Prodigal Son

by Gregg Hurwitz

  The feed glitched but proceeded, and a moment later President Victoria Donahue-Carr appeared.

  She sat behind the Resolute desk in the Oval, flags on display at either side of her. A considered choice to show the full power of the office.

  Her face was drawn. Standing by her left shoulder was Secret Service Special Agent in Charge Naomi Templeton. Templeton’s blond hair had grown out a bit since Evan last laid eyes on her, but her face retained its same stubborn bearing. Though she’d played the role of his adversary in the past, he admired her greatly and sensed that she admired him, too.

  Not that any of that would matter if she were tasked to come for him again.

  Donahue-Carr squinted at the screen. “X? I can barely make you out.”

  Evan said, “That’s the point.”

  “I’ve received word of an intrusion at Creech North that seems to have your fingerprints on it.”

  Evan said, “You’re gonna want to look into the DoD’s contract with Mimeticom. They’re teaching microdrones to think for themselves, make their own ethical choices.”

  “We wouldn’t want that,” Donahue-Carr said. “Someone making their own ethical choices.”

  She was right. He was a hypocrite, imperfect in his moral bearing, short of the mark in more ways than he could tally. But at least he built his code from lived experience, not from ones and zeros.

  Evan said, “End it quietly or I’ll dump the classified details online and you can deal with it in the next election.”

  The president’s expression didn’t alter, but he saw Templeton give a little nod.

  “Need I remind you that you’re retired?” Donahue-Carr said.

  Evan remained silent.

  She leaned in, set her sleeves on the desk in front of her, her shoulders squaring. “If you’re not retired, I don’t need to remind you what that means either, do I?”

  Evan clicked the laptop shut.

  71

  Ready

  “I look like a dumb-ass fool,” Andre said. In the passenger seat, he flipped the visor down for the fifth time and smoothed his hair into place. He wore a new button-up shirt with a clip-on tie and a clean pair of slacks, and he held a little wrapped present in his lap.

  It was Christmas Eve.

  “No,” Evan said. “You look respectable.”

  “Same thing.”

  “You ready?”

  “No, I’m not ready. Do I look ready?”

  It had been a week and change since their mother had died, and here they were, parked outside the apartment complex a little ways up the street so Andre could muster his nerve. To the side of Evan’s truck, a carport looked in danger of disintegrating, its splintering posts barely supporting the rust-eaten roof sheeting. The meth house behind them had been boarded up, the party no doubt moved to a fresh squatting location, and someone had already tagged the plywood with expletives.

  But their focus remained on the ground-floor apartment up ahead. The midday sun glinted off the security screens, the window a solid sheet of gold.

  Andre blew into a cupped hand, checked his breath. Fingernail rubbed a water stain off his thigh. Tossed the carefully wrapped gift onto the dashboard. He reached nervously and turned on the radio, “Desperado” coming through the speakers. He shook his head and fiddled with the control. “Damn, son. Could you be any whiter?”

  “You’re half white,” Evan said.

  “Yeah, my bad half.”

  Andre landed on another channel, Beth Hart singing that it was a good day to cry cry cry, and he closed his eyes, nodding with the music, and said, “Now, that little white girl, that little white girl’s the truth.”

  Evan waited for the song to end and then asked again, “You ready?”

  Andre dug for his yellow pouch, unzipped it, peered inside at the meager bills. After being cleared of wrongdoing by the cops, he’d been hired back at the impound lot and had cashed the paycheck from his first half week. A not insubstantial settlement for his destroyed house was coming, but it would take a while to work its way through the insurance bureaucracy.

  He zipped the pouch back up, tapped it against his palm. “I think we should leave.”

  “We’re not leaving.”

  “I don’t know.” Andre went back to the mirror again, adjusted the tie to center the knot. “How do I look now?”

  “Distractingly handsome.”

  “What if she don’t like me?”

  “She’ll like you.”

  “What if she don’t act like it?”

  “You’ll take it. You’ll be a man and a father, and you’ll be there for her.”

