Prodigal Son

by Gregg Hurwitz

  “Well, as a retirement gift, how ’bout some barrier-blind Black Hills HoneyBadgers.” Tommy toed open another drawer and produced several cartons of ammo. “Picked these puppies up at SHOT Show last year. Designed to penetrate intermediate light barriers and not break up. We’re talking windshields, doors, Sheetrock, body armor—they fly true straight through to point of aim. A hotter load’ll get you through both sides of a IIA vest. But when they hit anything gelatinous?” A whistle escaped that front-tooth gap. “They go hollow-point.” He slammed the cartons down into Evan’s arms. “You’ll be stacking bodies like they’re cordwood.”

  “Appreciate it,” Evan said.

  “Hey, it’s good to have an uncle in the furniture business.”

  Evan loaded his magazines, slipped them into his cargo pockets, and snugged the ARES into his Kydex holster.

  “I want a pistol, too,” Joey said. “I prefer a subcompact like a SIG P238, same reliability as a large frame—”

  Evan said, “No.”

  “You never let me do anything.”

  “You’re standing in a semi-trailer filled with enough munitions to take out a Panzer division, and we’re riding off next to break into a military installation.”

  “Right.” Joey popped her mouth. “Fair point.”

  Evan squared to head out. “Tommy, you know anything about Creech North?”

  Tommy paused, palm resting on the handle of the vault door, his face suddenly serious. “Where’d you hear about Creech North?”

  “Thing I’m looking into.”

  Tommy’s bird-nest eyebrows rose. “You’d best watch your taillights. We’re talking Area 6 now.”

  “Area 6?” Joey said. “That like Area 51—Nevada and alien remains?”

  Tommy nodded somberly. “Best way to cover a conspiracy is with a conspiracy. And 6 has long been a high-security testing site for unmanned aerial vehicles. Deep-black R ’n’ D with lots of private-sector overlap. That place doesn’t exist.”

  “That’s okay,” Evan said. “Neither do I.”

  “So where is Area 6?” Joey asked.

  “Remote detachment northeast of the Yucca Flat test site,” Tommy said. “Right in that big expanse of bumfuckery between the 93 and the 95. Undeveloped, unincorporated, short private-jet flight to the geekdom of Silicon Valley and all that tech. You playin’ around with drones?”

  “No,” Evan said. “But they’ve been playing around with me.”

  “Hold up.” Tommy ambled past Evan, flattening him to a rise of crates with Hebrew lettering, and started digging through a trunk in the back. “Hold this.” He handed Joey a rocket-propelled grenade, which she admired gingerly. “And this.” Now she bobbled a white-phosphorus grenade. “Ah. Here we are.”

  He walked back to Evan and pinched a thin rubber device no bigger than a money clip to the hem of his shirt. “You’re dealing with drones, you need infrared sensor protection.”

  Joey came over. “No way. Is that a miniaturized coarse head Laser Warning Receiver?”

  Tommy’s wiry eyebrows rose, his forehead wrinkling. “You ain’t the average girl.”

  “No shit.”

  He frowned respectfully. “It is. Since pretty much all military targeting systems use a short-wavelength IR laser—”

  Joey: “—that are around 1550 nanometers—”

  “—this tiny receiver here”—Tommy thumbed up the clipped device to show a pinhead lens—“uses Indium Gallium Arsenide sensors—”

  “InGaAs, right!” Joey said.

  “—to detect if you’ve been lit up by a covert illuminator, and then…” Tommy squeezed the device between thumb and finger stub, and it gave off a three-note bugle salute.

  “Taps?” Evan said. “Really?”

  Tommy shrugged. “Hey, they let me customize it. Besides, when it’s warning that you’ve got incoming, you think your ass is gonna get finicky about musical selection?”

  “Like you have any taste in tunes anyways, X,” Joey said.

  They were shoulder to shoulder, staring at him, their heads on parallel derisive tilts. They even blinked in tandem.

  “Your sudden rapport is alarming,” Evan said.

  Together they said, “What do you mean?”

  Then they cracked up.

  “Hey,” Tommy said. “It’s just refreshing to be around someone without a room-temp IQ for a change.”

