Dark Heart

by James Phelan

  Held a woman.

  43

  Walker recognized Agent Clair Hayes from the photo on Sally Overton’s phone. Her wrists were tied with the same plastic twine as that used on the hay bales, multiple loops of it, wrapped around tightly then hogtying her to a similar application of twine at her ankles. A grimy rag was tied around her head as a gag. She had a bruised eye and a swollen lip. There was straw in her blonde hair, dirt and grime on her skin and clothes, panic in her eyes. Walker made a gesture of putting down the hammer and showing her his open hands, then moved slowly toward her. Her blue eyes followed his. As he got closer he could see that her white shirt had been ripped open, that she had scratch and bruise marks around her neck.

  “We’re friends of Sally Overton,” Muertos called out from behind Walker’s shoulder, and he saw in that announcement relief flood through Agent Hayes.

  Walker used the tin snips to cut her free, then he and Muertos helped her move, on unsteady feet, to the entrance of the barn. Walker took a bottle of water from a stack of others in a plastic shopping bag in a corner, and she drank greedily.

  “Almasi?” Hayes asked. “Bahar?”

  “Almasi’s dead,” Walker said. “Bahar’s in custody.”

  “How did they get you here?” Muertos asked.

  “They . . .” Hayes nodded, a spooked look in her eyes. “I was tailing the Syrians. Then I was pulled over, on the I-95, by a couple of guys posing as Homeland Security agents.”

  “What’d they look like?”

  Hayes gave a description which matched the pair who had come for Walker in the hospital in San Francisco.

  “They tasered me,” Hayes said, “and I woke up here, bound and gagged. That’s when . . .”

  Hayes fell silent.

  “They were Homeland,” Walker said.

  “You’re sure?”

  Walker nodded. “They’re out of the picture now. But there are at least two others—”

  “Three, with Krycek,” Muertos added.

  Walker nodded. “Right. At least three, two of whom turned up here not long ago and tried to blow us up in the house. They must have been in the area, surveying the Syrians. They came in to get rid of Almasi, but I’d done that for them already.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Just a guy. I’m Walker, this here is Muertos.”

  “I was probably Sally Overton’s oldest friend.”

  Hayes looked deflated, and it hit her in the gut. “Was?”

  Muertos nodded, and fought back tears.

  “I . . .” Hayes looked from Muertos, to Walker, then at the dusty floor. She explained how Almasi and Bahar had extracted the information out of her; none of it was pretty, and Walker was glad Almasi was dead and hoped that Bahar would either rot in a supermax jail—where he’d be shivved or shanked soon enough by patriotic prisoners who didn’t take kindly to guys like him killing US Federal Agents—or maybe someone in his organization would get to him and do the job, like those two bent Homeland agents who’d come for Almasi. “What about the others? Bennet and Acton?”

  “Bennet is dead,” Walker said. “Bahar shot him. Overton too. And we presume Acton, sometime in between.”

  Walker felt bad giving her that news; she’d now know that her actions had led to their deaths. It was the type of news that would haunt her to the grave, but there was no way of avoiding it—she’d find out soon enough, and he had no good reason to lie to her. The best he could do was sugar coat it.

  “They’re all . . .” Agent Hayes couldn’t bring herself to say the word dead. “Because of me.”

  “You held out longer than almost anyone would,” Walker said. “You did all you could. Your colleagues knew the risk.”

  “I should have lied to them,” Hayes said, her head in her hands. “I should have given them different addresses.”

  “Then innocent people might have been killed.”

  “Maybe.” Hayes wiped her face with the sleeve of her shirt. “Or it might have bought time—time for my colleagues to find me.”

  “Unlikely. They’ve got some Homeland guys helping them out, at least five agents that we know of,” Walker said. “Who knows how many more, or how high this goes? They’re doctoring the biometrics at Customs so people like Almasi and Bahar can enter the country. Probably doing the same for the high-paying illegals they’re facilitating stateside. Those Homeland guys could have given them the addresses of Overton and Bennet and Acton with a few keystrokes on a government computer, all in real-time, so don’t for a moment feel guilty about it.”

