Terminal Rage

  What the hell are they yapping about?

  Challenging the cops or behaving like an obtuse or entitled tourist could hardly help his cause.

  He stood firm, eyes fixed on the three Egyptians holding court and discussing something obviously not meant for his ears.

  All sorts of crazy thoughts raced in his mind. What if they weren’t even cops, but highway robbers in cahoots with the driver? Any second now they would shake him down for all he’s got. Or worse, slit his throat and drown his body. No one would ever find out.

  His eyes met one of the cops briefly and he searched hard for any indication of what comes next. Then he glimpsed something horrific. Instead of staring him down, the Egyptian dropped his eyes out of Sam’s gaze. Not a sign of malice or anger, but something far more terrifying.

  Pity.

  In the horizon a fire raged across the bay, with thick blankets of white smoke starting to carry toward them inland.

  And that’s when he understood.

  This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening to me.

  Prayers in his mind for this to be a nightmare from which he would wake up were immediately shunned.

  Blood rushed to his head and stunted his vision. His jaw clutched and his throat clammed up until air could barely pass through to his starved lungs.

  His mind and consciousness split into divergent parts.

  One lagged behind and refused to accept what was no longer disputable. The Tylenol, I need to get back to the hotel for Ryan.

  The other part was scorched and damned until the end of time.

  When the two merged, the latter prevailed as the victor.

  Sam dropped to his knees and let out a single harrowing scream across the tranquil bay where the Spring Roy resort burned to the heavens, with his wife and children trapped inside.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Monday, July 9, 2012—1:12 p.m.

  Toluca Lake, CA

  Blackwell parked his car in front of a small Spanish villa in the heart of Toluca Lake, a ritzy slice of Los Angeles colonized by hip celebrities too cool for the Hollywood Hills.

  The house Blackwell was staking out had been empty for the last seven years, although nothing about its exterior would suggest that. The terracotta façade was freshly painted. The lawn seemed almost computer generated, shorn perfectly with uniform shades of green. A hummingbird was feeding on nectar amidst an explosion of blooming flowers in vibrant tropical colors.

  For the last two months, Blackwell had spent every free minute away from his kids investigating the mysterious life of a man he believed to be a ghost.

  The hunt had so far yielded nothing.

  Blackwell was back at Sam’s abandoned house to take a second look. After he’d zeroed in on Sam Morgan as a person of interest, he broke into the house once but had found it cold, empty and lifeless, without a single clue to help him narrow in on his suspect.

  The property was Sam Morgan’s last known address, where he had lived with his family until 2005. After his wife Angela Bright and their children Maya and Ryan were killed in a terrorist attack in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm El Sheikh, Sam never returned to live here.

  Records revealed a moving company packed the contents of his house and shipped it to an undisclosed location. He transferred ownership of the property to a corporate entity, and hired an Encino law firm to pay the bills, taxes and maintenance costs on the house.

  One year after Sam Morgan lost his wife and children, he disappeared off the face of the earth. No records existed to indicate he passed away or traveled out of the country permanently. He hadn’t been reported lost or missing by anyone. Overnight, the average trail of life transactions an adult in the United States leaves behind ceased to exist for Sam Morgan.

  In a swift move before he disappeared, he sold out his business to a competitor and resigned from his position as director of the company he had founded.

  His bank accounts and retirement funds were withdrawn and closed. Credit cards cancelled. Memberships, subscriptions, affiliations and even recurrent donations all abruptly terminated. His entire online trail, including his email accounts, were erased. The investment property he and his wife had purchased in Santa Barbara, along with their stocks and vehicles, were all auctioned.

  Just like his deceased wife and children, Sam Morgan had simply stopped being.

  Blackwell had learned a lot about Sam from sources close to him. Sam was an only child. His foreign-born parents had met as postgraduate students in the sixties. His father, Ryan Morgan, was a respected economist and professor at UCLA, of mixed Irish and Circassian roots. Chiara Ferracane, Sam’s mother, born in a small fishing village in Sicily, was a successful pediatrician in her community.

  Sam’s eclectic blood reflected in his features, making his heritage imperceptible. He spoke Italian and Russian fluently, and had dabbled in Asian and Semitic languages. Thanks to his parents’ insatiable wanderlust, he had seen more of the world by the time he was twelve than most people do in a lifetime.

  As a teenager, he got hooked on computers and developed a passion for films. When college harkened, he picked UCLA where he double-majored in film to satisfy his passion, and economics to impress his father. In his spare time, Sam taught himself computer programming.

  At UCLA he met his future wife, Angela, a marketing student who for a long time was his on-again, off-again lover.

  Sam graduated at the height of the dot-com era. His self-taught programming skills and family pedigree in economics landed him a safe job as a junior account executive at a San Francisco venture capital firm. For two years he got his feet wet there while taking on part-time gigs as a software developer.

  When the dot-com hype began to fizzle, Sam heeded his father’s incessant harping to follow the family tradition and hedge his bets on economics. He was accepted in the Finance and Private Equity graduate program at the London School of Economics in ’ninety-six.

