Terminal Rage

  The way Carter had said “inner posse” smacked of the bitterness of someone who was outside of it. Back in the day, Carter had lacked the necessary ambition to advance his career. Just an honest agent who did what he was told and never raised his head to ask for more.

  Clearly he hadn’t evolved much since Blackwell had last seen him, judging by the kinds of errands they were still sending him to run.

  “Monica and her team have all that juicy stuff waiting for you.”

  Monica and her team. What a shitstorm that promised to be.

  After years of battling his Monica ghouls, Blackwell was forced to ultimately accept she could only be exorcised by letting her go. Now the FBI’s Legal Attaché in Rome after making unit chief back in HQ, she still maintained close contacts with her CIRG buddies. She had started off as a special agent in the Violent Crimes Unit, but her stellar record of downing vile specimens brought the CIRG knocking.

  For Monica to head this investigation on the ground was unorthodox. Her official role as the Rome Legat would have ordinarily been limited to exchanging information with local law enforcement and security agencies. Marino must have pulled some serious rank to have her lead Julia’s kidnapping investigation, and now to helm the Exertify hostage standoff. Carter explained she was one of Marino’s favorites and he trusted her blindly. Unlike Blackwell, Hermosa Beach hadn’t even dented her career.

  Blackwell turned his attention to something else bugging him.

  “Why were there so many staff at Exertify’s office on a Saturday?”

  “We don’t know. Perhaps Price wanted a full house to impress his dignitary.”

  “Did fake prince pick the time and date?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s it then. On a Saturday, the building occupancy would be low and it wouldn’t take long to evacuate. This was no coincidence.”

  Carter nodded in admiration, although Blackwell was just conjecturing at this stage. Nothing about this case made much sense. Like why the hostages obeyed the perp’s commands and stayed in the building if he didn’t even have a gun to their heads, let alone explosives. Blackwell understood why Price would do it to protect his niece, but the rank and file? He questioned Carter about that.

  “My guess is the hostage-taker kept Price’s inner circle, the people with enough loyalty to the man and the family to stick it out for Julia. At that level in corporate America, things can get pretty incestuous.”

  “Did we try communicating with any of the hostages inside?”

  “He’s confiscated all their devices and shut off phone and Internet connectivity on the thirty-ninth floor. There’s only one line open in the conference room where he is now holed up with the hostages. He uses that to call us.”

  Carter fired up a map application on his tablet to show him the setup at the scene. Blackwell had seen one of these devices called an iPad with Milo and Calista and had assumed it was just a new video game iteration. He stood to be corrected. Some serious operational tech advances had occurred in the last four years, and he felt disadvantaged.

  “We have a hostage rescue unit on the rooftop of the building. Monica and her agents and analysts have set up at Fifty-four Vanderbilt Avenue, which is right across the street.”

  “The rest of midtown?

  “Pandemonium. We faked a HAZMAT at the corner of Vanderbilt and Forty-sixth.”

  “How do you fake a HAZMAT?”

  “A broken-down chemical truck with—”

  “Wait, is that even legal?”

  Carter stopped mid-sentence and shrugged. He studied Blackwell’s face briefly as if he had been abducted by aliens for the last four years who vaporized the part of his brain capable of filtering out dumb-ass questions.

  “We improvised. No other way to barricade a big chunk of the city and enforce a no-fly zone without creating mass hysteria.”

  “Are we talking about the same Manhattan here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t shut off a part of the island and expect the locals to pack up and picnic in Jersey. How about the news media, aren’t they asking questions?”

  Carter removed his headset and leaned toward Blackwell to speak off the record.

  “You wanna know what I think?”

  A hot flash of rage bolted across Carter’s eyes, like Blackwell had touched a live wire in him.

  “New Yorkers and the press can kiss my Irish ass and think whatever the hell they want to think.”

  “Woah.”