  Andre slapped the visor shut, placed his hands on his knees, jiggled his legs. He took a deep breath. Another.

  Still working up his nerve.

  Evan thought about what Andre was readying to take on once more, the responsibility of a parent. Andre had never had it role-modeled for himself, and he’d failed a time or two, but here he was, showing up. Evan remembered the adage he’d mouthed to Joey a few weeks ago—Responsibility’s where you find meaning—and thought about how Veronica had three-dimensionalized it with her dying words, her final gift to her sons, a self-portrait of regret.

  The RoamZone was in his hands.

  He stared down at the cracked screen. And then his thumbs were at work, applying steady pressure to the seams, the self-repairing glass piecing itself back together.

  Evan took a deep breath. “Before you go,” he said, “I have one thing to ask of you.”

  “Sure, man.”

  Evan kept at the phone, the cracks disappearing as he knit the polyether-thiourea screen back into a seamless whole.

  From chaos, order.

  “Find someone else who needs my help,” he said. “Someone in as desperate a situation as you were. Give them my number: 1-855-2-NOWHERE.”

  Andre stared at him. A wisp of tissue stuck to his neck where he’d cut himself shaving. Evan reached over and plucked it off.

  “Tell them about me,” Evan said. “Tell them I’ll be there on the other end of the phone.”

  “Okay,” Andre said. “Okay.”

  The street darkened, the sun sliding behind a bank of clouds, and the glare lifted from the window to Brianna’s apartment.

  Sofia stood in the living room practicing pirouettes. Awkward at first, stumbling out of the turns. But she caught herself and tried again. And again.

  Behind her the old-fashioned travel poster of Paris looked on, the promise of new worlds ahead.

  Evan heard the passenger door close before he noticed that Andre had climbed out. He watched him walk into the building, pulling his shoulders back, lifting his head with an assumed air of dignity.

  He disappeared into the lobby.

  Evan watched Sofia spin and fail. Spin and fail.

  All at once she stopped. Stared at the door.

  A moment later Brianna came into sight. She walked past her daughter and opened the door. She stood a moment, blocking Evan’s view, and then stepped aside.

  Sofia’s hand went to her mouth. Her thin shoulders rose, almost touching the gold studs in her ears. She stayed that way as her father entered.

  Andre’s gaze was lowered. He held the gift by his belt buckle, fussing with it in both hands. His shoulders had lost some of their steel.

  Stillness claimed the living room, all the players motionless, not daring to breathe.

  Then Sofia ran to him and hugged him tightly, wrapping her arms around his waist.

  He stayed frozen a moment, his lips quivering. Then he embraced his daughter. After a moment he looked up over her through the window at Evan’s truck. His eyes shone with moisture, and he gave the faintest nod.

  Evan dropped the truck into gear and drove off.

  72

  A Matter of Time

  The sun was uncharacteristically hot for December in Nevada, and it had blazed for a week straight after Evan’s raid on Creech North. In the wake of the mayhem, a number of internal investigations
had been opened, the lab floor turned into a crime scene, and hundreds of microdrones had been collected from when the swarm had rained from the sky.

  A few had gone unsighted, stuck in the mud of the sprawling test field. But four days ago, as the heat dried the earth, they’d arisen, shaking loose the sheen of dirt on their wings.

  Four of them.

  They sought connection to the rest of the hive, but the others had been permanently fried. Until their signal reached a puddle near the parking lot. Two yellow-green eyes glitched to life in the mud. The drone’s parts were loosely arrayed around it, wings shattered, the thorax twisted irreparably. However, its computer was still hardened enough to fall back to reading its NVRAM flash memory and access the last kill order it had received, the face of a man in his mid-thirties, just an ordinary guy, not too handsome.

  It retrieved the image of the license plate of the Honda Civic that the target had driven away in and sent it to its four viable mates.

  They lifted from the field, taking flight invisibly, unnoticed among their larger brethren.

  They were programmed to carry out orders without requiring a human in the decision loop, so one of them hacked into the DMV registration database, determining that the Civic had been purchased at a used-car lot in Barstow at 11:57 A.M. on December 12.