  Joey said, “Seriously.”

  Evan turned to open the metal door, realized it was locked.

  “What’d I tell you?” Tommy said. “Case in point.”

  He held up a four-and-a-half-finger hand, and Joey high-fived it.

  40

  Proper Identification

  Evan left the truck a few miles from the California Veterans Reintegration Center at a Zipcar location where Joey had reserved a homely white Nissan Sentra under a fake name. He locked the holstered ARES and his ammunition in the truck vaults in anticipation of high security at the military compound.

  Sure enough, as they passed through the exterior parking lot, two layers of chain-link rose into view, thirty-foot barriers encircling the center. Armed military police officers oversaw all points of entry, showing off blue berets and impressive firepower. A soft wind spiraled gusts of dirt up off the ground.

  As Evan approached the main guard station, he pulled on a cheap pair of gas-station sunglasses and clicked on the radio, scrolling through until he found an easy-listening station. Air Supply leaked through the crappy speakers. Joey shot him a pained look.

  Evan said, “It’s hard to find someone who listens to crap like this suspicious.”

  “Copy that.” Joey mussed up her hair, removed her shoes, and propped her bare feet on the dashboard. Cranking her seat back, she popped a piece of gum into her mouth, converting herself into a disaffected teen with alarming authenticity.

  Evan coasted into the sally port. The gate rattled shut behind them, trapping them inside. He eyed the half dozen armed air force MPs within view. “You’d better hope they don’t ask for ID,” he said.

  Joey smiled at the approaching MP, talking through her teeth. “I uploaded everything to their preclearance system.”

  “I’d prefer backup behind that,” he said, grinning back. “The Second Commandment: How you do anything is—”

  “—how you do everything.” Joey rolled her eyes. “Gawd. I can’t wait to take over for you so I never have to hear another Commandment again.”

  The MP knuckle-tapped the window, and Evan rolled it down, smoothing his face into an expression suited to a middle-aged dad from Carlsbad, California.

  “Howdy,” Evan said. “I’m Harold Blasely, and this is my daughter, Almudena.” He did his best with the accent but out of the corner of his eye he could detect Joey’s smirk. “We’re here to visit my brother-in-law.”

  “His name?”

  “Rafael Gomez.”

  The MP exhaled a breath that smelled of sunflower seeds and withdrew into the station, where he stared into a computer monitor, the greenish glow uplighting his features.

  After a moment he lumbered back out. “See some ID?”

  “Oh, darn it,” Evan said, offering Joey a grin rife with disguised told-you-so irritation. “We left our personal stuff back at the hotel. We were told that we’d be okay since we uploaded everything into the preclearance system.”

  The MP rested a beefy forearm on the roof of the Sentra and leaned down. “It’s never a good idea to drive without ID,” he said. “In fact, it’s illegal.”

  “You got me there, sir,” Evan said. “We woke up so early this morning to catch the flight up that my head isn’t screwed on right.”

  “I can’t let you onto the base without confirming proper identification.”

  “But I was told”—Evan risked another veiled glare at Joey—“that our passports uploaded to the system would be sufficient. Can’t you just check us against those?”

  “Go back to your hotel. And get your ID.”

  “O
ur hotel’s all the way in San Jose,” Evan said, “where we flew in. And our flight out’s this afternoon. If we go back to pick up ID, we won’t have time to make it back down.”

  The MP looked away, swallowed. “Not my problem, sir.”

  “Such a bummer,” Joey said, leaning forward, suddenly speaking with a full-blown Latina accent. “We haven’t been able to see Uncle Raffy since Mom’s diagnosis. And I made him this.”

  She twisted around to her overnight bag in the backseat, producing a folded poster board covered with LaserJet-printed color pictures. Evan did a double take at the images of himself and Joey with Rafael and a Hispanic woman Evan figured for Rafael’s older sister, Consuelo, Harold’s wife. There they were—in a Jacuzzi together, enjoying a meal on a backyard patio, standing on what looked to be a Caribbean beach with various other family members scattered around. The tableaus of Evan and Joey inserted into a regular American family were surreal and seamless, like a vision of some prior life. It took a moment for Evan to register fully that they had been Photoshopped.

