I sent a text message to Junie, asking if she had just texted me. She sent a quick message that no, she hadn’t. She was in the field and couldn’t talk. She ended it with a quick “XOXO.”
A few seconds later I got another text, but as soon as I saw it I knew it wasn’t from Junie:
I think my sister is crazy.
She thinks I’m crazy, too.
The message lingered for ten seconds and then deleted itself from my phone. Miss Moneypenny told me that it was never there. I tried to think which of my friends was having family issues but came up dry. I dictated a quick email to Bug, the DMS computer chief, and asked him to do one of those remote-systems-checks thingies. Five minutes later, I got a reply saying that my phone was working perfectly.
“That was weird,” I said to Ghost, but he was busy licking his balls.
So I said to hell with it and called Rudy to ask if he’d like to drop everything and catch a late flight back East. I briefly explained why.
“That is a very sad thing,” Rudy said. “Of course I’ll come with you.”
“Pack for a few days,” I suggested.
“Commercial air or Shirley?” he asked.
“Commercial,” I said, and we both sighed. Much as I love bouncing around in my own private jet—which, technically, belongs to the DMS, but I love saying that it’s my private jet—it’s expensive to fly. Hard to justify the costs unless the big clock was ticking down to boom time. That said, I knew that Lydia Rose could snag us a couple of first-class tickets. You take the comforts where you can get them. I told Rudy the flight time and we arranged to meet at the airport.
I sensed a disturbance in the Force and looked at Ghost, who was glaring at me from the passenger seat. Not sure if he actually understood that I was talking about airline reservations, but, if so, he knew what it meant. He’d be in a dog crate in the hold. If I was taking my own jet, he’d have an actual couch to himself. On a commercial flight, not so much. His brown eyes bored into mine.
“You’re going to shit in my shoes first chance you get, aren’t you?” I asked him.
He beamed at me and thumped his tail a couple of times.
“Damn,” I said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
INLET CRAB HOUSE
3572 HIGHWAY 17
MURRELLS INLET, SOUTH CAROLINA
SATURDAY, APRIL 29, 9:01 PM EASTERN TIME
They had a seat by a window with a view of the parking lot. Since neither of them had found much to say, Top dug into his briefcase and removed the folder on the person they were here to meet. He flipped open the cover and looked at the face of a black woman in a state-police uniform. Tracy Cole. Thirty years old, five feet seven inches tall, a native of Charleston. Served four years in the army, was attached to a U.N. detail doing security for a human-rights-assessment team. According to her records, she saw combat, and more than her fair share, but Cole was regular army, not Special Forces. She volunteered a lot, and this was often a red flag for Top. He distrusted almost everyone who went out of their way to get into a fight. Too often they were either trigger-happy bigots, broken ones with a death wish; revenge-seekers who’d lost someone in one of the wars; insecure types who were trying to prove something; or damn fools who thought this was all some kind of ultra-3-D video game.
He leafed through the notes of each action, written in the dry, acronym-heavy verbiage so prized by the military. It was on a par with the stilted language of police reports. Neither sounded as if the actions being described had anything to do with real human beings. Cole had two Purple Hearts. One was minor, from shrapnel; the other was from a knife. Top grunted as he searched for and found the incident report for the latter. And that’s when his interest was piqued, because although there was an official commendation for bravery stapled to the notice about the second Purple Heart, there was also a memo that had been sealed, written from the field officer to the company commander. MindReader had acquired it, of course. That note said that Cole had disobeyed a direct order not to interfere in an incident involving a small group of suspected ISIL soldiers in a compromised village. The entire region was fragile, and the officer in charge of the U.N. convoy had been afraid of things going south if his people got into anything with the locals. However, there was a small boardinghouse in the village that was on a list of suspected “hospitality” centers.
