Prodigal Son

by Gregg Hurwitz

  Now she was bedside, transported in the blink of an eye.

  He’d kicked down the sheets in his sleep, the pillow cold with dried sweat beneath his neck. He wanted to scream to wake up his sister, but there was no voice.

  And there was no sister.

  The head cocked, that stylish bob bobbing. I will punish your dirty parts out of you. You will learn.

  The quivering flesh of his arms, his neck, his inner thighs bare to the dead of night, bare to her to teach them what she needed to.

  His mouth lurched for air, just a sip to get out the word, the tracks in his brain laid down to produce the only two syllables he’d known in his whole miserable life that could bring comfort.

  Queenie.

  The loss came again, fresh as a slit to the throat.

  His mother leaned over his paralyzed body. Those fingernails fluttered, choosing their spot.

  He had no one to help him and an eternity to morning.

  63

  The Most Awful Thing

  In the not unlikely event that he got killed, Evan hadn’t made a contingency plan for Andre. So—at the end of this never-ending night—he’d reversed course to the one person who would need to step up.

  He paused on the footbridge in the front yard, watching the sleeping swans bob on the placid moat. He’d spoken to Joey on the drive back to Bel Air. She was all over mission planning, interfacing with Tommy and Orphan V, laying the groundwork for the plan Evan had hatched. He could see her extraordinariness only when he considered the fullness of who she was, not just the shape of who he wanted her to be.

  He wondered if that was what Veronica had arrived at with him, when she’d sat gazing across the kitchen table at his impaled arm, her face evincing total acceptance. When she’d placed her hand on his cheek, looked into him, and released him to do what it was that he did, she’d seen him for the first time, not the image of who she hoped him to be.

  Simple as it sounded, perhaps that was what love really was.

  What a lacking word, rife with clichés and misconceptions. It was so much more than what people talked about, with a depth that might accommodate even the darkness of his own soul.

  There was no answer to his knock, not even from the dogs. He tried the front door and found it unlocked.

  Worried, he moved inside. The dogs scampered to him but did not bark. They sniffed at his boots as he crossed the concrete stepping-stones. Seemingly contented, they bunched at his feet as he entered the kitchen, the living room.

  Veronica lay on the giant white swoop of the couch, passed out, a handle of Tanqueray resting on the table before her. A crystal tumbler was tipped onto its side in a tiny puddle of melted ice.

  No sign of the majordomo; perhaps he was off for the night. The dogs looked up at Evan, concerned. He crouched and petted their ratty little heads, and they licked his fingertips with rough tongues before scurrying off to curl up together in a corduroy disk of a dog bed by the bar.

  He stepped down onto the lush carpet and approached Veronica. Her pajama top was hoisted slightly to show a band of her belly, which looked distended. Her face had an unhealthy pallor, jaundiced and sickly. Her breath whistled. He wondered again at her seemingly rapid deterioration. Was it because he was only now seeing her unvarnished? Or was it the haze of his own perception continuing to clear?

  She blinked her eyes open lazily as he approached, and she reached for him, her fingers pale and thin. “Evan.” Tears beaded at the corners of her eyes, then dotted her temples. She tried to hoist herself up but couldn’t find the strength. Her words came in a slur. “What’re you doin’ back?”

  “We have to talk about the next steps for Andre. If something happens to me—”

  “I couldn’t bear it,” she said. “If something happened to you.”

  He reached for the tumbler and set it upright. “You can’t keep drinking like this,” he said. “It’ll kill you.”

  She produced a tease of a grin and stretched while barely moving, an elegant twist of her spine. “I’m already dead, Evan.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She sat up too rapidly, and her face yellowed even more with nausea. She lifted a trembling palm to her forehead, and then her pupils pulled north and she fell back against the cushions, seizing. She contorted, arched up onto the points of her shoulders, her mouth a twisted maw.

  He shot around the coffee table and cradled her with his good arm, turning her head to one side to keep her windpipe clear. As quickly as it started, the seizure ended.

  He held her and she breathed into his chest irregularly, one hand clawed in the fabric of his shirt.

  “You okay?”

