by Drew Murray
I grabbed the recycle bin from under Jack’s desk just in time to catch the green vomit smoothie. Ace backed out of the room, his job done, message delivered.
As I gasped for breath between heaves, I knew two things with certainty: first, I would never be able to unsee what Sterling did; second, I could feel my place next to Jobs, Gates, and Zuckerberg slipping through my fingers.
CHAPTER TWO
< Present Day >
A chime rings out from a speaker on the dresser, reverberating off tall glass walls. The sound from the mindfulness app reminds me of a temple in Okinawa. Once again chasing away the demons in my mind.
I keep my breathing slow and even. In. Out. Just as I’d been taught. I remember the smell of cypress and incense. The feel of bamboo under my feet. The taste of salt air from the ocean. With each breath, I push them away, one by one, until all that’s left is my breathing.
Stillness creeps into every corner of my mind and body. My shoulders relax. The steady thump of my heartbeat slows and fades away. Thoughts of Bruce Sterling and Fukushima will come back, they always do, but for now, there’s peace.
My phone vibrates in my lap, the familiar pattern for work, shattering the calm.
I open my eyes to a dark room, the moon reflecting off the ocean. Dim light pours through floor-to-ceiling glass around my bedroom. The time on the phone says it’s too late to be today and too early to be tomorrow.
The number is for FBI Headquarters in Washington. I swipe to answer.
Seven and a half minutes later, I’m showered and dressed, with this sweet travel bag I got from Kickstarter strapped to my back. As I step out into the night, the Southern California breeze coming off the Pacific is warm. Big oak doors close behind me with a satisfying thunk of the magnetic locking system. A Bureau car waits in my driveway.
“Nice place,” says the driver, gazing up at the ultra-modern collection of concrete and glass boxes. Young guy. White shirt, black tie. Bureau employee. Civilian. “Whose is it?”
“Mine,” I answer, tossing my bag in the back seat before climbing in the front.
“Wait, they told me you’re an Agent.”
“Special Agent.”
“Damn, the pay band sure is different for Special Agents,” he says, steering the car down the long driveway.
It’s not the first time I’ve heard comments like that. Won’t be the last, either. I may have walked away from Silicon Valley, but not the comforts. After the Sterling incident, I needed a change. I’d been taking for a long time and needed to give instead. Give away my money? Not a chance. I still own a large part of CastorNet, but someone else runs it.
A winding road led me to where I am now, giving something more valuable than money to the FBI: my time and talents. Theoretically, I work in the Cyber division, but reality is, I get called for any major case with a tech angle.
I’ve logged a lot of time on the road. But even for me, a wake-up call in the middle of the night from Assistant Director Burke, followed by a ride in a Bureau jet, is highly unusual. I love highly unusual.
“Big case?” the driver asks.
“Homicide,” I answer, without elaborating.
There’s a high-profile sense about the case, but Burke wouldn’t say what exactly, just that it’s top priority and sensitive. He told me to get on the plane, and I’d be met by another agent at the other end. A handler, if I know Burke.
He doesn’t like to let me work alone. I get it. The Bureau is a place that elevates structure and procedure to an art form. Burke is a product of that environment. So, it’s natural we don’t see eye to eye on my approach, which I call efficient, but he says is undisciplined, or something. What really chaps his ass though, is that I’m successful. I close cases.
Traffic’s light this time of night, even in LA. But somewhere out there in the darkness, someone’s dead. Who? Burke didn’t say. Why me? Whatever it is, it’s more than murder. Middle of the night and skipping about ten different protocols for the AD to put me on a Bureau plane? Sounds political.
Whatever it is, I’ll find out soon enough. Until then, I rest.
Hours later, the plane lands at a midsize airport as the sun breaks over the horizon. The Gulfstream was all right. The one I had was nicer, but you know, government modesty and all. Lavish interior or not, I know what each hour of flight costs. Someone thinks it’s really important that I be here right now.
