The Unseen

by Hines

  Exhausted, he pulled himself into a tight ball and fell asleep.

  He was jolted awake when the bomb on his ankle began to utter a high-pitched alarm. Quickly, he looked at the cab driver, who didn’t seem concerned at all. He pulled up his pant leg and looked at it. The ring of lights continued to beat out their steady pace. He realized, his brain still fuzzy, that he’d been dreaming about the ankle bomb.

  The cab slowed and pulled to a curb; as light began creeping across the eastern horizon, Lucas saw the dark outline of the church hovering.

  He paid the cabbie and entered the church. He moved slowly to the front wall, found the switch that illuminated the Blackboard, and flicked it, listening to the steady hum as the lights drew a current from the battery cells. Clever, that Dilbert; he used the generator to power the batteries, then ran power from the batteries.

  He stared at the Blackboard, following the trails of Creep Club members, the strings that connected their individual photos to mementos from their current projects. There was something big in here, he knew. Something very big. He just needed to figure out what it was.

  Hondo’s face was here, hanging on a nail. The nail had some string wrapped around it that led to another nail a few feet away. The string was wrapped a few times around this second nail (which held a family photo of a mom, dad, two children, and a golden retriever), then went to a third nail, which held a small tennis shoe, tied there by one of its laces.

  Photos of other Creep Club members dotted the huge wall, each connected by nails and pieces of string to other mementos all across the board. Photos of all kinds. Newspaper clippings. A child’s doll. A swatch of fabric. Several keys and key rings. Even the dismembered, mummified-looking hand Snake had lingered over before.

  Lucas found Dilbert’s photo on the wall, then followed the string that connected it to Kleiderman and Leila Delgado. He looked at Leila’s smiling face as she posed beside Kleiderman, the man who had beaten her for so long. Was that a fake smile she was wearing in the photo? No matter; it was a smile, and a familiar face of some kind. A friendly face. He took the photo off the wall and slowly sank to the floor, holding the photo carefully.

  Once sitting, he put the photo on the floor and turned his attention to the contraption that now encircled his ankle. It wasn’t big or heavy; his pant leg easily hid it. It was a dull lead color, except for the red LED lights that dotted its circumference every inch or so. The lights blinked on and then off in a steady pattern all the way around it, making it seem like a small flying saucer straight out of a science fiction movie.

  A flying saucer that was attached to his leg.

  A flying saucer that was attached to his leg and would blow it off in several hours. Unless he introduced Viktor to “backers” who didn’t exist.

  He put his hand on the—what was it, anyway? A manacle? Good a word as any. He put his hand on the manacle, feeling its solid metal surface, and turned it. It moved easily around his ankle. On close inspection, he could see the hinge at the back and the locking plate on the front with a small keyhole.

  He didn’t know much about bombs. But he did know they could easily blow if you tried to diffuse them and didn’t know what you were doing.

  But if he could get out of the manacle with the whole thing intact, maybe.

  He took off his sock and shoe, flexed his foot down as far as he could. His joints were much more pliable than most people’s, and if he could just . . .

  Nothing. He could get close, tantalizingly close, to slipping the manacle over the heel and ball of his foot. But it wouldn’t quite go. He was stuck with it. For now.

  He put his sock and shoe back on, looked at the photo of Kleiderman and Leila again, then picked it up and cradled it in his hands.

  (Humpty Dumpty had some great falls.)

  He stared at the photo, at the fake smile. There was so much he needed to do. Get in touch with Snake and his crew. Find out more about Saul. Investigate the Guoanbu. Stay hidden from the rest of the Creep Club (and this was not the place to do that). And, yes, find a way to keep his leg from exploding.

  But the veil of exhaustion smothered all those thoughts, and even as he struggled to stay alert, he was fighting a losing battle.

  Soon, his body slept.

  23:27:45 REMAINING

  A toe in the shoulder wakened him. He came to immediately, jumping to his feet.

  “Why am I not surprised to see you back here?”

