by Alex Howell
“Mason,” Marshal said, giving Mason the much needed-relief and return to normalcy he so desperately craved in that moment. “I will leave it up to you to discipline your daughter as you see fit. At the moment, because the lead is dead at the warehouse, there’s not much else we can do, but wait for another phone call. If you have any ideas, you’re the man with the boots on the ground. I would encourage you to look around and do some recon, but we’re in holding mode at D.C.”
That’s what I was afraid of. Damnit.
“Understood, Marshal.”
“You are free to use whatever tactics are necessary to get the mission done, so long as, obviously, you don’t get caught.”
The implication was clear. This isn’t the SEALs. We aren’t bound by silly laws or governance. We can do what we need to do to get the mission done.
“Mason,” Raina spoke up. “From my calls with Warrior, I’ve been analyzing his behavior and his personality. His language, tone, speech patterns, and emotional patterns suggest an insecure and angry person who uses whatever he has at his disposal.”
“So a reactionary person who has an overarching plan, but gets swept up in the moment?”
“A bit, yes,” Raina added. “I would act with more caution than normal. If you come across him, he may impulsively kill the kids. Handle with care.”
“No kidding. He might be unsophisticated and easily manipulated, but, like you said, he could still kill those kids, so we’ve got to find them.”
He looked at Clara, thinking about how much General Jones and his so-called allies could have killed her. And they had a much greater amount of self-control than what this Warrior character probably had.
It only heightened the need and intensity of the situation. Mason would have to continue to scout the area and pick up on leads—and, damnit, he’d have to have Clara along for the ride. To spend an hour and a half sending her back to the station and then another hour or so getting back here was wasting just too much time. Even their argument had been a waste of precious seconds.
“We’ll update you as we get more information, Mason,” Marshal said. “Good luck.”
The call disconnected. Mason, putting the phone in his pocket, turned back to Clara. He had expended too much anger to feel any more of it, but that didn’t mean he suddenly felt comfortable with the situation.
“I should put you on this vehicle right now, send your sorry tail to the train station, and tell you that if you don’t get back to Baltimore by tomorrow morning, I’ll knock you out myself.”
Clara seemed completely unfazed by everything that was being said. Damnit, Kyle, why did you have to flatter her in a moment like this? You validated her decision… now I’ve got to deal with that too.
“I should do all of that. But I can’t waste time with that. I have a mission to carry out and any time spent doing extraneous things will only increase the chances that this mission fails. So. Since you’re here and I’m stuck with you, promise me one thing. If gunfire breaks out, you hide.”
“I will.”
Too flippant and quick to answer.
“I’m serious, Clara,” Mason emphasized. “The only soldiers who are heroes are dead soldiers. You try and be a hero, you die. You do exactly what I ask of you to do, and you live. Understood?”
Clara nodded. Mason still wasn’t sure if he trusted her, but what other option did he have? She was a thousand miles from home, next to him, and ready and willing to do whatever he asked as long as she could stay. Frankly, if that didn’t mean she was safe, nothing would.
Left unsaid was a tacit acknowledgment by him that she was right—the last time he’d left her at the house, it had resulted in her kidnapping. Perhaps she was, weirdly enough, safer here than she was back home.
But there was no time to consider such questions.
“Let’s just go.”
14
Though the fire at the main warehouse still blazed like an inferno from hell, the blast had not taken out a few other side warehouses, buildings that might have served as auxiliary research stations or weapons storage for the enemy. Admittedly, the feeling was something of a long shot, and Mason didn’t have the greatest faith in the world that this side journey would result in anything, but it was the most educated search he could take on right now. Plus, if he found something, it would go a long way toward forgetting about his anger toward Clara.
Motioning for Clara to follow him, Mason headed for the outermost one, the one which had not even felt the smoke of the explosion. It was highly unlikely to have anything—but then again, Kyle hadn’t specified which warehouse Warrior was at. Perhaps it was a decoy.
Give me reason to still be alert. Good.
“Stand back,” Mason said. “For what, I hope are obvious reasons.”
“I’m not stupid.”
Clara backpedaled about three steps as Mason headed for the door, biting his tongue—further arguments would do nothing. He chambered his right leg and kicked the door in before he had a chance to reconsider if another bomb was about to go off because of his actions. He listened for the whirring of a bomb starting, of a ticking of a clock… but he heard nothing other than the door colliding with the wall.
He turned on his goggles, but didn’t see anything. No bodies, no weapons, nothing inside. It was as safe as his own car.
For a second, he started to just leave the warehouse behind, a building that had been cleared and needed no further investigation for the moment.
But then a thought came to mind. If Clara was here already, and he wasn’t going to be able to send her back home on the spot… why not give her a little bit of an on-the-job education? Can’t hurt, especially since there’s no further threat of violence for the moment.
Seeing an opportunity to train Clara in a low-stress situation, he motioned for her to come over. Cautiously, perhaps nervous of a different kind of trap from her father, Clara slowly walked forward.
“What do you see?” he asked.
