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Mac was happy to let Angie drive home. It was her car after all. And he could sit there, tip his head back, close his eyes, and think. He’d gotten in the faces of the tech workers. Asked them if they’d done the work on the blackout that isolated police for the kill. They denied it, but he didn’t believe them. He’d left business cards with his office number on it. And wasn’t it a bitch that he couldn’t write his cell number on it? He’d see if any of them called him back.
“You OK?” he asked finally, not even opening his eyes.
“Yes,” she said. “Scared me when I turned down the drive and there was a man standing in front of me with a rifle. And then I recognized him. Did I do the right thing?”
“You did wonderfully,” he assured her. “Got too close for a rifle. He expected you to park by the other cars and take you — or more likely he was expecting me — out when you exited the car. You sounded alarm and got out of sight. Now if you can get us home without being followed? It will have been a successful day.”
“Actually, I was thinking of going to the hospital. See how Nick is doing.”
Mac nodded. “Good idea.”
He thought about those people in Whalen’s building — a cubicle jungle of about a dozen people. One of them knew what happened, he thought. One of them would talk. If not now, later. And he would know the names.
They locked both guns in the trunk of her car and went up to the ICU. Rand was there with another agent. Mac wondered why he and Stan didn’t seem to trust the other agents to stand duty by themselves.
“How is he?” Mac asked.
Rand shrugged. “Might ask the nurses’ station?”
Mac wandered off to find a nurse, who found a doctor.
“Are you Mac, by any chance?” the doctor asked. He wasn’t happy.
Startled, Mac said he was.
“Then come talk to him. He’s been agitated. And no, he didn’t want to talk to the FBI, he said he’d only talk to you. So calm him down, will you?”
He led Mac down a hallway, and into a private room. Mac clenched his jaw, squared his shoulders, and took a deep breath. He didn’t like hospitals.
For all of the damage, Nick primarily looked like a sick man in a bed. Most of the bullets had been to his back as he got into the Ford Interceptor. Bad news. Really bad news. But you couldn’t see the damage from where Mac stood.
Mac sat down next to the bed. “Hey,” he said softly in case Nick was asleep. “Heard you were looking for me.”
Nick opened his eyes, glanced sideways at Mac, and closed his eyes. “You on this as a story?” he rasped out.
“Of course,” Mac said. “Janet’s got us all over it. But all this because you’re testifying against Anthony Whalen? Doesn’t make sense.”
Nick breathed for a while. “That may be where the firepower is coming from,” Nick said at last. “He’s connected to every bad apple in the force. But that’s not why. Remember the watch team that was pulled away, and left the Fairchild women vulnerable? There were a couple of other teams that were out of place, too.”
“Yes,” Mac said grimly. “I remember.” It wasn’t something he was likely to forget.
“The person who pulled them away was Captain Rourke.” Nick said with some difficulty. Mac couldn’t tell if it was because talking was still hard for him. Or if this was a hard topic for him to talk about — especially to talk to a reporter about.
“And he’s under investigation,” Nick finally continued. “That night? When I turned to get into my car, I saw him. He was there.”
Mac sat back in his chair. “We were looking more into McBride and his three stooges.”
Nick snorted. “They were probably the shooters, no lie. I didn’t see who was in the pickup. It was black. Tinted windows. And it was nighttime. To be honest, I wasn’t as alert as I should have been. I was going to the store because we were out of cream for morning coffee. But yeah, probably McBride’s men. Although Malloy might have been recruited. But Rourke was there to watch. He wanted to see me die.”
That was hard, Mac thought. Hard to think your boss not only wanted you dead, he wanted to watch it happen. “Rourke came here, Monday. Said he’d taken his family to Leavenworth for Oktoberfest,” he said.
“Might have been there,” Nick said. “Saturday maybe. But Friday night he was at my house.”
“Not disagreeing,” Mac assured him. “I believe you.” Nick calmed down at that and relaxed. He hadn’t expected to be believed? “Why?”
“He thinks I’m disloyal. That I went outside the chain of command. That I didn’t stand down as ordered when we got wind of the Army of God’s plans. He tried to get me fired then. That failed, in part because of that God-awful profile you wrote.”
Mac grinned at him. “Made you a hero,” he said.
