Michael Walsh Bundle

by Michael Walsh

  Still, he was going to have to turn her down.

  They were standing on the outside steps as he walked right past them, heading for his car. He eyeballed them both and the woman’s visual matched up to her driver’s license photo. He started his car and pulled around toward the front. The radio was still nattering on about the Stella Maris, the ship that had gone to the bottom in Long Beach Harbor. Danny didn’t buy any of the bullshit story they were putting out, about how some explosive gases had reached critical mass in one of the compartmentalized holds, and had ignited with a random spark. Somebody had put that ship down, and part of him wished that he had been in on the operation. But he was still too wrapped up in his own grief. Maybe that—his grief—was why he had agreed to this meeting. To assuage his own by imbibing somebody else’s.

  The woman and the boy were mesmerized by the view, as all tourists were. Back in the days before smog, this had been one of the great observation posts in southern California, not Mt. Palomar caliber, but close. California must have been something back then.

  “Mrs. Gardner?” he called out. She turned. “Get in, please. You in the front, Rory in the back.” They got in. He drove off quickly.

  At first nobody said anything. She had already told him plenty on the phone. He knew the story, she knew the drill.

  “Where are we going?” she finally asked. Brave woman—getting in a car with a total stranger. Brave him, opening up to a civilian. But he felt guilty—he had been ready to sacrifice her and the boy and now here they both were, no thanks to his judgment. He and Devlin had saved them both, but had cost Diane her life.

  They were heading deep into the park, over the crest and onto the side that looked toward Glendale and Burbank. There were riding trails and golf courses and the Los Angeles Zoo on this side, but plenty of solitude as well.

  There was a fire trail he knew, one of the roads the fire department used as access in case of trouble. A few years ago, there had been a big fire up here and even at a distance you could easily see which parts of the park had burned and which hadn’t.

  He ignored the warning sign to keep out and entered the access trail. If any cops bothered them, well, he knew all the cops from Hollywood Station. It was little more than a dirt road and the car bumped heavily. Sometimes dirtbags hid up here, kids fucked in their cars, illegals hid out, and the occasional dump job wound up under six inches of dirt. Those were the chances he had to take.

  He found a clearing and parked. They were hemmed in all sides by pine trees; the only thing he could see was the sky.

  “Rory, you stay inside for now,” he said, leaving the air conditioner on. It was blazing hot, still fire season, and the pine needles cracked under his feet as he and Hope got out of the car.

  “All right, Mrs. Gardner,” he said. “It’s your meeting.”

  At first, she didn’t know what he meant. That was what he got for using Hollywood-speak; even if you weren’t in the Industry out here, you talked like you were. “I mean, you asked to see me.”

  Hope nodded. It looked like she hadn’t slept a wink in three days. “Yes. Thank you for agreeing to see me on such short notice.” She took a deep breath. “As I said on the phone, I want to hire you.”

  “And as I told you, you can’t afford me,” he replied.

  “I don’t care. Jack had a sizable insurance policy, with a rider for accidental death, and I’m prepared to spend every penny of it if you can help me find my daughter.”

  “I told you. She’s probably dead.”

  “Probably is not good enough for me.”

  Danny kicked some dirt. “Ordinarily, I would never have taken your call. Never agreed to see you. Never would have invited you out here. But I cremated my wife this morning and…”

  “We had our service yesterday,” she said, simply. “Then we got on the plane.”

  “I’m sorry. Sorry for your loss, sorry for your trouble. But I don’t see how I can help you. Why don’t you take your kid and go home. Start over. Rebuild your life. That’s what I’m going to do.”

  Hope was surprised that it was so easy to hold her emotions in check. She was so much stronger than she ever would have thought, before all this happened. She had come all this way. And she wasn’t about to take no for an answer.

  “You’re a liar,” she said. “That’s not at all what you’re going to do. You’re never going to rest until you get revenge.”

  She was uncomfortably under his skin. “What makes you say that?”

