“Him staying on there isn’t a bad idea,” said Nathan.
Keira appeared to be considering the proposal, which underscored her fear of the situation in California. She had politely entertained the idea whenever his parents brought it up in person, dodging the question and eventually declining the offer based on a host of flimsy excuses. Nathan knew better than to broach the subject himself. She’d made her feelings much clearer to him in private.
“I don’t know about staying up there alone, sweetie,” she said, unconvincingly.
“Please!” said Owen.
“We’d have to drive back to pick you up, which would be extremely expensive.”
“Nana said they’d pay for me to fly,” said Owen, looking at his plate.
“We’ve already gone over this,” said Keira, flashing Nathan a dirty look. “They don’t have a direct flight, and you’re not old enough to be in an airport by yourself.”
“I don’t even know if we’ll be taking a trip, buddy,” said Nathan. “Things are going to be crazy at work for a little while. Once we figure that out, we’ll see about letting you stay for part of the summer.”
His son took a few moments to respond, placing his fork on the plate and looking up with a disappointed face. “It’ll never happen,” he said at last. “Can I be excused?”
Nathan glanced at Keira, who nodded. “That’s fine, buddy,” he said. “Finish your water first.”
Nathan forced a few more bites of a taco into his nervous stomach, watching his son guzzle the water he’d retrieved from the Pacific Ocean this morning. He understood Owen’s frustration. Southern California sucked for kids.
Years of drought had radically transformed Southern California’s adolescent experience. Once marked by daily trips to the community pool with friends, year-round weekend and evening trips to the beach, plus a whole host of outdoor fun just a short bike or car ride away, the California Resource Protection Act had put an end to all that.
All the pools were drained, either left empty and cracked, or filled with sand. Most parks had turned into dry, brittle pockets of suburban tinder, long ago bulldozed and treated semiannually with weed killer. Only the seaside parks, desperately sucking moisture from damp coastal air, retained a semblance of the glory that used to attract thousands to picnic and lounge in the grassy shade.
Then you had the beaches.
Little remained of the original beach culture beyond decayed concrete boardwalks, long stretches of the finest sand beaches in the country, and the same unexpectedly chilly water that always took tourists by surprise. California’s lively but rundown beach communities had been completely transformed by 2030. Rapid gentrification occurred in the early ’20s, when lawmakers lifted statewide property tax limits to pay for early infrastructure projects mandated by the California Self Reliance Act’s “Twenty-Year Plan.”
Slapped with significantly higher tax bills overnight, longtime residents of famed tourist meccas like Pacific Beach were forced to move inland within a few months. Leases were broken by landlords, as the new tax burdens forced building owners to sell their property to real estate conglomerates. As tenants and residents vanished, the bars, gift shops, restaurants, and tattoo parlors evaporated with them. Within a few years, the bungalows and dilapidated apartment buildings gave way to new construction, giving birth to upscale communities on par with La Jolla, Del Mar, and Encinitas.
With the new communities came town-implemented police checkpoints, elimination of public parking, and an unwritten municipal code promoting the harassment of outsiders. The beaches remained public, but few families were willing to sacrifice precious out-of-district time to sit in beach traffic, fight for outrageously expensive parking, and subject themselves to an undertone of disapproval.
“Inlanders” mostly steered clear of the immediate coast, making only the traditional pilgrimage when the rare out-of-town guest visited, or on public holidays, when the powers that be eased up on their harassment policies.
“We’ll figure something out, sweetie,” said his wife, as Owen skulked away toward the bedroom hallway.
When Owen had closed his bedroom door, Keira pushed her chair back and turned it toward him. “What’s really going on, Nathan? I’ve seen you stressed from work before. This is something different.”
He hesitated, still unsure how much to tell her.
“Nathan,” she hissed, keeping her voice low, “what’s going on?”
“Not here,” he said, nodding toward the hallway.
