Into the Fire

by Gregg Hurwitz

  Evan was talking hard, his voice low. “I need everything, understand? Procedures, schedules, security measures, equipment, guard shifts. I need names, heights, weights, and profiles for prisoners. I need to know gang affiliations—what they’re in for, who’s in which cell block, when they’re being released. I need security-camera positions, surveillance gaps, what you can alter, delete, control. I need to know—”

  “Jesus, X.” A sheen of perspiration sparkled at Joey’s hairline. “You can’t do this. Not with your head the way it is.”

  He pivoted to face her, walking backward without breaking stride. “Joey. I have to.”

  She shriveled a bit beneath his glare, and he realized that the intensity of his tone had scared her.

  “Chillax, okay?” Her voice sounded small, intimidated, and he hated himself for it. “I got you.”

  “There is no margin for error.”

  “I understand, okay?” She held up her palms, a rare show of submission. “What’s the plan?”

  “I don’t know yet,” he said. “I’ve never done anything like this.”

  As they reached the elevator doors, Joaquin called out from behind the security desk. “Hey, Mr. Smoak. And Ms.… Janie, right?”

  “Joey. She’ll be staying with me for a few days. Please give her access.”

  “Uh, the no-pets policy?”

  “He’s a service dog,” Joey said. “I have a severe psychiatric disorder.”

  Joaquin looked at her, gauging whether or not she was serious. Joey stared back, unblinking.

  Joaquin pursed his lips. “Why don’t we just make sure we keep it inconspicuous so we don’t have to show Mr. Walters any paperwork to that effect.”

  “Mr. Walters?” Joey said.

  “The HOA president,” Joaquin said. “He takes his HOA’ing pretty seriously.”

  “I appreciate that,” Evan said.

  He and Joey faced the closed elevator doors, breathing the crisp lobby air. Evan noticed he was clenching fists at his sides and did his best to still his hands. The floor indicators showed the car making glacial progress. Dog the dog sat, bent his head, and licked himself with abandon.

  “You hear the latest on Mrs. Rosenbaum?” Joaquin called out.

  Evan shook his head. Did not turn around. He felt the heat of Joey’s gaze on the side of his face.

  “I guess they caught the guy,” Joaquin said. “And someone returned her necklace for her. The old-fashioned one from her dead husband? Slid it right under the door.”

  Evan said, “Is that so.”

  “Yeah. I pulled the security footage to see who, but the system was down.”

  Joey turned her head to look at Joaquin, her hair flicking like a horse tail. Then back to Evan. “How odd,” she said flatly.

  “Yeah,” Joaquin said. “Guess we’ll never know who the Good Samaritan is.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t a Good Samaritan,” Joey said. “Maybe it was a bad guy who had a change of heart.” She shot Evan a glare. “Or a bad guy who doesn’t listen to anyone but himself.”

  Evan felt his face tighten, but before he or Joaquin could respond, the elevator chimed. Saved by the bell.

  Or not.

  He heard her voice before the doors parted. “—this case goes sideways on me one more time, so help me God, I’m gonna go full-on Sherman’s March to the Sea.”

  The elevator rattled open.

  Mia stood inside, phone pinched between ear and shoulder, bulging satchel briefcase in one hand, Batman lunch box in the other. Somehow her lunch-box hand managed a travel coffee mug as well, and she was caught mid-slurp, steam rising past her puffy eyes into the wild tangle of her curls. At the sight of Evan, her eyes flared, the cup frozen against her lips.

  With a pang of sadness, he realized how readily he could read her, how familiar he was with the cogs and gears by which her life ran. Darkness beneath her eyes, second cup of coffee to go, and the file-heavy briefcase meant she was working a big case. Up late last night, up early this morning to drop Peter at math tutoring, court-ready suit in case she had to file a motion.

  She let the phone slip from her cheek and fall into her gaping briefcase. Beside her, Peter tilted back in a partial limbo, his overstuffed backpack sagging past his rear end. He was firing bullets from a paper-towel roll he’d embellished with a Magic Marker, turning it into a futuristic gun.

