Assume the worst. She’d done everything she could to not set off the Bureau’s alarms, to not leave a trail at headquarters, but even the hardest-packed sand showed footprints. But why would they have looked? It didn’t matter; obviously they had. What next? A BOLO to all the field offices. A warrant for—no, forget the warrant, a national security letter, no judges—freeze what’s left of the bank accounts, search the house, track the rental car, track Paul’s phone, track her work phone.
Her Bureau phone. She’d left it on the dresser. That might buy them a minute or two.
What’s their next move? Come up all four stairwells, recall the elevators to the ground floor, post guards on all the exits. They’d have someone at the car. There might be a chopper or a drone overhead to spot anyone leaving the hotel. Any minute now, the entry team would discover she was gone and the beds were still warm. Then they’d search all the common areas. After that, all the guest rooms.
They were out of the room, but she and her family were still in a cage.
The kids hung onto each other, their eyes sleepy but scared. Nora squatted before them. “I need you both to be very, very quiet, okay?” she whispered. “You need to do everything I say and Daddy says and don’t ask why.”
“Why?” Hope whispered.
“Are we in trouble?” Peter asked.
“Shh. I’ll explain later.” She tried to smile at them—it felt completely wrong—then stood and stepped close enough to Paul to whisper in his ear. “They’re after me, not you, not with all this force. If we get stuck, I’ll lead them away. You get the kids out and call Juan, okay?”
“No way,” he hissed back. “I’m not letting you—”
“Don’t argue,” she snapped. She hated to cut him off, but this wasn’t the time. “Take the batteries out of the slates and your phone.” Nora kissed Paul, patted down some of his bedhead, then kicked off her shoes. “Watch the kids. I’ll be right back.”
The gray-painted concrete steps were cool against her bare feet as she tiptoed down to the landing just above the fifth floor. Her brain clicked into combat mode, shoving her emotions into a mental closet and spinning up the part that made plans and decisions. Complete the mission. Get out, get safe.
Boots paced on the next landing down. A radio squawked. “Sierra Eight,” a voice grumbled. Pause; then, “Negative, Sierra Six, all clear.”
Nora filled in the pause: “Did you see them?”
She’d reconned the hotel after they checked in. Each corner of each floor had a camera covering the two intersecting corridors and the stairwell door. The one on the fifth floor would’ve caught a perfect picture of her whole family charging into the stairwell…which the command team would be seeing just about now.
Guards in the stairwell. Cameras in the halls. Trapped.
Back on seven, Nora tugged on her shoes while her brain sorted through the possibilities. A search team would be in this stairwell any second. She and her family had to be gone by then.
The only logical move was the most illogical one.
“We’re going up,” she whispered, pointing toward the ceiling. “Quiet.”
The little sounds they made climbing the steps—clinks, sniffles, the squeak of a rubber sole on concrete—banged off the cinder-block walls. Every moment, Nora expected SWAT or the Quick Reaction Team to burst through the doors above and below them.
As they passed ten, a metal door squeaked open a few floors below. Nora caught the hush of a whisper, the tinkling of web-gear hardware. The search team, in stealth mode. She glanced behind her. Paul was two steps down, his arms wrapped around Peter, pressing her son’s face into Paul’s neck. She hefted Hope, patted her back and resumed the climb.
At each landing, she held up a hand and stopped to listen. Rubber soles scraped concrete a few flights below. Radios hissed, then fell silent. They were getting closer.
As she climbed, Nora considered what they might find when they reached the top. If the Bureau had a helicopter, it would be circling at roof level, and the pilot and spotter would be wearing NVGs. There’d be no way out. But choppers were expensive and loud, and she hoped the QRT brought their small drones instead. They’d fly twenty or thirty feet above the ground so their cameras could pick out the faces of anyone exiting the building, leaving the roof open.
Nora scurried up the last two flights of stairs to the roof level. As she set Hope on the floor, her daughter opened her mouth to say something. Nora pressed her fingers across Hope’s lips, shook her head. Paul made the landing, deposited Peter next to his sister, and sighed in relief. “Long way up,” he gasped.