  Snake, along with Clarice and Kennedy.

  “Guess I halfway figured you’d find your way back, but I had to try. ’Course, sleeping in the middle of the floor doesn’t exactly count as staying out of sight. Makes it a little hard for Hondo to believe that staged video. Nice touch, making the chair fall backward when Clarice shot you. I smell Oscar.”

  Snake held out his hand, and after a few moments, Lucas realized what he wanted. He handed the photo of Kleiderman and Leila to Snake, who put it back on the nail on the Blackboard.

  “You remember Clarice and Kennedy,” Snake said as he finished hanging the photo.

  Snake turned around to face them again. “After our little meeting last night, I made a few calls. Found out a bit more about Saul.”

  Lucas nodded.

  Snake set down a briefcase, opened it, and started rifling through several papers inside. “Interesting character, this guy,” he said. “Almost too interesting. Been in the intelligence community for the last seventeen years, first in the military, and for the last five as a civvie. Awards, plaques, the whole nine yards.”

  Snake stood, handed Lucas some of the papers. Lucas paged through them as Snake continued to speak.

  “A Purple Heart in the first Gulf War, plenty of commendations, several rounds of classified training . . . I mean, this is the poster boy for our intelligence community.”

  Lucas looked from the papers to Snake. “Meaning?”

  Snake shrugged. “Meaning I don’t know. I told you, I don’t think I can trust everyone inside the Creep Club. I’m not surprised to find some other branches of government intelligence trying to bust into our ranks, keep an eye on us, but not this guy.”

  Something Snake said jolted Lucas, but he couldn’t quite figure out what it was right now; his mind was still waking. He looked down at a photo of a younger Saul, dressed in his fatigues.

  “A little too obvious, is that what you’re saying?”

  Snake shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so. A little too visible; you send a guy to go snooping inside”—Snake stumbled just a bit, as though he’d started to say something he shouldn’t—“inside something like the Creep Club, you send someone who doesn’t have such a long trail. Someone who’s an unknown.”

  “Someone who’s expendable.”

  Snake looked at him. “Right.”

  Lucas thought about the manacle clamped to his ankle. “That’s where I come in, I guess.”

  “Maybe.”

  “So what are you gonna do now?” Lucas asked.

  “Well, we’ve been getting some things set up at Saul’s office. Doing a little digging. Figure maybe tonight we’ll have a look around, see what we can find.”

  Lucas nodded. “Sounds like a plan, but that building is a ghost building. Doesn’t officially exist on any maps or sat images. No businesses listed there. Can’t imagine it isn’t loaded with security.”

  Snake smiled. “You leave that to me. My contacts helped me put this all together.”

  “You already have it done?”

  Snake looked at his watch. “Past three in the afternoon right now. Didn’t want to wake you; you looked like you needed some sleep. And we got it handled.”

  Lucas felt as if the manacle on his ankle were tightening. For roughly the first ten hours he’d had this bomb attached to him, he’d slept. Now he was down to twentysome hours.

  “You okay?” Snake said. “I’m letting you into this, because frankly I need the extra boots on the ground, and there’s no one I’d absolutely trust outside of Clarice and Kennedy here. B
ut if you’re not up to it . . .”

  Lucas shook his head. “No, no. I’m good to go. I just—” He stared at Snake. “Kind of a rough night.”

  Snake nodded, then dropped to his knees and retrieved one more item from the suitcase. A newspaper page, folded to a specific story. “Your rough night have anything to do with this?” he asked as he gave the paper to Lucas.

  Lucas took the paper and scanned the story. “Body Found in River,” the headline said. Lucas read quickly, noting the specifics: a man named Brian Ford had drowned in the Potomac, and his body had been recovered late the previous afternoon. Authorities withholding details due to an ongoing investigation, the standard fare.

  Lucas, puzzled, looked at Snake. “I don’t get it,” he said.

  Snake smiled. “So I guess you’re trying to tell me you don’t know Donavan’s real name. Here I thought you two were close.”

