Dark Heart

by James Phelan

  “So did I, just this week. In Syria. And I traveled here via a military hospital in Germany. Now I’m here.”

  “Well, you don’t look that bad for it.”

  Rachel paused, then said, “Some wounds aren’t obvious on the outside.”

  “What is it you want from me?” Walker looked at the lift lobby, then his cell phone, waiting for Eve’s call to say the car was ready and to head down. He looked up and Rachel Muertos was quiet. It still niggled at him, maybe it was a set-up. Some of the guys back at State or the Agency having a laugh, thinking they’d get him to rush down to the main lobby, where there’d be some kind of “Surprise!” yelled out and a belated retirement cake and streamers. “Are there really men, at least three, one claiming to be from Homeland, headed here to kill me?”

  “Yes,” Muertos replied, her tone flat and her shoulders hunched a little, as though resigned to the fact that she’d missed her chance to get him out. “I . . . I might have led them here. In a way. I’m not sure. But indirectly I guess I did—but I can’t remember it and—”

  Walker held up a hand to signal he’d heard enough and started for the lifts.

  “So, I got here as soon as I could, you’ve got to believe me,” Muertos said, moving to keep in step with him. “And then I saw them, in the lobby, downstairs. Definitely two guys, with a—a leader, I guess you’d call him. A guy named Krycek, from Homeland. But there may be others. If they’re waiting for you to leave the hospital, or if they’re coming up here to get you, I don’t know.”

  Walker stopped and turned to her. “Then how about I go to the lobby and see what’s what?”

  Muertos was silent.

  “Really,” Walker said. “If someone’s after me, they’d have had their best chance up here, when I was alone in my room, out of sight of the rest of the staff and wards here.”

  The lift pinged. Two nurses came out. No one else. Muertos looked relieved. Walker smiled.

  “Walker,” she said, “I really need your help.”

  “Something to do with Syria?”

  “Ye—Yes.”

  “Why the hesitation just then?”

  “I forgot that I mentioned Syria before. That I was there, I mean. The hospital. Then Germany.”

  “You okay? Maybe you should still be in hospital?”

  “My memory, I—it’s complicated. But it was in Germany that I met Krycek. And he spooked the hell out of me. But I’d told him, or some other doctors, your name, so he became a threat to you too, right? So, I broke out, to come and find you—I had to warn you that he might be coming. See? And he’s here—I’ve seen him, he’s downstairs with at least two others!”

  Walker looked around as a doctor passed. “So, you’re here because you feel guilty about giving my name to a guy from Homeland?”

  Rachel fell silent.

  “Sorry, Muertos. It’s still a no.”

  “Walker, you can’t say no.” Muertos’s voice was full of despair now. “Please.”

  Walker shook his head, went to the lift and pressed the call button.

  Muertos called out, “It’s because of your father.”

  Walker turned to Rachel Muertos of the State Department.

  She said, “He told me to find you.”

  4

  The lift pinged. Two men got out: dark suits, white shirts with dark ties, rubber-soled dress shoes. Both military-age Caucasian. Crew cuts and clean shaven. They looked like they should be wearing fatigues and carrying assault rifles. Each guy looked around, saw Walker and headed straight for him, in step, looking around the ward as they moved. They were both shorter than Walker but not by much. They were maybe ten years younger. Each seemed jacked, ready for action, adrenaline overriding reason. Their eyes took in all the scenery.

  “Jed Walker,” the closer one said.

  Walker was silent.

  “We need to talk, sir,” the other one said, stopping to stand in line with his colleague. They seemed to relax a little. Then he gestured with his ID. “We’re with Homeland Security.”

  “Good for you,” Walker said. “I’ll make this simple: I’m leaving.”

  “This won’t take a minute,” the other guy said. “In private, if you don’t mind. Back in your room, if you will. Promise it won’t take a minute. Sir.”

