Stealth Attack

by John Gilstrap

  “Roman is not taking drugs!” Venice insisted.

  “And we’re not suggesting otherwise,” Gail said. She leaned forward to grasp Venice’s hands, but Venice wanted nothing to do with the gesture.

  “Police are creatures of habit,” Jonathan explained, hoping that he’d be making things better. “When there’s a homicide, the person who finds the body is assumed to be the murderer until evidence points otherwise. The guy left standing after the fight is over is the aggressor.”

  Gail said, “When kids in general, boys in particular, go missing, the default assumption is that they’re off to find drugs.”

  “Or get laid,” Jonathan added. Frankly, having recently caught a glimpse over Roman’s shoulder of what he was watching on his phone, off to get laid was the more likely scenario.

  “The point,” Gail said, “is that when the time comes for the police to interview you, you need to truthfully answer the questions they ask and not try to get ahead of them.”

  Jonathan said, “If they think you’re not being forthcoming, they’ll focus even less on the search to find them.”

  Venice’s features had locked into an angry glare. “Are you both finished? When was the last time I ever lied to either of you?”

  “Never,” Jonathan said. He launched the word quickly.

  “That’s exactly right,” Venice said. “I sure as anything am not going to start now.”

  It was time to move on. With more disturbing thoughts. Jonathan prepared himself with a deep breath. “You know how I feel about coincidences,” he said.

  “You don’t believe in them.”

  “I believe that they’re dangerous to believe in.” In his mind, there was enough of a coincidence to require a restatement. “El Paso is literally one step away from Mexico, and I’ve got a lot of enemies in Mexico. We’ve done a lot of damage down there, and if the Mexican army or their national police force got wind that someone who’s close to me was so close to them . . .” He didn’t finish the thought.

  Venice’s face registered panic. “Do you think they kidnapped Roman?” She turned her gaze to Gail but got no relief.

  “Again, Ven, I’m not to the point of thinking anything. Am I worried that might be the case? You bet your ass I am.”

  Venice stood. “We have to go down there,” she said. “If the police aren’t going to handle this seriously—”

  Jonathan stood, too, and pumped the air with both hands. “Whoa, whoa. Let’s do this one step at a time.” He kept his hands out, palms exposed as he ran the permutations through his head. If Roman had taken off to enjoy a few hours out of adults’ eyesight, there’d be hell to pay when he got home, but the danger was minimal, and there was no need for anyone to go anywhere from Fisherman’s Cove.

  If Roman were the victim of street crime, or if he’d gotten lost, or if he’d fallen off a bridge, the locals would eventually handle it, and what would happen, would happen. Jonathan had no role to play.

  But if this was a cartel play . . .

  In the absence of evidence to the contrary, he had no choice but to assume the worst.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m going to Texas. Get Boxers on the phone and tell him to meet me at the airport as soon as he can get there.”

  Gail rose from the sofa and reached out to Venice, then thought better of trying again to grasp her hands. “Try not to worry,” she said. “We’ll get this all straightened out.”

  Venice looked startled. “Why does this sound like a goodbye? I’m going with you.”

  Jonathan caught Gail’s eye and with a quick flick of his head invited her to leave them alone.

  As Gail approached the office door, Venice said, “I’m serious, Digger. I’m going to Texas with you.”

  “Let’s sit back down.”

  “No. I don’t want to sit back down. I want to go find my son.”

  “Then that puts us all on the same page,” Jonathan said. “With any luck at all, we’ll find out that Roman is fine, and we’ll get the news before we’re even wheels-up out of Manassas.”

  Venice said, “But if he’s in trouble, I need to be—”

  “Here,” Jonathan said. He softened his tone even more. “You need to be here, Ven.”

  “He’s my son.”

  “And that puts you too close to it all. You have to see that.”

  The tears came in earnest now. “I am not just staying back in Fisherman’s Cove waiting for the phone to ring. I need to do something.”

  “And what skills do you bring to El Paso?” Jonathan asked. “Look, I don’t want to be an asshole here, but seriously. What in your skill set makes you think that you would make our time on the ground in Texas more productive?”

  “Well, it’s a good thing you don’t want to be an asshole. What do you call this?”

  “I call this being practical. And if you think about it, you know I’m right. You are our eyes and ears, Ven. Do what you do and what only you can do. Find out everything you can. Start with everything you can find out about this Sarah Somebody kid and her family tree. Use those computer skills of yours to make the internet afraid.”

  His words found their mark. He could see it. “I don’t know that I can do that,” she said. “How am I going to be able to concentrate?”

  “How are you going to be able to think about anything else? You can stew and worry and cry and be in the way, or you can stew and worry and cry and be useful. Find out everything you can about everybody on that field trip. Tap into the security cameras at the hotel they’re staying in. Hell, find out what they had for lunch and what they’re thinking about in their spare time.”

  She wiped her eyes with her fingertips. He could see the wheels beginning to spin in her head.

  Jonathan continued, “When we’re wheels-down, if we haven’t already gotten good news, I want to be ready to roll with our own investigation. I want to know more than the FBI, and I want to know everything the El Paso PD knows.”

