The Blowback Protocol

by Lars Emmerich

  Returning to Malaga wouldn’t have been his first choice. In fact, it was very near the bottom of his list. There was emotional baggage, from what Hayward considered to be simpler times, though that wasn’t quite right. The time he’d spent with Katrin Ferdinand-Xavier in her family’s beachfront condo had been anything but simple. Malaga was where he came to know that he loved Katrin deeply and powerfully, and it was where he came to fully appreciate the devastation his growing love for her was bound to bring.

  Then there were more pragmatic concerns. Malaga contained the collection of thugs who had knocked him unconscious in the Ferdinand-Xaviers’ condo, sliced up Maria Ferdinand-Xavier, and lured him to find her body and deal with the bloody aftermath of her murder. So, Hayward reflected, the rest of his life could pass without him ever seeing Malaga again, and it wouldn’t hurt his feelings even a little.

  But the chief problem in Hayward’s world now was a logistical one. He was puttering along off the coast of Spain in a glorified life raft. He had no idea how much fuel the excursion boat contained. More importantly, he had no idea how much fuel he might need to return safely to shore. He’d driven the Swan Song long and hard the previous evening, heading out to sea and away from the Spanish police, who had undoubtedly received an anonymous tip regarding a noisy disturbance coming from the vicinity of slip fourteen on the north pier.

  For all those reasons, Malaga was a terrible destination, but it was the closest slice of civilization, and Hayward had no choice but to head there.

  There was also the matter of the small object in his pocket, which he had removed from beneath the skin of Maria Ferdinand-Xavier’s lower leg. He had a hunch about the object’s function, and he needed the services of a particular kind of professional. Hayward needed a veterinarian. Malaga was undoubtedly home to half a dozen of them, which meant that Hayward was going to have his work cut out for him when—if—he returned safely to dry land. He needed to navigate the city without drawing the attention of his former employers in the process.

  Motion caught Hayward’s eye, making him mindful of another hazard he hadn’t yet considered. Getting caught in the excursion boat belonging to the Swan Song, which was busy billowing black smoke into the air, would prompt a few uncomfortable questions.

  His attention snapped to what appeared to be an object on the horizon. The object had sharp edges and rose and fell with the surf. Definitely a boat. Definitely heading toward him.

  He torqued the steering handle hard to the right. The small boat lurched to the left in response. He twisted the throttle all the way to the stop, wishing for much more horsepower, and straightened the boat on its new heading.

  He watched the other boat carefully. If it remained on its earlier vector, he would see its shape drift right in his field of vision toward the aft of his boat. But that wasn’t what he saw. Instead, the boat remained in a fixed spot in his field of vision. It had adjusted its course.

  In fact, it had established a collision course.

  “Son of a bitch,” Hayward breathed. The shape grew larger. He couldn’t make out much detail, but he thought he saw a light bar across the top of the boat’s superstructure. Police? Hayward’s gut tightened.

  He turned hard to the right, hoping the other boat’s change of course was mere coincidence. But it wasn’t. It adjusted its heading, and Hayward once again saw the shape stabilize in the same spot on the horizon and set a course to intercept him.

  There wasn’t much he could do. There was no way he was going to outrun the larger boat, and if it was really a police boat as he suspected, running would be a terrible choice. It would do nothing but invoke their chase instinct.

  Hayward released the throttle. The engine slowed, then idled. The bow of the boat settled back to the water and he bobbed along with the surf.

  The shape grew larger. Garbled words came at him from a loudspeaker atop the boat. Spanish, but Hayward didn’t make out their meaning.

  Red and blue lights flashed. He needed a plan, and fast.

  It became obvious to Hayward in very short order that the police boat’s appearance hadn’t been coincidental; it had been dispatched to collect him. That meant either the Agency eyeballs had watched him leave the harbor in the Swan Song, or they had some other method of tracking his whereabouts. Neither eventuality would have surprised him. The Agency’s invasiveness was always impressive. It was their defining attribute, in his experience.

