Dark Heart

by James Phelan

  “Right. Well, before that?” Walker said. “They were at a rural property in Virginia, near Burnley. Check the news—it looks like a bomb site now. Agent Hayes was there—but I got her out.”

  Acton watched Walker closely, taking it all in, then he asked, “Where is Hayes?”

  “She’s fine, she’s safe. Almasi and Bahar had her captive out there. Almasi is dead.”

  Acton backed up a step, toward his family. “Dead how?”

  “Coffee pot.”

  “What?”

  “And I’m pretty damn sure Bahar is dead too,” Walker said. “He was taken to a hospital in Downtown DC, just after I took him down at Bennet’s apartment block this morning. You can check that out, to confirm my story. Where he was picked up, and where he was taken—and his current, real-time status. You’ll find out I’m telling the truth, and you’ll also find out that these two Homeland guys visited his room about forty minutes ago to make sure he never talked. I saw them leave and followed them—to St. Elizabeths. Call the hospital. Check my story. But beware those two guys out there, okay?”

  Acton kept his pistol trained on Walker. He didn’t attempt to move to his cell phone, which Walker could see was clipped to the outside of his belt, next to his Secret Service badge and empty hip holster with spare mags for the Sig. Walker knew the Service preferred .357 and larger-caliber rounds over the 9-millimeter, and that at this distance the agent wouldn’t miss. Walker also knew he wouldn’t live because these agents were trained to shoot to kill, and at this range the .357 was a devastating round.

  “You knew that already,” Walker said. He could see it, in Acton’s face. Some kind of confirmation, a light tell, in his eyes, which had gone from searching Walker to staring at him in a middle-distance kind of stare that said he was thinking, hard. “That Bahar was dead.”

  Acton nodded, met Walker’s gaze. “A friend at Metro PD told me on the drive over here. Can’t say I’m sorry for him.”

  “Well, you can check with the hospital staff,” Walker said, hands still raised. “Ask them if those two Homeland guys were there. I saw them come out, walking to their car. Swaggering. All the time in the world, because they were almost done, cleaning this up, and they knew you were at St. Elizabeths—why were you at St. Elizabeths?”

  Acton was silent. For a full five seconds, which was a lot of time, in that moment.

  “Anyway,” Walker said, motioning over his shoulder to the door. “You’re their last loose thread, because they think everyone else involved is gone. They went into that hospital and they pulled the plug on Bahar, or smothered him, or injected something into him. They set the house to blow, with Muertos and me in it. They took Almasi’s body—he’s either still in their car, or they dumped him on the road. But the latter’s unlikely, so check their boot. They’ll dispose of him later, along with you. Maybe in a furnace, or in a drum of hydrofluoric acid, or however guys like that make sure bodies don’t get found.”

  “Muertos?”

  “A long-time friend of Overton. She started all this. She’s with the State Department.”

  “Where is she?”

  “With Hayes.”

  Acton didn’t say anything, but he nodded.

  “Look, Agent Acton,” Walker said, “in their minds there’s only one loose end remaining—you.” He motioned again to the door behind him. “Those two Homeland guys are going to come in here and finish the job—in front of your family, if they have to.” Walker made a show of motioning to Acton’s wife and kids but the agent just kept his gaze and gun trained on Walker. “Or, if you’re lucky? They’ll ask you to go along for a ride—so that they can do what they have to do away from your family. Maybe they’ll say that they have to take you to a safe house, or to some Homeland office to give a bullcrap statement. That’s a maybe—I’ve met these guys, they’ve been squeamish before. But they might just do the job in here, the lot of you, make it look like a murder-suicide, because you couldn’t live with what had happened to your colleagues—better yet, they’ll make it look like you were the one cleaning house after an illegal operation, and they’ll heap some half-baked conspiracy on you, that you were bent all the time and you killed your colleagues and Almasi and Bahar. And dump Almasi’s body in here with you four.”

