“We should tell him,” Cosmo said.
“I’ll take care of it,” Kate said. “Do you have anything else? Were you able to contact the Kahuna’s son?”
“I tried to call him a couple of times. He finally answered the phone, sounding totally baked. When I told him that his father had disappeared, he said, ‘Don’t worry about it, dude. Let the universe handle it. He’ll turn up eventually.’ Then he told me he had to go because he was playing Xbox and hung up.”
“I guess I should count my blessings that he isn’t pushing me to declare the Kahuna dead too,” Kate said. “It doesn’t sound like he’s interested in taking over his father’s business anytime soon.”
Cosmo gathered a few more pieces of cereal into his hand. “There’s no gluten in Crunch,” he said. “Okay, maybe a trace from cross contamination, but I don’t count that. I could probably eat this whole box and not have an issue. Maybe some bloat, but everyone has bloat. I mean, who doesn’t have bloat?”
“I need a fast shower and change of clothes,” Kate said. “Go outside and wait in the hall. I don’t trust either of you in my apartment.”
“Can I take the Crunch?” Cosmo asked.
“Yes! Anything. Take the Crunch. Just get out of my apartment.”
“One last thing,” Cosmo said. “You might want to give the bathroom a moment.”
5
Jessup sat on one side of his desk. In front of him was a letter signed by the deputy attorney general strongly suggesting he declare Richard Wylde lost at sea. On the other side of the desk were Nick, Kate, and Cosmo with Jake’s search map.
“Let me get this straight,” Jessup said. “You want me to ignore a directive from the deputy attorney general so you can search an area over thirty-eight million square miles for a person who is, likely, either at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean or else downing tequila shooters in Los Cabos. And the reason I should let you do it is so you can chase some hunch that somebody is killing Silicon Valley billionaires for an unknown reason.”
“I told you he’d get it,” Nick said.
Jessup shook his head. “Just for the sake of argument, let’s assume there’s a kernel of a mystery buried somewhere in this. You don’t have a clue where to look. His wife and business partner aren’t going to help, and his son thinks the Kahuna will magically turn up.”
Kate glanced at the map, the seven-thousand-mile-diameter circle, and the location where the Kahuna’s plane went off the grid, one hundred miles off the coast of Los Angeles.
“We just assumed Hamilton was so wasted, he didn’t care that his father was missing,” Kate said. “What if he told us the Kahuna will eventually turn up, because he already knows where he is?” She drew a line connecting L.A. to the last known location of the plane and continued the line west to the border of the circle. It passed through 2,500 miles of Pacific Ocean before coming within fifty miles of the Hawaiian Islands.
“The Big Kahuna’s son lives in a small town on the north shore of Maui,” Cosmo said. “It’s called Paia, and it’s within the flying range of the Citation X. There are dozens of private air fields in that area left over from the sugar plantation era. A plane could easily land unnoticed there.”
Kate nodded. “It makes sense. From what Vicky told us, it sounds like Hamilton and his father care about each other. If the Big Kahuna was scared, maybe he went to hide with the one person he thought he could trust.”
Jessup sighed and slid the letter from the deputy attorney general into his desk drawer. “You have three days to find the Kahuna. That’s as long as I can pretend to misplace this letter. After that, I’m pulling the plug.”
Kate stood, gathered up the map, and hurried Nick and Cosmo out of the room before Jessup could change his mind. “Three days. No problem.”
“I can’t believe I’m sending you three on an all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii on some wild goose chase while I’m stuck here in this office, dodging phone calls from Washington,” Jessup said as Kate exited.
“Yep. It’s a real humdinger,” Kate said, and closed the door behind her.
“Let’s try to get on the next available flight to Maui,” Kate said to Nick once they were out of earshot of Jessup. “Three days isn’t a lot of time, and I want to hit the ground running.” She turned to Cosmo. “Check the Maui airports to see if any of them have a record of the X landing.”
