“With any luck, it’ll be Wendell Brower and his friends, and they’ll all surrender when we reach the door.”
“You mean Wendy,” Deeks said. “He must have taken some serious heat in Delta Force, with that name.”
Kensi shook her head. “It’s probably the first test. If you’re tough enough to wear a girl’s name, you can go on to the next level.”
The front door was standing open, and it was obvious before they reached it that the house was empty. A dark-haired woman in dress pants and a pink blouse with a bow on it turned as they approached, putting on a big smile. “You can’t be here about the house,” she said. “I haven’t even listed it yet, or put out the sign.”
“It’s for sale?” Kensi asked.
Also obvious, Deeks thought. He knew better than to say it. Although if they had been alone, he probably would have said it despite knowing better.
“It’s really a fantastic deal, and you could have the jump on everybody,” the woman said. She stepped forward, extending a hand. Kensi and Deeks both shook it, and the next thing Deeks knew, he was holding a business card with the woman’s face on it. “I’m Maria Orecchio.”
According to the card, she was a licensed realtor. Deeks didn’t know of any other profession in which people put their faces on their business cards and on every ad. He never saw bus stop benches with accountants’ photos on them, or plumbers’, even though both of those professions sometimes advertised there. On Maria’s card, her face took up fully a third of the space.
“I’m afraid we’re not in the market,” Kensi said.
“Yet,” Deeks added. “We might be soon, though. I’ll keep your card.”
Maria’s forehead wrinkled and her smile faded, leaving her open-mouthed. “Then what—”
They showed their badges. “We’re looking for Mr. Brower,” Kensi said.
“Oh.” The look of confusion didn’t go away. “I’m afraid you missed him by a couple of weeks.”
“Missed him?” Deeks echoed.
“He’s taken a job in Spain,” the realtor explained. “He left two weeks ago.”
“Spain,” Kensi said.
“That’s right. He left the key with me, but just completed the paperwork via the internet, so I could list the house for him.”
“Do you know where in Spain?”
“Barcelona, he said. Some sort of executive security position, I gathered. He didn’t go into a lot of detail.”
“I’ll bet he didn’t,” Deeks said.
“What do you mean?” Maria asked.
“Never mind. It’s just been that kind of day.”
“You said you might be looking,” Maria said. “If you want to see the house—”
“We’re kind of in a hurry now,” Kensi said. “We’ll let you know if we want to see something down the line.”
“Well, you have my card.”
“Sure do,” Deeks said. With your smiling face all over it, he added mentally.
They were barely back in the car before Kensi said, “You might as well throw away her card. There’s no way we’re living in Van Nuys.”
“Why? This looks like a nice street.”
“Maybe. But it’s Van Nuys. Ninety percent of the American porn industry is located here.”
“Ninety? Exactly? That’s really—”
“Approximately ninety. Maybe not that much. But a big, big piece of it.”
“I’m not sure ‘big piece’ is a phrase you want to use when you’re talking about the porn industry,” Deeks said.
Kensi ignored him. In that instance, he would have done the same. “Anyway, we’re not moving someplace where our neighbors might be porn executives. Or porn actors.”
“They’re probably perfectly good neighbors,” Deeks offered. “Stable incomes, take care of their yards. Their backyard barbecues might get a little wild, but—”
“No,” Kensi said firmly. “Van Nuys is off the table.”
“Off the table?”
“Off. Way, way off. End of discussion.”
“Got it,” Deeks replied. More discussions should end that way, he thought. Left no room for ambiguity. No are we finished talking about that? Should I say something else? Is she waiting for me to? Just end of discussion.
Still, having porn stars for neighbors couldn’t be that bad.
Could it?
He decided to let it drop.
At least, for now.
* * *
Back at the Ops Center, Hetty had another pair of photos for them. “Eric and Nell cross-checked the photographs of the three security contractors we’ve identified, and the computer found multiple recent instances of them with one other former Lionheart employee. That would be this man, Denis Faulk. He’s ex-MARSOC, joined Lionheart in 2006, and worked with the others in Iraq.”