  Acton glanced to his family. His wife was quiet and stoic for the kids, who were hustled in tight to her dress.

  “Bahar killed Bennet and Overton, but I’m guessing you know that already?” Walker said.

  No reaction from Acton, but Walker could see the tell again, the agent’s eyes glancing to the side, almost non-existent, but it was there.

  “Right,” Walker said. “These two Homeland guys are working for someone off the books, just like you were for Overton—but for them, it’s turned into a clean-up operation, and that means you’re in danger. So, what’s it going to be?”

  Then, Acton’s cell phone rang. He kept the pistol on Walker and used his left hand to unclip his phone. He glanced at the screen.

  Walker said, “Is it them?”

  Acton ignored Walker and answered it. “Yeah?”

  Walker watched and listened.

  Acton listened to the phone, then said, “Right. Okay. Wait a minute, okay?”

  He pressed a button on the phone, and looked from it to Walker, then back to his family.

  Walker said, “What do they want you to do?”

  “Take a ride with them,” Acton said. The color had drained from his face, and a gleam of sweat beaded his forehead. “To go talk with Bahar, who they say has now woken up.”

  “Is there a basement under those stairs?” Walker asked.

  “There’s an old cellar,” Acton said, holstering his weapon and turning to hug his family.

  “Your family needs to get down there, and find cover toward the back,” Walker said, turning and looking out the peep hole. The two Homeland guys were standing by their parked SUV, across the road, one of them with a phone pressed against his ear. “Tell them to come in and wait while you get ready.”

  “Okay,” Acton said, moving fast. He first directed his family, closed the cellar door under the stairs after them, then spoke into the phone and relayed the instructions, then he ended the call.

  Walker watched out the peep hole as the two Homeland guys conferred, then the older one shrugged and gestured toward the house and they both headed across the road.

  “You don’t have to be part of this,” Walker said. “You can head downstairs too.”

  “This is my house, my family,” Acton said, reaching down to his ankle and unholstering his secondary weapon, a small Glock hidden under his suit trousers. He passed the Glock to Walker. “And I want to hear firsthand what these two have to say.”

  51

  Walker stood back as Acton stole a look out the door’s peep hole, then the Secret Service agent leaned back and whispered, “Five seconds.”

  Walker could see that the guy was nervous.

  “Take a deep breath and settle yourself—don’t alarm them,” Walker said. “Open the door and let them in. Usher them through and tell them to wait for you in the lounge room. I’ll take the lead from there.”

  Acton nodded.

  Walker backed down the hall and into the lounge room and checked the small pistol Acton had passed him. It was a Glock 42 sub-compact automatic, chambered for the .38, and with its short barrel and single-stack six-round mag it fitted neatly in the palm of his hand. He stood out of view from the front door, his back to the wall. The floorplan was almost a mirror image of the layout of Hassan’s house in Annapolis, although this place was wider and the hall was deeper. It would be a full five strides for the two Homeland guys to get from the doorway to the lounge room.

  He heard a knock at the door, then the sound of the door opening. Nothing was said, but he guessed Acton had given them a gesture to head for the doorway, up the hall, because Walker heard footsteps headed his way, and then the two Homeland guys sauntered into the room. Their backs were to Walker, and be
fore they had a chance to turn around and react he shouted: “Down! Down! Down!”

  •

  Lewis called Harvey, and Harvey cringed and said, “You’ve seen the news.”

  “The fucking news!” Lewis’s voice boomed. “They blew up the house! How the hell did this happen?”

  “My guys were in a bind, and they reacted to a rapidly changing situation—”

  “Bind? A bind!”

  Harvey held the phone out away from his ear to avoid being deafened. He waited two seconds, put the phone back to the side of his face and said, “Yes, I am aware. It’s been reported as an accident. Faulty gas tanks. The local fire department put out what remained of the fire, and I already have a team there who have taken over the site and are cleaning it. It’s all okay.”

  “Okay? Okay!? If this gets linked back—”

  “There’s no link.”

