Plan C
The control tower was taller than it looked at a distance, probably about sixty feet high, the metal support structure alternating colors between ghostly white and blood orange. Peng led the way, the rest of us marching single file behind him. A wind picked up, and it moaned and wailed as it whipped the grit off the desert floor and threw it into our eyes. Maybe I would suggest to Hope that we get a summer home here.
“Peng, go see if there is any camera footage left in that tower.”
Peng scurried off without a word while the rest of us looked for Dempsey.
We found him lying on the ground behind the out buildings.
Hope rushed over and pulled his limp head up into her lap. “No.” Tears poured freely from her eyes. “Please, no.”
That was one of the things I loved about Hope. This man had kidnapped her, threatened her, and almost gotten her family killed, yet she was still openly worried about his well-being.
Dempsey coughed and opened his eyes. I nearly jumped in surprise. There was no way he should have survived such a fall, whether he had been shot several times in the chest or not. I looked closer at what appeared to be a square metal storage structure and saw it ripple in the breeze. It wasn’t metal at all but was only painted to appear like metal. It was an inflatable blow-up rescue mat that firemen placed under a jumper. Probably something Dempsey had gotten from a movie set. It appeared he had landed there and then rolled off onto the pavement, where he now lay. Still, he had been shot by real bullets, and ragged holes peppered the front of his shirt. But I had seen this movie before.
“Thanks,” I said to him as his eyes began to clear. “For saving my son.”
“I didn’t do it for you.” His voice was hoarse, and each breath seemed to pain him. He looked up at Hope and then back at me. “How is it that you got so lucky with the women in your life?”
He was right about that. I was the luckiest man in the world.
“Becca really liked you,” I said. “You didn’t have to hit her. You didn’t have to choose to work for the CIA. Nobody messed that one up except you.”
Dempsey nodded, and then he began coughing. He held one arm around his chest and another to his mouth. When he spoke again, there was blood on his teeth. He smiled at me. “I would appreciate if you told Becca I finally did something right. Tell her I did it for her.”
He began coughing again, and he winced in pain with each spasm. Hope was getting blood all over her clothes, but she didn’t seem to notice. Her only concern was to comfort Dempsey. She was too good for me. She was definitely too good for Dempsey.
“Tell her yourself,” I said. “We’re through playing your games.”
“Matt.” Hope looked up at me in exasperation. “He’s dying.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But only if I decide to strangle him.”
“Matt . . .” Hope’s voice was getting more insistent.
I bent down and dipped my fingers into the pool of blood. It was thick and sticky. I touched my fingers to my lips and tasted. I’d heard of the sweet taste of blood, but this was a little too sweet. “Karo syrup?” I held out my fingers to Dempsey. “Really?”
“Matt, what are you doing?” Hope asked. “He was shot. We all saw it.”
“He also seems to be extremely well defined under his shirt,” I said, standing up. “The Dempsey I knew never had pecs. It just so happens that a friend of mine has been testing some new body armor recently. It’s at the prototype level and is only available to a few people. But I’m sure with your connections, it wasn’t difficult.”
“Matt, he’s not faking the pain. I can feel his ragged breathing. He really is hurt.”
“I don’t doubt that. The impact of the bullets probably broke a couple of his ribs. But that’s not real blood, and he’s definitely not dying.”
Hope looked down at Dempsey, and he gave a slight shrug. “It was worth a try.”
She dropped his head from her lap onto the pavement.
It bounced.
Hard.
“Ow. Was that necessary? I saved your son’s life a few minutes ago.”
“That’s the only reason I’m not strangling you right now,” Hope said.
I smiled. There was another reason I loved this woman.
Peng returned from his trip to the tower. He was carrying a canvas sack.
“Were the cameras damaged?” Zack asked as if he was briefing one of his agents, not a fifteen-year-old boy.
“Yes.” Peng was matter-of-fact. “None of them are functional now.”
“You see?” Prince Sayami stepped forward, his nose tipping in the air. “This situation is beyond you. But if you let me go now, I might decide to forget that you have ruined my plane and killed most of my guards.”
I ignored the prince and kept my focus on Peng. “What’s in the bag?”
“The hard drives,” Peng said. “One of them was destroyed, but the other four are intact.”
“And the video is on those drives?”
“Yes.” Peng looked at me as if I should know. “I tested them on the monitor. You have video from four angles, and the sound is pretty decent too.” He patted the bag. “We have the whole thing in here.”
“It won’t matter.” The prince continued to push his way toward us. “As soon as you leave this place, those drives will be seized. You can’t win. You don’t know who you’re dealing with.”
“No,” I said. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with. Prince Sayami, meet Zack, the hammer.”
I nodded to Zack. He stepped forward and brought a huge fist down on the prince’s head. The prince crumpled silently to the ground.