  Walker looked at the two men, then back to his empty room, then around the ward still busy with nurses and doctors, then to Muertos. A curious little gang of four people standing in the middle of a working hospital ward. Most of the other patients, from what Walker had picked up during his few days there, were recovering from elective surgery. A couple had new knees, someone got a new hip, others needed tendon and ligament grafts and repair work. All in all, a place to get things fixed—it could end up being handy, for these two, if they insisted on annoying him.

  Walker looked again at Muertos.

  Damn.

  He could see sweat beaded on her forehead. And in that moment he knew. It’s like he could smell her fear, and with that, the legitimacy of what she’d said.

  At least three. Maybe more . . . One of them claims to be from Homeland Security.

  They’d have had their best chance up here, when I was alone in my room, out of sight.

  “You guys wouldn’t know an Agent Krycek, would you?” Walker asked.

  The two suited men shared a look, which was all the answer he needed. Then, Walker’s cell phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket and answered it as the two guys started to object.

  “Hey, look,” Walker said to Eve. “Something’s come up. Yep. I’m gonna meet you there. I’ll take a cab.”

  Walker ended the call. Something’s come up. Every couple had their codes. Usually it was the kind of line that would get them out of an annoying situation. For the Walkers, it was short-hand to follow instructions due to an imminent threat. Something’s come up meant that Eve would do as he instructed, no questions asked. They’d used it maybe four times over almost two decades. She’d be in shock right now, given her previous giddy mood, and Walker planned to call her back soon to allay any fears and to set things right.

  “Okay,” Walker said to the two Homeland guys, stepping back and glancing toward his empty room. “After you.”

  The two agents hesitated, then one said to Muertos, “With us, please ma’am.”

  Walker nodded to Muertos. He could tell that she sensed he’d changed gears, that he was going to act. The four of them moved as a group, the two Homeland agents up ahead followed by Walker then Muertos. The guy closest to Walker kept glancing back, and when they reached the room and the lead agent held the door open to let everyone pass, the briefest of nods passed between the two Homeland men. Like couples have their coded communications, so did partners in the field, to ensure efficiency. Military and law enforcement used all kinds of minimal gestures as shortcuts to action. And Walker knew that the look and gesture between them was a bad tell. And it told him that he had to act first.

  When it came to unarmed combat, Walker had few rules other than to be the one to walk away afterward. Things could and would change in the blink of an eye, and just when you thought you had an opponent sized up and their moves predicted, they would enter a phase of unpredictability as they attempted to regain control. Wanting to preserve your life would do that. It made even the best training go out the window. That’s why any fighter in the world, no matter the martial art or boxing style, trained long and hard, repeating the same moves with monotony so that when the time came, they could rely on muscle memory to move their body the way it had been trained: efficiently, purposefully. Action and reaction, drilled until it became second nature. When you started to mess with those instructions, you inevitably failed. And this was no fight in a ring with rules and procedures to follow.

  Take these two guys. In three seconds Walker would know that they had each been Marines at some recent point in their lives for the fighting stance that each went to employ—and three seconds, in a fight, was too long a reaction time. No sooner had
Muertos entered the room than the guy at the doorway shut the door and reached out and grabbed her. He had one hand around her neck in a choke hold and the other reaching for the holstered pistol at his hip. That was the first second of action. Walker saw that and kept his concentration on the agent closer to him. By the next second, this one had a weapon already at hand—he’d had it concealed up his left sleeve the entire time, and brought it out and was turning in a wide pivot on his right foot while his right arm was reaching for Walker to pull him into a headlock.

