by James Phelan
There was silence on the other end of the phone for fifteen seconds. Walker watched the screen of the phone, the duration of the call ticking over.
“I just tried calling Acton on my government phone,” Bennet said. “You’re right about the voicemail. But his house is just a few blocks from my apartment. I’ll pay him a visit. See what’s what.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” Walker said. “Call your superiors and have them send a tactical team to Acton’s place. And you need to get out and watch your back and contact us when you know you’re clear.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because,” Walker said, “Muertos and I are working on the same case you are. And right now, as far as we know, you’re the only person who knows about this who’s still alive. So, if you want to stay that way, you watch your back, and get some place safe.”
Silence. Then the sounds of movement, like the agent was walking, shuffling his feet. Then, in a hushed tone, he said, “I think someone’s at my apartment door. But I didn’t buzz anyone up.”
“Don’t answer it,” Walker said, putting the Beetle into gear. “Get out the window or balcony or however you can. What’s your address?”
Silence.
“Hello?” Walker said.
Nothing. The phone call ended.
31
“What do we do?” Muertos asked. “Wait to get through to him again?”
“We call in favors,” Walker said. He dialed Fiona Somerville’s cell number, and when she answered he asked for the residential address of Secret Service Agent Jim Bennet. He set the phone on speaker while they waited and he drove out of the neighborhood; it took three minutes for the information to come through.
“Okay,” Somerville said, and gave them an address in Cherrydale.
“Thanks,” Walker said, Muertos punching it into the map on the phone.
“And Walker, about that other matter—”
“I’ll call you back soon,” Walker said, ending the call. He pulled a U-turn and drove toward the dot on the map, which was a predicted fourteen minutes away. He’d try to make it in eight.
“Who was that?” Muertos said.
“A friend.”
“A friend who can get the address of Secret Service personnel over the phone in a couple of minutes?”
“A well-placed friend,” Walker said.
They drove in silence as Walker kept the revs of the little old engine high and used the brakes as little as possible through the morning rush hour. When the congestion forced them to stop at an intersection, Muertos finally spoke.
“That was Fiona Somerville, of the FBI?”
Walker glanced at her, then back at the road. “Yeah.”
Muertos paused, then continued. “I saw her name, and title. In an email, on your phone.”
“I figured as much,” Walker said.
“I didn’t mean to pry. I meant to look something up, and when the browser opened I saw it was logged onto your email, and my name was in the subject line, so I read it.”
“And?”
Muertos remained tight-lipped.
“You want to tell me anything about that email?” The road ahead cleared and he kept his eyes forward, his hands on the wheel and his foot on the gas.
“I guess I owe you an explanation.” Muertos looked out her side window as she spoke. “I’m not in the State Department anymore. Haven’t been for a few months.”
“I got that, from the email,” Walker said, hitting the brakes and making a hard right turn to make a red light. “So, why lie to me when we met?”
“It was unintentional.”
“I’m calling BS on that. You mentioned the State Department because you wanted me to take you seriously. You’d read my employment file, the heavily redacted version. But the file you read gave you clearance that covered the year I spent with the State Department.”
“Yes, and yes,” Muertos said. She held onto the dash as he sped through the gears, up and down as they accelerated then slowed for another turn. “Look, Walker, mine is a long and complicated story—but the short version is: State busted me out.”
“Busted you out?”
“Yeah. I had some—some issues, okay? And I wasn’t coping, but I insisted on staying. Then my boss said something to me that made it impossible for me to work there anymore. He said: You’re either on leave, or you’re fired.”
Walker maneuvered around an empty school bus.
“That was four, almost five months ago,” Muertos said. “But the joint taskforce team on the ground in Syria didn’t know that I was out. I called in favors, forged my order papers, went over there, worked with them, the whole time not flagging anything back here.”
“I need to know why you did that,” Walker said, and he glanced across at her. “What’s driving you?”
“Because . . . it was always my baby, from the ground up—and I want to stop these people from doing what they’re doing,” Muertos said. She spoke quickly, as though the information might not come out unless she pushed it out. “I’ve spent my life working with State in people trafficking, liaising with Customs and ICE and Homeland and whatever they want to call our border-protection agency every few years.” She laughed without humor. “It’s like they think that in rebranding it they can say to those up the chain: look what we’ve done—we’ve arrested more and recovered more and saved more than anyone in the history of this outfit. It makes me so furious.” She was quiet a moment, reflecting. “And beyond work, it’s personal, always has been, okay? My mother was an illegal, from Mexico. She informed on the smuggling ring that brought us into the US, after she was caught up in an immigration case—she was being held as basically slave labor with dozens of others, and she did that deal for me, so that we could become legitimate citizens. That was thirty years ago, and now here I am, paying it all back, getting the scum that preys on profits from trafficking desperate people like my mother.”
“Overton’s father worked that case,” Walker said, glancing sideways at her. “That’s what you meant last night, when you said he helped your mother.”
“Yes. He’s a good man. He went above and beyond, made sure that my mother’s deal was stuck to. We even lived with the Overtons for a few months in San Diego. I . . . I really should call him. About Sally.”
