The Hunted

by James Phelan

  Walker forced his thoughts to calm, to slow. Let go of this edge and it’s straight down. Six hundred and thirty feet. Concrete paving below. Two hundred and eighty pounds falling at high speed and hitting a paved ground.

  Not going to happen.

  Not today.

  But before he could figure a way to get up, he had to get this backpack away.

  How long to go? Two minutes? Less?

  He let go with his right hand and slipped the pack off his shoulder, nearly falling as the weight slid down his arm, and then—

  The weight caught. The forty-pound backpack hung from his right hand.

  The tips of the fingers on his left hand screamed with pain. His left hand itself did not move—he had it shaped like a hook, and it would hold.

  But for how long? Two minutes? Less?

  And then what?

  Walker closed his eyes, just for a second, and then he opened them. He could see into the window. Some tourists had gone to Murphy’s aid.

  First things first.

  Walker glanced over his right shoulder. The afternoon sun glinted off the mighty Mississippi, the state of Illinois on the other side.

  The river was close, but not that close.

  Close enough?

  Walker started to swing his body. Forward and back in a huge arcing movement. Perhaps just enough to launch the pack into the Mississippi. Perhaps. As he brought his right arm to the zenith of the let-go of the pack, he thought of all the reasons he wished it to make the journey, of why he was here, doing this, right now: the people below, the fallen SEALs, Zodiac, his father, Squeaker, Eve . . .

  He reached out.

  And was stopped.

  Murphy.

  His arm reached out the shot-out window. He grabbed Walker’s wrist and then went to work at the thick glass, which had shattered and held—laminated safety glass, the double panes held together by a film of plastic. He used his .45 to smash it out, making the opening bigger. Two men joined Murphy to help, using fire extinguishers to clear out the remainder of the shattered window.

  Walker swung up with the pack, but he missed, and the top of it slammed against the window frame.

  But the grip around his wrist held tight. Walker dangled, just for half a second, then he flung the pack through the window.

  That done, he reached around on the next pendulum-like momentum and grabbed the window frame with his now spare hand.

  “Check the time on the pack!” he yelled as he started to haul himself up.

  “A minute twenty!” someone shouted back.

  “Get me in!” Walker called.

  Six hands grabbed at him, pulling him up until he came through the window frame and dropped to the floor.

  Murphy was leaning against the wall, under the smashed-out window.

  “Get . . . her . . .” Murphy said, shoving the pack Walker’s way. The blood on his hand was dark and thick. “Keep going. Let’s see you move, Air Force!”

  “On it,” Walker said, getting to his feet, shouldering the pack and racing toward the ladder up to the roof.

  112

  Walker moved quickly but carefully to the edge of the roof.

  Levine was there, holding onto the clipped-in maintenance harness, looking over in the direction that Walker had flown, as if she were still waiting for him to splat onto the pavement.

  Walker held his Beretta in one hand, and hefted the backpack from his shoulder and readied it in the other. The wind was strong and the last vestige of daylight was clear.

  Walker neared his target.

  Levine turned, her face working through a range of emotions and understanding. Her eyes dropped to the pack in his hand, and the gun.

  “You won’t shoot me,” she said, defiant.

  “No. But you know what?” Walker said, tossing his Beretta to the roof and taking the backpack in two hands. “It’s the fall that’s going to kill you.”

  Keeping one hand to steady herself on the tethered harness, Levine dropped her gas mask and unholstered her Sig, then brought it up to aim at Walker’s center mass.

  She sighted with one eye down the tritium sights—

  Walker threw the backpack at her, a full-force pop-shot from his chest to hers. Before it connected, Levine fired.

  Levine got two shots off before dropping the Sig and the harness to repel the backpack. Her eyes opened full and wide as the forty-pound mass of the pack hit her and took her off her feet.

  Levine closed her eyes as she flew backward.

  Walker too went backward—every action having an equal and opposite reaction. A proportion of the force of his throw traveled through his arms and down through his body to his legs, to where the soles of his boots met the roof of the arch. He steadied himself. The gunshots had gone wide but were close enough to ring in his right ear.

  He ran to the ledge, grabbed the tethered harness, leaned out and looked over the side.

  Levine wasn’t falling down—she was falling through the air, away from the arch.

  Walker had thrown the pack with all his strength, with such force as to shoot her off the arch and out in a curved trajectory—creating a new arch all of her own.

  She was headed for the mighty Mississippi. If she hit the water before detonation, Levine and the WMD would be carried out to the Gulf of Mexico; one more substance added to the 12,500-mile dead zone out there.

  If she makes it . . .

  Walker watched Levine’s flight. Rather, her fall.

  He knew from high-school physics that for every second that an object falls the increase in velocity is the amount equal to the pull of gravity. In the first second Levine traveled at thirty-two feet per second. By the next second she was moving at sixty-four feet per second. And so on. The fastest a person will fall in normal atmosphere is 120 miles per hour, because the air resistance keeps the body from accelerating any more. Levine would not get to that point, because both the ground and the Mississippi were just 630 feet below.

