Dark Heart

by James Phelan

  There was no easement directly opposite—but there was a house for sale, the mailbox overstuffed with local letter drops and junk mail. He let go of Muertos, crossed the road and ran up the stairs then shouldered the door open. Muertos was two seconds behind him. He shut the door and continued down the hall.

  “The car’s the other way!” Muertos called out from behind him.

  “Forget the car.”

  “We don’t have to run from the cops,” Muertos said.

  Walker stopped at the back door and turned to her. “They’ll arrest us. We pushed our way into a home, where I fired what’s probably an illegal firearm, while holding two people hostage—including a little kid. That’s a whole bunch of laws broken right there. And you’re an accomplice to all of it. Sure, we’ll probably get bail, but all that might take a couple of days at best. Have you got a couple of days to throw down the can? Neither of us does—not if there’s someone high up in Homeland Security in on this.”

  “Okay. Okay. You’re right.” Muertos looked around the kitchen of the deserted house. “What now? We can’t wait here until they all go away. Those cops will start door-knocking, looking for two fugitives. They’ll find the door you just kicked in.”

  “Give me your phone,” Walker said.

  Muertos passed it over and stared as Walker put it down the Insinkerator.

  “Hey!” she said as he turned it on, the machine’s steel blade chewing up the plastic and silicone and glass of the phone.

  “They might trace it. We’ll get you a new one, prepaid with cash.”

  Muertos looked from the sink to Walker. “What about your phone?”

  “Mine’s brand new—they won’t have it yet.”

  Muertos nodded, then started to pace, running her hands through her hair. “That SWAT team showed up way too fast to be in response to the gunshot.”

  “It wasn’t the gunshot that brought them.”

  Muertos stopped and stared at him. “Hassan’s house is under surveillance by his minders.”

  Walker nodded.

  “The CIA?”

  Walker nodded again.

  “Shit. Right. Okay.” Muertos said. “They’ll be searching the surrounding area. We have to get moving.”

  Walker looked out the back window, from the kitchen, and saw a classic old VW Beetle in gleaming condition. Some kind of showpiece, a labor of love or collector’s item. Parked there either to show prospective owners that the paved courtyard could be used to park off the street, or because the present owners of the house didn’t have any better place to park it. Right now, it was a way out.

  “Yep, we have to get out of here,” Walker said, unlocking the back door.

  •

  Harvey took the call from Krycek.

  “The Maryland cops missed them,” Krycek said. “At Hassan’s house.”

  “Are you getting the track on their car?”

  “I’m looking at their car.”

  “What?”

  “I’m parked across the street from it. They got away, on foot. I just spoke to the SWAT commander. They’re door-knocking the area. Walker and Muertos are close. They’ll be hiding, waiting, to come back to the car to bug out.”

  Harvey paced around his office, said, “Walker is no amateur.”

  “So?”

  “He’ll leave the car there. Probably head for a bus or cab.”

  “Maryland PD are covering public transport,” Krycek said. “Can you put out a BOLO, to cover the cab and transit companies?”

  “Not ideal, not yet,” Harvey said. A BOLO—Broadcast, Out Loud—would mean every cop in the wider DC area would be on the lookout. Far too public for what he had in mind. “That’d let these two know they’re onto something. I want you to handle this—you need to be there, when they’re found—we can’t afford to have Maryland State PD being lead on their arrest interview, got it?”

  “Got it. And I just spoke with a contact there. They’ve got eyes on all the local bus routes, but there’s a few of them crisscrossing the neighborhoods through there. But he confirmed what we know—Maryland State PD won’t bust a gut on this, certainly not for the federal government. They’ve got enough of their own problems to deal with in the city, and my guy suggested, or asked, if we can’t take over this one.”

  “Good. Works for us. What’s your next step?”

  “Until I have something else to go on, I’ll keep eyes on their vehicle and wait for word. They might circle back here to the car. Or have someone else pick it up and transfer it to them.”