The plane taxis to a hangar far from the commercial terminal. I look out at the fence line. Anonymous warehouses. Sleazy strip clubs. No trees. Thick green weeds poking up through cracks in the asphalt. When the door opens, I take a deep breath of humid but not sweltering air. My world is New York, and California. This isn’t either. It’s somewhere in between.
There’s another car waiting for me. Dodge Charger. Gray. Indiana plate with a dent in the bottom-right corner. No covert LEDs in the grill or the headliner, so it’s not Bureau. A rental.
Standing next to it is a tall, well-built, African American man, his back ramrod-straight as usual, tie flapping in the breeze. Thomas Decker.
“Will Parker, as I live and breathe,” he says with a smile. The one that car salesmen use to say: you can trust me.
“Decker. How’d they get you out of New York?”
“Love of country,” he says, taking my hand in a grip so firm that I stretch my fingers out when he lets go. “How’s LA?”
“Hasn’t fallen into the ocean yet.”
“Well, there’s still time,” he says, popping the Charger’s trunk. “Let me get your bag.”
As he tosses in my Kickstarter bag, I recall what I know about Decker: born in Chicago, raised in NYC. Football fan. Still loves the Bears, otherwise a real New Yorker. Military out of high school. Then college on a GI bill. Followed by the FBI. Last I heard, a Special Agent, Counter Intelligence division, out of the New York field office. Not someone you expect to find in Indiana.
“What’s the deal? Why am I here?” I ask.
“To uphold the law and serve justice.”
Oh yeah, and he’s wound a little tight.
We climb into the Charger and I look longingly back at the Gulfstream. They’re already spinning up the engines. I’m going to be here for a while.
“Burke told me there was a murder.”
“Correct,” says Decker stomping on the gas. The Charger leaps away from the hanger. “Victim is a white male, forty years old. A souvenir vendor at some kind of Comic Con thing that’s going on this weekend.”
A Comic Con? Sweet. I wonder what the guest list is like. Seems like even small Cons are able to get some decent screen talent these days. Maybe being stuck here won’t be so bad after all.
“Security found the body at 04:30 in one of the washrooms,” Decker continues. “Head cracked open. Blood all over the place. COD looks like the blunt force to the head, but waiting on the autopsy to confirm. Should have that by noon.”
Noon? Definitely political. Even in LA, autopsies take longer. Someone’s really put the heat on this case.
“Witnesses?”
“None. It happened sometime in the night, after the Convention Center was closed.
“And they didn’t find him until 4:30 a.m.?”
“Security patrols every few hours, but mainly they just walk around,” Decker says, shaking his head in disgust.
“Fine. A Con vendor gets his head bashed in sometime overnight. Why the Federal case?” I lean back in the seat, pulling on a pair of Maui Jims as the Charger gets onto the highway. I’m still on LA time, and in LA it’s early.
There’s a pause as Decker chooses his words. Here we go. The smoke screen. These Counter Intel guys are all the same. Spy hunters, shrouding everything they do in secrecy. Even from other agents. He’ll tell me only what he wants me to know.
“The guy behind this Con thing is a prominent businessman in the community. When local PD wanted to close down the event, he lost his mind. Made some calls.”
“Must have been some big calls t
o get an Assistant Director of the FBI out of bed.”
We drive on in silence for a bit as Decker concentrates on traffic. Eventually he pulls off the freeway and navigates through crowded rush-hour surface streets. He stops at a red light.
“Who is this guy? How’s he connected?” I ask.
“From what I can tell, he went to high school with the Attorney General.”
We’re here as lap dogs for some old puberty buddy of the AG? We aren’t your run-of-the-mill violent crime guys. Where’s the tech angle? And Decker? Unless the dead guy was a spy, there’s no reason for him to be here. He’s not telling me everything.
“Why not someone from the local field office?” I ask.
Decker looks over at me, trying to read me, but my eyes are covered by the reflective blue Maui Jims lenses. The light turns green and he hits the gas. Decker drives hard, direct. A habit, I suspect, he picked up overseas and not de-programmed during Warrior Transition training.
