Red Right Hand

by Chris Holm

  “What are you after?” Pappas asked through gritted teeth. “Money? Name your sum and I’ll gladly hand it over, provided you let me go.”

  “I don’t want your fucking money.”

  “What, then? Revenge? If so, let’s not waste time. Pull the trigger and be done with it.”

  “Don’t worry—we’ll get to that, once you tell me everything I need to know. But first, you and I are going for a little trip to someplace where we won’t be bothered. Someplace where nobody will hear you scream. I set it up weeks ago for this very occasion. And I promise, once I get you there, you will talk.”

  Pappas spat. “The fuck I will.”

  Hendricks smiled. “You have no idea who I am, do you?”

  “Should I?”

  “I don’t know. I thought you might.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Last year, the Council paid a man named Engelmann to have me killed.”

  The gunshot had rendered Pappas’s sun-kissed countenance pale. Hendricks’s words made him go paler still. “Wait—you’re the guy who’s been whacking our hitters?”

  Hendricks said nothing.

  “Look, you’ve got to understand, that wasn’t my call. I was on the Council for all of a week when they decided to sic that guy on you.”

  Hendricks stepped on the hand Pappas held to the bullet wound in his thigh. Pappas screamed and writhed in pain. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Hendricks said. “My best friend is dead.”

  Hendricks lifted his foot. Pappas’s screaming ceased. “So, what,” he said between gasps, “you plan to take down the Council single-handedly?”

  “Of course not. You’re going to help me.”

  “You’re out of your goddamn mind—particularly if you think I’m going to talk.”

  “It’s not a matter of if. Just when. To be clear, I plan to kill you either way, but you get to decide how quick and painless your death will be.”

  Pappas flashed a manic smile that teetered between terror and bravado. “Gee, thanks.”

  “Don’t blame me. It’s the Council that put you in this position. If you’d like to return the favor, you’ll tell me everything I want to know.”

  “You don’t understand. If I talk, they’ll kill my family.”

  “What do you care? Half your family wants you dead.”

  “That doesn’t mean that I don’t love them,” he said. “Listen, you’re a businessman. Let’s talk about this. I’m sure we can reach some kind of agreement.”

  “We’re done talking for now. There’ll be plenty of time for us to chat once we get to where we’re going. I’ve got a car out front. Get up, or I will get you up.”

  As Hendricks turned toward the door, Pappas shouted, “Wait!”

  That’s when Hendricks realized that Pappas had been stalling for time all along.

  Too late, he wheeled and saw Noah lunging toward him, the fillet knife from the upturned table in his hand.

  Goddamn it.

  Hendricks tried to bring the .22 around, but there was neither time nor space. The knife slid into his side as Noah slammed into him. Its blade, still specked with salt crust, felt like it was on fire.

  Noah drove the knife forward with all his weight. Hendricks dropped his gun, wrapped his hands around Noah’s wrists, and tried desperately to halt the blade’s progress as they fell, limbs tangled, to the floor.

  Noah had gravity on his side. Hendricks had momentum on his. Rather than halt the blade’s forward progress, Hendricks wrenched Noah’s wrists sideways, angling the blade away from his vital organs. The blade glanced off a rib, parting skin and stinging like a motherfucker, and then wedged itself in the floorboards. Hendricks landed right beside it, but Noah’s forward motion sent him tumbling. Hendricks kept hold of Noah’s wrists, and Noah somersaulted over him and slammed hard into the floor. He sounded like a sack of flour when he hit. Hendricks yanked out the knife, scrabbled to his feet, and buried it in Noah’s chest. Noah’s chef’s whites blossomed red. His eyelids fluttered, then stilled.

  Fool me once, Hendricks thought.

  He held his left arm to his side as he rose, trying to stanch the flow of blood from his wound, and looked for the .22.

  Then he spotted it—in Pappas’s hand. He was aiming it at Hendricks’s head.

  Pappas stood a few feet away, his weight on his good leg, his thigh wound seeping. “You piece of shit,” he said. “These men were family to me. I promise yours will pay for what you’ve done.”

