Walker watched the cop he’d used to get into the house; the guy rubbed his neck and headed back outside, where he retrieved the pieces of his service automatic from the potted plant and blew the dirt and dust out before reassembling and departing down the steps to the street, where he picked up his baton. The other cop shut and locked the door and stood there, looking back at Walker, professional humiliation in his eyes. Walker thought about chastising him, telling him he had one job here—one job, to protect Monica at any and all reasonable cost—but he figured the guy had already learned—
“What you lookin’ at?” the cop said.
“You had one job,” Walker said, holding up a finger—his middle finger. “One.”
“This way,” Monica said, getting between them and steering Walker away.
Walker followed her up the hall, past the stairs. The floorboards were dark-stained timber, the walls stark white. The woman in front of him was a ghost. A memory. A person he’d not seen in the flesh in almost twenty years. Her appearance and voice were the same but different. Grown up, lived in. She was wearing dark blue pants and a tight white top and her body was as he remembered but she had a walk now, a way of moving that she’d not had before, a practiced motion. It was beyond a woman walking to attract attention. Walker had studied body language, as useful to those providing security at airports as it was to any intelligence or law-enforcement personnel in reading a person’s capabilities, training, intentions, their physical and mental state. It told Walker that whatever life Monica had lived over the past twenty years, she took care of herself, she had grown used to being watched, and she made the most of it. No motion or movement was wasted. Every action had a purpose. Everything was calculated.
She glanced back. Her eyes connected with Walker’s and she looked away. They were headed to the kitchen.
They passed a bag in the hall. A square carry-on, with wheels, the handle up. Her bag from her father’s. Now here, still packed and ready to go. She’d left San Diego forty-five minutes before Walker, but he’d sped the whole way, faster than the FBI Assistant SAC had driven, or his driver had driven, Walker was sure. They’d been home anywhere from twenty to thirty-five minutes. She’d left her bag there and done what? Watched the news?
They entered the kitchen. Monica moved around the other side of a long black-granite-topped bench with stools on Walker’s side.
“Where’s the FBI?” Walker asked.
“Excuse me?” Monica said. She looked at him, as if it was rude to talk business straight off the bat. But she couldn’t help herself. Her eyes searched his face, then glanced up and down his body.
“Your father said that the Assistant Special Agent in Charge out of the LA Field Office personally brought you back here,” Walker said. “Where is he? And he didn’t leave any agents here—but he did with your father?”
“She,” Monica said. She poured two glasses of water from a tap, a tiny tap, next to the main faucet, filtered water. Her hands trembled as she set them down on the long bench. She kept one glass near herself, and the other she slid across to Walker. Her hands didn’t shake violently, not spilling the content, but there was vibration there. Nerves and being wired and bugged-out by the situation with her brother. “The Assistant SAC is a she. And she’s back in the office, working with her people, to find my brother. And I didn’t need FBI agents here—I insisted. I can be quite persuasive. Two cops is more than enough. I’d rather the Bureau allocated their resources where best needed.”
Walker glanced down the hall and saw the cop still looking his way, watching, all kinds of embarrassment running through him and being replaced by anger and thoughts of revenge against the man who had so easily entered the house without any kind of weapon. Walker didn’t doubt that they could fight, nor that they could fight and shoot well. He was disappointed that they didn’t pat him down, even after the okay from Monica; her father’s .45 was tucked into the waistband in the small of his back, hidden from view by his untucked shirt and jacket. But he knew they’d learned a valuable lesson and that they’d now be on their toes for any kind of threat. He hoped. They’d probably accost the postman, he figured. Good. Better to err on the side of over-kill when on protective detail. But still, two guys did not a protection detail make, not in a suburban setting like this, not with a big house with all kinds of points of entry.
“You might be a target,” Walker said.
“I doubt it.”
“They may need leverage to force your brother’s hand to do something he refuses to do.”
“Like what? Make him leak some more social-media accounts?”
“Like melt down a nuclear power plant near a civilian population.”
“Is that why you’re here, after all these years?” Monica said. “To protect me from harm?”
Walker drank half his water and set the glass down.
He said, “I’m here to help.”
“How?”
“Any way I can.”