  “They’ll be A-Okay without their favorite bagel joint or Reiki studio for as long as it takes to get the damn job done,” he said with a quiver in his voice.

  “What happened, Yankees beat the Red Sox again?” Blackwell teased him about his Bostonian roots.

  “Just sick and tired of having to explain everything like we’re dealing with cretins. ‘The public’s right to know’ always trumps common sense and the need for operational secrecy. And New York is the absolute worst—”

  “You okay, man?”

  A massive sigh. “Yeah. Sorry about the rant.”

  “No need to apologize.”

  “The point is, we’ve got our evac zone and all you need to worry about are the hostages. Don’t distract yourself with anything else.”

  “Agreed. Tell me the boundaries of the barricaded zone.”

  “East of Madison, west of Lex, south of Fifty-third and north of Thirty-fourth.”

  Carter’s map gave Blackwell a spatial sense of the evacuated zone, but what he saw spiked his heart rate. Thank God it’s the weekend. Grand Central Terminal, the hub of the New York metro system, was practically under the besieged tower.

  Blackwell pointed at the problem area on Carter’s map.

  “Oh yeah, because things weren’t exciting enough.”

  “I imagine it’s been closed?”

  “Trains are passing through Grand Central with no access to the station for now. The last briefing I received, however, suggested even that was going to stop soon.”

  When there was nothing else to ask, Blackwell put his shades back on but couldn’t fall asleep. His thoughts drifted to Milo and Calista. When he was done with Manhattan, he’d go see them. Melanie would be livid he had come unannounced but the kids would negate whatever guilt she would try to shower on him. Just being around them would do him plenty of good. With the way this case was shaping, something told him at the end of it he’d be needing some serious rebooting.

  SIX

  Saturday, November 5, 2011—5:37 p.m.

  Manhattan, NY

  He stood alone in a cavernous boardroom sequestered from an architectural firm on Vanderbilt Avenue. The FBI had converted it to a forward command post for the hostage operation.

  Standing in this lifeless chapel of corporate greed, Blackwell looked back at how different his day had started. At the crack of dawn he had gone for a brisk run on the beach with his dog, then brewed a strong coffee and sipped it on his porch facing the open sea. Uncooperative winds were about the biggest threat to the rest of his day. Not the FBI, not a hostage situation and certainly not Monica Vlasic.

  Liam Nishimura, a younger agent who was Monica’s second in command, had toured him around the setup. Multiple adjacent rooms had been transformed into a living organism to serve as the operation’s communication hub.

  A workstation had been optimized for his benefit with an ergonomic chair facing endless monitors relaying streams from the key sites of the crime scene. He zeroed in on the rooftop of the target building, where the Hostage Rescue Team’s blue squad was positioned.

  On his desk, an espresso machine and a micro chiller stocked with Red Bulls foretold the sleepless hours ahead. A wireless Clupster headset made by a small German company had also been prepared for him. The last time he’d used one of these was many years ago, not to negotiate with a cr
iminal, but to counsel traumatized hostages. Three teenage girls in Southern California, holed up inside their Hermosa Beach home, after a masked man rigged their necks with sophisticated bombs and fled the scene.

  An old bitterness rose to his palette. For the first two years after the Hermosa Beach nightmare, Blackwell would wake up almost every night drowning in cold sweat, his heart pounding in his throat, whimpering to whatever God was listening to get the voices of the girls out of his head.

  Once upon a time Blackwell used to scoff at other FBI agents or cops who abandoned civilization after breaking down on the job. Like stock characters out of a formulaic novel, hiding in a mountain cabin in Colorado to glue back the shattered fragments of their lives, then rise like a phoenix. The ultimate redemption story, hashed and rehashed in pop culture to the extent that real law enforcement officers were buying it.

