Prodigal Son

by Gregg Hurwitz

  After retrieving a backup vehicle from one of his safe houses, Evan had circled the El Sereno block a few times, checking for strategically parted curtains, lookouts in parked cars, or binoculars flashing from neighboring roofs. Once he was convinced that the approach to Duran’s home was clear, Evan had left his silver Nissan Versa four blocks away in a parking garage beneath a strip mall and strolled back. He dressed generically as always—gray long-sleeved T-shirt, jeans, and an Angels hat pulled low enough to shadow his face.

  A spin through the databases in the Vault had given him some insight into the man Veronica wanted him to find. Andrew Duran was of average build, not unlike Evan, and he’d checked “Some Other Race” on the last census form. From his record he seemed like another hard-luck guy who couldn’t get his act together. Information on his childhood was sparse, but his sealed juvenile records showed the usual small-time busts in his late teens—possession of pot, vandalism, truancy. He’d seemingly cleaned up around the time most young men go to college or to prison, knocking around a number of jobs, the kind that put grease under the nails. Since then he’d collected an ex-wife, Brianna Cruz, and an eleven-year-old daughter named Sofia. A credit report showed a canceled Mastercard and a bank account that had hovered between seventeen and thirty-two dollars for a few months before it was closed. He’d struggled with debt and traffic fines, but the DCSS database showed no issues with his paying child support. He was currently an attendant at a parking lot for impounded vehicles.

  “Currently” meaning up until a month ago, when a murder was committed at his workplace and he went missing.

  It was the kind of shocking news that—given how Evan had arrived at his doorstep—wasn’t shocking at all.

  The impound lot’s security footage had been conveniently knocked out for seven minutes around the time of the attack, which had taken place at 3:09 A.M. In the wake of the killing, the city had begun to shutter the lot after six at night, a precautionary response to stave off potential lawsuits. The Los Angeles Times suggested that the murder might have been an inside job.

  Duran was wanted for questioning in connection with the death of Jake Hargreave, but law enforcement had failed to locate him. Evan had perused the reports and the crime-scene photos. Hargreave’s body had wound up sprawled on the asphalt, eyes open in an unnerving stare. As he’d fallen, his wrist had snapped under his weight, the hand swan-necked down as if Hargreave were displaying his fingernails. A bulky guy, air force, lots of gym muscle. A cross pendant had snagged on the collar of his shirt, caught in a nest of thin gold chain. One pant leg was hiked up, revealing the smooth-shaved calf of a triathlete. More blood had leaked from the gash in his neck than seemed possible, darkness spread beneath his body like a blanket.

  A BOLO had been issued for Duran through multiple agencies, but nothing had trickled in. Evan had also checked his credit cards, banks, and cell-phone number, but Duran had done a fine job keeping invisible.

  Or he was already dead.

  The cops had presumably checked his house already, but Evan wanted to nose around himself.

  He paused at the end of the walkway now, staring at the path of stones leading to the front door. So many questions.

  Why had Jake Hargreave been killed?

  Had Andrew Duran killed him?

  Or had Duran witnessed the murder and fled Hargreave’s killers?

  And the big question resting beneath the others: Who was Andrew Duran to Veronica?

  Starting up the front walk, Evan reminded himself that he was just looking into the matter informally. He’d not done anything except fly to Buenos Aires and have a conversation with a long-lost relative. He’d yet to cross any lines that would put him back on anyone’s radar and void his presidential pardon.

  Like, say, breaking and entering at the house of a murder suspect in a high-profile case.

  Reconsidering the consequences, he veered off from the front door to the side of the house. He’d just check the backyard, peek in a few windows, nothing invasive.

  Blackout shades protected the panes, giving up nothing. The small backyard was a work in progress, too, the crumbling patio replaced at one corner with new tiles. The remaining tiles waited in a lowboy dumpster puddled with rainwater. A jungle gym, half assembled by the rear fence, collected spiderwebs. As with the rain gutters, these projects had been halted abruptly sometime ago—certainly well before Duran had disappeared. What had caused him to abandon the home repairs? And the jungle gym, clearly purchased with eleven-year-old Sofia in mind?

