Dark Heart

by James Phelan

  His first call was to Somerville. He filled her in on what had played out at the farmhouse.

  “I just checked online, as you’ve been talking,” she said. “Bahar was picked up, unconscious, by DC Metro. He’s currently in a downtown hospital, listed as John Doe. Under police guard. The note in the system has him as being found in possession of an illegal firearm.”

  “Any mention of the dead Secret Service agent at the scene, Jim Bennet?”

  “No. Nothing. But it’s the Secret Service we’re talking about, so they’re probably taking their time examining and cataloging the crime scene. The murder charges against Bahar will come, but the illegal firearm is enough to keep him locked up until then. And when they eventually ID him, that’ll ring more alarm bells, because you said he got into the country a couple of days ago using false ID?”

  “Yep. And soon enough they’ll start finding the other bodies,” Walker said. “Overton, and Acton. And this whole situation will become so intense and tight that we’ll have no way in. So, we have to move on Bahar, fast.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I’ve got to get to him, question him,” Walker said.

  “This isn’t your fight,” Somerville said. “Unless something from Zodiac has popped up?”

  “No, nothing yet.” Walker looked at Hayes, who was absently pushing her half-eaten meal around her plate. “I know it might well be unrelated, but I’ve gotta do it.”

  “Because of your father.”

  “He was there. He told Muertos to find me.”

  “Okay. But for the record, there’s already dead Secret Service agents and a corrupt element from Homeland.”

  “Your point?”

  “It’s dangerous.”

  “Noted.”

  “And Bahar might be unconscious for quite a while,” Somerville said. “The first-responder report had him unresponsive due to a heavy blunt trauma. He might be out for hours, or days—maybe longer, if he’s got swelling on the brain and they have to induce a coma. You know how these things can go.”

  Walker said, “I know.”

  Somerville added, “Not to mention that they’ve got him sedated and shackled and under guard.”

  “I know,” Walker repeated, looking through the big plate-glass window at Hayes. She was cradling a cup of coffee in her hands, her gaze set forward, some kind of middle-distance stare that spoke of friends lost and her immediate future full of unknowns. “I’ll contact you when I’m at the hospital, looking at Bahar. Conscious or not, he’s the lead we have remaining.”

  “I’m gonna head to DC,” Somerville said. “I’ve already had it cleared. You’re going to need official support on this, and I can at least wait around the hospital with you. Call you when I land.”

  Walker’s next call was to Eve. She didn’t answer. He didn’t leave a message. He was about to—he listened to her voicemail greeting, and waited for the beep, then opened his mouth to say, Hey it’s me . . . but he stopped himself and ended the call. He didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t further disappoint her. It’s not like he could tell her when he would be home, or what it was that he was doing—because he didn’t even know. Hey, it’s me. I’m pulling at a string of a threat or conspiracy or cover-up that’s cost several lives in twenty-four hours and I’m gonna keep pulling and pulling at threads until I unravel the thing and, well, no, I don’t know when it will end, let alone where it will lead or how things will pan out—but it has something to do with my father, so I have to do it.

  So, Walker headed into the diner and sat opposite Hayes, ready to tell her that he was going to go, alone, to Bahar. Muertos would be easy to leave behind. Hayes might put up a fight, so he had to be tactful about it. The smells of the diner were familiar and comforting. The waitress poured coffee and left a fresh pot on the table and he ordered a serve of scrambled eggs and pecan waffles to go with his burger, which he started in on. Then he drank his coffee and poured another, and the sum of it all was an arrival at a calorie-driven America: hell yeah! moment, the kind that makes you want to jump up onto the counter and recite some lines from Walt Whitman, or The Star Spangled Banner—Oh say can you see—and he looked around at the satisfied diners and thought, You know what, I doubt I’d be the first.

  “What’s next?” Hayes asked.

  Walker drained his second coffee, and told her why it was that she had to wait to contact anybody, and why she had to wait around for Muertos while he went to interrogate their remaining lead.

  “Fine,” Hayes said. “It’ll postpone me getting fired for a few more hours.”

  “We’re gonna set this as right as we can,” Walker said, and the rest of the food arrived, and he ate fast. “Whether it comes from Bahar, or whoever they send to silence Bahar, we’re going to know a lot more about who’s behind this before this day is out.”

  46

  The town didn’t have a car-hire company and Walker didn’t have the time to wait for the next bus, nor the inclination to hitch a ride. He didn’t even have time to take a cab, because a cab would travel at or below the speed limit the entire way into DC. So, he started out on foot, following the traffic leaving the diner, which saw him walking four blocks east and two north, and came to a busy junction, where one road led to the interstate and another had a sign pointing to the local high school. Being Monday, and not a holiday, school was in. Drop-off was well over, and the car parks were full, and he stole his third car in twenty-four hours. It was an older model Ford sedan, from the 1990s, mid-size, basic spec, a smaller chassis and engine than a Crown Vic or Taurus, and he figured it would be the easiest to hot-wire for the lack of an alarm or engine immobilizer.

  Three minutes later Walker was on Route 1, doing eighty-five: fast enough to get a ticket, not so fast as to be arrested for a misdemeanor.

