The black man studied the street around them. “Sammy usually gets paid to follow people. I may have to start a tab here. You owe me big-time for this one.”
“Other than the fact that you’ve always started every conversation by claiming that I owe you a favor, what exactly are you talking about?”
“Breaking the code of the brotherhood. That’s what I’m doing by talking to you. We’ll just put it on your tab, Flash.”
“You want to speak English?”
“Yours truly, the footloose and fancy-free Sammy Wilkes, was asked to conduct a super-secret clandestine investigation of one Luke McKenna. ‘Course, I turned ’em down, which is lucky for you because I happen to be unmatched in my field.”
“Someone is investigating me?”
“Think nothin’ of it. And I do mean nothing. In fact, forget I’m here. If word gets out that Sammy makes a habit of calling ducks and letting ’em know that hunting season has started…well, that’d be bad for business.”
“Who is it?”
“Judging from his pictures, he’s more of a what than a who.” Sammy eyed a passing car in his side mirror, then came back to Luke. “But I hear you recently served him up a big ol’ can of whoop-ass.”
“The football player? Erickson?”
Sammy’s head started bobbing. “His lawyer called me yesterday. They gonna make you look like a crazy-ass loon — at least, that’s the plan.” His mouth erupted in a grin that looked like his face had suddenly cracked open. “If only they knew how crazy you are, Flash. If only they knew.”
Luke ran a wet hand over his head. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
“Oh, believe it. A blue Ford Mustang, old two-door model. It’s parked up the block from your house. Check it out.”
“You sure about this?”
“You kidding, right? Countersurveillance, that’s Sammy’s specialty. You wouldn’ta seen me earlier if I didn’t want you to.”
Sammy waited for a response. Apparently, he could see that Luke wanted more. “Sammy decided to look in on things, see who they put on you. When I spotted the snoop, I walked up to him and asked what he was doing there.”
“That was subtle.”
“Best way to do it. He thinks I’m a local, looking out for my neighbors, so he gives me his cover story. Tells me he’s a broker, scouting properties for his clients. Holds up a Multiple Listings book that’s sitting on his lap, lets me take in the Open House placards on his dash.”
“Maybe he is a broker.”
“You kidding, right? When’s the last time you saw a broker driving a two-seater? Not exactly what you’d use to drive clients around in. Besides, the camera sitting on his passenger seat has a telephoto lens that’d need wheels if it was any bigger.”
Luke glanced up the hill in the direction of his home. His jaw muscles hardened.
Sammy seemed to read his thoughts. “Keep it loose, Flash. Don’t make trouble for yourself.”
Luke looked at the ground, then back at Sammy. “I guess I do owe you. Thanks.”
“There’s times we gotta look out for each other. We’re off the books, remember?” Sammy handed Luke his business card, saluted with two fingers, and then punched the throttle.
By the time Luke finished reading the card, Sammy’s car had disappeared onto a side street.
Luke started walking toward his home.
Off the books. It had been years since Luke had heard that phrase. Proteus had been created to deal with national security threats that, by classified presidential order, were deemed too sensitive and imminent to disclose to the intelligence committees on Capitol Hill. The brainchild of a maverick Secretary of Defense and a President frustrated by congressional leaks, Proteus was the darkest special ops unit ever conceived. It was completely “off the books,” answerable to the President alone, and known to only a handful of White House and Pentagon staffers.
It survived through just two presidential terms. When the other party won the White House, Proteus was dismantled. The outgoing President saw it for the potentially lethal political liability that it was, and almost overnight all traces of Proteus disappeared. At the time, Luke still owed the military one more year for his Naval Academy education, but the President’s need to bury Proteus made that issue moot. Luke had jumped at the offer of an early discharge.
When he turned the corner onto his block, there it was. The blue Mustang was parked about seventy yards beyond his duplex under the overhang of an oak tree. With the car draped in shade, the outline of a large camera lens barely showed behind the windshield.
He felt the heat rise in his face. Each step was a battle against primal urges. When he reached the edge of his driveway, he took a deep breath and willed himself to turn toward his front door.
Keep it loose, Flash. Don’t make trouble for yourself.
He made it through the door, wended his way to the kitchen, and came out onto the elevated redwood deck that sat over his driveway. A trellis overgrown with jasmine shielded him from the Mustang’s view.
Luke seethed, thinking about Erickson and his attorney putting him under a microscope.
He started into his ritualized workout — abdominal crunches, inverted push-ups, fingertip pull-ups — but gave it up before he finished the first rep and, instead, sat on the deck sweating.
Erickson’s investigator would probably dredge up his “official” military record. It was nothing more than bland fiction, no more threatening than a gnat with a broken wing. His real file, the Proteus file, was buried under so many layers of security that no single individual acting alone — not even the President — had the authority to access it. His file was off the books.
But having some private detective shadow him, invade his life, and threaten the seclusion he had so carefully guarded, stirred an unfamiliar discomfort. Luke knew how to hunt a target, how to disappear into shadows, and how to stalk his prey. He didn’t know how to be the prey.
There was something dreamlike about the turmoil building in his life.
