by Brandt Legg
“Done.”
Forty-Eight
Wen had called Chase’s brother, Boone, at the hospital with their mother. She told him what Chase was about to do. Boone agreed that for his mother’s protection, Chase needed to stay away.
Chase stared at the phone, his mother’s bandaged face and thousand-year-old eyes staring back at him. Her pained look was almost more than he could handle after learning of his father’s murder.
“Convoy,” she said weakly.
“Mom, I’m so sorry.”
“Not your fault, honey, I should have listened. We . . . ”
“I should have—”
“We should have left like you told us,” she finished.
“Mom, save your strength. I’ll be there soon.”
“No. You can’t come. I don’t want more trouble. Boone is here. Those monsters could come back and hurt you, or Boone, or kill me . . . ”
“But—”
“Do not come. Don’t look for those monsters. Promise me you’ll stay safe.”
“Okay, Mom.”
“Stay safe,” she repeated. “I love you.”
“I love you, Mom.” He wanted to tell her how sorry he was about his father, but worried the emotional toll would be too much in her condition. He could tell she’d been crying. There’d be time later.
She tried to smile, but the pain held it back. Boone, who’d been holding the phone, took it away from her.
“Chase,” his brother began, “you be careful.” Boone gave Chase a knowing look, understanding that nothing in the world, not even a promise to his mother, would stop him from finding those responsible for his father’s death. “Anything you need, you call me.”
“I will. Love you, man.”
Boone nodded, a hundred words and emotions conveyed between brothers in that unspoken instant, chief among them—resolve. “Love you, too, Chase.”
Then his mother was back. “I forgot to tell the police,” she whispered. “Your dad had a camera thing.”
“You mean a surveillance system?”
“Yes. It was hidden, but you can see footage online. Maybe it will help.” She gave him the website.
“What’s the access code?”
“Boone’s birthday and yours.” She began to fade again. “If there’s something there, you decide what to do with it.”
“I will, Mom. Thanks. You should rest.”
Boone appeared again. “Use your tech-magic.”
Chase nodded. “You’ll stay with Mom?”
“Every second. Police are right outside the door.”
“We’re sending some backup.”
He whispered so Daisy wouldn’t hear. “Get me a weapon.”
“You got it.”
As Chase ended the video-call, Dez looked at him. “You okay?”
“No.”
Dez nodded.
Wen reached for Chase’s hand.
“That wasn’t fair,” he said to her.
“I know.”
“But you were right.”
They stared into each other’s eyes for a moment.
“Let’s go see that footage,” Chase finally said.
“Are you sure you’re up for that?” Wen asked.
“No.”
The head of security walked up and asked for the game plan.
Chase told him to send ten of his best people. “Coordinate with the police and make sure to get my brother, Boone, a semiautomatic pistol.”
A few minutes later, Chase, Wen, and Dez were alone in the elevator, heading back to the upper floors.
“After you left,” Dez began, “I asked SEER where the next strike would be based on the companies with government contracts. It came back as Las Vegas.”
“What’s in Vegas? Chase asked.
“Lipton Innovations. Major defense contractor. Supplies a ton of stuff to the intelligence community.”
“Sounds like a fit,” Wen said.
“Let’s go to Vegas,” Chase said.
“SEER still says, based on the data from the other track—”
“The non-government contract targets?”
“Right,” Dez continued. “Balance Engineering is one of the next three strikes. Most likely the first, most likely tonight.”
“Two strikes in one night? That would be a new pattern,” Chase said. “Vegas seems the most probable. Wen and I will go there. Let’s keep the full force on guard here tonight. We’ll get Flint to find some more people and we’ll have this place covered.”
“What are you going to do in Vegas?” Dez asked.
“It’s our chance to be there, waiting.”
“And?” Dez asked. “What do you do if a Fire Bomber shows up?”
“Wen is a lethal agent, one of the best in the world.”
“I’m not worried about her,” Dez said, wanting to simultaneously hit and hug his distraught friend.
“Oh, don’t worry, I’ll think of something,” Chase said as he pulled out his ringing phone. “I think this is Mars.”
Chase clicked the speaker button and told him about his parents. Mars, who had worked for them for fifteen years, was as devastated as if it had been his own parents. More so because Mars had lost his parents as a teen, and kind of adopted the Malone family as his own.
“Tell me what you need,” the prisoner said, “and I’ll find a way.”
“Thanks, brother.”
“I wish I had longer to talk, but I’m in one of those limited windows. The reason I needed to reach you is, after your folks were here yesterday . . . geez, yesterday . . . they were just here . . . ”
“Yeah,” Chase said, remembering laughing with his dad twenty-four hours earlier.
“This hacker contacted me,” Mars went on, “with information about the bombings.”
“Yeah, one of probably thousands the FBI is sifting through.”
“No, this is different. I’ve worked with them before. They have something. It’s scary big.”
“I’m listening.”
“They want to sell. Half a million dollars.”
“What?”
