Wired Dawn

by Toby Neal

  Ginger fell in behind Sophie as she pushed ahead, thankful for her wet-dry hiking shoes because the narrow trail was slick with iron-rich red mud, winding between tall banks of pili grass, and wild guava trees. The smell of wet grass, mold, and the sweetness of rotting fruit flavored the air. Sophie plucked a yellow guava off one of the trees and bit into it as she pushed forward, already feeling the forty-pound pack’s weight sinking heavily onto her hips. She paused to tighten the belt so that the weight didn’t land on her lower back.

  She took another bite of the firm, tangy guava, enjoying the sweet-sour pink flesh as she paused to look around at the soaring, green-robed sides of the valley. This place reminded her of Waipio Valley on the Big Island, her first real exposure to this environment—and a case that had scarred her for life.

  Sophie shut down the memory of that place, that case—and of her partner Jake, who’d saved her life.

  Jake Dunn.

  She wouldn’t think of him, of her conflicted feelings about and toward him. Because thinking of him reminded her of Connor. And Connor didn’t deserve anything from her, at all. She was off men. Forever.

  Sophie hurried, bumping into Ginger and urging the dog into a trot. She used the sturdy bamboo stick she’d picked up on the first day she left to push branches out of the way and for leverage as she hiked as rapidly as physically able, straight toward the back of the valley.

  She’d heard from some other hikers that there was some kind of settlement back there, a village of renegade local people who refused to honor the five-day permits issued by the state for camping. She was ignoring the five-day limit too, and thus needed to avoid areas patrolled by state park rangers.

  The trail meandered along a clear stream, climbing steadily back toward the steep head of the valley where the junction of the walls boasted a waterfall that plummeted hundreds of feet.

  Sophie paused eventually to let Ginger drink from the stream and to drink herself, from a canteen of boiled water. At each elevation, she paused to look back at the view down toward the ocean, to savor a slight breeze that dried away sweat brought to the surface of her skin by effort and humidity.

  Sophie wanted to see the waterfall, and then she’d pick another campsite. One with enough openness that hopefully she’d get her gear dried out, and be able to connect her satellite-ready laptop with some satellite internet.

  She hadn’t been online for five days, an eternity for someone as “wired in” as she was normally. After the first couple of days of free-floating anxiety, she’d come to enjoy the anonymous feeling of being unplugged.

  She was well and truly off the grid.

  And she’d left everything and everyone behind—including her name and identity. Her father. Her partner Jake. And her friends Lei and Marcella.

  It was all the Ghost’s fault. That bastard had let her grieve for him…

  Sophie shook her head to rid it of buzzing, painful thoughts as she reached a small knoll surrounded with the bright yellow-green of kukui nut trees in full leaf. The remains of lo’i, the ancient Hawaiian terraces used in the cultivation of taro, provided a stacked rock wall that would block the wind. If she was under the trees, her camp would be out of the sun. She could set up camp now and see the waterfall later…but she didn’t want to be in sight of the path.

  “Come, Ginger.” Sophie turned off the trail and bushwhacked through waist-high ferns and undergrowth deep into the grove of kukui trees.

  Looking up into their interlaced branches, she enjoyed the hum of the wind blowing across the trees’ large, palmate leaves. “This seems like a good spot.”

  She had just unslung her heavy pack, lowering it to the ground, when she heard the sound of gut-wrenching weeping. A woman burst through the bushes, making Ginger sit up and bark.

  “Help me! My son is gone!”

  Chapter Four

  He’d lost her.

  The Ghost’s fingers tapped his keyboard in a blur of motion. A sense of panic tightened his chest as he routed the surveillance cameras at the Kaua’i airport through another scrub program. Sophie’s makeup had fooled the facial recognition, but by tracking Ginger instead, he hoped to spot her eventually.

  The video feed caught Sophie and Ginger getting into a car with a strange driver at the baggage claim of the Kaua’i airport. The Ghost zoomed in on the license plate. Likely a ride-share vehicle, but in a few moments, he would know for sure.

  He sat back in his chair, releasing a tense breath.