“Who are you working for? Not the Air Force. My father told me you left that behind, nearly ten years ago. Then you good as disappeared.”
Walker didn’t answer. He didn’t know how to answer. Instead, he tried a different tact.
“You look good.”
“Really?” Monica said, her tone that of a woman shooting down a guy’s advance. Her demeanor changed. There was the slightest nod of her head and the corner of a smile. She took a step back from the bench that was between them, and then she paced a little in the kitchen. “Is that why you’re really here—you saw this on the news, and you thought, what, you decided to reach out to me? To make contact, after all this time? For what—just to see me? Is that what this is? Not really appropriate timing, don’t you think?”
Walker shook his head. “It’s not like that. I’m here because I just had a good chat with your father.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because we have to stop what’s coming. And we need to find and save your brother.”
Monica stared at him. Her eyes were still, locked onto his. After about ten seconds, she looked away, picked up her glass of water, sipped it. Her hands were now steady. Walker fought the desire to talk about the past. They had to keep moving forward. He needed her to be in the present, to shed any kind of light she could on her brother.
“I’m working on this thing, have been for a while,” Walker said. “An operation. Anti-terror.”
“Terror?”
“Terror cells. Cutouts. Linked. Triggered by other terror events.”
“For who?”
“That’s . . .”
“Complicated?”
“Yes.”
“Try me.”
Walker bit his lip, thinking, then replied, “Myself.”
“No.”
“No?”
“You’re not a plumber. You’re not a PI. You’re not even a gun for hire. So, no sole-contracting work for you.”
“What am I?”
“I’m trying to figure that out. But I haven’t got the time. I really haven’t got the time. And I don’t need your protection, despite what my father may have said to you.”
Walker looked up the hall. To the bag. “You’re leaving?”
“Look at you, being all observant,” Monica said. “Yes, I’m leaving. A hotel. A big one, in Beverly Hills, a place used to looking after big names and keeping things quiet—in case the press shows up, here or there. They’re bound to find me, sooner or later, like you have. By sunrise, probably, to broadcast it on the morning shows—they love a little drama, right? Then it will be a zoo. And who knows what else may happen—human nature, right? People know where I am, who I am, and they may want to harm me for what my brother is being forced to do. Rotten, isn’t it? People . . .”
“When?”
“They’re moving me at midnight.”
Walker looked down the hall at the cop, who was still staring at him. Walker considered giving him the finger again, to reinforce the one job the guy had . . .
“Look,” Monica said. “Walker?”
He looked at her.
“I think you should go,” she said. “There’s really nothing you can do here. Nice to see you, though. Another time, perhaps? Say, another twenty years from now?”
There was a moment of silence between them, then Walker said, “You know I had a hand in what happened at the New York Stock Exchange.”
“I saw that. Are you trying to impress me?”
“And St. Louis.”
Monica paused, her hand on her glass of water, which she was looking at, and then she let it go and crossed her arms across her chest.
She said, “That was you?”
“I helped out,” Walker said.
“For who?”
“Us.”
“Us?”
“All of us. I’m doing what I was paid to do by the US government for nearly twenty years. This is all connected.”
“It’s really been that long, hasn’t it?”
“We’re getting old. But you’re missing my point.”
“That this thing with Jasper is connected to New York and St. Louis? How?”
“I’m working on the how. But yes, it is.”
“Who pays you now?”
“No one.”
“Bullshit.”
“No one,” he repeated. “I could cash a pay check, I guess. If I wanted to, if I said yes.”
“Yes to whom—a check from whom?”
“The UN.”
“The UN?” Monica uncrossed her arms, her fingertips on the bench. “They’ve got no money. And they don’t have people like you on their so-called payroll.”
Walker shrugged.
Monica said, “Why are you here?”
“I’m here to help.”
Monica turned and looked out the window that looked into her backyard. Her arms crossed across her chest again, as though a shiver of cold had run through her. She looked fragile, in that moment. Walker wanted to hold her, but it wasn’t the time. She seemed distant. Resigned. Exhausted—not from today, but from memories of long ago, dragging her back, wearing her out.
She said, “You can’t help.”
“I think I can.”
“How?”
“Tell me about your brother.”