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Misaki saw Whalen and his small team go into the house. Stan wasn’t on the roof any longer; he’d gone down to take charge of arresting several wounded men who’d come in through the gate and had been shot when they ignored Stan’s warning when they got out of their SUV. She glanced at Ruri and Mike. Mike was watching the gate. Ruri had her sights trained on the lake — not a bad idea, Misaki acknowledged. If she’d been gaming this out, she would have had a more clandestine second team come in from the lake while everyone was focused on the gate. But the people who had planned this operation were morons.
She heard gunfire. She wasn’t sure from whom or at what. Morons with a lot of firepower, she acknowledged.
But Whalen was here, and he’d gotten into the house. The kids were there. And Shorty. She nibbled on her lip.
She’d interviewed with Whalen’s manager on Friday. It had been a good interview, and he’d offered her a job starting Monday. And he’d given her a test scenario. She hadn’t liked the scenario — she had meant to talk to Mac about it today. Well maybe Shorty. Mac scared the devil right out of her, no lie. But there hadn’t been time.
She sighed. Damn it. She glanced at Ruri. “He’s inside,” she murmured low enough for her to hear and not Mike. Ruri glanced at her. “I’m going in after him.”
Ruri nodded. Misaki kept her pistol, although she had never shot one before. But Paulina had showed her how, and it seemed simple enough. At close range, she might even hit something, who knew?
She heard Mike protest behind her, but Ruri said something soothingly. Good girl, Misaki thought. They’d been friends since middle school — two female nerds united against the boys in the computer club. She thought they would probably be friends forever. Lovers might come and go, and she grinned at that thought, because damn, she’d had fun out here, but a friendship like hers and Ruri’s lasted. Women friendships did. She thought it was why women lived longer.
Well, her mother hadn’t. But then she hadn’t been allowed to have women friends, had she?
Misaki focused on the present as she entered the house silently. She resisted the urge to go check on the children, but she knew Paulina was there — and that was one fierce mama bear. No, the children were safe. She hesitated at the elevator and then went to the stairwell instead. She knew from experience that you could hear the elevator in the computer room.
She almost had the identification of the people involved in the technological side of this. She’d recognized the ‘footprint’ of one of them all too well. That led to a back chatroom where the boys liked to go and boast. She shook her head. He’d been there. He’d be back there again, and then she’d have him. It was not enough to know who it was, she needed to prove it. Although she thought if she couldn’t prove it, capturing him IRL, taking him out to see the Moore’s house and talking to him about the kids might elicit a confession.
She climbed the stairs to the second floor, opened the door and peered out. No one. Stupid MF, she thought. Didn’t even post a guard?
Of course, she’d smartened up a lot about security this last week. A houseful of professional paranoids, and a couple highly skilled amateur ones like Shorty and Janet? Yeah. Her security would never look the same.
She walked down the hallway, and stopped at the door, hoping to hear something. Nada. She sighed. She pulled off her wig, and stuffed it in her pocket. And then she opened the door, stepped through, her gun raised. She wasn’t sure she held the gun correctly, but it made her feel like a badass. She grinned at that.
The first person she saw was Scott. What the hell was he doing here? He was leaning against the wall, as if he didn’t have a care in the world. She glanced around the room, saw Shorty. His gun was pointed at Scott not Whalen. Shorty was smart — he could see who was truly the dangerous one.
She didn’t know the two younger people. But she’d give a good guess they were the missing links: the fake dispatcher and the fake cop. Dupes really.
And Whalen. It helped to think of him like that.
“You!” Whalen said furiously. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Misaki smiled at him. “Hello, Dad,” she said. “What does it look like I’m doing here? Protecting people from your insanity. Again.”
Shorty’s mouth dropped. She laughed at him. “You missed that item in my bio, Shorty? Yeah. Well, I try to not think about it either. But yes, this is the man who raised me. And drove my mother to suicide.”
Shorty looked from Misaki to her father and back again. “Did you know he was involved when you signed on?”
“I had him on my short list,” she admitted. “And yes, it’s why I agreed to help out. Seems like I’ve been cleaning up his messes for a long time. Maybe he’ll get locked up for this one, and I can move on.”
Scott had a sympathetic half-smile on his face. “Should have just moved on a long time ago, Kristy,” he said. “Wait, what name are you using for this gig?”
“Misaki,” she said absently. “I do just fine, Scott. I have friends. Lovers. A life. And a healthy bank account with no bankruptcies on my record. What about you? Why do you stay?”