  “It’s sounding like you have a plan,” Venice said through the slightest trace of a smile.

  Jonathan winked. “I do,” he said. “I’m going to find your baby boy, and I’m going to bring his ass home so that you and Mama can take turns beating him blue.”

  * * *

  Jonathan caught up with Gail as she arrived at her desk. “Can I talk with you for a second?” he said.

  “Sure.”

  “Not here.”

  Jonathan led the way down two flights of stairs to the first floor of the converted firehouse that served as both his home on the first two floors and the headquarters for Security Solutions on the third. They stepped out into the bright sunshine, then he buttonhooked to the left and punched in the code to open the front door to his residence. As commutes went, this one was pretty damn easy.

  Jonathan pushed the door open and stepped aside to let Gail enter first. Here, as in his office, his decorating palette ran toward dark woods and leather. Lush oriental rugs adorned the floors. Jonathan had spent a ridiculous amount of money converting the four-bay firehouse into his home. Having spent so much time as a youngster hanging out here with the fire crews, he still recognized much of the original architecture, but those details would be invisible to a casual observer.

  “What’s with the secrecy?” Gail asked, still standing in the foyer.

  “It’s not secrecy,” Jonathan said. “It’s that I’m about to piss you off. I need you to stay behind for Mother Hen. This is a lot for her to take, and I don’t want her here alone.” The request struck right at the heart of a long-standing wound. Gail had come up through law enforcement, not the military. A lawyer by training, she’d been an FBI agent and the sheriff of Samson, Indiana, before joining on with Jonathan’s team. Her view of the world was more nuanced than his—and a world away from Boxers’—and her contrarian views had often chafed, leaving her to feel sometimes that she was less than an equal part of the team. Jonathan got it. He didn’t think it was true, never even for an instant, but he understood how
she might think that way.

  And now he was asking her to stay behind.

  “Why me?”

  “Big Guy has to fly the plane. And I think we can all agree that I’m nobody’s first choice for providing comfort.”

  Gail clearly wanted to argue. He could see it in her stance, the way she’d crossed her arms. But he could also see that she understood his point.

  Jonathan went for the close. “There’ll likely be leads to follow here anyway, and I don’t want Ven to feel compelled to become a field operator. Especially not when she’s as spun up as she is.”

  Gail’s jaw muscles tensed. “You know I don’t like this,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you guys going to do anything stupid while I’m not with you?”

  “Probably.” He flashed a smile as he stepped closer and folded her into a hug. She hugged him back.

  “I won’t say it,” she whispered.

  “Good.” Jonathan considered wishes for good luck or to be careful to be fundamentally damaging to a mission. The desire for either could get a team killed.

  “But you will, right?”

  “I’m going to bring Roman home.”

  Chapter Three

  Venice stood there in front of the sofa in Jonathan’s office for what might have been two minutes. She didn’t move. She couldn’t think. The enormity of what she’d just learned was incomprehensible. Her baby was missing.

  Was Digger right? Had she been irresponsible to let him go on the trip to Texas?

  She felt a flash of anger. If it was such a dangerous thing to do, why hadn’t Digger spoken up before? She knew for a fact that she’d told him about the trip. It was typical of him to tune out any information that wasn’t specifically about him.

  “Settle down,” she said aloud. Things were spinning out of control, and what she was doing—this panic—accomplished nothing.

  I’m the master of electrons. That’s what Digger called her, anyway. How many times had she saved their butts by working miracles over the internet? Now it was time to turn her skills on finding Roman.

  Venice spun around, strode out of Digger’s office and across the Cave—the secured inner office that housed the workings of the clandestine side of Security Solutions. A renowned private investigation firm that served some of the most recognized corporations in the world, Security Solutions specialized in obtaining the kinds of information that sometimes could not be requested in official settings. For the overt side of the company, which employed a team of supremely talented investigators—many of them disabled vets to whom Jonathan Grave had given a chance when so many other companies would not—discretion was perhaps their most valuable commodity.

  But there was a covert side to Security Solutions that the investigators who toiled in the Fishbowl—the outer office on the third floor—knew nothing about. And if they suspected, they knew not to say anything. Again, discretion.

  This side of the business had no official name, but its focus was unique among private investigation firms. Nominally specializing in freelance, extralegal hostage rescue—resolving kidnappings without the burden of due process—the team was frequently called upon by Uncle Sam, usually the FBI, to accomplish tasks that governments were not permitted to perform.

  Three levels down, a reinforced concrete underground bunker spanned the width of the parking lot and more, with disguised entrances in the basement of the firehouse on one end and the basement of St. Katherine’s Catholic Church next door on the other. The bunker housed all kinds of weaponry, from small arms to explosives—the tools of Digger’s trade. Venice hated going down there and avoided it whenever she could, which was pretty much always.

  The covert side of the business occupied maybe one-quarter of the entire floor space on the third floor, and it resided behind a locked and guarded door. Known colloquially as the Cave, the space housed offices for Digger, Brian Van de Muelebroecke (a.k.a. Boxers), and Venice Gail worked out of the Fishbowl to serve as a management influence and resource for the investigators.