  “If it comes back in any way.”

  “It won’t come back.”

  Lewis was silent for a while, then said, “There was an off-books investigation, following Almasi and Bahar.”

  “And it’s been taken care of, trust me.”

  “How many agents are you using on this?”

  “I started with five of my own, now down to four, because of San Francisco.”

  “You should have only used Krycek, the man’s a wrecking ball.”

  “He has his uses, and this time they weren’t needed,” Harvey said. “Look, the people I used are loyal to a fault. Don’t worry about that. And any thread that could possibly be drawn back to us is gone.”

  There was a pause, then, “Gone?”

  “Gone. Finished. No more Almasi, no more Bahar. Their involvement in our operation has come to a dead end. Along with Walker and Muertos. Okay?”

  “They’re—you can’t just . . . they were all out at the house?”

  “It’s been a fluid thing, and it’s done now. Okay?” Harvey leaned back and looked out at the view from his office window, across the tops of trees to the Potomac. “You knew lives would be lost in the course of this.”

  “I couldn’t give a shit about lives. It’s having this unravel before my eyes when we’re so close to finishing what was started so long ago.”

  “It was an operational call. An imperative. I’m the man on the ground handling logistics and manpower, you’re the one planning the operation. You’ve never questioned my methods or motives before. You need to relax about this.”

  There was a pause, and then his voice was lower, as though that would stop eavesdropping of the encrypted call: “You can’t get rid of people, and houses, without it being looked into. Too much attention and this will blow up in our faces.”

  “Please, listen,” Harvey said, trying to make his voice sound soothing. “It’s too late for any of that, right? And who do you think will look into it?” Harvey went silent, and Lewis was too. “What I think is this: it’s time. For us to use what we’ve got. To go operational, with what we’ve already imported.”

  Lewis paused a moment, then said, “We’re not where we need to be.”

  “It’ll work,” Harvey said. “Trust me. Like you said, we’ve got enough from Almasi to do more than we ever dreamed of. What we’ve got will shape the news for years to come. You’ll be driving policy, building a mandate, taking us to where we belong.”

  “You really think that?” Lewis’s voice was wavering, as though he wanted to believe it too, to be reassured.

  “Yes.”

  “I hope so. Maybe you’re right. Maybe we have enough to get things started. Let me look at what we’ve got, and I’ll decide.”

  Harvey smiled. He liked saying news to the man. Being confident. Putting the situation and decisions back in Lewis’s lap. The line went dead. Then Harvey hung up. He watched the news playing on one of the screens in his office. Waited for a final call from the field. Imagined where he would be a couple of years from now.

  52

  In Walker’s experience in the military—which was ten years all up, from training at the Air Force Academy in the mountains of Colorado, to the dangerous built-up streets of cities and towns in Iraq, and in the frightening mountains and villages of Afghanistan—there were two kinds of reaction to quick, powerful force: fight, or flight. To react with force, or to comply without trouble.

  Usually, when a person heard the repeated command “Down!” shouted up close and personal, the reaction was to comply, to be wary, to raise hands and make it clear they weren’t making any trouble, to make eye contact out of curiosity and probably fear, that basic human tenet that made it near-on impossible not to turn and look.

  The other reaction was to fight it. Walker had seen that happen a few times. The most spectacular had been when on leave in Kuwait, where a troop of drunk Marines were being arrested by MPs. The setting was a bar, which Walker had always considered a bad place to make an arrest because the arrestee was likely inebriated and thereby non compos mentis to the authority being brought to bear upon them, let alone being up to a fair fight. In that situation, the group of Marines decided to take the appearance of four MPs with batons ready and shouting compliance commands as a cue to start a full-scale bar fight. No lonely man was safe. A fight that Walker and a fellow Special Ops soldier had to put to rest after a few minutes of bemused viewing. Those Marines ended up in the hospital for the night, rather than a military cell, because of their choice of reaction.

