by Barry Eisler
He hoped the video could be recovered. He really didn’t want to send a team to the Cuero house. It would be indecent.
12
Just past midnight, Livia met Little at Fremont Canal Park again.
She’d been lucky: cleaning up and getting rid of her clothes and the other contaminated items had gone smoothly. And no one had missed her at headquarters. She’d even slept deeply on the plane back to Seattle, knocked out by the parasympathetic backlash to the adrenaline rush of combat. Which was good, because she was so furious at Little—and at herself—that it would have been dangerous to confront him exhausted and not fully in control.
She waited in the shadows by the asphalt plant at the edge of the park until she saw him walking up the path. She listened. Other than his footfalls, the park was silent.
She ghosted back to the tree line, then circled around to his rear, satisfying herself that he hadn’t been followed. She knew Little wasn’t as surveillance conscious as, say, Carl and Rain and the rest of the team she’d worked with in Paris. And she knew now he needed to be.
Not that she was in a great position to throw stones. Look what had almost happened to her outside of Campo that very afternoon. But that was the point.
“Hey,” she said, coming up behind him.
He spun, his gun arm stopping halfway to his waist, his eyes wide in the glow of a distant streetlight. “Damn,” he said. “You trying to give me a heart attack?”
She looked at him for a moment, watching his breath turn to vapor in the cool night air. “Just being careful. Like you said, remember?”
“Did you learn anything?”
“You tell me.”
He frowned. “What does that mean?”
“Who were the men who ambushed me?”
“You were ambushed? What do you mean?”
She looked at him. She had a good nose for deception, and he seemed genuinely surprised. But a suspect could always tell the truth if you didn’t ask the right questions.
“Outside of Campo,” she said. “A few miles south of Interstate 8. Two cars and two bodies by the side of the road. Don’t tell me you haven’t already checked with the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department. You knew what was coming.”
He shook his head as though confused.
She took a step closer, trying to tamp down the anger. “Did you check with the sheriff’s department?”
A beat. Then, “Yes.”
“Then you fucking knew.”
“Livia, I . . . there are no bodies. No cars. No reports of anything like that at all.”
She looked at him, trying to process that. “There’s no way those two vehicles have been sitting on the shoulder since it happened, next to all that blood on the ground, without someone calling it in. Without a highway patrol passing and checking it out.”
“Blood on the ground . . . what are you talking about? Somebody came at you? You killed them? Please, tell me.”
She shook her head. “No, Little. You don’t get anything from me until you come clean.”
“About what?”
“You knew,” she said, coming closer. He was six inches taller and outweighed her by at least a hundred pounds, but he took a step back. “You knew someone would be watching. You knew I would walk right into it. You used me to draw them out.”
He held up his hands as though in surrender. “I told you I was being watched. And that you had to be careful.”
She flexed her hands, resisting the urge to grab him by the lapels and throw him onto his back. “You told me knowing I wouldn’t listen. That I’d discount it as paranoia—a mirage, like you said, produced by desperation. You only told me so you could cover your own ass. So that when I confronted you later, you could wave it in my face like some kind of get-out-of-jail-free card.”
“Livia, listen to yourself. You’re—”
“Fuck you. I’m done.” She turned and started walking down the path.
“Livia!” he called out from behind her.
She kept walking.
“Livia!” he said again.
She heard his footfalls, coming fast, overtaking her. “Goddamn it, would you just—”
She sensed his right hand coming in to grab her arm an instant before it landed. She snatched his sleeve at the wrist, dropped, blocked his right leg at the knee with her thigh, yanked his arm forward, and threw him with tai otoshi. He was already off balance, his momentum carrying him forward, and there was nothing he could do to stop himself from sailing past her. She resisted the urge to drill him into the ground, keeping the arm and pulling up at the last moment to protect the back of his skull. If she’d wanted to, she could have transitioned to an arm bar and broken his elbow. She resisted that urge, too.
She stepped back and looked down at him. “Don’t touch me.”
He lay there, sucking wind. “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “Like I said, my football days are behind me.”
He got his legs under him and stood, a little stooped and still catching his breath. “We cool now?” he said.
“No, we’re not cool. I told you. Come clean or we’re done.”
“But you know I’m right. You know those men are out there. You know—”
“Shut the fuck up right now,” she said. “Or you’re going for another ride. And this time I won’t be gentle.”
They stood there, staring at each other, both breathing heavily. She hated that he knew what buttons to push. And that he wasn’t hesitating to push them. Because, okay, was she really going to walk away from this just to prove a point? Just to show him that he couldn’t control her? Whoever had made a run at her in Campo, whoever had taken Hannah Cuero, whoever was protecting the perpetrators . . . was she really going to let them prey on new victims?
He put his hands on his hips and blew out a long breath. “Okay,” he said. “I didn’t know. But . . .”
“But you knew it was possible. Maybe even likely. Otherwise you wouldn’t have checked in with the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department.”