  Venice beelined to the War Room, the high-tech teak conference room and mission control center. From there, she had access to resources that would make NASA blush. She couldn’t access nuclear launch codes, but in all fairness, she’d never tried. Her latest technological acquisitions had come to her direct from the National Security Agency, entirely without their knowledge. There had to be a way to find one boy in El Paso.

  As she settled in behind her computer screen, she logged in and went straight to work. The first step would be to find Roman’s cell phone signal. Roman would be furious if he knew how much software Venice had loaded onto his phone while he slept. The kid thought he’d disabled the tracker, and she had no intention of setting the record straight. Given their progressively more open warfare as he struggled with adolescent angst, she figured the more he thought he was winning, the better off they’d all be.

  Everybody else was going to think he ran away, but that didn’t make sense to her. As much as Roman hated her these days and as much as he might want to make her squirm, he would never hurt Mama. He was her everything, and he knew it. He’d never in a million years do anything to make her worry.

  It took all of five minutes for Venice to navigate to the cell towers in and around El Paso and from there to initiate her search for his smartphone. Nothing. Certainly nothing in the downtown area or around the university.

  She widened the search and still got no response. Worry began to blossom large. That boy never turned his phone off. Even if it was turned off, she should still be able to find his SIM card. Even if he knew how to remove it, why would he possibly want to? He thought he was invisible in the first place.

  The phone was gone. Nowhere to be found. The worry became fear and bloomed larger.

  “Come on now, think,” she said. She decided to hack into his call history. All of the numbers she found were from Virginia. The most recent was an incoming call from a 757 area code. The number traced to Dennis Kelly. A bell rang in her head. Roman hadn’t run off with Sarah Somebody. It was Ciara Kelly. That couldn’t possibly be a coincidence.

  Venice entered Ciara Kelly’s number into the tracking program, and it likewise was nowhere to be found. It took a little longer to hack into Ciara’s phone list, but it was well within Venice’s skill set. Sure enough, there was Roman’s phone number, number two in her list, and with the corresponding time stamp.

  Correlation is not causation, she reminded herself. The stakes were too high to allow herself to jump to conclusions. Maybe they were in some weird kind of dead spot where phones were invisible.

  She needed to see if other phones had become invisible, too.

  “What’s that boy’s name?” she asked no one. There was one classmate who had been Roman’s friend since their early years at the Neck and also was on the trip. Come on. He’s been to the house!

  Luke Eadie. That was the name. Luke Eadie. Nice kid, deeply into martial arts. That’s how he and Roman became friends.

  Again, it took a few minutes to funnel through all the possible Luke Eadies to find the right one. Venice narrowed the choices down dozens at a time at first, then one at a time, until she found the one and only Luke Eadie in El Paso whose phone carried a Northern Neckphone number.

  And there it was, pinging a tower downtown.

  “Damn,” she said. Hearing the word made her feel uncomfortable. Venice did not like cussing, whether from herself or from others.

  Commotion from out in the Fishbowl, beyond the security door, drew her attention away from her computer.

  Annoyed by the interruption, she pushed herself away from the computer, exited the War Room, and moved to the security door. When she opened it, she saw a very angry Mama Alexander and a very frightened Rick Hare. A former Special Forces operator with too many years in the Sandbox to calculate, Rick was a hard-as-mahogany member of the office security team. Venice had seen him stare down some very scary people. But Mama was Mama.

  �
��What is going on out here?” Venice demanded.

  “Venny, you and me are gonna have words,” Mama said. “And you.” She thrust a stubby finger toward Rick Hare. “You’re lucky she saved your sorry backside.”

  Venice opened the door wider. “Please come in, Mama. We can talk in here.”

  She led her mother past the War Room, where there were too many gadgets and widgets that she had no business knowing about, and back to Jonathan’s office.

  “Have a seat, Mama.” Venice gestured to the leather sofas.

  “I don’t want to sit.”

  “Well, I’m not going to talk to you while you’re yelling at me,” Venice countered.

  “Is it true that Roman is missing?”

  “Mama, please sit down.”

  Her eyes showed that she didn’t want to, but Mama rounded the coffee table and lowered herself into the nearest end of a green leather sofa.

  Venice took the leather chair closest to her. Reached out and grasped her hand. “We don’t know what happened to Roman, Mama. All we know is that he didn’t show up to a place he was supposed to be.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because I just found out myself. We’re still piecing the details together.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “We have to assume that he is. There’s no reason to assume that he’s not.” Venice wished that she could bring herself to believe her own words.

  “Well, what happened?”

  Venice caught her up on the details of his going missing from the field trip. She left out Digger’s embellishments about El Paso.

  “Roman wouldn’t do that,” Mama said. “He’s not that kind of boy.”

  “I mostly agree with you, Mama. But you know as well as I that he’s been acting out.”

  “He’s not that kind of boy,” Mama repeated. “If he wandered off, it wasn’t his idea.”

  Venice didn’t see how that could matter, so she didn’t reply.