by Josie Brown
We walk over. He looks around to see if anyone is watching. Noting we’re all alone, he raps his knuckles in some sort of convoluted knock-knock game.
Slowly the door opens, but no one is on the other side. In fact, it’s not a meeting room at all but a darkened corridor.
“After you,” he says.
I wince. “Should I crawl through?”
“Nah. But I’d suggest ducking if you hear gun shots.”
Some things never change.
Bosworth is right; the room is filled to capacity. Thank goodness it’s not truly a broom closet. In fact, it’s the same auditorium where they hold the Golden Globe nominations.
Unlike the well-juiced lighthearted revelry of that more celebrated event, this one is akin to the last passengers on the RMS Titanic, all arguing at once as to who gets in the last few lifeboats.
They are of both genders, all ages, and nationalities. I recognize a few of them: Ursula, the swallow-turned-nun; Jasper, a grizzled hitman whose now shaky hand saves him in his daily game of Russian Roulette; Lydia, a retired CIA Bureau Betty with too much knowledge of the game, and too much time on her hands; Frank-slash-Ivan, who boasts so much about his hits that no one really knows how many are real and how many are imagined; and then there’s the Castilian spymistress who carries a stiletto between her heaving breasts.
These people don’t just need a life. They yearn for the lives they once had.
In other words, the life I lead. I’m still not totally convinced that I should count my lucky stars.
Bosworth shouts above the hysterical din, “Calm down, everyone, or someone may send management to investigate!”
His threat has the desired effect. You could drop a pin on the carpeted floor and probably hear it.
“That’s better,” he growls. “Now, only when I point to you is it your turn to speak.”
They nod obediently. Lydia raises her hand. “The disappearances are all over the spook loops! I know at least ten of the missing personally! If they’re being tortured, a few may fold! In fact, two of my contacts squeal like little piggies if you waterboard them longer than ten seconds. Think of what they’ll give away!”
“You read the spook loops?” Ursula looks at her aghast. “But it’s against our group’s bylaws—”
“Give away, to who?” Ivan interrupts with a shout. He stares around the room, wild-eyed. “Whom are they taking to? My contacts in Moscow swear it isn’t the GRU!”
“And you trust those drunken Cossacks?” the Castilian spymistress smirks. “They chortle whenever they feed you this misinformation! Had Stalin known you were ever hired there, he’d be turning in his grave!”
“Why is Ivan still talking to Moscow?” Ursula asks indignantly. “It’s not fair! He’s out of the business, just like the rest of us!”
Bosworth throws up his hands. “Enough already! Enough! It’s Jasper’s turn! He actually sighted one of the missing spooks, right here in Los Angeles.”
His declaration shuts them up. The wave of faces turns to Jasper.
Their stares cause him to shake. Even his voice trembles as he murmurs, “It’s…it’s true! I saw him. Short and bald, with those round-frame glasses—a former Stasi. ‘Heinried Müller’ is what he called himself.”
Ah, so Pinky Ring’s name is Heinried Müller! Finally, Jack has the answer to the riddle of his nemesis’s identity.
“Müller? That sniveling little bastard?” This time Lydia’s spittle fans out, drenching three others in the face. “They put a revolving door in the Berlin Wall just for him. I prayed he’d be crossing when it came down, so that he’d die in the rubble.”
“That is what I’m trying to tell you! He did die—albeit not so poetically. In London, some six or seven years back.” Wild-eyed, Jasper shakes the man beside him “Please, you must listen to me! There are others too! I know, because he wasn’t the only one! He was there for a rendezvous with another who was long presumed dead. A woman with an exceptional figure. She was known as a mistress of disguises. I remember her as having ravishing red hair—a true beauty! Last night her head was covered in a turban, so I cannot swear it was she, since this woman also had a scar on her face. It made me gasp! They turned and saw me! I ran as if my life depended on it—”
Scarred woman.
Tatyana Zakharov.
