The Search

by Alex Howell

  “Well done, Mason,” the voice on the other end of the line said. “I knew we did well in choosing you to help run our mission.”

  “I’m not your errand boy,” Mason growled. “Tell me what I need to do next before I take these three for a swim in the Hudson.”

  “To the point. Another reason we like you. You do not waste time.”

  “You sure seem to be, though.”

  A pause came, almost as if Mason had caught the computer voice off-target. Perhaps, he thought with a small sense of satisfaction, he had even angered him. Or her. Or maybe even it, if a computer program could be angered.

  “Very well. You need to drop these three men off at an abandoned warehouse in Harlem.”

  “OK,” Mason said. “Good start. Don’t know if you know this, but Harlem isn’t a building, it’s a giant neighborhood. Do you mind telling me the address?”

  “I think we’ll let you figure this one out,” the voice said. “I think—”

  Two thoughts crossed Mason’s mind at that point.

  One, he needed two minutes so that Tessa, wherever she was—surely doing what she needed to do to remain hidden—could track down these guys and he could go on the offensive.

  Two, he needed reassurance that Clara was safe.

  So don’t get to the point. Stall out some.

  If Tessa’s even in range at this point.

  “—your training will help you figure it out.”

  “OK,” Mason said. “But I want reassurances that my daughter is safe right now. I haven’t gotten a word in a few hours.”

  “Your daughter is quite alright,” the voice said. “You must trust us, Mr. Walker. You can be assured—”

  As if making a point, Mason stopped the car suddenly. The self-driving cars around them moved around him with ease, though the three men in the vehicle with him all swore as his slamming on the brakes caused them all to jolt forward in surprise. One raised his gun, but Mason knew a bluff when he saw one.

  “You broke into my house, you helped me free what I assume was a terrorist from customs, and you just had me gas an entire building. And you want to talk about trust? No, whoever or whatever you are, there is no trust between us. I’m not going anywhere until I hear from my daughter.”

  Silence came on the other end of the line. Worried that they had hung up, Mason quickly checked his phone to see that he was still connected, which the ticking timer advised he was.

  “Here she is.”

  “Dad?”

  The switch came so quickly that Mason hesitated for a split second. It felt jarring, like two recordings changing pace—like someone could not possibly have had time to move the phone from their hand to her mouth.

  But that was really Clara’s voice.

  She sounded OK. A bit pained and a bit weak, but not as if she was on death’s door.

  “Clara, baby!” Mason said, trying to get past her sobbing. “Thank God. Are you hurt?”

  “No, but I’m scared,” she said through tears and whimpering. “Dad, I don’t want to die, I don’t—”

  “Listen to me, baby, Clara, listen,” Mason said. “I’m going to get you out of there. I promise you that. OK? You just do what they say and I’ll make it right. Don’t disobey them. I’ll get you out.”

  “OK, Dad, thanks, love you.”

  “I love you—”

  But then she was pulled away, leading to some more distant screams.

  It was of great relief to hear his daughter’s voice once more, but damn if he didn’t get nearly enough time with her. Whoever this was had clearly told her to hurry up. Clara would not have rushed through her words there at the end normally.

  Sure enough, the voice’s sigh announced its presence back on the line. Mason went from grateful and relieved to raw anger once more.

  “Such emotional sentiments are sweet but unnecessary to the mission, Mason,” it said. “As, I might add, was the help you had earlier from your old lady.”

  Oh, crap.

  “Whoever you were seeing, you better have not gotten help from her,” the voice said. “That had better have been a concerned relative. You will not like it if we find out that she was helping you.”

  Now it was Mason’s turn to go quiet. No longer needing to have the vehicle stopped, he drove it toward Harlem, allowing the silence to weigh on the phone caller and the three men in the room.

  But how could they not have known that she was helping him? Were they playing with him, testing to see if he’d lie to them as a means to punish Clara? Or did they really not know?

  It seemed completely infeasible that they wouldn’t know she was helping him, and yet it actually seemed that way. Don’t believe anything that seems a certain way. You have to verify it. So answer him by not answering him.

  “Do you understand us, Mason?”

  “Loud and clear,” Mason grumbled, giving what little he was willing to say.

  “Allow me to make it even clearer for you,” the voice said. “You get help outside of us? You lose your loved one.”

  With that, the line disconnected. Crap.

  He couldn’t just give up Tessa’s help so easily. It was the only feasible way for him to play offense, and without it, he was doing nothing more than abetting terrorist activity. He had to assume that this was another bluff, especially since Mason still had the three men in the car. It might be a fatal mistake, but in the absence of trust, only leverage worked. And the only leverage they—whoever “they” were—had on him was his daughter.

  If she went, so did the mission.

  But, for right now, he had one more job as errand boy since he knew Clara still lived.

  Get the three men in his car the hell out of the vehicle in Harlem.

  12

  Given that the remainder of the car ride was spent in absolute silence, Mason spent as much of it as he could going over hypothetical scenarios.

  The most important question revolved around “Where is my daughter?” If he could rescue his daughter, then they lost all leverage; Mason could call in support from the authorities, and any potential threat would be eliminated.