  First, Walker fixed on her face. She was only a second into her fall when her expression softened and realization set in. She knew her fate and was resigned to it. He could see that she felt that she would be triumphant, in the end—that she would hit the ground at about the same time the backpack would detonate, and that she would give her life to her cause. She was doing it for her father, for all those she felt needed this. She closed her eyes, drifted toward success.

  Walker saw differently.

  He mapped her path. The arc was beautiful. Levine’s trajectory formed the descending half of a catenary arch all on her own. She was being dragged to the ground by gravity but she was still headed out, away from the Gateway Arch, away from the ground and the masses of demonstrators down there, toward the river, a curve of physics and geometry in her wake.

  Below, the mass of people had seen the falling body and panic had set in—the crowd split into two groups as though the person hurtling toward earth was some kind of contagion to be avoided at all costs.

  113

  There was nothing Walker—or anyone—could do but watch. Levine’s gas mask was on the roof behind him but he didn’t think much about putting it on. If the device detonated, and he masked up and went down to ground zero, saw the sum of his failure in the faces melting away, spewing the green bile or whatever hellish reaction to the WMD agent . . .

  Six seconds later Levine hit the water. She was too far away for Walker to see her expression. He figured the fall would have killed her; from that height it would have been like hitting solid ground. Bones shatter. Vertebrae unlink. Internal organs rupture. The brain rattles around. The human body simply is not designed to stop suddenly from such a pace.

  The water swallowed Levine up—and then threatened to spit her out.

  The explosion was a muffled puff that made the water rise and fall.

  And that was it.

  Walker saw the fire department arrive in their hazmat suits, rushing to the shoreline. He dragged himself back to the manhole and down the h
atch. Murphy was pale, but by the look of it the bystanders had done a good job of patching him up. He gave Walker a questioning look. Walker gave him a thumbs-up and then helped him to his feet.

  “Come on, sailor,” Walker said, slinging his arm under Murphy and wrapping Murphy’s around his shoulder. “Let’s get you to your family.”

  “Not hospital first?” Murphy asked as they climbed into a tram car.

  “You Navy guys,” Walker said. “A little scratch and you want your momma.”

  As the tram car descended, Walker leaned back and closed his eyes. He was tired. He knew that with Zodiac he was closer to the beginning than the end. In his mind he heard the echoes of those two gunshots, back in New York. He could hear his heart beating in his ears, echoes of his father running through him. Progress.

  Epilogue

  “It doesn’t matter. You can’t stop this. Twelve attacks have been set in motion.”

  “I can catch up.”

  “No,” David Walker said to his son, shaking his head, “you really can’t.”

  Walker stood in the hotel room. Watched. Listened. Waited.

  The sun was rising. California sun. He was there for no other reason than he wanted to be somewhere warm.

  The television was on. Muted. The news was reporting the terror attack. Hazmat-clad teams from the CDC and FBI were combing through the Mississippi for debris from the explosion. Traces of a weapons-grade biological agent were found, and each news outlet seemed to have their own experts giving different ideas on what that was and where it came from and who really did this. The tickers told barely half the truth.

  His new cell phone rang. He let it ring. McCorkell’s number. A lead? Go-time on the next Zodiac target?

  The tone was incessant. He answered it.

  “Where are you?” McCorkell asked.

  Walker looked at the naked form of the woman in his bed. The white sheet covered her tanned back and was wrapped along a leg. Her long dark hair covered her face, fanned across the pillow. Beautiful. Enticing. Dangerous.

  “R&R,” Walker said. “What’s up?”

  There was a pause, then McCorkell said, “It’s Eve. She slipped away.”

  “What?” Walker was awake now, alert.

  “In the night. She left the safe house.”

  “Where?”

  “They’d just moved her to Boston. Somerville was going to talk to you and send her home, today, but she bugged out during the night, out her second-story window. No sign of her since.”

  “Why would she leave like that when she was being sent home the next day?”

  “She spoke to Somerville late last night.”

  Walker rubbed his eyes, remembered all the missed calls from Somerville that he’d seen when he got back into his room after 3am.

  “And?”

  “We need you to get back to work.”

  “What’s happened?” Walker asked. He went to the coffee machine above the minibar, inserted a tiny capsule of coffee and hit the button. The hot brew bubbled into the cup below. The smell filled the room. The woman stirred in her sleep.

  “Nothing. Yet.”

  “Yet?” Walker took the coffee and went to the balcony. He stood outside and looked down at Sunset Boulevard. Cars streamed along. It was hot. The sun was bright. He squinted and looked at the sky.

  “We’ve received a letter. From your father. Sending you a pic of it now.”

  Walker’s phone bleeped with the incoming message. He looked at the screen. Handwritten. Five words. His father’s handwriting.

  Jed—Barrow, Alaska. Five days.

  “What’s there?”

  “Not much,” McCorkell said. “Oil town. Closest government installation is an old ice-runway airbase, now some kind of NSA listening post, a relay station. Year-round crew of five.”

  “Have you warned them?”

  “Not yet. Thought you’d like to look around first, see what’s what. Maybe there’s something else. The oil rigs or pipeline.”