  Blackwell used to believe fallen heroes had to face their demons. It took his own self-implosion to revise this arrogance. Turns out the real reason men like him escape had nothing to do with easy redemption. They do it to save their lives, plain and simple. Because all it takes is one small trigger, just like the Clupster headset he was now staring at, to flush you to the bottom of the swamp. When a tortured man relapses enough times, his desire to stay alive eventually becomes a liability.

  Blackwell shut his eyes momentarily. When he opened them, he noticed a framed photo of Milo and Calista on his desk, upholding a tradition he had started when Milo was born. Someone had kept note of how he negotiated best with his family at hand as a reminder of what was at stake. The photo was taken many years ago on their last holiday as a family, and whoever had summoned it from the Bureau’s archives had also taken the liberty to crop his ex-wife out of it. How classy.

  After he fled to Anguilla, Melanie wasted no time filing for divorce. Their marriage had begun to unravel years before his meltdown. Knowing he was radioactive and in no position to look after them, Blackwell surrendered custody of Milo and Calista.

  In the end, it was Milo and Calista who kept him alive. He had a future vision of them as adults carrying the burden of a wacko father who lost it and blew his brains off. His tragic life and death would end up defining them and Blackwell knew firsthand what growing up harboring grief and shame can do to a young spirit. Whatever pursuit they chased in life—falling in love, getting a job or making new friends—would always come polluted with the humiliation of needing to explain what happened to daddy.

  Launching the charter business was nothing more than a gentle way for Blackwell to interact with people he’d never see again or be tied to emotionally. Emerging out of his shell began to soothe his bruised soul at a mellow pace, until he felt well enough to see his kids again. He reached out to Melanie but she slammed the door shut on the proposition. She called him a self-absorbed bastard who’d put himself ahead of his children. She was probably right, but that didn’t stop Blackwell from pleading for months. He may have gone on for years and never broken through to Melanie if fate had not intervened on his behalf.

  Milo’s violent tantrums and Calista’s fragility were keeping Melanie awake at night. A pediatric therapist who saw them confirmed what she may have suspected all along but was too arrogant to admit. Regardless of her feelings toward Blackwell, the kids were desperate for a father and had never come to terms with his sudden exit.

  She finally caved in and granted him supervised visitation rights in Bethesda, with a thick manual of rules that reinforced how little she respected him.

  Earning his children’s trust, however, was neither painless nor guaranteed. Innocent as they are, children have a bullshit radar that can’t be gamed, especially when you’ve already broken their heart once. Blackwell couldn’t just pretend he was on the mend. Milo and Calista forced his heart open, and oblivious though he may have been at first, just being in their presence was the most powerful disinfectant for his oozing wounds.

  Now stuck in this soon-to-be command center, a gaping hole of uncertainty had opened up in his chest. Back again in this dirty game. The whole place was teeming with opportunities for him to relapse. Like the imminent showdown with Monica Vlasic just around the corner.

  Although he had his back to her, Blackwell felt his skin crawl the minute she had slithered into the room.

  He filled his lungs with enough oxygen for what lay ahead, then turned slowly to face her.

  “Alex,” she said, her hands extended like an olive branch.

  He kept his arms to his side and pointed with his chin to the photo frame.

  “A picture of my kids minus the ex. Whose bright idea was that?”

  “The Bureau will bend over backwards to please you. Nothing’s changed on that front.”

  Blackwell stood firm, ignoring her hand.

  On the flight to New York, he had secretly hoped the pressures of the job and karma would have been unkind to Monica. That her electric confidence had been humbled. At forty-five now, barely a few years older than him, that her ebony silk hair would have lost its luster and her buttery skin stripped of its youthful elasticity. He hoped to find a middle-aged woman overpowered by a frumpy indifference with early wrinkles baked across her face, and her once astounding boobs now cursed with the double burdens of time and gravity.

  He found not one of these things.

  Before him stood the molten essence of femininity poured into a black lace dress with trim short sleeves, leaving no space even for air molecules between her figure and the fabric. Despite the anguish his heart had suffered from the actions of this woman, it still skipped a beat when their eyes met. What am I, nostalgic?