  Muertos would get to the diner and Hayes would tell her that he had split—and what then? She’d be pissed, no doubt; first he breaks her arm, then he leaves her behind. But he figured that she’d found him once—if she tried hard enough she could find him again. And the truth was, he couldn’t see any useful need to have her around.

  But what happened today would depend on what he could get from Bahar or whoever went to kill him, and where that led. A name, a contact of the stateside operation. Beyond that, via Somerville’s assistance, he planned to get access to headshots of Homeland agents and go through them, looking for the four guys he knew to be operating against their mandate, and run a search on a fifth, for which he had a name, the big guy Muertos mentioned, Agent Krycek.

  •

  The Homeland Security agent with the bad back answered the call from Harvey.

  “How far from wrapping this up are you?” Harvey asked on speaker.

  “About thirty minutes from the hospital, depending on traffic.”

  “You should have been there by now.”

  “We’re getting there, boss,” he said, and glanced across at his partner.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “We had to stop, for gas, and coffee.”

  “Whatever. Listen. The computer records at the hospital were just touched.”

  The agent said, “What’s that mean for us?”

  “You need to hustle. Someone just snooped all DC hospital records for in-patients in the past six hours, searching for male John Does brought in under police guard.”

  “And what? You think it’s the Secret Service?”

  “No, it’s not them,” Harvey replied. “They’d ask us to do it.”

  “Then who?”

  “There were only two people looking into this from the outside,” Harvey said. “Muertos, and Walker. So, I figure it was one of them.”

  “Uh-uh,” he said, looking again to his colleague and grinning. “Walker and that chick from State are toast.”

  Harvey paused, then asked, “What’s that mean?”

  The senior agent replied: “You told us to take care of them.”

  “But this looking in the John Does f
or Bahar,” Harvey said. “I need to know this wasn’t them.”

  “It’s not them. No way it was them.”

  Harvey said, “Tell me how you dealt with them.”

  “Okay,” the senior agent said. “So, we rigged the house—with the gas, from the stove. Set a fire. The two of them in there—restrained. It took all of maybe, what, ten minutes? We pulled over before the highway to make sure. The house blew. Big. We were six miles out and felt the concussion. So, they’re . . . toast.”

  Harvey was silent.

  The other agent said, “You told us to take care of them, boss.”

  Harvey asked, “So, you two didn’t see the bodies?”

  “Things were happening fast,” the senior agent replied. “We had a murder scene to take care of, and two targets. And you said you wanted no trace of Almasi or Bahar left behind. This dealt with all those issues.”

  “Did you look for Agent Hayes?” Harvey said.

  The two agents shared a look, then the senior agent replied, “We didn’t see anyone else. But if she was in the house she’s well and truly out of the picture now.”

  Harvey again fell silent.

  “Sir,” the agent driving said, “it’s actually a good result, if you think about it. There’s no immediate evidence at the scene; nothing even that’ll be dug up until they start combing through over the coming days—and they’re not gonna do that unless they find a chunk of flesh or bone, and I doubt that, because it was a big kaboom. But even if they did, it’s going to take some serious DNA testing to find out who or what the flesh or bone belonged to. So, yeah, all considered, we did good.”

  Harvey said, “You know whose house that was?”

  The agents looked at each other. “No. Whose?”

  “Doesn’t matter. I’ll deal with it. Get to the hospital. Deal with Bahar. Make your work there untraceable. Try not to burn the whole hospital down.”

  47

  Walker pulled up at the hospital bordering on the Chinatown district of Downtown DC. It was a six-story yellow-brick building taking up half the block, built in the 1960s. Its windows from the second floor up were narrow slits with concrete frames, to prevent jumpers, giving away its original purpose as an institution for mental illness and one of hundreds closed down by the Reagan policies in the 1980s, which poured tens of thousands of mentally ill out onto the streets where they ended up either homeless or in jail. Repurposed as a general hospital, the exterior had barely changed but for the signage: white steel letters had been placed over the removed but still painted-on sign, which ghosted through the more recent paint job.

  Walker parked the Ford across the street and watched the comings and goings. There was no obvious police presence. As he’d reasoned before, maybe they’d not made Bahar as a suspected killer of three Secret Service agents yet, or maybe the Secret Service was taking its time. Or there was a third possibility: that the Feds were here, ferreted away inside the building and crowded around their suspect, their vehicles parked out of view of the front. So, Walker waited. This wasn’t the farmhouse in rural Virginia where he’d opted to use surprise to its fullest. This was reconnaissance first, action a cautious second.

  His phone bleeped. A text message from Paul Conway, a computer genius who owed him, a guy he trusted.

  Your guy’s in room 304. Third floor, northeast corner.