  Across the bottom glitter-glue lettering read WE MISS YOU, UNCLE RAFFY!

  When a sniffle sounded from the passenger seat, Evan and the MP looked over with equal startlement to see Joey’s bottom lip wavering, tears spilling from her eyes.

  “I promised Mom we’d check on him before her last chemo,” she said. “I can at least do that. I know I’ve sucked as a daughter—”

  “We never said that,” Evan assured her, warming to the role of Harold Blasley, prospective traveling brush salesman. “Your mother never thought—”

  “—but if I could just do this one thing for her. And now with the rectal cancer spreading to her lymph nodes…” Joey sucked in a wobbly breath and broke down sobbing.

  It was so convincing that Evan barely had to act at all to comfort her, patting her knee. The MP looked past him at Joey. “Hey,” he said. “Hey.”

  Joey looked up, eyes brimming.

  “I’m sorry about your mamá,” he said. “Lost mine to breast cancer when I was in high school.”

  She nodded stoically.

  He withdrew a small tablet from a belt holster and scrolled through. Evan watched him pull up their scanned passports. He caught Evan looking and tilted the screen away.

  “Pop your trunk.”

  As Evan obliged, the MP made a circle with his upraised finger, and two more officers came out and searched beneath the car with under-vehicle inspection mirrors.

  The MP checked the trunk, slammed it, and came back around. “Magnolia South Residential Building, room fifteen,” he said. “Edge of the compound that way. Next time bring ID.”

  The gate ahead of them rattled open. Evan thanked him and drove through, keeping his gaze ahead. As the guard station receded, he said, “Rectal cancer?”

  Joey’s tears evanesced, and she smacked the radio to turn it off. “Of course. Who would ever make that up?”

  He slotted the car into a space outside the residential building. “You.”

  “And—wa-la—look where it got us,” she said. “What would you do without me?”

  “I would arrange for proper ID instead of badly singing karaoke with Bicks.”

  He was out of the car before she could retort.

  Another MP guarded the entrance to the building, wanding them down even after they’d stepped through a metal detector. They padded their way along a carpeted hall. A few doors opened into spaces with a dorm-room vibe, veterans slouched in beanbags, reading books or playing first-person shooter video games.

  The door to Room 15 was closed.

  Evan knocked.

  A voice issued from within. “Harry! You made it!”

  The thump-thump of footsteps, and then the door swung inward to reveal Rafael Gomez. Lean, muscular build, clean-shaven, backward baseball cap. His boyishly handsome face registered them, the smile flattening into shock, and his features contracted.

  “So you motherfuckers finally got to me.” He showed his palms, backing away. “Go on, then, and kill me quick.”

  41

  A Dark-as-Fuck Rabbit Hole

  Evan and Joey stepped inside, Evan pulling the door closed behind them. Rafael backed to the far wall, head lifted with dignity, still glaring.

  The small space was neatly kept, photos thumbtacked to the walls in perfect parallel, shirts precision-folded on shelves, stack of Air Force Times newspapers on a nightstand, edges aligned. The room’s conformity—so opposite the wreckage of Andre’s place—felt soothing to Evan, the environment of a like soul.

  “We’re not the ones who killed Jake Hargreave,” Evan said. “We’re trying to figure out who did. We need your help.”

  Rafael held his position flattened to the wall. Then his ramrod posture softened, a breath easing out of him. He sat on the bed, joined his hands between his knees, and lowered his head. His arms started shaking uncontrollably.

  Joey said, “You okay?”

  Rafael said, “Don’t talk.”

  He sat like that for a time, limbs vibrating, until the tremors receded. He cleared his throat, tugged at his mouth, and finally looked up. “You’re not here to kill me?”

  Evan said, “No. We want to—”

  Rafael held up his hand, a hard stop. “It’s not safe. They could be listening.” He reached beneath the bed, dug out a soft black pouch the size of a binder, unzipped it, and held it open. “Phones.”

  Evan and Joey dropped their phones into the flexible metallic fabric of the Faraday bag, and Rafael closed it and tossed it on the bed.

  “You have no idea the reach of these people,” he said. “What they’re capable of.”