“Yeah, well heroes have bullseye targets on their back,” Rodriguez said. “Anyway, it backfired on him. Lorde thought there was something wrong with Rourke’s complaint. So he opened a case on that whole incident. And yeah, Whalen got folded into the investigation when he sued. But the bigger fish is Rourke. He’s a captain. He deliberately sabotaged an operation. Could have resulted in several people’s deaths.”
He paused again. “Lorde has been moving slow,” he said at last. “I think it’s not the only time Rourke has done shit like that. And no telling if Rourke has protection above his paygrade.”
“Will the Police Chief do anything?” Mac asked. “He overturns a lot of Lorde’s recommendations.”
“Above my paygrade,” Nick said. “But Rourke is dirty.”
“All right,” Mac said. “That’s a good thing to know. Now you rest. Get well. We need to get you out of here.”
“No argument there,” he said. He paused for a moment. “Mac? Take care of Anna?”
“We’ve got her covered. Everyone is safe,” he assured him.
Nick nodded slightly, but he didn’t look at him.
Mac got up to leave. As he opened the door, Nick said, “Thanks.”
“No problem,” Mac assured him, not sure what the thanks was for. “Stop worrying. Doc says it’s impeding your recovery. So think happy thoughts about fluffy kittens and get well.”
Nick snorted. “You ever even seen a fluffy kitten?”
Mac laughed, and stepped outside the room. The doctor was waiting for him. “Hope it helps,” Mac told him. “He’s a good man.”
“He’s on the road to recovery,” the doctor said. “But it’s a long road. We’ll see how far he gets.”
Mac looked at him with narrowed eyes. “Will he walk?”
The doctor gave a slight shrug. “That really is down the road. We’ll have to wait and see.”
Mac nodded, then headed back to Angie and the waiting room. It suddenly occurred to him — no, he’d never seen a live fluffy kitten. Not even as a child. He frowned. Was that weird? Or was it just a weird phrase for him of all people to use?
He was tired, he decided. He needed a nap. And supper. And he needed to talk to Lorde. And he needed to write this story, talk to Janet, then meet with Leatherstocking. He grimaced. This story wasn’t going to run tomorrow.
Angie drove again. “How is he really doing?” she asked.
“Don’t know,” Mac said. “But he could talk, carry on a conversation. His mind is sharp. The rest? Doc said it would be a long road to recovery. And he wouldn’t even guess about walking.”
Angie was silent, and then she just nodded. “I got a call from Shorty,” she said. “We have to pick up Tim at UW as we go past there.”
Mac nodded. He got out his phone, the new one, security guaranteed by two phreaks who dressed like something out of Manga. He shook his head and checked the messages on his office phone. Bingo. He had a nibble from one of those cubicle fish.
“Not telling you my name,” a woman said. She sounded young. Nervous. “But? We do training exercises from time to time. Competitions. There are bonuses. And what you described? Sounds like a recent scenario we had to design. Isolate two people in different parts of the city. They’re crooks. We don’t want them to be able to call each other for backup or to their home office, until police can get to them and make an arrest. But we don’t want to alarm their neighbors either. So their phones have to work. How would you do it? I didn’t win the competition. I don’t know who did. And I don’t know if someone implemented that plan to isolate your cops.”
She took a breath and left a phone number. “What worries me? It’s not the first competition. And it wasn’t the last one. I need out of here.”
“Babe, listen to this,” Mac said. He put the message on speaker.
She frowned. “So they game out different scenarios, and then he’s got someone who will actually implement them?” she said slowly. “Be interested to hear what Misaki and Ruri have to say about that. I bet one of the others in that place does the adaptation and implementation.”
Mac started to call the number. “Don’t!” Angie said sharply.
He glanced at her startled by the tone.
“Call her back from the office tomorrow. Or we can go to the mall and you can call her there. But I think they could track your call from her phone, right?”
Mac shook his head. “Got me,” he admitted. Who knew? Angie was more paranoid than he was. “We can ask our two phreaks.”
They picked up Tim at the university bookstore. He climbed in back of the small Honda with a grunt. “Everything OK?” Mac asked.
“Yes,” Tim said shortly. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
Mac glanced at him trying to determine if this was his usual surliness or if he was hiding something. “Because Andy Malloy shot at Janet? Shot at me? Was out at Whalen’s place with a rifle? Did you see anything — anyone — that tipped you off to a problem?”
Tim sighed. “No,” he said, and didn’t sound as defensive. “And cops — even retired cops — stand out on campus. I can’t imagine them blending in very well.”
