by James Phelan
He kept the Cuda near-on ninety-five miles per hour. The limit here was seventy; he was driving fast enough to get booked at the highest rate, but not so fast as to get arrested and have the car impounded. He didn’t care about racking up tickets, but he couldn’t lose hours in a police cell, and couldn’t lose the car. Well, he could get a new car. But he liked this car.
It was a Saturday afternoon and the traffic was light. The overtaking lane was empty and when it wasn’t he either flashed his lights to force a slower car to move or he wove around them. The speed needle never moved from ninety-five. Over a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour. Walker preferred metric, given the choice. It was simpler in its description of accuracy, and as someone who had called in all manner of ordnance in the mountains of Afghanistan, often dropped from fast jets in what he would describe to them as a danger close situation, with friendly forces within the kill box, accuracy was everything.
Walker wondered about the choice of days for these cyber attacks. A regular weekend. The main events would play out tomorrow, a Sunday. A day of rest for most. A time of worship for many. Either way, not many people would be at work in offices. Did that mean anything? Or was today just an opportunistic time for the people who snatched Jasper?
And today. Saturday: people shopping, kids at sport. Saturday night: busy, people out, bars and clubs and restaurants packed.
The possibilities of targets for the cyber attacks seemed limitless.
Walker’s plan was to get to Monica, question her, take her to Jasper’s house where the abduction had gone down and see what he could put together. Maybe she knew people who wished him harm, or something secret from his later Army career. Maybe she had some further insights into her brother, insights that could lead to something, anything.
Walker turned up the radio news. A Senator was calling on the press not to publish any salacious details of people’s inner lives that had been laid bare in the first attack, or whatever was coming next. Walker couldn’t care less.
He was worried about what was coming next.
19
Monica’s neighborhood was Abbot Kinney and Venice Boulevard. Down side streets were framed views of the beach. Boats. Cafes serving gluten-free organic everything. Walker had to navigate through a street blocked off for a farmers’ market and side streets lined with food trucks. A lot of yoga pants on display and upscale frozen yogurt in hand. Old rich guys wearing velour in a non-ironic manner. People with laptops at outdoor cafes running their start-up ventures and looking for shared studio space to run said start-ups out of, as though if only they had said space then their ideas would really take off. Shops that stocked the fancy things that hipsters didn’t yet know they liked.
He parked around the corner from Monica’s place, on a hill that ran four blocks down until it petered out. He locked the car and pocketed the key ring. Looked around. The afternoon was warm. The air had a tinge of gold to the particulate in the Los Angeles air. He headed to Monica’s street on foot.
Walker liked the LA weather, but he preferred defined seasons. He’d grown to like Colorado in his three years there, but some said it had twelve seasons, where in winter you would have an eighty degree day and the next there’d be a blizzard. He didn’t miss Houston summers, and that place had but two seasons—hot and less hot. It was the Philly weather that always felt like home. And every place he’d lived in across the US all trumped the time he’d spent in Iraq, where he’d been during the 2004 summer.
The scene on Monica’s street was different from that on General Brokaw’s. There were no marked police cruisers at either end. In fact, there were no uniformed cops nor police cruisers in sight. There were cars parked along either side of the street. Walker figured there must be either FBI, or plain-clothed LAPD officers in unmarked cars. Probably the former, given the FBI’s involvement in running this. He scanned the windows of cars as he walked, searching for faces.
The cars seemed empty, no cops. Residential area. Cars belonged to those still home or those who commuted to work some other way; while LA was no doubt born and raised and matured as a car town, this neighborhood was the type that looked as though communal carpooling was the vogue thing to do, driving around in their electric Toyotas or bio-diesel Mercedes, using some kind of app to organize who was driving who to where on any given day.
He counted down the houses. Monica’s would be the seventh on his left, going by the street numbers.
He was two houses away when he saw motion. A guy, emerging from a hedge, a house before Monica’s. There was a flash of something shiny. A badge. A plain-clothed cop. A young guy, in casual jeans and polo shirt, bulge at his hip, showed an LAPD badge and put a hand out to Walker to signal he was to halt like traffic. Walker stopped. The cop glanced around, making sure that Walker was alone.
Walker said, “I’m a friend of Monica’s.”
“She can’t see friends today. Move along please, sir.”
“I just came from her father’s. She needs to see me.”
“I’m sorry sir, no visitors. Come back Monday.”
Walker looked up and down the street. “There may not be a Monday.”
“Excuse me?”
“You haven’t seen the news? You know what they’ve got Monica’s brother doing?”
“Sir . . .”
“Just knock on the door, and you’ll see that—”
“You have to leave, sir. No visitors. That’s my orders.”
“I’m just here to—”
“I’m gonna count to three.” The cop reached to his hip opposite the gun and returned with a weapon—he flicked out an extendible carbon fiber baton.
“You ever serve?”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Navy. Four years.”
“I won’t hold that against you. I was Air Force. Monica’s father was a General. He’s sent me here to check in. You can verify that.”
“You have to leave.” The cop held the baton out. “Last warning.”