“So we know all four now,” Kensi said. She studied the pictures. There wasn’t much difference between Faulk’s military ID and his driver’s license. He had a head like a cannonball, squared off only by a short crew-cut. His blue eyes were set wide, over an almost flat nose and a thin, lipless mouth. His neck looked as thick and solid as a tree trunk. He wasn’t smiling in either shot; Kensi wasn’t sure from the photos that he knew how.
“Do we have an address?”
“Eric and Nell already checked it out,” Hetty said. “He rented an apartment in Santa Monica. It’s empty. He left no forwarding address, even though he has a thousand-dollar security deposit coming to him.”
“So we have four guys who were in Iraq together,” Deeks said. “One of them’s dead, and—”
Hetty cut him off. “That’s the other thing we learned while you were out. I had Mr. Shogren’s casket exhumed. He was not at home.”
“What was in it?”
“Currently, nothing at all. But when I contacted the cemetery, I was told that it had already been dug up. Seventeen days ago. There’s a police report on it, but no suspects. It happened at night, and a groundskeeper found it in the morning.”
“That’s where the tablet was, then,” Kensi said.
“Almost certainly.”
“Okay,” Deeks amended. “Four guys, all presumably living.”
“And one woman,” Kensi added. “No longer living.”
“Right. All of whom have disappeared from their homes in the last few days or weeks. We know who they are, we know what they look like, we can even link them using facial rec. But we can’t find them now.”
“That sums it up nicely,” Hetty said. “And we believe we know what their goal is. Now all we have to do is prevent it from happening, and make some arrests in the process.”
“It sounds so simple when you put it like that,” Kensi said.
Hetty smiled. “I’m sure, Agent Blye, that it will be anything but.”
19
Callen studied the file that the Ops team had amassed on Slava Belyakov. His father had been a mid-level Party functionary in Belgorod, but Slava had been born during an extended assignment across the border in Kharkiv, Ukraine.
Kharkiv, Callen remembered, had been the first Ukrainian city occupied by Soviet troops, back in 1917. The third largest city in the Soviet Union, it had been a target for German forces during World War II, and in the course of being captured twice by the Germans and liberated twice by the Soviets, most of the city had been destroyed, its people either enslaved—Ostarbeiter, or Eastern worker, was the polite word for it in German, but the euphemism didn’t change the reality—executed, or starved. When Belyakov was born there in 1947, his father had been one of a small army of Soviet officials sent to oversee the rebuilding. Apartment blocks and factories went up, jobs returned, and before long Kharkiv was a leading center of science and industry, third in the USSR only to Leningrad and Moscow.
By then Slava Belyakov was back in Belgorod, which was undergoing its own rebuilding. His family had an upper-floor apartment with a view of the Seversky Donets River, and lived a comfortable existence. At their son’s birth, Belyakov’s fam
ily had adopted the Ukrainian style of speech, so pronounced Vs as Ws, making the boy Slawa Belyakow. Callen imagined that had prompted more than a few fights with his fellow Russians.
His father’s position in the Party got him into a decent university, where he married a girl whose father was even higher up the Party ladder. These connections resulted in a management position with a company that manufactured pipe. When perestroika created opportunity for entrepreneurship, Belyakov gathered funds from a few investors and opened his own, competing pipe-manufacturing business. He drove the first one under, then took over its factories and client base, which included several major oil companies. His new, larger company extended credit to a struggling oil company, and when they couldn’t pay it back, he took over that company, too. Little by little, he amassed more oil companies drilling more and more wells, until he had his own small empire and a net worth in the billions. Only estimates of his total wealth could be made, because it was assumed that, given the usual patterns of corruption among Russia’s wealthy, he had hidden millions if not billions of dollars in offshore accounts.
Now he owned palatial homes in London, Sochi, and Moscow, a fleet of private planes, a railroad in Ghana, and a media business in Sweden. His varied interests kept him on the move. His romantic life was just as diverse: he had divorced that first wife in 1993, and had since been linked with a rotating cast of models, actresses, and other world-class beauties. Rumors of darker habits were many; at least two of his homes were said to contain dungeons, and people whispered that three or four willing women who had gone into those had never come out.