She looked in the room. She tried to step in, but Mason stopped her.
“Don’t step foot into someplace you haven’t thoroughly examined yet,” he said. “You never know what you would trigger if so. Better to be cautious and slow than zealous and fast.”
“Ok,” she said, taking a step back.
At least she didn’t blow up after that last one. She’s calmed down. Things might just not be that bad yet.
But she could only shake her head after examining the room for a few seconds. She looked frustrated, as if she was supposed to find something in there.
“I don’t see anything.”
Mason turned on the various visions on his goggles, hoping that something, anything would reveal itself—some footprints, an old weapon, fingerprints. But Clara was right, there was nothing. It was a valuable teaching lesson that not all paths turned up something, but finding Warrior or clues to him was far more pressing a concern.
“Unfortunately, you are right on this count,” Mason said with a grumble. “There is nothing in here. You can tell because the building looks like it hasn’t been touched in some 30 years. No footprints, no dust, nothing out of place, nothing.”
“That long?” Clara asked.
“Well, maybe not 30, but certainly longer than the time that our Warrior friend decided to become an enemy of the state. Come on, there’s a lot more warehouses here. Let’s go check out another one.”
Along the way, he patrolled the area for anyone who might have decided to make their presence known—and not just enemies, but people who thought they were allies. Other warehouse workers, police, nearby residents of a concerned nature. Mason hadn’t gotten back into special missions like this to deal with red tape, and the more people that dropped in, the more red he’d be seeing.
Of course, there were the concerns of an enemy waiting to ambush them. Nothing seemed less appealing, not even the prospect of annoying “good guys,” than the idea of losing Clara again, but, fortunately, the prospect of an enemy seemed les
s and less plausible as time went by.
That was assuming that it was actually fortunate that they weren’t running into anyone else. All it resulted in were dead leads.
A second warehouse visit turned up nothing. A third produced the same. The main warehouse, the one up in flames, still burned, and, even if it were to die soon, Mason didn’t have the proper equipment to run inside and examine the area.
And frankly, Mason didn’t have much to go on.
Mason did appreciate that Clara’s temper and sheer stubbornness had dwindled a bit. Although she had gotten exactly what she wanted, Mason recognized that so long as she didn’t again put herself in severely dangerous spots, what she was doing now was not so bad. Forensics teams did much of the same, after all.
“Anything else we can do?” Clara asked. “Surely, there must be something, right?”
“Doesn’t look that way, regrettably,” Mason said. “Sometimes, we don’t have enough to figure things out.”
“You always figured it out, dad!”
The words were stunningly sweet for the arguments they had had, but, unfortunately, it also showed a severe lack of awareness of what Mason actually dealt with.
What would she know? We figured it out because people conducted intel for us. When you’re a team of a little over a half-dozen compared to a team of the entire United States military…
“I had a little help back in my day, Clara,” Mason said, his voice resigned to a fruitless night. “Right now, I don’t think there’s anything left to do but hunker up at a nearby hotel.”
“You sure? We could—”
“Yes, I’m sure,” Mason said. He sounded a little cold when he spoke, but that had much less to do with frustration with Clara than it did frustration with himself and with the night that gave him nothing. “Let’s get out of here.”
Clara looked half-defiant and half-disappointed, but, for once on this journey, the deferral side of her won out. Mason suspected that Clara knew she’d run out of her goodwill—if she had any in the first place—and that pushing him further would only lead to her being physically put back on the bullet train, even if the act was nothing more than throwing a boomerang of sorts for Mason.
He led Clara to the car, put in the coordinates for a nearby hotel, and reclined in his seat as Clara remained seated up. She kept looking at him with concern in her eyes, as if she had never suspected that her father could look so defeated. Mason, not particularly interested in a deep conversation, did not engage at first, choosing instead to turn on the radio to rock from his day. He relaxed as Metallica blared through the system speakers and the vehicle pushed back.
But Clara would have none of it, turning the volume down before “Enter Sandman” hit the vocals.
“I thought you always found a way, dad,” she said.
A part of Mason took that very harshly, but he’d heard much worse in his day. Whatever sting had accompanied those words quickly vanished under the realities of the current mission and the fact that Clara had spoken her words not to taunt, but because it was her own world that was crumbling around her.
She’s realizing dad isn’t perfect.
Welcome to life, I’m afraid.
“Sometimes, not even I can find a way in the moment,” Mason said. “This isn’t a video game where there’s a defined script for figuring it out. Sometimes, you need a little bit of luck. And sometimes, you don’t get luck and you lose.”
Clara looked up at the stars above, as if luck could be found there. Admittedly, way back in the day, Mason had once done the same. But luck didn’t come from anywhere; it just seemed to appear out of thin air. That’s why it was called luck and not fate.
“Do you think we’re going to lose?”
Of course not, Mason thought.
But if nothing changed, they would lose.
They had no leads, no further information, and no phone calls. The most they had was that the enemy had once been in this warehouse, but they could have just as easily been on a jet back to California or China or South America by now. Technology made traveling all too easy—as Clara so evidenced right now.