Scott shrugged. “Someone has to manage the firm,” he said. “I decided it would be me.”
“And you got involved in a plot to kill a couple of cops?” Shorty asked. Misaki thought he was angrier than what showed.
“Well, no,” Scott admitted. “I missed that. I went on vacation — Aruba for two weeks. Came back and Anthony is bragging about taking down a couple of cops. I’m still trying to figure out how to clean it up. Aruba was beautiful, however.”
Shorty shook his head. “You’re brushing this off as no biggie, just brush it off, move on? And you’re part of an invasion force here, fighting it out with the FBI? You aren’t going to get away with it.”
Scott shrugged. “Money talks, bad guys walk,” he said. “This isn’t the worst mess I’ve handled.”
Shorty stared at him for a moment. Then he looked at the quiet two. “Names,” he ordered.
“They’re not going to tell you that,” Scott said.
Shorty just stared at them. “Names,” he repeated.
Misaki looked at the two of them, and thought about the employee list. “Sharon Costello?” she guessed. The woman, a girl really, started. “And Justin Blake?” He smirked. “Maybe David Nalley?” The smirk went away. “Meet our two actors.”
“Sharon?” Shorty repeated. “You’re the one Mac went to rescue. You should have taken his advice.”
Misaki nodded. “She should have. But she was in too deep. Were you hoping he’d bring you here to the safe house?”
Sharon flinched. “Originally,” she admitted. “Then that creepy guy showed up, and it got real. He was going to shoot me!”
Misaki looked back at her father. He was aging well, actually, she noticed absently. “So where is Anthony?” she asked about her other brother.
“He’s on another task,” Whalen answered, with a smirk. “So, we’ll just finish collecting the information you’ve accumulated here, and we can go back him up.”
Misaki shook her head. “Backed up the data where you can’t reach it,” she informed him. “And disks have been cleaned so you don’t know what we have.” Truth was, she didn’t know what they had either — nothing that warranted this!
“You’ll promise not to use it,” Whalen said confidently. He pulled something out of the messenger bag he was carrying. Misaki’s eyes narrowed. What the hell was it? It looked like a cell phone.
“A cell phone?” Shorty asked.
“A very specific one,” Whalen said. “Its sole purpose is to send a message to the bomb we left downstairs near where the children are. It’s enough to take down the whole house. Nothing survives. Not the data, not the children. Probably not you.”
“And you?” Misaki asked. “You’re in this house too.”
Whalen’s smirk was really crazy, Misaki decided. She glanced at Scott. He hadn’t known about this either. Well, baby brother needed a wake-up call. There was no ‘managing’ this.
“It’s a dead man’s switch,” Whalen explained. “I activate it. Toss it to you. You keep your finger on it? No problem. Go down. Dismantle the bomb. We’ll be gone. But first the data issue.”
Shorty looked at Whalen like he was nuts. Well, he had that right. He shook his head briefly, and then without warning, he shot Whalen.
“Been around Mac too much,” he muttered, as he grabbed for the cell phone. He looked at it. It hadn’t been activated — she could tell by the relief on his face. She kept her gun trained on everyone else.
“Scott,” she ordered. “Listen to me. He’s toast. His financials say he’s going under — again. So save yourself and your team.”
Scott was focused on Shorty, his mouth open. No slacker pose now. “He shot him!”
“And unfortunately for us all, he didn’t kill him,” Misaki said. “What the hell are you here for?”
Scott refocused on her. “You wish he killed him? He’s your father.”
Misaki looked at him with pity. “He’s insane. He has been for a long time. He abused my mother, drove her to drink, kept her so isolated that she took her own life. You know all this! You know he’s insane. He remarries, has you and Anthony, and your mom ran, leaving you two behind. I get that has probably warped you two forever, but we’re all adults now. Time to leave the bastard behind.”
Scott turned to look at their father. “In the data you’ve collected, Sharon said she thought you’d gotten ahold of other scenarios. We need to know which ones. We need to destroy them. And to stop the ones we might have in operation IRL.”
“This isn’t the only scenario you’re playing out?” Shorty said slowly. “I was looking historically.”
Scott shrugged. He wasn’t going to say more. “I wondered,” Misaki told Shorty. “I was going to tell you and Mac today — the one they had me game out yesterday was how to reach a man in an ICU bed.”
The young man spoke for the first time. “I gamed that one out on Wednesday,” he said. “But Clyde, the guy you interviewed with, was impressed. He thought he might use yours instead.” He sounded admiring.
