by Barry Eisler
“Beyond the targets still being alive.”
“Yes, of course. On balance, I think it was mostly a lost opportunity. Which is, of course, a shame, but no one is going to know what that drone is. And if they ask, they’ll get stonewalled in all directions.”
“Do you want any follow-up?”
“No, for now, stand down. I’m sure I’ll be in touch.”
“Roger that.”
Kane hung up. As soon as he was off the phone, his anger bloomed again, and he waited for it to pass.
He’d screwed up, there was no denying it. Whether a plan had made sense at the time, in the end it was success or failure that mattered. And his plan had failed. Spectacularly.
For so long, he’d been very . . . conservative in his approach to managing Bradley’s problem. Discreetly intervening when Bradley had behaved foolishly in high school. Blocking Little unseen later on, when the man’s obsessions threatened to lead him to Bradley. Separating Bradley from the influence of that creature Snake. And easing Bradley into a position of political responsibility—Kane’s own congressional seat—where Bradley would finally be forced to become a man, and to once and for all put aside childish things.
But then Snake had been released from Leavenworth, and Hannah Cuero had gone missing, and Little had reacquired the scent. All Kane’s careful measures, his graduated responses, suddenly for naught. He wished he had been less circumspect to start with. Of course, proceeding that way against Snake—a decorated Special Forces soldier, after all—and a Homeland Security investigator would have entailed risks he preferred to avoid, and that he judged unnecessary. But now, with the benefit of hindsight, he couldn’t deny that if he had eliminated Snake and Little at the outset, the entire situation would have been nipped in the proverbial bud.
He realized now that in moving against Little and Lone the way he had, he had been overreacting to shortcomings born of his previous cautiousness. Which of course was its own form of mistake.
What he needed was an approach that made sense based on where things stood, not one that he was unconsciously designing in reaction to past successes or failures.
When he felt calmer, he began to consider the situation. There was a silver lining, he supposed. Given that something had gone awry, it was best that no one but Gossett knew what was supposed to have happened. Well, Gossett and the presumably dead operator, which amounted to the same thing.
A paranoid thought gripped him: Could they have arrested the operator?
Little and Lone were law enforcement, after all. If they had the operator in custody, and a goddamn Azrael drone along with him, it could be a lot. The drone itself would be denied by everyone. But testimony from a live operator about what the drone was intended for . . . That could implicate Gossett.
Gossett would probably hold firm, at least if given assurances of a presidential pardon, which Kane could almost certainly arrange. But still.
He breathed deeply, in and out. He was being paranoid. That was all right, up to a point, but too much was never helpful. Because Lone had left those two bodies in Campo, hadn’t she? What aboveboard cop does something like that? She obviously had a lot to hide. Whatever had made her leave those bodies at the scene in the first place, of course, but now the bodies themselves.
He thought about that. He’d been assuming that whatever she was hiding was tied only to Campo. But the more he thought about it, why wouldn’t it be more . . . far reaching than just that?
What? What else is she hiding?
He thought about Bangkok. That seemed to be her initial connection with Little. The anti-trafficking task force.
He started Googling news from Bangkok. It seemed a long shot, but he tried “Bangkok Lone.”
The first entry was Senator Ezra Lone, who had died in Bangkok a year earlier.
Kane stared at the screen. What the hell?
He knew about Ezra Lone, of course. Supposedly it had been a heart attack. The scuttlebutt, though, was that the man was a predatory pedophile, who had been over there on a child-rape junket when someone had shown up at his hotel suite and butchered him, his aide, and some high-level cop with the Thai national police force. Neither government wanted any of that coming out, and the powers that be had cooperated in devising a “heart attack” cover story that included a Bangkok morgue that had conveniently caught fire, destroying any evidence that might have contradicted the official narrative.
Which, at the moment, sounded a hell of a lot like Chop’s white phosphorous training accident.
Kane had never made the connection between Livia Lone and Ezra Lone. It was a reasonably common name, and because Detective Lone was Asian, he had assumed her name was of Chinese extraction. But now . . .
It took him five minutes of additional research to learn that Livia Lone had been trafficked to America from Thailand, rescued in a police raid in Llewellyn, Idaho, and fostered in the home of local magnate Fred Lone. Whose brother was . . . Ezra Lone.
Kane shook his head, trying to make sense of it all.
Fred Lone, it turned out, had also died of a heart attack—when Livia Lone had been a junior in high school. And Livia, according to the press reports, had been some kind of local wrestling and judo prodigy.
He leaned back in his chair, his head swimming, suddenly nearly certain Fred Lone’s heart attack had been another “heart attack.”
This woman . . . what the hell was she?
Well, at a high level it seemed clear enough. The brothers had abused her when she was a child. She acquired martial-arts skills. She killed Fred Lone and then had to bide her time with the brother, because a senator was a little harder to get to than someone whose house you lived in. She’d found a way eventually. If the stories about what had happened in Ezra Lone’s hotel suite were true, the killer was certainly capable. After all, one of the dead was a Thai cop, and Lone’s aide was a former American soldier. If the stories about the condition of the bodies were true—the Thai cop castrated and choked with his own severed sex organs, the aide’s face shot to pieces, and Ezra Lone gutted like a deer—the killer had also been extremely . . . motivated. Consumed by molten hate, and carrying out the most savage, primal revenge.
