Prodigal Son

by Gregg Hurwitz

“Right.” Andre shivered. “’Member that broken window in Papa Z’s laundry room?”

  Evan smirked. “How could I forget?”

  “We had to get our wet clothes into the dryer fast, or that shit would freeze.”

  “That one time Ramón snapped his sock in half—”

  “His big-ass feet. Size thirteens.”

  Evan said, “At least he got his own gym shoes.”

  “Right. We had them two pairs we had to share depending on who had gym that day. Size-eights and size-tens. We’d rotate that shit.”

  “Man, those things stank.”

  “What are you complaining about? When we were overcrowded, I had to share a bed with Tyrell, and he’d wet the sheets, and I’d smell like piss all the next school day.”

  Evan was laughing now. “I remember that.”

  “Shower off with that Boraxo powder hand soap Papa Z lifted from the gas-station bathroom, be like scraping my skin off with sandpaper.”

  “And what was with that generic mac and cheese?” Evan said. “Yellow box with black lettering. Tasted like cardboard and cheddar.”

  “And we couldn’t even eat that when Papa Z would go out ’cuz our dumb asses couldn’t figure out how to turn on the stove.” Andre laughed. “Wait. Van Sciver knew how to turn on the stove.”

  “Then he’d eat all the food, though,” Evan said.

  “Charles Van Sciver. Shit. ’Member that fool?”

  Evan’s smile faded. “I do.”

  “He left a bit after you. Same guy came for him. Mystery Man. Van Sciver was all puffed up. Left one day, and we never saw him again, just like you. Wonder what ever happened to him? You ever see him again?”

  “We had to work some shit out,” Evan said. “Later.”

  “And?”

  He hesitated. “It didn’t go well for him.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Evan could feel the heat of Andre’s stare on the side of his face. He studied the lot across the street, hoping for the line of questioning to die.

  “At least tell me what you guys did,” Andre said. “After they took you. Where’d y’all go?”

  The kiosk went dark.

  Evan held up a hand to silence Andre.

  The worker emerged, locked the door behind him, and trudged to the front gate. He slid it shut, looped a chain through the bars several times, and secured it with a heavy-duty padlock. Then he climbed into an ancient BMW 2002 covered with more rust than paint, and the vehicle coughed its way up the street and around the corner.

  Evan and Andre sat in the relative quiet for a moment. Then Evan slid a laptop from the backseat and pried the lid open. The impound lot’s Web video server had a serious vulnerability. Its string input parameters hadn’t been type-checked or checked for length, so Joey had crafted an overly long POST request for Evan to deploy when he needed it. It would cause a buffer overflow, escalate privileges using another vulnerability on the system, execute Joey’s shellcode as root, and let Evan intercept and replace the video stream.

  With a few clicks, he did that, and the footage showed the empty impound lot on a perennial loop. He could lead a marching band up the main aisle of wrecked cars and the stream would show nothing but a deserted tract of vehicles.

  Andre watched, his mouth ajar.

  Evan exited the truck. Andre trailed him to the gate, fumbling with his keys. They got through the padlock and entered. Evan paused, sensing a note of danger vibrating the night air.

  He went back and left the gate open in case they needed to beat a quick retreat.

  32

  Lifelike

  Andre stood at the spot where Hargreave had bled out, staring at the dark blotch on the asphalt. His cheeks looked heavy, shiny with sweat. “He died right here,” he said, his voice strangled, like he had to push out the words. “And it was my fault.”

  But Evan had no interest in Andre’s guilt. He scanned the street once more and then moved cautiously to the kiosk. A shiny new lock assembly secured the door. As Andre came up behind him, Evan lifted the tiny rake pick and tension wrench from his back pocket.

  “Don’t have that key,” Andre said. “I broke off the old key in the lock, so they replaced—”

  Evan twisted, and the lock released with a click.

  Andre said, “Dayum.”

  They entered the tight space, the motion-activated light clicking on overhead. Triangle desk in one corner. Tall file cabinet. Security monitors showing hacked surveillance footage—an abandoned lot, a locked front gate, and a dark, empty kiosk. The room hadn’t been cleaned anytime recently, which was good given what Evan was looking for. The scent of musky cologne lingered.