  The problem was that he literally had no idea where to begin. She could have been in the house over from him in Baltimore; she could have been captive in some random city like Chicago; she could even be in the basement of a plane that some rich terrorists had taken over, placing her now in someplace far away like France, Nigeria, or Vietnam.

  There was literally just about no place she couldn’t be.

  Logistically, given the brief window between when she had gotten kidnapped and when he had seen her on the video feed, her location was most likely somewhere within an hour or so of their home, but there was no reason to believe that the terrorists would have kept her in one location. About the only thing going against that notion was the idea that it would take a lot of effort to move her and keep her hidden, but given the highly advanced nature of these pros, that seemed too easy.

  So the question had to change to something that could be more defined, something that Mason could operate off of. Where were the terrorists operating out of? What building? What floor? What room?

  Tessa would hopefully get the answers to that question, but even that would just give him a starting point. While it might have had the added bonus of also being where Clara was, there was the significant chance that they had diversified their locations, meaning wherever Tessa was…

  Except that when Mason had asked to speak to his daughter, she’d gotten on the line almost immediately.

  So perhaps the terrorists and his daughter, or at least the cell communicating with him, were together. In that case…

  Well, it was up to Tessa to pull through. He had to see her again, somehow get it across to the eye in the sky that she was not helping him for the purposes of the mission. And he had one advantage—it really, genuinely seemed that the terrorists had no idea who she was and what she was doing for Mason.

  He would have to sell their meetings as somethi
ng else. A relative, or a date, perhaps. They obviously had eyes on him even when he was not in obvious locations—perhaps they hadn’t gotten a good face scan of her in his car, but she couldn’t remain hidden forever—so if he saw her again, they’d have to make it quick and out of sight.

  That was not an impossibility, but Mason knew so long as he had the three enemies in his vehicle, there was a perfect zero chance of that happening. This problem had to be taken care of. Tessa could wait until the completion of this particular task.

  And then? Well, perhaps it was time Mason went on a good date with someone for the first time in years.

  He made his way to Harlem, driving aimlessly down each street, making something of a snake pattern as he moved his way through the self-driving cars, trying desperately to search for the right warehouse—of which he had literally no identifying information. With that in mind, he tried to focus on the drive itself. Though Mason had come to enjoy automatic vehicles for their ability to let him work on other matters, they also had a nice feature that angry New York drivers often did not—self-preservation.

  He could move in a hurry, swerve, cut off, and the vehicles did not honk or try and cut him back off. Vengeance was not in this particular AI, and it made his job all the easier as he moved through. He would take whatever benefits he could get right now, no matter how seemingly small.

  Only after about five streets and six turns did the man in the front put a hand on his shoulder and say “Stop.”

  Mason slammed on the brakes.

  “Where’s your warehouse?” Mason asked with the hope of getting some sort of information from the three men.

  But they all got out without a word, even as Mason asked again with fake charm. Damn. These guys are good. Too good.

  Just before leaving, the first one, who had sat in the front with Mason and communicated with him the most, turned, made a motion to his gun, and said, “Keep driving.”

  Mason at first refused, trying to keep an eye out on the other two men who were moving ahead. But the first man actually placed a hand on his gun, and Mason had no choice. Some bluffed, but these guys did not look like the type to do so—they looked more like the meatheads meant to execute the physical aspects of such operations instead of the intellectuals who often did not fire for purposes of self-preservation.

  Mason moved forward slowly, keeping his eyes on the rearview mirror as best as he could. He saw a sushi shop, a fried chicken shop, a grocery store, and…

  The three headed into an alleyway—not even a building could serve as a guide. It was both a literal and a metaphorical dead end.

  Still, he made a mental note of the location of the alleyway that supposedly had the warehouse, committed it to memory, and swore for Clara’s sake he would not forget this detail. Nothing could be left to chance—it was just too damn bad that the men had left their gas masks on, making anything other than their somewhat-audible accent difficult to decipher.

  As soon as Mason cleared the street, he parked at the nearest spot he could find, jumped out of his car, and backtracked to the alleyway he’d dropped the men off, hand on his hip so he could pull out his gun if need be.

  He passed by a few civilians and made it a point to walk as casually as he could. The last thing he needed was the locals losing their minds about a shootout or, worse, getting involved themselves. He needed to keep this contained as best as he could—if that meant using his hands and arms on the streets instead of guns, so be it.

  He reached the corner, took a breath, reached for his gun, and turned.

  But when he turned the corner, he realized they had faked him out.

  There was nothing in the alleyway but dumpsters, windows, and a homeless person sleeping on cardboard with a sign that said “Automation took job, anything helps.”

  He quickly looked around, trying to find a warehouse nearby, but all he saw were local mom and pop shops, the kinds of places that no terrorist would commandeer for the attention it would have received. And if they had gone into one of those shops, they had done so on purpose—there was no way he would ever get them to come out or would succeed in a quiet manner.