A billion dollars crossing palms here and there bought a lot of forgiveness, Callen supposed. He harbored no expectations that he would like Belyakov, and the more he learned, the more confident he was in that assumption. The man was a ruthless opportunist, apparently unburdened by anything resembling a conscience.
Fortunately, he didn’t have to like the man. He just had to get the man to like him.
* * *
“You, Mr. Callen, will be Grisha.”
“That should be easy enough,” Callen said. It made sense, too. He was getting used to the name, but almost nobody used it. The people he worked with still went with G, or used his last name. He had internalized it, though, so if someone called him Grisha, he would respond naturally.
Hetty handed him a flash drive. “Your last name is Koslov,” she said. “Learn this. Your identity is more than adequately backstopped, but you don’t have much time to memorize the details. We’re going tonight.”
“Tonight?” Deeks asked. “I was kind of hoping to, you know, get some sleep tonight. Since we didn’t last night.”
“Sleep is overrated,” Hetty said. “I once went for nine days on only seven hours of sleep.”
“On purpose?”
“Had I slept any more than that, a large portion of Boston would probably still be radioactive.”
“Well, then I’m glad you didn’t.”
“If we could get back to the business at hand,” Kensi said, “where is this going down?”
They were all gathered in the bullpen. Callen, Deeks, and Kensi sat at their respective desks, Hetty, Nell, and Eric were standing, and Sam was perched on the corner of his desk. Nell turned toward Kensi, her cheeks starting to redden. “We’ve learned that the Belyakov party will be enjoying the pleasures of the Tops & Tails club, on Olympic.”
“Tops & Tails? Isn’t that a strip club?”
“They call it a gentlemen’s club, but yes.”
Kensi turned to Hetty. “If you’re expecting me to go undercover as a stripper—”
“Not at all, Agent Blye. You’ll be undercover as Agent Deeks’s date. I trust that’s not too big a stretch.”
Kensi shot Deeks a glance. “I guess I could pull that off. With a little practice.”
“What about me?” Sam asked.
“You’re a bouncer.”
“Typecasting again,” Sam said. “Okay, I’m down with that.”
“What about us?” Eric asked. “Are we going in?”
“You’re needed here,” Hetty replied. “Sorry, Eric.”
“You wouldn’t like it anyway,” Nell added. “All that female flesh on brazen display.”
“Oh, yeah,” Eric said after the words registered. “Who’d like that?”
“Exactly,” Nell said.
“Get busy, people,” Hetty said. “You have to be on scene in seventy minutes. Here’s how it’s going to go down…”
20
Traffic was a nightmare.
The 405 freeway was a parking lot, thanks to a semi full of chickens that had collided with a luxury SUV and overturned, so Granger took surface streets to Sunset. But Sunset was just as bad as the freeway had been. Smoke from the fire in the hills tinted the sky a dusky gray-brown, and the line of cars headed westbound, away from the fire, looked like a mass flight from some apocalyptic disaster. Some were still thick with ash, though it sheared off with the wind of their passage. Headed eastbound, the cars were also lined up, but going nowhere.
Granger drove Stacey Quan’s old Dodge pickup, creeping along at five miles per hour. When he was able to hit ten, he felt like he’d achieved a triumph of some sort, though it was short-lived. Past Greenway and around the bend he crawled, past the Maltz Park and its silly sculpture, going slow enough to study the bits of houses that could be spotted from the road, the ones that, at the usual Sunset pace, were essentially invisible behind walls and screened by trees and shrubbery. He gained a little speed after Whittier, because people ahead of him gave up and turned south there, likewise at Roxbury, but after Bedford even five miles an hour became an unreachable goal.