Walker sighed.
“No,” he said, looking down at his feet, his voice low. “You’re either knocking on that door and seeing that all is well with me being here, or I’m going to shove your badge up your nose, and the baton up your butt.”
The cop smiled, said, “One.”
Walker didn’t wait for three. Or even for two. He reached out, spun the cop and put him into a one-handed choke hold that had both the cop’s hands fighting at the grip, the baton falling to the ground. Walker used his free hand to field strip the cop’s Glock as he marched him onto Monica’s property and dropped the weapon into the potted plant at the top of her steps. He then used that hand to take the cop’s badge and held it under his nose, building the pressure there to the point where the cop, when they were at the door, went to stand on his tiptoes to try and alleviate the pain. Walker relaxed the grip on the guy’s larynx and said into his ear: “Who’s in the house?”
“Monica.”
“Who else?”
The cop was silent. Walker increased the pressure.
He said, “You want me to go get the baton?”
The cop replied, “One officer.”
“Okay. You knock on that door, gently, three times,” Walker said. “Don’t try being stupid. Don’t think. Just do this and you’ll see that all’s right in the world.”
“You’re making a big mistake.”
“You made the mistake. You weren’t listening to reason. You were provoking me. And you let me get too close. And you sure as hell don’t have enough security out here.”
The cop knocked on the door, a big old green-painted thing. Tap-tap-tap with the brass knocker.
Silence.
“Yeah?” said a voice from behind the door. Male. Similar tone and timbre to the cop he had in the hold.
“It’s me.”
“Can I help you?”
“Tell them you need the restroom,” Walker whispered into the cop’s ear.
“I need the restr
oom,” the cop called.
“Hold it in,” the other voice said.
“Tell them you can’t.”
“I can’t.”
“Piss in the gutter. Or a shrub.”
“It’s not that,” the cop said.
Walker smiled. He quite liked this cop. He had spunk. He would learn lessons from this encounter and be better for it. Navy always were a little slow at learning. Quicker on the uptake than Army though.
“Okay,” the cop on the other side of the door said. The door hardware shifted: a bolt, a chain, then two key locks.
The door opened.
Walker applied more pressure to the choke hold and rushed the room, pushing his cop into the other and pinning them against a hallway wall.
“Don’t move!” Walker said to them.
The other cop, uncertain as to what was going down, and what the intruder was armed with and how his colleague had been subdued and used, raised his hands and didn’t fight.
“Monica!” Walker called out. “Monica!”
A head appeared from around a corner. Monica Brokaw. She looked at Walker and did a double-take, as though she were seeing a ghost. That’s how it felt for Walker too. A face he’d not seen in so many years. Similar but different. Familiar but foreign. Even from here, her light blue eyes took him back to memories of shared intimacy.
“Monica,” Walker said. “Tell them I’m here to help you.”
“But . . .” There was hesitation in her eyes as she stayed in the doorway at the end of the hall.
“Your father sent me,” Walker said. He kept his attention on the face in front of him, the back of the head and the two bodies, a few hundred pounds of LAPD flesh pressed against a wall. “I left there just over an hour ago. Tell them it’s okay. That I’m here to help.”
Monica looked at the scene. She could see that the cop pinned against the wall was slowly moving his hands down, his right hand to his hip holster.
Walker noticed it too, and he shook his head at the guy.
“It’s okay,” Monica said. “It’s okay. This is a friend.”
Walker released some of the pressure. His eyes were locked onto those of the pinned cop who, Walker could see, was computing that he hadn’t seen a firearm on this intruder and that both his hands were holding his comrade.
“It’s okay,” Monica said, moving toward the three men. “I know this guy. He’s okay. It’s all okay.”
20
Walker watched the cop he’d used to get into the house; the guy rubbed his neck and headed back outside, where he retrieved the pieces of his service automatic from the potted plant and blew the dirt and dust out before reassembling and departing down the steps to the street, where he picked up his baton. The other cop shut and locked the door and stood there, looking back at Walker, professional humiliation in his eyes. Walker thought about chastising him, telling him he had one job here—one job, to protect Monica at any and all reasonable cost—but he figured the guy had already learned—
“What you lookin’ at?” the cop said.
“You had one job,” Walker said, holding up a finger—his middle finger. “One.”
“This way,” Monica said, getting between them and steering Walker away.
Walker followed her up the hall, past the stairs. The floorboards were dark-stained timber, the walls stark white. The woman in front of him was a ghost. A memory. A person he’d not seen in the flesh in almost twenty years. Her appearance and voice were the same but different. Grown up, lived in. She was wearing dark blue pants and a tight white top and her body was as he remembered but she had a walk now, a way of moving that she’d not had before, a practiced motion. It was beyond a woman walking to attract attention. Walker had studied body language, as useful to those providing security at airports as it was to any intelligence or law-enforcement personnel in reading a person’s capabilities, training, intentions, their physical and mental state. It told Walker that whatever life Monica had lived over the past twenty years, she took care of herself, she had grown used to being watched, and she made the most of it. No motion or movement was wasted. Every action had a purpose. Everything was calculated.