“Shh.” Nora pressed her ear against the metal door leading outside. She heard the hum of machinery, Paul’s panting, the kids’ squirming next to her, and the relentless scratch of boot soles on concrete drawing closer. No helicopter. She held up a finger to Paul, took a deep breath, and slipped outside.
She crouched on the steel-lattice deck, watching for moving lights or heat distortion in the city lightscape beyond the roof. No alarms, no camera above the door, just a flickering florescent bulb in a metal cage. No helicopter. Praise Allah.
She pulled open the door and beckoned to her family. Paul herded the kids out. “Now what?” he whispered in her ear.
“Go to the back of the building. Stay low, move fast. Go inside the next stairwell, but stay at the top. Wait for me.”
“Wait.” He grabbed her arm. “Where are you going?”
“I have to do something. I’ll just be a minute.” She hoped. Nora stepped back into the stairwell and carefully closed the door behind her.
Shuttling between stairwells wasn’t going to fool anyone very long. They had to get away, but with the guards and drones watching the exits, they couldn’t just walk out. They needed a diversion, something to overload the Bureau teams.
Like a fire alarm.
The boot-shuffling sounded very close now. Nora slithered down the steps, her heart thudding at triple time. Every second she expected to see men pointing guns at her. She craned her head to see around the corner at the bottom of the first flight. Nobody on fourteen, the top floor, but she could clearly hear breathing.
Nora scrambled down the last stairs, not caring how much noise she made—they’d know where she was soon enough—and burst out into the atrium. She yanked the plastic fire alarm handle so hard it broke off in her hand. An ear-splitting drone filled the hotel, drilling through her skull. Nora pelted down the corridor toward the opposite stairwell. A glance behind: the first agent had just leaped into the corridor. She crashed through the metal door, dashed up to the roof again, burst out into the warm night.
The alarm wasn’t as obnoxious outside. She jogged to the building’s opposite corner, where her family waited, picturing elevators full of SWAT and QRT heading to the fourteenth floor to flood down all four stairwells. They’d assume she’d try to get down to the ground floor. Going up made no sense—she’d be trapped with no way out except over the side.
They didn’t know her family wouldn’t be the only ones going down the stairs.
In the northwest stairwell, both the kids buried their heads in Paul’s stomach to escape the noise, while Paul plugged his ears with his index fingers. His grimace told her it wasn’t working. His lips said, “Let’s go!” but she couldn’t tell if he spoke or just mouthed the words.
Nora shook her head at him, held up a hand to signal “stay,” then ran down to the landing between the roof and fourteenth floor. As the first confused, sleepy people in bathrobes stumbled out through the door just below, a pair of SWAT agents shoved through them and pounded down the stairs, carbines ready. She signaled to Paul to come down slowly.
By the time they passed the tenth floor, a herd of thirty or more evacuees surrounded them, some fully dressed, some in sweats or shorts, others in less. Nearly half were children; carrying the kids, she and Paul blended in perfectly. Nora put her ball cap on Paul. She set Hope down on the landing above eight, rummaged through the carry-on and
found her dark-blue FBI fleece. She turned it inside-out to hide the seal, pulled it over her sleepshirt, then flipped up its hood. At least she didn’t look so much like what the cameras had seen of her.
An Asian man in an FBI windbreaker stood at the fifth-floor stairwell door, watching the crowd go by. Nora’s heart tripped into overdrive. What if he recognized her? Could she attack one of her own? She hefted Hope higher in her arms, looked down at her feet, tried to avoid the agent’s gaze. She saw his eyes flick from face to face, sometimes shifting to get a better angle. Occasionally he’d glance at the slate in his hand. Nora managed to catch a glimpse: a stillframe from the hotel security video, just minutes old.
Nora shuffled past the agent.
Hope blocked her view, and his. She saw his head bob, trying to look at her face. Her flight instinct sparked through all her muscles. She’d run if she had to, put Hope down and bull her way through the crowd. She wouldn’t get very far, but it only had to be far enough to let Paul get away with the kids.
No shout, no hand on her shoulder. She turned the corner to go down the next flight of stairs. Nora started to breathe again. She hugged Hope, said a little prayer of thanksgiving. This was going to work. It had to work.
