by Greg Rucka
“Lenhart can’t make it before noon,” Larkin says. “But he’ll come straight. We’re set for two.”
“He can’t get there any sooner?”
“You’re lucky he’s coming at all. You’re lucky any of them are coming. They don’t understand why this is needed. I don’t understand why this is needed.”
“Mutual survival,” Brock tells Larkin. “Or mutual destruction.”
“We’ve no reason to trust him.”
Brock doesn’t bother responding to that.
“Two,” Brock says, and hangs up. He drinks his coffee, finishes going through the correspondence and reports that have backlogged over the last eighteen or so hours on his computer. Everything looks normal, no signs of him being cut out of the loop. There is nothing about an Indigo operation gone wrong or an Indigo operator’s murder, but it doesn’t matter. Brock thinks, at the most, he’s got a day before the trail leads to him.
He takes his coffee with him into the small home office where he and his wife have their desks, positioned back-to-back rather than facing each other. He picks up a piece of his monogrammed stationery and a pen, spends the better part of a minute staring at the blank page before he begins writing, and is finished in less than another. He folds the paper, closes it within an envelope, then takes it with him upstairs.
He bathes, goes to dress, stares at his uniform on its hanger on the hook on the closet door, feels a surge of disgust. He cannot go into work today. He cannot wear it.
He replaces the uniform in the closet, puts on civvies instead, then kneels and opens the trapdoor to the small compartment hidden in the floor. He puts his fingers into the slots of the safe, taps in the code with his other hand, and the lock snaps back. He takes one of the bundles of cash, another burner phone, the gun, the ammunition, and the magazine. Some of the ammunition goes into the magazine, and the magazine goes into the gun, and for the first time in years, the gun goes onto his hip. He closes everything up, heads downstairs, grabs his jacket, and stows the envelope in an inside pocket. He pauses at the window, looks out at the street. It’s another in this string of endlessly sunny summer days. A kid with his pants too low skims past on a skateboard. Brock sees no signs that he’s being watched, but he knows that means nothing.
He leaves the house without his laptop or his secure phone, and as he pulls out of the driveway, he thinks this is the last time he will see his home.
It’s less than ten minutes to the nearby Starbucks on Connecticut Avenue, where Jordan is already, standing in line and waiting to order. She shoots him a smile when she sees him, one unlike any that he’s seen from her before, genuinely happy. He wants it to be because of him. She moves to pick up her drink, and Brock doesn’t bother with the pretense of ordering one of his own, just waits until she’s done and holds the door open for her, following her back outside.
“He let you out alone?” Brock asks.
She moves to her Jetta without pause, but smiles at him again. “You make it sound like I wear a collar and chain.”
“Don’t you?”
“Jealousy unmans you, Emmet.”
“Where is he?”
“Are you asking if he’s watching us?”
“Is he?”
“Did you talk to your people?” She’s reached the car, unlocks it with the fob, opens the door. He watches her bend and put her drink in the cup holder between the front seats. She’s wearing a summer dress, and her legs are bare, and the length and tone of muscle is magnetic. Then she straightens, turns so she’s wedged between door and seat. “Do we have a place and a time?”
“I talked to them. They’re not happy.”
“Well, we knew they wouldn’t be, didn’t we? Where and when?”
Brock tells her. He can feel the gun at his hip, acutely aware of its weight, the way it presses against the bone. He puts a hand lightly on hers where it rests on the frame of the door, his skin ruddier, so much older and more used than hers. She’s watching him, curious.
“I want you to come with me,” he says.
“Where?”
“Anywhere.”
She laughs softly.
“Come with me,” Brock says. “We can go right now.”
She stops laughing. “You’re serious?”
“You and me. We can go, right now, we can go, Jordan.”
She looks past him, turns her head slightly, as if checking their surroundings. Her expression doesn’t change, but her manner, he thinks, does, a new weight settling upon her.
“You think we’d be able to hide?” she asks. “Honestly? You think we could get away from everyone? Your people? Him?”
It’s a question that gives him hope, and he seizes it. “I told you before, I can protect you.”
The smile remains, but now he can read the change, the edges of a sadness he’s never seen from her before, even a fatigue. “I think you really are in love with me.”
“It was what you wanted me to be.”
“Yes.”
“Then you shouldn’t be surprised.”
She takes the corner of her bottom lip between her teeth for a moment, again switches her focus past him, over his shoulder. Her hand on the door frame, beneath his, turns, and he feels her fingers entwining his. She kisses his lips lightly.
“He has a plan,” she says. “It will work.”
“His plan,” Brock says. “For him.”
“For all of us.”
Brock squeezes her fingers in his. “Do you really think he cares more for you than I do? Do you really think that when it comes down to survival, his or yours, he’ll put you first?”
“But you will?”
“I love you. Of course I will.” He says it knowing the hoped-for response won’t come. Her answer delivers on that anticipated disappointment, yet brings with it an exquisite elation.
“I love him. But I think I might love you, too. I don’t know what to do.”
“Will you be there this afternoon?” Brock asks.
“If he wants me there.”