  “I’ve got no family left,” Hendricks replied. “The Council took them from me. That’s why I’m here.”

  The statement was true enough, if intentionally misleading. When Engelmann came after Hendricks, he did so by targeting the only two people in the world that Hendricks cared about: his partner, Lester, and his former fiancée, Evie. Engelmann tortured Lester to death, extracting Evie’s location from him in the process. But Lester held on long enough to tip Hendricks off and afford him the advantage he needed to kill Engelmann. Afterward, Evie and her husband, Stuart, entered witness protection. Hendricks had no idea where they were or how to find them.

  Evie had been pregnant when Hendricks last laid eyes on her. By now, she must’ve had the baby, which meant there were again two people in the world that he cared about.

  Hendricks’s hand crept toward the gun he’d pocketed. Pappas slowly shook his head, a teasing gesture. “You’ll never get to it in time.”

  Pappas was probably right, but Hendricks didn’t have a better play to make.

  He went for the gun. His wound made him clumsy. Dulled his reflexes. The hammer snagged on his pocket, which gave Pappas time to react. A shot rang out. Hendricks’s eyes clenched shut as he braced for the bullet’s impact—a useless reflex.

  But the impact never came.

  Then Pappas hit the floor.

  Hendricks opened his eyes. Wobbled a little from blood loss. Saw the waitress in a textbook shooting stance a few feet away. Her face was pale. Her eyes were wide. Her hands were white-knuckled around the grip of Dimitris’s gun.

  Hendricks’s thoughts were a jumble. “What…who…how the hell did you get out?”

  “The walk-in’s interior is equipped with a safety release so employees don’t freeze to death. You can lock people out, but you can’t lock anybody in. Next time, barricade the door. If I weren’t on your side, you’d be fucked.”

  “But—”

  “Shhh.” She tilted her head and squinted as if straining to hear something. A second later, he heard it too.

  Sirens.

  “We have to leave,” she said. “Now.”

  6.

  THE HEELS OF Kathryn O’Brien’s sandals clacked against the polished tile floor as she strode purposefully across the bustling lobby. Her capri-length chinos and sleeveless blouse looked out of place in a building dominated by men in somber business suits, but the crowd parted deferentially around her nonetheless. Thompson—who felt woefully underdressed in shorts and a V-neck T-shirt—wasn’t sure whether that was because they recognized O’Brien or because her every movement exuded authority, but either way, it was something to see.

  The FBI’s New Haven, Connecticut, field office was a modern red-brick building occupying a full city block a short walk from Yale’s campus. It was indistinguishable from most office buildings in the area but for the fact that it was set back from the road and encircled by a fence of galvanized steel painted black to look like wrought iron. Small, unobtrusive NO TRESPASSING signs were posted here and there along the fence, and all entrances, automotive and pedestrian, were gated. The building’s clean lines and manicured lawn lent the property a serene air. Inside—today, at least—the mood was anything but.

  At forty miles away from Thompson’s parents’ house, the New Haven field office was the nearest FBI facility in the area. Thompson and O’Brien had made it there in under half an hour. In the car, Thompson tried to apologize for her dad’s harsh reaction to their visit. O’Brien shrugged it of
f—said it wasn’t fair to hold Thompson responsible for what her father thought—but Thompson could tell that it bothered her.

  When they reached the front desk, O’Brien said, “What’s the situation?”

  “Ma’am?” The kid behind the desk was wide-eyed, overwhelmed.

  “The situation. I’ll need a briefing, the sooner the better.” O’Brien noted his confusion. “Someone told you I was coming, right?”

  “Uh…” It was clear he had no idea what was going on. Thompson felt a pang of sympathy for him. He was a baby agent thrown into the deep end, and she remembered all too well what that felt like.

  “Director O’Brien!” A forty-something black man in a polo shirt and khaki shorts trotted over to them, tennis shoes squeaking, and stuck out his hand. “Ty Russell—special agent in charge of the New Haven field office.”

