Point And Shoot Part 15

Abrams considered this a smart, relatively inexpensive insurance policy. Doyle would have gone all high-tech with it; sometimes, the old tricks work the best. And now it had paid off.

The gunmen had simple orders-grievously wound Charlie Hardie and bring him back to L.A. They needed him alive. He didn't have to be conscious. Just with a pulse. It was important if she was going to make her point heard and end these bitter little internecine squabbles with Doyle. Prove her way worked. Keep costs down, use forward thinking, not expensive gadgets and elaborate schemes.

If Doyle were in charge he would have probably sent heavily armed mobile death troops in dozens of bulletproof cars to hunt down and destroy Hardie. Which would have cost hundreds of millions and most likely exposed them in a number of small ways. Given the enemy something to exploit.

No, better to do this quiet and clean and cheap and easy.

Now it was nearly 6:00 a.m. East Coast time. Abrams leaned back in her first-cla.s.s seat, picked up her orange juice, and eagerly awaited the status update.

The shoot-out was brief, as they tend to be. The gunmen behind Deke Clark opened fire. They were expert marksmen, ex-mercs who'd impressed the Cabal enough to be given retainers. They knew how to make shots designed to incapacitate. Kill shots were easy; the surgical ones required on-the-scene finesse.

There was no time for Charlie Hardie to speak or scream or protest or reach for the revolvers in his pockets. His body was thrown back against the vehicle, then slid down to the asphalt.

Deke Clark, still laboring under the delusion that these were his trusted men, spun around to face them, a stunned expression on his face. The gunmen knew the ruse was blown; they were under orders to execute Deke right after Hardie was taken out. His usefulness to the Cabal had come to an end.

Deke decoded the expression on their faces in a fraction of a second. He'd always been good at reading people, thinking fast on his feet. He opened fire; the gunmen adjusted their aim and returned fire at close to point-blank range.

Meanwhile another man emerged from the driver's seat and used a Glock .23 to open fire on the gunmen on the opposite end.

Those gunmen were momentarily gobsmacked; they had been trained to kill Charlie Hardie; had studied various photographs until his image was burned into their minds. The moment that Deacon Clark confirmed the man in the bandages as Charlie Hardie-"Charlie?"-that man was taken out. So who was this man, who looked exactly like him?

This gave the double a small window of opportunity.

Headshot, torso shots. The double wasn't s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g around. He pulled a second Glock and started firing in the opposite direction, toward Deke and his gunmen-already engaged in a brief, blood-splattered, close-range battle. Metal panged, gla.s.s sprayed, asphalt was ripped up by shots gone wild. The noise was as if the very air around them were full of firecrackers and all of them were popping off at the same time. Smoke obscured some shots. Agonized cries cut through the din and the fog and blood.

All told, the gunfight on that Nebraska road took maybe nine, ten seconds.

To all involved, it felt like forever.

Deke hadn't called an ending like this. Not for him, not for Charlie Hardie. He kind of saw the two of them as old men in a backyard, swilling beers they shouldn't be swilling, talking war stories while their grandkids milled about. While Deke and Charlie were never friend friends, he'd always hoped they'd mellow into some kind of grudging mutual respect as they grew old. And that would somehow transmogrify into real friendship.

None of this was right. It wasn't supposed to happen this way. Charlie Hardie, slumped against a black Lincoln Town Car, shot in every possible way a man could be shot.

Deke, breathing blood, feeling numb all over, knowing this was it.

As he died he mumbled words to his wife, Ellie, a confused tangle of apologies and sweetness. He sent his love to his daughters. He thanked his wife for the eggs.

The bullets didn't kill Charlie Hardie.

The sight of Deke Clark, shot up and dying on a cold Nebraska road ... now that killed him, in the deepest way possible. This was a point-blank shot to his soul.

This was Nate Parrish all over again, but somehow worse, because when a man swears something will never happen again, when a man voluntarily exiles himself from his life and all that he loves so that it has no chance of happening again ...

... and it happens again ...

It was almost too much to bear.

Hardie got a good man killed. He always seemed to let good people die on his watch. Nate Parrish. Lane Madden. Now Deacon Clark. And somehow he went on living.

How? Project Viking? Was that bulls.h.i.t even true? Was that his curse? To survive, even as good men were cut down all around him?

So be it.

He deserved the pain he had coming.

On the dizzy edge of consciousness-Hardie had to have lost a ton of blood in the past few minutes, because his clothes were soaked as if he'd gone swimming-he prayed that the Project Viking stuff was true. That somehow he was death-proof, maybe even immortal. That he could stand up now and the bullets would drop out of his wounds and go tinklingon the asphalt. And then he'd go save his family ...