Cosmo’s upper lip had begun to bead with sweat. “Okay, okay. Let’s not panic. I’ll get all the forms and reports and paperwork we’re going to need and pack them into my big suitcase. I should probably also check in with human resources.” He smacked his head. “I almost forgot. We’re going to need vouchers from accounting. Lots of vouchers.”
“I heard accounting is running low on vouchers,” Nick said. “You’d better get them now before they run out. You can meet us at LAX at three P.M.”
“Gotcha. Three P.M. I’ll call you once I have the vouchers so you don’t worry.”
Nick watched Cosmo disappear into a maze of cubicles. “So, once we get to Hawaii, have you given any thought to what comes next?”
“We stake out Hamilton and follow him around Maui until he leads us to the Big Kahuna.”
Nick laughed. “That’s your plan?”
“What? It’s a classic.” Kate crossed her arms. “It’s how I caught you.”
“Have you ever been to Paia?” Nick asked.
“No. Why?”
“It’s a small town of three thousand people, made up of big-wave surfer types, bohemian types, artist types, and other assorted back-to-the-earth types. There are people there from all over the world, of every possible different culture, religion, and background. But you know what type there isn’t in Paia?”
Kate pointed at herself.
“Bingo,” Nick said. “There are zero take-no-prisoners, make-no-apologies FBI types in Paia. And even if you do somehow manage to blend in, there’s no way you’re going to stake out Hamilton.”
Kate narrowed her eyes. “I’ve been on hundreds of stakeouts. I can stake the heck out of just about anything.”
“How about a herd of Black Angus cattle? Because that’s where Hamilton lives—in a one-bedroom cottage in the middle of a two-hundred-acre pasture overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Trust me. What you need is a plan with subtlety.”
“You mean I need a first-class grifter type who can cozy up to Hamilton and con him into revealing where we can find his father?”
Nick smiled. “Bingo.”
“Well, then, it’s lucky I know where to find one of those.”
“No problem. I’ll have the entire thing organized by the time our plane is in the air.”
Kate stared at Nick. “You’re being unusually cooperative. What’s up?”
“Did I mention I have this teensy problem with one of my most important clients that we need to solve before I can leave town? It shouldn’t take more than an hour or two. And, before you ask, I already know what you’re thinking. Yes, it’s absolutely one hundred percent legal-ish.”
Kate shook her head. “No. Not happening.”
“That’s too bad. It’s going to be awfully hard to be on my A game in Hawaii when I have my mind on clients.”
“I’d think staying out of jail would be enough motivation.”
“Good point. Jail sucks.” Nick draped an arm across Kate’s shoulders and hugged her into him. “How about professional courtesy? Curiosity? Doing a friend a solid? Paying it forward? A bag of burgers?”
Kate sighed. “No, no, no, no, and those burgers had better come with bacon and cheese fries.”
“That was easier than I thought,” Nick said. “I thought you’d hold out for dessert too.”
Kate smiled. “What can I say? It’s my nature. I see bacon, cheese, and all-beef patties tucked between toasted sesame seed buns and I must have them.”
* * *
—
Kate and Nick were parked across the street from a modest circa 1970 split-level ranch house with a small but well-cared-for yard. A wood-paneled station wagon was in front of the single-car garage.
Kate finished her burger, crumpled the empty burger bag, and threw it into the backseat. “This is where your most important client lives? Don’t tell me. Let me guess. It’s either the Partridge family or Marcia Brady.”
Nick retrieved a Loro Piana white button-down shirt, a black Armani sports jacket, and designer sunglasses out of his backpack. He stripped off his T-shirt and changed in the car. “How do I look?”
Kate thought he actually looked pretty good. Not as good as he did without the shirt, but pretty good. “Like Jerry Maguire.”
“Excellent. Nicolas Nacky dresses for success.” He grabbed a manila envelope stamped “Top Secret” out of the backpack and handed it to Kate. “So, when Mrs. Kowowski answers the door all you need to do is flash your FBI badge, hand this to her son, and tell him, ‘Be careful. The Badger is on the move.’”