Misaki and Shorty looked at each other. “Let’s go,” Shorty ordered. “Scott? Pick up your father and help him down the stairs. The other two of you follow them.” They started out the door.
Shorty looked at the cell phone in his hand. “Can you deprogram this?” he asked as he followed them out of the room. “Defuse the bomb? I know it’s not activated. But it’s giving me the creeps.”
Misaki took it from him as they walked down the stairs. She popped out the battery. “Come on,” she said. “We need to find Stan Warren. Turn these cretins over to him. And then we can slag the bomb too.”
Shorty stayed focused on the people ahead of him. “And you need to tell one of the agents about the ICU scenario.”
“And I need to tell one of them about the ICU scenario,” she agreed. She paused. “We OK?”
He smiled at her. “We’re just fine.”
Reassured, she went to find Ruri and an FBI agent. She liked Shorty. And a man who would just shoot a man who was threatening to arm a bomb? Turned her on a bit, she admitted with a laugh. Shorty was 10 years her junior, but hell, what was a decade between friends?
––––––––
Mac looked up when someone threw a shirt at him. Rand Nickerson was standing there. “Stan thinks this is a diversion,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Mac glanced at Angie. She nodded and shoved him a bit. “Go,” she said. “I’ll be fine. Well, I’ll go find Janet, and have a meltdown where she and Paulina can take care of me. Go.”
Mac kissed her hard, and then he followed Rand to his car parked down the street. Figures he wouldn’t let his car get blocked inside any more than he would let himself get trapped in a conference room, Mac thought as he shrugged into the shirt. Man was seriously paranoid — and that was a compliment — but still. Rand unlocked his SUV, and Mac got inside.
He looked at his hands. They had blood on them. Rand handed him a bottle of water and a towel from a gym bag. Mac cleaned up as best he could.
“Fool stunt,” Rand said conversationally, as he drove through the ruined gate and headed for the 520. “Could have gotten yourself killed.”
Mac shook his head once as if to clear it. “I couldn’t do it,” he said, somewhat in disbelief. “Couldn’t let him die because someone was holding a gun to my head. Couldn’t let Malloy see me flinch. Couldn’t do it.”
Rand glanced at him then back to the road. “First rule is you have to survive,” he said. “That’s first. You hear me?”
Mac said nothing. That had been his rule since he was old enough to walk, look after Number 1. No one else will. And then? It had broadened to become his posse, for lack of a better word. Marine squad. But he’d always taken care of himself. Who else would if he didn’t?
Apparently, Angie would. She’d stepped up. He set all of that behind him.
“Where are we going?” Mac asked, changing the subject. He might need a therapist, he acknowledged. It wasn’t going to be Rand Nickerson. “Diversion from what?”
“Going to the hospital,” Rand said, accepting the new topic. “Stan said Rourke isn’t at the house. Neither is Andrew Whalen, which I find more alarming. Rourke might be keeping his distance from this clusterfuck. But Stan is afraid he might be going for Rodriguez.”
Mac chewed his lip. “What about Sgt. Scott McBride? Did you see him?”
Rand shook his head. “Only know him by the picture on your wall,” he said. “But no, I don’t think he was there, either.”
“Did Lorde ever interview Nick?” he asked.
“He has it set up with Stan for tomorrow,” Rand replied. “Has to be before Monday, but he wanted to give Nick as much recuperation time as he could.”
Mac didn’t think one day or two was going to make that much difference. Nick’s recuperation was going to take months. He wondered if there’d been any talk about when Nick would be ready to leave the hospital? Or where they would go? Well, he guessed there was no reason people couldn’t stay at the Parker house for as long as they needed.
“Another thing?” Rand said. “Andrew wasn’t at the house, but his father was. And that’s weird. Why would Win Whalen come along?”
Mac shook his head. “Computer data,” he said. “He’s the computer data expert. Something we have must be incriminating enough to pull him there in person. But fuck me if I know what it is.”
“Misaki and Ruri?” Rand said, thinking out loud. “They must have gotten farther along than they’ve told us.”
Mac nodded. “Might need to ask them some questions when we get back,” he agreed. He closed his eyes, and rested his head against the headrest, trying to jettison the adrenaline that flooded his system. Fight or flight. There wasn’t a fight, and flight wasn’t an option. Not ever. Which might go a long ways to explaining why he couldn’t roll away from Brian.
But he knew that wasn’t it. He just couldn’t let another clueless, good-natured guy die on his watch at that house.