He’d always assumed those lurid rumors were tall tales—exaggerations, at least. No longer.
How the hell had she gotten away with it?
Some skill, obviously. She’s a cop, she’d know how to clean a crime scene, how to throw off an investigation. And some luck. The authorities on both sides didn’t want an investigation.
And good God. This . . . avenging angel, or whatever she was, was now after Bradley. With a partner from Homeland Security motivated by the disappearance of his own daughter, presumably at Bradley’s hands.
Kane needed to call his CBP guy to confirm Lone had been in Bangkok when the senator had been butchered. But the confirmation would be redundant. He knew it was her.
And he needed to get Bradley help. Counseling. Something. He wasn’t getting better on his own.
Kane felt a surge of helpless rage. He’d worked so hard to get Bradley clean. And now this creature Snake, who was like an evil drug pusher, had gotten Bradley hooked again.
But that would come later. For now, the priority was neutralizing Little. And even more so Livia Lone.
He pushed aside his distress and tried to think clearly. Tactically.
It seemed this woman had been getting away with quite a few killings. Fred Lone in Llewellyn. Ezra Lone and his entourage in Bangkok. Oliver Graham in Paris. Chop’s men outside Campo.
In fact, in some ways it was a shame Chop had cleaned up the Campo mess. It might have been interesting to let the local police take care of it. And see if it could be tied to Lone. There was more than one way to take someone out of commission.
Which gave him an idea.
20
Livia was lying on her futon and just beginning to doze off when the phone buzzed. She sat up instantly and clicked the answer key. “Yeah.”
; “You ready?” Fallon said.
Instantly her heart was pounding. “You got it?”
“Didn’t I tell you I know a guy?”
“Let’s do it this way,” she said, jumping up and heading to her desk. “First, just tell me the times he was stateside. If those windows don’t match the disappearances—if he was fighting in Iraq when those girls were being abducted in America—he’s not who I’m looking for.” She sat, woke up the laptop, entered her passcode, and opened Little’s file.
“Got it,” Fallon said. He started ticking off the dates when Boomer had been rotated back to the States. By the time he was done, Livia had eight out of eight matches. Hannah Cuero was number nine, but of course that was only a month ago, when Boomer had long since left the military.
“What’s the overlap?” Fallon said when he’d finished.
She looked at her notes. “One hundred percent.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. Every time one of the girls disappeared, Boomer was in the States. Three times he was in the States and nothing happened. Or at least, nothing got entered into ViCAP—the FBI database.”
“Which I guess wouldn’t really mean much.”
“That’s right. For whatever reason, he could have been inactive for some periods. Or local law enforcement just failed to enter a missing girl into the database, which happens all the time. What matters is, not a single report of a disappearance while he was in Iraq. That alone would be a hell of a coincidence.”
She looked at her notes. Names, dates, locations of disappearances.
Trying to tamp down her excitement, she said, “Now let’s narrow it further. On those occasions when Boomer was in the States, can you tell me where he was?”
“I can’t account for all his movements, but I can give you some parameters.”
“Whatever you have.”
“Okay. Just about every time, his fort would be the first place he’d go, because weapons need to be put up and gear put away—plus people like to see their families once in a while. The army has forts and marines have camps, by the way. Anyway, for Boomer, who was Fifth Group, we’d be talking Fort Campbell, in Kentucky near the Tennessee border. Any hits near there?”
She checked her notes, opened a mapping application, and felt another adrenaline dump of excitement. “One. In 2007. Guthrie, Kentucky. Which looks maybe a half hour from the base. When in 2007 was Boomer back at Fort Campbell?”
“All of October, all of—”
“That’s it. October 10, 2007. A girl named Kaila Jones. Was that Boomer’s first rotation home?”
“Yeah, it was. Why?”
“Because he must have realized after that he couldn’t hunt near the base again without establishing a pattern. Couldn’t shit where he eats. After that, I’m guessing . . . he would use other opportunities to hunt. Farther afield. Vacation time, things like that.”
“Well, everyone gets thirty days’ leave a year and can go wherever they want in the world. No requirement to take all those days consecutively, so if his unit lets him, and he’s not engaged in training or daily garrison operations, he could use a week here or there, or a two-week block here and a week there, etc. If you don’t use leave one year, it carries over to the next. You can accrue up to sixty days before you find yourself in a use-it-or-lose-it situation. But my guy doesn’t have access to records of Boomer’s individual vacation days.”
“Shit.”
“Hang on. There is something called block leave, when everyone has to take leave at the same time. Units like it because it keeps the cycle of deployment, home, train-up, and redeployment manageable and orderly.”
“And your guy had records of that?”
“You bet. You ready?”