He hesitated, and then asked, “Do you really think the church is involved?”
Mac considered the question. “I think that they are finding each other there,” he said slowly. “It’s a networking opportunity. ‘Hey, do you know someone who can do programming?’ That kind of thing. Nothing wrong with that. And some of them may have started attending so that they could tap into that. I have a hard time thinking Malloy is devout, for instance, but he might see the value in going there. Maybe some of the people who use his range attend, so he thinks he might find more clients. People do that all the time.”
Tim still looked troubled about something.
Mac sighed. He told him about the sermon he and Angie had heard in Mount Vernon. “I think that kind of preaching provides a fertile ground for extremists,” Mac said. “Hell, I think that is extremist, and it scares the hell out of me. What about you? Do you think the church is involved? Not just some of its people?”
Tim just looked out the window.
Mac didn’t press him. He’d talk when he was ready. And Mac had already learned that if he pushed, Tim could do stubborn silence like no one else he knew.
Angie glanced at Mac. He shrugged minimally. No he didn’t know what that was about either.
Angie took the turn onto Evergreen Drive, and Mac tried to watch their back trail. The biggest problem with the Parker house as a safe house was that there weren’t all that many ways to approach it. Basically there was a winding road, Evergreen Drive, that started near 520 right after you got off the bridge and meandered along Lake Washington until you reached a small town square. Then you could drive through the Clyde Hill neighborhood into Bellevue.
There was a neighborhood grid, he conceded, but eventually you would be on Evergreen Drive, either coming in from the north end at the bridge, or from the south end at the town square. And it was clogged with cars. Women with children. Teenagers. Larger cars with drivers, and someone in the back.
He didn’t like it.
Angie apparently had her own method to look for surveillance. She slowed way down, stopping to gawk at the houses. He watched her, amused. She even backed up once to get a better look at a house. And then she moved on. Took her 20 minutes to go two miles. But when they got to their gate, he was pretty sure no one was following them. And if they were? She had tourist written all over her. So unless someone spotted her face, and knew who they were looking for, she was clean.
“Very good job,” Mac said with approval.
She grinned at him. She rolled down all of the windows so the guard could see in. It was Kevin Winters. “Let me out,” Mac said. “I need to talk to him.”
She nodded, and pulled through the gate and on down to the house. Tim went with her. Mac considered him for a moment. He’d try to get him to talk later.
“Wanted to tell you, I’ve put in some discreet cameras on Evergreen Way to monitor traffic from the north and south,” Kevin began before Mac had a chance to say a word. “We can watch them from the iPad in the guard house. It’s been worrying me that we get no warning of danger headed our way. Not until they pull up out there in front of the gate.”
“Good thinking,” Mac said in approval. And it was. “Can we access the feed from the house?”
Kevin started to tell him how. Mac shook his head. “There are computer nerds at the house,” Mac said with a laugh. “I’ll have one of them call you and you can tell them how.”
Kevin grinned. “Computers not your thing? There is something the great Shadow isn’t good at?”
Mac started at the nickname. He managed a smile. “That name takes me back,” he said. “Where did you hear that?”
“Did some more checking when you told me what this job would involve,” Kevin admitted. “I knew of you. You have a good rep. But I wanted a bit more to go on than that when you laid it all out.”
Mac grunted. Shadow. He shook his head.
“One thing,” Mac said, changing the subject. He wasn’t going to reminisce about the old days. “Brian was startled when I reminded him no one comes through the gate that isn’t cleared — not even cops. He resisted that. Your people understand that, right? That the bad guys, when they come for us, may look like cops?”
Might be cops he thought, but Mac would take this one step at a time.
“Might be cops,” Kevin said for him. “They’ve all been told that. But Brian in particular isn’t just a Boy Scout. He’s an Eagle Scout — for real, actually. And it sets hard with him that he might not be on the same side as the cops.”
“He is,” Mac said. “Remind him of that. Two of the men at the house are FBI. Another is a cop. But not all cops are good cops.” Mac wasn’t even sure most cops were good cops.
Hell, it had only been in the last year that he’d been willing to admit any cop was a good cop.
“I’ll talk to him,” Kevin said. “But he’ll do his job, Mac. He looks and acts like he’s fresh off the farm. But he did two years in Kabul. Guard duty, mostly. He’s sharper than he looks.”
