by Tod Goldberg
“He once told me that he gambled because it was the closest thing to feeling normal that he had,” Brent said. “Does that make any sense?”
I told him it did. One thing I’d learned all of these years, and why I’ve struggled so long to get my name back and clear my burn notice, was that I never felt more like who I was supposed to be than when I was a spy. It was the most natural state of calm and being I’d ever possessed. And then one day it was gone. Helping people like Brent salved the wound some, but nothing was the same.
Sam came into the living room and plopped down in a caramel-colored recliner that was positioned about four feet from one of the ubiquitous flat-screen televisions. He attempted to turn on the television using one of the four remotes that were tucked in the recliner’s pocket, but none of them worked.
“Life was easier when there were only thirteen channels,” Sam said. “I’m telling you, if Reagan were still in office, there would be one remote control in every house and it would operate every television in the universe.”
“I’m guessing you didn’t find anything,” I said.
“He had software on that computer from the nineties,” Sam said. “And judging from the amount of music he downloaded from Napster in 1999, I’m going to say he’s lucky he didn’t get thrown into record-industry prison.”
“That was my mom’s computer,” Brent said. “He didn’t want to change anything on it.”
“Your mom,” I said, “how did she die?”
“Car accident,” Brent said. “Dad fell asleep at the wheel. They were driving home from the Keys. They’d gone down there for their anniversary and left me with my nana.” The way Brent recited the information was robotic. He’d given the answer so many times in his life that it was now just a series of simple, declarative facts. He’d boiled down the worst part of his life into three mundane sentences.
“Jesus,” Fiona said. “How old were you?”
“Nine,” Brent said.
The problem in dealing with teenagers is that they sometimes leave out salient bits of personal information.
“Let me ask you something,” I said. “Do you know if your dad gambled when your mom was alive?”
“No, no, never,” he said. “He was a completely different person.”
“Grief will do that,” I said.
“No, I mean he was actually a different person,” Brent said. “He got thrown out of the car in the accident and his brain, it was like it got rewired. He was in the hospital for three months and when he got out, he had a different personality pretty much. I mean, you know, he was a notary. And now he’s like this . . . dirtbag.”
Traumatic brain injuries resulting in changes in personality aren’t uncommon. In Henry’s case, married with the inadvertent death of his wife, it was pretty much textbook. That he was ready and able to risk everything on the outcome of a sporting match spoke to a larger mental instability, certainly, but in light of everything else I’d learned about Henry subsequent to his disappearance, there was a strong sense of paranoia at work here, too, and a certain fatalistic streak. He’d left his son to fend for himself, but also left him with a fortune in life insurance. Nothing about Henry made sense, because nothing in Henry made sense. I had a sinking feeling that when we found Henry, he wasn’t going to be in a good mental state.
“When did your dad start collecting plasma TVs?” Sam asked.
“That was a recent obsession,” Brent said. “For a long time he was just really into Star Wars.”
“How recent?” I asked.
“He started stockpiling them a few months before he skipped town,” Brent said.
“Any idea why?”
“He watched a lot of sports,” Brent said. He then shrugged for maybe the thousandth time in the last two days. I was empathetic toward Brent for the odd life he’d been forced into, but I wondered if his shoulders ached from the amount of shrugging he did. “He’s a hoarder when he puts his mind to something.”
I was pretty sure that wasn’t it. Ten plasma televisions was obsessive even for an obsessive. There had to be something else.
“Your father’s gambling,” I said. “He ever think about turning the tables?”
“What do you mean?” Brent said.
“Going into business,” I said. “Starting his own sportsbook.” I remembered what Sam had said about his insurance coverage: You don’t hoard plasma televisions and then remember to add them to your home insurance. It spoke to a stability that seemed curious in light of everything else.
“I don’t think so,” Brent said.
“Your pop hoard any of those beers of the month I heard you mention?” Sam asked.
“Probably,” he said.
“You mind if I find out?”
Brent shrugged, which was all the permission Sam needed to pop out of the recliner and head to the kitchen. He came back a few minutes later with cold beers for all of us, even Brent.
“I’m not twenty-one,” Brent said.
“It’s all right, kid,” Sam said. “Your uncle Sammy is.”
I sat there in the comfortable living room of Brent Grayson’s childhood home and pondered what it must have been like to grow up within these four walls. They weren’t so different from the walls I’d grown up around and crazy parents are crazy parents. The difference is that I had Nate and Brent had to be with his father on his own. I coped by becoming a spy. Brent coped by becoming the kind of nineteen-year-old who was smart enough to dupe a man like Yuri Drubich.
I had no idea where Henry Grayson was. I thought I could take Big Lumpy at his word, but in light of the men on the street that Fi had dispatched, it seemed Henry had more people after him than could reasonably be accounted for, and that was a problem.
I took a sip of my beer. It was ice-cold. The logo on the side of the bottle showed a cresting wave and so for a moment I imagined what life would be like if I were one of those people who actually was able to spend the majority of their Miami time beachside covered in suntan lotion versus constantly running into and out of trouble, mine and other people’s, in well-ventilated homes, hotels and secure government locations.