  “Okay. Stay put. I’ve got Walker and Muertos in the TrapWire system. Maryland and DC are wired up the wazoo. They’ll turn up soon enough.”

  “Call me when you know,” Krycek said, “and I’ll end this.”

  18

  “We need gas,” Walker said. The needle on the Beetle’s gauge had hovered not far over empty since he’d push-started it out of the backyard, and thirty miles of back streets and B-roads later it was below the empty mark. The sun had set, and the yellow headlights of the Beetle gave a warm glow to the crisp spring evening.

  “So, pull into a gas station,” Muertos said. “We’ve passed about ten of them.”

  “Too risky,” Walker said. “They’ll get a make on us, then they’ll know what vehicle we’re in, and soon after they’ll catch us—and as sweet as this little tin can is, it’s not what we want to be in during a high-speed pursuit.”

  “So, pay for the gas with cash, then they can’t trace you.”

  “No. Every gas station has cameras. And we have to assume our friends at Homeland have uploaded our faces into the TrapWire network.”

  “TrapWire?”

  “Not our friend. Think of every Internet-connected camera in the country being fed through Homeland Security, with facial-recognition programs looking for us. The first time they find us, they’ll have the ID and location. The next, they’ll have an idea of the direction we’re headed. And if they get our license plate, well, then they’ll get a fix on us in real-time through all the Automatic License Plate Readers you see dotted along every highway and major junction.”

  “Well, that’s all just great,” Muertos said, and she looked out her side window up at the lamp poles and building corners, as though trying to spot cameras that may be perched up there. “So, what do we do about the gas situation?”

  Walker slowed, then took a left down a street in the outer boroughs of DC. It was a mix of industrial and converted warehousing, all being gentrified as quickly as small-time developers could muster. This street was dark and quiet and backed onto a creek that formed a tributary to the Potomac.

  “There’s more than one kind of gas station,” Walker said, slowing as he passed a few multi-story townhouses sandwiched between big brick buildings. The area was mainly commercial, and once would have been a bustling center of business, goods received and goods packed and dispatched from the warehouses, back when they were built in the nineteenth century, when the waterways served a purpose and barges connected the railroads and docks. Now most of the properties seemed to be converted to short- and long-term storage lots, presumably filled with stuff from people’s lives that didn’t fit into ever-shrinking silo-like apartments that were sprouting up all around DC like a viral outbreak. He took a right into a cul-de-sac and slowed as he passed a few parked cars, and then came to a stop. “Wait here.”

  Walker moved quickly and quietly, over a short fence and into the front lot of a tiny row of workers’ cottages with overgrown front gardens, then came back to the car with a garden hose. He put the Beetle into first and took off, working up the gears and getting up to fifteen miles an hour before coasting in neutral to save gas.

  Muertos looked at the roll of rubber hose that Walker had put in her lap and said, “You’re not . . .”

  “There’s our gas station right there,” Walker said, dropping down to second and turning onto a dark side street, pulling up close behind a big pick-up. He took the hose, went to the pick-up and forc
ed the gas cap open, then took the plastic ends off the hose and started to siphon. He spat out the unleaded gas that touched his mouth and pinched the end of the hose tightly, then put it into the little Beetle’s gas tank. In twenty seconds the tank started to overflow and he pulled the hose out of the truck’s tank, replaced the cap, and put twenty dollars under the petrol flap before closing it.

  “An honest thief,” Muertos said as Walker got back into the VW.

  “A fair transaction,” Walker said, reversing away from the truck and then heading down the road. “He probably made a profit.”

  “He?”

  “The owner of the pick-up.”

  “Could be a woman.”

  “Doubt it.”

  “Women don’t drive pick-ups?”

  “Did you see the same truck I did?”

  “The one with shiny chrome wheels, and a stencil of a Playboy bunny on the mud-flaps, and a bull horn tied to the front bumper?”

  “That was it.”

  “And a woman can’t have all that?”

  Walker paused, then said, “Fair point.”