  A yellowed newspaper fluttered beneath an unlit citronella candle on the patio table. It was written in a foreign alphabet rich with circles and right-angle strokes. Korean.

  Was Duran dating a Korean woman?

  Did he have a Korean houseguest?

  Keeping an eye on the drawn shades of the back windows, Evan stepped beneath the lattice roof of the porch and slid the newspaper free. The date at the top was rendered in both Hangul and English. Five weeks old. Beneath the paper was a junk flyer with a yellow post-office sticker forwarding the mail of Chang-Hoon Baek to this address.

  Evan assembled a theory. In need of money, Duran had sublet his house to Mr. Baek, abandoning his home-improvement projects when he moved out. Judging from the take-out menus accruing on the front porch and the five-week-old newspaper, Mr. Baek had been out of town since before Duran went underground.

  The cops would’ve already searched the house for Duran, figuring out what Evan was only now learning: that they were in the wrong place.

  Evan paused abruptly, sensing something amiss. Was someone watching him from the darkness at the yard’s edge?

  He looked for a crack of light beneath the drawn shades. A breeze picked up, whispering through the yellow leaves gathered at the base of the porch. They silenced.

  He heard it then, a telltale buzz branded into the memory center of his brain.

  You never forgot that sound.

  Not even here, wildly out of context, eight thousand miles and an ocean away.

  It was as faint as a bee, now a touch louder.

  Incoming.

  He stood frozen, staring up through the lattice roof at the clear night sky.

  Then his knees unlocked.

  He took three big strides across the porch and launched himself at the lowboy dumpster.

  A whooshing noise filled the air all around now, as if the sky itself had drawn a massive breath.

  He cleared the 18-gauge-steel lip and crashed down on top of the stacked tiles an instant before the house exploded.

  15

  A Million Pieces of Evan

  The lowboy dumpster rocked up nearly onto one side and then crashed back down, a cascade of tiles battering Evan’s shoulders. He boxed his head with his arms, blinking against the dust. The sky had turned desert brown, the air filled with flecks and splinters.

  He dragged himself over the edge of the dumpster and flopped flat on the ground, his head throbbing. The house was gone, a heap of tinder and flame in its place. Half a bathtub nosed up from the rubble like a breaching whale. A tangle of ducting, twisted improbably into a yarnlike ball, smoldered inside flapping sheaths of insulation. A crater dented the earth at the center where the house had taken the full force of the missile. Black smoke lingered over the site, a miasma of gloom.

  Shrapnel was embedded in the outside wall of the dumpster, protruding like porcupine quills. The jungle gym by the rear fence was gone, as was the rear fence itself; the wreckage of both floated in the neighbor’s pool. The air tasted poisonous. It smelled of burning rubber and plastic, a scent familiar to Evan. The only thing missing was the acrid reek of burning flesh. His head hummed, his eardrums throbbing distinctly enough that he could feel the pressure of each heartbeat.

  A drone strike. On U.S. soil.

  He pictured it circling invisibly two miles overhead waiting for the blossoming smoke to clear, a seamless extraterrestrial aircraft the size of a Volvo, held aloft by a modified snowmobile engi
ne. A silver-gray assassination weapon with a smooth windowless bulb where a cockpit would be, at once eerily blind and all-seeing. Gauging the blast radius, he figured the missile to be a Hellfire launched from a Predator. Fifteen to twenty meters of damage meant they were intent on getting the job done. Even if that meant deploying a seventy-thousand-dollar missile.

  They could have gone with a Reaper, faster and smaller, and its Small Diameter Smart Bomb, which could kill a man in the bedroom while sparing his wife in the neighboring kitchen. But here at Andrew Duran’s house, they clearly didn’t want to take any chances.