And then it occurred to me: I was drinking an ice-cold beer in an air-conditioned home. A home that had been unoccupied for at least two months.
I grabbed the stack of mail from the coffee table and began sifting through the envelopes until I found what I was looking for: the electric bill. It had a credit balance of three thousand dollars. Why would a person disappear but keep his electricity on? Actually pay for it for months in advance?
I picked up the book on underground dwellings. If you want to find out what pages of a book have been read the most, you can do a simple fingerprint test using a variety of chemicals, but in a bind you can just use iodine and an oven. After the iodine is heated, the prints will be revealed, but only for a short period of time—just a matter of minutes. More effective is a brushing of silver nitrate followed by some good old-fashioned ultraviolet light, better known as black light to anyone who happens to watch too much television.
Or, if you simply don’t have the time to do a fingerprint test, you can figure it out the old-fashioned way: Look for the dog-eared corners, which, in this case, led me to page sixty-seven, a chapter titled “How to Build False Walls, Floors and Crawl Spaces.”
“Your dad do any redecorating, Brent?” I asked.
“His bedroom and his office used to be one big room,” Brent said.
“When was that?” I asked.
“A couple of months ago.”
“The bookshelves,” I said. “Those new?”
“Yeah,” Brent said. “He used to just stack his books up all around the house, but then he got those built-in shelves. He was pretty proud of them.”
“I’m sure he was,” I said. “Brent, would you mind getting me another beer?”
Brent, not surprisingly, shrugged and then headed off to the kitchen. I handed Fiona the open book and pointed at the photo of a small room built behind b
ookcases on page sixty-eight. Fiona made a grunting noise, as if viewing the page actually pained her—it had been a long day already for her, clearly—and then handed the book to Sam, who looked at the page with a slight air of bewilderment. “What am I looking at here?” he said.
“Henry’s in the house,” I said quietly.
“What’s our move?” Sam said.
“You and I are going to stay here,” I said. “Fi, I want you to take Brent back to my mother’s. Make sure no one tails you out of the neighborhood.”
“You’re aware that I’ve done this before?” Fiona said.
No one likes to be ordered around. Fiona likes it even less. “Yes, I know,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said. “And can I pick up your cleaning?”
Brent walked back into the living room, saving me from my own likely response. “Brent,” I said, “Fiona is going to take you back to my mother’s while we finish up here.”
“Can’t we just go back to my dorm?” Brent said.
“Your dorm isn’t safe,” I said. “I don’t think your vampire friend King Thomas will actually bite anyone if they come looking for you.”
“Your mom has a shotgun,” Brent said, but not in a positive way.
“I know,” I said. “But she knows how to use it.”
“I’ve got class at nine a.m. tomorrow,” he said. “I really can’t miss again.”
“Uncle Sammy will write you a note that says hired killers are looking for you,” Sam said.
“My professor said if I miss one more class I’ll get an F,” he said.
“Then tomorrow we’ll go to school,” I said.
“We?” Fiona said.
“You,” I said.
“Me?” Fiona said.
“We’ll figure it out,” I said.
After Fiona and Brent left, Sam and I stood in Henry’s office and examined his workmanship.
“Nice shelves,” Sam said. “Oak?”
“I believe it is,” I said.
“Be impossible to rip those out,” he said.
“It would,” I said. We examined the shelves closely and my assessment was correct: They’d been bolted into the wall and reinforced with steel cross-supports. The door that had been created by the shelf opened out, which meant that it locked from the inside, just as the handy guidebook had suggested.
We stepped out of the office and walked down the hall to the bedroom and examined the wall that Henry had erected. It was just plain old drywall. Wallpapered drywall, but drywall nonetheless.
Drywall comes in a standard size. Half an inch thick and four feet wide. You don’t need to be a spy to know this. You only need to spend half of your childhood kicking and punching walls out of frustration to learn specifically what home improvement stores keep in stock. You can get thicker drywall for soundproofing, or for fire retardation, but if you just want to build a wall and you have limited resources and ability, a nice ten-foot length of drywall can be turned into a very flimsy wall in a day.
You don’t need a battering ram to break down a wall made only of gypsum, which this one was. You just need a good pair of shoes and a strong side-leg kick to the weakest seam—which would be the first panel on a three-panel wall.
Neither Sam nor I was wearing particularly good shoes for the deed, so we went back to the office. I knocked on the wall.
“Henry,” I said, “my name is Michael Westen. I’m helping your son, Brent, out. I know you’ve heard us in here for the last hour, so you know it’s safe. I’d like to talk to you. I mean you no harm.”
When no answer came, I said, “Henry, either you come out or I’m leaving here with all of your Boba Fett dolls.”
That did the trick.
I heard three different sliding locks being moved, and then, oddly, both televisions in the office turned on and shortly thereafter I heard noise coming from the living room and from down the hall as well. The bookshelf made a creaking sound and then it popped open to reveal a small, well-appointed room with a single bed, a dresser, a recliner, a television and several framed family photos on the wall. Standing in the middle of the room was a man wearing white boxer shorts and a tank top that barely covered his potbelly. His hair was messed up and he had at least a three-day growth of beard, but otherwise he looked just like the photos of Henry Grayson that could be found around the house.