  “His name is Brian Ford? I thought . . . well, I guess I thought it was Donavan Roxwell.”

  “It was his name, for everything he did with us. For everything he’s done the last few years.” Snake smiled. “For the trail he’s been laying.” Snake stared for a few seconds, waiting for Lucas to make the connection.

  “You think . . . he’s connected to Guoanbu too? Maybe he’s been meeting with Saul?”

  Lucas thought of Saul’s geopatch movements. Was Donavan, née Brian, the person he kept meeting at the Lincoln Memorial? After all Saul’s blather about not wanting to work with Donavan—the “junkie”—was he working with him after all?

  “Doesn’t sound like a bad theory to me,” Snake said.

  “What about Hondo?” Lucas asked. “He didn’t seem like a big fan of Donavan’s.”

  Snake stayed silent for a few more moments, glanced at both Clarice and Kennedy, then back at Lucas. “No, I don’t think Hondo will be heartbroken.”

  Lucas held out his hand, and Snake grasped it. “Thank you,” he said to Snake, meaning it. He half thought of showing Snake the manacle on his ankle, asking if he had some way out of the predicament. But that would be showing a weakness. He didn’t want to show any kind of weakness to a snake.

  “See you tonight. Nine o’clock,” Snake said. “And do me a favor until then. I doubt anyone will be dropping by—whole club’s in a bit of a frenzy—but maybe you could hide yourself just a bit better.” Then the three of them were gone, leaving Lucas alone with the Blackboard.

  And his thoughts.

  And his bomb.

  His eyes strayed back to the photo of Leila and Kleiderman. He scanned the other faces of Creep Club projects on the giant board, letting his mind soak it all in. In addition to photos of the people, he saw depictions of architectural plans, satellite images, coordinates. He saw actual microchips and circuit boards hanging on nails, along with passports, vials filled with liquids, plastic baggies containing hair samples.

  A sudden thought bloomed in his mind, and he went back to Leila and Kleiderman one more time. He glanced at their faces, then checked off the faces representing all the current projects for the Creep Club, Viktor Abkin’s face included.

  This wasn’t just a memento board—a blackboard, as the Creep Club liked to call it. Viewed as a whole entity, it became clear to him now. He was looking at an evidence board.

  And he didn’t like what the evidence was showing him.

  TWENTY-SIX

  22:11:55 REMAINING

  Leila opened the door of her home, then stood in front of him silently.

  “Well,” she said. “You back to set off my alarm again?”

  “Um, is your husband here?” Lucas asked.

  “Hospital,” she said. “Tore up his leg pretty bad when I shot him. Had to have surgery.”

  “Is he gonna be okay?”

  She shrugged.

  Lucas shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Look, can I come in?”

  She stared for a moment. “Why do I get the feeling I’m going to regret this?” she asked.

  “I just figured something out,” he said. “I think you should hear it.”

  She stared for a few more seconds before stepping aside. He walked into the house and waited for her to close the door, then followed her back to the living room and sat down when she did. He tried to put thoughts of his last visit to this house, just a few nights ago, out of his mind.

  “So,” she said, “you back for some more video, are you? Need a couple extra shots?”

  He ignored her question, but offered one of his own. “So, your story—how’d it hold up?”

  “You mean about my husband going paranoid, and seeing people in our basement, and beating me because he’s sick?” She ran a hand through her long, dark hair. “So far, so good. I think they even bought it when I told them a friend picked me up at the hospital last time, let me stay at her house, and brought me home the next day.”

  “Which explained your car at the hospital.”

  She nodded. “Story’s mostly true, anyway.” She looked at him with her dark eyes. “All the important parts, anyway.” She leaned back against her couch. “Now, you want to tell me why you’re back?”

  “I . . . uh . . . can you tell me what, exactly, your husband does?

  His work?”

  “Diplomat for the Venezuelan embassy here.”

  Lucas nodded. “And what about you, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Don’t mind you asking what?”