  “But not their names.” Hayes sleeved away more tears. “They wouldn’t have known their names.”

  “They had your burner phone, with the numbers in it, and the agents stating their names on their voicemail. Homeland would have taken two seconds to get their details—they can find anyone, thanks to the Patriot Act. You know that.”

  Muertos moved over and sat on a hay bale next to Hayes then put her good arm around her shoulders.

  Hayes looked from her to Walker and said, “You found me. My friends would have found me too. I gave them away. How do I live with that?”

  “With time, you’ll find a way,” Walker said. He crouched back down to look her in the eye. “And I only got to you because I used a car from a guy I almost killed. Bahar.” He saw Hayes flinch, memories playing behind her eyes. “There were no laws holding me back when I took him down. I left him out cold, with a heavy concussion and shattered knees. We took his car and headed straight here. And you know what, if it had played out differently, and Bahar was arrested and Almasi knew that? What do you think he’d have done then?” Hayes was silent. “My bet is he’d have finished you and bugged out of here, fast.”

  “You don’t know that.” Hayes composed herself. “That’s all hypothetical.”

  “But it’s a reasonable assumption,” Walker said. “Agent Hayes, look: I’m sure that your colleagues, your friends, if they’d somehow apprehended or evaded Bahar this morning, they would have got to you as fast as they could. But it would have been too late.”

  “He’s right,” Muertos said, still with her arm around the agent.

  “I’ve been around long enough to know how these people operate,” Walker said, and he started looking around the bench and checking jars and cans full of nails and screws and nuts and bolts. “No matter how much they tried to coerce Bahar, he’d have held out. It was writ large all over the guy. He was a hard nut. Sure, they would have eventually found his car, and checked the sat-nav, then driven out here like we did—but that whole process would have taken longer, far longer, because they would have had procedures to follow, and a guy to question, and by then you would have been dead.”

  Hayes looked at the floor of the barn. “You don’t know that,” she said again.

  “We do,” Muertos said. “Believe me, Agent Hayes, I feel your pain. And we’re not going to stop until we get justice served against everyone involved.”

  Hayes nodded, closed her eyes, found some measure of resolve and asked, “Where’s Bahar now?”

  “I left him in Bennet’s apartment lobby, with the murder weapon nearby,” Walker said. He found what he was looking for stored away in a tin can, then loosened his jeans and sat up on the bench. “We called it in, so DC police would have picked him up within minutes of us leaving. They’ll have found Bennet, too, because I mentioned him. Bahar won’t be going anywhere.”

  “You think these corrupt Homeland agents will get rid of Bahar to clean house?” Hayes asked.

  “That’s my thinking,” Walker said. He used some superglue to stick his leg wound closed.

  “That’s disgusting,” Muertos said, cradling her arm and watching him wrap his thigh tightly with a rag.

  “That’s what it was used for in the Vietnam War,” Walker replied, getting to his feet and fixing his jeans.

  “Well, I say let them at him,” Hayes said, getting to her feet.

  “We have to get to him before those Homeland guys,” Mue
rtos said, standing next to Hayes. “We need to question him. Work up the chain to get the US contact, because outside the Homeland guys, he’s the sole lead we’ve got.”

  Hayes seemed nonplussed.

  “First we need to get out of here,” Walker said, “before the fire department arrives, because once they see the wreckage of the house they’ll call the cops, and all that’s going to slow us down. We get the two of you treated, then we find Bahar.”

  •

  Harvey walked past his secretary at St. Elizabeths Homeland headquarters, holding up a hand to motion that he was not to be disturbed, then he shut his office door behind him and rushed to his desk. In the locked drawer was his burner phone, which had a missed call from the field. He pressed the number and it was immediately answered by his agent.