In the language of ISIL a hospitality center was what they called a rape hotel. A comfort station. Tracy Cole had tried to get her lieutenant to take some action, to at least investigate, but the officer was either timid or had a stronger read on the local situation. He ordered Cole to return to her platoon and stand down. She returned to the small house where her platoon was bunked down, but only long enough to wait for dark, gear up, and go hunting. As it turned out, not only was the hotel being used to hold seven girls and women, ranging in age from eleven to twenty-three, but there were also weapons and explosives stored in the basement. And there was a worktable behind a locked cellar door where canvas vests were being rigged with stolen C4.
According to the memo, Cole had attempted to leave quietly and report this to her commander, but a guard spotted her and there was a fight. She took some serious knife wounds to the face, shoulder, and stomach, but she killed her attacker. The scuffle woke everyone up, and then there was a big damn gunfight. The startled ISIL team began firing randomly at everyone. That’s when the U.N. team, roused, came running. When it was over there were eight dead ISIL shooters, two women were hospitalized for damage from ricochets, and Cole was nearly dead on her feet.
The lieutenant called in for support, and the village was surrounded and thoroughly searched. Eight more ISIL fighters were found, and these were taken alive. A total of twenty-six hostages were freed: the sex slaves and several people from the village who had been under guard in order to keep the villagers in line. When the story hit the news services, the action was listed as an “official rescue operation undertaken by United Nations Peacekeepers.” Cole wasn’t named, nor, Top noted, was her lieutenant. After that action, Cole was transferred Stateside and did the equivalent of busywork until the rest of her term of service burned off. She didn’t re-enlist. Top guessed that she was advised not to. Or maybe she’d become disillusioned by the constant play of bad nerves and questionable politics.
As he closed her file, Top caught movement in the parking lot and saw that a white 4Runner had pulled in and a woman got out on the passenger side and slammed the door very forcefully. She wore bluejeans, cowboy boots, a plain white T-shirt, and a ball cap that threw shadows over her face in the downspill of tangerine light from the sodium-vapor streetlamps. She walked three paces away from the truck, whirled, and stabbed the air as she said something to whoever was behind the wheel. Top couldn’t hear her words, but he would have bet his pension she wasn’t saying “I love you.” There was a lot of anger and indignation in every line of her body.
Top tapped the tabletop with a fingernail, and Bunny came out of his thoughts, looked at the finger, then followed Top’s gaze.
“That her?” asked the big young man.
“Looks like it.”
They watched her stand there and continue to emphasize whatever she was saying by jabbing the air with her finger.
“Uh-oh. She’s pissed at someone,” said Bunny. “Husband?”
“Not married.”
“Boyfriend?”
“Or someone,” said Top. “Hold on, here we go.”
The driver’s door opened and a man got out. He was a big light-skinned black man. Not as tall as Bunny’s six-six but close, and he had all the sculpted muscles of a dedicated bodybuilder: broad shoulders, a deep chest, flat abs, and a tiny waist. He wore a muscle shirt that showed off his big arms, and jeans that put his crotch on display. Like Cole’s, the muscle freak’s body was rigid with anger, and he stalked around the front of the pickup and stood towering over the woman.
“Lovers’ quarrel?” mused Bunny.
“That’d be my guess,”
Top agreed.
The argument outside was intensifying, with both of them gesticulating. There was a difference, though, and Top noted it. The man was waving his arms all over the place, as if he had so much rage inside that he wanted to throw it around, paint the walls of the restaurant and all the cars in the lot with it. His hands moved with great speed and force, and Top was pretty sure the guy was having a very hard time not directing that power in the same direction as his words. The woman, on the other hand, was clearly furious, but the more hysterical and demonstrative the man got, the less dramatic her own movements became. As if she was pulling her power in, containing it. Either she was being gradually cowed by the bruiser or in the face of his rage and physical potential she was priming herself for action. Top rather thought it was the latter. The drama was maybe going to end with both of them storming off in separate directions—and probably separate lives—or it was going to turn nasty. There was a palpable violence in the air.