  “And what about stealing this car?” Muertos said. “You didn’t leave a stack of cash back at that house.”

  “We’ll park it in a tow-away zone when we’re done with it,” Walker replied. “The owners will be notified to come and pick it up.”

  “With a fine and tow-fee to pay.”

  “They’ll survive.” Walker glanced over at Muertos. She was watching the road ahead, nothing showing in her eyes. He wanted to ask her about skipping out of the hospital in Germany. About claiming she worked for the State Department even though she was ousted months ago. About her motivation to attach herself to the taskforce in Syria. The continued motivation, because this wasn’t a job she was doing, it was personal. But he opted to observe. At least until after this next meeting. “You still navigating?”

  “Yep. Keep going straight. The turn’s about a mile ahead.”

  “Tell me about this contact of yours we’re about to meet.”

  “Sally Overton. Old friend. At the Department of Justice, as a liaison officer with the Secret Service, where she used to work. We’ve got an hour to the meet, and judging by your driving it’s about forty minutes away.”

  “How do you know her?” Walker asked.

  “Left up here, then head north onto the Beltway.”

  Walker took the instructions, easing the little car onto the main northeast-bound arterial that fed onto the I-495 that ringed Washington DC.

  “She’s like a sister to me,” Muertos said. “Her father helped my mother, a long time ago, back in Mexico. They became family friends, and we’ve known each other since we were kids. She’s one of those rare friends, the kind you call in the middle of the night when you’ve done something terrible or embarrassing and she’s there to help, no questions asked, no judgment made. She’d do anything for me, and I’d do the same for her.”

  Walker thought about Bloom. A lifelong friend. A guy who’d literally sewed him up, not to mention all the times he’d given him false papers, money, weapons, a place to stay, a shoulder to lean on, a companion to laugh with, a man to learn from. His knuckles went white on the steering wheel, and in that moment he doubted anyone wanted to find the culprits more than he did.

  19

  Walker eyed Muertos as he drove. Muertos in turn watched ahead, the blank look quiet in her dark eyes. He could feel that she was tense, stressed to the point of giving up. As though finding Walker, and going to this next meeting, was the last roll of the dice for her. Desperation.

  “What Hassan was saying,” Walker said, to focus her attention, “did that make sense to you?”

  “Which part?”

  “The motivation of the smugglers.”

  She sighed, her eyes snapping back to the here and now. “It’s a global problem. All those refugees moving out, the money moving hands, the lives lost. It’s a dirty economy all of its own, feeding on war, and more often than not a lot of that money goes back into the war. What Almasi was running into America was a tiny part of it, but we’d never seen any actual people arrive, which was frustrating Customs and State, who had evidence from Syria that it was happening. It was estimated he was putting a couple of dozen people into the States per month, give or take. Compared to thousands into Europe, and thousands elsewhere. And he was just one of hundreds of people traffickers.”

  “Hassan was genuinely shocked to hear that Almasi was alive.”

  “Right. That was genuine, his reaction. At seeing me, too. And he’s spooked.”

  “He was spooked to see you alive.”

  “Right. And Almasi. Maybe it’s even Almasi’s reach back here that he’s scared of. His US contacts. But there’s little to nothing we know about him, other than he was the top of the local food chain.”

  “But you knew he was working for others outside the country?”

  “Right. The money men, living in luxury somewhere in the West. He was like their local manager on the ground. Buying and selling. The profits went offshore.”

  “To the contact here in the US.”

  “That was the consensus with all those in country.”

  “Someone with contacts inside Homeland.”

  “It explains the prices they can charge for setting up what seem to be completely legitimate IDs back here.” Muertos paused, then said, “I mean, up until today, I’d thought maybe there was no physical connection back here, that there might be a money trail to banks or law firms in the Caymans. But the nano-track was going to answer some of those questions.”

  “Does State have any idea who the US contact is?”