“You can’t trust him.”
“He has a plan, Emmet.”
“So do I,” Brock says.
A flicker of something in her expression, the corner of her mouth turning down slightly, and Brock thinks, for the very first time, he’s seeing confusion, even doubt, from her, and it renews his hope.
“There’s a Hilton near BWI,” Brock says. “The one on West Nursery Road. Meet me there. I’ll leave a note at the desk for you. Just meet me there, we can go, he’ll never find us.”
“You don’t know what he can do, Emmet. You don’t know how far he can reach.”
“I know what I can do. Noon. Can you meet me there at noon?”
She slips her fingers free from his.
“Will you be there?”
She kisses his mouth softly a second time, then climbs behind the wheel. He holds the door open as she puts her hand out to close it, and there’s a moment where he feels her pulling, and he can’t bring himself to let go. She looks up at him, that sad smile, and he releases his grip.
“Maybe,” she says, and the door closes, and the engine starts, and he watches her drive away.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“IT’S BROCK,” HEATH says. “If I wasn’t sure before yesterday, I’m solid fucking gold on it now.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Nessuno says. She looks to Ruiz for support, but he’s already up and getting on his sat phone. She looks to Bell, who’s seated on the floor just inside the door of the hotel room, his back to the wall, looking as wrung out as she feels.
Nessuno turns her gaze back to Heath. “You’re saying our oversight, Interdict’s oversight, is rotten.”
“I know damn well what I’m saying, Chief. You think I’d throw that down without paper to back it up?” Heath gestures at the folder spilling its guts on the little round table in the corner, where Ruiz was seated until a moment before. Now the colonel has retreated to the far corner of the room, by the curtained
windows, and he’s got someone on the other end of the line, and he might as well be alone for all the attention he’s giving them.
“It doesn’t track,” Nessuno says.
“Not that you’re seeing.”
“And you are? The only reason to kill Tohir is to keep him from talking, to keep him from fingering Echo, right? You don’t have that if we don’t have Tohir to begin with, and we don’t get Tohir without BI putting me next to him! It’s not like Brock didn’t know what I was doing!”
Heath gets angry. “I’m not explaining it, I’m telling you what it is, goddamn it. This is the fucking evidence, Chief, this is the paper trail, this is the call logs, this is the goddamn time stamps, you clear? This is Brock accessing Indigo personnel files. It’s not a motive, no, it’s not, but you know what? Fuck the motive. I don’t know the motive, and none of us will until we’ve got that ratfuck son of a bitch in irons and talking, which, by the way”—Heath pivots, points at Ruiz—“better fucking well be what you’re working to achieve right now.”
Ruiz hears that, raises an eyebrow, continues speaking on the phone. By the door, Bell clears his throat.
“Sir,” Heath adds.
“There’s another reason,” Bell says.
Nessuno shakes her head. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that Tohir was about to give up the action.”
“That’s what I’m thinking.”
“That assumes Echo cares about the action.”
“You think he doesn’t?”
“I told you—the only thing Echo ever seemed to care about was money.” She takes the vacated seat at the table, finds herself sitting more heavily than she’d intended, bone-tired and aching. It’s well after midnight here in Westminster. The last thing she ate was the breakfast Bell made that she barely touched, and that seems eighteen days, not eighteen hours, ago.
She thinks of what happened in that apartment in Provo, and the shame scores her so suddenly and sharply she has to fight the physical response, the urge to vocalize. The last they’d heard, two of the SWAT team were dead from their wounds, one was still in surgery and it didn’t look good, and one was post-op and in recovery.
She wants this day to end.
She’s covering her sector, her slice of the room, and the blast comes, and before she can stop herself, even as she’s thinking she shouldn’t, her head turns to the noise. The SWAT team is stacked at the door the way they’ve taken each door, one after the other—breach, banger, clear—except at this one there’s chaos, and Nessuno can see blood spatter on the door and the wall, pieces of drywall and wallpaper all flying.
Bell grabs her then, and she barely keeps from shooting him by accident, gets her trigger cleared, her finger safe, and she hits the floor on her side. Her breath goes, her own elbow in her stomach, and she can’t get it back because he’s on top of her. Then the shots, burst after burst after burst, and she sees this guy come out of the bathroom that was supposed to be cleared but wasn’t, and instinctively she wraps her arms around Bell, holds him to her as tight as she can. The guy is dropping the mag on a motherfucking assault rifle and swapping it and she holds on to Bell, clamps his arms against hers, and thank Saint Nicholas or thank God or thank the fucking Higgs boson but the shooter doesn’t look down at them, he’s in too much of a hurry to get to the door and out of there.
Then Bell is up and going after him, and Nessuno is trying to follow suit, fumbling, clumsy, and she sees these men, their broken movement, and through the dulled world behind her ear protection, she hears their pain. The amount of blood spilled on the walls, on the floor, is shocking. She keys her radio, calls it all in. The urge to stop and render aid, to begin triage, is at immediate war with the need to follow Bell, to give him cover, to be his backup.
He is relying on her. She has no choice.