“He hits her and I’m going out there to hand him his own dick,” said Bunny.
Without looking, Top nudged Bunny’s plate of shrimp closer to the big man. “Eat your sea roaches and enjoy the show, Farm Boy.”
The woman said one last thing that landed on the man like a physical blow. It staggered him, and he actually took a half step backward. The woman opened the door, reached in, came out with a cell phone, and held it up so that he could see the screen. The man gaped at it, his mouth slack, then, with a speed that surprised the woman, slapped the phone out of her hand. It flew ten feet and smashed to bits against the side of a heavy wooden trash can. Then the man tried to use the same speed to grab the woman’s wrist.
Bunny lurched to his feet, but Top didn’t. He sat there, fascinated, watching as the woman evaded the grab with a boxer’s backward lean, and then bent forward and used the flats of both palms to shove the man backward. She did it fast, and she did it at exactly the right angle to send the bruiser crashing heavily and awkwardly into the fender of the 4Runner. He dropped to one knee and stared for a moment at the huge dent his shoulder had made in the white metal. Everyone at the restaurant was staring at the drama. Bunny was heading toward the door. Top, smiling, sat where he was.
The muscle freak came up off the ground and tried to belt Cole with a blow that would have dimmed her lights and put her in a neck brace. She leaned back, agile as a boxer, let it pass, and then stepped into the man, her hands moving so fast that Top couldn’t tell whether she hit him five times or six. They weren’t what he would have labeled combat blows. She wasn’t going for a kill or even trying to do serious damage. No, this woman was schooling the asshole. She hit him in the throat, the nose, the lip, the eye, and the nuts. Maybe one or two other places. She didn’t hit him very hard, but damn if she didn’t know what she was about. The lip split, the nose erupted into blood, the eye puffed shut, and the guy dropped to his knees, cupping his balls, while his face turned a ghastly shade of brick red. Then the woman took a fistful of his short hair, jerked his head back, and bent close to spit in his face. She thrust him sideways and he crashed once more against his truck, though this time his shoulder hit the tire and did no damage. He fell over, trembling and weeping, looking very small for such a big man.
By this time Bunny was in the parking lot, closing on her with long strides, his face set in lines of indignation.
Top sat back in his chair and took a deep swallow of his warm beer.
* * *
Top didn’t take particular notice of the small man seated alone at a deuce thirty feet from him. The man wore a nylon windbreaker and a billed cap. Both the jacket and the cap bore the logo of Apex HVAC, a company that handled the installation, upgrade, and maintenance of heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning systems for thousands of small businesses in that part of South Carolina. Apex was part of a much larger conglomerate that provided the same services—as well as sprinkler and Halon systems—for larger industrial firms. The man had spent much of the past two years installing special upgrades, and had even serviced this restaurant a few days ago to bring it up to code.
The name stenciled above the logo on the left breast of the jacket was Mitch. Today would be Mitch’s last visit to the crab house. He had a half-eaten Salisbury steak in front of him and a freshly topped-off cup of coffee. There was nothing particularly remarkable about Mitch’s appearance, and when Top had earlier scanned the room he saw a thirtysomething man who was so ordinary that he blended seamlessly into the crowd. Which was rather the point.
Mitch made three calls during the thirty-five minutes he was there. The first was to report that he was on station and had secured a table with excellent visual access to the inside of the crab house. The second call was to confirm the identities of the two big men at a nearby table. He didn’t make the third call until after Tracy Cole arrived. When he checked with the images stored on his phone, he hit the speed dial for his contact. The call was answered at once by a man with a French accent.
“We’re all good,” said Mitch, then he added, “We’re live in five.”
“Très bien,” murmured the Concierge. “You had better get out of there.”
“Yup,” said Mitch. He ended the call and signaled the waitress for the check. While he waited for the check he took a small Altoids tin out of his pocket, opened it, removed two unmarked capsules, and swallowed them with the last of his coffee. His hands were shaking as he put the tin back into his pocket. He paid the bill and left.
