Phantom Instinct (9780698157132)

by Gardiner, Meg

  “I’d gamed out a dozen escape plans. Getting arrested was the only scenario where I came out alive. I couldn’t simply run. Travis and Zero would have come after me. I needed to pen them in. Jail was the only thing that would protect me.”

  “Harsh form of rescue.”

  “When was salvation ever painless?” she said. “I pleaded guilty and was sent to Kern County Juvenile Hall in Bakersfield. The last time I saw my mom was the afternoon I was sentenced.”

  “Brutal.”

  “Could have been much worse,” she said. “Kern County had a school for juvenile female offenders, the Pathways Academy. I begged them to take me. The court ordered me to eight months in Pathways, then sixteen weeks closely supervised release at home. But I petitioned for legal emancipation.”

  “You got it? Under those circumstances? Don’t you need . . .”

  “I had a cousin in Sacramento. She agreed to take me in. The judge looked at my family history, granted my petition, and said, ‘Good luck.’”

  Aiden picked up the student ID card again. The photo looked ordinary, taken before homeroom on a chilly desert morning. She wondered if Aiden could see the pain and confusion barricaded behind her sleepy teenage eyes.

  He handed it back. “You remade yourself from the ground up.”

  “Nobody can change the clay they’re made from,” she said. “But I broke from China Lake, completely. Harper’s my grandmother’s maiden name. When I turned eighteen, I petitioned the court to change it legally. I petitioned to have my criminal record sealed. And I joined the Navy.”

  “Maddox?” he said.

  “He cut me off. My mom called my cousin a couple of times, sniffing around. Becka never told her where I was.” She smiled. “Patron saint of family battle lines.”

  “Travis and Zero?”

  “State prison. They were eighteen—tried as adults. Travis got forty-eight months. Eddie shattered the store owner’s ribs with a sledgehammer and got six years.”

  The sun flickered through the leaves of the fig tree. A car cruised past, stereo thudding. Across the street, a dog stood panting in the sun, a muscular red brindle.

  Aiden said, “Did they know you set them up?”

  “They had to suspect.”

  “You think they’ve been looking for you?”

  “I think they’ve found me.”

  She tried to keep her voice level, but nauseating dread threaded through her. Aiden stood and came to her side.

  “If Sorenstam won’t listen, I’ll find someone who will,” he said.

  “They’re going to come after me, and they won’t care who’s in the cross fire.” She pressed her fingers to the corners of her eyes. Her voice dropped. “Zero likes cross fire. Travis will set it up and let him pull the trigger.”

  “Hey.”

  “We have to find them and shut them down. Because they won’t stop. Jesus, Xenon wasn’t enough for them.”

  He stood close and leaned in. “I’m going to get on it.”

  His face was grave. The assurance in his voice calmed her. She nodded wordlessly.

  He headed for the door. She followed, wiping her eyes.

  Halfway out, he paused. “Lock up behind me. Don’t let anybody in unless you know who it is.”

  “I won’t. I have a class later, but I’ll be all eyes.”

  Heat was radiating from him. They held for a second, looking at each other.

  She touched his arm. “Thank you.”

  “For?”

  “Believing me.”

  He put a hand over hers, squeezed, and rubbed his thumb against the back of her wrist. She felt unbearably hot. She impulsively raised up on tiptoe and gave his cheek a good-bye kiss.

  His stubble brushed her skin. When she stepped back, he put two fingers to his forehead in a jokey salute. Then he was gone.

  16

  From the lobby at Spartan Security, Tom White watched Sorenstam drive away. He watched until her car disappeared behind the screen of eucalyptus trees.

  White had trained himself never to hesitate—not with other security specialists, not at passport and immigration control, not when speaking to law enforcement. Present a confident aspect. One of the seven rules he lived by.

  He returned to his office and closed the door. Sorenstam was keen to pry open a can of worms that had melted shut in the Xenon fire. Employee swipe cards were an issue. He wondered how she had obtained this one.