  “Because I saw you chop that man’s arm off…with a smile. You’re a killer, so don’t try to pretend otherwise.”

  Danny felt his heart racing. This little woman had just rocked him back on his heels in a way no man could. “Like I said, it’s your meeting.”

  “The 160th. You guys are supposed to be the best.”

  He looked back at the car. There was a video player built into the backseats, and he had put a movie on for Rory. “We’re pretty good.”

  She took that as a yes. “So’s Xe, I hear.”

  Danny was impressed; this lady had done her homework. “We try. We take a lot of bum raps, but whenever any Congress critter or media nitwit needs to keep his ass safe, we keep his ass safe. Not that we get any thanks for it.”

  “I know she’s alive.”

  “I already told you—”

  “I don’t care. A mother knows these things…Besides—I know about the other man. And I want to hire him too.”

  “What did you say? About another man?” That part she hadn’t mentioned on the phone. She had his full attention now.

  “The man who saved Rory’s life when the bomb went off. An angel, he called himself.”

  “Can Rory describe him?”

  Hope was confused. “I thought you might know him.”

  “I might,” said Danny. “But I need to hear from Rory first.”

  “Okay.” Hope had thought to keep Rory out of this, but she realized that would be impossible. They walked back to the car. As they did, she said, “So does this mean you’ll help us?”

  “I haven’t decided yet,” said Danny.

  They got into the car, feeling relief from the heat, dry or otherwise. Danny glanced at the temperature gauge on the dashboard—well over 90. A red-flag day. “Tell me about the man you saw, Rory,” he said. “The angel.”

  Rory threw his mother a look and she nodded: go ahead. “I didn’t get a real good look at him,” he began. “All of a sudden, he just grabbed me and we both dove in the big trash can. I was scared—you know…”

  “But he said he was an angel. What kind of angel?”

  Rory shrugged. “I asked him if he was a missionary. Like in cannibals and missionaries. I like to play that game. Do you?”

  Danny looked at Hope and Rory, a woman and a child. Not helpless, exactly, but as vulnerable as the missionaries to the cannibals. “Looks like I’m going to have to,” he said.

  He knew what he had to do.

  He had to keep them safe.

  He had to help Hope find her daughter.

  He had to avenge Diane and give himself and Jade something to live for.

  How he was going to do all this, he had no idea. He’d already missed three calls from “Tom Powers,” but somehow he had to track him down.

  “Are you in or are you out?” Hope asked him. An hour in LA and she was already speaking the local lingo.

  “Let’s go,” he said, slamming the car into gear and roaring down the dusty trail toward Hollywood.

  Twenty minutes later they were flying down Highland Avenue. The Kodak Center was the new fresh underbelly of the entertainment beast, where the Oscars were now held, a vast, sprawling complex that took in everything from the intersection of Hollywood and Highland, west to what used to be Grauman’s Chinese Theater, now owned by the Mann group. The one with the hand-and footprints.

  Just before the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard, Danny turned right into the parking garage and headed to the lowest level.

&
nbsp; There wasn’t much to subterranean Los Angeles, not like New York or even Seattle, but he had a small piece of it. The Red Line ran right under the complex and where subways traveled, so also did clandestine offices flourish.

  Instead of punching the button, Danny slapped an ID card up against a plate on the elevator bank. The doors opened. Then he pushed a key into the console. “Security code, please,” said an electronic woman’s voice. Using the floor keys, he punched in a five-digit number. “Going down,” said the synthesized voice, even though there were no “down” floors visible.

  After what seemed an eternity, the doors slowly slid open. Even three stories beneath Hollywood Boulevard, it looked like a normal office floor in anybuilding, anywhere, USA.

  Danny led them down a private hallway. Hope caught a glimpse of people in some of the offices—cops, guys in suits talking quietly into telephones. He unlocked a door and ushered them into a small office. At once, Danny set to work, firing up computers, flicking switches, checking voice mails. Video screens flickered to life, audio streams came online; from a tomb, the room was suddenly alive with activity.

