The Search

by Alex Howell

  Now, though, he wished that he hadn’t left that life so far behind. He wished that the cognitive dissonance he had about his career hadn’t been so strong, that he could’ve stuck to what he knew and better protected his family.

  Instead, he was weak.

  “I see that you finally listened to our instructions.”

  Mason just breathed heavily into the phone, his way of responding to the man. The less he said, the better. Though he was not really in a position to negotiate or discuss anything, the less information he gave, the better. Even if all he gave away was that he was stressed, an obvious reaction for any parents in that situation, it might be used against him later.

  That, at least, was what Mason said to provide what little comfort he could to himself. There wasn’t much, though, that he could do, and if he didn’t acknowledge it consciously, he sure knew it on a subconscious level.

  “I know you are there, so I will tell you what is happening, Mr. Walker,” the voice said. “We know who you are. We know your background. We know your skills. You are not a man who can so easily escape his past, Mr. Walker. And now—”

  “That was over ten years ago,” Mason said, trying to keep his voice as even-keeled as possible. “If you know who I am, then you know full well that I don’t use those skills anymore.”

  It strained Mason to not curse the voice out and tell him he’d slit his throat, no matter how many lives it took to get to him, but he had to remember to stay calm. Lieutenant Jack Jones, Mason’s commanding officer in Iraq—now General Jones, if Mason remembered right—would have been disappointed. Keep it together, Mason. Only way to see Clara again.

  “You might be correct, Mr. Walker, but we know you have not forgotten your skills. You have tried to leave them behind, but a man like you does not engage in such missions and just forget how to fight and do things. So—”

  “What does this have to do with Clara?” Mason said, wrestling control of the conversation. “Where is she? What have you done to her?”

  “She is with us. And so far, nothing other than tying her up. We have not hurt her.”

  “I know she’s with you, I’m not an idiot,” Mason said, biting his tongue before losing control. “I want to know where she is.”

  “Do you think we would give away such information so easily?” the voice said, adding what sounded like a computerized laugh. It made Mason wonder if he was actually speaking to a bot at that moment—it wasn’t out of the question with advanced technology. “I can assure you, however, that she is safe. The video you are seeing in your home is live. We would not harm our leverage so quickly.”

  “Prove it. Prove that what you’re showing me is live before I come and rip your throat apart.”

  As if on cue, a man in all black went over to her, ripped off the tape on her mouth, and Clara screamed out. Mason heard it both through his own phone and on the video screen, and it synced with the way her mouth moved. And then, seconds later, when the man put the tape back on Clara, her words again became muffled.

  Mason wanted nothing more than to punch the cameraman, the captor, and anyone else who was involved. He wanted to show them he was going to get vengeance, whatever form that took.

  But, right now, want and actually being able to were worlds apart—possibly very close by, or possibly very far away.

  “Satisfied?”

  “I’m so glad you’re honest,” Mason said. “But what do you want? Tell me what I need to do to get Clara back.”

  “Ahh, so now you finally get to it,” the voice said. “We want you to conduct some special missions for us, Mr. Walker. We need someone of your caliber and your skills to accomplish what we need. We will tell you what you need to do as you go along. Everything is on a need-to-know basis. In return, your daughter will remaine unhurt and safe so long as you cooperate.”

  “Seems like a hell of a deal to me,” Mason grumbled. “Clara was fine this morning, and I didn’t have to work with you then.”

  “Yes, but times have changed, haven’t they?”

  Mason bit his lip and let out a very long sigh. Ironic, he thought, that those skills and the life that he had sworn to leave behind so that he could be with his family… were now the very things that he needed in order to be back with what family he had left. The voice on the phone was right in one way.

  Mason hadn’t forgotten how to fight. He would be a bit rusty in certain areas, but the constant vigilance, ways to kill a man, and state of mind he’d developed in the SEALs was now permanently ingrained in him. He felt that he could better kill a man in fifty ways with his bare hands than he could drive to his daughter’s high school from his own home without the use of an automatic car.

  So much for being an insurance salesman.

  “What’s the first so-called ‘special mission’ that you need your help on?” Mason said. “And don’t you dare jerk me around.”

  “Everything has a purpose, Mr. Walker. Everything has a purpose. There is a target of ours who needs safe passage. His name is Harnad Abdi. Abdi is currently being held at customs at the John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City. You need to use whatever means necessary to free him. Once you have him in custody, we will give you next steps.”

  New York City… but…

  “I’m sorry, you do realize that I live in Maryland, right?”

  “Yes.”

  The line went blank as both parties waited for the other to speak. Mason knew that he had asked a stupid question—someone had kidnapped his daughter, so, of course ,they knew that he lived in a different state. But then, how the hell did they think that he was going to magically get to New York City and save some random guy in an airport? Mason wasn’t a billionaire who could get a private jet over there. He was a citizen who happened to have a set of useful skills, but nothing more.

  I have no choice. I have to do it.

  “And how soon do you want this accomplished?”

  “How soon do you want to see your daughter?”