  Bar staff. He pulled up Xenon’s records and found an employee ID photo: bartender, girl with coffee-colored hair pulled back in a loose, sluttish clip. Spare makeup, eyes like tarnished coins. Face that could fool the savviest man. She had survived, he knew. The two staff members who died were men.

  He got his cell phone, the pay-as-you-go, and called a number from memory. After a second, a grating voice picked up.

  “Just got a visit from a sheriff’s detective,” White said.

  “Who? The woman?”

  “Sorenstam.”

  “Huh.”

  White waited but got nothing more. “That all you have to say?”

  “She was there that night. She must feel personally invested.”

  “She asked me about an employee swipe card.”

  “Did she? She should have asked about it a year ago.”

  “Stop playing games,” White said.

  “Then why did you call?”

  A year back, the swipe card would have been a valuable piece of evidence. The night of the shoot-out, it had been key—White had no doubt. But when the club went up in a Molotov and magnesium blaze, the cards became nothing but warped, sooty plastic. They were of no use to him now. They were nothing but trouble.

  He said, “I want to know why Sorenstam showed up today. The card she obtained belongs to”—he looked again at the ID photo on the computer screen—“Harper Flynn.”

  “Sheriffs know Flynn is connected to the Westerman family. Got to.”

  White watched the news like everybody else. The Westerman family had to loathe the bartender who had crawled out of Xenon alive, while their son had died.

  “Keep eyes on surveillance,” he said. “But for Christ’s sake, be careful.”

  “Ain’t I always?”

  White could have choked him. “You’re as careful as an avalanche.”

  “And as effective.” He hung up.

  Tom White stood by his desk, phone hanging in his hand. Sorenstam had no cause to suspect that he cared about anything besides selling security software and earning his Christmas bonus. If she did, he would get backup from his bosses. They’d vetted him. They trusted him.

  I’ll check it out, he’d told Sorenstam. He didn’t need to. He already had a handle on the issues.

  He had from the start—from the day he interviewed for the job at Spartan. He had walked in and told the HR interviewer about the vulnerabilities of their client list and how he could electronically and physically exploit those vulnerabilities to clean their clients out. Then he told the interviewer to call the Spartan CEO, a dark prince who had earned his millions as a bagman delivering cash to US toadies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Tom White told the interviewer exactly how he would hack into Spartan’s secure server to expose their kickback list and their back-channel money drops, and to reveal how negligibly they screened the guards they hired, and where their warehouse was, the one with the illegal firearms and RPGs that they exported to conflict zones for their own profit.

  The interviewer turned the color of an egg white.

  When Tom White said he could plug the holes in the company’s security and screw their competitors, they shook hands.

  The interviewer said, “Welcome to Spartan.”

  The military-industrial complex was a beautiful beast. And White had figured out how to get himself a teat to suck on. Spartan profited by sowing rumor
s of war and chaos. Bump up people’s fear. Persuade them they needed ever more sophisticated and expensive protection. Turn the ratchet ever tighter, and never release it. Convince them they were always on the verge of losing it all—violently, catastrophically—and that a robust, even vicious response was their only salvation.

  It worked for him. He lived in an apartment in Marina del Rey. He drove a BMW. He had Lakers season tickets. Last year, Spartan had flown him to the Super Bowl to schmooze some of their big clients. He was now the guy Spartan counted on to keep their clients’ data and money safe.

  And he did keep it safe. Usually.

  Spartan’s clients didn’t think of themselves as criminals. They saw themselves as hard-nosed business people. They might employ Spartan’s dark ops to damage their competition with malware and industrial espionage. Then blame the Chinese, always. But they didn’t countenance open violence. That didn’t square with their self-image.

  So they never expected him to countenance it and subvert them from within. Neither did Spartan.

  He always wore a white dress shirt and a rep tie. He cut his hair as though he were a few months out of the Marines. He talked bro-talk and drank beers with his colleagues after work. He told PG-13 jokes. He was a White Hat. Squeaky clean.