Kate opened the envelope and removed the contents—three cards with pictures. Miss Scarlet, the conservatory, and the lead pipe. “Who is Mrs. Kowowski? Why do you have an envelope marked ‘Top Secret’ containing board game parts? And also, what the fudge?”
“Mrs. Kowowski is my client’s grandmother. Because Clue is an awesome game. And I kind of told her that her grandson, Greg, is a secret agent working for the government.”
“Okay. Why?”
“She was threatening to kick him out of the house unless he got a real job.”
“And secret agent is what you settled on?”
“At the time, it seemed like a good idea,” Nick said.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to just get a job?”
Nick walked with Kate to the front door. “Greg’s a good guy, but he’s had kind of a tough life. Parents died when he was just a kid. He isn’t what you’d call ‘employable’ in the traditional sense. Do you consider playing video games twelve hours per day a job?”
Kate rolled her eyes. “No.”
“Strange,” Nick said and rang the doorbell. “Neither does Mrs. Kowowski.”
An older woman answered the door. Her hair was cut utilitarian short. Her skin was pre-cancerous. She was wearing a faded cotton caftan and fluffy pink slippers.
Nick removed his sunglasses. “Good morning, Mrs. K. This is Special Agent Kate O’Hare. She has urgent business with Gregory. The fate of the world could be at stake.”
Mrs. Kowowski took off her reading glasses and squinted at Kate. “Are you really a government man?”
Kate showed her FBI identification to the woman. “Yes, ma’am.”
“And you have urgent business with my Gregory?”
Nick stepped forward. “She’s not really at liberty to say, Mrs. K.”
Mrs. Kowowski nodded toward the basement door. “He’s down there, like always.”
Kate peered down the stairs. An eerie electric glow emanated from the otherwise dark basement. “I’m not going to get sucked into an alternate universe by some poltergeist if I go down there, am I?”
“Alternate universe, yes. Poltergeist, no,” Nick said.
Kate and Nick walked down the stairs and into a basement apartment. The walls were wood paneled. The carpet was orange shag. A scraggly looking twenty-something with a five-day-old beard, the worst case of bed head Kate had ever seen, and mustard-stained dinosaur pajamas was playing a video game in front of an eighty-five-inch high-definition television screen.
“What’s he playing?” Kate asked.
“Fortnite Battle Royale. It’s a live-action game where you compete with up to a hundred other players to be the last one standing. It has over 125 million people actively playing and earns hundreds of millions of dollars each month for its developer, Epic Games.”
Kate looked at the television. The scraggly twenty-something’s avatar was busy using a pickax to mine some kind of metal. “This is your important client?”
“He has ten million YouTube subscribers and has made more than a million dollars so far this year.”
“Just to watch him sit around and play video games?”
“Not exactly. That’s only fifty percent of it. You also need to be able to goof around and crack jokes,” Nick said. “YouTube pays around ten dollars per every thousand views, so you need to broaden your appeal to as many people who like to watch free crap as possible. The most popular online gamers have fifty million or so subscribers and can earn more than ten million dollars per year.”
“Sounds ridiculous.”
“Did I mention people like free? Anyway, that’s when it came to me in a flash of social media influencer influencer genius.”
“I can’t wait to hear all about it.”
“L.A. is filled with good-looking out-of-work actors who are great at goofing off,” Nick said. “And it’s also overflowing with dysfunctional millennials living in their parents’ basements playing Fortnite. By themselves, neither could scrape together enough to buy a cup of ramen noodles, but put them together and you have social media gold.”
Kate looked at Greg. Except for the rapid-eye movement and fingers working the PlayStation controller, he was almost catatonic. “He doesn’t exactly seem like the life of the party.”
“That’s why I hired an actress and outsourced the goofing around.” Nick opened a bedroom door. A cameraman was filming a pretty girl-next-door type, wearing stretchy lululemon yoga pants and a sports bra one size too small for her breasts, pretending to play Fortnite, while a clone of Greg Kowowski’s gameplay was live-streamed onto her television.
