Dark Heart

by James Phelan

  “Are you suspicious of anyone?”

  Muertos shook her head and led Walker through the small terminal. There was no check-in line or security, because all of the aircraft were owned and operated by the people assigned to fly on them. Inside the big open terminal space was a desk with a couple of staffers to handle questions and bookings and logistical issues, a small convenience store, a cafe, and lounges and armchairs spread about to accommodate around fifty people. Walker bought a prepaid phone. Muertos didn’t bother with the desk and headed straight through to the tarmac, where she spoke to a guy in a high-visibility vest who pointed toward a waiting Gulfstream V 200 meters away.

  Walker’s first call was to Eve, and he transcribed some numbers into his new phone while making calls on the old. He told her things were fine, but to keep off the grid for twenty-four hours, when he’d contact her on a new number.

  “Can you tell me what’s going on?” Eve said.

  “Marty Bloom has been killed,” Walker said.

  “Oh Jed, I’m so sorry.”

  “I need to find out what’s going on,” Walker said. “Call Paul if you have any hassles.”

  “Okay. And Jed? Stay safe.”

  “Always.” He ended the call and tried three more numbers. The first two went straight to voicemail. The third number was answered.

  “Hey,” the voice said. It belonged to FBI Special Agent Fiona Somerville, a friend and sometime colleague of Walker. While still an active FBI agent, she was assigned to Room 360, a small multi-national UN investigative outfit tasked with counter-terror investigations.

  “You the only one working today?” Walker asked. “I just tried McCorkell and Hutchinson.”

  “They’re somewhere over the Atlantic, headed for Belgium,” Somerville said.

  “What’s in Belgium?”

  “Chocolates.”

  “And you know why they invented the chocolates, right?”

  “If the punch line is something about child abuse, don’t say it.”

  “Fine. Why are they headed over there?”

  “Work. You know, that thing where someone pays you money in exchange for you doing or making something? You should try it sometime.”

  “Thanks, I’ll file that one away. Much funnier than my joke.”

  “Anyway, I’m out of McCorkell’s UN outfit. I’m now back at FBI in New York, working a mind-numbing fraud case. Wanna swap with whatever you’ve got going on?”

  “Depends, is your case a Wolf of Wall Street type of thing?”

  “Nope. Some guy’s been skimming a penny or two per transaction at a company he’s worked at for thirty years.”

  “A penny?” Walker asked, ditching all the phone packaging and heading outside toward the aircraft.

  “Sometimes two, if he felt he could get away with it. There were almost two hundred million transactions over that time. You know what two hundred million transactions of one or two missing pennies looks like?”

  “About two million transactions of missing dollars?”

  “Right. Like I said, you want a job, we’re always hiring.”

  “Have to take a raincheck. I’m onto something . . .” Walker gave her Muertos’s name and asked Fiona to look into her background. “I just had a couple of Homeland agents visit me, and it wasn’t a friendly house call. I’ll message you their IDs, then can you check them out, see who they report to? Email me what you find. We’re headed to Maryland to check a lead. I’m switching phones after this call, I’ll call you when we land.”

  “Okay.”

  Walker ended the call, then pulled his phone apart, snapped the sim card, and pocketed the pieces. As he and Muertos crossed the tarmac, he said, “Who knows you’re back in the US?”

  “Someone I trust,” Muertos said.

  “Just one person?”

  “That’s it.”

  Walker kept pace with her but didn’t say anything. This didn’t smell right, but he would make a call of his own within the next twenty-four hours to settle that. The Gulfstream’s co-pilot greeted them at the bottom of the stairs, and they were aboard and the stairs folded up into the cabin and the door closed and the business jet taxiing to the runway and taking off all in the time it took them to settle in to oversized seats and buckle their belts. The aircraft took off northwest, into the headwind, and as it quickly climbed it went into a slow and gradual east-bound curve that would have them headed to Maryland.

  Walker said, “So, we get to Annapolis and talk to Hassan?”

  “It’s the only lead I have.”

  “Do you think he’s bent?”

  “Maybe. It certainly crossed my mind. Like, straightaway, when he was a no-show and the bullets started flying.”

  “So, if you had to call it one way or the other?”

  “Then yes, he is. Got to be.”

  “Had you ever been suspicious of him?”

  “No. Other than that day, and then afterward, when I had time to think back on it. It’s just too big a coincidence that he wasn’t there when the government forces showed, right?”

  “Why do you think he would have sold you out to the regime forces? What’s in it for him?”

  “I don’t know. But that’s what I was thinking, when I was under those bodies. How I wanted to face him and question him. Preferably at gunpoint. I lost friends that day.” Muertos paused, then said, “And you lost a friend too. Sorry.”

  “Or maybe they made Hassan?” Walker suggested, acknowledging her reference to Bloom with a slight nod. Now was not the time to let his sadness and anger cloud his judgment, and he tried to push Bloom to the back of his mind. He hoped revenge would come soon enough. “Maybe someone there, on the trafficking side, discovered he wasn’t who he said he was. Bled him for information. Syrian regime forces are good at getting people to talk. Especially those with family, like Hassan. So, don’t get hell-bent on the idea that he sold you out for profit, or the fun of it.”