  Sophie had taken the suggestion he’d planted and gone to Kaua’i.

  When he’d pinned the postcard to her side of the desk at the hidden office they’d called the “Batcave,” he’d hoped she’d pick up on the subliminal message he’d left her. There was a lot that demanded the Ghost’s attention in that remote valley, and Sophie could be his eyes and ears.

  But she had stripped herself, her clothing, and all of her possessions of the various tracking devices he had installed in and around her. She was too wary, savvy, and sensitive not to have noticed if he’d tried to plant a subdermal tracker on her. He’d slipped a harmless radioactive isotope into her tea that last time they’d been together in Paia. That would last a while, but was only detectable at a much closer range.

  The Ghost had always hoped she would become his partner in the mission, but he had not anticipated falling in love with her. Emotion was a sickness in his bones, sapping his strength, draining his vitality and weakening the hunger for justice that had been fuel for so long. He’d almost given up the whole game for her!

  Now, Connor just missed her with a longing that had not lessened since they parted at her Mary Watson apartment on Oahu.

  He kept hoping to feel better, to reclaim his motivation. Even seeing the evidence that his manipulation to send her to Kaua’i had worked only tortured him with visions of hiking with her, Ginger and Anubis all the way to that remote and beautiful paradise to right wrongs.

  But Sophie had rejected him even after he’d given her a copy of the Ghost software to pique her interest. She continued to cling to ineffective and outmoded methods of conventional legal action.

  Connor’s inability to execute Sophie’s husband Assan Ang stuck in his craw. The one time he’d really needed to mete out justice on behalf of a worthy victim he loved had failed. He’d been too caught up in dealing with his own staged death and its aftermath to help Sophie when she really needed him.

  Fortunately, she had dealt with Assan Ang herself.

  Unfortunately, that had left her legally vulnerable.

  That was unacceptable.

  Perhaps he could at least help her with something. He scowled at the screen, and leaned forward in concentration, his fingers flying.

  Chapter Five

  Nakai’s breath blasted out of him as he hit bottom.

  The boy lay stunned in a blackness so thick that it felt like a weight against his eyes. Was he dead?

  But dead people didn’t feel pain, did they?

  Nakai opened his eyes. At least he was fairly sure he opened his eyes, but there was no change in the oily density that surrounded him. He sat up slowly, surprised that he could move his arms and legs, that he had landed on something relatively soft in the harsh raw lava environment of the underground tube.

  He didn’t know how far he had fallen.

  His thoughts scattered, like tiny, flashing fish in a tide pool, then re-formed, rushing at him in a burst of terror.

  Why hadn’t he just died? He was just going to, anyway, but now it would take a while and be painful and terrifying.

  He smoothed his hands over rounded pebbles and noticed, for the first time, the sound of trickling water.

  Chapter Six

  Marcella got into her black Honda Accord, turned on the air conditioning, and called Frank Smithson with the news about Sophie. “She’s gone. Cleared out of her apartment, but rented it by paying cash for another six months.”

  “Why would she do that? She might be facing a murder charge!” Smithson’
s deep, resonant voice went taut with anxiety. “Sophie knows better than to run at a time like this!”

  “I don’t know why she ran, Frank.” Calling the dignified ambassador by his first name felt uncomfortable, but Sophie’s father had insisted she do so. “Sophie is desperate to put these events behind her. Maybe she decided she didn’t want to go to jail for Assan, no matter what the DA decided.” Sophie had killed her ex-husband in a brutal way. Assan Ang was a sadistic brute, and he had been torturing their mutual friend Lei, using her as a hostage to leverage Sophie into giving herself up. Killing Assan the first chance she got was the only sane and reasonable choice. The fact that he’d been unarmed at the time was merely semantics—he’d been armed in other ways.

  “When will we know if the DA is bringing charges against her?” Frank asked.

  Marcella, looking up through the windshield at the ugly building and its lone plumeria tree, shook her head. Belatedly she remembered that Frank couldn’t see her gesture. “I’m supposed to go on record in a deposition today. I’m worried because I’m sure Sophie is supposed to come in as well.” Marcella blew out a breath. “I’ll try to hold them off for as long as I can, but if they find out she’s gone…”

  “That will not help her situation,” Frank said. “We need to alert her employer, Security Solutions, and Jake Dunn, that partner of hers. Maybe they can locate her.”