  She nodded faintly, her hair rustling against him. “Happens sometimes. Just need … rest.”

  He adjusted her back into the couch, doing his best to keep pressure off his wrapped right forearm. She felt frail, light as a bird.

  He laid her head gingerly on a throw pillow, and she was asleep.

  He drew himself up and walked over to the kitchen counter, where she’d moved her pill bottles.

  He found the rifaximin once more, the antibiotic he thought she’d taken for traveler’s stomach, though it had numerous uses. Next to it the vitamin C, calcium, a bottle labeled furosemide, and several more.

  With mounting dread he started tapping the names into his RoamZone, searching through medical websites, those graveyards of hope. At last he had enough overlaps to narrow the noose around a diagnosis.

  “… used in the treatment of chronic hepatic encephalopathy, a syndrome observed in patients with cirrhosis of the liver.”

  Scar tissue clogging her liver from excessive alcohol consumption.

  And there were the symptoms. Wasted muscle in the arms, bloating in the stomach, jaundice, weight loss, fatigue, concentration and memory problems.

  The prognosis was grim, the survival rate even lower in patients who continued to drink. Seizures were rare, often occurring only at the acute end stages.

  I’m already dead, Evan.

  Grief moved through him, pure and immediate. They had come so far to finally see each other with clear eyes. And now to lose her before anything could be built on the foundation they had imperfectly begun to lay seemed profoundly wrong, a joke from the universe itself.

  He wasn’t sure how long he stood there at the counter, but when he finally moved, his legs had almost fallen asleep. He found a blanket in a guest room and draped it over her.

  She moved as the fringe touched her chin, opened her eyes. She stared up at him, and he stared back, and at least they had this, a few moments as fragile as the surface of a still lake.

  She finally spoke, breaking the surface tension. “We all know it’s near, but you never think it’s right around the bend. The ski accident, the yielding cough—it’s out there, sure. Your first friend dies, the end of an era. And then come your forties, the decade of breast cancer, heart attacks. Then the fifties, a few acquaintances felled by strokes. You’re not ready to lose your friends yet, let alone be the one who drops, but it happens. Then the next decade…” She paused to catch her breath. “And now I’ll be another cautionary tale, the name people lower their voices to mention when they speak over dinner tables. Veronica LeGrande, did you hear? She died a drunk.”

  She reached out and took his hand, her skin papery and thin. “I spent so much time trying to numb what I’d done that I lost all the time to set it right.”

  “Set what right?”

  “What do you think, sweet boy?”

  His face grew hot.

  “I don’t have any wailing angels or pitchforked demons to concern myself with,” she said. “No reordering of a will, no woe-is-me final trip through the south of France or the Italian Riviera or wherever the hell people spend their lifetimes wanting to go. Just this. Just you. And him.”

  “That’s why you found me now? Because you knew…”

  He couldn’t get out the words.

  “My whole life was a straig
ht line running away from you. And Andre. We all have the story we tell, the tape that loops in our mind. Mine was that if I looked it in the face—” She stopped herself. “You. If I looked you in the face, I would crumble into dust from shame.”

  “But you didn’t,” he said quietly.

  She shook her head, wiped her eyes. “No. But what about you? What about the wasteland I consigned you to? What did that do to you?”

  He felt a pressure beneath his eyes, his voice full of gravel. “I was a small kid. Powerless. So I made a vow to do so well, to be so tough, so perfect, that I would be invulnerable. That I would no longer have to feel human. I put my mind to it second after second, year after year. And the most awful thing happened.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I succeeded.”

  She stared at him breathlessly. He felt breathless, too.

  “But now maybe I have a chance to undo that,” he said. “Because of you. Because of Andre.”

  And Joey.

  And Mia.

  And Peter.

  She reached again for his cheek, and in the soft pressure of her palm and the boundless hazel of her eyes he felt something he never had before. A maternal warmth with a depth and breadth and reach like nothing he’d encountered. It was dizzying, terrifying in its scope, like staring at the night sky pinpricked with countless other worlds.

  “Jacob,” she whispered. “Your middle name. Evan Jacob.”