  Andre waved a hand in front of his nose. “That’d be Juan. Motherfucker smell like he bathed in Old Spice.”

  Evan crouched by the crappy rolling chair and searched the linoleum, running his fingers along the seams where floor met wall. He assumed the cops would have missed it, because they wouldn’t have known to look for it. And he figured the Gentners wouldn’t risk returning to a crime scene to get rid of a dispensable item. Even so, it could’ve been thrown out or stepped on.

  “What are we looking for?” Andre said.

  “Eyes up,” Evan said. “Watch the street.”

  He rose so his gaze came level to the desk. Crumbs, mouse pad, keyboard, outdated Dell Inspiron desktop, chipped coffee mug, legal pad shaved down to a few sheets and covered with doodles. He checked behind the computer and then turned, frustrated.

  The file cabinet.

  Rising on tiptoes, he gazed across the dust-layered metal top.

  There it was, resting toward the back, expended.

  He reached carefully, picked it up by a fragile metallic wing, and placed it on his palm.

  When he pivoted in the tight space, Andre was waiting, his stare locked on the item resting in Evan’s hand. “Did you just find a motherfucking metal dragonfly?”

  “It’s a KAM.”

  “Come again?”

  “A kamikaze assassination microdrone.” Evan gazed down at the delicate robot on his palm. Amazingly lifelike, easily mistaken for an actual dragonfly. It weighed no more than an AAA battery. The slender body, the size of a snap pea, wore a tiny processor like a backpack. Beautiful translucent wings veined with carbon-fiber, camera and microphone mounted on the head, copper electrodes visible beneath the metallic blue polyamide coating.

  Protruding from the face was a wicked-looking stiletto blade, about an inch and a half in length, its silver tip colored with bright arterial blood.

  Hargreave’s.

  Andre reached a finger to poke at the dragonfly but couldn’t seem to muster the courage to actually touch it. “They stabbed him with this?”

  Evan pictured the surveillance footage Joey had produced, Declan holding out his hand as a launch pad, the near-invisible KAM taking flight from his palm. And his attempt to recall it after it had taken out Hargreave.

  “Yes,” Evan said, tilting the wings to the light. On the underside a tiny etched logo featured an M with wings sprouting from the letter’s outer downstrokes. “These things can fly, hover, and perch. Some of them can even store a solar charge and stay afloat indefinitely. We got lucky that you locked it inside the kiosk. And that you weren’t in there when it came in to puncture your throat.”

  “Who the hell are these people?”

  Evan slid the microdrone into one of his cargo pockets and pressed past Andre, relieved at the rush of fresh air greeting his face. “That’s what we have to figure out.”

  Andre skip-stepped to hold pace at Evan’s side. “So drone people killed Hargreave. And drone people blew up my house. And Hargreave was a drone pilot.”

  “Which is why I have to talk to his sensor operator ASAP, find out why they were discharged a few months ago.” Evan approached the wrecked Bronco bookending the nearest row of vehicles. It was a sorry lineup: a VW Bug missing two tires, a Ferrari with a front trunk twisted open from a collision, the carbon-fiber lin
ing giving off a stoical gleam.

  “I’m going with you,” Andre said. “To talk to the sensor operator.”

  A MINI Cooper puttered by on the road ahead, and Evan halted, reaching back to put a hand on Andre’s chest. He waited for the car to pass and then resumed walking.

  “No,” Evan said. “And watch the street.”

  He passed in front of the Bronco’s smashed grille, his Original S.W.A.T. boots grinding over glass pebbles. He tugged at the passenger door, which gave with some resistance.

  Andre hovered at his back. “What are you doing now?”

  “This is where Hargreave was looking before you interrupted him.”

  “Right,” Andre said.

  Evan knuckle-tapped the pine-tree air fresheners dangling from the rearview, sending them into a twirl, and then searched the top of the dashboard. Nothing.