He dragged himself back into the living room and dropped onto the couch. Suddenly, he was very tired.
17
Moist ocean air collided with a warm offshore breeze, creating a one-hundred-meter band of mist that clung to the shoreline. Slow-moving streams of wet fog crept over the deck of the pier and meandered around its enormous concrete pilings.
For once, Luke thought, intelligence had gotten it right — near perfect weather conditions for their mission, with the fog giving them cover for their ingress onto the pier that stretched a quarter mile into the darkness. Their target was at the end of the concrete platform.
“Omega, do you have the bogey in sight?” Alpha, the team leader, spoke in a whisper.
Alpha hadn’t yet labeled the man Luke had in the crosshairs of his nightscope as a hostile. For now, the unknown figure remained a bogey, someone in the target area who was putting their operation at risk.
Luke made a clicking sound with the back of his tongue, inaudible even from a few feet away but sufficient for his throat mic to send an affirmative click to Alpha.
Three seconds later Alpha’s voice came through again. “Gamma, Zeta, can either of you identity the bogey?”
“Negative,” Gamma whispered.
That was followed by two quick clicks — a negative — from Zeta, who was in Zone One with Luke and too close to the hostiles to speak.
Darkness heightened the Proteus team’s advantage. Luke’s nightscope pierced the fog and turned warm bodies into luminous greenish-gray images. Poorly equipped North Korean security forces were blinded by the mist. Meanwhile, he captured every twitch, every distracted scratch, every casual gesture by their adversaries — men who at that moment were probably thinking about little else than keeping warm.
The bogey was approaching Proteus’s most forward-positioned team member, Kappa, who had already reached the pier. The bogey was small and thin, and young judging by his light gait. He had no rifle; in fact, Luke
saw no weapon at all.
After ten seconds of silence, Alpha said, “Bogey nearing Kappa’s position, fifteen meters and closing.”
Kappa was tucked into a shallow inset between two large warehouses. The mission planners had identified the structures as seafood processing plants, placed there to camouflage the military installation.
The three remaining members of the insertion team, including Luke, had only three minutes to take their positions on and under the pier, then five minutes to get to the perimeter of the naval supply station. Once at the perimeter, they had exactly four and a half minutes to breach perimeter security and place explosive charges on the hull of the submarine, which, if not destroyed, would soon transform North Korea into a nuclear naval power.
He clicked the magnification setting of his rifle scope one notch higher and trained the crosshairs on the bogey, who was nearing Kappa’s position. A plume of bright green light, emissions from a heat-exhaust pipe, turned the bogey into a wavy mirage as he passed through it.
The bogey moved to within five meters of Kappa. The unidentified man was now in the mandatory kill zone.
Alpha said, “Omega, the bogey is now your target. Take him out.” His voice revealed no hesitation, no emotion.
Luke was full of hesitation. His target had no weapon. Was the target a soldier, or a civilian who’d wandered into the wrong place at the wrong time?
“Anyone have an identity on the target?” he asked.
“Omega, take out the target. Now!”
The blaring siren came out of nowhere.
Luke shot up onto the edge of his sofa, his chest heaving, his face drenched in sweat.
An instant later the phone rang and a bolt of pain speared his right eye. His spine arched and he flung himself back onto the couch.
Then, just as suddenly, the pain was gone.
He hoisted himself up and threw his feet onto the floor while grabbing for the telephone. Its ring had invaded his dream, his mind transforming it into a siren.
“You’re not gonna believe what just happened,” came Ben’s voice without preamble.
The afternoon sun painted a ribbon of orange across the far wall.
Luke rubbed the sleep from his face. “What?”
“Barnesdale marched into my office ‘bout an hour ago with some big shot from the Guatemalan Embassy—”
“You mean consulate?”
“Embassy, consulate, who gives a rat’s ass? The point is, Henry marches in with this muckety-muck and his attorney, telling me to hand over the tissue samples from our boy.” The pitch of Ben’s voice rose. “Henry was all swole up in the face, acting like I was some kinda ax murderer or something.”
“Hold on, Ben. Tell me exactly what happened.”
“I just told you. They demanded that I give ’em all the organ tissues, so that’s what I did. Except for the bone marrow. Apparently, they’d already gotten that from Oncology.”
“How’d they even know you had it?”
“I’m guessing the mortician. They gotta embalm the body before transporting it out of the country. The idiot musta said something to the mother, told her a piece of the boy’s rib was missing. What do they think we are, a buncha ghouls who go around collecting body parts?”
“Did anyone explain why they wanted the tissues back?”
“The consulate fella said something about religious burial rites and how important it was for the family to get back all the remains. Seems their tribe has some fancy burial ritual that gets the spirit from this life to the next. If we desecrate the body, the boy doesn’t get to go to heaven, or wherever it is that Mayan Indians go.”
“Did Barnesdale or this guy say anything else?”
A heavy breath came through the phone. “That’s about it. I wasn’t real eager to pursue the discussion.”
“So we’re back to where we started.”
“Not exactly.”
“What do you mean?”
“They didn’t ask me for the slides,” Ben said. “Just the tissues.”