  More silence filled the air. Mason kept reminding himself he was dealing with some high-level criminals here, but he’d never been in a spot like this. He’d never had to serve as an errand boy or a puppet for anyone. It was uncomfortable and shaking his soul.

  “Damn you.”

  “You can swear all you want at me, Mr. Walker, but it will not get your daughter free any faster. You will need to execute the mission we have requested in order to get her. Do you want to see Clara again, or not?”

  Mason dropped his phone, feeling his hand shaking and hardening with frustration. He took a long breath as he fought not to break his phone in half. Like it or not, he was in the grips of whoever was on the other end of the line, and there was no getting around it. If the SEALs had taught him to get comfortable with being uncomfortable, well, it was harder to find a situation more uncomfortable than this.

  “And why am I doing this? What does this Abdi man want in the USA?”

  “That’s none of your concern.”

  “Is it? Seems to me customs would have some—”

  “You are a man of great connections and influence, Mr. Walker,” the voice said. “Do what you need to do to free Mr. Abdi and get him into your custody. We will be in touch once he has been secured. You know what you need to do if you ever want to see your daughter again.”

  With that, the line disconnected. Mason stared at his phone, stunned. How had it all gone so wrong?

  Just a couple of hours ago, he was an insurance salesman, bored out of his mind, eager to see his lovely daughter for a Monday afternoon lunch. He was someone who grappled with his past but mostly kept it in the past. Being a Navy SEAL had felt more like a piece of trivia instead of something that would ever become relevant again.

  And now, there were legitimate questions as to whether he would ever see his daughter again.

  Sighing, Mason knew the truth. He’d run from it. He’d pretended it didn’t exist.

  But it was there.

  Mason Walker, black ops special
ist, Navy SEAL veteran, was back in the game, whether he liked it or not.

  5

  Mason being back in the game, however, didn’t mean going in, guns blazing. Aside from the fact that he literally did not know where to go with guns blazing, it was also him against an unknown number of enemies. Better to figure out exactly how many men the other side had first and then formulate a plan than to haphazardly run into the equivalent of a machine gun.

  Instead, it meant doing the thing that he most hated while actually in the SEALs—diplomacy.

  He hated diplomacy because it wasn’t his job to talk to people. It was his job to kill them. They didn’t spend most of the time in SEAL training going over field exercises so they could make dinner plans with the enemy.

  In this particular case, though, it wasn’t even diplomacy so much as it was doing the whims of a shadow leader who had a disturbingly strong grip on him. He hated that he felt like whoever had set this up, whoever had his daughter, whoever had just spoken to him knew far too much about him. Because they were right in one regard.

  Mason did have connections.

  His time in the SEALs had given him access to a cadre of senators, politicians, behind-the-scenes string pullers, and other associates whom he knew could come in handy like this. Within his own platoon, he had access to several men who had moved from behind the barrel to enacting legislation about the barrel. There was little doubt Mason could work his way pretty high up in Washington D.C. if he wanted to.

  But he didn’t want to have to bring them in until the last possible second. The first rule of taking care of missions was that the fewer people that knew about it, the better. And among the people who did know about it, the less each individual person knew, the better.

  Although Mason needed allies, what he needed less of was people using the information against him as leverage or for blackmail purposes. God forbid that someone be working for the enemy and betray Mason—not that he thought any of his former associates actually would, but there could not be any risk taking, more than necessary.

  That probably explained a lot about why the voice had no further information about Harnad Abdi. Just as the voice knew Mason possessed a certain set of skills and a certain awareness, so, too, did the mastermind of the enemy have those skills and awareness, or at least the intelligence to not give everything out on a silver spoon.

  But that didn’t mean that Mason couldn’t conduct some research of his own accord, even if it was starting with the most public and obvious of information.

  Google was pretty scant on details about this Harnad Abdi, but it provided some information. Mr. Abdi hailed from Saudi Arabia and apparently was a diplomat of some kind to the United States from Saudi Arabia. If ever there was a joke of a title to Mason, it was “diplomat.” The job either meant a cushy gig for someone retired, someone who didn’t do much work, or it was a cover for something more. And given that the captor of his daughter wanted Mr. Abdi freed, it was an accurate guess to say that his duties went beyond shaking hands and filing meaningless reports about the state of relations between the two nations.

  The most that Mason could gleam from this was that he was coming from a nation that had, at best, complicated relationships with the United States, but that didn’t automatically make him the bad guy. Just as men from the allies could suddenly turn into hostiles, men from the other side or from backstabbing countries could also turn into friendlies.

  It was too early to tell.

  And that’s what drove him the craziest of all. He wanted resolution now, wanted Clara back now, wanted to go back on that coffee date and go back to planning trips in the Alps now.

  But he was not going to get any of that now or possibly at all.

  Mason bought himself a plane ticket to JFK, leaving in an hour and a half, and had his automatic car drive him to the airport. Though the expense was somewhat harsh given the quick turnaround nature of the flight and the relatively low pay of his current job, expenses were the last thing on his mind. If he had to burn through his entire financial assets to get his daughter back, well, that was not going to be the thing that stopped him.