“I told you. My boss, Tilden, is watching me. And I thought . . . if someone is watching me, and being that careful, it’s not impossible they’ll be watching the Cuero house, too.”
“And you let me walk right into that.”
“Not exactly. I told you to be surveillance conscious. And wait, wait, I’m not saying that to get out of jail free. You’re right, I knew you’d discount it. But I also know the way you can handle yourself. Look what you just did to me.”
She said nothing. She realized that, as furious as she was, she couldn’t blame him. Not really. Would she have put someone else at risk to find out what had happened to Nason?
She hated to admit it, but putting someone else at risk might have been the least of it. If she’d had to make that choice.
“The men you killed,” he said. “It wasn’t them, was it? The ones who took my daughter?”
She looked at him. Maybe he didn’t deserve an answer, but she couldn’t be that cruel.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But . . . I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“The men who are doing it . . . they don’t stick around after. This was something else.”
“What?”
Yeah, that was the question. She realized it wasn’t Little she was furious with. It was herself. She should have seen all this beforehand. And the worst part was, she had seen some of it. She just hadn’t put it together. She’d told herself Little was traumatized, desperate, overreaching. And she’d gone to Campo and interviewed Mrs. Cuero at least half thinking she was doing it just to humor the man and get him out of her hair.
And then she realized something else. She’d been so focused on what she might have left behind at the scene, and getting rid of the evidence, and how she was going to confront Little, that she hadn’t thought back to the Cueros. And now that she was . . .
“Surveillance,” she said. “Whoever came at me on the highway must have tracked me from the Cuero hou
se. I didn’t spot surveillance, but they wouldn’t have had to be present. They could have been watching the house remotely, a video camera in a tree, a telephone pole, wherever. They could have logged me going in and coming out, and rolled up behind me a few miles out of town, without my realizing until it was too late that they’d followed me. Which is pretty much what happened.”
“That makes sense.”
She shook her head. “You don’t get it. I gave Mrs. Cuero my business card.”
“What? Why?”
Because I didn’t really think there was anything to your theories. Because I assumed you were so stricken you were just being paranoid.
“What was I supposed to do?” she said. “‘Hi, Mrs. Cuero, I can’t tell you who I am or under what authority I’m here or why you should let me into your house and open up to me about the most traumatic, horrifying thing imaginable, but please spend hours with me talking about your daughter and maybe I can help’?”
“Okay, but—”
“What time did you check in with the San Diego County Sheriff?”
“About an hour ago.”
“And they had nothing? No reports of a roadside homicide?”
“Not a peep. Not even a speeding ticket.”
“Then someone moved those bodies. Which means . . . some kind of nearby manpower. If I’m right about the video, there might be a recording. Of me, maybe of my rental car. And even if there’s no recording, all they have to do is ask Mrs. Cuero who was visiting. And based on the way they came at me, I don’t think these people are in the habit of asking nicely. And maybe they won’t want her talking afterward. They want to clean up loose ends, like they just cleaned up the bodies and cars by the side of the road. Have you thought about that? You didn’t just put me in danger. You put me in continuing danger. And not just me. That poor girl’s traumatized mother and aunt, too. Do you even care?”
“They’ll be fine. No one’s going to—”
“That’s the same bullshit rationalization you told yourself to get me to go out there. Who the fuck are we dealing with, Little? Enough manpower to monitor the house, send two at me, sanitize the crime scene right afterward, and you’re telling me the Cueros are safe now? Do you understand how out of your mind you are on this? Forget about me. What are you going to do if something happens to the Cueros? You think that’s what Presley would want?”
His face darkened and his gun hand clenched. “You don’t ever get to—”
“Yes I do! Because you dragged me into this, and now I can’t get out even if I want to! I’m stuck with you, you asshole, and I need to know you’re going to be enough in control of yourself to not get innocent people killed!”
He stared at her, his eyes furious, clouds of vapor that could have been smoke jetting out of his nostrils. Then his expression softened and he looked down.
“You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
They stood there for a moment, neither speaking. Little looked up again. She couldn’t read his expression.
“What?” she said.
“I really am sorry.”
“Yeah, but you’re glad, too.”
“That’s part of what I’m sorry for.”
She nodded. She hated it, but she actually understood.
“What’s your theory?” he said.
“About who attacked me?”
“And who was behind them.”
She considered. “Well, we know we’re dealing with significant local manpower, right? The surveillance, the attack, the cleanup.”
“Agreed.”
“I’m no expert on Campo, but from what I’ve seen, I can imagine only three things that could explain that. The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, the Border Patrol, and the navy Mountain Warfare Training Camp.”
He nodded. “Agreed again. You like any one of them better than the others?”
She thought about the vague sense she’d had that she should drive by the naval base, her frustration that there wasn’t time. And the way “Trooper Johnson” had performed his traffic stop.
“I don’t think they were law enforcement,” she said. “I don’t think they were accustomed to doing any kind of vehicle stops or searches.”
