Red Right Hand (10 page)

“And what happened to those twenty-three?”

“I rigged their search history so it looked like they'd visited chat rooms of known terror groups. Added them to the no-fly list. Posted their Social Security numbers and credit card information on the dark web. Made a website for each of them that kept track of their online-porn-viewing habits and rigged the SEO so it'd be the first hit anybody who Googled them found.”

“Damn. Remind me to never piss you off.”

“Better to have me as an ally than an enemy,” she agreed. “Anyway, I mighta bragged a little that I was behind the sites, and the administration caught wind. The dean of students didn't appreciate my efforts. It turns out one of the kids who'd been harassing Becca was a legacy whose family name was on our sports complex.”

“They tossed you out?”

“Yeah. For violating school policy on bullying, of all things.”

“Ouch.”

“The irony wasn't lost on me,” she said. Then she patted his stomach gingerly. “You're all stitched up, by the way.”

Hendricks inspected her work. For someone with no medical training, she'd managed a passable suturing job. It wouldn't heal pretty, but it'd heal.
One more scar for the collection,
he thought. There'd come a day he wouldn't be able to tell this one from all the others.

“Thanks,” he said. “You got anything to eat? Seems like I should replace some of the stuffing that I lost.”

“Sure,” she said. “You want ramen or ramen?”

Hendricks smiled. “Ramen's fine.”

Cameron filled her electric kettle and turned it on.

“Shame you don't have a TV,” he said. “I'd love to check the local news, see if anybody's looking for us.”

She looked at him like he'd just lamented her lack of a Victrola. “What century is it again? I don't need a TV—I have a
laptop
.”

“Oh,” he said, chastened. “Right. Fire it up for me, would you?”

Cameron took a USB drive from her pocket, inserted it into the port on the side of her laptop, and turned the laptop on. It booted scary-fast. “Can you take it from here,” she asked, “or do I need to explain to you what a browser is?”

“I'm good, thanks.”

Hendricks went to Google News, but before he'd typed anything in the field, the day's top headlines caught his eye. “Ah, hell,” he muttered.

“What's wrong?”

“There's been some kind of attack.”

“Where?”

He clicked through to CNN. A video began to play—three talking heads blabbing at once, with a disaster scene behind them on the big screen. “San Francisco,” he said. “The Golden Gate.”

“Oh God,” she said, crossing the room and peering over his shoulder at the screen. “I grew up just south of there, in Redwood City. Is it still standing? Is anyone hurt?”

“The bridge is still there,” he said, watching shaky helicopter footage of first responders trying to rescue people trapped atop it. The faces of the stranded were filthy and slick from the spray of the fireboats below. Their expressions were a mix of hope and terror. Thick dark smoke mingled with the rising steam and periodically blocked the bridge from view. “But it looks like there were casualties.”

The kettle clicked off, the water inside boiling. Neither of them moved.

They watched awhile in heartsick silence. The images of the rescue efforts were soon replaced by cell-phone footage of the attack itself, film that looked as if it was initially intended to be a cheery home movie. Then came a grainy video of a young man with a scraggly beard dressed in traditional Muslim garb. He claimed credit on behalf of a terror group whose name meant nothing to Hendricks—which was odd, he thought, given that his old unit had hunted terrorists for years—and promised there were more attacks to come. After that was a statement from the president urging calm, followed by a tirade from that blowhard Senator Wentworth, who insisted America close its borders and turn the Middle East into a parking lot. Between each segment, the talking heads parsed, speculated, stoked, argued, and divided.

Hendricks forced himself to back his browser up and search for any fallout from the Salty Dog.

“Anything?” Cameron asked.

“Nothing but a headline: ‘Reports of Shots Fired at Local Eatery.' When you click through, there's no story—just a note saying the page will be updated as more facts are available.”

“That's good news, right?”

“Could be. At the very least, it's not
bad
news. If I had to guess, I'd say local PD is distracted, their attentions elsewhere. Probably every cop from coast to coast is tracking down known militants. I hate to say it, but what happened in San Francisco helped us. It means we should be able to crash here tonight without much worry and then head out first thing in the morning.”

“That's ghoulish.”

“That's life—
my
life, at least. And it'd be yours, too, if I were to take you on.”

