“Detective Reeves?” announced someone from the house. “You need to see this.”
“Care to join me?” she said to Jackson.
“Why not?” he said. “The scene can’t get any weirder.”
A few moments later, Jackson was muttering to himself as they stared into an open refrigerator. Two phones sat at the bottom of a full pitcher of water. She glanced at Jackson, who nodded with a sly smile.
“Someone was worried about eavesdropping,” said Jackson.
Why would Nathan Fisher, mild-mannered water department engineer, sink his phones? This was something they saw with narcos suddenly tipped off about police surveillance. None of this added up. Bloodstain with brain chunk in the backyard. Crashed van that a dozen neighbors saw, but the police can’t find. Reports of masked men running through the street with guns. Smoke grenades. Strange buzzing noises. All somehow connected to a man she’d questioned less than twenty-four hours ago in connection to the reactor shutdown.
“Detective Reeves?” asked one of Jackson’s investigators from the bedroom hallway.
“Yes?”
“We found a box of pistol ammunition hidden in a clothing drawer in the master bedroom: 9mm jacketed hollow points. Sixteen rounds remaining in a box of fifty.”
“I’ll be right there,” she said, glancing at Jackson.
“This guy is starting to sound like some kind of anarchist,” said Jackson.
She shook her head. He was definitely sounding less and less like a county water engineer by the minute.
CHAPTER 51
Nathan Fisher’s eyelids fluttered at the sound of chirping birds. For a few brief moments, his mind vacillated between the conscious and unconscious world, unaware that he was sleeping on the hard ground next to a jeep trail, miles from the nearest building. All at once the reality of their situation slapped him awake, his eyes opening wide, as his body snapped upright in the bivy bag. The waterproof shell arrested his involuntary reaction, knocking him back to the gravel. He lay on his back for a few breaths before unzipping the thin bag far enough to slip into the chilly morning air.
He peered north, still seeing very little of Camp Pendleton’s terrain in the darkness. The view west, toward the Pacific Ocean, yielded a few scattered lights, but little more. He didn’t know what to expect when the sun rose. He remembered that the base sprawled for miles, with Marine units stationed in distant camps connected by a few main roads. The northern part of the base was sparsely populated, from what he recalled. Even after the sun rose over the base, they might not see anything of consequence from their vantage point on the hill.
A thin blue ribbon peeked between the hills to the east. The birds had woken him earlier than necessary. A quick look at his watch confirmed it: 5:15 a.m. The sun wouldn’t break the horizon for another thirty to forty minutes, and they wouldn’t be in danger of discovery by any of Camp San Mateo’s Marines for at least another hour after that. He considered lying back down and trying to go back to sleep, but he didn’t trust his wristwatch alarm to wake him.
Sleep hadn’t come easy after they’d settled in for the night. The last time he remembered checking his watch had been around three thirty. His wife had finally fallen asleep, after several unverified tarantula sightings. He supposed it didn’t matter. Once it was light enough outside to walk safely, they could relocate their makeshift camp into one of the nearby draws and sleep all day. They had little else to do while they waited for Quinn to show up tomorrow night besides eat and sleep—and drink coffee.
Keira’s backpack contained a one-pound propane bottle and a single-burner propane stove that screwed to the top of the bottle. They could heat water in the stainless-steel canteen cup from Quinn’s rucksack to make the instant coffee found in every MRE. His father had praised MRE coffee, but the man drank instant coffee spooned out of a red plastic can. Nathan expected it to taste vile, but at the same time, he couldn’t wait to make a cup.
“What time is it?” his wife murmured.
“Still too early,” he said. “Sun won’t be up for another forty minutes.”
“Shit,” she said, burying her head inside the heavy sleeping bag. “Wake me up when it’s time to move.”
“I can give you another hour. Six fifteen,” he said. “I don’t know how long it will take to find a good hiding spot, and I’m thinking about making some coffee before we relocate.”
“That sounds nice,” she said, shifting in the sleeping bag. “Are you going back to sleep?”