  Furiously, he punched numbers into a keyboard, from time to time consulting old-fashioned black loose-leaf code binders, flipping through pages of what to her eye looked like gibberish. It wasn’t gibberish to Danny. Every keystroke, every glance, had a purpose.

  Nothing. He had mined every database, run every kind of tracking software, done a dozen concentric-circle relationship charts, and he still couldn’t find out who the hell Tom Powers was, or how to contact him. One-way streets were a bitch, especially when they were blind alleys.

  He was about to turn to Hope and tell her that he was sorry, that he couldn’t help her after all, when suddenly Rory said—“Cool. An iPhone.”

  There it was, in his bag. It had been there all along.

  Fucking Skipjack. That was how he was going to get in touch with Powers, whether he liked it or not. Walk the dog backward…

  Its contract with the U.S. government stipulated that Xe had to be ready to put a team on the ground anywhere within twenty-four hours. Sub rosa, untraceable. Just enough men to do the job, but not one more than necessary. He couldn’t roll without the kind of authorization that Powers could pull, but with it, in a heartbeat, he could have a full complement of men who had served in the 160th: in, up somebody’s ass, out. The Night Stalkers.

  The Stella Maris. That had to be what “Powers” had been calling him about. Somehow, it must be related to what had happened at the Grove. And, in his grief, he had blown the assignment. Nobody could blame him for that, but—

  Thank God Jade was going to make it. When he’d visited her today, she was awake, barely. Her eyes had lit up at the sight of him, and for a long time he said nothing. He just sat there, stroking his little girl’s hair and telling her everything was going to be okay. He didn’t say anything about Diane. He didn’t know whether she knew, whether she remembered. She’d learn soon enough.

  He thought of Diane and all the pain and rage and guilt and blame came flooding back. And yet, she was gone and no amount of remembrance could bring her back. It could only honor her, passively—

  “Stay a little longer, Daddy,” came a weak little voice. Danny looked down at Jade and squeezed her hand.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can and not one second less. And then we’ll go for that chopper ride…all of us.”

  But maybe it was more appropriate to honor her memory actively. Proactively.

  What the hell was Powers up to? Whatever it was, it was big. Whatever had started in Edwardsville, it was time to finish it. For the sake of his family—for the sake of all their families—he had to be a part of it.

  Well, that was what he had this office for. Up to now, he had abided by Powers’s rules. But this was no time to stand on ceremony.

  It wasn’t simply a matter of a last-number call-back. Powers’s contacts went through multiple cutouts. But however many there were, in the end his call would have to be vetted by the Skipjack chip embedded in Jade’s iPhone, a chip that Powers himself had placed there. He could reverse-engineer the sequence, and one of those cutouts, no matter how many there were, would have to be real, and would accept the handshake from its very own mole, inside a little girl’s cell phone. He had no idea how long it would take, but there was no time like the present to start.

  He said a silent prayer. The hamsters started spinning.

  He was in luck.

  The last call had been recent, fresh. The sequencing logarithms weren’t that old, and he was high on Powers’s priority list.

  He didn’t get a ring-through, but he got a punch-through. Good enough for government work.

  As he waited for the response, he realized that he was biting his own tongue.

  Come on, damn it…come on…

  There—

  HOW’S YOUR FRENCH?

  UP TO SNUFF.

  SOAR, CLARA VALLIS, SOAR.

  He got it. NSDQ.

  Danny turned to Hope. “We’ve got a plane to catch.”

  That brought a smile to Rory’s face. “Where are we going?” he cried.

  “Van Nuys, for starters.” said Danny, shutting down the office and gathering up his stuff, as if that explained everything.

  Chapter Forty-nine

  VADUZ

  With stock and property markets around the world collapsing in fear, Emanuel Skorzeny doubled down on his bets, short-selling like mad, snapping up whole companies for ten cents on the dollar. Through a series of shells, he had already taken a majority position in General Electric, whose stock price was at a depression-era level. He worked the phones, ordering shipments of relief supplies to Illinois, Los Angeles, London. He even gave interviews to selected friendly media, by Internet video. Four days after Edwardsville, Skorzeny International was nearly ten billion dollars richer than it had been a week earlier. One more disaster and he would practically own the U.S. Treasury.