Permelia pushed at the prince’s body with her foot. “I want you to show me how to do that,” she said to Zack. “It might come in handy someday.”
“What would it take to send that video to a few of my friends?” Zack asked.
“We need a laptop and a wireless connection,” Peng said without hesitation. “The file is too large to send, but we can create a Dropbox folder and send the link. It would probably take about fifteen minutes.” Peng nodded at Dempsey, who was now sitting up and rubbing his ribs. “He’s got a computer inside the building. We can tether into a cell phone for the Wi-Fi.”
Zack glared at Dempsey. “Mr. Dempsey, you are going to take us to your laptop. Now.”
Dempsey winced and reached again for his ribs, but his hand came away holding something that looked like a can, and he said something that sounded like, “Plan C.”
“Get down,” I said, pulling Hope behind me and reaching for the stroller to cover Jin’s ears.
The flash-bang grenade did exactly what it was supposed to do. I was temporarily deaf and blind. Dempsey must have followed up with a smoke grenade because when my senses began to return, I still couldn’t see more than a few feet.
People were staggering around, attempting to get their bearings. The one remaining guard was trying to crawl away, but Zack’s foot had come down on his back. When the coughing finally subsided, I began counting heads. Everyone was present, accounted for, and in reasonably decent shape, except for Dempsey—he and the canvas bag Peng had been holding.
“We need to find him,” I shouted to Zack.
He nodded, a grim look on his face as he scanned the surroundings. Everything was flat, dusty, and empty. Dempsey was nowhere to be seen.
Jin was crying. Hope picked her up and held her close. Peng looked down at his side, where the bag had been, blinking his eyes as if he were surprised it still wasn’t there.
“This is bad,” I yelled. I was only a few feet from Zack, but I wasn’t sure he could hear me.
Zack nodded in affirmation. “You don’t need to yell.” He must have prepped his ears for the bang better than I had. I’d been focused on protecting Jin.
I held my hands against my ears and made yawning motions, trying to bring back my hearing. There was an annoying buzz in the back of my head that reminded me of Permelia’s motorcycle, but I was slowly starting to hear things again.
Dempsey had disappeared into the dusty barrenness like a hero at the end of a Western movie—and he had taken our evidence with him. We still had Morgan and the prince. We still had the eyewitness testimonies of three current or former antiterrorist agents. We still had Hope and Permelia, two innocents who’d been kidnapped and nearly killed. It should have been enough to secure justice. But I knew the people we were dealing with. People like Dempsey, who liked to play games. We really needed those drives.
“Let’s fan out,” I said. “Demetrius, you take left, Zack take the center, and I’ll take the right. Any sign of Dempsey, make your voice heard.”
“What about me?” Peng was still looking down at his side.
I wanted to tell him it was okay. That he had done enough. That his actions these last few days—from stealing my watch and showing me the position of the bad guys to rigging the plane door to explode and prevent Yehudi from leading us all into an unimaginable terror—were more than anyone could ever ask of a young man like him. But I could see from his face that my words would not be enough. Peng didn’t want comfort; he wanted to help.
“You check the buildings in the back.”
“What about—”
“You go with Peng.” I cut Permelia off before she could finish. The longer we talked, the easier it would be for Dempsey to escape.
Zack and Demetrius had already started fanning out. I tried to think like Dempsey, and it made my brain hurt. Playing games with him was like going against a Sicilian when death was on the line. But I thought that maybe if I were Dempsey, I would have gone back toward the plane. The desert might be safer, but it would also take a lot longer before he could connect with his people. And the desert would be dirty and dusty. Dempsey had always liked his creature comforts. Using my skills of deduction, I headed toward the plane.
None of us had gone very far before I heard a yelp that reminded me of a dog that had been accidentally stepped on. It was coming from the desert across the runway, somewhere in the direction Demetrius was heading. So much for my skills of deduction.
“Hey.” It was Dempsey’s voice, and he seemed to be in distress. “Hey. Ow. That was my nose. What did you do to it?”
“Fixed it for you.” The other voice was also familiar.
“I don’t think Dempsey understands that the C in plan C stands for Chico,” Demetrius said, a grin beginning to spread across his face as two figures appeared and began to move closer. “Hey, Chico, it’s about time you woke up. They don’t pay us for sleeping on the job.”
“Where’s the one who cold-cocked me?” Chico was holding Dempsey by the back of his neck, his fingers almost meeting on the front side of Dempsey’s throat. Anytime Dempsey tried to speak or struggle, Chico would just tighten his grip.
“He’s sleepin’ for now,” Demetrius said. “You can pay him back later. Maybe fix his nose too.”
As Dempsey got closer, I could see that Chico had indeed fixed Dempsey’s nose, putting it back in the middle of his face where it had been so many years before. But in doing so, he must have broken some cartilage because Dempsey was bleeding heavily from both nostrils.