  “Bahar was picked up, here in DC,” Harvey said, then spent two minutes explaining the situation, of the arrest, the transfer, finding Bennet’s dead body, the weapon. “He’s under guard at a downtown hospital. He’s unconscious, and as long as he stays that way it’s okay. But you have to hustle. I’ll send you the details. Get there, and clean it up. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Bahar must not be allowed to get out of his current state. I can’t tell you how important that is. I’ve made sure that you’ll have two hours from now before the Secret Service takes over his supervision.”

  “Yes, sir, but, we, ah . . .”

  “What?”

  “We’ve already got a body in the trunk. Almasi. You don’t want us to dispose of him first?”

  “This is first,” Harvey said. “Leave Bahar’s body behind. People die in hospitals all the time. Then dispose of Almasi.”

  44

  The Lexus was beyond undrivable. The tires had melted off the alloy wheels. Spot fires were all over the undercarriage. The gas tank would likely soon catch fire. His boots, which had been outside the front door, were nowhere to be seen—either obliterated by the blast, or sent into the sky with the smaller debris.

  “Okay,” Walker said as he headed back to where Muertos and Hayes had stayed by the barn. “The car is not an option.”

  “Waiting around is too risky,” Hayes said. “What if those Homeland guys decide to come back to have a look-see?”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Walker said. “They didn’t have the guile to kill us in cold blood, but they might just circle back to make sure their plan worked out.”

  He looked back at the house. The echoes of the blast had long gone, and the initial force of the explosion had snuffed out the fire by removing all the fuel but for the few remnants that remained ablaze at the site, which was now no more ominous than a teenager’s weekend bonfire or farmer’s burn-off, and wouldn’t be out of place in the cool gray spring sky in an area of farmland.

  “Or,” Walker said, “we can make our own way along the eight miles to the closest town.”

  “I don’t think I’d make that,” Muertos said, looking down to her arm. “It hurts every time I move.”

  “Not by foot,” Walker said. “We take the ride-on mower.”

  “How long will that take?” Hayes asked.

  “Quicker than walking,” Walker replied, moving down the stalls and stopping to look at the decade-old John Deere.

  “I’m in,” Hayes said.

  Muertos nodded.

  Walker topped up the ride-on with gas, and sat in the driver’s seat. The engine turned over on the third try of the key and a few pumps of the gas pedal. The exhaust spewed blue smoke, but the mechanics and drive gear seemed in good order—the tires were all pumped, and the engine didn’t miss. Muertos sat on the forward section of the seat between Walker and the steering wheel, her broken wrist cradled tightly in front of her, and he could see clear over her head. Hayes sat on the steel cargo rack behind the seat, her back to Walker, her feet resting on the small tow-ball, her hands holding onto the metal tubing.

  He eased the vehicle out of the barn, then along the driveway and eventually merged onto the black-topped B-road, where he sped up and gave the engine about seventy-five percent throttle. The drive train was automatic, and the pedal was two-stage—push down with his toes for forward, and push down with his heel for reverse. He took the left when they got to the two-lane highway, and kept to the shoulder, which had just enough tarred surface to fit them, and there he pressed the pedal fully forward. There was no speedometer, but he calculated that they were doing maybe fifteen miles per hour, by figuring the uniform distance in the fence posts counting the time it took to pass them. Twenty minutes to town, going flat-out like this.

  Muertos leaned her back against his chest, while Hayes pressed her back against his. As much as he wanted to continue to help them, the fact was the more he got into this, the less likely it seemed to be connected to the Zodiac terror-cell network. People-smuggling just didn’t fit the mold of a significant and immediate threat to national security. His father’s involvement was most likely nothing more than covering his own butt in transit by posing with the refugee family.

  But the fact remained: David Walker had told Muertos to find him.