When she first came up against Jack, she was the victor in their struggle for a thumb drive containing a list of bank accounts holding funds from Russian oil bribes to the Russian president. I ran into her when she tried to abduct Lee during a peace summit held here in Los Angeles. Jeff was taken in his stead.
Guess who killed her? Yep, you got it. I am the ultimate tiger mom.
But it was Jack who tortured her in Acme’s Club Dread. The facial scars were the most obvious result.
Could Tatyana have been the woman with Pinky Ring? On the Biarritz hotel’s security camera footage, her face was always covered, so it was hard to tell.
“Another man joined them, also long dead.” He points to Lydia. “You women used to swoon for him. He was a handsome double agent. No, make that a triple! He was always changing alliances—”
“That is so like a man,” Lydia spits on the floor in disgust.
Yes, I’m disgusted too. Doesn’t she know how dirty that is?
Wait…what’s this about a triple agent?…
“You couldn’t have seen this Heinried fellow, or the good-looking one, or for that matter the slut, Tatyana,” the Castilian spymistress scoffs. “All three are dead, remember? We are talking about spooks, not ghosts.”
“I did, I tell you! This, I swear on my handler’s grave!” Jasper insists.
“You ungrateful son of a bitch!” someone yells from the back of the room. “I’m still alive! Are you trying to put a curse on me?”
“That’s just my point!” Jasper howls. “We are all cursed! The living are being taken, while the dead walk amongst us!”
“Bah!” Frank-slash-Ivan throws up his hands. “I’m alive, and I may as well be dead.”
Suddenly, the room goes black. The speakers roar with a man’s voice, obviously altered mechanically: “I’m happy to accommodate you, Ivan.”
The streak of bullets from assault rifles flare from two directions.
Bosworth body-slams me to the floor. We fall deep within one of the stage’s voluminous velvet curtains.
His timing couldn’t be better. A spray of gunshot puckers the curtain over our heads, ripping it off its rod. It falls on us. It is so thick that I can barely breathe, and I dare not move.
Just as quickly as it started, the gunshots stop. Its silence only amplifies the chorus of moans from the injured.
Eventually, the lights come back on. I push aside the curtain. Not many are left standing—Jasper and Frank-slash-Ivan included. They lay in pools of their own blood.
Lydia sobs over their bodies. Ursula whispers a prayer in their memory.
Humbled and awestruck, the Castilian spymistress shakes her head, mumbling, “Aye, Dios mio! He was right! They have come back to haunt us!”
The shooters are nowhere in sight.
I suddenly realize Bosworth is still buried somewhere in the curtain. I find him from the circle of blood that blackens one panel of it. Furiously, I dig through it until I hold him in my arms. His eyes are closed. I reach down to his neck for a pulse—
Yes, he is still alive.
Slowly, he opens his eyes. He flinches as he touches the wound on his arm. “Just a scratch,” he mutters.
With my help, he sits up. He pulls out a cigarette—not vapor, but a real one. He shrugs at me.
I bend down beside him. “Those things will kill you.” I hold out my hand to his good arm. “Come on; let’s get you patched up.”
When we’re in the car, I call Ryan on speaker to tell him what just went down, and to ask if Acme’s resident physician, Dr. Friedman, can patch up Bosworth.
“Yes, of course, bring him in,” Ryan replies.
�
��How should we handle the rest of the carnage?” I ask him. “All those dead bodies…” I shiver at the memory.
Bosworth snorts. “It’s already taken care of. Our cleaners are meticulous.”
“How do you know any were still alive?” I ask incredulously.
He glares at me. “We take care of our own.”
Enough said.
“Donna, Emma is pulling footage now from the hotel’s security audio and video feeds, as well as the Beverly Hills PD’s street cameras. By the time you get here, we may have a clue as to who did the hit.”
“The bullet grazed Mr. Hobart, but he will be bandaged up in no time,” Dr. Friedman, assures me.
“Thanks, Doc. Hey, would you mind giving him a ride back into the city? Ryan needs to see me.”
“Sure, no problem,” Friedman agrees.
I give Bosworth a peck on the cheek. “Stick to the vapor cigs,” I warn him.