  He could never have anticipated the rush of emotion that brought into his chest, crowding his throat.

  “One more piece,” she said. “Let that be one more piece toward making you whole.”

  64

  Wear the Brown Pants

  They staged the raid from a shooting range north of Vegas at the end of a winding dirt road that led up into a seascape of moonlit dunes. Evan and Joey arrived an hour past dusk and sat on the hood of his truck in the dusty darkness, the air flavored with chaparral and sage and the allergenic scent of hay from the bales that served as backstops. The moon was thin but fierce, casting a pale glow through a cloudless sky, making the shell casings gleam like treasure. Shredded paper targets snapped in the breeze. Somewhere a coyote howled, the plaintive cry joined by another and another and another, the pack zeroing in on its prey.

  Tommy was next to show his face, the piercing eyes of his headlights rumbling into view, climbing the switchbacks of the dunes. His dually truck drifted toward them and parked nose to nose with Evan’s F-150.

  Tommy emerged with a grunt, the earth jogging those old warhorse joints, and he circled to sit on his own trunk, for once not offering any sage Tommyisms.

  They sat in the quiet, listened to the wind. It blew invisible specks of rain across Evan’s face, and for a moment the world seemed vast and peaceful and full of hope. But the awful responsibility of what was to come tightened his chest, reminded him that every breath was on borrowed time and fate could decide when she’d had enough with a snap of her fingers. Jake Hargreave had set this all in motion. One drone pilot trying to whistle-blow on a $500-million program for UAVs with their own programmed ethical adapters. A solitary man standing against a totalitarian future.

  “Beautiful here,” Tommy said. “Could almost make you think there’s still some sense in the world.”

  Wasn’t that how it always began? They heard the next vehicle before they saw it, an engine growling, big tires crunching over rock and mashing through mud. No headlights.

  Tommy stiffened, but Evan said, “She’s with me.”

  A shadowy truck neared, revealing itself to be an old Jeep Wrangler. It parked with its grille to their grilles, their vehicles forming a trefoil like a three-leaf clover, a Gothic church floorplan, a hazard symbol. The door swung open.

  Candy McClure slid out.

  Evan heard Tommy take a sharp inhale at the sight of her.

  Orphan V was something to behold. Not just her looks—which were considerable—nor her body—which was a poetic blend of curve and muscle—but the energy she conveyed with every movement, an unspoken vibe that said she was the fullest version of herself, that she was possessed with all the composure and murderous skill the world had to offer, and that her presence before you was a privilege. That she was sparing you from her terrible, terrible powers, and if you could countenance her company with grace, she might add a drop of her potency to yours.

  She winked at Evan and hoisted herself onto her trunk, sat cross-legged, and stared at them. She wore slouchy boots and a fuzzy sweater off one shoulder. Her hair had grown, falling well below the firm line of her chin, and she’d tousled it out a bit in keeping with the 1980s dream-girl vibe. Her eyes had that predatory gleam that made you want to curl up in surrender just to get it over with.

  “Well,” Evan said, “that’s all of us, then.”

  Candy lifted her chin, anointing him with her attention. “What happened to your arm?”

  “I ran into a combat knife.”

  She tsk-tsked. “Careless.”

  Tommy couldn’t take his eyes off Candy. “We gonna do this, then? Or jaw around with fancy talk?”

  Joey reached behind her to her backpack and tugged out her laptop. “Transport’s due to arrive at Creech North at midnight. A team of private contractors is providing security for delivery.”

  “Why not real army?” Candy asked.

  Evan thought back to the team Molleken had dispatched to the impound lot to clean the scene. They’d been ready to kill not just their targets but any witnesses or first responders as well. “Because these guys don’t have any ROEs,” he said. “They’re mercs ready to execute whoever gets in their way. Until these drones are delivered to the base, the hidden kill order is executed, and Andre and I are neutralized, Molleken is taking no chances.”

  “Will he be on site?” Tommy asked.

  “Yes,” Joey said. “Internal comms make clear he’s overseeing it personally.”

  “The doctor goes down,” Evan said. “And his privately hired mercenaries. But not a single soldier.”