“Probably not,” he said. “I might make that coffee now and start looking for our temporary home when the sun comes up. We can let Owen sleep as long as possible.”
“I’ll join you,” she said, unzipping her sleeping bag.
“I promise not to drink all of the coffee,” he said. “Get some more sleep. We had a long night.”
She laughed quietly. “Sorry I kept you up with the false alarms.”
“I couldn’t sleep, anyway,” he said, kneeling next to her pack.
Keira sat up in her bag. “This is going to be a long day, isn’t it?”
“Sleep will be a big part of our day,” said Nathan, yawning.
“Owen doesn’t nap,” she said, nodding at the camouflage bivy sack between them.
“Yeah,” he said, finding the propane bottle. “We have a long day ahead of us.”
Keira put an arm around Owen’s hidden form and nestled against him. Nathan wondered how much they could tell an eleven-year-old about the full situation they faced. Owen knew that someone nasty and well equipped was chasing them, but they’d been intentionally nebulous about who and why. Incredibly enough, his son hadn’t asked last night. He’d marched forward, happy to play his role without asking questions. He couldn’t imagine this temporary lack of curiosity holding much longer. They needed to be prepared with answers. Nathan leaned toward telling Owen everything, but he’d defer to Keira’s judgment.
“He’ll be all right,” said Nathan, feeling like it was the right thing to say, even if it was a cliché.
“I hope so,” said Keira. “I’m tempted to take David up on the offer to hide him with another family on base. I think he might be safer that way.”
“I don’t want him out of our sight,” said Nathan.
“I don’t either,” she whispered, lying next to Nathan. “But he’s not safe with us. Tarantulas weren’t the only things keeping me awake last night. I couldn’t stop thinking about how this whole thing unfolded.”
“I should have told you about what I saw at the beach,” said Nathan. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I really don’t. I never meant to put us in danger. I thought this would all blow over.”
“Actually, your head-in-the-sand approach may be the only reason we’re alive right now.”
“I feel like I’m being set up for a smackdown,” he said, picking up the bottle and stove. “How about you deliver it over breakfast and some coffee? Grab two of the MREs. We can watch the sunrise. Give us a little privacy, too.”
“Got it,” she said, pulling two plastic pouches out of the box Quinn had given them. “Does it matter which ones I pick?”
“Not really,” said Nathan. “They’re all pretty gross. My dad used to have MRE night at home, until my mom put an end to it.”
“Sounds like a blast,” she said sarcastically.
“Actually, it was pretty cool,” he said. “For a while.”
They sat on the western slope of a small spur and set up the stove. Nathan dragged one of the five-gallon water cans over and filled the canteen cup to the brim. He lit the stove with matches from one of the MRE packs and balanced the stainless-steel cup on the stovetop. The contraption looked like it would tip over if he breathed too hard.
“The water should be ready in a few minutes,” he said, putting an arm around her and pulling her close. “So what was the crazy theory you had about how I saved us?”
“I’m still mad at you,” she said, leaning her head into his shoulder. “But I really d
o think your patented wait-and-see attitude kept us alive.”
“Smackdown coming up,” he said.
“Seriously. Think about it. Quinn arriving when he did is the only reason we’re alive.”
“He certainly saved us from something horrific,” said Nathan.
“Right. If he’d shown up in the afternoon, or the day before, he would have dropped off the phones and we would have never seen him again. We would have driven off oblivious to Cerberus and probably been killed on the road.”
“Quite possibly,” he said.
“Every scenario, except for Quinn showing up when he did last night, kills us,” said Keira.
“What if I had told the police about the boats when they questioned me?”
“They would have promised to look into it and sent you on your way with the same geo-restriction,” she said. “And Cerberus would have known that you saw their boats. They probably would have snatched us out of the house that night.”
“I could have listened to you when I got back from the beach and left for my parents’ house that same morning, ditching work.”