“If?” she said hopefully.

“Poor choice of words,” he said, “because it's never gonna happen.”

Cameron sighed and returned to her vestigial kitchen to set the water boiling again. She unwrapped two packets of ramen and dropped the tangled noodle-bricks into two bowls. While she was otherwise occupied, Hendricks opened an incognito window in her browser and pulled up Twitter. He typed in his user name,
j_rambo1972,
and his password,
3v31yn,
and hit enter.

His account was protected; a little lock icon beside the user name indicated that only those to whom he'd given permission could see his feed, and he had only one follower. That account was also protected. Neither of them had ever tweeted. Both their avatars were Twitter's default egg.

The accounts were set up years ago by Lester as a way for them to communicate if their usual channels were compromised or otherwise rendered inaccessible. To the outside world, the accounts appeared inactive—two of the literally millions of abandoned handles on the platform. But they could be used to communicate via direct message without affecting their perfect-zero tweet count.

For the longest time, the other account had belonged to Lester. But last year—just after Lester died—Hendricks briefly saw his ex, Evie, and he'd slipped her the user name and password on a piece of paper as she squeezed his hand in good-bye. The account was intended only for emergencies, and it had sat dormant for months, but Hendricks still checked it every day.

Today, when the page loaded, he sat up ramrod straight. His stitches strained, though he hardly noticed.

Over the envelope icon in the toolbar, there was a
1.

Hendricks had a message.

He clicked on it, pulse thrumming in his ears. A window opened.

We need to talk,
it said.

Hendricks replied,
Where/when?
Then he held his breath, although he had no reason to expect the reply to be immediate.

The reply was immediate.
Roadhouse Truck Stop, I-76, PA
.
ASAP
.

He Googled the place. It was in the middle of nowhere. Open twenty-four hours. Approachable from the highway and two rural routes. A good place for someone on the run. A good place to spring a trap too.

As if it mattered. If it wasn't a trap, then Evie was in trouble. And if it
was
a trap, then Evie was in trouble.

He typed a quick reply as Cameron wandered over. She handed him a bowl of ramen and a spoon. Cocked an eyebrow as he hastily closed the browser window.

“Change of plans,” he said, taking the bowl. “We're getting out of here tonight.”

F
RANK CROUCHED IN
the underbrush and watched the Park Police go door to door down Funston Avenue. They worked in teams of two, one conferring briefly with the residents, the other idling in a cruiser at the curb. He'd seen dozens of them doing the same throughout the Presidio as he fled inland through the woods, running parallel to the Battery East Trail until it intersected with Lincoln Boulevard and then following Lincoln southeast.

He'd hoped to leave the Presidio before they locked down the perimeter, but the park was lousy with coppers, and the scrutiny given to everyone they came across was too intense. His forged ID was convincing enough for everyday use, but it would never stand up to a database search, and although he was thought dead, his prints were doubtless still on file.

Best to hole up for a while until the investigation shifted away from the park, he thought, and then slip out unnoticed. But finding a decent hiding place was proving harder than anticipated.

He'd spent half an hour casing the Lendrum Court town houses. They were bland midcentury beige boxes with taupe accents, situated on a terraced slope bisected by a winding drive. In most cities, units like these would be low-income housing. On the Presidio, they ran nearly five grand a month.

But as exorbitant as their rents were, the buildings were among the cheapest housing in the park, which meant they wouldn't have as much security as the luxury properties overseen by the Presidio Trust. Trees towered over the Lendrum Court complex on all sides, isolating it from the outside world, and its parking lot was half empty, which meant some units were temporarily unoccupied thanks to the lockdown.

In short, the place looked perfect—at least until a neighbor had spotted Frank prying open a corner unit's sliding-glass window and chased him off.

That was over an hour ago. He'd attempted to put some distance between himself and the angry neighbor in case the guy reported him, and he worried the Park Police might now be on the lookout for him. His progress was slowed by his injuries. His punctured palm bled every time he flexed it wrong; his bum knee crunched like gravel with every step.

Frank stuck to the woods whenever possible. It wasn't always. To cross beneath the Presidio Parkway, he'd had no choice but to take the sidewalk for a few excruciatingly exposed minutes—there wasn't cover enough beside the road to hide him until Lincoln jagged away from Highway 1.