There was silence between them for near-on a minute, Walker driving, Muertos thinking about her loss. Then he said, “What department was her father in?”
“He’s well retired,” Muertos said. “He was DoJ, and later helped form ICE.”
“Okay.” They were stopped at an intersection along Arlington Boulevard. “And why’d you get busted out of State?”
“I think the official reason was insubordination, along with accessing compartmentalized data I had no clearance nor orders to access.”
“They kicked you out for that?”
“It was a three-strike thing.”
“So, you had form.”
“Let’s just say I used up all three strikes in one epic disaster of a day.”
“Unofficially?”
“What?”
“You said that was the official reason.”
“Yeah, I mean, that’s what they said when I took my forced leave,” Muertos said. “There was more to it. More than they knew. I’d spent the best part of two weeks doing the same kind of thing—it’s just that that day I got caught.”
“What drove you to do it?”
Muertos took a deep breath and said, “I was desperate.”
“About?”
“About helping someone I care very deeply about.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Okay.” Walker hit the gas and took a left.
“Okay?”
“Okay. I can deal with that. And we can talk about it more later. Right now, try calling Bennet again.”
“I hope he answers,” Muertos said as she went to the call list.
“Me too.”
32
&nb
sp; Muertos dialed the number and it went straight to voicemail:
“Jim Bennet. Leave a brief message after the tone.”
“What now? Just show up at his address?”
“Now dial Somerville back so we can give her Acton’s name, in case Bennet’s house call was something innocent and he’s now going to check on Acton,” Walker said, but Muertos was already onto it, again putting the call on speaker. He overtook a line of cabs and blacked-out town cars, a few beeping his illegal maneuver.
“Fiona,” Walker said, “time’s ticking fast on this one—I need the address of Agent Blake Acton, colleague of Bennet and located just a few blocks from his apartment.”
“Walker, I just called in a big favor to get that last address for—”
“Life or death, real-time,” Walker said. “Tell the Service that too, if you need to—just get me that address.”
“Okay, hold . . .”
Walker was heavy on the brakes at a jammed-up intersection, the skinny tires of the Beetle leaving tracks of rubber on the road. He looked over his shoulder as they came to a stop, then reversed the little car as fast as it would go, pulling on the hand-brake and completing a J-turn, taking the first left between traffic. Muertos rattled around next to him, holding the dash and the phone and trying not to be thrown out of the vehicle.
“Walker,” Somerville’s voice came loudly over the phone. “I’ll text you the other address.”
“Thanks.”
Muertos ended the call and punched in the new address as it came up.
“It’s close, just north of North Pollard Street. About another mile from here.”
“Got it,” Walker said, taking a left through an intersection, the tires squealing in protest.
“What do we do when we get there?” Muertos asked.
“You wait in the car,” Walker said. “I’ll check on Bennet, and if he’s gone, then we’ll bug out to Acton’s.”
“Okay.”
“And keep the engine running, we might need to bail out fast.”
“You think they got to him?”
Walker didn’t answer.
33
Walker crossed the road, leaving Muertos behind the wheel of the idling Beetle. He stepped up onto the curb, looking around as he moved. Bennet’s apartment building was anonymous in a forest of mates—an orange-and-white painted concrete mix of seven- to eight-story towers sandwiched close together, either studio apartments or single-bedroom units, each with a tiny balcony poking out over the street. The kind of place populated by low-paid single government employees or couples trying to make a start of it before moving to something bigger. He found the building number and stopped at the glazed entry. The address he had for Jim Bennet was apartment 532: level five, apartment thirty-two. The security door was accessible via an electronic lock attached to the buzzer, or with a resident’s electronic key-fob. The glass in the aluminum frame was half-inch-thick tempered safety glass, conforming to whatever safety code DC demanded in such a setting—the type of glass they used in shop-fronts and commercial spaces that would not break or shatter short of a car hitting it, and still, when broken, would shatter into safe little cubes and hold together because of the plastic laminated between the two panes.
Walker wondered about the possibility of an unknown number of assailants getting up there, how Bennet had said someone was outside his door but he’d not buzzed them up. Had the assailant buzzed at random, asking to be let in? Or he might have followed a resident in, or ducked in after someone exited for work. Walker figured there was a fire escape or car-park entry around the back, which could conceivably be forced open or the lock picked to gain entry. Walker didn’t have time to go and look, so he started to buzz. He’d buzzed four apartments on the fifth floor by the time one of them replied.
“Hey,” said Walker, “this is Jim from thirty-two—I’ve locked myself out, any chance you can—”
The buzzer sounded, and the door’s electronic lock made a loud click.
“Thanks.” Walker entered and pressed the lift button. One lift. It was coming down, currently at level seven, then six, then it stopped at five. He headed for the stairs, took them two at a time, got to the first landing and then stopped.
The lift. He had to see. To be sure.