  En route, he jotted down ideas and ways that he might get this Abdi character out of customs—and in doing so, he became more frustrated as he realized the conditions he wanted were about as far from the conditions that he wanted.

  He could use an alibi of some kind to persuade the officials to release him, but that would require bringing other higher parties into the game, and Mason didn’t want to do that until he had no other choice.

  He could ask others to take care of the job for him, but that had the same problem as Mason walking up to the customs office and demanding his release. Actually, it might have had even more problems, given that it would make Mason’s mission more known than it already was.

  He could sneak him out, but that would create a manhunt for Mr. Abdi and put himself in hot water. Mr. Abdi’s face would become the most searched for in all of New York City, and it wouldn’t do Mason any good to be in the same place as him. That was all but out of the picture, occupying an even lower rung than using his connections for help.

  He thought of sneaking him out with more violent means—less of a sneak out and more of a procurement, similar to how he had rescued Senator Charles’ wife and daughter all those years ago in Iran—but that seemed even dumber.

  Mason let out a sigh, his lips fluttering, as he realized his ideas were getting not just riskier but more into the realm of impossible. His brainstorming session was becoming less of a productive self-help seminar and more of a flippant waste of time. The more things he came up with, the more he realized he just had to get someone else involved who could pull some strings, put some orders in, and help Abdi get freed. There was just no other way—and, besides, didn’t it say something that the voice over the phone had suggested to Mason to use his connections?

  Would he really have suggested such a thing if he didn’t want it to happen?

  Or he’s laying a trap for me in the long run.

  And then it hit him.

  There might just be a way out of it.

  There was one person who, from Mason’s time in the SEALs, had gone on to take a high-ranking security position within the US government, so high-ranking that Mason only knew him by the title he was allowed to give: “senior security analyst.” It was no guarantee that it would get Mason what he wanted, most especially because he wasn’t even sure the person had the authority to direct customs, but, if nothing else, it would get the ball in the right arena. From there, he’d have to find the right section, the right aisle, and the right seat, but it was a far better search than trying out different arenas randomly.

  The only risk was that if this connection didn’t work out, a whole lot more would have to get involved, but with the mile markers for BWI Airport drawing closer and closer, the time for wanting things his way was waning rapidly.

  Ten minutes from the airport, he pulled out his phone.

  “T-101,” he said. “Go into incognito mode until I exit the vehicle.”

  “Acknowledged,” his vehicle said. “Shifting into incognito mode until you depart.”

  Mason waited for the vehicle’s dashboard to light up with that notification. A red sensor alerting “Health and Visual Tracking” for the driver flashed, and Mason immediately dialed the number of the man he knew would help him no matter what. Just be able to actually help me. Cuz if you can’t, I’m at a dead end right from the start.

  “Mason Walker?” the surprised voice said on the other line.

  “Luke Simon,” Mason said, smiling inside but stoic on the outside. “I know you missed hearing from me.”

  “I, uhh, damn, Mace, was wondering if I’d ever hear from you again.”

  Luke Simon, formerly Mason’s sergeant before he went into the SEALs’ black ops, was perhaps the man Mason trusted most—even more so than General Jones, back when Jones oversaw Mason’s unit. Luke had saved Mason’s tail on more than one oc
casion while overseas, and Mason, in turn, had done the same for Luke. They were closer than some actual brothers, and if anyone was going to help Mason in a time like this, it was Luke.

  It was Luke who had been the first to call Mason after Bree had passed. It was Luke who had offered Mason protection for Clara when she went overseas. It was Luke who had told Mason he had a job in D.C. anytime he wanted it.

  And, now, Mason had to request something that he wasn’t sure even Luke could help out with.

  “Yeah, you had legitimate reason to wonder that, but I can’t talk for long now. Luke, I need a favor from you.”

  “Hold on, Jason’s asking for directions.”

  Luke knew full well what that meant. The two only uttered such words when they needed to do something off of the books, and Mason had little doubt that Luke was going somewhere private. And there was only one place at where Luke worked that he’d get such privacy, the one sanctuary from cameras, sensors, and any other technology that had the ability to produce a record of someone going somewhere.

  “Forgive the echo,” he said, obviously in a bathroom. “Jason got his directions. What’s going on?”

  “There’s a man being held in customs at JFK by the name of Harnad Abdi,” Mason said, wasting no further time. “I need you to get him out.”

  “Wait, what?”

  I knew this wasn’t going to work. It’s asking too much.

  But… it’s gotta be done.

  Luke, you have to come through. There’s no negotiating this. You have to.

  “Mason, I don’t work in customs. I, uhh, I guess I could put you in touch, but—”

  “Luke,” Mason said, summoning his strongest “shut-down” voice that he could muster. “This is a favor I’m asking you. But I can’t be involving anyone else if I can help it.”

  A prolonged sigh came from the other end of the line. Mason held his breath, not sure that even Luke could pull this one off. He knew that he was asking a lot of his good friend, and if it ever came back to either of them, they were likely to be in a world of hurt. At best, they both would get fired from their jobs; at worst, they both could be seeing each other a lot more from a prison cell.