“Slides?”
“The slides of the lung tissue, remember?” A short beat, then, “I musta forgot to tell ’em.”
Luke allowed himself a small grin.
“These folks were very particular about what they wanted,” Ben said. “They didn’t mention anything about slides.”
“Then they probably didn’t want them,” Luke threw in.
“Probably not.”
“So what do they show?”
“Can’t tell you until I look at ’em, now, can I? And I don’t plan on doing that until I get home. Henry’s already taken enough of my weekend.”
“Fair enough.”
“Glad you think so,” Ben said. “By the way, the Wilson clan is barbecuing some steaks tonight. Nothing fancy, but you’re welcome to join us if you want. I’ll probably get a look at those slides before dinner.”
“For a lot of reasons, I think I’ll take you up on that.”
“Steaks’ll be ready around seven.”
* * *
The knock on Ben’s door came as he was hanging up the phone with Luke.
“It’s open.”
Two workmen in gray uniforms gave Ben a deferential smile when the door opened. The larger one, a well-muscled Hispanic who was missing part of his left ear, pointed at the ceiling. “Your phone wiring?” When he didn’t get a reaction from Ben, he added, “I assume someone told you we’d be working in your office today?”
“Nope.”
“Third time this has happened.” The worker scratched the crown of his head, glanced at his Asian partner, then Ben. “Whoever’s supposed to let you people know isn’t doing their job.”
“Does that surprise you?” Ben asked. “If it does, you haven’t worked around this place very long.”
The Hispanic blew a pocket of air out from the side of his mouth. “It’s a capacity problem — the hospital’s maxed out and we’re reconfiguring the trunks to add more lines. Believe it or not, we’re trying to stay out of everyone’s way while we’re doing it. That’s why we’re here on a weekend.” The man gave him an expectant look.
Ben waved them in. “How long you gonna be?”
“Not long at all.”
Fifteen minutes later the Asian worker was still on a ladder with his shoulders and head buried inside the ceiling. A labyrinth of wires hung down through the hole where he had removed two ceiling tiles.
“You guys about done?” Ben asked.
The Hispanic said, “We should have it wrapped up in another few minutes. Sorry we’re taking so long.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Ben grabbed his briefcase and tossed in some papers. “Will you be needing to get back in here again?”
“No. You won’t be seeing us again.”
18
Luke had been to Ben Wilson’s home only once, for a holiday party a few years earlier, but he immediately recognized the distinctive two-story Craftsman structure. Ben lived in an older area of the city known as Windsor Square, and his home made a statement with its bold red and brown tones and bright yellow trim. It looked like the type of house in which Hansel and Gretel might live.
The Lakers game was playing loudly in the background when a teenage girl answered the front door.
“I’m Dr. McKenna.”
She gave him an empty stare and smacked on a golf-ball-size piece of gum, then turned her head inside and screamed, “Dad, it’s someone for you.”
The door swung open and her arm shot out as if it were spring-loaded, pointing down a mahogany-paneled hallway toward the rear of the house.
As Luke stepped through the doorway, a gigantic bloodhound charged through the entry hall and raced out the front door.
From the back of the house Ben’s voice called out, “Don’t let the dog out.”
The girl shrugged at Luke, swung the door closed, then trotted up a broad stairway.
He found Ben in the kitchen, standing against the island counter mashing potatoes and wea
ring a ridiculous lavender apron. The pathologist said “Howdy” with a drawl that stretched the word into a lengthy greeting.
Luke had met Ben’s wife only in passing at that holiday party and couldn’t remember her name. “Where’s your wife?”
Ben pointed through the wall with the potato masher. “Lakers game. From the sound of it, things ain’t going too well.”
As if on command, a woman’s voice pierced through a mahogany door at the far end of the kitchen. “Wake up and get into the game. You guys are playing like a bunch of wusses.”
Ben’s daughter charged through the kitchen with two other gangly teenagers in jeans and halter tops. “Tell Mom I’m taking her car.”
A tangle of bony elbows and knees scurried out the screen door.
Ben opened his mouth as if to say something, then shrugged instead.
His wife’s voice called out again. “C’mon, you morons! You’re leaving the lane wide open.”
Ben’s head retreated into his shoulders. “We best leave Charlie alone in her misery.”
“Your wife’s name is Charlie?”
Ben grabbed a pair of barbecue tongs and led Luke out the back door. “Short for Charlotte.”
“Ah, I see.”
Ben turned on him. “I know what you’re thinking, and you’re wrong.”
Luke spread his palms, brimming with innocence.
“I like tarantulas,” Ben insisted. “They’re beautiful creatures.”
“Of course they are.”
“So I named one after my wife. What’s wrong with that?”
“Not that this discussion isn’t important in its own right,” Luke said as they stepped over to a brick-mounted barbecue grill, “but did you get a look at those lung slides?”
“Yep.” Ben scratched his nose with the tongs, then pointed them at Luke. “Like that little girl Alice said, it’s gettin’ curiouser and curiouser. That boy’s airways, particularly the smaller airways leading into the lung, looked like a tornado hit ’em.”
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