“It’s worth it, but I can’t say more over the phone. I’ll get you a message on the meeting place through one of our normal channels. But it needs to be tonight—they’re low on time. You need to be in that town where we once had the best milkshakes you’d ever tasted.”
“Okay,” Chase said, knowing Mars meant Los Angeles.
“These two are okay, but someone is bound to know they got this high octane stuff, so be careful. This is as dangerous as you’ve ever stepped in.”
“The information they have, does it implicate the people who killed my dad?”
“It implicates everyone.”
Forty-Nine
Chase, Wen, and Dez worked for the next two hours, fine-tuning the inputs for SEER and planning on how they would approach Las Vegas. Chase was convinced that San Francisco would be safe if the Fire Bomber hit Vegas. Chase let Wen and Dez know he was going to skip out for a moment. He looked at Wen, and she knew where. On the roof there was a Zen garden. He went and sat by a fountain, meditating for a few moments. Chase cried, breathed deeply, and let go—at least for a moment. A searching look through the clouds gathering on the bay, he mourned his father.
“What if we go to Vegas and no Fire Bomber?” Wen asked Chase once he’d returned. After a concerned glance, she decided he looked better.
“Then we’ll alert Dez,” Chase replied. “He’ll have time to evacuate.”
“I think we should move SEER,” Dez said for the sixth or seventh time.
“You’re absolutely right,” Chase said. “Get all the priority stuff out.”
“It’s time to call the Astronaut,” Wen added, noticing the time. They’d arranged to check in with him earlier.
Chase laid out the latest information from SEER and their frustration at not being able to find the Bombers.
The Astronaut appeared on the screen, smiling, almost child-like, as if delighted by their
confusion.
“I don’t understand,” Chase said again.
“Of course you don’t, because you are just focused on the question, ‘What do all the companies that were bombed have in common?’ Instead, you should be looking at the answer.”
Chase glanced at Wen as if they were talking to a crazy man. She nodded back to the screen.
“But we don’t know the answer,” Chase said. “That is why we’re asking the question.”
“Of course you don’t, because you are asking the wrong question.”
Chase let out an exasperated sigh. “Then who would want to bomb all these companies and why? How’s that? Do you like that question better?”
“It doesn’t matter what I like. Patterns don’t care about likes, dislikes, or preferences of any kind. Patterns don’t want anything. They exist only because there is a pattern, a sequence, a repetition . . .”
“It’s technology,” Chase said out of his frustration. “The common denominator is technology.”
“Good,” the Astronaut said, “but technology is an enormous subject. One could travel in that subject for a long time, a lifetime, and never see the same thing twice. In fact, one could say that every company is involved in technology of some kind or another, couldn’t you?”
“The companies that have been bombed on the first track don’t make anything similar,” Chase said, staring off into the distance. “That’s one of the clues. They make all different products . . . It’s components. Each company is contributing a component to make something else.” He looked back at the screen for validation from the Astronaut.
“Yes,” he said, pleased. “Now, what is the question?”
“What are the components used for?” Chase asked, as if he’d conquered a great math equation for a cranky old professor.
The Astronaut frowned disappointment.
“What?” Chase asked. “That’s not the right question?”
The astronaut said nothing.
“Why would somebody want to destroy what all the components are making?” He glanced at the Astronaut, who remained silent.
Wen watched Dez continue to enter data into SEER, then checked out the security monitors on the opposite wall. They were well protected, but she knew at any moment a breech could occur. Wen had been trained what to look for—anything different or anything too normal. She scanned the forty-two monitors for what she expected could come at any minute.
“If it’s not what they’re making, or who would not want them to make it,” Chase began, “then it must be why is it secret?”
The Astronaut smiled slightly.
“Why is it secret,” Chase continued, “and who wants it secret?”
The Astronaut’s full smile returned. “Good boy. Now put that into your SEER and see what it tells you. See if it doesn’t answer all your other questions first.”
Dez began typing faster.
“But you know already, don’t you?” Wen asked the Astronaut. “Why don’t you just tell us?”
He winked at her, pleased she’d figured that out. “I only know what they’re making with the components,” the Astronaut said. “But, as we’ve just established, that is not enough to find our answer.”
“Well come on,” Chase said. “Tell us what the hell they’re making.”
“Drones. The components are used to manufacture drones.” The Astronaut said ‘drone’ as if saying the word ‘evil’. “They are making the most sophisticated drones you could ever imagine.”
“Drones?” Chase repeated.
“For surveillance?” Wen asked. “Or for bombing?”
“Both,” the Astronaut replied. “And, I’m afraid, even more.”
“This is the most important puzzle of our lives, and we must continue putting the pieces together. Time may be on the side of the bad guys.”
“Before we set the hour for our next call,” the Astronaut began, “Chase, I want to tell you, I’m sorry they took . . . that your father is gone. Kahil Gibran once wrote, ‘For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.’”
Fifty
As the Bombardier-8000 jet leveled off to its cruising altitude for the fifty-six minute flight between San Francisco and Los Angeles, Chase logged into the security site his mother had given him and entered his and Boone’s birthdays as the password. He’d tried doing it while they were still at Balance, but wasn’t ready for what he was about to see. Chase stared out at the ocean of clouds stretching below the sapphire sky into the infinite, and whispered mostly to himself, “It’s hard to lose someone you loved, and doubly hard when you liked them so much.”