  The agent behind the front desk blanched when he realized the woman standing before him was the ranking officer on-site, and he shrunk a little in his seat.

  “Good to meet you, Ty. Please, call me Kathryn. This is Charlie Thompson. She’s with me.”

  Russell’s handshake was firm and cool. “Sorry about the mix-up here,” he said to O’Brien. “It’s not every day we get a visit from the head of CID. And things have been a little nuts this afternoon, as you might imagine. I got here only ten minutes ago myself—I was at my niece’s birthday party when I heard.”

  “What can you tell me about what happened?”

  Russell looked pained. “Not much more than what the news is carrying, I’m afraid. I haven’t been briefed yet, so I can’t even say for sure whether the explosion was intentional, although obviously the Bureau and Homeland Security are proceeding as though it was. I had a conference room set up for you with a secure link to DC, as you requested. I’m sure they can fill in some of the blanks.”

  He led them to an elevator and up two floors. The doors slid open to reveal a bullpen crackling with nervous energy. A dozen people on phones, all talking at once. Countless e-mails, texts, and faxes coming in. Every face drawn tight with stress.

  “As you can see,” he said, “we’re doing what we can. Sifting through chatter. Liaising with our West Coast offices. But there’s only so much we can do from three thousand miles away. Ah, here we are.”

  Russell ushered them into a conference room and closed the door behind him. A large cherry-laminate table dominated the room. Faux leather office chairs surrounded it. An equipment tech ran wires from one of two laptops to the flat-screen television on the wall. “Dan Nakamura, meet Assistant Director Kathryn O’Brien and, uh, Charlie Thompson. Dan will be assisting you with anything you need.”

  “Were you able to get in touch with anybody from NSB?” O’Brien asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Nakamura replied. “Special Agent Sarah Klingenberg is waiting on me to dial in as we speak.”

  “Then, please, don’t let me stop you.”

  Nakamura got to work while O’Brien remote-desktopped into her Bureau computer.

  “You know this Klingenberg?” she asked Thompson under her breath.

  “A bit,” Thompson replied. “We were at Quantico together. She’s a bit of a striver, always looking toward the next rung on the ladder. It’s served her well, I hear—word is, she’s become Osterman’s go-to gal.” James Osterman was the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division. “But she’s a solid agent, and her heart’s in the right place. Honestly, we could do worse.”

  O’Brien nodded. “Good,” she said. “The last thing we need right now is for this to devolve into a pissing contest.”

  O’Brien—like Osterman—was an assistant director, though she was in charge of the Bureau’s Criminal Investigative Division, or CID. The CID fell under the Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch, or CCRSB, and was responsible for policing everything from violent crime to major thefts. The Counterterrorism Division fell under the National Security Branch, or NSB. The NSB was founded in 2005 in response to a presidential directive to consolidate the counterterrorism, counterintelligence, weapons of mass destruction, and intelligence resources of the Bureau under a single senior Bureau official, and most of its resources were siphoned directly from the CID. They lost a lot of good agents and over a quarter of their budget in the restructuring and had been playing second fiddle ever since. The result was an intra-agency rivalry as heated as it was counterproductive.

  Thompson fished a pair of earbuds from her purse and plugged them into her loaner laptop. She placed one earbud in and let the other dangle. Then she opened an array of tabs in the laptop’s browser: CNN, NPR, the San Francisco Chronicle, the LA Times, Twitter. Counterterrorism wasn’t Thompson’s bailiwick any more than it was O’Brien’s—Thompson worked for the FBI’s Organized Crime Section, which fell under the umbrella of the CID—but she knew the Bureau well enough to realize O’Brien’s official briefing would be sanitized and out-of-date. She wanted to get a sense of what was going on in real time.

  The television at the head of the room came to life, displaying a Windows desktop and a buffering chat window. Nakamura gave O’Brien a wireless keyboard and mouse. “You should be good to go,” he said.

  “You’re not staying?” O’Brien asked.

