“What now?” Monica asked.
“You said there were guys in the military who have reason to harm Jasper.”
“Sure. But wouldn’t the FBI already be onto that?”
“I’d like to think so. But we’ll make sure it’s flagged. I’ve got a colleague who works for them, on secondment to the UN. She’ll find out.”
“Right. And what—we wait here in this crappy motel?” She waved her hand around the room. Walker felt she was being unfair. Sure, it wasn’t a five-star resort, but it was clean and tidy and warm. Far better than the majority of places he’d spent outside base in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“We go to breakfast and you tell me everything about your brother that you can think of, starting with the old friend of his that you mentioned,” Walker said, opening the door and slipping on his jacket against the morning chill. The sky had that dirty silver hue of an overcast LA sunrise in March. Monica slipped past him.
He cranked the car door open and slid into the seat. As he fired it up, eight cylinders of American pride thrummed to life with a distinctive whump-whump-whump. It was an inherently unstable design, the typical crossplane V8, requiring all kinds of crankshaft stabilizers to keep things in harmony—but nothing beat the sound of these crossplane V8 engines with the unevenly spaced firing patterns within each cylinder bank, producing a distinctive burble in the exhaust note.
He drove them two miles north of the motel, taking it slowly, waiting until the oil and coolant warmed through. The big fat tires banged on broken blacktop and thumped into potholes, but they were high profile and the suspension was soft and he felt like he could have done the drive at four times the speed and it would feel the same. The course he took had a couple of left and right turns, an ambling route, the kind used by people who were lost or those checking to make sure they didn’t have a tail. He found a diner near the interstate on ramp, and he pulled in hard, flicking the Cuda’s steering wheel and the handbrake to slide into a parking spot.
Walker checked his rearview mirror, and then his side window and then the windscreen. He watched an old Crown Vic buzz by. It had been behind them the whole time, a few hundred yards back on the journey from the motel to here. The driver was a male in his fifties. He kept his eyes straight ahead, went through the next intersection, kept driving.
“What?” Monica said.
“Not sure. Maybe nothing.”
“We’re eating here?” Monica said.
“We’ll talk. I’ll eat. You do what you like.”
Walker killed the engine, got out with the keys in his hand and waited at the diner’s entrance, holding the door open for her. As Monica breezed by he watched her motions as she looked around at the early-morning clientele. Truckers and delivery men and people on the road, consuming fried food and drinking bottomless cups of drip coffee. There was a television above the counter, playing ESPN.
Walker sat in a booth and a waitress delivered menus and coffee. Monica sat opposite. She looked out the window, to the east.
“This will make you feel like you’re back in your neighborhood—they have a gluten-free option,” Walker said, looking over the menu. He looked up and Monica had cracked a small smile despite herself.
“I just can’t see how I can help Jasper like this.”
“I don’t know either,” Walker said. “But you can help him, I believe that. We just need to know where to start.”
“The proverbial needle in a haystack.”
“Let’s start again,” Walker said. “At the beginning. Who would have any reason to abduct and use Jasper’s expertise like this?”
She sighed, but played along. “Any number of terrorists, foreign or domestic.”
“Sure. But what about what you know.”
“Personally?”
“Yes.”
Monica looked out the window, tension straightening her posture. Walker knew that thinking back about Jasper’s past meant reliving her own memories. But it was necessary, it was the only way.
“Jasper had a friend, then the guy’s family moved away.”
“Military?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Just saying. They move around a lot.”
“Right. So, they connected again in college. Got really close, dormed together, did systems engineering at SOCAL in San Fran. Then they went their separate ways. Jasper never spoke about him. A year later, out of college, Jasper joined the Army, but not using his IT skills at all. It was weird.”
“And you think this friend might have a reason to hurt Jasper?”
“Reason, maybe, but he wouldn’t. Paul wouldn’t hurt a fly.” Monica nodded. “I saw an email from him, on Jasper’s tablet, last Christmas. It was open, on the bench, and it was just a ‘Hey, what’s up?’ kind of thing. So, they stayed in contact.”
Walker drank his coffee and allowed Monica time to tell the story.
“I Googled him. I wanted to know what had become of him—he’d been a constant around our house, years earlier. Then he disappeared completely. I wanted to know what he was doing, where he ended up. A curiosity.”
Monica looked out the window again. She was silent for a full minute, then said, “It was his name, that drove me. The name in the email. The photo was him but it was the name that made me do the double-take and read it.”
She looked Walker in the eyes.
“He’d changed his name.”