“And nobody would have found the bodies at your parents’ house for a few weeks,” she said. “We were dead as soon as you arrived at the beach, which wasn’t your fault. Bad luck. Bad timing. Whatever. Somehow the world wasn’t ready to give us up.”
“This is starting to sound very philosophical,” said Nathan.
“Call it what you will. Quinn could have showed up earlier, but he didn’t want to sit in traffic to deliver the phones. He didn’t want to bring them at all, but his dad insisted. He was pretty honest about that. He begrudgingly arrived at our house moments before we were attacked.”
“Or his arrival sparked the attack,” said Nathan.
“Cerberus had plans to grab us last night,” she said. “One way or the other, they would have paid us a visit. I think we left at the only moment we could have escaped and survived, thanks to Quinn—and you.”
She was probably right, but he was too tired to think about the deeper meaning of life at the moment. Keira worked the opposite way. The more exhausted she became, the closer to a spiritual guru she sounded. Right now, he just wanted to drink some bad coffee and watch a sunset without thinking. They had the whole day to explore the cosmos.
“Water’s ready,” he said. “First cup is yours.”
“We can share,” said Keira, handing him one of the MREs.
A few minutes later, they cautiously sipped the questionable liquid from the awkwardly designed canteen cup. The distant strip of visible horizon had brightened, the wispy, scattered clouds immediately above it betraying hints of orange. He held Keira tight with one arm and held the canteen cup with the other. For a brief, fading moment, he forgot about last night. Nathan was alone with this wife, enjoying a gorgeous sunrise in a pristinely quiet, natural environment—the kind of thing they talked about doing just about every week, never putting in the effort to make it happen. He stifled a laugh.
“What?” she said.
“Now you have me waxing all philosophical over here,” he said, sipping the coffee and grimacing.
“It’s pretty gross,” she said.
“Disgustingly good.”
She took the cup from him and wrapped both hands around it, staring ahead silently.
“What’s really going to happen to us?” she asked.
“Nothing bad. Someone or something is looking out for us,” he said.
She turned her head and kissed the side of his mouth. “Thank you for saying that.”
What choice did he have? They’d been dropped off seven miles from the nearest human with a case of MREs, ten gallons of water, a few sleeping bags, and a machine gun. They had no way to contact anyone or figure out what was going on beyond this ridgeline. Their fate was most definitely in someone else’s hands right now.
CHAPTER 52
Nick Leeds stood inside the closed vestibule, waiting for the door to buzz. He checked his watch: 6:20. Flagg would be surprised to see him this early. They had adjourned from the last operations briefing at 2:15, after scouring the police channels for news related to their operation. Police units had been called out to Nathan Fisher’s neighborhood but hadn’t entered the residence. No surprise there. All 911 calls from the Fishers’ neighbors focused on the van crash and the smoke. A few reported seeing armed men around the van, but with the van missing, it didn’t elevate to the level of a critical municipal threat. Police would have knocked on doors and taken statements, alert for signs of duress, but without obvious damage to the front of a residence or signs of forced entry, they wouldn’t investigate any further. The real fun would start when the police ran a list of current residents, connecting the dots between Nathan Fisher and the police department’s visit to the San Diego Water Reclamation Authority corporate office in Poway.
The door buzzed, and Leeds pushed it inward, immediately seeing the faces of two men displayed on two of the parabolic screens. He recognized one of them. Jon Fisher. Nathan’s father. The other had a similar haircut but didn’t elicit a memory. The smell of espresso coffee filled his nose before he stepped inside the room.
Flagg swiveled in his chair. “Care to guess how these two men are connected?”
“Jon Fisher had a brother stolen by gypsies at birth?” asked Leeds, heading straight for the coffeemaker.
“You’re still on my shit list,” said Flagg.
“Who isn’t?” asked Leeds, turning to face the screens. “What did you find?”
“While you were sleeping, I made an interesting discovery.” Flagg touched the computer screen in front of him, and the two pictures on the screen expanded, showing torso-up images of the men wearing formal Marine Corps uniforms with an American flag draped in the background.