“Get the bag.” I nodded to Peng.
“What’ll we do with him now?” Permelia was licking her lips. “I’ve always wanted to try waterboarding. Do you think it would work with a bloody nose?”
Peng retrieved the bag, and Chico dropped Dempsey in the dirt in front of me. I looked down at him and thought about all the grief this man’s actions had caused my family and me these last few days. I thought about Peng and the other Scouts being terrorized by armed mercenaries in the mountains; I thought about Hope, Jin, and Permelia being taken from our home and held hostage as pawns in a game of politics and power; I thought about Yehudi’s knife and how close we had all come to being put into the hands of a raving maniac.
Hope was examining Dempsey as well, her eyebrows knit in thought.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said. “I am the man I am, not the one you’d like me to be.”
“And yet you saved my son.”
“I went back for the hard drives. My agency has blown my cover, and I’m going to need all the leverage I can get. End of story.”
“You thought the cameras were turned off,” Hope said. “There was no reason for you to go back for the hard drives.”
“I had to be sure.”
“Then why didn’t you just take the drives and run when you had the chance? None of us would have seen you. You could have been miles from here by now. And Yehudi would have killed my son. You may not be willing to admit it, Mr. Dempsey, but there is good in you somewhere. You know what else I think? I think you hit Becca because you cared about her. You knew the life you were going to be leading with the CIA, and you didn’t want her to have to endure it. You needed a way that she would let go of you forever. You did it for her.”
Dempsey acted as if he’d been slapped. Hope had been able to see truth behind Dempsey’s mask that I’d never gotten close to discerning. He turned to me as if asking for help.
“Don’t fight it,” I said. “She has that effect on everyone.”
Zack stepped up next to me. “What do you want to do with him? It’s your call.”
Hope was still staring at Dempsey with a curious mixture of anger, disappointment, and . . . something I’d seen many times before when she’d looked at me. Something that always made me want to stand a little taller.
“Let him go,” I said.
Everyone, including Hope, turned to stare at me in stunned silence.
“We don’t need Dempsey.” I directed my comments to Zack. “With the video, the bearded man, and your relationship with the president, I think we have more than enough to make our case.”
“You have a relationship with the president?” Permelia asked. “Why didn’t you ever tell me about that?”
“He was a student of mine,” Zack replied. “I choked him once until he passed out.”
“I’ve been wanting to do that for years,” Permelia said. “Can you teach me?”
Zack ignored Permelia’s request. His eyes met mine. “I’m afraid he’ll be back to his old games in no time.”
“Let him,” I said. “Someday he’ll realize he’s playing a game he can’t win.”
“I always win,” Dempsey said.
“Not in this case. You made an errant move early on, and you never really had a chance to recover.”
“You’re right, but I’ll make sure the new deputy director doesn’t underestimate me in the future. I should have anticipated the little weasel throwing me under the bus.”
“I’m not talking about the deputy director,” I said. “You made the wrong move long before that. You had a chance at a real life with Becca, one with real friends and real family. One where you wouldn’t have to worry constantly about people stabbing you in the back. You should have moved right, and instead you moved left. After that, you had no chance of winning. The game was already decided.”
Dempsey shrugged. “If that’s true, I guess my only choice is to play it out until the end.”
“No,” Hope said. “You could admit defeat and start playing a different game. One where you aren’t forced to shoot your friends in the head.”
For a moment, I thought he might listen. Dempsey had a faraway look in his eyes that suggested he longed for something more. Then he came back into focus and deliberately looked away from Hope toward me.
“How about a vehicle?” he said.
“Don’t push it,” I replied. “You get to walk your way out of this one. I think some long hours of self-reflection might do you some good. The desert is that way.”
Dempsey shrugged, stood, and began to walk away.
“Wait,” Demetrius said. “What about that bag of money?”
“I’m sure he’s stashed it somewhere only he can find,” I said. “Let him take it. He’s going to need it.”
“Wait.” This time it was Chico who spoke. “If he’s got a phone on him, he might tip off his friends at the agency before we can get that video uploaded.”
Dempsey turned. “I’m not sure I have any friends left at the agency,” he said. Then under his breath, “I’m not sure I ever did.” He pulled out his cell phone and tossed it to Chico. He turned and began to walk away again, still looking a bit too sure of himself.
“Wait.” This time I was the one to raise my voice.
“What is it?” Dempsey said without turning around. “I’m starting to get tired of this. I don’t really need another lecture.”
I directed my comments toward Chico. “He gave up his phone too easily. I know Dempsey. If he’s got one phone, he’s got at least two more as backups. Why don’t you see if you can find them?”
Chico almost smiled. Then he walked over to Dempsey, picked him up by his boots, and began to shake.