  His gaze caught on a sticker adhered to the inside of the windshield. He swung out of the truck and looked at it through the glass. An elaborate security hologram of the air force base’s insignia—a robotic set of wings rising from a five-pointed star.

  He leaned close. The hologram was elaborate and—given the drone innovators’ capability with and fondness for lasers—no doubt embedded with covert laser readable imagery. The features hidden inside the hologram could be verified only at a security checkpoint with a control device endowed with proper input illumination.

  They’d let Hargreave keep it on his windshield to lure him back.

  It had worked.

  Rendered in white against white at the bottom corner, as subtle as a watermark: INS NORTH.

  It took a moment for Evan to recognize the capital letters as the Federal Aviation Administration three-letter identifier for Creech Air Force Base.

  But this was slightly different.

  Not Creech. Creech North. Evan had never heard of it.

  He whipped the Strider out of his pocket, the refined-grain particle blade clicking open, and Andre took a step back. “Whoa, Nelly,” he said.

  “Watch the street.” Evan leaned back into the cabin and gently sawed the knife beneath the sticker’s edge. The corner popped up, and then he was able to pinch it and peel it free intact.

  It disappeared into another cargo pocket.

  Andre slapped one hand with the other. “So that’s what Hargreave came back for.”

  Leaning back, Evan saw that the Little Tree air fresheners had stopped spinning, revealing a visitor parking pass hung in their midst.

  He slipped the permit hanger free. CALIFORNIA VETERANS REINTEGRATION CENTER. One-day pass. The heavily guarded compound in Fresno where Hargreave’s sensor operator was being rehabilitated.

  Something behind Evan clicked, shifting the shadows.

  His head snapped over, his hand moving toward his holster, but it was just the motion-sensor lights turning themselves off in the kiosk. He untensed his back muscles, then straightened up.

  Over Andre’s shoulder a set of headlights flared at the intersection. As the car continued in the direction of the open front gate, Evan made out the model.

  A Tesla Model S.

  Tinted windows.

  Like the one that had passed them earlier.

  Midnight silver instead of pearl white. Different license plate. Los Angeles was lousy with Teslas.

  And yet the First Commandment spoke up in the back of Evan’s mind: Assume nothing.

  His body stayed on alert, Andre keying to it. “What?”

  “I told you to watch the street,” Evan said.

  At the far end of the facing road, another Tesla turned into view. And then another. The third plate Evan recognized.

  The vehicles sped up, converging on the open front gate.

  33

  Search and Destroy

  Evan’s pistol was in his hand instantly, his Woolrich tactical shirt still gaping at the belly where he’d reached straight through it for his holster. The faux buttons were held together by magnetic closure, the halves now refinding their mates, the shirtfront clapping back together.

  At his side Andre made a strangled noise that barely emerged from his lips.

  Evan pulled him down behind the Bronco and ran a quick calculation. Eight rounds in the magazine, one in the spout. His cargo pants had low-profile inner pockets on either side hiding an extra mag, which put twenty-five rounds within reach.

  He’d recently upgraded to Gorilla Silverbacks. The Silverbacks had excellent terminal ballistics with huge cavities in the ogive and premachined fracture lines that allowed them to expand rapidly to two and a half times the original caliber. When the hygroscopic effect was elicited, they basically turned into grappling hooks, punching a hole big enough to vastly increase the chances of hitting something vital. A downside of the expansion was that they didn’t always defeat soft body armor, which called for precision shooting—throat, head, pelvic girdle. But he preferred them in situations with noncombatants present, since he didn’t want his rounds going through walls into the next room or through the intended target into a no-shoot.

  Right now he would have taken something with more penetrating power. An assault team this well coordinated would come with body armor.

  He stared at his Ford F-150 through the gate and across the street. The job of his pistol was to get him to that truck, because the locked vaults in the bed held World War III. But within seconds the Teslas would be between him and it.

  Outnumbered. Less-than-optimal ammo. Cut off from a munitions upgrade.

  This would go down very fast, one way or another.