He turned back and went down through the lobby and waited by the lift, out of sight, opposite the building’s glass doors; there was nothing but a tall table with a bunch of plastic flowers in a fake Ming vase and a few square feet of empty space—the dead-end place a person wouldn’t look if they got out of the lift and headed straight toward the light of day outside, to the only exit.
The lift was at level two.
As Walker waited he relaxed his heart-rate; kept his hands, arms and shoulders loose; shifted his weight to the front of his feet. He could hear the mechanics of the lift working, the counterweights and cables shifting. The bulk of the steel lift in the shaft. The slight grind as it came to a stop.
The lift doors pinged, and a single figure stepped out. Male, six-five, 250 pounds, shaved head. Familiar. He headed for the exit.
“Buddy?” Walker said, already moving forward.
The guy turned to look—through the waist, a glance over his left shoulder as he moved toward the door.
It was the guy from Overton’s picture. Bahar. Almasi’s muscle. Most likely Overton’s killer. A clean-up guy. He was bigger in the flesh; shoulders wider than the doorway; arms hanging by his sides like an ape; a neck as thick as Walker’s thigh. A brute of a man with a shiny scar snaking across the top of his head.
There were plenty of options to take the guy down, and Walker knew he would be armed—he wouldn’t have gone to a Secret Service agent’s home with the intent to kill with just his bare hands, no matter how big and strong those hands were. But bare hands were all that Walker had at his disposal, and he regretted it immediately. In one respect it was fine, because he didn’t want to kill the guy.
Not yet.
But it was easy to kill someone with your bare hands. Walker knew that, because this was far from his first fight. It was too easy to kill someone, really. Accidents happened, especially in hand-to-hand combat, especially when the stakes could quickly escalate in the moment to become literally life or death. He knew if he hit Bahar too hard in the head, he might die. Get in to tussle and wrestle, his neck might snap. Well, maybe not that particular neck, but in principle it was a possibility. Crash into him and take him off his feet and Bahar’s head or neck might come to an abrupt end against the thickly laminated glass door, and the mass and impact point of the two would be similar to a car crashing into it, and that force would easily snap a neck or crack a skull. And with their combined mass and his kinetic energy, it would be a big impact.
So, all things considered, Walker was cautious. And he acted fast, because he knew that whatever transpired would be over inside a few seconds.
Walker moved in. Took aim.
Not at the head. Not at the neck. Not to engage a wrestle. Not to crash-tackle Bahar into the doors.
His first move was to kick down at the back of Bahar’s knees with brute force, a single blow of Walker’s size fourteen left boot, the impact horizontal, obliterating both knees at once, hard and fast. Walker thought he heard the sound of an ACL or MCL snapping in Bahar’s right knee, which bore the brunt of the force. All that mass, hitting the tiled ground at speed. Speed was again the damaging factor, multiplying that mass on impact. The guy hit the ground hard, on his knees, and Walker heard cartilage and bone shatter and crunch.
But Bahar was not done. He was far from being done, that much was clear as the surprise left his eyes and was replaced with calculated fury. Clearly not his first fight, either.
Despite now being on his knees, despite the pain that must be coursing through him, Bahar continued to turn at the waist, his face grimaced in what might have been pain or anger or a combination of the two. In the same motion he lifted his right arm to reach under the left side of his jacket, wh
ere, no doubt in Walker’s mind, a side-arm was holstered. Probably a silenced 9-millimeter automatic, because silencers worked better on the 9-millimeter round than on heavier calibers. A silenced pistol meant a long pistol, and a long pistol meant a long, slow draw, giving Walker a couple of seconds. But that was a guess. Walker couldn’t rule out that after doing his job upstairs the assassin unscrewed the silencer so the weapon wasn’t as cumbersome to conceal—or use, in a hurry, if it came to it. That was probably the case. Walker would have done the same. If so, sans silencer, Bahar could draw the firearm quickly and shoot at Walker through his jacket. Not an ideal situation for Bahar or his tailor—and that suit had to be tailored because suits that big didn’t come off the rack—but effective. Perhaps he’d even shoot while the weapon was still holstered, which he could if there was enough play in the holster, which would be an even quicker action. A second maybe.
Walker erred on the side of caution and determined that the gun was stowed without its silencer. And that, given Bahar’s size, there would not be much play in the holster—he imagined it would be tightly strapped around his shoulder and back, played out to its maximum size because the manufacturer didn’t make them any bigger, or it was custom made, like the suit.
However the weapon was stowed, Walker figured he had a second before it could be brought into play. And a second was a long time, in a do-or-die fight. And up until now Walker didn’t want to kill him, but having the gun involved altered that mindset.
Walker side-stepped to the right as Bahar was still moving to his weapon and still twisting at the waist to look over his left shoulder. It negated the firing of the weapon while still holstered, and Bahar knew that and adapted, twisting around to relocate his moving target and bring out his right arm. Out, and up, a huge black pistol in his hand, still with silencer attached: an H&K SOCOM, a massive .45 caliber automatic originally designed for the US Special Operations teams, and it looked like a child’s toy in Bahar’s oversized fist.