  “Why don’t you tell us?” Evan said.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “I promised someone I would look into Jake’s death. That’s all I can tell you.”

  “You know they’ll kill you.”

  “I’m willing to take that risk,” Evan said. “If it gets me to the people who murdered Jake.”

  Rafael sat back down on the mattress, yanked off his baseball cap, and worked the brim in his hands. The San Diego Padres emblem, gold against brown, looked worn and faded. “No one listens to me anymore, man. Got me locked up in here. A cot and three squares. Once a week I get a pass, go to the shooting range, get some trigger time just to remember I’m still alive. Then they put the horse back in the stable. These four walls.” His shaved scalp was sweating, beads standing out against the taut skin. “They ruined me, man.”

  Joey said, “How?”

  “Hacked my social media, put up fake posts.” Rafael raised his stare, a sudden anger edging his words. “Islamophobic shit. Red Pill MGTOW male-power psycho stuff. QAnon. Then a rant on my Facebook page that sounded like some kinda delusional schizophrenic snap. Doesn’t take nothing to ruin a guy’s reputation. A shitty-ass hacker with twenty minutes on his hands can take a motherfucker down. Think how ready you all are to believe.”

  “Believe what?” Evan asked.

  “That us military guys are fucked up, one Tinder rejection away from losing our shit. Internet’s a dark-as-fuck rabbit hole, and they made it look like my stupid ass dove down there. All of a sudden, I’m discharged, diagnosed, all my pay and benefits tied up unless I take accountability for some shit I never said and prove I’m fit to reenter society. They wanted to take me off the board, you copy? Make it so no one would believe anything I have to say.” Rafael ran his hand over his head. “It’s not like I don’t have … it’s not like I don’t get it that my head isn’t always right, you know? But I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve this. No one’ll listen, and anytime I talk, I dig a deeper hole, and I have no one to talk to, and they got Jake, man, they got Jake.”

  He lowered his head, pinched his eyes. His shoulders shook.

  Joey started to say something, but Evan cut her off with a look, wanting to give Rafael more space. He’d been locked up inside his own thoughts for months and needed them out.

  When Rafael lifted his
head again, his eyes were dry. “You know how hard our job is? Flying hunter-killer drones? How fucking confusing?”

  “Tell us,” Evan said.

  “You kill so much it gets monotonous. Think about that. You’re playing a video game that never ends, man. You live at home, sleep in clean sheets. Drive through Starbucks on the way into base. And there they are. Ground control stations lined up like fancy-ass shipping containers. You walk into your GCS and you’re not in California no more. You’re in Fallujah. You’re in Kunar. Or Al-Baghuz Fawqani or Mosul or … or fucking Yemen. Cushioned seats, man, A/C, and your latte right there by your mouse pad. And you don’t have fear, right? Your own life’s not on the line. So you don’t get that … dunno, that skin in the game, that you might lose an arm or get your guts spilled all over your lap. I mean, some Taliban motherfucker ain’t gonna come here and snuff you in the Starbucks drive-through, right? So what are you doing? To you it’s target practice, putting warheads on foreheads. But on their end? Feels like fucking war.”

  “Will you tell us about Jake?” Joey asked.

  Rafael’s head snapped over. “I am telling you about Jake.”

  “Okay,” Evan said. “Okay.”

  “You need to listen, a’right?”

  “I will,” Joey said. “I’m sorry.”

  Rafael palmed his skull and rubbed some more. “What I’m telling you is, you’re in a box halfway around the world for twelve hours, and then your girlfriend’s mad you didn’t pick up milk on the way home. You understand what I’m telling you?”

  “We do,” Evan said.

  “And who bears that responsibility? Jake Hargreave does. I do. It’s all on us. And the fact that it’s not … dunno, dangerous makes it even worse, you understand? Makes it harder. Like I said, you don’t have fear. You have dread. Dread at what you’re doing, what it’s doing to you. The choices. The decisions. You copy?”

  The heater clicked on with a low hum, and Rafael’s eyes shot over at the noise. A warm, dusty air breathed through the room, thick and claustrophobic. The window fogged from the bottom up, a patchwork of clouds. He licked his lips, settled his tensed shoulders.