She stopped playing, walked over, and waved a stack of papers at Nick. “I’ve been trying to reach you all day. This script is awful. The writing is horrible, and the jokes are worse.” She handed one of the pages to Nick and pointed at a sentence she’d circled in red pen.
Nick studied the page. “What’s the problem?”
“Are you kidding me? It doesn’t make any sense. I mean, come on. Blort isn’t even a real word. It just rhymes with Fort.”
Nick googled blort. “It’s a blend of blow and snort, or a snort of liquid out through the nose in response to something unexpected.” He pointed to the script. “You must have missed the part where you’re supposed to take a drink of milk then blow it out your nose when your avatar gets bushwhacked by zombies. Then you say . . .”
The actress reread the script and smacked her forehead. “Fortnite. More like Blortnite.” She took back the pages from Nick. “That’s actually pretty good. It might even be Twitter hashtag worthy,” she said and turned to the cameraman. “I don’t want to half-ass this thing. Can somebody get me a gallon or two of milk, so I can practice my blorting before we go live?”
Nick closed the bedroom door. “Sorry about that,” he said to Kate. “You have to put out a lot of fires when you’re in the high-octane world of professional online gaming.”
Mrs. Kowowski walked down the basement stairs, carrying a platter of peanut butter sandwiches and oatmeal cookies. She put the tray on the couch next to her grandson, looked around the room, and used a broom handle to fish out a pair of tighty-whities from a stack of clothes lying in the corner. “Gregory!” she shouted. “How many times have I told you? Put your dirty clothes in the hamper.”
Greg twitched, jumped out of his seat, and put his hand to his chest. “Judas H. Priest. You scared the heck out of me, Grandma.” He paused to take a bite out of one of the sandwiches. “She’s always sneaking up on me,” he said to Nick and Kate.
Mrs. Kowowski hit him on the back of the head. “It’s almost noon, and you’re still in your pajamas.”
Nick nudged Kate. “Thanks for the sandwiches, Mrs. K., but we should probably be going. Agent O’Hare has to catch a flight in a couple hours.”
Kat
e handed the “Top Secret” manila envelope to Greg. “Watch your back. The Badger is on the move.”
“Thank you for your service, FBI lady,” Greg said. “Your country owes you a debt of gratitude.” He nodded solemnly and saluted Kate. “I’ll take it from here.”
Mrs. Kowowski shook her head, followed Nick and Kate back up the stairs, handed Kate an oatmeal cookie, and let them out of the house.
“Do you think she bought it?” Kate asked once they were back in the car.
Nick shrugged. “It’s a long shot, but Greg’s the classic underdog. She wants to believe.”
Kate looked at Nick. “I’ve noticed you like the long shots. And the underdogs.”
“Are there any other kind of shots worth taking?”
“Anyway, that had to be the weirdest part of the past forty-eight hours,” Kate said. “And that’s saying a lot considering that I just blew up a Ferrari in the lobby of a five-star hotel.”
Nick smiled. “At least you got a cookie out of it. And the day isn’t over yet.”
6
At 3:15 P.M., Kate and Nick were sitting in the first-class cabin of their five-hour Hawaiian Airlines flight direct to Kahului, Maui. Kate had booked four economy tickets a couple of hours earlier, but an overly friendly flight attendant moved her and Nick to the comfortable leather seats in the front of the plane, leaving Jake and Cosmo to fend for themselves in economy.
Nick finished his heated nuts, wiped his face off with a warm wet towel, and settled back into his seat. “There’s just something about heated nuts. Why do people even bother with room-temperature nuts?”
Kate thought about Jake and Cosmo back in economy. She suspected they didn’t have any nuts, let alone warm ones. “Look,” she said to Nick. “I enjoy warm nuts as much as the next person.”
Nick raised an eyebrow. “Really?”
Kate punched him in the shoulder. “What I was about to say was why are we sitting in first class, being waited on hand and foot? Even the pilot came out and greeted us personally. What did you do?”
The Big Kahuna Page 4