  Candy wiggled her shoulders forward in a manner that seemed flirtatious; it took Evan a moment to realize she was pulling the fabric tight across her back to soothe the itching burn scars. “What if one of them looks at me funny?” she said.

  “You’ll show restraint.”

  “Hmm.” She licked her lips, considered. “Not my strong suit.”

  “Base is closed,” Evan said. “Sunday-night crew is the leanest—essential personnel only. That’s why we’re doing this tonight. The timing is best for them to make a low-profile delivery, which also means it’s my best shot to get inside.”

  “I have access to the Creech North network,” Joey said, “but I can’t remove the kill order for Andre Duran remotely. Altering any kill orders requires hardware-authentication tokens.” Joey dug in her pocket, removed a pluglike electronic device. “This is a Yubico FIDO2—a hardware access device I preloaded with the stolen system-authentication keys.”

  “We know what it is, girl,” Candy said.

  “I gotta teach to the lowest common denominator.” Joey tilted her head at Evan. “Once this is plugged in to a networked computer, this trigger has to be tapped.” Tilting the Yubico key to catch the glow from the headlights, she indicated a depressed button on top. “Once that’s done, it’ll perform the authentication. Then it’s simple. Pop in your run-of-the-mill Hak5 USB Rubber Ducky to inject code and wipe out the kill order on Andre Duran.”

  “That’s pretty styley,” Tommy said.

  Joey shrugged, her face coloring slightly. “Hacking is my love language.” She continued, “The good news? Creech North is like a smart city. Tons of interconnected devices, including surveillance cameras, security access doors, even wireless smart Hue lamps. All that stuff has vulnerabilities in their wireless stack that let me deliver an infected payload via a forced over-the-air firmware update that puts control via a backdoor in my hands.”

  Tommy tugged at his biker mustache. “Like a video game.”<
br />
  “That’s right.” Joey hoisted the laptop. “And this is my joystick. But the next-gen drones coming in tonight? Uh-uh. Those things are lethal, walled off from anything else once they get their marching orders.” She turned her gaze to Evan, and for the first time he sensed worry in her face. “If they lock onto you, you’re done.”

  “Well, not entirely.” Tommy slid off his hood, walked around, and fussed in the back of his truck. He came back with a Pelican case in one hand and in the other a massive fat olive-drab gun with DRONEWRECKER stenciled on its side. “This is a little prototype I been playing around with.”

  “Dronewrecker,” Joey said. “Who named it that?”

  “I did.” Tommy looked affronted but managed to regain his composure. “’Cuz it is. I brimmed it up with soft-kill countermeasures. Drones zero in on a target using electro-optical and infrared sensors. This bad boy throws off laser dazzle to overwhelm the EO sensor and blind the drones. Big ol’ flare like shining a flashlight into NVGs.”

  Evan thought back to the impound lot when he’d done precisely that to the private military contractor wearing night-vision headgear.

  “At the same time, it projects a diffuse wave of heat that’ll confuse the infrared sensors, throw ’em off your thermal signature, buy you a little time. And you got smoke, too, for backup here.” Tommy tilted the Dronewrecker to show off a red button, then regarded the weapon with pride. “It’s also a prototype, which means it ain’t in any of the weapons databases, so the drones can’t recognize it and identify it as a threat. Till you use it. Then you’d better hold on to your ass.”

  He handed the weapon to Evan. Longer than two feet, weighing less than ten pounds, it resembled a science-fiction ray gun.

  “And for the lady…” Tommy slung the Pelican case onto his trunk and unlocked it to reveal a rugged silver device about the size of a tennis-ball can. “This is a portable electromagnetic-pulse weapon. You’re gonna need to get inside the hardened concrete walls of the front guard station—according to Hacky Sue over here, that’s the nerve center for perimeter security.” He pointed to a switch at the base of the device. “Activate it by pulling this pin. It’ll fire a burst of high-powered microwaves that’ll knock out the whole goddamned perimeter, access gates, surveillance cams, and all. Everything electronic, toasted. It’s got limited range and takes about ten minutes to recharge, so don’t use it until you mean it. You’ll just need to figure out how to get in position.”