“Who’s the light bird?” asked Leeds.
“Allow me to introduce you to then–Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Quinn, Sergeant Major Jon Fisher’s commanding officer at First Radio Battalion from early 2019 to late 2020, currently working in an undisclosed capacity at the Defense Intelligence Agency.”
“That’s not good,” said Leeds.
“An appropriate response, given Quinn senior’s background,” said Flagg. “I’ve called in a few favors at that agency to get a better picture of what we’re dealing with. He retired from the Marine Corps in ’26, after a twenty-two-year career as a Marine intelligence officer, with a secondary Military Occupational Specialty in counterinsurgency/human source intelligence.”
“Like father, like son,” said Leeds. “This could be a big problem on more than one level.”
“This retired colonel might be in a position to learn enough about Cerberus to connect some dangerous dots,” said Flagg. “Which is why we need to take Nathan Fisher out of the equation immediately. The younger Quinn, too. He saw enough last night to cast some serious doubt on the story we concocted to frame Fisher. Without Quinn, Fisher’s story about the boats will sound like the desperate ramblings of a cop killer with nefarious ties to the California Liberation Movement.”
“What about Fisher’s parents? Same orders?”
“It’s too late to back up on that one,” said Flagg. “If they know we paid the house a visit in Idaho, there’s no way they’ll write their son off as a quasi-terrorist cop killer. They’re more dangerous alive than dead, so the orders stand.”
“Should we start looking for Stuart Quinn?”
“I already started that ball rolling,” said Flagg. “You have enough to worry about between here and Idaho. I have a different group working on it.”
Leeds wasn’t sure if that signaled a loss of confidence in him, or if Flagg was starting to get nervous about the entire operation. Deep inside Leeds, a dangerous voice begged to be released from its tightly guarded cage. A voice that would love nothing more than to point out how none of this would be a problem right now if Flagg had popped Fisher on the way home from work two days ago—like Leeds had suggested. Instead, he took a sip of coffee and nodde
d, approaching the screens.
“I have eight operatives filtering into Camp Pendleton over the next two hours,” said Leeds. “Two will locate and watch Captain Quinn. The rest will comb the commissaries, exchanges, and other base services for the Fisher family and Quinn’s wife. She never returned to their house last night. I assume she’s aware of the Fishers at this point.”
“I don’t want our operatives wasting any time when they find them,” said Flagg. “The Fishers are to be terminated with extreme prejudice. Alison Quinn, too, if she’s with the Fishers. If she’s alone, capture and interrogate—then terminate.”
“Copy that,” said Leeds. “Any news on the Raptor?”
“It wasn’t an accident,” said Flagg. “San Diego County PD lost a traffic-surveillance drone in the same area at the same time. Twenty-three houses a few blocks east of the I-5 in Encinitas burned to the ground last night.”
“From two drones crashing?” asked Leeds. “Sounds like a commercial airliner went down.”
“I wish we had one to drop on the site right now,” said Flagg. “Investigators are not going to like what they find.”
“Doesn’t the Raptor disintegrate to prevent recovery by the enemy?”
“That was the problem,” said Flagg. “The self-destruct system relies on a thermite reaction built into the drone’s frame, which literally burns the aircraft apart. Unfortunately, thermite burns incredibly hot for a long time, and its designers clearly didn’t consider the impact of a thermite shower over a crowded suburb.
“Normally, I wouldn’t be worried about this,” Flagg went on, “beyond the obvious implications of explaining the loss of a twenty-million-dollar asset to the board of directors. But a CLM surveillance team managed to transmit video of the drone launch before airfield security dropped Javelin missiles on their heads. The video itself can’t implicate One Nation or Sentinel, but the airfield land purchase represents a risk. We sanitized the field and burned the hangar down, with the woman’s body inside. If CLM directs the police or the feds to the site, they’ll have to explain why a known CLM operative was found in the hangar.”
Fractured State (Fractured State Series Book 1) Page 22