  “Right.” Walker looked again at the image of his father’s note. “When did this letter get to you?”

  “This morning. Not ten minutes ago.”

  “How?”

  “Found it in my pocket.”

  “In your pocket?”

  “Yep. I walked to work, went to take out my ID pass at the security checkpoint, and it was in my coat pocket.”

  “Could have been there awhile.”

  “Pockets were empty when I left my apartment.”

  “So my father’s in Vienna?”

  “Maybe. Though he wouldn’t have done the drop, would he? He’d have used someone. Some pick-pocket, a local gypsy kid or something.”

  “Maybe.” Walker thought about his father. Could imagine him doing the drop, the kind of sleight of hand he’d shown in magic tricks to Walker as a kid, and that he later learned had been part of his CIA tradecraft as a young intelligence officer in West Germany. A faceless man in a crowd. A ghost. Connecting people. Recruiting. Facilitating. “So what’s the plan?”

  “You’re getting on the next flight to Alaska.”

  “Not Alaska Air. I hate those guys.”

  There was a knock at the balcony door.

  Walker turned. The woman stood there, wearing his shirt. She passed him an envelope, said it was just dropped at the door by the concierge. Walker gave her the remainder of his coffee and she took it and went back to bed. He’d thought that he could spend all day with her. He’d thought last night, looking into her eyes, that he could spend the rest of his life with her, someplace quiet and off the grid, with not a thought of the outside world. Similar to what he’d learned Levine and Grant had planned, with their arrangements to run down to Chile, new IDs and a suitcase of money to keep them anonymous.

  That thought broke his fantasizing.

  He opened the envelope. Alaskan Air flight, LAX to Anchorage, leaving three hours from now.

  “You knew I was here,” Walker said.

  “Yeah. Patriot Act and all that, makes a place like LA a small town.”

  “Three hours?” Walker said. He looked to the woman. She climbed into bed and gestured for him to return to her. He wanted to hang up the phone and go there and never leave.

  “You can get a lot done in three hours,” McCorkell said.

  Walker looked back out at the sky, as though looking for a drone that might be spying on him and relaying live video feed back to McCorkell. In truth, he thought, he was looking at his last blue sky for a while. “You know what this means, though, right?”

  “I think so.”

  “My father.”

  “Yep.”

  “He knows more about Zodiac than he let on back in Hereford.”

  “I’d say so.”

  “He knows the next attack—how would he know that if he wasn’t involved, right?”

  “Involved or not, he knows more than he said,” McCorkell said. “We’re still looking for him, but he’s a ghost.”

  Walker glanced back to the bedroom, said, “What did Somerville tell Eve?”

  “She told her that she might need to be protected for a while longer.”

  Walker was silent. The woman was lying on her side, watching, waiting.

  “Hutchinson and Somerville are in DC, at Homeland Security,” McCorkell said. “Got them their own office there, semi-permanent, fully staffed and resourced, until Zodiac is over. They’ll be in touch, soon as you land in Prudhoe Bay.”

  “Prudhoe?”

  “Change at Anchorage. Prop flight to Prudhoe, then on another thousand or so klicks northwest, to Barrow. Weather permitting. It was the fastest way. Be there in twenty-four hours.”

  “Great. Thanks. You know, that’s almost in Russia.”

  “Almost. Could probably see Russians from there.”

  Walker looked out at LA. “Weather permitting?”

  “You’ve just been on the Ozarks. How much worse can the weather in Alaska be?”

  “Speaking of, how’s our SEAL?” W
alker thought of Squeaker. He’d accompanied her body back to her home town, where she was put in a plot next to her mother. Murphy had cried. His kids didn’t know what was happening.

  “The Murphys say thanks. All the SEALs, actually. Say that they owe you one.”

  “Great.”

  “Handy thing, having a team of SEALs in your back pocket.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “And Walker?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Good luck.”

  Walker ended the call and headed inside. The woman got to her knees on the bed and held out her arms. Walker wrapped his arms around the woman he’d married and had somehow let go. He’d not make that mistake again. He closed his eyes and took in a deep breath against her neck, lost in her smell.

  “I understand,” Eve said.

  Walker remained silent.

  Acknowledgments

  This book marks ten years of working with Hachette: ten years, ten novels, and I couldn’t be happier. With The Hunted I owe a huge thank you to my publishing team: Vanessa Radnidge, Kate Stevens and Claire de Medici, for once again making the best of my work. Fiona, Louise, Justin and Anna have been by my side the whole way and very encouraging of this latest thriller. Big thanks to all others involved in the publishing process, especially those frontline sales staff who work tirelessly getting my work into readers’ hands.

  My thanks to my family and friends for the fun and friendship. The usual suspects, Emily (E Mac) and Tony W (Pa T), did an early read—thanks for being critical.

  Gratitude is due to my agents for keeping things ticking along, particularly Pippa Masson and Laura Dunn.

  This book is the product of a decade’s worth of conversations with serving and former intelligence and military personnel across three continents, and I’m thankful for their time and candor.

  Nicole, more than ever, has been my strongest advocate and biggest support.