74

Chinatown, San Francisco

Agent Lucan Stone stood just inside the Powell Street grocery store on the northwest end of Chinatown. When he’d spotted a short-haired brunette Isabel Odegaard through the second-story window, there was only one reasonable reaction.

“Well, I’ll be damned.”

Clancy Johnson was downtown San Francisco with Senator Hayes’s people, going over the plans for the Alcatraz speech in two days. No one liked it. The photo ops would be brilliant—talking about prison reform on one of the starkest piles of rock in the country—but dropping Hayes on an island was a logistical nightmare. Stone didn’t envy the Secret Service in charge of that security detail. Realistically, there was nothing Clancy or Stone could do to help, but the government liked to stack everything one too high.

Stone knew his speedy rise through the FBI ranks had pissed off a lot of agents that he’d stepped over. He’d made peace with that. He wasn’t in the field to placate colleagues.

He was here to make his mother proud.

She’d died before he graduated Quantico, even before he’d gone to college, the victim of a stray bullet through her kitchen wall.

“Life gives you defeats,” she’d say, “but don’t ever let yourself be defeated.”

That had gotten him through the first year after her death. Her second favorite saying, “Life doesn’t work unless you do,” earned him a full ride to college, and his 4.0 GPA opened the door to Quantico. Turns out growing up in the streets of Detroit had prepared him well for FBI training. After that, there was no secret to his success. He worked hard, he listened to his gut like his mother had taught him, he always made good on his word, and, when possible, he kept his mouth shut and eyes and ears open. That’s how he’d acquired the tip that had sent him here, across the street from the Golden Lucky Fortune Cookie Company.

According to Stone’s contact in the NSA, a female agent he traded intel with (and sometimes more), the NSA had been collecting SIGINT from the Golden Lucky Fortune Cookie Company ever since a protocol search had intercepted unusual emails being sent from their server, messages containing words guaranteed to draw the government’s attention: state of emergency, executions, terrorism, Iraq, North Korea, fundamentalism. The communications, once decoded, were vague enough that the NSA assumed they were still a code within a code, things like the fundamentalists are funding North Korea, the executions have begun. The messages were not yet grounds for a search warrant, but they were suspicious, coming from a fortune cookie factory.

But then came words that spoke directly to Stone’s current mission: Gina Hayes assassination, Vida Wiley, Isabel Odegaard, and one that threw him for a loop even though he’d read the decoded message four different times: the Hermitage. The NSA cross-referenced their files, found Stone and Clancy assigned to the Wiley and Odegaard case, and Stone’s contact passed on the intel. Stone had skipped out on Clancy’s San Francisco snipe work with Hayes to follow up on the lead, and here he was, discovering a whole lot more at the Golden Lucky than he’d bargained for.

“How about that.”

Salem Wiley had just passed in front of the same second-story window as Isabel Odegaard, her hair short enough to send her corkscrew curls into a straight-up halo, but it was her, nonetheless. Stone’s heart thudded. He didn’t think he’d ever see her again, not since he received word that she and Odegaard had escaped from the Amherst holding cell. He’d almost laughed when he’d heard about their prison break. Those two were either the worst double agents or the best women on the run he’d ever encountered.

Wiley and Odegaard squatting inside Golden Lucky spun the NSA’s findings in a new direction. It also made Stone dislike even more the fat-fingered suit across the street.

The man’d been leaning against the melon stand adjacent to the Golden Lucky for far too long. Stone didn’t like the lethal, compact shape of the man, or the girth of his fingers, each like a muscled sausage. Stone guessed from the way he squeezed an exerciser in each that his digits were as strong as they appeared.

The sun was beginning its downward trajectory. Stone estimated he had half an hour of natural light left. The creeping twilight brought out the natural witchiness that he’d always felt in San Francisco’s Chinatown. He possessed a healthy respect for the culture and magic of the place, and there was a lot of it—people taking care of each other, family secrets passed down through the women, medicine that treated your spirit as much as your body. It reminded him of his MawMaw, his mother’s mother, who cooked her own salve out of almond oil, beeswax, and boiled herbs. He could recall the acrid, green scent at will, and craved it even to this day when he was cut or burned.

An exultant yell caught his attention, yanking him out of his MawMaw memories. He glanced out the window to the north, up Powell. A parade was starting, probably forming to celebrate the Autumn Art Festival. Like most in displaced, close-knit communities, the people of Chinatown would find any reason to celebrate, and they’d do so often.

Children in red silk kimonos led the parade. Behind them, four women in heavy white face paint and ornate headdresses followed, and to the rear of that, one of Chinatown’s famous parade dragons rippled and swelled, spitting sparklers running the length of it, tossing hot bits of light into the street.

He needed to figure out what he was going to do about Wiley and Odegaard and soon. They were known fugitives, and with the parade, this street was going to be chaos in a matter of minutes.

“Can I help you?”

Stone glanced at the shopkeeper. He’d been standing in this exact spot for twenty minutes, taking up valuable space. “Sorry. Can I buy some mango juice?”

“In back.” The man pointed toward a cooler humming against a far wall and returned to his till.

Stone nodded. His phone buzzed, and he yanked it out of his pocket as he turned back to the window. The fat-fingered man was also pulling his phone out and gluing it to his ear. A chill passed through Stone. Why did he feel like they were both about to talk to the same person? But of course that was impossible. Caller ID told Stone that his SAC was on the other end of his line.

“Hello.”

“Stone, where are you?”

Stone didn’t answer immediately. He couldn’t. Across the street, a dozen men in full SWAT gear were swarming upstream from the parade and toward the Golden Lucky Fortune Cookie Company factory, silent as mice, lethal as deathstalker scorpions.