  “I’ve since thought about that too. But he’s still the best lead, right?”

  “Right. He may have sold you out,” Walker said, watching out his window. The coast was now long gone, the urban sprawl of Sacramento below. “Whether he wanted to or not will prove interesting. I mean, what’s his motive? Was he a sleeper for the regime, designed to turn over as many Americans as he could over a long duration? It’s happened before. He could have been bent all through his Navy years, selling secrets to the Syrians and their Russian proxies. Or was his hand forced? He might have been taken in by the Syrian government and tortured for Intel, or he might have had a flat tire or got stuck in traffic and had nothing at all to do with what went down—there are any number of other things that might have prevented him from being at that meet. Coincidences do happen, like them or not. Life isn’t fiction—there’s little to no neatness to it, and it’s often stranger than anything some writer could make up.”

  “Yes, I get all that. But Hassan’s still my first port of call. Well, after I found you.”

  “Okay, so we get to Hassan, we question him—we need to know what he was up to that day, and where he stands in the scheme of things,” Walker said. “But you’ve got another angle.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The US contact for your smuggling outfit. You said they had a contact back here, the one you were trying to make, and track, via the money handling.”

  “But I still don’t know who they are,” Muertos replied. “The meet didn’t go through, remember?”

  “But you said the guy at the scene got out, the head of the trafficking ring?”

  “Right.”

  “And he handled the money, laced with your nano-track?”

  Muertos was silent.

  “My bet is that he’s well out of the country now,” Walker said. “Not out of the game, but out of Syria—no way a cashed-up guy is going to hang around in a place where he knows he’s marked by the regime in power. He’s cooked, retired from front-line work. So, he flees, to take up a position elsewhere in the n
etwork. Somewhere that the current Syrian government, and their Russian allies, can’t get to him.”

  “Where?”

  “Here, I’d say. Could be another Western nation, but here makes more sense, if it’s his main money earner as a destination, and he has a contact in place. And for him, the benefit of being in the US is that we have the best security apparatus in the world, so he’ll feel safer here, more protected from reprisals or assassination, than he would in the UK or Canada.”

  Muertos nodded, like it made sense to her.

  “He handled the money,” Walker said. “So, you can track him, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “That’s . . .”

  “Complicated?”

  Muertos nodded again, but didn’t answer.

  “You have to be honest with me,” Walker said. “If I’m getting into this, you gotta tell me everything.”

  9

  Harvey called Lewis, who picked up after a few rings.

  “This had better be urgent,” Lewis said.

  “It’s been four hours since we lost them at the hospital,” Harvey said. “And there’s been no sign of them. Nothing. Not at airports, nor at any mass transit terminal.”

  “That’s why you’re calling me?”

  “It’s important.”

  “This hands-on stuff is your role.”

  “I know. It’s just . . . I need to think out loud. Bounce ideas.”

  “Okay. So, you’re saying they’ve disappeared? Gone to ground? Or they’re in a private car?”

  “I think they’re either hiding somewhere, or in transit.”

  “What’s your gut telling you?”

  “They’re headed east. Muertos is home. She’s found Walker, and teamed up with him. What’s next? She reaches out to friends.”

  “How?”

  “They’ll be traveling by car. Or maybe a private flight.”

  “So, track the private flights.”

  “You know how many there are?”

  “I have a rough idea. You’ve got a massive surveillance tool at your disposal, now’s the time to use it, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Going down that road, making more noise, will make this public. We can’t afford the scrutiny. Not now.” Harvey hesitated, then said, “Right?”

  Silence. Then, “Where’s Krycek?”

  “Still in San Francisco. He was there, with two other agents, both of whom are now getting medical attention following their run-in with Walker.”

  Lewis sighed. “So, send Krycek east. Have him wait until they pop up on the grid. They will. And then have him put an end to this little side issue. Use Krycek. Let him do what he does best.”

  “But you wanted them alive earlier.”

  “Because you said your guys could do that—pick them up and see what’s what, isn’t that what you said? And how’d that work out?”

  This time Harvey was silent.

  “We tried your softly-softly approach,” Lewis said. “Time to adapt. But you’re right to be prudent. Keep this in-house, quiet. Let Krycek loose on them. It’s only two targets, how hard can it be?”

  •

  Walker had heard her story in greater detail. How Muertos and a joint-agency and departmental taskforce was combating human trafficking in and around Syria and Libya. The difficulties they had on the ground, where there was effectively no government, or a hostile one, and near to everyone was corrupt, and those few who weren’t were scared to get involved with American forces. Her story wasn’t a new one, and it would be repeated by other agents just like her for many, many years ahead. So long as there was war and conflict, there would be displaced people doing anything they could to flee, and that would create a market for the entrepreneurial predators who emerged in such situations.

  “How’d you find me?” Walker asked after about an hour’s silence. They were somewhere over one of the Virginias, and the banking meant they were coming around from southwest to northeast on a wide landing approach.

  Muertos sat up a little straighter in her chair. “What do you mean?”