The motion-activated footage began with the men entering the home. Chase could tell by the time-stamp that his father would have already been in the basement. He woke every morning at four AM to work-out for about an hour. His computer would have given him an alarm when the cameras were triggered, at which point Zack Malone expanded the view by activating cameras in the foyer.
The incredible scene of the three thugs going upstairs and then returning with his mother left him gasping. Wen rubbed his shoulders. He could only imagine what his dad was going through in the basement. The tension pulsed through them as they saw the men go out of camera range, obviously searching for Zack. Then the rumble exploding into the foyer.
Chase and Wen watched, riveted, as the battle between Chase’s father and the men raged. A thousand emotions gripped Chase as he sat miles above the earth, stunned—both proud and furious—while his father fought Tarsoni and managed to come up with the weapon. Like Chase, his father didn’t like guns, but smoothly turned Tarsoni’s submachine gun on the other two men as if he’d been trained in the special forces. As the footage rolled, it didn’t seem real, looking more like an action movie than something happening in his childhood home. Yet the high-drama of the attack zoomed by in real time. Suddenly, Zack shot Tarsoni, and Chase let out a, “Yeah!” It was more a nervous reaction than anything else.
He felt nauseous even before watching Ryker fire endless rounds into his dad. Wen, noticing Chase’s whole body trembling, paused the video and hugged Chase, holding him until he said, through gritted teeth, “I want to finish it.”
She clicked the button to resume.
The angles and lighting made some of the action impossible to clearly make out, but when Ryker carried his mother out of the living room, Chase involuntarily lunged at the screen. Watching her fight and yell as the two men left the house, he wasn’t aware that his hand, clenched into a fist, was pounding his thigh in a wild frustration he could hardly handle.
The back-door camera caught Ryker bashing Daisy’s head and then shooting the female police officer. After that, the lack of light left only grainy shadows as the monsters disappeared into the darkness.
Chase switched back to the interior camera to take one last look at his dad. They were shocked to see that although left for dead in the empty house, his father was crawling through his agony across the floor. Watching him with labored breaths, pulling his bloody body inch by inch, Chase was desperate to go help him, as if it were still happening.
“Where is he going?” Wen asked.
“Don’t know,” Chase whispered.
Zack Malone struggled with a purpose and urgency that belied his brutal injuries, leaving a trail of blood.
“What’s he doing?” Wen asked.
Chase said nothing. His father’s progress grew slower as more blood drained from his dying body with each move. They watched for three-and-a-half torturous minutes until he reached his apparent goal—a large bookshelf. He took another forty seconds fighting to pull a heavy book from the bottom shelf and trying to open it.
“I don’t believe it,” Chase said, tears falling.
Wen was about to ask what he meant, but then she saw the thing Chase’s father had been after. Through his fatal injuries, with the determination of a wild animal protecting its cubs, Chase’s dad pulled open a photo album filled with beautiful childhood pictures of Chase
and Boone. Wen almost cried herself as Zack became clearly upset when he got some blood on one of the pages. He carefully turned two more pages, looked, smiled, and cried before he collapsed, dead.
Chase, silent for a few long moments, finally stood up, walked to his pack on the other side of the cabin, pulled out the HK MP5/10, and said, “This one gun isn’t going to be enough.” He pointed it to the computer, where a photo of Ryker still occupied one section of the split screen. “I’m going to need a lot more weapons!”
“An eye for an eye, is that what you want?” Wen asked softly, staring at him dead on.
A thousand words filled Chase’s eyes. A thousand images. He knew about revenge. He knew it would not satisfy. He knew it would be wrong. He knew.
“Damn it!”
Fifty-One
Inside Mission Control, in the basement of the Vienna, Virginia CISS building, Tess and Travis watched the wall-sized monitors while technicians worked the computer terminals. The monitors, populated with live images from several points in Austin, Phoenix, New York, and the other Fire Bomber strike locations, were divided into horUS and non-horUS targets. They still couldn’t be sure what the Fire Bombers were targeting. The horUS companies represented between forty-four and fifty-three percent of the attacks, depending on the most recent hit. Travis argued that there was a good chance that the Bombers were after something other than horUS, and the number of victim-firms involved in that project was mere coincidence.
“Are you willing to gamble the security of the country on that assumption?” Tess asked. “Or, the reputations, freedom, and even our lives, of all nine of us?”
“Of course not. That’s why we have IT-Squads in every operational theatre of this thing,” Travis said. “I’m just saying that it would explain why we haven’t been able to discover the backers or apprehend even one of them. We may be looking in the wrong place.”
“So you’re back to Chinese economic terrorism?”
“Statistically, it’s just as likely as someone going after horUS. How possible do you really think it is that someone uncovered the operation? The background checks, although still ongoing, have so far cast no suspicion on any of us. And they’re not going to.”