Kevin considered that, and rolled his eyes. “Of course, he looks like he was raised in Mayberry, not Tacoma.”
Mac snorted. “He does,” he agreed and walked away. He started down the hill and hesitated. Instead he turned onto the walking path to the north.
Shadow.
He’d earned that nickname running with his cousin Toby in the San Diego gangs when he was 12 or 13? Something like that. Toby had been living with his Dad down there. When Mac’s mother deemed him uncontrollable — he’d pulled a gun on one of her boyfriends — she’d shipped him to the only man she knew — her sister’s ex. To his credit, his uncle took Mac in. But Toby was already in a gang; Mac just tagged along behind him. Shadow, they called him then, amused at the reversal — a white shadow for a Black guy. It was there he picked up the mannerisms and habits that got him labeled Black. Eventually his uncle threw up his hands about the trouble Toby was getting into and shipped both of them to Lindy in Seattle where he thought they’d be safer. Less likely to be in the gangs.
He’d been wrong, but Lindy had tried. And Mac loved her as much as he loved anyone for making a home for him. When he got there at 14, she greeted him with a hug. He hadn’t known how to return it.
His eyes burned at the memories.
Shadow. The nickname followed him into the Marines. Some of the guys he’d known in San Diego were Marines by then too. Some just knew the story. But it got around. In the Marines, though, it took on new meaning. A man who could live in the shadows. Recon. Yeah, there were stories, Mac acknowledged. Some of them he could be proud of. Other stories had established his reputation as a ruthless son of a bitch.
And those were true too.
Mac followed the path that led through the woods to the water’s edge. He needed to go up to the house. He had questions, and he was sure there were questions for him. He needed to tell others what Nick had told him. Needed to move Rourke from the question category on their rogue’s gallery to front and center. Needed to ask Misaki about the phone message.
Needed to talk to Janet about what story to do next. And about their publisher.
Instead, he stood on the shore of Lake Washington and looked back up the hill toward the house. It was all lit up. Welcoming. Full of people he knew, liked and cared about. He barely recognized himself. And most certainly, the people who had once called him Shadow wouldn’t recognize him.
Shadow cared about very few people, people warned each other. His squad. His current girl. And his aunt back home. Mess with them, he’ll fuck you up. But don’t think he cares about you because he had a beer — more likely more than one, probably a lot more — with you last night, and he was smiling. A lot of the enemy saw that smile and they died.
He wasn’t that man anymore, he realized. They were right; he had been. But he’d gotten soft. Now he cared about people. Cared about the people of Seattle who were strangers to him even.
He shook his head. It made him feel vulnerable. He could take care of himself. But all of these others? And if something happened to one of them it would hurt. Hurt a lot.
He knew Stan Warren’s metaphor: Mac was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Not because he wanted to sneak up on the sheep, but because he realized sheep got fed regularly and had a warm place to sleep. Janet had told him about it. She said she thought he was more of a wolf who had found being a guard dog for the sheep to be a better life.
Whatever. He thought Warren’s metaphor was at least funny. But he knew Warren watched him for signs that he was going to revert to being the wolf. Hell, Warren had pushed him into going wolf when he thought the situation called for it. And he’d been OK with being Warren’s attack dog. Sometimes it was needed.
But he wished one of them would tell him what happens when the guard wolf gets attached to the sheep he’s guarding? What then? He could see the danger coming. And he didn’t know if he could survive it if one of his sheep got hurt because he let them down.
He saw a dark shape of a person walk toward him. Warren.
“Something wrong?” Stan Warren asked.
Mac snorted. Warren grinned. “OK, stupid question,” he said. “What’s bugging you?”
“Thinking about your stupid metaphor about a wolf who dons sheep’s clothing for three squares and a warm bunk,” Mac said sourly. He glanced at the man standing next to him. “So what happens when that wolf finds out he kind of likes the sheep? Yes, they’re clueless as hell, but he gets attached to them. What then?”
Stan laughed but Mac thought it was sympathetic. “Then he’s no longer a wolf, Mac,” he said. “He’s human.”
Mac grunted, amused. “Let’s go inside,” he said. “I’ve got a lot to tell my herd of sheep.”
Stan snickered. “I dare you to tell that line to Janet.”
“Not a chance,” Mac muttered. He shook his head.
He had thought himself tough, needing no one. The man who could get the job done. In hindsight, it had been a hell of a lot easier than this.
He thought he would miss being a loner.