She goes out the door in pursuit, exits the building with no idea which direction to go. She pulls the phones down around her neck in time to hear shots, a pistol double tap, makes the corner in time to see Bell sprinting away from her, in time to see a woman in a parked car screaming. She gives chase, following Bell following the shooter, and by the time she’s caught up it’s all but over. Ledor turns at the edge of the interstate, and she can see what he’s going to do before he does it.
At the bottom of the slope, her angle on the action narrow, she watches him disappear, then reappear suddenly, thrown high into the air. He comes down, vanishing again, and she’s racing up the slope, this time ahead of Bell, and Ledor reappears for an instant, tossed once more, body twisting, the angle unnatural. It’s not a fall, it’s a throw, she thinks.
She reaches the shoulder of the road first, asphalt under her boots, and Ledor is easily eighty feet away, where he’s finally come to rest. Traffic is jerking to a desperate halt, cars sliding at angles. She hears metal meeting metal, plastic and glass shattering. She races along the side of the highway, but part of her wonders, what’s the point? Why waste the energy? Michael Ledor has become meat in torn clothes, avulsed, all abraded flesh and cracked bone. She takes a knee beside the body, sees the eyes, one wide open, pupil exploded, the other half lidded and leaking fluid. She checks for a pulse anyway. He has none.
Bell stands beside her, chest heaving, sweat running down his face. She’s feeling defeat when she looks up at him, but that’s not what she sees. She sees cold anger.
Then Bell squats on his haunches, sets his pistol aside, and begins going over the body, emptying pockets, checking his hands, his wrists, his neck, his legs. He finds a wallet and a cell phone, and he tosses the cell to her, opens the wallet, pulls out a driver’s license issued by the state of Utah. He shows it to her. Michael Ledor.
“The apartment,” he says.
It’s a long walk back, and she sees that Bell is limping slightly.
“Ankle?” she asks.
He grunts.
“This is my fault,” Nessuno says. “I thought the bathroom was cleared.”
Bell says nothing.
There’s chaos at the complex when they return, police and ambulance and crime-scene people, and Bell leads, pushes his way past officers and technicians to get them back inside. Someone from the bomb squad tells them that they found another trip wire, another grenade trap, that it’s been disarmed. They should wait outside until they’re finished.
“Sure,” Bell says and doesn’t leave, and so neither does she.
They stay until after dark. They go through everything, every drawer, every cabinet, every closet, every bag. Bell finds three grand in mixed bills wrapped in a plastic bag that’s been taped to the back of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. Nessuno finds a passport hidden in one of the DVD cases stacked beside the television, the photo and name both Michael Ledor, the issuing country Belgium.
The alarming shit, she thinks, is what they don’t have to search for, what the police have already found and begun to catalog. There’s more than twenty thousand rounds of ammunition, half of it for that assault rifle they’ve recovered, the rest in 9mm and .40. It’s stacked in boxes in the cupboards, stored beneath the kitchen sink. There’s multiple magazines for all the weapons and four more grenades. Most of the heavy gear is recovered from a bag in the bedroom closet, not hidden so much as it was placed out of sight, with boxes and boxes of ammunition neatly stacked beside. Bonus items in the bag included a gas mask and a vest that Nessuno thinks is rated at level II, maybe IIA.
She does the math, quietly asks Bell, “If they’re all geared like this?”
“Nothing good,” Bell says.
Nessuno understands. Six of them working together, armed like this, it’s been seen before. The Mumbai attacks come immediately to mind, small terrororist fire teams looking to spill as much blood as possible. This guy, Ledor, he knew what he was doing with his weapon; his fire had been disciplined. If they’re all trained like that, the body count will easily reach triple digits.
There’s another option that is potentially more frightening. If Ledor was in
Provo to stage before moving on to target, before meeting up with the rest of the cell for their action, that’s one thing. But if the plan is not for a group action but rather for individual attacks, the result could be truly horrifying. To Nessuno, that would be true terror. Not one target but five, hit all in concert, different places at the same time or in quick succession, one here, one there, sowing widespread panic and, subsequently, terrible paranoia.
Those five could be anything, she thinks. Movie theater on a Saturday night, shopping mall in the middle of the day, church on Sunday morning.
She thinks about Ledor, his willingness to fight and his desire to survive right up to and until the moment he knew it was over.
She thinks about five more men, similarly motivated, similarly trained.
Everything in this apartment hints at what they’re planning, but nothing tells them when. Nothing tells them where.
Everything tells them they’re running out of time.
Ruiz isn’t having any of it. He’s off the phone now.
“Walk us through it,” he says to Heath.
“That’s the problem, there isn’t an ‘it.’ There’re two things here.” Heath holds out her hands in fists, straight ahead of her, looks at Ruiz, at Nessuno, at Bell. She opens her left, palm up. “Here’s the attack in California, bought and paid for, and another one coming up. According to Heatdish, it’s one that’s been built by Echo for the same buyer. That’s what you found in Provo, right? One of those elements. That’s Ledor, that’s Zein, Alexander, Hawford, Dante, and Verim. We have anything more on those guys, by the way?”