  Right now he was shooting out the overhead lights. “Pew pew pew!” He turned and saw them. “Evan Smoak! And niece-person Joey! And a awesome dog!” He swung around and fired the paper-towel roll at Evan. “Pew pew pew.”

  Mia looked how Evan felt: mortified.

  “Pew pew pew.”

  The doors started to close, and Mia stuck out a foot, knocking the bumpers back. “C’mon, Peter. Let’s go.”

  “No,” he said. “He has to shoot back.” For good measure he swept the cardboard barrel to cover Joey, too. “Pew pew pew.”

  Mia hustled Peter out of the car, but he bucked away.

  “C’mon! You haveta shoot back. That’s how you play.”

  Heat crept up Evan’s throat, spread beneath his face. Reluctantly he made a finger gun and aimed it at Peter. “Bang,” he said.

  Peter flung himself against the wall, crunching his backpack against the marble. He clutched his chest, gasped theatrically, and slid to the floor, legs splayed before him in a manner not unlike Detective Nuñez’s final pose.

  Mia’s face was flushed, her tone sharp. “Get up right now, Peter. We’re gonna be late.”

  As Peter reanimated, Evan and Joey stepped past him into the elevator, tugging Dog the dog with them.

  “Wait, I didn’t get to pet the dog,” Peter said as Mia dragged him away. “Mom, can we get a dog? Just a little one?”

  The car sealed off Peter’s continued entreaties. As the elevator rose, Evan blew out a breath through clenched teeth.

  “What was up with that?” Joey said. “Awkward.”

  Evan said, “It’s complicated.”

  “Okay, Facebook.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  They rode the rest of the way in silence.

  40

  Your Average Lowlife

  For what was coming, Evan couldn’t have any tactical gear on him.

  No cargo pants with discreet pockets for hiding spare magazines. No Woolrich shirts with magnetic buttons. No Original S.W.A.T. boots. No ARES 1911 or Strider folding knife.

  He had to look like your average lowlife.

  He grabbed a pair of dark 501s from the bureau drawer and stepped into them.

  The door to the bathroom was open, the shower door slid back, the hidden door ajar. And Joey was inside the Vault at the commands, a pilot driving a spaceship, shouting her findings out to him. “Unshockingly, Twin Towers Jail hasn’t updated their security systems in ages! Budget shortfalls, blah-blah-blah. I mean, a noob with a Compaq and a USRobotics dial-up modem writing their hack in Visual Basic could get in here in, like, thirty seconds.” She gave a self-satisfied snort.

  Evan went toward the walk-in closet, buttoning his jeans. “I don’t know what any of that means.”

  Joey’s voice boomed out at him. “Jail surveillance bad. Joey good.”

  At the foot of the bed, a scattering of dog hairs rested on the concrete floor, pronounced beneath the overhead lights. He blinked his eyes hard, opened them, but they remained. He’d have to deep-clean the penthouse when this was over with.

  He tore himself from the sight and entered the closet. Past the neatly stacked cartons of boots was a bin holding several pairs of sneakers he’d dragged behind his truck, scuffing them up for undercover work.

  This would certainly qualify as undercover work.

  “So get this!” Joey shouted. “Like, half of the surveillance cameras are still using the factory default passwords.” She laughed heartily.

  It never ceased to amaze him what the girl found amusing.

  He stomped into his sneakers and swept the han
ging shirts aside to reach a cubbyhole cut into the drywall. A dozen metal cases, each the size of a deck of playing cards, were stacked inside. He slid the top one free and cracked it open. Slotted neatly into the black foam lining were twenty glass microscope slides. An oval of silicone composite film half as wide as a strand of dental floss resided inside each, suspended in a ghostly float.

  Fingerprint adhesives.

  As he slid the case into his pocket, Joey rattled on. “They have everything hooked up to the Internet. Typical. Like, let’s get everything online and vulnerable and then not update it, ’cuz we’re stupid city bureaucrats. So I banged in there with Shodan.”

  “Shodan?”