  During that year, Sam had two epiphanies.

  The first was a matter of the heart. He realized Angela was his great love story and the only woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. He had dated a few perky undergraduate Europeans in London, but nothing ever amounted to much beyond the bedroom.

  The second was a matter of the mind and soul. Sam conceded that software and film were his true callings. No longer under his father’s thumb, he vanquished that small voice in his head pestering him to follow in his dad’s footsteps. His interaction with his fellow students, the future policymakers and elites of the global economic system, had put him off the entire discipline of economics for good. Having barely completed nine months in London, he dropped out and flew back to Los Angeles in the summer of ’ninety-seven.

  From the airport, he drove straight to Angela’s workplace, a boutique public relations firm in Century City. Still single, she too had never stopped loving him. He produced a ring and proposed in front of her colleagues and bosses. That day he won more than her heart.

  Within a few months of getting back from the UK, he lured Angela to quit her job and join him in launching a software company that would overhaul the film industry.

  From a tiny room in a converted warehouse in North Hollywood, Sam and Angela launched Entertainment Sciences, Inc.

  Less than two years later, they were earning two million dollars in annual revenue. They moved from their edgy, shared space to swankier exclusive premises in a modern building in Santa Monica. And from just the two of them, their staff had grown to twenty full-timers and hundreds of freelance programmers across the globe.

  Sam’s intuition to focus on the specialized software needs of the film industry was paying off in leaps and bounds. While all the major software players were chasing the crowded pot of creative applications, Sam and his tribe developed everything else. From intuitive casting databases that matched talent to production, to complex
applications that modeled dangerous stunts before they were performed to determine and eliminate risk.

  When their children were born, Angela began to gradually step back from the day-to-day responsibilities at the company to raise them.

  These rich details about Sam Morgan’s life came to Blackwell courtesy of Angela’s parents, who he interviewed at their house in Portland. They were Sam’s only remaining family in the world. His own mother had died a year after he returned from London, and his father passed away days before his son Ryan was born.

  After their daughter and grandchildren had perished in the Middle East, Sam’s in-laws stayed in touch with him until his ultimate disappearance one year later. When Blackwell reached out to them, hinting their son-in-law may have resurfaced, they were more than eager to play ball.

  Sam had come to visit them one last time that summer before he vanished. He was complaining of not being able to adjust to a life without Angela and the children, and was going away for a while to reassess his life. He needed time and space to heal, but he asked them not to worry about him, regardless of how long he was gone.

  Angela’s parents gave their son-in-law their blessings, although they secretly assumed he had either met another woman, or was just ready to move on with his life. It felt like he was trying to sever the final connection tying him to the painful memories of his past.

  Blackwell strode with rehearsed purpose to the majestic villa. Like the hundreds of San Fernando Valley realtors who had flooded the patio with business cards and shameless pleas to whoever owned the house to consider putting it on the market, Blackwell was armed with a highly plausible cover story to feed any overly impertinent or suspicious neighbors.

  He scanned the street for onlookers and when he was certain it was clear, he jumped the gate to the backyard. With the skill of a seasoned home invader, he pulled out the requisite tool and surreptitiously jimmied the master bedroom window.

  Empty as empty can be, the energies imparted on this house by its previous inhabitants were still palpable. A wide spectrum of human emotions, from the happy delirium of a young family making its mark on the world, to the catastrophic devastation of a father robbed of the people who made his life worth living and left alone to rot in this world.

  Not being the sort of man upon whom emotional nuance was wasted, Blackwell traveled in his mind to his suburban Rockville home during happier times.

  Melanie was baking cookies with Calista, who couldn’t have been more than three. Blackwell wanted to sneak up on them, but Calista heard his footsteps and hurled herself off the chair to hug him. He picked her up and flew her in the air, her laughter warming his chest with the light of life. She smudged his black suit with cookie dough, but he didn’t care one bit. There between his arms was everything he cared to live for. A tiny creature channeling the essence of unconditional love with minimal effort. All she had to do was be for Blackwell to melt. Light as a feather but weighing the worth of a universe to him.

  Pain like acid poured on your heart is what Sam must have felt when his children were murdered. An unfathomable strength required of him to walk in this house on his own for the first time after the tragedy. And the most innocent of vestiges would have scarred his soul deepest.

  Food left in the fridge.

  Toys scattered on the floors of his children’s rooms.

  Angela’s clothes, shoes, makeup. Breathing in her scent from a nightgown or a pillow. Strands of her hair caught in a brush on the vanity.

  Blinking voicemail messages left by friends trying to organize events and outings with Sam and his family upon their return from a vacation in paradise.

  Snapshots of lives unjustly cut short.

  How could anyone recover from this tragedy to lead a normal life?

  Wandering from the kitchen to what he assumed was Maya’s bedroom, judging by the color of the wall, Blackwell noticed what appeared to be a bar code sticker underneath a set of wall plugs. Either it wasn’t there the first time he broke in, or he must have missed it. It looked like the UPC stickers you find on purchased products for price scanning.