  The ultra-high-resolution infrared camera in the rotating sensor ball beneath the Predator’s nose would be scanning the area now, heat-sensing body outlines, while other surveillance gear searched cell-phone signals, logged SIM cards, even read license plates on the surrounding streets. At the first sign of life, a software program aptly named BugSplat would calculate the best angle of attack and analyze collateral damage. Then a pilot in a trailer somewhere would be cleared hot to deploy the second Hellfire, a sensor operator would sparkle the target with an infrared flash, and a million pieces of Evan would join the incinerated debris filling the air.

  Unless he moved fast.

  The dust cloud continued to mushroom, and Evan knew he had to stagger free before it dissipated. His shirt was torn, the brim of his baseball cap scorched. He reached into his pocket and thumbed the RoamZone off, removing any digital signature from consideration. Rather than stumble out of the splash zone, he clawed his way into the heart of the wreckage, using the smoke as cover. His palms and knees burned as he fumbled around for what he was looking for. Over the sound of his own hacking, he could hear people shouting from the street, tires screeching, car alarms shrilling all up the block.

  A crowd would be useful to lose himself in.

  Grit lodged in his eyes, tears streaming down his face. At last his hands sank into something soft and scratchy.

  The duct insulation.

  One-inch fiberglass with foil facing.

  He tore a massive sheet free. Wrapped it around himself to block his body’s heat signature. The fiberglass dug at his raw skin and his scalp as he hobbled across the ruins, finally reaching level ground.

  He moved across the backyard, through the blown-down fence, past the neighbor’s pool, and up the side yard. Emerging on the far street, he shot up an alley, drawing a few stares. Ditching the fiberglass cape, he tossed his baseball cap into a trash can and popped out another block over, walking leisurely up the sidewalk, keeping tight to the storefronts, tucked beneath awnings.

  He imagined the Predator ten or fifteen thousand feet up, watching bodies streaming around the accident site in real time, trying to locate which one was Evan.

  And that’s when it occurred to him.

  They hadn’t been aiming at Evan.

  With his hat pulled low, his long-sleeved shirt, and his average build, he resembled Andrew Duran. They’d been watching the house from above, waiting on Duran’s return. And the instant he’d surfaced, they hadn’t been willing to delay to deploy an assassin for a controlled neutralization. They were willing to risk tens of thousands of dollars and a massive cover-up just to take Andrew Duran off the chessboard.

  Which prompted the question, what the hell did that guy know?

  They’d no doubt watched Evan circle the house earlier and disappear beneath the roof of the back porch.

  It took a missile between fifteen and thirty seconds to reach its target, during which they assumed he’d entered the house.

  He’d survived for only one reason, and that was because he’d been held up on the patio, reading Mr. Chang-Hoon Baek’s newspaper.

  Evan finally reached the covered parking garage, ducked into his low-end Nissan, and gripped the wheel. It was shaded and quiet down here. He realized he was breathing hard, his chest heaving. That his clothes were smudged with ash. That his eyes were still watering.

  Eight knuckles lined on the top of the steering wheel, all of them squeezed to pale. His hands trembled slightly. He stared at them. Made them stop.

  Any drone strike on U.S. soil had to have been ordered from within the deepest recesses of the government. It would be a full-black, fully deniable operation. He knew the drill: Tomorrow’s news would say it was a water-heater explosion. As if a water heater could unleash a blast wave sufficient to crush internal organs, turn a house inside out, and aerate a concrete foundation with high-velocity steel shrapnel.

  When General Atomics weaponized a drone in 2001, the state of warfare had been irreversibly altered. Pilots assumed a godlike power, hovering above the fray looking down, unleashing a thunderbolt from the heavens when they saw fit. For them it was a bloodless, odorless, soundless affair, more like hunting than fighting. Drones were what the DoD had hoped would make Orphans defunct, but they’d learned soon enough that human operators were still required on the ground. Those who would bear the risk and the cost. Those willing to get close enough to feel the warmth of the blood, to hear the suck of lungs through a slit throat, to smell the wreckage of voided bowels, the last hot fumes of life expiring.