“So not the sheriff’s department. Not the Border Patrol.”
“If I had to guess. So. Can you find out anything about that naval base?”
He nodded. “You better believe it.”
13
Admiral Kane hung up the secure phone. For a moment he just sat, rubbing his chin. The situation was quite a conundrum.
He leaned back, put his feet on the desk, and steepled his fingers. He needed to devise a plan, something that would quickly and cleanly prevent things from spiraling further, and he didn’t have much time. The life of a vice president wasn’t quite as demanding as that of the president himself, but more than a few minutes alone without some aide disturbing him was a rarity.
Chop hadn’t managed to recover any video. If there was a recording at all, it seemed Chop’s men had hidden and probably password protected it. So, given that the men in question were now dead, the video had functionally been rendered a dead end, too. Meaning that learning who had visited the Cuero house and then killed Chop’s men might have involved a regrettable interrogation of Hannah Cuero’s parents. But Chop, to his credit, had devised an interim solution that had worked just as well. He’d sent a team to black bag the Cuero house. They’d found a card, right in the kitchen, secured to the refrigerator with a little magnet. A Seattle sex-crimes police detective named Livia Lone. A quick search of CBP records revealed that Detective Lone had flown round-trip from Seattle to San Diego the very day Chop’s men were killed. It was her. It had to be.
And what was even more interesting was, Lone was connected to Little.
Kane had known about this man Little for a long time—ever since Kane, on a hunch Bradley might have relapsed into some metastasized version of his degenerate high-school habits, had asked an FBI contact to use the Bureau’s ViCAP database to check into possible disappearances from areas around the country to which Kane knew Bradley had been deployed.
The results were extremely unsettling.
Kaila Jones, a black teenager, had gone missing from Guthrie, Kentucky, a small town close to Fort Campbell, Bradley’s unit’s base. Nothing so remarkable about the disappearance of a teenaged girl, at least statistically, and the story probably wouldn’t even have made the news. But the girl’s parents both worked on the base, and they insisted that their daughter would not have just run off. They were certain she had been abducted. And there had been other disappearances, too, all from towns near and at the same time of Bradley’s various deployments.
And worse, Kane wasn’t the only person with an interest in these disappearances. It seemed a Homeland Security investigator named Benjamin Dixon Little spent almost every evening, sometimes until nearly dawn, querying ViCAP about missing teenaged girls. Indeed, Little had taken a particular interest in the very girls whose disappearances coincided with Bradley’s stateside rotations. Little’s own daughter had gone missing, it seemed, and the man was obsessed with finding whoever had abducted her.
Kane put his elbows on the desk and massaged his temples. He had attributed Bradley’s high-school behavior to boys-will-be-boys excesses, and blamed the girls involved at least as much as he blamed his son. Girls should know not to lead a young man on, that it was hard to stop once things got started. A young man’s sexual impulses were strong, even overpowering, and the discipline required to manage those impulses could take time to develop. Everyone understood this. He didn’t know why so many people were intent on denying it.
And maybe Bradley’s behavior was occasionally a bit more than average. But that just meant his impulses were stronger. His discipline, more lacking. Kane had sensed this even before discovering his teenaged son’s stash of pornography. The material had been . . . extreme. Kane had burned all of it, leaving a note in its place: If I can find it, so can oth
ers.
He and Bradley had never discussed that note, or what it referred to. And that was fine. Kane had never found any other material. Problem solved.
The main thing was, he always knew Bradley would grow out of the boyhood behavior. If he was given time. If his environment could be properly managed. If the occasional girl who decided to deal with postcoital shame or regret by accusing a boy—who was no more culpable than she—could be persuaded to keep quiet.
As betrayed and even humiliated as he’d felt when Bradley announced he was eschewing Annapolis and joining the army, Kane thought there would at least be a silver lining: The rigor. The discipline. The responsibility. It was a cliché, but the army, Kane had believed, would make his son a man.
And then Kane had received a call from Bradley’s commander in Iraq. A reluctant call, full of apologetic circumlocutions. It seemed that Bradley, along with one of his teammates—a low-class specimen named Stephen Spencer, known among the men as “Snake”—had developed a habit of taking advantage of young girls during raids on houses suspected of harboring insurgents. Bradley’s commander didn’t condone the practice and wanted it to stop, but out of respect for Bradley and his heroism, he preferred to avoid overt action.
Kane had understood that by “respect,” the commander had meant “fear.” Which was good. Fear was a more valuable currency than respect. Fear was what had caused the commander to quietly notify Kane, rather than risking public action against the son and grandson of former admirals, one of whom had gone on to become a congressman. Fear bought Kane time to engineer a solution. And he had time: Bradley was finishing a six-month tour, shortly to rotate back to Fort Campbell.
And then, a month later, Kane had awoken in the night with a strange intuition—more akin, really, to a premonition. He’d called his FBI contact. Learned about the disappearance near Fort Campbell. The other disappearances. And Little.