Bosworth acquiesces with a sly wink. “You know as well as I that this isn’t going to be what kills me.”
“Maybe not, but let’s not tempt fate, shall we?”
He whistles appreciatively as I walk down the hall.
Arnie is in Ryan’s office. However, Jack is not. “Is the illustrious Mr. Craig taking the night off?” I ask.
Ryan shakes his head. “Not quite. He’s on his way to DC to apprehend a suspect. We’ve had a break in the case.”
“I’m all ears.” I plop down on his couch next to Arnie.
“Arnie was right—in regard to one thing, anyway,” Ryan explains. “Drucker knew about Operation Hercules since its inception. Show her, Arnie.”
Arnie’s shaky smile indicates his knowledge that he’s still in the doghouse for his diarrhea of the mouth this afternoon at Lee’s little shindig. He clicks a button on his computer screen. It shows Drucker and Gordon Soames talking in the West Wing hallway, outside Drucker’s office. “Our audio scanning software went back as far as eighteen months, looking for any word recognition on the phrase, ‘Operation Hercules’. We were concerned because Eileen never set up security feeds, either video or audio, in Vice President Drucker’s West Wing office.”
“Isn’t it odd that she did it to every room in which POTUS might have had some meeting except for Drucker’s?” I ask.
“Not necessarily. She knew of the animus between the two men. Knowing Lee would rarely set foot in there, perhaps she thought it wasn’t worth the hassle.”
“Another reason could be that he’s Quorum,” I counter.
Ryan shakes his head at the thought. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I hope not! I really don’t want to go there. I’m hoping this is a simple case of political ambition. In any event, we lucked out. Such a conversation happened right outside his door.”
“With whom?” I ask.
“Just watch.” Arnie clicks the button.
On the screen, Drucker is coming out of a meeting in the Roosevelt Room. The halls are bustling, but when he passes Gordon Soames, the White House photographer, he nods and smiles. They stop to exchange small talk—something about the Washington Nationals’ losing streak. But then you hear Gordon say, “They’re meeting now.”
Drucker softly asks: “On Hercules?”
Gordon gives barely a nod.
“Is it in place?” Drucker asks.
Gordon gives another imperceptible nod.
They then go their separate ways.
“By ‘it,’ do you think they meant a drone?”
“We don’t think it; we know it,” Ryan declares. “Eileen’s cloud has a file with the drone’s footage of Lee and Marcus Barnham’s meeting in the Oval Office. Its timestamp matches the date of this audio feed.”
“When will you break the news to Lee?”
“First thing tomorrow. By then, Jack will have gotten the unadulterated verification we need from the suspect.” He rubs his face wearily. “That is to say, Gordon. If need be, Jack will detain him, or bring him here to Los Angeles. I’m sure the president has a few questions for him as well.”
“It’s going to be interesting to see what Lee wants to do about Drucker.”
“My guess is nothing—at least at first. But it’s a card he can play when the right time comes: either with the party bosses, or against Drucker himself, criminally—if you’re right and he’s Quorum.”
“We may never know.” Emma’s voice comes from the doorway. Her face looks strained. Nicky sleeps in her arms. “Drucker is in a coma.”
“What?” Ryan and I shout in unison.
Emma lays her son in his father’s arms. “It happened twenty minutes ago. His motorcade was hit after he left Hilldale to go back to LAX. Mrs. Drucker is confirmed dead, as are the security detail who were in her car with her. The media is reporting it as terrorism, but no one has claimed the hit, so we don’t know if it’s a domestic or international cell that caused the chaos. The president and his family are now in lockdown, in Lion’s Lair.”
“That means all of Hilldale will be secured as well! I should get home! Mary, Evan, Jeff, and Jean-Pierre are still awake, and they’ll have so many questions—”
“Donna, wait! I think you’ll want to know about the hit on the Spooks Anonymous group at the Hilton.”
Emma’s words stop me short. “Yes, of course.”