  The reactions of the two Homeland guys were somewhere above and beyond that, setting a new benchmark for Walker’s future reference. At least with the Marines there was predictability—you could see where their minds were going well before their inebriated fists and elbows and knees and feet started to flay about. These two Homeland guys responded like they’d never been arrested before, like they’d never been threatened, like they’d never had to comply with an authority greater than their own. They were about to learn an important lesson.

  The agent closer to Walker was the younger guy. His reaction, to fight, had been in sync with the older agent, but his movements were faster. They’d both reached to their hips at the same time, both made to turn around at the same time. The thing was, their expectations, and therefore their reactions, were way off. They’d expected Acton to be the one doing the shouting, because he was the obvious choice, and they knew from the walk from the front door that the Secret Service agent was a couple of paces directly behind them. Neither considered the possibility of there being another man there, out of sight, and in the context of this fight far closer to them. In effect, their reactions were rendered mute well before they could be of any use.

  Walker’s first movement was to drop his Glock pistol and take a step forward, grabbing the faster guy’s rising arm in a tight grip around the elbow joint; he then put his other hand at the agent’s back, between the spine and the shoulder blade, and pulled until the shoulder joint popped out and tendons tore and snapped.

  That Homeland guy dropped his pistol and fell to the ground, hollering in pain.

  The second agent was halfway through his turn, side-arm drawn, when he reacted the way most people would when their partner had just been put out of the fight—his motion slowed and he turned his head to see what was unfolding right next to him. Walker could see this reaction, because he was watching him as soon as he’d made contact with the first agent, never taking his eyes off him, reading his every move. He saw the agent weighing decisions as events played out seemingly faster than real-time: another threat in the house, his comrade down. And then confusion gave way to recognition—he knew the perpetrator, a guy he’d assumed he’d killed in a gas explosion that morning. He needed to alter his original plan of turning and shooting back through the doorway he’d just walked through. Walker saw it all register, calculate and compute—the guy was a dinosaur, an analogue man lost in the digital age. By the time the agent had changed his mind about how to act, it was far too late. By the time he’d shifted his feet and turned to square up to Walker, he was collected under the c
hin by a rising uppercut, then yanked forward by his tie.

  Walker pulled him in and down, a sharp yank that ended when he felt the guy’s nose and face connect with his rapidly rising knee. A broken nose, loosened teeth, shattered cheekbones, fractured orbital sockets, concussion—the sum of it all being: lights out. The second agent fell to the floorboards with a heavy thump.

  Walker didn’t stop there. He kicked the younger agent’s pistol away, and hefted him up with one hand, using his other hand to grab the small Glock from the floor. He buried the snub of the barrel under the guy’s chin, pinning him against the wall, lifting him up onto his tiptoes. The agent’s face was twisted in pain and he put up no fight as he cradled his loosely hanging arm across his body.

  “Talk,” Walker said to him. “You need to talk.”

  53

  “You’re . . . dead.” The Homeland agent with the bad back was trying to make sense of the apparition in front of him. A guy he’d left tied to a table of solid hardwood to be blown to bits in a gas explosion. His partner’s bright idea.

  Walker was silent. He let the Glock do the talking—he pushed it harder under the guy’s chin, letting go with his other hand and patting him down, pulling out a wallet and throwing it to Acton.

  “Agent Matt Kingsley,” Acton said. “Department of Homeland Security.”

  “Okay, Matt,” Walker said. “Talk time. Who are you working for?”

  Agent Matt Kingsley did not speak.

  “Matt, come on . . .” Walker said, then brought his free hand to the guy’s wrecked shoulder and squeezed. Kingsley let out a yelp. “Talk to me. You’re just an amateur here, so you don’t need to die, or suffer. Jail, sure. You deserve that. Sweet little Federal Agent like you in jail, you’re gonna be a popular boy, passed from cell to cell. Imagine your back then? So, use these last minutes of freedom wisely, so that Agent Acton here can put in a good word for you for cooperating. Who are you reporting to?”

  Kingsley stayed silent.