  But he still wondered what the hell they were up to. It made no sense for them to set him up for Maria’s murder. If they wanted him out of the picture, they could have simply made good on their promise to blot him when they ambushed him in the Ferdinand-Xaviers’ condo. So what was their play? What were they after? And where would the Spanish police fit into the equation?

  There was nowhere to hide, and Hayward sat slumped in the excursion boat as the Guardia Civil patrol pulled alongside. He raised his hands and offered no resistance as the officers hauled him aboard. They forced him onto the deck, spread-eagled, and searched him. Then they shackled his hands and strapped him into a bucket seat in the rear of the cabin.

  There wasn’t any interrogation to speak of. Hayward expected some perfunctory attempt to demonstrate the legitimacy of his arrest, but they didn’t bother. It was clear to him that the officers weren’t representing the Spanish state’s interest in law and order as much as they were furthering their own interests. They were moonlighting. Hayward had a strong hunch where the funds had come from to underwrite this particular operation. The initials were C and I and A.

  Money greased wheels all over the world, and Hayward’s time in the Agency’s employ taught him that everyone had a price. It also taught him the exquisite art of finding that price.

  “These are troubled times, my friends,” Hayward said, employing the formal and slightly stilted language customarily adopted in coastal Spain to open bribery negotiations. “Perhaps, if there is some burden that weighs heavily on your minds, you might offer me the opportunity to be of assistance.”

  The lead gendarme, a square, squat man with a large florid honker of a nose and the name Garcia written in bold gold lettering on his name badge, regarded Hayward for a long moment. “These are indeed troubled times, sir,” he said, “but there are no difficulties you may assist us with.”

  This was an expected rebuff, a cynical and ritualistic nod toward propriety, and Hayward knew not to take it seriously. “Forgive me, sir, but is there no area in which I might be helpful?”

  “Alas, we have already received all the necessary assistance,” Garcia said.

  Hayward knew what he meant. The CIA had already paid them a handsome bribe to pluck him from the ocean. Hayward had concluded the Agency hadn’t killed him because they still needed him. That conclusion fit the current situation as well, Hayward decided. He couldn’t very well find the ChemEspaña data if he got himself lost at sea. But he wasn’t about to settle for falling once again under the Agency’s direct oversight.

  “Perhaps, sir,” Hayward said, “you might allow me to demonstrate my goodwill.”

  Garcia smiled in a way that told Hayward they were now getting down to business. “I am afraid, sir, that it would have to be a persuasive demonstration.”

  Persuasive it was. Once the Guardia Civil boat moved close enough to the shore to permit cell phone access, Hayward transferred a hefty retainer to Garcia’s account. Hayward moved the money from a hidden account, one of the dozen or so he’d established for a rainy day. He had set the accounts up without the Agency’s cognizance, he believed, but it was impossible to know for sure.

  Garcia used his smartphone to check his bank balance. His square face erupted into a broad smile when he saw the new deposit.

  “You are most gracious,” he said. “Malaga is a humble place, and we are simple people, but we are at your service.”

  Hayward smiled. “It was my pleasure.”

  “A man freshly plucked from the sea must have substantial needs of his own,” Garcia went
on. “My fellow officers and I would welcome the opportunity to assist you.”

  Who said you couldn’t buy friends? Hayward didn’t waste any time making his request. “Me gustaría ver a un veterinario,” he said.

  His request drew puzzled stares from Garcia and his fellow officers. For a moment, he wondered whether his Spanish skills had failed him. Just to be sure, he repeated the phrase in English: “I would like to see a veterinarian.”

  Hayward saw more puzzled looks on the officers’ faces, then a brief huddle. They talked among themselves, arriving in short order at a consensus. Garcia delivered the good news.

  An hour later, with an additional electronic transaction completed to ensure a completely smooth transition between the Guardia Civil’s sea and land arms, Garcia and his cohorts handed Hayward off to a pair of their land-locked counterparts.