  He snapped a picture of the sticker with his phone and made a mental note to look into it later. Perhaps Maya had peeled it off one of her toys and stuck it there without anyone noticing.

  Empty of any objects, the house still exuded a tremendous amount of residual life energy. Trapped memories that once-upon-a-time had belonged only to Sam. Maybe he never sold this house to keep it as a shrine to honor his family, and to avoid having other people desecrate it by manufacturing their own memories.

  As he dwelled in Sam’s abandoned chapel, Blackwell was now convinced more than ever that the architect of the most enigmatic crime Blackwell had ever been entangled with, the man he knew as Seth, was no other than Sam Morgan.

  This conclusion was not one reached casually. Blackwell had flown across continents, stared at executed cadavers in freezers, and forced to face his darkest demons in Hermosa Beach to get there.

  For three full days Blackwell had locked himself up to analyze every surviving family member of the victims of the Sharm El Sheikh attack, using a manifesto Robert Slant had given him when they met. Through a detailed process of elimination, Blackwell narrowed it down to the only person who had the right profile, motives and means to do it. The one person who had disappeared like smoke one year after the attack.

  Sam Morgan.

  The bodies of Nabulsi, Madi and Salimovic in Frankfurt were a thinly veiled message and a first piece of a puzzle that had put him on the path of singling Sam Morgan as the man behind the Exertify affair, the hostage-taker with whom he had negotiated.

  The man who had gone to great lengths to free convicted terrorists didn’t do it because he believed them to be innocent, but because he was convinced of their guilt.

  Sam had masterminded the release of the two Jordanians convicted of the Sharm El Sheikh attacks for the most basic of instincts—revenge.

  He had asked Blackwell if he possessed the moral strength to ignore the division bells separating them and to judge him truly on his actions, rather than who Blackwell assumed he was. Everything made perfect sense now.

  From behind the heinous mask of a terrorist, Sam was desperate for Blackwell to understand he was a father and a husband doing what needed to be done, not a terrorist waging a holy war. Why else would he have revealed to him what he had done to the Jordanians?

  Knowing Seth was motivated by a higher cause was one thing, and letting go of the case was an entirely different proposition. The one thing Blackwell hated more than losing was not knowing.

  Why had Sam singled him out as the only person with whom he could negotiate? Only Sam could answer that question. And for that to happen, he had to find him first.

  Blackwell paced around the house one last time to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. Just like his first break-in, he had found nothing tangible to go on.

  As he was about to exit through the window, he heard a car pulling up outside the house.

  He rushed for cover and spied from behind the venetian blinds in the living room. A black van with tinted windows had just parked outside.

  Hello, what do we have here.

  He tiptoed to the master bedroom and took cover behind the door, his eyes fixed on the outside.

  Blackwell’s mind raced but he tried to stay focused to search for any innocuous explanation. Houses don’t get maintained in such perfect condition without regular tradesmen like landscapers and hedge painters calling in periodically. This could be one of them.

  Yeah, right. Coincidence, my ass.

  Two olive-skinned men with shaved heads, dark shades and bulky figures emerged from the nondescript vehicle. They slipped on gloves and sneaked their way toward the main entrance.

  Doom sprawling in his chest, Blackwell crawled out of the open window from which he had broken in, back into the
backyard. All he could find for cover was a short wall behind the shed at the back of the yard.

  From that vantage point, he glimpsed one of the goons climbing over the gate from the outside.

  Beretta at the ready, his heart thumped hard and his head boiled over.

  When he scanned again, the guy had disappeared. But where? There were very few options for cover in the otherwise sparse yard.

  The doom in his chest spread to the rest of his body.

  He glimpsed rapid movement inside the house. They must have separated to come at him from two different angles.

  This place must be trip-wired. What an idiot to come in without backup.

  Cornered by the shed, there was no where else to take shelter. He was in the worst possible position now. If both these knuckleheads came at him hard and fast at the same time, they wouldn’t even need guns to squash him like a bug.

  Blackwell scanned around, his visioned blurred by the adrenaline spike. A large tree by the shed extending its canopy mid-way into the yard was about his only chance.

  He tucked his gun in his pants, then climbed for dear life and waited.

  The tree gave him an aerial view of the backyard below. A tiny advantage in an otherwise inequitable battlefront. If they kept their heads at eye level while scanning for him, they’d find nothing. And if they did look up, he’d be obscured by the foliage. Or at least he hoped he would be.

  Finally the guy who had jumped the gate crept in the yard with a silenced gun.

  What now?

  Blackwell couldn’t hide in the tree forever, he was a sitting target even with the foliage.

  Damn!

  Behind him, the roof of the carport could have been a great way for him to jump on to the next house, but it was too late now. One wrong move and the guy moving with stealth below would shower him with bullets.

  One final option remained.

  Attack with lightning speed, and pray.

  When the man was a few feet from the tree, Blackwell got into position.

  A deep breath.