  “What news of Miss Harrington?” Skorzeny inquired of Pilier. “I have not heard from her in several hours. I suspect alienation of affection.”

  Inwardly, Pilier frowned. The old man was already besotted; now, he was bordering on obsession. The Harrington woman, while spectacular, was young enough to be his daughter.

  “Busy, sir,” replied Pilier. “Making a fortune for us. For the Foundation. That is her brief, I believe.”

  “A woman of many and variegated talents,” observed Skorzeny. He was standing by his desk, staring at the Alps in the fading light. “And no less than what I expect of her. Still, I am distressed that she hasn’t called.”

  Typical Skorzeny, thought Pilier: no matter what the situation, it was always about him. And yet that selfishness, often masked as selflessness, was what made him great. And richer every day. Not bad for a boy who started with nothing.

  His back to Pilier, Skorzeny said, “What of the news?”

  “Im Westen nichts neues,” said Pilier, in German. All Quiet on the Western Front. It was, he knew, one of Skorzeny’s favorite books and motion pictures.

  Skorzeny looked at his watch and raised an eyebrow. “Really?” he said. “I have found throughout my life that bad news begets more bad news. The panic of the mob. The extraordinary madness of crowds. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. And in times of mass hysteria—”

  “If sir,” Observed Pilier. “If you keep your head when all about—”

  “You dare quote Kipling to me?” he said.

  Pilier backtracked as fast as he could. “Purely for referential purposes, sir,” he said. “After all, Kipling is—”

  “An imperialist and an Englishman,” said Skorzeny. “As the Americans say, that is two strikes against him.”

  “Yes, sir,” admitted Pilier in defeat. Best not to try and trade literary witticisms with his superior.

  “This woman…” mused Skorzeny.

  Oh, no, thought Pilier.

  “She is remarkable, is she not?” inquired Skorz
eny.

  “Are you soliciting my opinion, sir, or merely stating a fact?”

  “Both, I should say.”

  “Then I absolutely agree.”

  The Glare, for just a fleeting moment. Then, “When the American markets reopen,” said Skorzeny, blessedly changing the subject, “what will be our position?”

  “Aggressive, sir. Stocks, commodities, real estate. We also snap up the ancillaries—tech stocks, defense industries, shipping, the lot.”

  “Good. What about the public utilities? The banks?”

  “The utilities can wait a bit, but we will be taking a very strong position in Bank of America and Citicorp and I expect we should be able to push that toward majority status should we wish to. In fact, with any luck, we can own them outright tomorrow.”

  “What about Credit Suisse? J.P. Morgan Chase?”

  “Proxies will take care of both of them. Also Barclay’s. And, of course, Société Générale we already own. Last but not least, we’ve taken a very bearish stance against both the dollar and the euro, and I believe events are bearing out our wisdom of the plan adopted by the board at your suggestion.”

  “Sell our holdings in Universal and Paramount. Parent companies too. Might as well make a clean divestiture. Clear out the rot and start over.”

  “What ‘rot’ might that be, sir?” wondered Pilier. “The company has done very well with its Hollywood investments. Not to mention by its friends in the industry.”

  Skorzeny shot him an irritated glance, a warning that he was overstepping his servile boundary. “I am bored with movies about comic books,” he said. “What is this world coming to? Jejune juvenilia, elevated to the level of art. What would Shakespeare say? Goethe? Rimbaud? Tolstoy? Ne kulturny. Given the demographics, we will first run out of children and then run out of comic books…Now, what of our ship?”

  Pilier wondered whether the old man was going senile. “Sir, you know that the Stella Maris sank two days ago under mysterious circumstances in Long Beach Harbor. And despite our protestations, the United States government has not yet seen fit to—”