  The patrolmen gave him a ride in the backseat of their police car to the nearest veterinarian’s office in Malaga. The two officers posted themselves near the front door, standing guard. They were eager to earn an additional stipend, Hayward surmised.

  Hayward approached the receptionist and explained his situation, nodding toward the Guardia Civil officers to underscore the urgency of his request. The receptionist nodded, rose, and disappeared behind a door. Half a minute later, she emerged from the same door with the veterinario in tow. He wore a white smock, smelled of animals, glanced nervously at the officers in his lobby, and asked how he might be of assistance.

  Hayward produced the small cylindrical object he had removed hours before from Maria Ferdinand-Xavier’s lower leg. The veterinarian understood instantly. He took the electronic identification tag, turned on his heel, and motioned for Hayward to follow.

  The veterinarian led him to what Hayward surmised was an exam room. The air smelled of wet dog but also carried subtle notes of disinfectant and cat piss. The electronic ID tag scanner sat atop a counter against the far wall. The veterinarian waved the scanner over the small tag in his hand, studied the readout, then frowned.

  He repeated the process, this time wearing a quizzical expression. “Something’s wrong,” he said in Spanish. “The animal tag should have the pet owner’s name and address, but it doesn’t have any of that information.”

  Hayward asked to see the scanner’s display. The veterinarian obliged, and Hayward partially agreed with the man’s assessment: there was no name contained in the digital information stored on the tag.

  But it definitely contained an address—nine digits separated into smaller groups by three decimal points. That many decimal points made no sense numerically, but Hayward instantly understood their significance. It was an IP address. Internet protocol. The collection of numbers that uniquely identified a single network-enabled device among billions of them on Planet Earth.

  Hayward asked for a pen and paper, then scribbled down the IP address and shoved it into his pocket. “Which way to the back door?” he asked. The veterinarian looked confused, but raised his arm and pointed. “Muchas gracias, señor,” Hayward said, disappearing down the hallway.

  25

  Hayward was grateful for the Guardia Civil’s help and cooperation, expensive as it had been, but he was not eager for them to know any more about his whereabouts. That their services could be bought so easily was both useful and problematic. It had come in handy to get him out of a jam, but the Agency could easily outspend him to buy their momentary fealty, which would put him again at a big disadvantage. The less they knew about what he was up to, the better.

  He snuck out the back alley behind the veterinarian’s office, leaving the Guardia officers to mill about the veterinarian’s lobby. He hoped to be long gone before they learned of his departure.

  He stopped at the first hotel he could find, rented a room, and used his room key to unlock the business center on the ground floor. Two aging computers sat adjacent to each other on a modest desk unit. Hayward chose the one furthest from the door and angled the monitor away from the window. He jiggled the mouse, waited for the computer to wake up, then double-clicked on the browser application.

  The Spanish incarnation of the ubiquitous search engine smiled at him. The two o’s in Google were made to look like eyeballs. Hayward didn’t bother to read the fine print to discover their significance.

  He clicked on the address bar and typed the IP address he’d written down at the veterinarian’s office. He waited as the page loaded. His heart raced and he broke out in a nervous sweat. Butterflies swarmed in his stomach. He was about to find out what had been important enough to be buried beneath Maria Ferdinand-Xavier’s skin.

  “Son of a . . .” Hayward breathed as the screen changed and the writing came into focus.

  Is this it? Could it possibly be? He re-read the document header a second and third time: “ChemEspaña Protective Coating Formula, Revision 17.3.”

  “My God,” he said aloud, scrolling and reading, eyes darting side to side as he devoured the text.

  Joao must be fucking crazy, he thought. Or desperate.

  Then he thought he must be reading it wrong, that it must not be what he thought it was because it made no sense. It looked like the data. It looked like the reason the Agency had assigned him to worm and weasel his way into the Ferdinand-Xaviers’ world. Hayward believed he had found the ChemEspaña formula for the neutron-absorbing paint the CIA coveted.

  It can’t be, he thought. It must be a decoy, some gruesome trick. The Agency must be toying with him, luring him, baiting him.