  “What you do, your line of work.”

  She smiled. “So you don’t buy the stay-at-home trophy-wife story, huh?”

  He returned the smile. “Trophy wives, for the most part, don’t know how to use a gun.”

  She nodded. “Okay, no harm, I suppose. I was a weapons designer once upon a time,” she said. “Got my degrees here in the States, did some work for the U.S. government, designing . . .”

  “Weapons.”

  She smiled. “Yes. Weapons. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were a police officer suddenly.”

  He shook his head. “Just trying to put some things together.”

  “Like?”

  “Like why your house was targeted.”

  “Targeted for . . .”

  “For surveillance. A group that calls itself the Creep Club. Couple dozen people across the whole DC area, and they . . . well, they essentially spy on people in their homes.”

  She stared for a moment. “You’re serious,” she said. She shook her head, looked at the ceiling. “A bunch of high-tech Peeping Toms.”

  “I think Peeping Tom is maybe the wrong way to describe them. I think, maybe more like spies.”

  “Spies,” she repeated.

  He switched gears. “You and Kleiderman, you’re both from Venezuela originally?”

  She stared for a few moments. “Yes.”

  He bit his lip, unsure how to continue. “Venezuela’s been through some . . . well, political turmoil is a good way of putting it, these past several years.”

  “Some is a mild way of putting it. Just spit out what you’re thinking,” she said.

  “I was looking at the Blackboard today—”

  “The Blackboard?”

  “It’s a large wall. Kind of a giant bulletin board, where people in the Creep Club keep photos, tidbits, souvenirs of the projects they’re working on.”

  “Stolen pieces from the homes.”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s there from my home?”

  He squirmed. “Some photos. Uh, I think a wiring schematic of some kind.” He swallowed hard. “Hair samples in a vial.”

  She stared hard. “Someone stole hair clippings from my home?”

  Lucas said nothing.

  “Why?”

  Lucas said nothing again. He wasn’t sure what he could say.

  “And this is what you do?”

  “No, no, no. Like I said, I’m not one of them. I’m trying to stop them.”

  But he felt the sour, medicinal taste of the lie in the back of his throat. He wasn’t o
ne of the Creep Club, not in any official capacity. But he was getting the feeling there was some thread that tied them all together. He did all the things they were doing, but he was a natural monster, not a trained one. That, in many ways, was worse.

  “Okay,” she said, not sounding convinced. “So what do we do?”

  “Well, like I said, I was looking at the Blackboard, paying attention to all the faces on the photos—all the people pictured who were targeted for projects—and it occurred to me how many of those faces were brown, black, yellow. A few of them white, but only a few. And I started wondering why that is, and when I began looking at the names, I noticed most of the people had—what’s the politically correct way to say it—ethnic names. Not Americanized names, you know.”

  Her eyes were hard flint. “Yes.”

  “And here were photos of these people and videos and things from their homes, and it just struck me, this isn’t random. I mean, we’re in Washington DC, and—”

  “Homeland Security.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what you’re dancing around. You think we’re all being watched by Homeland Security, because we have foreign ties.”

  “I know it sounds crazy.”

  She smiled. “Ask any Japanese American who was herded into an internment camp during World War II if it sounds crazy.”

  He thought he saw a tear starting to form in the corner of her eye, but then her eyes shifted and became that hard steel again.

  She looked at him. “So what are we gonna do about it?”

  He smiled. “I was hoping you’d say that,” he said, “but I need to ask you something first.” He dropped to a knee on the floor.

  “If you’re going to propose, remember I’m already married,” she said.

  He smiled. A little humor. Good.

  He rolled up his pant leg, exposing the manacle. “Unfortunately, I’m already attached too.”

  She crouched on the floor beside him, examining the manacle for a few seconds.

  “Ever seen anything like it?” he asked.

  She nodded. “You wouldn’t believe the kinds of things I’ve seen,” she said. “It’s pretty basic.”

  “So can you get it off me?”