  “Already on it. Don’t worry, Ambassador. We’ll find her.” Marcella wished she felt as confident as her words sounded as she ended the call and pulled out, heading toward her office downtown in the Prince Kuhio building in Honolulu.

  Her thoughts turned to the man most likely to know where Sophie was: a man whose memorial they’d recently attended together, but quite possibly very much alive.

  Sheldon Hamilton, aka Todd Remarkian, had been Sophie’s boyfriend—and also, according to Sophie, the cyber vigilante known as “the Ghost.”

  The Ghost, whatever his name was, had outsmarted all of them.

  And with his computer skills, Marcella couldn’t see Hamilton just letting Sophie disappear without any idea of where she’d gone. Marcella had no idea where Hamilton was or how to contact him. But the acting head of his company might know.

  Marcella used voice command to call Kendall Bix, acting President of Operations at Security Solutions. She could hear the frown in Bix’s voice when she told him she couldn’t find Sophie at her last known address. “Of course we will try to locate her. Was there any evidence in her home pointing to where she might have gone?”

  “No.” But Marcella’s fingers touched the postcard in her pocket. Could it be a clue? She only knew one person well on Kaua’i, but real estate developer and MMA fighting coach Alika Wolcott was someone Sophie had dated, and things had ended sadly between them. She couldn’t bother the man on such a thin shred of information. “I have to give a deposition about the killing of Assan Ang. I hope to sound out the DA about any charges against her.”

  “Keep us informed. I will reach out to Jake Dunn and see if he has any information on her whereabouts,” Bix said.

  Marcella navigated the busy downtown Honolulu streets easily, headed for her parents’ little Italian restaurant on a side street in Waikiki near the yacht harbor. She’d ordered several of her mother Anna Scatalina’s popular meatball sandwiches for the office. “Oh good. Let me know if he knows anything. And I’d like to speak to Sheldon Hamilton regarding this matter. Do you have a contact number for him?”

  A long pause. Clearly Bix was reluctant. “He’s asked me not to give out that information. I would need a…subpoena.”

  “Really?” Marcella’s already frayed temper exploded. “What the hell is he hiding?”

  “I can’t speak to that. He’s just been through the tragedy of his best friend’s death and is grieving…”

  Marcella pulled her Honda onto the small side street leading to her parents’ restaurant and mercifully found a parking space. “You’re kidding, right? This guy goes missing, turns up for a dramatic announcement that he’s living abroad permanently, dumps the business on Todd Remarkian, and then surfaces after his partner’s death only to disappear again? This doesn’t strike you as bizarre? Indicative of criminal behavior? Because that’s what it says to me, buddy.”

  “I really couldn’t say.” Bix sounded like an English butler confronted by dog shit on the front stoop. “There has been no criminal activity that I’m aware of. In fact, we are Security Solutions, in business to prevent crime.”

  “Just give me his freakin’ number or I’ll come in, not just with a subpoena but with a team to turn your desks upside down looking for that cyber vigilante that we never found, but who is associated with your firm. And who knows? The raid might get leaked to the press.” Marcella jumped out of the car and slammed the door, pissed off and glad to have somewhere to direct the frustration that was, at least in part, about Sophie.

  “I don’t take kindly to threats,” Bix said frostily. “But we are ever mindful of keeping a good relationship with the FBI. You can reach him at this number.” He rattled off a series of digits and ended the call.

  Marcella hurried across the narrow side street just opposite the Waikiki Yacht Harbor with its flotilla of gently rocking sailboats, and into the Hawaii Italian Bistro. She sucked in a deep and restorative breath of the restaurant’s aroma of basil, garlic, and fresh hot bread. The restaurant was mostly empty, between breakfast and lunch shifts. Her parents, retired from her father’s successful shoe import business in Jersey, had drawn the line at offering dinners, too. She loved the traditional decorating: red tablecloths and bent-backed chairs contrasted with black and white checked flooring.