On the ground floor, a SWAT guy just outside the alarmed exit door had a finger jammed in one ear and all his attention on his radio. Nora slipped past him, melting through the knot of shuffling evacuees into the parking lot. A drone whined overhead, paused, then its blinking red marker light disappeared around the next corner. So far, so good.
Paul herded the kids around Nora. “Now what?”
She’d walked the grounds when they checked in. A parking lot surrounded the hotel, leaving no cover for fifty yards behind the building, then a Ryantown in an old park.
Nora pointed toward the tents and draped tarps crowding the long-dead grass. Here and there she could see people moving around or watching the show at the hotel. “We’re homeless now,” she said. “Let’s go meet the neighbors.”
15
Ryantown is the popular term used in the United States to describe organized encampments of unhoused people on abandoned or neglected land, especially former public lands such as parks…A 2030 UN-HABITAT study revealed that 81% of Ryantown residents of all ages are employed, but at wage levels that do not support traditional housing arrangements within practical proximity of their workplaces.
— “Ryantown,” Wikipedia
WEDNESDAY, 5 MAY
A distant ringing sound dredged Luis out of a dream that evaporated the moment before he was awake enough to remember it. Why was the bed so hard? Then it came to him: he and Bel were still playing emotional chicken, and he was still sleeping in the garage. Damnit.
He fumbled for the burner phone next to him on Rilie’s ratty, fake Turkish rug. “Huh?”
“Mr. Juan? It’s Nora.”
What the fuck? He pried open his eyes, squinted at the time on the phone’s screen. Two-eleven. “What’s wrong?”
Her hesitation woke him up. “The Bureau…came for us at the hotel. We got out—”
Luis hijacked the conversation. “Where are you? Are you safe?”
“For now, I think. We’re in a Ryantown behind the Embassy Suites on Harbor south of Disneyland. It looks like it’s on an old driving range.”
“Cops?”
“They’re all over the hotel, locals and Bureau.”
After they got done with the hotel guests, they’d widen the search, start busting up the Ryantown. Nora and her people didn’t have much time left. Luis woke his personal phone, brought up Google Maps, zoomed in on the area and switched to satellite view. “You need to get out of there ASAP. Did you leave your work phone in the hotel?”
“Yes,” she snapped. “We also took the batteries out of Paul’s phone and our slates.”
“Good move. Are you with someone now, or just hanging out?”
“We’re with Jiminy Cricket.”
“What?”
“She works at Disneyland, she wears the Jiminy Cricket costume. I guess she can’t afford rent. Why?”
“Keep moving. See if she can get you into the neighborhood just west of the park. I’ll pick you up at the apartments on Chapman—that’s south of you—just east of Debbie Lane. Cricket should know where that is. Hide in the parking stalls until I call you. Got it?”
“Okay. How long will it take? The kids are scared to death.”
“I’ll be there. Give it an hour.”
Or less. He needed the money more than the cops did.
A police helicopter picked its way across the sleeping neighborhood next to the apartments, its spotlight stabbing into the back yards below it. Its clatter filled Nora’s ears and brain. Did the locals have drones out, too? Ones that could pick up their infrared signatures in these carports? Waiting was agony, but she had no choice. It was up to the narco.
Nora’s hand ached from trying to crush her burner phone. The last time Juan called, he said he’d be here in a couple minutes. So where was he? “Do you see him?” she snapped at Paul.
“I’ll tell you if I do, all right?” He was in the next garage over, lost in the darkness.
The kids hid in the shadows behind Paul, eerily silent. She hadn’t told them that their lives were about to change forever. Now they’d learned in the worst possible way, and it was all her fault.
“A car’s coming,” Paul announced.
A sedan’s red taillights and white backup lights rushed down the driveway toward them. Nora drew her weapon and slipped into Paul’s garage. Another unneeded bucket of adrenaline drenched her system. What would she do if it was a cop? Could she shoot a badge?
The car—a newish Toyota—chirped to a halt under the balcony overhanging the next garage. The locks clunked. Nora slithered toward the opaque driver’s window, pistol ready.