Nathan led his wife onto the backyard patio, closing the glass slider behind her. They sat across from each other at a rectangular wrought iron table situated under a worn, double-slatted pergola attached to the house. Beyond the six-foot-tall stucco wall bordering the western side of their tiny backyard, the horizon glowed deep-orange, fading into a deep-blue sky. Long shadows from their neighbor’s dwarf palm trees reached across the yard, touching the edges of the patio.
Keira raised both eyebrows. “Well?” she said, leaning forward in her chair.
“The police talked to me this morning.”
“At the off-ramp checkpoint,” said Keira. “You already—”
“No,” he interrupted. “At my office.”
“What?” she said, slapping her hands on the table. “When were you planning on telling me this?”
“I got home late, and Owen was in the kitchen with you,” he said, tripping over his own words. “I didn’t want him to—”
“You should have called me,” she said, sounding angrier. “You know, like as soon as the police left! I don’t like being kept in the dark like this.”
“Sorry. I just didn’t want you to worry about it all day—and it’s not a big deal,” he said, immediately wishing he hadn’t added that last part.
“Not a big deal?” she said, sitting back. “The police don’t visit you at work unless it’s a big deal.” Keira rubbed her face, sighing through her hands. “What did they want?”
“They had questions about my weekly trips to the beach, especially my extended visit this morning. All easily explainable.”
“You told them about the desalinator?”
“I had to,” said Nathan. “They didn’t seem to care.”
His wife took a few moments to process what he’d said.
“They think the reactor was sabotaged?” she said.
“They’re certainly not discounting the possibility,” said Nathan. “Though they didn’t come out and say it.”
“This is serious, Nate,” she said. “How did they leave things with you?”
Nathan dreaded telling her.
“I can’t leave San Diego County,” he said, wincing.
“For how long?”
“Until someone figures out why the cooling pump failed.”
“We really need to leave before that happens,” said Keira. “If the station was sabotaged, the secession issue will go critical. Staying here could become extremely dangerous.”
“We—I can’t go anywhere,” said Nathan. “They filed a geographic restraint with the county. If I leave, they’ll issue a warrant for my arrest.”
“No state outside of California honors that crap,” she stated. “Plenty of counties in Northern California don’t either. A few hours of driving and that won’t be a problem anymore.”
“Except we can’t come back to the county without me being arrested and detained as a permanent flight risk,” said Nathan. “Then I’m fucked.”
“Maybe we don’t come back,” she said quietly, turning to face the sunset.
“The thought crossed my mind, but skipping out on a geographic restraint can seriously backfire. I looked into it as soon as the police left the office. I can be charged on a felony level for violating a court order. And regardless of what other states think about the constitutional legalities of the geographic restraint system, municipalities and corporations tend to frown on employing felons. And if the county wanted to get really pissy, they could file a petition with the
feds to have my passport revoked.”
She considered his assessment, and her lips formed a grimace, barely visible in the fading light.
“I hear what you’re saying,” Keira said, “but I’m more worried about what might happen if we stay.”
“The state won’t descend into outright civil war overnight, even if the reactor was deliberately sabotaged.”
“No, but the police might round up everyone on their list and drop them off at one of those new detention centers on the border, in the name of state security,” she said. “You’re on that list.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“Are you willing to bet our family’s survival on that hunch?” asked Keira, lowering her voice. “We sure as shit can’t live here on my income alone. Not even for a month.”
She had a point, but the thought of driving off tonight or tomorrow, never to return, felt reckless and impulsive. Life outside California wouldn’t be easy. When the county classified him as a permanent fugitive, they’d face immediate foreclosure on their home, which would destroy their credit rating. Within a few weeks of fleeing the state, they’d lose access to the rental market. Not the entire market—just the areas without sky-high crime rates, crippling unemployment and bottom-tier schools. California had its flaws, but at least it was safe.