  Whatever chances he had at following a lead here were shot to hell. He’d lost the men. He’d lost clues. But he couldn’t lose his chance to go on the offense. He couldn’t lose out on the larger mission on the whole.

  He pulled out his phone, hesitating for only a second. He knew that there was a decent chance—actually, a pretty high chance—that his phone was being tracked or, at a minimum, having his conversations intercepted. He needed to make his message subtle and not so obvious.

  It was a risk he needed to take, even with their threats about what they would do to Clara.

  He typed in Tessa’s number, saw that the last text he had sent her was from over ten years ago, and breathed a small sigh of relief. He hadn’t said anything to her, nor her to him, about what had happened today. If he had, there was literally no point to the cover—but at least this way, there was a reasonable chance he could keep the game going long enough to help his daughter out.

  “Hey!” he wrote her. “Long time no chat. In NYC for business—want to catch up? ;-)”

  He felt ridiculous typing as his daughter would have and wasn’t even sure that the winky face was something people used to flirt anymore. He felt so out of the loop that he now realized how old he was—he was no longer the hotshot eighteen year old out of Concord, Georgia, but instead a father, a man with a teenager daughter. If that didn’t say “old man,” nothing much did.

  “Oh, do I? ;-)” she wrote back almost immediately. “What kind of catching up do you want to do?”

  This is so ridiculous. Why did I have to go with the former lover angle as cover? Why couldn’t I have picked literally anything else?

  “The fun kind,” Mason wrote with a bit of a desire to vomit, realizing that he had been out of the game of flirting as much as he’d been out of the game of SEAL operations. He felt like the teenager who just wanted to know the exact right thing to capture the girl’s heart, but instead stumbled over his words, sounding like a massive dork.

  That, and the whole thing just felt more than a little inappropriate, and not just because he suspected Tessa was still married.

  “Come to the bar on 15th and 2nd,” she said. “O’Paddy’s. Why don’t we have a couple of drinks there first and then have some… excitement?”

  I really hope you know what you’re doing, Tessa. You have to know these are being tracked.

  I trust you, but, damn, if that doesn’t make me uncomfortable going to a place you just wrote out for anyone reading these to see.

  Damn, this doesn’t feel like the most ridiculous thing ever.

  “Deal ;-)”

  Mason put his phone down and looked in the driver’s window just before getting inside. His face had turned a bright red. At least if they were tracking him with street cameras, they’d see he looked more than a little ridiculous.

  “Oh, how embarrassing,” Mason grumbled to himself.

  Just don’t call me for a little bit. Or, if you do, wait until I’m with Tessa.

  Something has to go right today.

  His phone rang then, and he answered it, frowning a little at the odd number that showed up. “Hello?” He asked with a cautious tone.

  “Mason, it’s Jack.” Jack Jones’ voice came through the line crystal clear. Mason’s heart leapt in his chest.

  “Jack! There you are… I have been hoping to hear back from you. So… did you find anything? Do you have anything at all?” Mason asked, his blood coursing through him like lightening.

  “It’s tough to say, Mason. There are a couple of ways that it could go. It almost really depends on what you know. Do you have any kind of leads yet? Do you have any idea at all who might be behind this?” Jack sounded as if he was trying to figure out a jigsaw puzzle and Mason was holding the missing pieces of it.

  Mason shook his head and grimaced. “I really don’t. They’ve got me on some
ridiculous, wild goose chase, and I have never been so frustrated with anything in my life, but I have no choice. I have to do this. I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place.”

  Jack sighed. “Well, that doesn’t do much to help me. There wasn’t a lot to go on in the files you sent me. It would be more helpful if you had any kind of clue as to who it might be that’s so hell bent on coming after you, but since you don’t know, that leaves the possibility wide open on this end, and it leaves us with too many options to narrow it down at all.”

  Mason closed his eyes and dropped his head. It wasn’t at all the news that he had been hoping for. Jack spoke again.

  “Do you have anyone else helping you on this? Be honest with me, Mason. This is no time for confidentiality concerns.” Jack’s voice took on an unrelenting tone.

  Mason considered what he should and should not say, but in the end, he knew that Jack was right. He had to lay all his cards on the table if he expected to get anywhere with the search for his daughter. He couldn’t ask his friends for help and then not give them the information that they needed to help him. “Yeah, I do have a couple of friends who’ve stepped in to give me a hand with it.”

  “Old mates from your SEAL days?” Jack asked, knowingly.

  “Yeah.” Mason nodded and opened his eyes again, looking around but not really seeing what was before him.

  “Any names you care to share with me?” Jack continued.

  “Luke Simon.” Mason began, wondering if he should mention Tessa or not. She was his ace, and he wasn’t sure he really wanted to give that away, but he knew that Jack probably needed everything he had. “And Tessa Rogers.”

  Jack was quiet a moment. “Those are a couple of names that I haven’t heard in a long while. Have they been much help to you?”

  Mason shrugged. “Some. Not enough to locate my daughter or get her back, but I’m further along with them than I would be without them.”

  “Very good.” Jack replied. “I’ll keep looking on this end and see what I can come up with. I’ll check back with you if I uncover anything.”