“As you suspected, there were two attackers. Frankly, I’m surprised there weren’t more dead and injured in the melee, but they seemed to have targeted just the man talking.”
“They could have taken him out after the meeting,” Ryan points out. “They also used this opportunity to send a message to the spook community.”
“Who exactly is ‘they’?” Arnie wonders aloud.
“Hard to say,” Emma replies. “They dodged security well enough. The only thing I know for sure is that one is a woman and one is a man. Both were dressed casually. She had on a sunhat and glasses. He wore a baseball cap, false facial hair, and dark glasses.” Emma scans through the camera footage for us to make her point. “I tracked them to their vehicle, and then picked them up via satellite surveillance.”
She fast-forwards to Acme’s SatCom feed as it follows the car—
Which hits the 405 and goes south, into Orange County.
It gets off a few exits before Hilldale, taking a two-lane back road instead. It’s on one of the less traveled routes used by Lee’s security detail to deliver him and other dignitaries to Lion’s Lair.
The suspects pull the car off the road, behind a shed that keeps it from being seen from either direction. The car is close enough that they can climb onto the shed from the car’s roof. When they jump out, they are both wearing ski masks. They leap up there with a couple of big boy toys—in this case, MANPADs: shoulder-launch surface-to-air missiles.
Half an hour later, their target comes into sight: the convoy of limousines and SUVs that made up Vice President Drucker’s motorcade.
They allow the first few cars to go by before taking out one of the limos. When the missile makes impact, the explosion sends metal, glass, and carnage in all directions including toward other cars.
“That must have been the one with Mrs. Drucker,” I whisper.
The other limos swerve at the sight in front of them. The larger security cars make a half-moon around the other three limos in an attempt to shield them.
They succeed, but at the expense of yet more brave agents.
A second blast from one of the terrorist’s MANPADs tosses an SUV in the air; when it lands, debris shatters the glass in one of the limousines as it attempts a U-turn.
Still, the limo screeches away.
The others speed off after it.
The terrorists must know an SOS went out because they leap off the shed.
Their SUV detours around the disabled vehicles and the fire-ravaged debris, taking them in the opposite direction from where they came.
“If they wanted to assure themselves of the kill, why didn’t they wait until Drucker was safely ensconced on Air Force Two?” I ask. “One of the m
issiles would have had no problem taking it down.”
“Perhaps they felt a closer proximity would guarantee a hit,” Ryan muses.
“Or maybe it brought back too many memories of the last failure,” Emma replies.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Keep watching,” she warns me.
We see the terrorists’ SUV zig and zag through Orange County’s catacomb of neighborhoods.
Suddenly, I realize it’s headed toward Hilldale.
They change their mind when they see the lineup of law enforcement waiting at the entry. Instead, they turn around and head back toward the 405. When they get to the exit, they pull over into a strip mall, where they ditch their vehicle for two others.
The woman, back in her disguise, jumps out of the car first, from the passenger side. She grabs both MANPADs, stuffs them in the trunk of a station wagon, and drives off.
The bearded man jumps into a sports car: the Jaguar F-type. Before he peels off, we watch by his side view mirror as he pulls off his beard:
It’s Carl.
But…how?
“I’ve…I’ve got to get home!” I stumble out the door.
There is no time to lose.
The police blockades on the way to Hilldale add another hour to what is usually just a half-hour commute. All the while, I hit a round robin of telephone numbers on my speed dial, hoping to reach Mary, Jeff, or Evan, but no luck. The lines are jammed. I’m sure this is part of the security measures Homeland Security has taken in response to this crisis. When I hit the barricades at Hilldale’s entry gate, I use my security clearance to get inside.
I pull into my drive to find a dark house. I run inside, shouting, “Mary? Jeff? Evan?”
Mary runs out, a finger to her lips to silence me. “Mom! Shhhh! Trisha is still asleep! What’s wrong?”
I collapse in relief. “I couldn’t get through to anyone’s cell phone! There was an attack on the vice president. All of Southern California is in lock-down, specifically Hilldale.” I’m talking so fast that my words come out in fits and stops.