As Frank pressed eastward through the pines, their thick canopy enclosed him. Nestled in this copse of trees, he could almost believe that the world of fire, chaos, and destruction he was fleeing was a thousand miles away. But what little of the sky he could see between the branches was ambered by the noxious smoke that continued to pour out of the wreckage of the tugboat, and the air—which scratched at Segreti's throat with his every breath, and made him cough—tasted of oil and ash. Even the peppery scent of pine resin was no match for it.

Eventually, Frank came to a break in the trees and found himself at one end of a large cemetery. He rested for a moment in the shadow of a stone obelisk, catching his breath and attempting to get his bearings. The headstones all around made somber dotted lines that seemed, by a trick of perspective, to converge on his position. The implication troubled him. When he ducked back into the forest, he left behind a bloody handprint on the granite where he'd leaned.

When he hit the edge of the Main Post, he froze. The Main Post was essentially the Presidio's downtown. From Mexico's handoff of the base to the U.S. Army in 1848 until its closure by Congress in 1989, the Main Post had been the center of the Presidio's administrative and social life. Now its historic brick buildings were home to museums, businesses, and tourist attractions.

Today, its massive central lawn was set up as a staging area—tents, personnel, and heavy equipment everywhere. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of police and first responders flitted back and forth across it, their clothes and faces blackened with soot. Armed men in riot gear stood guard at regular intervals. Frank felt like he'd just put his foot through the papery scrim of a wasp's nest.

He hunkered down and watched awhile as afternoon marched toward evening. He was trying to discern pattern, logic, strategy, but the scene was too chaotic. He gave up and slowly made his way around the perimeter of the Main Post—always watchful, always just inside the tree line. That's when he spotted the perfect house in which to hide.

It was a gorgeous Queen Anne–style home with off-white clapboard siding and a red roof. Three stories, with a front-facing gable and a wraparound porch, a portion of which was glassed in. Simple wooden struts added historical accents to the roof and deck posts. A set of concrete stairs led upward from the sidewalk to its front path. A narrow border of succulents and drought-faded wildflowers rimmed the house on all sides.

The rear of the house abutted the woods, so Frank had a straight shot to the back door without much fear of being seen. And he watched the Park Police knock for several minutes straight without answer—they'd clearly taken the sleek blue Jaguar F-Type in the driveway as a sign someone was home—so he knew he'd have the place to himself.

He waited for the cops to disappear around the corner. Then he burst from the trees and ran, stiff-limbed and creaky, to the house. As he traversed the yard, he felt naked and exposed, but once he reached the door, he breathed a sigh of relief. He was tucked comfortably out of sight of the neighbors and of the street.

The door had an inlaid window, three panes by three panes. He needed something he could use to bust the pane nearest the doorknob and then he'd be inside. But as he looked around for a rock, a garden gnome, whatever, he heard something that stopped him short: a low growl from just behind the door.

His head jerked toward the window, but the dog was too short for him to see. What he
did
see was a woman watching him wide-eyed through the glass.

For a moment, Frank froze, and the two of them stared at each other. In another context, he might have found her striking. She was a light-skinned black woman a few inches shorter than he, slender in a manner that suggested activity rather than diet or vanity, with high cheekbones and brown eyes flecked with gold. She wore white cotton pajamas with pink piping and pink roses small enough to look like dots all over them. She looked to be in her sixties, and her hair—steely gray—fell in tight natural curls. The ends were wet, as if she'd just been sitting in a bath. Her pajamas clung to her breasts and hips, dampness bleeding through.

It looked to Frank like she'd been crying. Her eyes were glassy and red-rimmed, the skin beneath them dark as bruises. That was understandable, given the day. Her city was injured. Frank knew how deep that ache could be. As a young punk running small-time rackets on the streets of Hoboken, Frank used to eye the gleaming city across the Hudson with almost romantic longing. That longing metastasized and he'd succumbed to Manhattan's siren song, to life as a made guy. When the towers fell, they took some secret part of him with them, something no new construction, no matter how ambitious, could replace. In Frank's eyes, the New York skyline was a key that no longer fit. What it had once opened inside him, it never would again.