  The only good news was that they’d taken their shot—a norm-destroying illicit operation on U.S. soil—and they were unlikely to risk another cover-up. There were only so many atomic water heaters they could claim in the news.

  Evan wiped the sweat off his forehead, left a streak of blood and ash. He’d have to clean up at the safe house before showing his face at Castle Heights. Then he’d regroup and figure out just what the hell was going on.

  He thumbed on his RoamZone and called Veronica’s prepaid phone.

  She answered quickly. “Hello, Private Caller.”

  “Are you trying to have me killed?”

  “What? Of course not.”

  Evan made out voices in the background—a dinner party? He thought he recognized the sharp timbre of former fútbol star Chancellor Matías Quiroga’s voice fussing about something.

  Veronica hushed whoever it was, came back to Evan. “Why would you ask that?”

  “Because I went to your guy’s house and it blew up.”

  “It doesn’t help to exaggerate, dear. But I’m sorry you’re finding it troubling.” Then, sharply, her mouth off the receiver, “I said I’ll be there in a minute.” Back to Evan. “I’m doing my best to get to Los Angeles tomorrow.” She rattled off a Bel Air address. “I should be there by midday. Why don’t you come by around one? A little mother-son time.”

  He could hear the smile in her voice, but he wasn’t in the mood.

  “What kind of trouble is this guy in?” Evan asked. “Duran?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” she said. “He was terrified when we spoke and not making much sense. All I know is that there are people after him. And that he’s scared for his life.”

  Evan said, “He should be,” and hung up.

  16

  Outsize Monikers and Well-Honed Skills

  A long-term-storage shed with a roll-down orange door was admittedly an uninspired place to commit torture. But one had to work with what one had. And it was quiet enough here, with the oceanic roar of the 110 Freeway a stone’s throw away, to work on a human body without worrying about being overheard.

  The space was mostly empty.

  A toolkit.

  A sufficiently heavy chair.

  And the man zip-tied to it.

  To avoid getting blood on his slim-tailored suit jacket, Declan Gentner had removed it before entering and had left it with his sister outside as she preened in her little red Corvette. Queenie could stomach a good deal of violence, but she lacked stamina for the slowly escalating infliction of pain.

  While the man in the chair whimpered, Declan removed his platinum cuff links and rolled up the sleeves of his nonwrinkle royal oxford shirt. Growing up broke-ass in east Philly, he and his sister had risen through the ranks of Irish organized crime as wetwork contractors before they outgrew the operations employing them—and the ci
ty itself. They both had nicknames, as was a prerequisite for working with any self-respecting East Coast outfit. Given Declan’s sartorial proficiency and the resonance of his surname, he earned the title of “The Gentleman.” And due to Queenie’s talent for bloodletting and her penchant for the color red, they called her “The Queen of Hearts.”

  Just another pair of unwanted siblings from Kensington with outsize monikers and well-honed skills. Their mercilessness drove their asking price ever skyward until they were renowned on both coasts. Now they didn’t get out their implements for a job that paid less than seven figures. This narrowed their client base to venture capitalists inclined toward creative accounting, sociopathic scions with inadequate prenups, moguls tangled in inconvenient partnerships. It had been a long climb from the gutter, but they’d arrived, shouldering up to the trough, elbow to elbow with the elite. Local kids done good.

  Declan stroked the thin, meticulous lines of beard that edged his jaw. Zip-tied in the chair, Johnny “Mac” Macmanus shuddered. He wore his thinning hair scraped back tightly over his scalp, secured with a man-bun at the nape. It had the unfortunate effect of making it look as though he were wearing a hairnet. “I wish I had anything to tell you, man. Anything. And believe me I would. I don’t give a shit about him. Do I look like someone with honor?”

  “He worked with you for seventeen months. He let you borrow his car.” Declan made a conscious effort, as always, to deepen his voice. He had all the musculature of a welterweight boxer, with the voice of Mike Tyson. He wet his lips, the tip of his tongue brushing the fine strip of mustache riding the bottom edge of his upper lip. “I don’t let anyone borrow my car.”