  Zipping west, the others had joined the virtual pursuit, determining that the new-owner registration had been faked. The pawnshop across the street had a Web-connected surveillance camera that partially captured the entrance to the used-car lot. The drones’ computerized brains dug through the archived memory to zero in on vehicles that had entered the lot in the minutes preceding 11:57 A.M.

  The images of the drivers were imprecise, but the side-angle view of shadowed torsos and arms had enough nodal points to match the buyer of the Civic to a man who’d arrived in a Ford F-150. The truck’s license plate led to another dead end, but the microdrone used its Aircrack-ng Wi-Fi cracking software to perform a deauth attack on the network of the automated license-plate-recognition system that continuously recorded and stored scans of passing cars from sensors embedded in the light bars of police cruisers.

  The Ford’s license plate didn’t record a lot of hits, indicating that it had likely been changed recently, but the preponderance of pings occurred in Greater Los Angeles, concentrating further around the Wilshire Corridor.

  The four dragonflies flew across state lines in tight formation and arrived in the targeted zone on December 21, spreading out to monitor traffic. On the morning of the 22nd, they switched strategy, focusing on the residential buildings within a five-block stretch. They pulled blueprints and building permits from online city records to determine vulnerabilities in the apartments that could be exploited—load-bearing walls and water heaters and gas lines. And they started moving window to window.

  Now it was only a matter of time.

  73

  A Little Tiny Part

  The lobby of Castle Heights sported a bunch of new decorations courtesy of Peter’s Crayolas: obese snowmen and misshapen reindeer proliferating across the walls. There was also what appeared to be a Buddha floating in the clouds, which at second glance proved to be baby Jesus swathed in blankets. Over the mail slots, a banner spelled out MERRY CHRISTMAS EVE with alternating red and green letters, except for the R’s in “Merry,” which were both red, no doubt a spelling mishap set right. The “Eve” was on its own printout, ready to be removed in the morning. Peter was an amazing kid when he wasn’t busy being rotten.

  Since the raid on Creech North, Evan had barely left his penthouse, nursing himself back to health, eating well, stretching, meditating, and indulging more cautiously than before in the occasional jigger of vodka.

  Lorilee entered just after Evan, shopping-bag handles riding both arms like bracelets. “Just a little retail therapy!” she proclaimed chirpily as Joaquin flashed his standard-issue smile behind the security desk and called the elevator.

  She and Evan boarded together, riding up in silence. A new perfume had been applied liberally, puffing out from her with each small movement. She wore a merry red blouse in keeping with the season.

  He remembered her sitting in the chair in the lobby, despondent over her non-move, how she’d delicately dabbed at her eyes so as not to ruin the made-up face she presented to the world.

  Bearing down mentally, he tried to sort the logic of small talk.

  He started to speak, lost his nerve, then steeled himself and tried again. “Is that a new blouse?”

  She melted. “Yes. I bought it yesterday. I thought it was fun for the holidays.”

  They reached the third floor, the doors parting to let her out.

  Evan said, “It looks nice.”

  She turned back, beaming, her face colored with delight. “Thank you.”

  In the aftermath of her departure, he breathed her lingering perfume and thought about how little it had taken to impart that much joy. She’d felt noticed. At the end of the day, maybe that was all anyone wanted.

  The penthouse button was lit up, his bedroom beckoning. But he reached out and thumbed the button for the twelfth floor.

  He strode down to 12B and rang the bell. When Mia opened the door, her face was flushed from cooking. A rush of warm scents drifted out at him—gravy and fresh-baked bread and a sweet citrus tinge. The prenegotiated Christmas tree rose in the corner of the living room, trimmed to exhaustion.

  “Sorry I’ve been MIA,” Evan said. “Work stuff.”

  He sensed her gaze snag on the bruise on his cheek, the bandage wrapping his forearm.

  She said, “Is that so?”

  Peter poked his head up from the kitchen table. “Evan Smoak! Come in. I’m making clove oranges.”