  The weapon was a hypodermic needle in the form of an auto-injector pen, designed by the US military to be able to stab through clothing hard and fast in the event of an emergency, such as administering anti-nerve agents. It was also used by various government agencies to inject barbiturates to render a person unconscious, to later be detained and, perhaps, tortured. Eventually the technology became available to the public, where it was broadly known as an EpiPen or Adrenaclick. Walker caught the guy’s wrist, just below the flying needle, and squeezed as hard as he could until he felt the bones compress together and the guy slowed, his face reddened with pain. As he started to react and engage in a fight with his free hand, inside the third second, where he displayed his moves as a former US Marine by the grapple hold he attempted, Walker grasped the guy’s other arm and pulled the two wrists together while twisting and turning him around. With his back to Walker and his arms crossed, Walker yanked the arms so that the guy injected himself in the chest.

  Three seconds. One threat down, one to go.

  As the guy was collapsing to the floor, his colleague had drawn his side-arm and was bringing it up—Walker was moving for him, and Muertos stomped on her captor’s foot, a hard sharp blow with the heel of her boot onto the toes of the cheap dress shoes. The guy grunted at the sound of tiny bones snapping, and he let Muertos go.

  Walker closed the gap and with his left hand on the inside of the guy’s rising gun hand he squeezed and twisted. A shot rang out. Walker kept twisting, and the weapon clattered to the ground. The guy punched at Walker, so Walker grabbed that wrist too.

  “You can get out of this okay,” Walker said to him, twisting his hands out and down, putting more pain on the guy’s wrist and elbow and shoulder joints while bringing him closer in. “What do you want with me?”

  “You’re trapped here, Walker . . .” The guy was deep red in the face with the exertion of trying to fight the twisting motion on his arms, and Walker didn’t stop. This was no compliance hold. This was an action to put this guy down, and out of the fight, for a long, long time. Major reconstructive work was in this guy’s near future. Walker’s hands were tight around the guy’s wrists and he twisted all the way, well beyond any arresting cop would, twisting and turning and increasing the pressure until the guy’s shoulders dislocated, forearm bones shattering on the way, tendons snapping, and as he came rushing downward desperately trying to relieve the pressure, Walker kneed him in the face. The guy fell to the floor, unconscious.

  Five seconds, beginning to end. Two ex-Marines turned Homeland Security agents down and out.

  “That was . . .” Muertos stood there, trying to find the words. “Disgusting.”

  “He’s in a good place for the medical attention he’s gonna need,” Walker said. He checked pulses on both the agents: both were alive. He put each into the recovery position, and then he picked up the fired pistol, a Glock 19, and field stripped it, pocketing the recoil spring. He checked their pockets. Each wallet contained what looked like legitimate Homeland Security Agency ID. Both cell phones seemed the kind of bland government-issue Blackberry that Homeland agents would receive. The hypodermic was labeled Etorphine, which Walker knew well was used by the CIA to render suspects unconscious. He’d seen enough. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “How?” Muertos asked.

  Outside the room, the nurses’ station was still. Four staff stood and stared, the phones and pagers ringing and bleeping around them.

  The gunshot. Walker headed past the lifts to the first set of stairs, and as he held the door open for Muertos he pulled the little red lever on the wall, then followed her through as the hospital fire alarm started to shriek.

  5

  The klaxon blazed and Walker and Muertos emerged with a mass of staff, patients and visitors onto the eastern concourse.

  “This way!” Muertos said over the hubbub, and pushed and ducked her way through various human obstacles.

  Walker had a clear path. Crowds have a certain type of hive mind, something innate that makes smaller people move for bigger people—some deeply ingrained survival instinct, rather than good manners. Walker was a big guy making his way ahead like a shark moving through a school of fish—the smaller people, a crowd numbering in the hundreds, shifted and moved out of the way. The evacuees ended near the curb. He looked up and down the road: no one about but pedestrians on a Sunday morning in San Francisco, rubbernecking at the growing mass of people evacuating the hospital. There was a distant siren, but apart from that, there was something reverential about the time. Sunday. As if everything were quieter, calmer. From the cars on the road to the birds in the sky. Life was taking stock. Walker, too.

  Two big blacked-out SUVs rolled up. Muertos got in the second vehicle and Walker shuffled in after her. The door closed, and the cars moved off. Smooth, efficient. Melted into the streets. Walker didn’t see any other obvious threats.