  “How’d you know what hospital I was in?”

  “I—” Muertos caught herself. But there was something there, Walker saw.

  “You could Google me, my name, read some stuff I’ve done,” Walker said. “But finding me? That’d take outside help. All those letters and cards of congratulations I got this week went to City Hall in SF, or via the FBI. No one outside my few immediate friends knew where I was.”

  Muertos nodded. “I had a friend help out. She’s in the Department of Justice, and was handling the nano-track on the money. I reached out to her from Germany, and by the time I landed stateside, she had your location, and some deeper bio info.”

  “Sounds like she’s a good friend to have.”

  “The best. She owed me one. But now I owe her about ten.”

  “You trust her?”

  “With my life.”

  “Then reach out to her again. About the nano-track. She might have found the US contact by now.”

  “She’ll be onto that. I can set up a meet with her, but anything further, I’ve got to do it in person. She made that clear, when I called her from Germany—she’s paranoid about security over the phone and email, because this was a favor, not a sanctioned thing. It’s her career on the line.”

  “Where’s she at?”

  “DC.”

  “We’ll go there after meeting with Hassan. Hook up a meet.”

  Muertos nodded. “What do you want from her?”

  “Let’s talk and see where she’s at with that nano-track. Find the money, we find the man—either the guy from that meet, or the next up the line, or both.”

  10

  As they came in for landing, Walker’s eyes were closed but he didn’t sleep. He compartmentalized all the information Muertos had given him, and ordered it about, then re-ordered it. Looking for a pattern that wasn’t obviously apparent. The op in Syria, the missing agent, the mess-up at the meet, his father’s appearance and then disappearance, Bloom’s death, the off-books favor from the friend in the Justice Department.

  What bugged him most about it all, aside from the news of Bloom’s fate, was his father going back, two hours later, to help Muertos out—and specifically, telling her to find him. Why? Was this in any way related to Zodiac? Could it be? If there was a connection, Walker couldn’t see it. Maybe his father wanted that family to get into the US and make contact with him. Maybe they were going to send a message, from father to son, face to face, to avoid detection or interception. But he would never know.

  By the time the Gulfstream taxied then came to a stop and the door opened, Walker knew he had to reach out to another friend.

  “Had you spent much time with Hassan?”

  “No,” Muertos said. “He was being handled by others on the team. I’d met him maybe four times, each in passing. But the team had nothing but trust in him.”

  “So, you’d recognize him.”

  “Of course,” Muertos said.

  “Good. When we land, do you have access to a vehicle?”

  “No, I’ll need to get us a rental.”

  Walker shook his head. “Homeland Security will be all over our credit cards and IDs. We’ll need to borrow one from somewhere.”

  “Borrow?”

  “Temporarily.”

  “Steal?”

  “Only for a little bit.”

  “I can do better,” Muertos said. She pulled her purse from her small bag. “I’ve got State Department emergency ID.”

  “Has it ever been used?” Walker knew the type of ID, issued to all operational agents outside the US, usually Canadian passports, should US diplomatic IDs be compromised in an emergency or war-like situation.

  “No.”

  Walker looked at the passport that Muertos handed over: Rochelle Jones of Canada. It was as legitimate as a real passport because it was made by the Canadian government and issued to their allies, who
reciprocated the favor.

  Walker said, “Any chance Homeland has access to this?”

  “No. They’re completely compartmentalized, for security purposes, and I generated the name myself. It’s clean, as is the matching credit card, so we can hire a car.”

  “Okay, we’ll do it your way,” Walker said, passing the passport back. “We hustle out to Hassan, then make contact with your Justice Department friend. But keep your eyes and ears open at all times. Those Homeland guys weren’t there to quietly ask us questions. Whatever this is leading to, it’s bound to get rougher before we’re done.”

  •

  Fiona Somerville used the Office of Personnel Management database of Federal Employees to find out about Rachel Muertos.

  Rachel Maria Muertos. Analyst for the State Department. Married, no children. Husband, Steve, also in the State Department as a special investigator, listed as KIA in the field six months ago. Rachel had been on stress leave after that. Her latest assignment had her working on an inter-agency operation to combat people-smuggling out of the Middle East. There were several pages of information from the OPM’s Human Resource team; results from psych evaluations and her security clearance. There were a few reports from her superiors, from notation of jobs well done and comments on her aptitude for certain tasks and ability to work under pressure, to the notations around her husband’s death and the recommendation that she be put on indefinite leave pending favorable psych evals.

  Somerville copied all the information into an email and sent it to Walker.

  •

  Rachel Muertos’s State Department file was flagged with an electronic trigger. When it was accessed by the FBI on behalf of Special Agent Fiona Somerville, an alert popped up in the internal review service of the Diplomatic Security Service, the policing, protective and investigative arm of the State Department.

  The Agent in Charge of the unit made two calls. First, to the FBI field office in New York, where he left a message for the Assistant Director asking for a please explain on the unauthorized access.

  Then he placed his second call, to the number listed in the flag, to notify that person that the personnel files had been looked into. He ended the call and thought nothing of it; it was all well above his pay grade.