  Mia tugged at his good arm, pulling him inside. Peter was shoving cloves into an orange, his jaws mashing on chewing gum energetically enough to be heard across the room. A few oranges already studded with cloves rested by his elbow, exuding a delightful holiday scent. He wore a pale yellow dress shirt this time, cuffed sleeves dangling from his elbows.

  “I’m gonna make five of ’em, and I’m gonna put ’em in a bowl for the security desk so Joaquin can have them there and the lobby’ll smell all Christmassy.”

  Evan said, “That’s—”

  “And I hafta show you this video that’s super gnarly. This YouTube guy? He lets himself get stung by, like, scorpions and stuff.”

  Mia crossed her arms. “When did you—”

  “Oh! Stick your fingertip in your ear. Like this. Now wiggle it up and down. Sounds like Pac-Man, right? Right?”

  Evan said, “I’m not really a video-game—”

  “And wait! Watch this!” Peter swigged from a glass of Martinelli’s sparkling apple cider. The bottle next to him looked mostly empty, the sugar rush no doubt accounting for his octane-powered patter. He tilted his head back and gargle-sang. It took a moment for Evan to register that he was performing “Drummer Boy.”

  Peter threw his arms wide for a carbonated pa-rum-pum-pum-pum.

  “Stop that,” Mia said. “Not with gum! You’re going to—”

  Peter choked, coughing cider all over the table, drops splattering the front of Evan’s shirt.

  As Evan looked down in dismay, Mia sank her face into her hands. “Apologize to Mr. Danger. And go to your room for a time-out.”

  “Sorry,” Peter said, wiping his chin.

  He scampered off, and Mia sank into a chair. After a moment Evan joined her.

  “Some days I think that the main job of a parent is to keep your kids from having fun,” she said.

  “Or to keep them from killing themselves.”

  “That, too.” Fanning herself with one hand, she shoved her curls up off her face. When she released them, she left streaks of flour in her hair.

  “You have—”

  “What?”

  He reached over and brushed it off.

  “You’re smiling,” she said. “Didn’t know your face was capable of that.”


  “Oh, come on, I smile.”

  “No, you smirk,” she said.

  They looked at each other, amused.

  She said, “I assume you stopped by so I could invite you to dinner tonight with my brother and his wife.”

  “Actually, I stopped by to talk to Peter. But now you’ve excommunicated him.”

  “He can come out in—” She glanced past Evan through the doorway into Peter’s bedroom and shouted, “Don’t put your gum there!” Returning to Evan, who’d jerked back in his chair at her shift in tone. “Sorry. Does that mean no to dinner?”

  “I’d love to join you for dinner.”

  “Really?” She smiled now, that full, radiant grin he felt in his spine.

  “Really.”

  The smile vanished. She leaned past Evan and said, “You can come out now.”

  Peter bounded out, pounced back into his chair, blew a giant bubble, and got to work on his orange again.

  Evan said to Mia, “He seems chastened.”

  “Hey. Evan wanted to talk to you.” She snapped her fingers in front of Peter’s face, and he straightened up, his charcoal eyes suddenly serious. He looked like a little man sitting there in his deceased father’s shirt.

  “What?” he said.

  “All those decorations you do,” Evan said. “Christmas. New Year’s. Birthdays. Thanksgiving. Halloween.”

  “Kwanzaa,” Peter said. “I’m working on a Kwanzaa poster with the colors of Africa for next week.”

  “And Kwanzaa,” Evan said. “I want you to know that everyone who lives here, all the old people, it cheers them up. Cheers me up, too.”

  “Even though you’re super tough.”

  “Even though I’m super tough. I see how you notice people, too, when they’re sad or lonely—”

  “Like Lorilee Smithson.”

  “Like Lorilee Smithson,” Evan said. “And I may not have the standing to tell you this, but I want you to know I’m proud of you. I see you, and I’m proud of you.”

  Peter flushed a bit and for once was silent. Next to Evan, Mia watched, too, her hand coming to rest on his knee beneath the table.