She was glad he was volunteering what he’d learned before she gave him the dates and places of the disappearances, which was the right way to do it. Not that she thought Fallon would feed her false information, but this way was always better. On a multiple-choice test, people could fake knowledge. On an essay, not so much.
“Go.”
Fallon gave her six different instances of block leave. Three were negative. Three others overlapped with disappearances.
“Three hits,” she said, struggling again with her excitement. “Charleston, San Antonio, Minneapolis.”
“It sounds like the timing supports your theory. But if you want to place Boomer in the vicinity during those times, rather than just knowing he had the opportunity, I think you’d need credit-card receipts or cellphone records or whatever. For now, it sounds like all you have is that Boomer could have done it. I mean, you know he doesn’t have an alibi, at least not the alibi of being on base, but the absence of an alibi means he can’t prove he didn’t do it, not that you can prove he did, right?”
“Right. But let’s keep going. There were four other girls. I guess those he could have done while taking regular vacation time? For which your guy wouldn’t have a record?”
“That’s right.”
“Any other times he would have been off base for a few days at a time or longer?”
“Plenty. For one thing, there’s a forty-eight-hour pass, which isn’t treated as formal leave. If the forty-eight-hour pass aligns with a weekend, well, congratulations, now you have a four-day pass. For these, you’re not supposed to go far, because you have to be ready for recall if necessary. Though honestly, you think SF guys really do what they’re told? More like what you think you can get away with.”
“Okay, this is great. It sounds like he would have had more opportunities than I was first thinking.”
“Hey, we haven’t even gotten to the training, for which my guy does have records.”
“Off-base training?”
“Exactly. There are more SF courses taught at sister service posts than you can keep track of—physical surveillance at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, combat diver training at Naval Air Station Key West, the military freefall jumpmaster course at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona, winter operations training at the Northern Warfare Training Center at Fort Wainwright in Alaska . . . Those are just a few, and Boomer’s been to all of them and more.”
“Give me the names of those bases again,” she said. “One at a time.”
He did. She plugged each of them into the mapping app. None was in the vicinity of a disappearance.
Shit.
“No go on those,” she said. “Okay, give me the rest.”
Fallon went through each of Boomer’s training deployments. Each one came up negative.
“I’m getting the feeling he doesn’t operate when he’s training,” she said, looking at her screen. “Either because he’s too busy, or because he’s being careful not to create a pattern that could be checked against military records, or both.”
“That makes sense. Well, again, he’d have plenty of opportunities during regular leave and short-term passes. And maybe during language training.”
“Language training?”
“Oh, yeah. Fifth Group would mean most likely Arabic, Dari, Farsi, or Pashto. Most of that is taught at Bragg, but Boomer was one of the lucky ones—he got sent to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey in 2006.”
“No match for that.”
“Okay, one other possibility. Civilian training.”
“What do you mean?”
“Aside from the official courses we’ve been talking about, SF guys also attend a lot of schools taught by civilians with special skills. Shooting schools, driving courses, climbing schools, man-tracking schools, pack-mule courses, self-defense schools, lock picking, B&E . . . you get the idea. If an SF team can write a good concept letter and get it approved through command, it’ll get funded, and guys will get some cool training. Your tax dollars at work.”
“Did your guy have any of those records?”
“Not a complete record like he had for the block leave and the official training, but some.”
“Go.”
“Okay, stick-and-knife stuff like kali with
a guy named Mike Killman, former SF. A warrior monk type I’ve trained with myself.”
“He’s named ‘Killman’?”
“Yeah, a Wordsworth kind of thing, I guess. That was in Fayetteville, North Carolina, right next to Fort Bragg.”
“No matches. Probably he didn’t like Fayetteville because it’s near another Special Forces base.”
“Okay, next is something called Guerrilla Jiu-Jitsu with a guy named Dave Camarillo in San Jose, California.”
There had been a disappearance in Santa Cruz, a half-hour drive from San Jose. “I know Dave,” she said. “I used to roll with him when I was in college. When was Boomer there?”
“December 2010.”
She felt a flush of excitement. “Bingo. That’s five matches. What else?”
“Radical Mixed Martial Arts with someone named Rene Dreifuss in New York City.”
Another guy she had rolled with. “When?” she said.
“March 2011.”
“Bingo. A disappearance in Summit, New Jersey, same time. That’s six. Six.”
“My God.”
Her heart was pounding. “Yeah. It’s him.”
She stared at the screen for a moment as though expecting more information to materialize on it. But holy shit, she had him. She fucking had him.
Something occurred to her. “What’s up with the martial-arts training?”
“Lot of SF guys are into it. MMA, jiu-jitsu, modern combatives, you name it. Why?”
“They any good?”
“Are you kidding?”
She hoped Boomer was good. Maybe she’d get to see for herself.
They went through the rest of the civilian training. There weren’t any other clear matches. But it didn’t matter. The vacation times could have explained the rest. In fact, she expected there were even more—abductions that hadn’t been entered into ViCAP.
She thought for a moment about Little’s certainty that it was a two-man team.
“Can you check one more thing for me?” she said.