“Okay, so he’s got some weight.” I prod further. “Why the FBI? Why me? Why you? You’re still Counter Intelligence, right?”
“I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you,” he says with a smirk, looking at me out of the corner of his eye.
“So that’s a yes. Come on, Decker. A New York Agent from Counter Intel and an LA Agent from Spec Ops, Cyber. Because a guy got his head bashed in at a fan convention?”
Decker tilts his head and doesn’t say anything else, pulling into the drop-off area of a downtown hotel.
“We aren’t going to the crime scene?” I ask, frowning.
“This is it.”
“You said the vic was killed at the Convention Center.”
“There’s a secondary here,” he says, getting out of the car and handing the keys to a valet.
I roll my eyes, climbing out after him. Never the whole picture with him. Just dribs and drabs. It’s a pain in the ass.
CHAPTER THREE
When we get into the lobby, Decker heads straight for the elevators. The hotel is surprisingly upscale with a mahogany front desk, polished marble floors, and a well-furnished lobby. A few people sit around waiting for whatever it is people wait for. A stand-up sign invites me to check out the coffee shop, promising Kona’s finest coffee. This is the best news I’ve had all morning.
I peel off across the lobby.
“Parker, where are you going?” I can almost hear his eyes rolling.
“Fuel.”
He follows me in to find a corny little affair with Tiki idols and barn board walls. Hawaiian cowboys. Well, it’s the right island for Kona coffee. I’m feeling good about the chances for a decent cup right now.
“You need to know something,” Decker says.
“Like why Agents from Counter Intelligence and Cyber are consulting on a murder, and not an Agent from Violent Crime?”
“There’s more to it.”
“I bet.”
There’s no line when we walk up to the counter. A girl holding up her phone lifts a finger for us to wait. Teenager. No tats. No piercings. She turns slightly and flicks from the bottom of the screen.
“You’re hunting in here?” I ask, taking out my phone. “Anything rare?”
“Nah, just Pidgeys,” she says looking up at me. “But that’s okay, I’ve got a Pidgeotto I’m trying to evolve so I grab them when they wander in.”
“Pigeons? I don’t see any birds,” says Decker looking around.
“They’re Pokémon, Decker.” I wave my phone.
“I thought you wanted coffee.”
The girl puts her phone back into her pocket with a sigh.
“What can I get you?”
“Peaberry. Biggest you have,” I say.
She looks at me blankly.
“From Hawaii? Kona?”
“Oh, we don’t have that,” she says. “But we’ve got a Tropic Blend. That’s pretty much the same thing.”
Pretty much the same thing? So much for that. I’m now certain whoever owns this coffee shop has never actually been to Kona.
“Coffee is coffee,” says Decker. “It’s all better than what I drank in Kandahar. We’ll take two.”
“You’re killing me, Decker.”
Cups in hand, we make our way to a table by a window overlooking the street. No one nearby. It’s sunny. Warm.
“Upstairs is the vic’s hotel room. Local PD checked it out after they finished with the murder scene,” says Decker.
“What did they find?”
“A new state law came in last year. All crime scenes have to be swept for evidence of WMDs.”
“Weapons of Mass Destruction? Seriously? Here?”
They don’t even scan for WMDs in New York or LA without a specific reason. What the hell could they have found? I hope it’s not biological. Gross. I don’t want to go up there.
I take a sip of the Tropical Blend. Against all odds, it’s actually drinkable. Or, I’m just that desperate.
“Maybe some of the detection gear is made in-state. I don’t know why,” continues Decker. “What I do know is they got a hit on an empty case. Nuclear.”
The cup of Tropical Blend freezes halfway to my lips.
“Nuclear?”
“The radiation signature doesn’t match weapons, but it’s identifiable. The reading was consistent with an object exposed to the 2011 Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear accident in Japan.”
I put my cup down on the table hard enough that hot coffee splashes out of the lid. The scalding pain in my hand barely registers. He can’t be suggesting what I think he is. It isn’t possible.