  “No. That’s what we were going to use the nano-track on the money for. We know Almasi has entered the US several times on false passports, but he’d always shake whatever tail they’d put on him. And I’m starting to think he had help in that, from Homeland.”

  “Who’s we?”

  Muertos looked at him. “The joint taskforce.”

  “What’s the last contact you had with anyone on that team?” Walker looked across at her. “They lost some of their own in Syria. They must be pissed.”

  Muertos paused a second, then said, “Why the interrogation?”

  “Curiosity. You’ve been out of contact with them—first the hospital in Damascus, then Germany, then finding me. You said earlier you’re unsure if you could trust them.”

  “That was my thinking until those Homeland guys jumped us. Now I think the compromise is at Homeland.”

  “But you’re not in current contact with anyone at State?”

  “No. I mean, you’re right. I’m out of the loop right now,” Muertos said. She fidgeted with her hands in her lap. “Medical leave, following what happened in Syria. And, like I said, I thought someone within State might have tipped off the pro-government forces.”

  Walker didn’t push the point. He navigated the traffic and said, “Okay. Let’s get back to Almasi. What if he wasn’t meant to get out of there alive?”

  “I’m sure he wasn’t,” Muertos said. “The Syrian regime soldiers came in with every weapon blazing, believe me. It was indiscriminate. No prejudice. No one was meant to get out of there alive.”

  “But you did,” Walker said.

  Muertos paused again. She looked across to Walker. “So did your father. And a few of the mercenary types around Almasi. And the Syrians gave chase—that’s the only reason I got out. Same for your father.” Muertos looked to Walker. “Why didn’t you ask Hassan if he’d ever heard of your father?”

  “I didn’t want to put his name out there.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, like I said, Hassan’s house would be wired for sound,” Walker said. “Cameras too, at least outside. That’s how the CIA had Maryland SWAT on the scene so fast.”

  “Why would the CIA watch one of their own like that?”

  “He must have put a request in, after Syria,” Walker said. “For protection.”

  “Or,”
Muertos said, “he didn’t. I mean, the Agency is not in the business of trusting people, right? Maybe they were keeping an eye on him.”

  “Possible.”

  “Take the next left,” Muertos said.

  Walker checked his rearview mirror as he changed lanes and made the turn, watching, wary of any tail. He didn’t see one. But it was what he couldn’t see that worried him most.

  •

  Harvey clicked on the sound file and listened to the CIA recording from Hassan’s house. Then he called Lewis.

  “Good news, I hope,” Lewis said.

  “An update,” Harvey said. “A development.”

  He played him the conversation.

  Lewis said, “Can Hassan lead back to us?”

  “No. He only knows Almasi on a surface level.”

  “Almasi is here in the US?”

  “Yes. He’s waiting for orders. He wants direction—obviously his place in the program has changed.”

  “I think he’s at the end of his usefulness. Once you deal with Walker Junior and Rachel Muertos, take care of Almasi and his friend.”

  “He’s the best contact we’ve got if we want to get back into Syria.”

  “Too bad. It’s become too hot—we should have shut it down days ago, when Walker’s father showed up. It’s been a good op, run far longer than I expected. We’ve got from this little operation more than we need. So, it’s time to pack away all our things, and prepare for the next stage. Which means you need to make sure you clean up after yourself.”

  20

  Walker pulled the Beetle up to the curb and parked next to a walnut tree erupting with the green buds and sprouts of spring. They were in Logan Circle, a leafy district, home to junior staffers for people in the capital. Lots of up-and-comers; fashionable meets prime-patch-of-real-estate between Shaw and Dupont Circle. They’d driven down 14th Street NW, past wine bars, beer bars, tapas bars, oyster bars; the dining options—reasonably priced bistros and cafes and brew houses that straddled a mix between classics and organic hipster fare—occasionally punctuated by a chic boutique. The side streets hold stately old manors that give the neighborhood a feel of old-school class. The smell of wood smoke was heavy in the night air. Not a star in the sky for the cloud cover.