Really, if you didn’t know any better, you’d have thought Henry had just woken from a Sunday nap. Sure, he was a bit unkempt, and there was the fact that he was inside a hidden compartment inside his house, but he looked otherwise very normal if you were able to discount the fact that he was holding what looked like an ignition switch for a bomb in his hand. I now had a pretty good idea why he had so many plasma televisions in his house, too.
“I will blow up this entire house if you touch my son,” Henry Grayson said, “or any of my toys.”
“Your son isn’t here, Henry,” I said. “I just sent him somewhere safe. It’s okay.”
“Who are you?” he said to Sam.
“I’m Sam,” he said.
“Sam,” he said. “That’s a friendly name.”
“I’m a friendly guy,” Sam said.
“If you touch my toys,” Henry said to me, “I will blow up the entire house and Sam.”
“Actually,” I said, “you’d probably kill everyone in about a two-block radius.”
This gave Henry some pause. “Two blocks?”
“You have the televisions rigged?” I asked.
“Maybe,” he said.
“I’m going to guess that you’ve rigged a heating line to them. Would that be accurate?”
“Maybe,” he said.
“Pump a little heat into each television and the xenon, neon and helium in the plasma cells will act like hundreds of tiny bombs. How hot does it need to be? Three hundred degrees for, what, ten seconds? That sound about right?” I stood back and examined his bookshelves again for a moment until I found the right book: Your House Is Your Kingdom: How to Stop Radical Islam and Communism at Your Door, Literally. I pulled it off the shelf and handed it to him. “You find that recipe in here?”
“It’s in a couple books,” he said. “All from very reputable sources in the counterterrorism community.”
“See, the problem is, Henry, you can’t just turn off three hundred degrees of heat. You didn’t figure in cool-down time, did you? And that ignition, where’d you get that? A fireworks store? You’re more likely to explode yourself than the televisions, but say you’re lucky. Say everything works perfectly. Odds are still fair that you broil alive and so do a bunch of innocent people you don’t owe money to.”
“Who are you with?”
“I’m with your son,” I said. “You’ve left him in a very tight spot, Henry.”
“I mean, who are you with? What agency?”
“I’m not with any agency,” I said.
“You haven’t been watching me?”
“No,” I said.
“Because many people are watching me,” he said.
At that moment, I realized how very lucky we were that Brent was gone. Because his father had gone mad. Plain and simple. My second-worst fear had been realized, at least as it related to Henry.
“My name is Michael Westen,” I said. “And he is Sam Axe. Your son, Brent, has been staying with me since you disappeared. He sent us to help you. Do you want help?”
“Can I Google you?”
“You can,” I said. “If you hand me that ignition switch I’ll let you do whatever you want to do.”
When you’re negotiating with a crazy person, the best thing to do is let them feel like they are in charge of the situation, while still maintaining the position of mental and physical power. In a hostage negotiation, this is usually done by accepting whatever condition the hostage taker wants.
They want a plane that will fly them to Beirut? Roll a private jet onto the street in front of them.
They want eighty million dollars? Make an electronic
deposit in their foreign bank account.
They want to talk to their dead mother? Find a Ouija board.
None of it matters in the long run because what you have that the hostage taker doesn’t is, invariably, overwhelming firepower and operational intelligence. They know this, too, but usually are under the impression that the human life that waits in the balance is too much to risk.
“How do I know I can trust you? That you’re not with . . . them?” Henry asked.
“For one,” Sam said, “we don’t have any black helicopters.”
Henry nodded. “What about the fluoride? Are you doing anything with the fluoride in the water?”
“Nope,” Sam said. “Not us. We’re promoting tooth decay and other freedoms.”
Henry looked at me and I could tell he was waging a war of many voices in his head. Sam’s probably wasn’t helping.
“You’ll just have to take my word for it, Henry,” I said.
I decided I’d wait five more seconds and if Henry didn’t hand me the ignition, I’d punch him in the face and take it. It wasn’t personal. I just didn’t want to die.
Apparently, Sam felt the same way, since I only made it to three in my head before Sam punched Henry flush on the chin, knocking him out cold. I reached down and picked up the ignition.
“Sorry, Mikey,” Sam said. “He was sweating an awful lot and I didn’t want him to short out the system and cook us.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “I was about to do it, too.”
Henry opened his eyes, but they clearly weren’t focusing yet. “Mom?” he said.
“Oh, Mikey,” Sam said, “this isn’t good.”
9
Weapons of mass destruction aren’t all that difficult to build. If you really want to kill hundreds of people at a time, all you need to do is go to the grocery store and purchase a few different cleaning agents, a box of nails, an artificial fire log, a few pressure cookers and, if you really want to cause problems, put all of those items into a car loaded with containers of hydrochloric acid. And then if you really want to make an impression, park the car next to a convention center hosting a gun and ammo show, and when it blows up, well, you’ll also have people against the Second Amendment up in arms, too, since in this case unchambered ammo would kill an awful lot of innocent bystanders.
