obvious haste. "What did you do?" he said after receiving the call.
A gruff voice sounded from the speaker, yet too quiet to identify the words it was saying.
"My ex-wife called, upset, telling me she'd call the cops."
He listened to the answer for a moment.
"No, no. I calmed her down, said I'd take care of it."
Another pause. Kenrick stood up to pace around the room.
"I told you I'm not interested," he sounded desperate. "Why can't you just leave me alone? I promise I won't tell anyone. All I want is to live my life in peace."
He stopped to listen to the voice on the other end of the line again.
"NO! Please. I'll do it," he yielded, voice cracking. "Alright, I'll do it. Just promise me you'll leave them out of it."
The voice in the phone sounded victorious, proceeding to prattle on for quite some time.
"North Station. Locker number 39. I got it," he seemed to be repeating the instructions back to whoever was on the other side. "You'll know when it's done."
The line went dead. Kenrick held his cell in his hand, frozen, simply staring at the screen. He seemed utterly small for a man his height, almost as if he'd burst into tears at any second.
Then his breathing started growing heavier, he started shaking all over his body. Finally Corey Kenrick threw his cell phone against the wall before a huge blast rocked the house and there was only fire.
Claire simply stared at Sylar, who had stood up again. He even had the decency to look genuinely concerned. But she couldn't really see him, all she was thinking about was what he'd told her. And what he'd told her meant something bad. Only what? They needed to know more.
"Anything else we could use?" she asked him, her voice oddly emotionless.
"No," Sylar said grimly. But then again, Claire was already expecting that answer.
"Any chance he died in the explosion?"
"Close to zero. No body, remember?" he said flatly.
She got on her feet, pacing the empty site determinedly as the gears in her head kept turning to formulate a plan. "Alright. We have two viable leads which mean two possible plans of action. We can either go to the North Station to find the locker or we can pay a visit to that ex-wife of Kendrick's. I should have her address somewhere in the file…" she looked up hopefully. "What do you think?"
Sylar raised his eyebrows, leaning against the chimney. "North Station," he said after a short pause.
"But consider this the call was made five days ago. It's more than certain that whatever was in that locker is long gone by now. With the ex-wife we could take advantage of your lie detection skill."
"You think the blackmailer left any evidence behind to track him down? I don't think so. He seems smarter than that," Sylar said coolly. "As for the locker, I might get lucky and get a glimpse of the contents."
Claire nodded slowly. "So let's go," she announced as she turned around and started walking towards the car and detective Brooks who waited them by the vehicle.
As soon as they reached their driver, Claire gave his companions the plan. "Brooks, you'll drop us off in the nearest train stop that can get us to the North Station and after that you'll drive to this address she handed him a paper note-find this woman and ask her about any threats she may have received recently. And try to be tactful about it, okay?"
"Of course," the man promised meekly.
"You think she'll tell him anything?" Sylar mused as they pulled away from the explosion site.
Claire thought about it for a moment. "She already wanted to call the cops, so I think we have a fair chance that she'll come clean."
Detective Brooks stopped the car near a small train station, wishing them luck in a rather nonchalant manner. They watched him drive away while climbing to the concrete platform.
"Can we trust him?" Claire asked.
"When he agreed to question the ex-wife, he wasn't lying," Sylar said. "I think you can trust him as long as the bribe is big enough."
It took them almost an hour to make it to the North Station. Brooks called right before they stepped off the train to inform Claire that Mrs. Kenrick had admitted being threatened. She'd told him about a stranger who had given her son a letter to deliver to his mother. The letter had generously explained that if her ex-husband won't do as he's told they should expect a quite unpleasant future.
"So somebody is using Kenrick's family to blackmail him into doing something. He can blow up things hence we have to presume he wants him to blast something. We need to know what and we have to stop it," Claire summarized the situation as they elbowed their way through a mass of people.
"Yes, that's simple logic, but how do you know he hasn't done it already?" Sylar pointed out.
"He said 'you'll know when it's done', not 'I'll call you when it's done' which means it has to be big. Big enough to make the news and I haven't heard of any suspicious explosions except for Kenrick's own house."
They came to a halt in front of a wall of lockers, Claire's eyes darting around to find the number they were looking for.
"39," Sylar said, tapping against a thin metal door of the locker in question.
He made a simple gesture with his finger, opening the lock with ease. The door swayed open, the space behind it empty as Claire had predicted.
Sylar cocked an eyebrow at her that seemed to say "I love challenges". Then he did his trick again, placing his hands on the inside of the locker, moving them around as if trying to get a "hit". He looked positively like a madman, feeling the cool metal with his eyes closed.
"Two things, two paper slips," he started, sounding like a psychic communicating with some long lost spirit. "One's a plane ticket. Damn it, I can't see a thing… the other is a note, scribbled handwriting…"
Then his eyes suddenly flew open as the understanding came to him. He looked at Claire and there was something in his eyes that made her feel uneasy. "Oh, fuck," he murmured. "The picket at Washington."
"The one Strauss mentioned?" Claire asked anxiously.
"Yes. He's gonna blow it up."
"There're going to be hundreds, maybe thousands of people! I remember seeing the headline in the paper you were reading yesterday morning. And that was in Texas so it has to be huge," Claire said unbelievably. "He'd kill at least hundreds of people…"
"But he'd save his family. Talk about priorities," Sylar said, though, for once not an ounce of amusement accompanied his remark.
"The time!" Claire shouted, probably looking like a lunatic. "What time does it begin?" she demanded looking at her wristwatch.
"I think the article said at 12 o'clock," Sylar said, glancing at his watch as well.
Claire gasped when she saw that it was past 11 already. Her whole body was protesting in terror her hands had turned shaky, her stomach was churning and her knees felt weak.
"No," she said rigidly, her voice abnormally calm. "No, this can't be happening. If this goes down there will be no peace between us and them."
Sylar looked at her with an expression that could only be interpreted as concern, in all probability waiting for her to collapse or start screaming again. But nothing happened. Claire just stood there, dumb-struck, trying to find a way out of this mess.
"I'll call Tracy," he said softly. "You inform Parkman. I'm sure they'll know what to do."
Claire nodded submissively, still frozen with shock. She pulled out her phone which, by the way, wasn't an easy task to perform with her shaky fingers and dialed the number. Not the one to the headquarters, but directly to Matt Parkman.
After she had explained the situation, Parkman just kept drilling her who's behind it, what are their true motives and on and on and on. But what he didn't provide was a solution. In fact, he acted as if the massacre had already occurred and damage control was in order.
"We can still stop it," she hissed to him, knowing it was a long shot. Kenrick was probably there already, among hundreds if not thousands of people, ready to execute his task. Even if they'd catch the next plane, even if the Company's tracking system would be able to locate him… which Molly most likely wouldn't be able to do since she had no connection to Kenrick and it wouldn't serve a real purpose because they knew where he was, only how to find him in a crowd of people?
"Tracy's making some calls, but she's not sure there's anything she can do," Sylar said after Claire had ended her conversation with Parkman. "It's too late."
Claire's mind was working with feverish speed. There was only one feasible course of action and it rested mainly on blind luck.
She raised her eyes to meet Sylar's. "You'll have to fly us there."