  He ran a quick tap-and-tug on the ARES to quadruple-check that the magazine was full. Taking a high, firm grip on the pistol to disengage the grip safety, he snapped off the manual safety with his thumb and swung up to peek over the hood of the Bronco, tracking the vehicles over the barrel. He liked a narrow front-sight blade and a lot of light around the blade in the rear-sight notch. The Teslas breached the front gate, flashing into the lot—one, two, three.

  Evan ducked back down. Andre was looking at him as if he’d never seen him before.

  “Are these guys here to kill me?”

  Evan said, “Probably.”

  “What are you gonna do?”

  “Ascertain whether they are. And if so, kill them first.”

  Andre’s mouth gaped a bit.

  Behind them headlight beams strobed through myriad shattered windshields, the vehicles nearing.

  Evan head-tilted at the Ferrari backed into the space next to them, the maw of the front trunk low and beckoning and reinforced with bullet-resistant carbon-fiber. “I need you to get in.”

  “What? There’s no fucking way I’m gonna—”

  Still crouching, Evan grabbed Andre in a wrist lock, forced the joint to urge him off the ground, and flipped him into the trunk.

  “Stay here. Don’t move.”

  Andre blinked up at him as Evan slammed the lid. It wedged shut with a grinding of metal.

  Staying low, Evan pivoted back to the Bronco and peered through the side windows.

  The Teslas neared the dark kiosk, spreading out.

  Driver and passenger doors opened in concert. Two men spilled out of each car.

  Gym-burly, dark polo shirts, black Polartec masks covering the lower halves of their faces—everything about these men screamed private military contractors.

  Down to their slung MP5s and the Browning Hi-Power clones on their hips.

  The six men fanned out, forming a semicircle around the kiosk.

  Raised their submachine guns.

  And aerated the kiosk.

  The sound was thunderous. Glass shattering, wood splintering, the flimsy paneling yielding under the barrage until the kiosk sagged to one side.

  No concern about being heard or seen—they were here to neutralize Andre at any cost and kill anyone else who got in the way.

  One of the men—the team leader?—moved to the door and kicked it open. Surveyed the interior. Shook his head. Backed out.

 
His voice carried to Evan. “We need the scene completely cleaned. Witnesses and—if need be—first responders.” He nodded at his partner. “Diaz, hold center position at the kiosk. Go.” He gave a quick circle of his upturned finger, a command to search and destroy, and then climbed into his Tesla and got on the phone. Reporting back.

  The other five operators pivoted to the rows of cars, spreading out, each taking a different corridor through the wreckage. Evan flattened to the ground, praying that Andre would stay silent.

  The Bronco was high enough that he could roll beneath it to note the men’s positions. The heftiest operator and the two heading to the darker outskirts of the lot flipped down monocular night-vision headgear for hands-free. The two staying nearest the kiosk held tactical LED high-lumen flashlights; the tallest shoved his Polartec mask down around his neck, holding the flashlight between his teeth so he could wield his MP5 with both hands. The team leader waited in the Tesla, his form visible behind the windshield, phone pressed to his cheek.

  Outnumbered six to one, Evan would have to delay giving away his position as long as possible. And determine who to pick off first.

  Jack’s voice came to him as a memory-whisper: The Ninth Commandment: Always play offense.

  Evan gauged the men as they started to disperse, watching their chests and the mist pattern through the Polartec masks to assess their breathing. The hefty guy sweeping the aisle on the north side of the lot and the tall man with the flashlight in his mouth were both jerking in breaths, not quite panicked but not far from it either. The team leader’s partner, Diaz, was circling the kiosk. He looked dead calm, like he’d done this too many times with a positive result, cocky enough to let his guard slip. The other two with monocular night-vision displayed good combat breathing, shuddering intakes, slow exhalations. Appropriately alert but not too nervous.

  They’d be the most dangerous.

  Evan rolled out from under the Bronco, darting low through the next row of cars, threading past a jagged bumper, and planting himself along the trajectory of the tall operator with the readied MP5 and the flashlight clenched between his teeth. Evan sank low behind a Pathfinder with half its hood sheared off.