  But this thing with Sorenstam. That worried him.

  She struck him as a digger, Sorenstam. All that Scandinavian cool, the black suit with the holster beneath the jacket, the slick way she slid the photo across the table with her pearly manicured nails. She was probing into the Xenon shooting—a case that should have been closed.

  He needed to know what was going on.

  No—he needed to shut this down. Now. Before it began to unravel.

  And it might, because the sheriff’s investigative report was essentially on the money. That night, the shooters had gone to Xenon to deal with Arliss Bale. Tom White had sent them.

  White worked for Spartan Security, but he also worked for himself. He maintained a network of private clients who paid him to liberate information from Spartan’s secure servers. They used that information to conduct business in the black economy. Sometimes, their business involved fraud, extortion, and illegal movement of funds through countries that don’t follow UN money-laundering protocols. And on one occasion, it had involved a transaction with Vegas meth marketer Arliss Bale.

  Bale, shabby gangster that he was, had entered a contract but failed to deliver. Tom White’s clients had therefore needed redress. Consequences. White was adept at meting them out, from a distance.

  How wonderfully excited he had felt when he realized that Bale could be lured out in public, to a hot club where he would be surrounded by a thousand revelers. At Xenon. Damn, that was karma giving Tom White a French kiss.

  Send a message. That was his remit. Frighten Bale, put a semiautomatic to his head and remind him to honor his commitment. Maybe pistol-whip him. Clock’s ticking, asshole. But the shooters had ignored the mission parameters. They didn’t believe in rules of engagement. Aside from: Fuck ’em all.

  White shook it off. Regret was pointless. Action was everything.

  He scrounged change from his pocket and strode down the gray-carpeted hall to the break room. He nodded at a drone who was texting and sipping a diet soda. He dropped coins in the vending machine. A PayDay bar clattered into the slot.

  He tore open the wrapper and stalked back to his office, chewing. He dropped into his desk chair and again examined the photo on the screen. Her employee identification number undoubtedly matched the card that had been issued by Xenon to Harper Flynn.

  He’d made sure they matched. He had gone into the database and verified the employee ID and the alphanumeric that tied this bartender to the card she was required to use at the club.

  Now Sorenstam was sticking her nose into things.

  Sorenstam seemed to enjoy coming off as a Valkyrie. Choosers of the slain, weren’t they? He found that ominous. She had come to him. She might not stop there. She might talk to somebody else at Spartan. She might have other sources.

  He needed to make sure this didn’t go any further.

  White finished his PayDay bar and balled the wrapper and three-pointed it into the wastebasket. That damned swipe card. He started making calls.

  17

  Aiden unlocked his door, disarmed the alarm, and checked the house for signs of intrusion. He let Cobey into the backyard and tossed his keys onto the counter.

  Harper Flynn checked out. Robber, scammer, thief. And true confessor—if he could trust the story she told, stony-eyed. It’s only teenage wasteland.

  His bones ached. His face, where she’d kissed him, seemed to throb.

  He had liked it. He had liked her. Way too much.

  Online, he checked the searches he’d been running. No luck with the tattoos. Eddie Azerov’s ZERO tat was not in the database. Which, admittedly, was spotty, running to gang tats and Russian prison ink. The search for photos matching the tattoo on the hand of the man in the trees at the memorial had returned fourteen hundred hits. The photo, and the search parameters, were too vague.

  His searches for the current whereabouts of Azerov and Travis Maddox caused him greater concern. Azerov’s last known address was the halfway house where he had gone after his release from prison four years earlier. Maddox’s last known was his father’s decrepit McMansion south of China Lake, which, according to one of Aiden’s contacts, was abandoned and in the process of being condemned. Travis was in the wind.

  Aiden didn’t like it. Threats seemed to flicker from every corner, but when he looked for them, they dissolved into shadows and air.

  He took his lockbox from the kitchen cabinet and headed out back to the picnic table. In the shade of the live oaks, beneath the looming mountains, he stripped and cleaned the HK and the SIG. He needed something he could rely on.