  Walker was parked to the western side of the hospital, so he couldn’t see the windows of that room. He got out of the car, waited for the traffic and then crossed the street. He attempted a jog but the pain in his leg bit at him. The way he’d glued his wound closed had created a messy knot of skin that didn’t want to be disturbed. So, he walked, and did a quick lap of the block, checking cars and people as he moved. Nothing doing. The eastern side of the hospital was a large service area, the wall blank and devoid of windows, brickwork all the way up and down and across but for the lines of concrete slab that denoted each floor. Two chimneys at the top, maybe one for a furnace of hazardous waste, the other a boiler for heating, the latter currently spewing out a cycloning plume of gray steam. He got to the southwest corner and looked side to side along the street. No official-looking cars. No CCTV that he could see, which meant this wasn’t a secure medical center where the cops or Feds sent high-value suspects—more likely, it was the closest hospital to the scene that responded that it could take an unconscious patient with head and other body trauma. Walker kept looking over the hospital, noting the emergency and staff entry and exit points—he needed a lay of the land, options for getting out in a hurry, if it came to that; routes back to the car; places he could get another car; somewhere with a view to hole up and wait; somewhere to disappear to, places to hide.

  There was a multi-story car park to his left, on the eastern side of the hospital, a laneway between the two structures. People came and went across a skybridge at the third story, a concrete path that was glassed in on the top and sides to keep the weather out, like an airlock between the open car park and the hospital. Most of the people were in hospital garb. Change of shift, maybe. Or lunch. But there weren’t many people in plain clothes coming and going. Perhaps the skybridge was only for official use, and visitors had to access the building through the front doors, on the other side of the building.

  He found yesterday’s newspaper on a bus-stop seat with a view of the skybridge, which held the only real activity to observe. He held the Washington Post in front of him and watched the stream of people. Five minutes passed. Then ten. The flow of staff was lessening. Change of shift closing, or the scheduled lunch break over. He’d seen enough here. He was about to get up and go around the front to the main entrance. But he didn’t. Because that’s when he saw them.

  48

  Walker watched as the two Homeland Security agents from the farmhouse made their way across the skybridge. They were walking out, not in. Job done. Something about their gait. Hurried, but not overly so. An air of confidence in their demeanor. Free of task, after a job well done. Like a couple of guys who’d just tied up the last loose end and were on their way to a bar somewhere to celebrate. Walker zoomed his phone’s camera as far as it would go and took photos of the two men, one on side profile, the other facing the camera as he’d turned to talk to his partner. They disappeared from view as they entered the car park.

  Walker ran. At least, he did his best job of moving fast, his damaged right leg never quite matching the stride of his left. The exit for the car park was on the north side of the block. His car was parked to the western side of the hospital. A fair distance to make up, when injured. As he moved in an uneven skip he emailed the pictures, twelve in all, to Paul, asking for an urgent ID of the corrupt agents, including the name of the person to whom they reported. He got to the small Ford, still parked where he’d left it, still unlocked, still with the bare wires under the steering column where he’d bashed it open and wrenched them from the ignition switch. He connected the wires and the engine kicked over and started, and he dropped the lever into drive and took off, driving up to the corner and slowing, looking right.

  A black SUV was at the exit gate of the hospital car park. The two agents were inside. The way that the front tires were turned toward the right, as they waited for the boom gate to rise, was all Walker needed to convince him to make a right turn, heading east, the direction they’d soon be taking, and as he drove he watched the gate lift and the SUV pull out and he was now behind them, half a block back, driving east. The faded silver Ford sedan was as near to being invisible as anything else on the road.

  His phone rang.

  “Those pictures are terrible,” said Paul.

  “Can you ID them?”

  “They’re with Homeland?”

  “Yep.” Walker made a left turn after the SUV. The guys drove as though they had nothing else to do that day, and he fell back, even slower, to try not to arouse suspicion. “Two of their not-so-finest.”

  “How badly do you need this?”

  “Badly. Why?”


  “My search will be mining data on Homeland servers, and it will leave breadcrumbs. Electronic fingerprints. It’s okay, but it’s a risk—on my part. Means I’ll have to scrap a few favorite servers that I like to use.”

  “I need this.”

  “Okay. I’ll go in and see what’s there.”

  “Time frame?”

  “I’m typing as we speak. Minutes, not hours. I’m going into their facial-rec program, running it against their own personnel records. And after this?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Get yourself yet another burner phone. I will too. These ones are cooked. Go to the site and let me know the new number.”

  Walker paused and looked at the cell phone on speaker on the passenger seat. “You sure this phone’s done?”

  “Because of what we’ve just said, we’ve triggered a whole bunch of flagged key-words, and I’m looking at your number popping up in their system right now,” Paul said. “Homeland will put in a request to trace and transcribe all calls in and out of cell towers that your phone has connected to, including placing you in the vicinity of that house you were at before. I see NSA processing this command as we speak. You can thank the Patriot Act, and related surveillance bills. They’ll have all the metadata off that device, and soon. Who you called, where you were when you called them, where you are right now. Basically it’s like you’ve got a tracking device in your hand, because that’s exactly what it is, with GPS, accurate to within a meter anywhere on the globe—unless you plan to take your investigation underwater soon? Didn’t think so. So, your phone is constantly singing out into the world, saying, I’m here, I’m here to the nearest cell tower, and that tower makes a permanent record of that activity. They know everywhere you’ve been, they know everyone you’ve been in contact with: on the basis of this they’ll know all of your associations—including my number. And even if you switch the phone off, they can still activate the microphone and camera. So, is it cooked? You betcha.”