  And the “why” that came with that kept itching at him. So, he had to know—he had to unravel this, to take it to its conclusion. At the very least, he figured, he’d chase this through until they found that US contact, to see if something Zodiac-related popped its ugly head in. Until then, there was some justice to dish out, on behalf of the fallen agents, and those refugees taken advantage of by this group. The sun had broken through the cloud cover and the world had a golden hue. The engine hummed along as he motored full throttle toward town. There were worse ways to spend his time.

  45

  Thirty minutes after leaving the farmhouse, Walker dropped off Muertos at what passed as the emergency room of the local hospital, which was little more than a couple of doctors and a few nurses working in a double-story brick building with a single ambulance parked in a bay. The staff were used to treating minor farm-related injuries, which judging by the wait in the emergency room seemed to be frequent, and being the first responders to road accidents, and mending the usual kind of things that happened around households and schools. Anything more serious or that needed specialist attention or surgery was sent north on Route 1 or I-95 into the outer suburbs of DC. Muertos had been told that, all things going well, and save any more-serious emergencies presenting, the wait would be two hours for her X-ray, set and plaster. Unless she needed a plate inserted, which they could do, but she’d be there until that doctor was out of surgery in the late afternoon. They gave her something for the pain and she sat in the waiting room, alone.

  Walker delivered Hayes to a diner on a corner of the feeder road back to the interstate, where she ordered scrambled eggs on a short stack with potato hash on the side, and a bottomless cup of pale drip coffee. She waited anxiously for Walker to return to his requested order of coffee and burger with a side of mac-and-cheese—anxiously because she wanted to use a phone to call her office, and there was no payphone in the diner. Before he’d left, she’d discussed her next steps with Walker, who agreed it was the best course of action: call in to a trusted senior agent at the Secret Service, come clean about the side-operation run by Overton, and see where that would lead. Her goal was to ensure that as much information could be worked out of the detainee, Bahar, as possible. Walker suggested that she work with whichever police agency had the Syrian detained, by dishing out her knowledge tit-for-tat, and she agreed.

  Walker wasn’t in the waiting room of the hospital, nor sitting in the window booth of the diner, because he needed shoes. Eat when you can, rest when you can only got you so far when you didn’t have shoes. So, after dropping off Muertos, then Hayes, Walker steered the little green John Deere down the main street and looked for options. There were a few, even a Walmart, which he drove right on by without a second glance, and after doing a full lap he made a U-turn through bemused traffic and parked the ride-on in front of a family-run hardware store, where
he figured he could get a sturdier pair of boots than at the local menswear store, and he was right. Sixty bucks later he laced up a pair of steel-capped work boots, suitable for building sites—and just as suitable for kicking the crap out of bent Homeland Security agents—and the store owner threw in a free pair of socks when he saw the state of Walker’s. He broke his new footwear in on the walk back to the diner.

  There were at least a dozen cars in the car park next to the diner, with one vehicle coming and one going every other minute. Walker figured it was busy for the traffic peeling off the interstate to grab gas and use bathrooms and get food and coffee before the grind of getting closer to DC. There was no sign of the two bent Homeland Security guys. No wailing siren of a fire engine. No threats at all.

  It was a typical all-American diner so often found in small towns off interstates, and from afar it was clear it was either made to look like a time capsule from the 1950s or was immaculately kept. When he got closer he discovered it was the latter. Plenty of shiny chrome and red vinyl, and black-and-white linoleum floor tiles, a skinny laminate counter that spanned forty feet with a couple of guys behind it tending to the dozen or so customers seated on stools at the bench, and a couple of waitresses bussing the rounds on the floor where patrons were seated at tables and booths.

  He saw Hayes seated in a window seat in one corner, her back to the wall, a fire exit close behind her, an unimpeded view of all and sundry, exactly the seat he’d have chosen. She looked more relaxed, inquisitive even, as though the big bright outside world was hers again, as though she’d come close to giving up hope of freedom until they’d found her an hour ago. Walker paused outside the diner, his phone to his ear.