Frank watched her approach the door. She moved slowly, her slippered feet scuffing along the floorboards. A goodly amount of white wine in a glass sloshed in her hand but never quite spilled over. When she reached the door, she unlocked it and swung it open wide. Beside her was a tan little ball of fur who looked as puzzled as Frank felt.

The woman turned and shuffled back the way she'd come. The dog—a Pomeranian, Frank thought—regarded him a moment, then trotted over. Frank offered it his hand, still caked with blood. The dog licked it once and solicited a head scratch. Then it followed its mistress back inside, its claws a ticking clock against the floorboards.

Frank shook his head in puzzlement and followed too, his movements as deliberate as if he were navigating a minefield. He closed the door behind him. Set the lock on the knob. Engaged the dead bolt. By the time he turned around, the woman had disappeared from sight.

He set off in the direction she'd gone and soon found himself in a kitchen of stainless steel and gleaming white. A dog bowl in one corner was heaped to overflowing with kibble. The woman was rooting around in the bottom of her refrigerator, the open door hiding her from view. A memory flickered across the fore of Frank's mind, of a mook he'd been sent to teach a lesson to who'd kept a backup piece inside his vegetable crisper. The asshole offered Frank a beer, all cool and civilized, reached into the fridge, and then damn near blew Frank's head off when he turned around. Thankfully, condensation kept the gun from firing or Frank wouldn't be alive today—and that mook still might be.

When the woman closed the refrigerator, Frank braced himself reflexively and eyed the nearby knife rack, but all she had in her hand was a half-empty bottle of chardonnay. She set it on the counter beside her wineglass and fetched a fresh one from the cupboard. Then she poured Frank a drink and topped up her own. He accepted it automatically, although in truth he had no idea what was going on, and it unnerved him.

“You're bleeding,” she said, nodding at the bloodstain on his shirt. Although she didn't slur her words, they came out flat and affectless. She sounded as if she'd taken something for anxiety, Valium or Xanax, before she'd started on the chardonnay.

“I cut my hand,” he said carefully. “Not badly. It's fine now.” He didn't actually know if that was true—the barbed wire had been rusty, the puncture deep—but the last thing he wanted was for her to call a doctor.

She said nothing for a full minute. Just looked at him and drank. Frank met her eyes but did not lift his glass. The dog looked back and forth expectantly between them.

“I know you,” she said finally.

Frank waited for her to continue. She didn't. “I don't understand,” he said.

“From the TV,” she replied.

Frank's guts went crawly. Gooseflesh sprung up across his skin. “I think you've got me confused with someone else.”

She shook her head. Frowned slightly, as if trying to hold on to a slippery thought. Her eyes brightened somewhat, and when she next spoke, her voice was stronger, more assured. “There's a cell-phone video the networks have been showing. A smiling family. A boat hitting the bridge. I must've seen it thirty times before I turned the news off. I couldn't stand to watch any longer. It was too horrible. You took that video, didn't you?”

Shit. If his face was out there, it was only a matter of time before the Council came for him. “Yeah,” he said, “I took it.”

“The anchor said the family in the video survived. Apparently, their eldest child was the one who uploaded the video. But no one seemed to know what became of you.”

“I'm glad they're okay,” he said. “We were separated by the blast.” He offered neither details about himself nor explanations of why he'd shown up at her house, which was two miles from where he'd last been seen.

Silence descended once more. The woman sipped her wine. Frank ignored his. She was trembling, Frank realized—her wedding ring clinked against her wineglass as she raised it to her lips.

“I'm not going to hurt you,” he said.

She blinked at him in confusion.

“You're shaking,” he added, by way of explanation.

“Oh. I'm not…It's just…” She waved her hand as if the gesture were sufficient to finish her thought, which Frank supposed it was.

“Did the people on the news ever mention my name?”

“If they did,” she said, “I don't remember.”

“It's Max,” he said, “Max Rausch.” Max Rausch was the name on all his fake IDs.

“I wish I could say it's nice to meet you, Max. I'm Lois.” She raised her glass in a halfhearted toast. Frank did the same with his. Then they drank, two strangers in a quiet house—he a sip, she the entire glass.