She glanced back. Her eyes connected with Walker’s and she looked away. They were headed to the kitchen.
They passed a bag in the hall. A square carry-on, with wheels, the handle up. Her bag from her father’s. Now here, still packed and ready to go. She’d left San Diego forty-five minutes before Walker, but he’d sped the whole way, faster than the FBI Assistant SAC had driven, or his driver had driven, Walker was sure. They’d been home anywhere from twenty to thirty-five minutes. She’d left her bag there and done what? Watched the news?
They entered the kitchen. Monica moved around the other side of a long black-granite-topped bench with stools on Walker’s side.
“Where’s the FBI?” Walker asked.
“Excuse me?” Monica said. She looked at him, as if it was rude to talk business straight off the bat. But she couldn’t help herself. Her eyes searched his face, then glanced up and down his body.
“Your father said that the Assistant Special Agent in Charge out of the LA Field Office personally brought you back here,” Walker said. “Where is he? And he didn’t leave any agents here—but he did with your father?”
“She,” Monica said. She poured two glasses of water from a tap, a tiny tap, next to the main faucet, filtered water. Her hands trembled as she set them down on the long bench. She kept one glass near herself, and the other she slid across to Walker. Her hands didn’t shake violently, not spilling the content, but there was vibration there. Nerves and being wired and bugged-out by the situation with her brother. “The Assistant SAC is a she. And she’s back in the office, working with her people, to find my brother. And I didn’t need FBI agents here—I insisted. I can be quite persuasive. Two cops is more than enough. I’d rather the Bureau allocated their resources where best needed.”
Walker glanced down the hall and saw the cop still looking his way, watching, all kinds of embarrassment running through him and being replaced by anger and thoughts of revenge against the man who had so easily entered the house without any kind of weapon. Walker didn’t doubt that they could fight, nor that they could fight and shoot well. He was disappointed that they didn’t pat him down, even after the okay from Monica; her father’s .45 was tucked into the waistband in the small of his back, hidden from view by his untucked shirt and jacket. But he knew they’d learned a valuable lesson and that they’d now be on their toes for any kind of threat. He hoped. They’d probably accost the postman, he figured. Good. Better to err on the side of over-kill when on protective detail. But still, two guys did not a protection detail make, not in a suburban setting like this, not with a big house with all kinds of points of entry.
“You might be a target,” Walker said.
“I doubt it.”
“They may need leverage to force your brother’s hand to do something he refuses to do.”
“Like what? Make him leak some more social-media accounts?”
“Like melt down a nuclear power plant near a civilian population.”
“Is that why you’re here, after all these years?” Monica said. “To protect me from harm?”
Walker drank half his water and set the glass down.
He said, “I’m here to help.”
“How?”
“Any way I can.”
“Who are you working for? Not the Air Force. My father told me you left that behind, nearly ten years ago. Then you good as disappeared.”
Walker didn’t answer. He didn’t know how to answer. Instead, he tried a different tact.
“You look good.”
“Really?” Monica said, her tone that of a woman shooting down a guy’s advance. Her demeanor changed. There was the slightest nod of her head and the corner of a smile. She took a step back from the bench that was between them, and then she paced a little in the kitchen. “Is that why you’re really here—you saw this on the
news, and you thought, what, you decided to reach out to me? To make contact, after all this time? For what—just to see me? Is that what this is? Not really appropriate timing, don’t you think?”
Walker shook his head. “It’s not like that. I’m here because I just had a good chat with your father.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because we have to stop what’s coming. And we need to find and save your brother.”
Monica stared at him. Her eyes were still, locked onto his. After about ten seconds, she looked away, picked up her glass of water, sipped it. Her hands were now steady. Walker fought the desire to talk about the past. They had to keep moving forward. He needed her to be in the present, to shed any kind of light she could on her brother.
“I’m working on this thing, have been for a while,” Walker said. “An operation. Anti-terror.”
“Terror?”
“Terror cells. Cutouts. Linked. Triggered by other terror events.”
“For who?”
“That’s . . .”
“Complicated?”
“Yes.”
“Try me.”
Walker bit his lip, thinking, then replied, “Myself.”
“No.”
“No?”
“You’re not a plumber. You’re not a PI. You’re not even a gun for hire. So, no sole-contracting work for you.”
“What am I?”
“I’m trying to figure that out. But I haven’t got the time. I really haven’t got the time. And I don’t need your protection, despite what my father may have said to you.”
Walker looked up the hall. To the bag. “You’re leaving?”
“Look at you, being all observant,” Monica said. “Yes, I’m leaving. A hotel. A big one, in Beverly Hills, a place used to looking after big names and keeping things quiet—in case the press shows up, here or there. They’re bound to find me, sooner or later, like you have. By sunrise, probably, to broadcast it on the morning shows—they love a little drama, right? Then it will be a zoo. And who knows what else may happen—human nature, right? People know where I am, who I am, and they may want to harm me for what my brother is being forced to do. Rotten, isn’t it? People . . .”