  But why? His mind returned to the condo where they could easily have done away with him. Where they would have done away with him, he concluded once again, if they had found what they needed.

  But they hadn’t killed him, which meant that they didn’t have what they were looking for. It had to be the reason they’d let him live. No other reason made sense. They wanted him to help them find it.

  Except they did have it all along, from the moment they kidnapped Katrin and her family.

  “They had no clue,” he said aloud. His mind returned to the grim business of carving out the RF identification tag from beneath Maria’s skin. There were no new scars around the tag’s location on her leg, which meant that it hadn’t been inserted any time in the recent past. The implication was clear: the CIA had not inserted the tag. It had not been part of some scheme, some ploy undertaken for his benefit. Maria had been walking around for weeks, maybe even months, with one of the most powerful industrial secrets on the planet buried under her skin.

  He scrolled through the document again, more slowly this time, pausing to look at all the chemical notations and molecular diagrams. He wasn’t a chemist, but he had studied up on the ChemEspaña breakthrough. What he saw before him looked completely authentic.

  “My God.” Hayward whistled. The mother lode.

  Then he shook his head. No way. It’s too damned good to be true, he thought. The CIA delivered Maria’s corpse to him and her body held the key to the information they had been seeking for months, the data they had been plotting and scheming to obtain by any means necessary. It seemed a little naïve to believe they had no knowledge of the embedded tag, that they went to all the trouble of staging the grisly scene on the Swan Song but had no clue that Maria’s body itself pointed the way to the crown jewels. It certainly wasn’t necessary to extract the tag to read its digital contents. That was the whole point of the tagging devices, after all, to enable animal-control officers around the world to identify the owners of lost pets just by waving a wand over Fido’s back. So it was entirely possible that they knew.

  “Suppose they do know,” he mumbled. “How would that mesh with the timeline?” He thought back over the previous night’s events. He had discovered Katrin’s brooch, raced to Malaga, opened the safe in Joao’s study in the beachfront condo, and had his lights turned out by a blow to the head. They’d searched the safe, left plenty of money behind and left him on the floor, unconscious but very much alive.

  Maybe they hadn’t foun
d what they were looking for in the safe, but a good bit of time had passed between when he had been knocked unconscious and when Fredericks, that vile ghoul from his past, called him on the condo’s landline. Perhaps they had discovered the RF identification tag in Maria’s leg in the interim, extracted the information they needed, tied her up inside the boat and slit her wrist, then reeled him back in with a phone call.

  He shook his head. It didn’t pass the sniff test. Why bother with a phone call and a midnight non-meeting on some boat? Why not just send a hit team back to the condo to finish him off?

  Because they had no clue, he decided, the logic taking him full circle. They didn’t know what Maria was hiding. They hadn’t killed him because they needed him. They killed Maria in a brutal, cruel, and outrageous way to motivate him, to spur him back into action.

  Because they were out of ideas. Because the Ferdinand-Xaviers—Joao, Maria, and Katrin—his beautiful, amazing Katrin—were holding out. They were resisting the Agency’s exploitation attempts. Hayward couldn’t imagine how brutal and twisted those attempts must have become by now. A pit grew in his stomach. Was Maria the only casualty, or had Joao and Katrin also been killed?

  If they were still alive by some miracle, he wondered if it wouldn’t be better for Katrin and her father just to succumb to the punishment, to let go and welcome death, than to deal with the scars the Agency’s depravities would undoubtedly inflict.

  Hayward’s hands clenched and his jaw tightened. I will kill every last one of you, he vowed again.

  A noise in the hallway jarred him. The hotel proprietor swiped his key and opened the door. “Everything okay, señor?” the man asked in English. Hayward’s accent had obviously given him away as an American when he checked into the hotel. Not a great sign. He was leaving traces, little bread crumbs the Agency could follow. He would eventually meet the Agency murderers, without a doubt, but he needed to do so on his terms.

  “Everything’s fine,” he said. “Thank you.”