  The key rattled in the lock. When the door opened, noise from the freeway grated into the living room. The dingy sunlight silhouetted the man in the doorway. He pocketed the key and took two steps inside before spotting that he wasn’t alone in the room.

  He stopped. “How did you—”

  “Hello, Feliks.”

  Feliks Galkin drew in on himself, shoulders rising. “Mr. Maddox, I didn’t—”

  The shadow that had been standing behind the door stepped into the light. “Didn’t expect us?”

  Feliks jumped.

  The shadow’s face was half-lit beneath the brim of a Dodgers cap. A shiver visibly rippled up Feliks’s back. In the light that filtered through the yellow curtains, his face looked like a wilting hatchet. Travis sat facing him in an easy chair, legs crossed, hands tapping the armrests.

  Feliks cleared his throat. “Is there something I can help you with?”

  Travis continued to tap the armrests. Feliks glanced toward the bedroom.

  “We sent your girlfriend away,” Travis said.

  “Okay. Yeah.”

  Feliks ran his hands up and down his thighs, wiping away sweat. He didn’t ask if she was injured when she left, or whether she would ever come back. He stood in his own living room, hunching as though he’d been stripped naked and dowsed with ice water.

  Behind him, the shadow leaned in. And sniffed. “You been drinking on the job?”

  Feliks’s shoulders ratcheted tighter. “Never, Eddie.”

  Eddie Azerov began to rock back and forth, sharply, like a metronome. Feliks looked at Travis with something approaching pleading. Good.

  “We have questions,” Travis said.

  “Of course. Sure.”

  He couldn’t have looked less sure, or more confused.

  “Xenon,” Travis said.

  Anxiety ignited in Feliks’s eyes. “Yeah?”

  “You haven’t spoken to anybody about it, have you?”

  “Of course not. No way.” He wiped his palms on hi
s jeans again.

  “Has anybody contacted you about it?”

  “No. How could they?”

  “Because you were the one who spray-painted the cameras in the back alley, Feliks. And if your face was at all visible, they could have you on a security video.”

  “Unh-uh. Impossible.” His knee started to jitter. “I did exactly like you asked. I wore the mask, the . . . the . . .”

  “Balaclava.”

  Feliks nodded frantically. Behind him, Zero rocked, his tempo increasing. From the kitchen came the sound of a slow gathering and claws ticking on linoleum.

  “Your assignment was to provide a clear path.”

  “I carried out my assignment, Mr. Maddox. Completely.”

  “We have a report that the cops saw you in the alley.”

  “Bullshit. That’s impossible.”

  Travis stood up. “Are you contradicting me? I don’t make statements without evidence.”

  Feliks raised his hands in placation. “I did what you asked. I checked that no vehicles were in the alley. That nobody was out there. I sprayed the camera. They couldn’t have seen me.”

  “They?”

  Feliks’s mouth hung open.

  That was all the evidence Travis needed. He glanced at Azerov. Eddie’s metronomic rocking ceased.

  Travis walked toward the door. As he passed, Feliks turned, beseechingly, and grabbed his arm.

  “Mr. Maddox. Wait. No, I swear . . .”

  Travis shook him off. “Don’t swear. Not at me, ever.”

  “But—no, but I . . .”

  Eddie stepped up behind Feliks. In his hand, he held a red cylinder the size of a stick of dynamite. He jabbed it against Feliks’s cheek. Feliks cringed.

  Eddie said, “‘But-but-but.’ Let’s talk about what that means, in terms of your impeccable assignment. Really talk. ’Cause this flare bu-bu-burns hot.”

  Travis smoothed the sleeve of his jacket where Feliks had grabbed him. “Five thousand six hundred degrees Fahrenheit, roughly. Tell Eddie what he needs to know. In full.”

  He opened the door. Into the slit of yellow sunlight, the dog walked out of the kitchen, rippling, almost tiger striped, the sun turning its dime-size eyes to ingots.