  “’Cella!” Anna Scatalina’s musical voice called from behind the glass case of cannoli and tiramisu. “These subs are getting cold and soggy. You know I don’t like to have them go out anything less than our best.”

  Marcella advanced across the restaurant and took the paper sack from her mother after a quick kiss on both cheeks. Anna looked adorable in her chef’s hat and an apron emblazoned with Kiss the Cook. “My bad, Mama. The guys love your hoagies no matter how cold they are. Where’s Papa?”

  “Down at the Yacht Club with his buddies, playing cards. He says he earned a break between shifts.” Anna’s lips pinched together in disapproval. “I keep telling him to stop the gambling, but he keeps winning.”

  “Hey, Marcella.” Gustavo, dressed to wait tables today in a white shirt and black pants, poked his head out of the kitchen. “Did you think about my proposal?” The young Italian man was a distant cousin, as were most of the wait staff and kitchen helpers. There was always another relative from the Old Country who wanted to come to Hawaii to work.

  “Dude, give it up,” Marcella said. Gustavo had theatrically asked for her hand the first day he saw her. “You just want my mother’s cooking. Permanently.”

  He clutched his heart. “Give me credit for knowing a good thing when I see it.”

  Marcella and her mother both laughed as Gustavo withdrew back into the kitchen and splashing sounds commenced. Anna narrowed her big dark eyes. “Speaking of marriage. When is that boyfriend of yours going to make an honest woman of you? Your papa, he doesn’t like you shacking up.”

  Marcella had recently moved into a little cottage outside of Honolulu with Detective Marcus Kamuela of the HPD. They were blissfully happy, except when bothered by his Hawaiian mama or her Italian one to get on with marriage and children.

  “Mama. Seriously. Give it a rest.” Marcella tossed a twenty on the counter. “Or you’ll never get grandbabies, and that’s a promise.”

  “You’re not getting any younger, ’Cella, and neither are we!”

  Marcella scowled and grabbed the bag. “It’s none of your business, Mama. Marcus and I love each other and that’s enough for us.” She spun and strode out the door. Only the customers present kept her mother from yelling after her in that crazy fishwife way that got activated whenever the subject of Marcella’s future ca
me up.

  But heading for the door, Marcella felt a twinge of something like pain in the area of her ovaries. The clock was ticking, and she felt it too.

  Chapter Seven

  Sophie dropped the tent she had been unrolling and caught the distraught woman by her arms. “Slow down. Something happened to your son?”

  Dark-haired with ashy brown skin, the woman was as thin as a methamphetamine addict, her eyes bloodshot and rolling in her sallow face. She collapsed in Sophie’s arms, and Sophie lowered her gently to lie on the soft leaf mulch under the kukui nut trees. Ginger whimpered anxiously and crowded close, trying to lick the woman’s face, but Sophie pushed the dog back. She unscrewed the top of her canteen and poured water into her palm, splashing it onto the woman’s face and narrow, bony chest.

  The woman came around from her faint, eyes fluttering open. Sophie lifted her upright and poured water into her open, gulping mouth. As soon as she was sputtering, Sophie took the canteen away and lowered her back down. “Just catch your breath. You must be dehydrated.”

  “Who cares? My son! My Nakai is gone!”

  “Tell me your name.”

  “Enola.”

  “My name’s Sandy. Sandy Mason.” Sophie almost stumbled over the alias. “Why don’t you start at the beginning? What happened?”

  “My son ran away.” Enola looked up, rheumy eyes defensive. “He’s thirteen. Teenagers get in moods.”

  “I can imagine.” Sophie kept all expression out of her face and voice. It couldn’t be easy having a druggie mother. “So you are alarmed that he ran away?”

  “Not so much that. I know where he went. He joined the lost boys at the top of the valley.” Enola gestured toward the steep cliffs to the south. “The Shepherd looks after them. But he ran away from the Shepherd, too. Shepherd thinks something happened to him, that he got lost in the caves.” Her voice caught and she covered her face with her hands.