  She was about to lower her dejected hand when Blackwell changed his mind and shook it. The speech he had prepared full of hurtful adjectives would have to stay capped in his head now.

  “There were things I thought I needed to offload,” he said, his muted voice disappointing him.

  “Wish we had time for a couples session,” she said, folding her arms across her chest. “You’d rather be somewhere else, I get that part.”

  “Didn’t exactly have a say in the matter.”

  “Always someone else to blame,” she aimed back with a smirk that burrowed under his skin.

  He inhaled deep and tried again. “Whichever way we dissect this, Monica, our history is despicable on every level.”

  “Wait, you think Hermosa was the highlight of my career? And the body count was just for my personal amusement?”

  Blackwell glanced away from her relentless fix on him. A part of him wanted to come clean with her and acknowledge his own role in the disaster. To man up and admit for the first time that Hermosa Beach was far from being the only reason he broke. Blackwell was already cracked years before his failure that day presented a perfect scapegoat for him to come undone in a spectacular fashion. All Monica was really guilty of was exploiting his vulnerabilities and handing him the lit match he used to set himself on fire.

  She flicked her hair and took a few steps toward him. Close enough for them to embrace if they had been any two people in the world except them. Still a tough little bitch on command, but he wasn’t going to cower under her feet on this occasion.

  “Let’s get a few things straight. I’m here to do a job. I fully understand you’re the case agent. For the record, I don’t hold you responsible for Hermosa any more than I blame myself.”

  “Now that’s progress. We could even skip therapy and go straight to yoga.”

  “If you just shut up and allow me to speak, you’ll hear something other than your own snarky voice.”

  “You’re still a dip-shit, Alex.”

  “That’s exactly what I meant to say. I’ve seen the kind of person you are, and you don’t strike me like the type who changes either. Once this charade is over, move the hell out of my way ’cause I want nothing to do with you. You always were and always will be toxic for me. You so much as try pl
aying me while I’m working the perp, I swear to God I’m walking.”

  Monica tried to manufacture a smile as if what he said didn’t sting. Too bad for her, Blackwell knew her far better than she gave him credit for.

  SEVEN

  Saturday, November 5, 2011—7:02 p.m.

  Manhattan, NY

  With less than an hour to get Blackwell up to speed, Liam Nishimura took center stage to start the briefing. Young and fresh-faced, Nishimura had a natural talent for digital forensics. The Critical Incident Response Group had snapped him up early in his career from a field office to beef up its efforts against the growing threat of digital warfare.

  Monica and Blackwell sat around the conference table with three experts who had been assembled to provide intelligence, analysis, and language and psych profiling.

  Robert Slant, the senior counterterrorism analyst in the room, was a former CIA badass who Blackwell had liaised with after 9/11, back when inter-agency cooperation was all the rage. Slant had crossed over to the FBI as an employee a few years before Blackwell left it.

  Also assembled was Special Agent Natasha Shaker, who was no less humorless and to the point as when Blackwell last needed her linguistic expertise five years ago.

  At the far end of the table sat Eddie Grove, a star in the psych profiling world who had joined the Bureau as a freelancer after Blackwell had left it.

  Nishimura clicked a tiny remote and displayed a photo of a woman with chestnut hair and a continental come-hither smile. Blackwell found it hard to glance away from her apple-green eyes, until he realized who she was.

  “This is where our story starts. Julia Price was nabbed in Rome. Kosher, no priors, no drugs, but she hasn’t held a job in more than six years. Relationships are not her forte it seems, especially with her parents. Big-time daddy issues.”

  Blackwell delved deeper into Julia’s eyes to search for hints of the estrangement Nishimura was citing as solid facts.

  “Who reported her missing?”

  Nishimura clicked again to replace Julia’s picture with a photo of another woman’s pouting face on the cover of Italian Vogue.