  “Dude, c’mon, X. The search engine for Internet-connected devices? Every device that sends data out has a string that IDs what it is. Shodan searches all those strings, feeds you the geolocations based on the IP addresses. I bust into the cameras, and I’m looking at a bunch of ugly-ass felons sitting in jail. Oh—and a deputy in the control room picking his nose. Aaaand he’s eating it.”

  Pulling on a T-shirt, Evan ducked into the bathroom and fingertipped in another specialized contact lens to cover his dilated right eye. Then he yanked open the other drawers, searching their contents.

  “I’m gonna drop in a zero-day exploit now,” Joey said. “Make that two, so I have one for insurance. Hang on, and…”

  Evan heard the pounding on his keyboard and wondered if she’d actually break it. It struck him how odd it was to hear another voice within the walls of his penthouse. He was used to drifting through the rooms accompanied only by the sound of his own breathing.

  “The more secret digital doors into the system software we have, the better,” Joey was saying. “Then, to cover your ass, I can always slew a lens to face a wall or spoof a frame to show an empty room or just burn down the whole house with a distributed denial of service attack and be all, ‘How ya like me now, bizatches!’”

  Beneath the sink he found the bottle he was looking for. Charcoal pills. He pocketed eight of them and stepped through the shower into the Vault.

  Joey had shoved Vera II to the side and yanked the keyboard into her lap so she could type while cocked back in his chair at a breaking-point angle. Her dirty bare feet were up on the sheet-metal desk. A glass of orange juice rested on his foam mouse pad.

  As he entered, the projection light hit him in the face, streaming glare and shadow across his eyes. He lifted the sweating glass off his mouse pad, swiping at the condensation ring with his wrist. “Don’t they teach the use of coasters in evil-hacker school?”

  “Shockingly not on the curriculum,” Joey said.

  Dog the dog lifted his leg and urinated in the corner. Joey swiveled her head from the dog to Evan, trying unsuccessfully to bite down a smile.

  He watched the trickle leaking out from the wall. “This isn’t funny.”

  “Actually, it’s really funny.”

  “You’re gonna clean that. Paper towel in the kitchen and Clorox spray beneath the—”

  “Whatevs. Once you see what I just did, you’re gonna drop the whole OCD routine.”

  Evan came around the L-shaped desk, nearly tripping on her kicked-off shoes, and stood behind her to take in the OLED screens horseshoeing the walls.

  One photograph was front and center.

  A bland-looking man in his late forties. Side part, affable features, totally ordinary.

  “Who’s that?”

  “That’s your shot caller.” Joey flicked a hand over the mouse, bringing up a rap sheet for Benjamin Bedrosov. “Weird last name. I mean, I thought this was an Armenian operation.”

  “Quite a few Russian Armenians had their surnames changed to end in ‘-ov’ somewhere along the way,” Evan said. “Like Garry Kasparov.”

  “He that actor in all those westerns? High Noon and shit?”

  Evan knew that a withering look would be wasted on her, so instead he studied the rap sheet more closely. A host of dismissed charges. Two failed convictions. A deep bench of defense attorneys with Century City and Beverly Hills addresses—a clear upgrade from Alexan Petro’s array of legal firepower. Under Aliases a single nickname was listed: Bedrock.

  “He’s a full-on businessman,” Joey said. “Bernie Madoff motherf—” She caught herself. “Homey’s got a I-banking firm downtown, slick crib up Beachwood Canyon, on the board of a half dozen companies. Check out the fancy website. If you didn’t pull his rap sheet, you’d think he was legit.”

  Evan couldn’t help marvel at the photo again. Bedrosov wore a suit jacket and a button-up shirt loose at the collar. He wasn’t smiling exactly, but his face was set in a pleasingly mild expression. It was the kind of portrait you’d see on bus benches and billboards, a Coldwell Banker Realtor conveying can-do competence.

  Evan leaned over Joey and thumbed up Bedrock’s booking photo. The suit jacket was gone, but the same inoffensive expression remained, a businessman you could rely on to be steady at the helm through rocky waters.

  It called to mind that well-trodden line about the banality of evil.

  Dog the dog tapped his way over, circled a few times at Joey’s feet, and lay down with an old-man groan.

  “How’d you find this guy?” Evan asked.