Mitch made sure that he moved casually, naturally, and not at all as if he was running for his life.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
SAN DIEGO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
3225 NORTH HARBOR DRIVE
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
SATURDAY, APRIL 29, 6:02 PM
I fed my overweight, middle-aged, and frequently cranky marmalade tabby, Cobbler, and then took him down to the nice old lady who lives in the condo below me. She was always game to babysit the old boy and, on occasion, Ghost, too. The neighbors tell me she sings to them. Old bluesy standards from the forties and fifties. Cobbler perked up when he saw her and pretty much instantly forgot that I existed. Cats, y’know?
Ghost and I got to the airport first. While we waited for Rudy, I got another text on my phone. This time the message said:
I wish I could help, but she wouldn’t like it.
She’ll be so mad I’m even texting you.
Again there was no identification, and again Miss Moneypenny told me there was no text, even though I was staring right at it. Then it occurred to me that it could be Sean using a burner and trying some kind of code on me. That didn’t fit right, though, because burners didn’t have text functions. So I texted back:
Who is this?
The reply was equally as confounding as the other messages:
I don’t like to play these kinds of games.
I responded, asking what she meant. There was no answer. Had it, in fact, been Sean? We don’t have a sister, so none of the texts would make sense, and if it was a code, then he was being way too cryptic. I double-checked with Bug, and he told me that my phone was fine. He sounded busy and annoyed, and told me to simply disable the text function.
I did.
Then my phone rang and it was Steve Duffy, one of the agents at the Warehouse in Baltimore, the local DMS shop.
“Yo, Cowboy,” he said. “Got the goodies from your bro and am on the way back to the barn. Got a couple of science geeks coming down from the Hangar to pick it up. There’s some paperwork and digital stuff that I’ll upload to your laptop.”
“Any problems with the pickup?”
“Nah. Your brother doesn’t smile much. He always a sourpuss?”
“It’s been a long couple of days. He’s okay,” I said. “You spot any tail around my brother? Black SUVs or anyone else?”
“No, and we looked pretty hard. Even so, we have some birds in the air. If we get anything, I’ll be in touch.”
The “birds” he mentioned were the latest
generation of pigeon surveillance drones. They looked real and had adaptive behavioral software that allowed them to learn from real pigeons. Unless you absolutely knew they were fake you’d be tempted to toss them breadcrumbs. It was a weird and somewhat troubling irony that the DMS was using pigeon drones for urban aerial surveillance. It was pigeon drones armed with explosives that had destroyed our field office here in Baltimore, killing nearly two hundred people. All friends of mine. Brothers in arms. And that same blast was how Rudy lost an eye. Add to that the attack at Citizens Bank Park, which was mostly carried out by bomb-carrying pigeon drones. You’d think after all that we wouldn’t go anywhere near that technology. But … it’s a useful bit of science. No, we don’t put bombs on our drones, but we do use them. Lately we’ve used a lot of them, and the technology was something we stole from the bad guys. As I said, a troubling irony.
“Hey, Duffy,” I said before he hung up. “You didn’t by any chance just text me, did you?”
“Text you? No,” he said.
“Okay,” I said, and ended the call. Ghost suddenly jumped to his feet and gave a single, happy whuff, and I saw Rudy getting out of a cab with three large suitcases.
“Jeez, Rude. I said to pack for only a few days.”
“I did,” he replied, then nodded toward the single suitcase I’d brought. “And while I’m sure you have a nicely polished lecture all prepared about living the spartan life and the science of packing for field operations, consider three things.” He counted them off on his fingers. “First, you neglected to say what we’d be doing for those few days, so I wisely planned for multiple business and social contingencies. Second, we have significant differences in our approach to personal grooming, as I believe we’ve previously discussed.”
“And third—?”
He smiled. “You may kiss my ass.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
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