  Thompson smiled. O’Brien was something of a technophobe. She couldn’t even work the volume on their television once they’d routed it through Thompson’s receiver.

  “Pretty sure this conversation’s above my clearance level,” he replied.

  As the door closed behind him, the chat window glitched, displaying horizontal rainbow stripes, and then a woman appeared on the screen, her blond hair pulled through the back of her FBI ball cap.

  “Special Agent Klingenberg? This is AD O’Brien, can you hear me?”

  A brief delay, during which O’Brien’s voice echoed back at her, and then Klingenberg nodded. “Yes, ma’am. I’ve been told to bring you up to speed. How much do you know so far?”

  “Assume I know nothing.”

  “Copy that. At a little after noon Pacific time, a tugboat collided with the Golden Gate’s south support tower and exploded. Given the size of the blast, it’s unlikely it was accidental. The bridge is still standing, thank God, but several of the support cables have snapped. Portions of the bridge are canting dangerously, and the roadway is impassable. First responders are coordinating with FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers to figure out a plan of action to evacuate the bridge. It’s unclear how badly the structural integrity has been compromised or how many casualties were incurred.”

  “Do we know how many people were on the bridge at the time of the blast?”

  “No. We’re still waiting on the data from the tollbooths. Early DOT estimates put the number of cars on the bridge at the time of the explosion at anywhere between four and eight hundred, but again, that’s cars, not people. And those estimates count the bridge’s full span—one point seven miles of roadway, six lanes wide. Most people on the bridge were well outside the blast radius, but the ensuing panic caused a pile-up north of the crash when they tried to flee.”

  “And the investigation?”

  “We’re still in the early stages, ma’am. And the nature of the incident has made collection of physical evidence impossible thus far. But the fact that the bridge is a major landmark works to our advantage. Analysis of cell-phone pictures uploaded to social media just prior to the blast indicates the tugboat’s markings were painted over, which suggests whoever did this might’ve stolen it or at least wanted to obscure its point of origin. The bay below the bridge is still on fire, as I’m sure you’ve seen from the news coverage. U.S. Park Police are locking down the primary scene, triaging the wounded, and detaining witnesses for questioning.”

  “U.S. Park Police?”

  “Yeah. The bridge’s southern span cuts through the Presidio, which falls under their jurisdiction.”

  “Ah. Of course. What about water traffic?”

  “All commercial and recreational boati
ng in the area has been suspended, and vessels already on the water have been instructed to drop anchor until the Coast Guard can inspect them and clear them to dock. The San Francisco field office is coordinating with local PD and Homeland Security to search every inch of the waterfront to determine where the tugboat came from and who was piloting it. We’re talking hundreds of vessels and nearly eight miles of waterfront, though, so it’s going to take some time. I’ll be wheels-up soon to oversee the effort—although I’m going to have to hitch a ride on a military flight, because commercial air, rail, and bus transportation to and from the Bay Area is on lockdown.”

  “Has anybody taken credit yet?”

  “Yeah. The usual suspects, mostly—with one notable exception.”

  “Yeah? Who?”

  “A group calling themselves the True Islamic Caliphate. They released a detailed statement within seconds of the blast, which sets them apart from the rest of the nut brigade.”

  “Who are these guys? I’ve never heard of them.”

  “Join the club. The truth is, they seemed like small potatoes until today, with little influence outside their native Syria. State tells me the TIC has historically been more a militia than a terror group; until today, their primary focus was on overthrowing the Assad regime. We’re still trying to determine how—or even if—they could’ve pulled this off.”

  “Was their statement written or video?”

  “Video. Grainy, indoors, a dirty sheet as a backdrop. In English, although it’s clear the man reading it—who we’re working to identify—is not a native speaker. They e-mailed it to all the major news outlets as well as the White House. I’m told they tried to put it up on YouTube shortly thereafter, but by then the administration had already been in contact with Google, who owns YouTube, and they blocked its upload.”

  “I wonder what that little favor cost the president,” O’Brien mused aloud. “What did the statement say?”