“I think we need to give it more time,” he said. “A few days, at least. We’ll have everything ready to go, and if the situation is the same on Friday, we’ll take off over the weekend.
“A lot can change in two days.”
“We’ll keep the plan flexible,” said Nathan. “We can be on the road in an hour.”
“I don’t know.”
Nathan got out of his seat and nestled behind his wife, wrapping both arms around her waist. He kissed her neck, before placing his forehead on her shoulder. “We’ll be fine,” he whispered. “If anything weird happens in the next few days, we’ll take off. Promise.”
She leaned her head into his. “I do love you …”
“But?” he said, filling the pause.
“I sometimes worry about your everything-is-going-to-be-all-right attitude,” she said. “This would be one hell of a time to be wrong.”
“Wrong or right, we have a good plan. We can be out of the state in two and a half hours if we head east on I-8.”
“The wastelands?” she said, pulling her head away. “I’d rather take our chances with a longer trip north.”
“We won’t have to go anywhere,” he said, holding her tight. “They rushed the construction of that place. All of the new triad facilities, actually. We’ll wake up to news of an improperly calibrated electrical part, or some kind of design flaw. Everything will be back to normal.”
She shook her head. “Does Mr. Optimistic ever take a break?”
“No. It’s bad for family morale,” he said, his thoughts drifting to the mysterious boats and the black SUV at the beach. Probably new security measures implemented in light of Almeda’s assassination. Nothing to get worked up about, and certainly not something he was going to bring up with Keira right now. She was one conspiracy theory away from booking three airline tickets to Argentina.
CHAPTER 19
Nick Leeds watched the target through a powerful digital spotting scope, hoping that nothing had been omitted from his intelligence packet. They had zero margin of error tonight; a failure here could unravel the entire California operation.
“Target stationary in great room,” he whispered, his throat microphone transmitting the message to the rest of the team. “On my mark, initiate the sequence.”
“Copy that,” murmured Raymond Olmos, loud enough for Leeds to hear without the help of his earpiece.
Olmos lay a foot away to Leeds’s right, his full attention focused on the illumination-adaptable scope attached to the latest-generation 50-caliber sniper rifle. The XM-850 was a semiautomatic, recoil-compensated killing machine, capable of reaching out and touching targets over a mile away. At the current distance, a little more than a half mile, an experienced sniper like Olmos could hit a target center-mass with two successive shots—virtually ensuring a kill.
Unfortunately, tonight’s mission wouldn’t be that simple. Gareth McDaid, lieutenant governor of California and staunch antisecessionist supporter, was one of the most heavily guarded public officials in the nation. In addition to an ever-present California State Police special operations detail, McDaid privately bankrolled robust security at his Sacramento foothills mansion.
Leeds had quickly dismissed the possibility of a direct raid against the house. McDaid kept a platoon-size contingent of hired guns on the property, and Flagg wasn’t keen for the kind of bad exposure a full-scale ground assault might generate—especially if the state police detail got in the way or one of McDaid’s family members took a stray bullet.
He settled on the sniper option, which carried less risk to his team and bystanders, but still presented its own unique challenges. First, a dizzying and exhaustive array of active and passive security measures prevented his team from approaching closer than eight hundred yards. Covered by thermal protective blankets and dressed in military-prototype, heat-signature reduction suits, they had cautiously inched into position, well within the detection range of the thermal sensors surveying the foothills. Computer simulation models and practical experience—not to mention his nerves—kept them from moving any closer.
Then there was the small matter of locating and shooting the lieutenant governor, a task made both easy and difficult by the vast sheets of floor-to-ceiling glass facing the foothills. With the exception of a single trip to the bathroom, McDaid had been under direct observation since the teams moved into position a few hours ago. Olmos could have taken the shot already, if that same glass hadn’t been designed to withstand 50-caliber, armor-piercing rifle fire. Fortunately for Leeds, the intelligence packet provided by Cerberus had suggested a work-around—which he was moments from initiating.