Now he moved along a car-length at a time, stopping longer than he was able to inch forward. He watched the sun sink in his rearview. On the faces of other motorists he saw panic, disbelief, frustration, and rage, and he suspected others saw much the same on his. Mostly, what he felt was an unfamiliar sensation that he eventually pegged as powerlessness. He didn’t like it. He was the assistant director of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Getting there had been a hard climb, and he’d had to do and see and endure things that would have broken most people. What he wanted now was to flick a switch, illuminate a light bar and wail a siren and flash his badge and get past all the vehicles blocking his path.
But Stacey’s truck wasn’t equipped for that. A steel box contained some tack and a few tools, and there was a plastic water jug in the bed, but that was about it. It didn’t have a siren or a light bar, and even if it had, he would have refrained. Every person in every vehicle no doubt felt the same, had his or her own reasons for wanting to drive the wrong way, heading toward the conflagration instead of away from it. Granger felt that his mission was the most important, but that was only because it was the only one he knew. In the long run, it wasn’t—whatever the OSP team was up to in his absence was undoubtedly more crucial to national security. All he was trying to do was rescue some horses that weren’t even his, and the urgency came only because Stacey’s father had saved his life in Da Nang back in ’78.
Granger had been trying to extricate Nguyen Bao, a South Vietnamese scientist who’d been helpful to the Americans during the war, and whose agricultural research would continue to benefit the West, if he could be liberated from the reeducation camp to which he’d been sent. And where so many had died, after the Americans bailed and the South fell. Quan Huong had been an agent of South Vietnam’s intelligence service, and after the war he’d been spirited out of the country with his wife. But he had volunteered to go back for Nguyen Bao, and his presence had made the difference between freeing the scientist—by then suffering from beriberi and a skeletal shadow of his former self—and utter failure. The three had escaped the country together, and Granger’s debt to Quan was lifelong.
Once stateside, Quan had Americanized his name, becoming Huong Quan instead of following the Sino-Vietnamese custom of surname first, then given name. His children, S
tacey, Jack, and James, had been given American-style names at birth. Granger tried to watch over all three, but Stacey had stayed in Los Angeles and she was the one Granger knew best. At that moment, she and the now elderly Quan were on a kind of pilgrimage back to Vietnam, so he could show her the places he’d known growing up, before the South’s fall to the Communists. When she’d asked Granger to look after her precious horses, he could hardly refuse. And with an out-of-control wildfire tearing up and down the hills, he had to do whatever was necessary to get them to safety.
When Granger reached the intersection of Beverly and Lexington, the traffic stopped again. This time, uniformed sheriff’s officers were to blame. Granger recognized what was happening, and pulled his badge out. When he finally reached the officers, he rolled down the window—no electric windows in this old beast of a pickup—and showed it to the harried-looking young man. “NCIS,” he said. “I need to get up into Coldwater.”
“Sorry, sir,” the officer said. “Only residents allowed beyond this point. And that won’t last much longer. We’re trying to evacuate everybody, not let people drive into harm’s way.”
“I’ll only be a few minutes. It’s important.” He stopped short of claiming “national security,” though he considered it. But people whose jobs really did affect national security learned early on not to cheapen the phrase by throwing it around lightly.
“No can do. I’m really sorry, but we’ve got a bad situation up there. You could be the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover and I’d tell you the same thing.”
Granger glanced at the line of vehicles behind him, and the steady stream coming past from the direction he wanted to travel. “I’m kind of stuck going this way, now.”
“We’ll break the traffic so you can turn around, sir. I wish I could cut you a break, but if I did that, I’d—”
“Never mind,” Granger said wearily. “I understand. Can I just turn left onto Lexington?”
“Sure, we can arrange that. Thank you, sir.”
Another officer stopped the oncoming traffic long enough for Granger to make the left. There couldn’t be roadblocks on every street, he figured, and there was more than one way up into the canyon. He took Lexington back to Hartford and made a right on Cove. Here, traffic was lighter. The evacuation route seemed to be confined to the main streets out of the hills, Beverly and Benedict Canyon, so he wound up on smaller streets, making frequent turns. Approaching Coldwater Canyon Drive on Shadow Hill, he saw that Coldwater was barricaded by sheriff’s vehicles. Nobody was getting through there.
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