Closing my eyes for a moment, I’m taken back to the night of the tsunami. I remember Ace delivering the news. I also remember Sterling’s grin of anticipation as he held that knife to Kate Mason’s neck. CNN flashing “Nuclear disaster” and “meltdown” beneath scenes of destruction. My stomach lurches just as it did then.
“That got your attention, didn’t it?” Decker smiles.
Manipulative bastard. He’s enjoying this. He knows the deal for Fukushima Semi fell apart that night, and I left CastorNet shortly after. He knows it’s important to me, and now he’s making sure I know who’s in charge. But he doesn’t know about the rest of that night. Watching someone die because of my mistake.
Decker doesn’t know that I went to Fukushima and bribed TEPCO workers to let me search the radioactive hot zone in a hazmat suit. He doesn’t know that I followed up on every rumor and lead for months, no matter how sketchy. He doesn’t know that when I finally admitted it was over, I didn’t have the heart to come home for an entire year.
Salvaging the Fukushima deal became my way to make amends for the colossal fuckup that got Kate Mason killed. Something so good for the world, it would make up for what I’d done, even if I was the only one that knew it.
“The Fukushima Unicorn.” The words feel thick coming out of my mouth. Like a foreign language.
“It looks that way,” he says, nodding.
It isn’t over, after all. My mind races with the possibilities, thoughts colliding until I can’t keep them straight anymore. I force my breathing to steady. In and out. Find the calm.
We tried to keep the deal secret, of course, but a company as large and high-profile as CastorNet couldn’t keep a lid on it. Word leaked out that we were on the verge of acquiring quantum computer technology, representing a giant leap forward, from a small company in Fukushima, Japan. During the tsunami and nuclear disaster, it disappeared. In the absence of details, people started calling the missing technology a Fukushima Unicorn because no one left alive had seen it. Except me.
“How do we know this isn’t another wild goose chase?” I say. “People have been claiming to have known someone, who knew a guy, who saw it, for years. It’s become an urban legend. That’s why they call it a Unicorn.”
“How many urban legends do you know that are radioactive? The lab confirmed it,” says Decker, shaking his head. “It’s legit.”
The initial shock fading, I force
myself to confront logic and reason. When I’d finally managed to get to Fukushima, everything was gone. Cleared out. The building empty; the people vanished. It was like they’d never even existed. I checked every evacuation center, ryokan, and minshuku for two hundred miles. Nothing. All I ever found were rumors.
“Confirmed what?” I ask, shaking my head. “That something that used to be in that case was exposed to radiation from the Fukushima-Daiichi accident? Do you have any idea how big an area of Japanese countryside was irradiated? Everything in the exclusion zone got hot.”
I let Decker get to me, and that’s not good. I don’t want a guy like that knowing how to push my buttons. In my defense, he ambushed me. He acts all friendly, but to him I’m just a pawn in his game. Best to let him think that, for now.
“Can you take that chance, Will?”
I can’t, and he knows it. Bastard.
“Tell me about this empty case.” I pick up my coffee and take a long sip.
“Pelican case. Hard shell, foam padding inside with a cutout the right size and shape for a Unicorn.”
A good sign. It sounds right. The genuine Fukushima Unicorn would be bleeding rads. If someone had made it out with the Unicorn, I would have found them. Which meant the Unicorn had to have been left behind when the radiation hit the area. In addition to providing protection for the Unicorn itself, a lead-lined Pelican case would contain the radiation, protecting whoever carried it.
“They found it here? Vic’s hotel room, I take it?”
“Correct.”
Decker takes a drink from his coffee, quick, despite the temperature. He sucks in air to cool the coffee in his mouth. No retreat. Push through. His eyes dart around scanning every face in the coffee shop, and those on the street he can see through the window.
All Decker’s looking around is making me paranoid. Who does he expect to find in this little slice of middle America? I suppose if you chase shadows long enough, you start to see them everywhere.
“What else is in the room?” I ask.
“Right now, a local crime scene tech and a homicide detective. They’re waiting for Uncle Sam’s experts. That’s us.”