“Stand by. Three. Two. One. Mark,” said Leeds, triggering the laser designator on his spotting scope.
The soft, hollow thumping of four tripod-mounted 25mm smart grenade launchers broke the high-desert silence, as he centered the laser designator’s targeting reticle at the nape of the lieutenant governor’s neck. His attention split between the reticle and the scope’s built-in digital timer, he vaguely noticed the basketball game playing on the screen beyond McDaid. A few seconds later, the green digital counter in the bottom of the spotting scope’s display read “2.5 seconds.”
“Fire,” he said, his command answered by the repeated, thunderous bark of the 50-caliber rifle.
While the 50-caliber, laser-guided bullets raced toward the lieutenant governor at three thousand feet per second, sixteen 25mm high explosive grenades finished their lazy, coordinated arcs toward the fifteen-foot-high sheet of ballistic glass. The grenades struck within milliseconds of each other, creating a ripple of compact explosive flashes that cleared the way for Olmos’s bullets.
Through the falling cascade of shattered blue-white glass pieces, Leeds caught a splash of crimson-red against the wall-mounted flat-screen television. An instant later, after the glass had fallen, he watched with grim satisfaction as the final two 50-caliber projectiles tore through the lieutenant governor’s headless torso, propelling the bloodied corpse halfway across the room.
“Confirmed kill. Move to extract,” said Leeds. “Teams Alpha and Delta cover the withdrawal. Be advised. Do not engage state police assets without my permission. I repeat. Do not engage state police assets without my permission. All teams acknowledge.”
While the teams acknowledged his explicit order over the radio net, Leeds expanded the scope’s field of vision to view the entire property. A bedside lamp on the far side of the house suddenly illuminated the master bedroom, exposing McDaid’s confused wife to outside observation. Two men carrying compact rifles burst through her bedroom door, one of them smashing the lamp to conceal their movements.
Desp
ite the absolute darkness in the room, his scope’s image sensors maintained a near perfect color picture as the men dragged her out of the room. While taking in the scene, his eyes registered a small flash from the center of the home’s rooftop—triggering an instantaneous survival instinct.
Leeds straight-armed Olmos, using the momentum from the shove to roll in the opposite direction under the thermal blanket. A sharp crack exploded next to his head, ripping the thick blanket away. He scrambled backward along the rocky ground until the rooftop’s dark outline disappeared. Somewhere to his right, he heard Olmos hiss obscenities in the thick darkness as the sniper’s boots struggled for purchase against the rocky fold.
“Delta engaging sniper nest,” Leeds’s earpiece announced. Still half-dazed by the near miss, he squinted at the shadow moving next to him. “You good?”
“Oh yeah,” said Olmos, breathing heavily. “Saved thirty bucks on a haircut. How the fuck did our intel people miss that?”
“I have no idea,” said Leeds, hoping they didn’t miss anything else.
A short burst of distant explosions snapped him back into focus.
“Rooftop sniper neutralized,” said the Delta team gunner. “I have two groups of four working their way past the pool, firing in our direction.”
The sound of automatic gunfire drifted through the hills, followed by overhead snaps and ricochets off nearby boulders. With more than eight hundred meters of rocky, uphill terrain to negotiate, the security teams didn’t present a serious danger to their escape. Still, there was no reason to risk any casualties at this point.
“Can you identify any state police officers among the responding teams?” Leeds asked the gunner.
“Looks clear to me. No police in the mix.”
“Copy. Alpha and Delta, engage and eliminate the two groups. Everyone else pack up,” he said, crawling back into position on the ridge.
He raised the spotting scope in time to witness a tight cluster of explosive flashes tear into the rocks beyond the far right side of the glowing pool. Half of a severed leg skipped along the smooth deck, tumbling into the pool trailed by more body parts. A nearly identical horror show unfolded on the opposite side of the pool.
Fractured State (Fractured State Series Book 1) Page 9