“We’ve got time,” Mason said, but those were words he would never use to reassure himself.
In war, “we’ve got time” was on par with “we’ve got hope”—they were nice things to say for morale, but they were not operations to execute. They were mere words, and words could not win a battle like bullets could. Words could persuade, but words could not execute.
And, right now, the lack of execution left Mason very discouraged.
“We’ll find him,” Clara said. “I’m sure we will.”
Mason nodded, closing his eyes. I hope we will.
15
August 18th, 2028
11:38 p.m. EST
Washington, D.C.
I must be out of my mind coming back here. Well, might as well… just in case!
Yeah, that’s not going to make me feel any better right now.
Case stood outside the pool hall where Diego and the rest of the Joras gang had threatened to turn their heads into pool balls if they returned. Case knew what he was doing was beyond stupid—of all the ways to get killed, in a domestic gang dispute seemed like the most un-SEAL-like of them all—but he had a hope, or perhaps just a very long-shot prayer, that the Joras would actually help him.
For one, Case had no history with them, which at least left open the possibility that they would communicate with him a little more gently than they would with Duke. Second, although the Joras were tough, cold, and hard, they seemed to have an honorable code of ethics—as much as criminals could have, anyways—and might at least give Case the chance to defend himself.
And third, most importantly, the fact that Diego had said “we got paid to say we took the kids” and not “we took the kids” left a very strong feeling in Case’s gut that they had more information at hand than they had initially let on.
He knew that if it got back to Duke that he had gone to see the Joras on his own, it would enrage his part and create schisms within Onyx. But he also knew that Duke and Diego were more like the Hatfield and the McCoys than two brothers who had once fought. Bringing Duke back would definitely get them killed. Going alone only might get him killed.
Not great odds, but odds in his favor.
But first, Case had to make sure that he made the proper entrance without getting popped. Then he could worry about not getting shot during the conversation.
He took a deep breath, put his hands up as if in surrender, and walked inside.
It took his eyes a few seconds to adjust, but his ears found Diego quicker. It wasn’t hard with the laughter that came from the back of the pool hall.
“My friend, how foolish you are!” Diego shouted, clapping his hands. “And to come alone! I can’t decide if you’ve got the guts of a warrior or the brain of a scarecrow!”
Noticeably, though, no one had shot him.
Yet.
“A little bit of both, if we’re being honest here,” Case said. “Listen, I know what you said, Diego. I’m not here to cause trouble, and I’m not here to arrest you.”
A round of laughter came from all across the hall, as if a chorus of Joras gangsters decided to make it a point to humiliate Case as much as possible. The longer that went by without Case getting his moment, the more he began to suspect that it was working pretty well. All it takes is for one of them to want to prove a point to Diego…
“Arrest me?!?” Diego said, which led to even more laughter. “You are out of your mind, Case! Oh, man. Tell me then, what are you here for, hmm? Entertain me as you would your masters, boy. Where’s Duke?”
Snickers came, but the roars seemed to die down. Thank heavens, Case thought as he realized that he had finally gotten the chance to speak what he had done.
“Duke is not here,” Case said. “I know you have a history with him and I didn’t want to upset you.”
Diego arched an eyebrow.
“You’re mor
e clever than you know,” he said, a statement Case didn’t really have the time to analyze. “Now tell me what you are here for.”
Case cleared his throat, raised his head, and folded his hands in front of him.
“Your rings,” he said, speaking slowly so that he could also examine the ones on the men around him. They confirmed his suspicions—though generally similar, they all had minor differences that distinguished each one as unique. So whoever went into the room would have one that matches exactly what someone here is wearing. If… if they did it, that is. Which I don’t think they did. “You know how we said we saw a ring at the crime scene?”
“Uh huh,” Diego said. “I know your boy said a lot of things. Many of which I should have had him killed for. But like I said, I’m a forgiving man.”
He took a long puff of a cigar before puffing it directly in Case’s face. He coughed, leading to more snickers and quick remarks about his inability to handle some smoke.
“However, you are testing my limits of forgiveness. Even God has a hell for those whom he cannot forgive.”
“I, just,” Case said, struggling for a less philosophical conversation. “I have an imprint and outline of the ring left at the crime scene, and I wanted you to see it. See if you recognize it. Honestly, I don’t think you guys did it. But maybe you can say if it’s a former member or something like that.”
Diego took another puff, but, this time, his stare seemed less meant to intimidate and more one of sheer curiosity. Was Case serious? Was his statement of believing in their innocence sincere and real?
Or had he come here as part of a trap?
“Tell me something, Case,” he said. “Do you have this imprint on you?”
“Yes,” Case said immediately.
Diego motioned for him to produce it. It did not take any effort on Case’s part to notice the numerous guns at the ready—none pointed at him, per se, but any attempt to make it look like Case was about to reach for a weapon would result in him getting about a half-dozen rounds to the torso and head before he would bleed out to death.