The glass whirred down. Juan scowled at her. “Get in. Now.”
The car darted out of the driveway before Nora could even grab her seat belt. They jolted onto a broad street flanked by apartments and split by the dead landscaping of a median strip.
Juan demanded, “Were you followed?”
“Not that I saw.” Nora buckled up, then stretched to touch Paul’s knee in the back seat. He cradled Hope, whispering to her as she blubbed into his chest. Peter clung to two fistfuls of his father’s sweatshirt and stared at Nora with eyes the size of poker chips. Twin knives stabbed her heart.
“The Cricket?”
“Um…I gave her some money. I think she thought it was all a big adventure.”
“Great. Let’s hope she doesn’t tell her friends at work about it.”
A patrol car blazed by going the other way, its light bar strobing. Nora’s overloaded system jammed instead of reacting. She was wide-eyed exhausted, her body trembling, thoughts pinging off her skull like rain, emotions tumbling like a pack of weasels fighting over scraps.
The next coherent thing out of her mouth was, “Where are you taking us?”
“To a safe house. You’ll stay there until I can move you.”
“How safe is your safe house?” Paul asked. “We don’t need to do this twice in one night.”
“We change them out pretty regularly. We haven’t lost one in ages.” They swung right onto a two-lane street that rapidly turned into dark, struggling-to-stay-respectable residential. Juan checked the mirror, then glanced toward Nora. “Why come for you now? Why tonight?”
“I don’t know.” Nora sort-of knew but needed Juan to focus on his job, not her. “Maybe AAI went on the list today. Maybe they’re after Paul.”
Juan frowned. “I drove past the hotel. It’s a zoo, too much for one lawyer. What did you do?”
Before Nora could cobble together a convincing lie, Paul said, “It’s about me. I have contacts. They probably don’t want me using them.” He leaned forward. “I’m Paul Khaled, by the way.”
“I gathered that.” Juan nodded to the mirror, then turned to Nora. “Your FBI buddies. How much of the
stuff on the web is true?”
“You don’t know?”
“I deal with ICE and CBP and the Border Patrol, not the Bureau. What’s their next move?”
Was it that different? A few moments’ stuttering thought confirmed it was. “They’ll track me. Us. They’ll track us.”
“No joke. How? What do they track?”
Her flight-combat-mother-wolf reserves of energy were collapsing. Her nerves pulsed from adrenaline withdrawal and lack of sleep. Nora sagged in her seat, buried her jittering hands under her thighs. She whispered, “Everything.”
“Define ‘everything.’” Juan’s voice was growing harder.
“Everything.” Nora wrestled the manual into the front of her brain. “The IDs and credit cards, the bank accounts, email, online memberships. Mobile service on the slates. The phones.”
“Okay, so you stay offline.”
“Black boxes in the cars.” Her voice sounded dead to her. “Toll passes. Gas pumps. Private security cams. Traffic cams. ATM cams. Dash cams on PD units.” A thought stumbled into focus. “We’ve got to avoid the cameras.”
“That’s why we’re on a side street. Besides, the windshield and all the windows are blacked out. Keep talking.”
She’d seen that and forgot already. She was becoming a hazard. “Oh. Look, I…I haven’t slept since Monday. Can you just get us to the safe house? We can go over all this in the morning.”
Juan swooped into a fire-hydrant space along the curb, swung on her. “No. The game just changed. I need to know—right now—exactly what to expect. So talk.”
If she wasn’t completely wasted, she’d take his head off, but her body had pulled her emotional drain plug. Focusing hurt like childbirth. “Whatever. Fine. Let’s just…go.”
The Toyota lurched back on its way. “Right,” Juan said. “What if they get a hit on you?”
Nora screwed shut her eyes while she corralled her thoughts. “Okay. We’ll get a tower dump, throw blanket wiretaps on—”
“A what?”
“A tap on all the phones using a particular cell tower so we can find the right one. It’s how we get around people having burners.” She watched suburbia scroll by without seeing it. “That works for a limited area, like a block or two usually and static. We have to get NSA to help for bigger searches. That’s a pain. They’re slow and hard to work with. If we—”
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