  “The payments to the dirty cops didn’t come from Petro,” she said. “They came from this other account. Which is funded with incoming wires directly from a shell corp that happens to also have the controlling interest in—you guessed it—Petro’s Singapore bank. The shell corp lists Benjamin Bedrosov as the principal. I’m guessing this guy has a few Petros under him scattered around the city, all of whom feed his bank for a small piece of the ownership.”

  “And he’s currently in Twin Towers.”

  “Awaiting trial for wire fraud,” Joey said. “Looks like he’ll be tried under Penal Code 186.10 as a felony. Been there about a month and a half.”

  Evan checked the date. “Right around when payments began to Brust and Nuñez.”

  “Like you said, he put the detectives in place to cover his ass and squelch the investigation. I’m not big on reading legal mumbo jumbo, but from the prosecutor’s internal memos here”—she swiveled to an investigative document projected onto the south wall—“it looks like they know they don’t have a solid case. The bureau director himself called it ‘thin’ twice in the case-review memo.” Click, highlight. “Like, youch, right? Bedrosov’ll probably walk, same as he did every time before. The guy does an exceptional job insulating himself from Petro and everyone else beneath him.”

  “Which makes Grant’s files that much more damning,” Evan said. “Wires, accounts, transactions, code names—all linking back to Bedrosov. And the cash thresholds are probably high enough to take the case federal. Then you’re not talking a few years in prison for a conviction. You’re talking twenty per. That doesn’t just put him away. It sinks him for good.”

  He thought back to Grant Merriweather’s final moments, confused and depleted. He’d given his life uncovering the evidence to take down Bedrosov’s operation. He’d been hired by dirty cops with a hidden agenda. By doing his job well, he’d turned it into a death sentence. For himself and for Max.

  If Evan didn’t shut Bedrosov down, he’d send the next wave of hit men after Max. And another wave after that.

  Evan stared at Grant’s thumb drive, currently slotted into a USB port. The attached Swiss Army knife key chain protruded, a mundane hiding place for a data dump that had cost twenty lives and counting. Bedrosov had presided over the whole bloody mess with calm upper-management demeanor, a pleasing façade, and a psychopath’s willingness to dispatch anyone in his way.

  Evan had faced evil before in various guises—dark and dirty, passionate and zealous, powerful and cruel. But he’d never gone up against someone so … ordinary. This mission moved against the grain of all those that had come before. Rather than winding into increasing perversion and turpitude, it seemed to arc upward toward a kind of warped legitimacy. He kept looking fo
r a clear enemy, but the faces he continued to encounter were seemingly interchangeable. Terzian and Petro and Brust and Nuñez and Bedrosov were variations on the same theme, a progression of men seeking profit at any cost.

  As if reading his thoughts, Joey said, “I thought we’d finally get to some master villain, you know? Someone who looks the part. But he’s not a villain any more than those dirty cops were. It’s like they’re all pieces of a villain that have to be put together for us to see. And that makes them worse, almost. ’Cuz they can pretend none of them are to blame.” Her dark eyes were shiny, her hair twisted down to cover one eye. She’d withdrawn into herself, but Evan could hear in her voice how keenly she felt the outrage. “The guy does whatever he wants to whoever he wants and gets away with it.”

  “Not anymore,” Evan said.

  Joey’s eyes were glassy, drinking in the evidence writ large on the walls.

  Evan thought about the epiphany that had hit him after he’d taken out Petro: That he wasn’t fighting a snake but a hydra. That the fanged mouths would keep multiplying until he reached the commanding head and severed it. He hoped that was Bedrock. But this time he had to make sure of it.

  “While I’m doing this,” he said, “you dig into Bedrock’s connections, bank records, comms, e-mails, everything. I’ve been caught on the back foot three times now. I need to know that if I walk out of this alive, I’m done.”

  Joey’s eyes flared at the “if,” but he gestured her aside, not wanting to get bogged down. After she vacated the chair, he rattled around in Google, coming up with a slew of articles from April about Armenian pride rallies. A San Diego feature contained several photographs depicting some of the marchers and naming them in the captions.

  Evan started highlighting names and running them through the databases.