  A suited guy was at the wheel. The vehicle in front kept at the speed limit as they merged onto the 101. Walker figured they were headed for the airport—which, if those guys back there really were from Homeland Security, would be a bad idea. You get on a plane, you have to show ID. If Walker showed ID, and he was for some reason on a Homeland watchlist, then the TSA officers, belonging as they did to a subordinate agency of the Department of Homeland Security, would detain him.

  “Okay.” Walker looked across to Muertos. “What do you know of my father?”

  The mention of his father had sealed it. Not the attack. His father. Walker had no choice but to tag along and see where this rabbit hole went. Muertos seemed to compose herself before answering. She let out a deep breath, looked at the scene out the window, then turned to Walker. In Walker’s experience, people who needed time to get their thoughts together were either forming a lie, or a version of the truth that suited the situation.

  “Nothing.”

  “But you saw him.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “In Syria.”

  “Syria? What was happening in Syria?”

  “That’s a long story.”

  “I’m a good listener.” Which was true. Walker preferred to listen than to talk, given the choice; talking just enough to get some good listening in. Listening to someone talk was to sit in judgment. He had been in the business of judging and recruiting agents to oversee and run for the CIA for the best part of a decade—a job he’d proved good at. The Socratic method, as he’d learned at the CIA’s trade-craft school at The Point: questioning, seeking answers by making the subject think aloud, drawing out the answer from them. So far, Muertos was someone to mine for information. He’d yet to form a solid opinion of her other than she had given him the heads-up at the hospital—but to what extent that was her doing in the first place he was keen to figure out. “Just keep it relevant. And tell me how you fit in.”

  “Okay. I was in Syria as an undercover, working on an anti-human-trafficking taskforce,” Muertos said to Walker, looking down at her hands as she spoke. “With the refugee crisis there, it’s a big, big business. There are tiers depending on what the person who wants out of the country can offer as payment. For the well heeled, those with hard currency or easily tradable assets, some of them can pay up to a million dollars per person to get to a Western nation like Germany or the US or Canada or Australia, with full ID papers and a new life waiting for them. Then there are those who pay about fifty grand per person to just get into a Western country. Those who can pay about
half that can get transit to any Western nation’s border. Then there’s all the others—that’s the ninety-plus percent, those who can’t pay because they’ve got nothing to give—nothing but their lives. They’re making all kinds of deals to get out. You name it: selling kids as slaves; selling wives and mothers and daughters into sex rings. And when they do get into new nations, they’re expected to pay off the debt. For years.”

  “I’m aware of most of that,” Walker said. “Saw it happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, though the money involved seemed far less.”

  “There are some wealthy people who found themselves on the wrong side of the ledger in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.”

  Walker shifted in his seat. “How does my father fit in?”

  “I was at a meet in Damascus,” Muertos said. When she spoke she continued to look down at her hands, her fingers linked together and moving in a stress-related action. “We’d closed in on a high-level smuggling outfit and were due to meet the local kingpin, who would lead us to his contact back here in the US. That’s where I saw your father, at that meet. He came into the building. He met with the guy I was to meet with, which meant he was offering up more money than my local fixer and I were. At least five million US. Then . . .”

  Walker let her silent pause hang in the air a moment, then asked, “What’d he want?”

  “I couldn’t hear, he was across the warehouse, and it was a noisy place—military jets overhead and small-arms fire nearby. But I made out that he was American because my fixer had met him before.”

  “Who was your fixer?”

  “Just a local guy wanting to help out,” Muertos said. “He’d lost his family to this smuggling outfit, so he wanted to see them taken down. Your father had gone to him a few days before me.”

  “Saying what?”

  “We didn’t get to that.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “The meet went south, right as my fixer was recounting the story. My guy was among the first to die. A lot of people died that day. Five people from State. All our local fixers and support staff. Dozens of refugees.”