Hardie's eyes fluttered, then closed.

And in the end, you're the only one left standing.

You drop the Glocks, walk around the car to see what happened to the original Charlie Hardie. Your knees pop as you crouch down and reach out to feel his neck.

Please.

Please don't let him be dead.

Because that wouldruin ... everything.

21.

You know, when I woke up this morning, I didn't expect to be trading nine millies with my friend.

-David Morse, 16 Blocks.

Undisclosed Location-Virginia Suburbs.

ABRAMS HEARD ABOUT the Nebraska Incident and the death of the former FBI agent within seconds of landing at Dulles. The operation had been botched utterly and completely, which was something she was not used to. The wrong target had been killed-this mystery man with a face full of bandages. And Charlie Hardie had sped away, with the mystery man in his trunk.

Sure, they could waste more resources hunting Hardie and the corpse of his masked friend across the middle of the American heartland. But it was painfully obvious where Hardie was headed.

Home to Philadelphia.

While walking through the Terminal she texted the go order: MANN YOUR TEAM IS UP.

They would pin Charlie Hardie down and destroy his family and return his body posthaste. The only upside to this entire abortion was that Abrams would get to crow about it to Doyle. So much for an unbreakable vault, huh?

A Cabal employee took her to the private hospital in the Virginia suburbs where Doyle resided. There was nothing like a personal visit to emphasize the current power structure. If she had been a real d.i.c.k, she would have forced Doyle to come to her in L.A. But the man was bedridden, and there was something to be said for looming over someone who's trapped in a p.r.o.ne position.

Doyle looked no better than when she'd visited him a few months ago. The a.s.sault had devastated him. Some men are able to recover after a violent trauma. Doyle was not one of those men.

"I hear that Nebraska did not go well," Doyle said as she entered the room.

"Have your teams recovered the s.p.a.cecraft from the Pacific yet?" Abrams replied.

Attaque au fer, beat parry.

"Don't worry," Doyle said. "Your precious information is safe. There's no one who can pick up or decode the beacon, and almost no one with the diving capabilities required to recover it. Unless Jim Cameron decides to go looking for it on a whim. Come to think of it, deep sea is just as unreachable as deep s.p.a.ce. Maybe I've been thinking in the wrong direction."

"That's not the point. I know the information is safe. But this was a very expensive mission, Doyle. And what did it get us?"

"For some pursuits, money should never be an object."

Doyle was a tinkerer. Always had been. While his profession was lawyer, his true pa.s.sion was cobbling together strange devices in one of his many garages and labs scattered throughout the country. He was the one who had given the so-called Accident People many of their untraceable weapons, from the wasp's nest to the coma car. Though Doyle probably regretted inventing the latter.

This was all fine when they ruled the Cabal as a triumvirate-Gedney being the brains, Doyle the hands, and Abrams the heart. With Gedney gone, however, the dual leadership of Doyle and Abrams resulted in an organization led only by hands and heart. Gedney had always been able to keep Doyle in check; over the past year, he'd run amok. And it was destroying them.

"I think it's time that you take a break, focus on your recovery," Abrams said. "Leave the day-to-day stuff to my care."

Doyle smiled and reached under his blanket.

The day-to-day has been left to your care, Doyle thought, and you've done nothing but f.u.c.k it up.

Oh, she must have been in her glory. Gedney gone, her other partner incapacitated.

But no more.

This organization used to be feared and respected; now it was simply too large and diffuse. Doyle believed they needed to focus on what they did best: arranging and tweaking and hacking the mechanics behind the reality everyone else saw. The reality everyone else accepted.

Abrams, meanwhile, had this ridiculous idea about taking over the world as it ended. Didn't she realize that with the proper planning and tweaking, you could choose the second, minute, hour, and day the world ended?

Something had to be done to properly refocus their organization.

So in the days after his attack at the hands of Charlie Hardie, Doyle stared at the tiled ceiling of his private hospital and came up with a way to resume command, to get things back on track. There was only one thing that Abrams had over him: the complete operational knowledge of their organization. She called it their heart. The heart was everything, and she'd tended it and cared for it and lorded it over them for years. The heart had purchased her seat at the table back when it was just Gedney and Doyle running the show. Doyle realized he needed to find a way to let Abrams voluntarily surrender the heart to his care.

And he had.

Boy, had he.

Convinced her that the only safe place for the heart was out of everyone's reach, including their own. The heart would be guarded in a hack-proof bulletproof tamperproof and every other kind of -proof place you could think of, inside the head of an unkillable man who-get this-didn't even know what he had in his head.

It took a great deal of effort to convince Abrams to relinquish control of the heart, and even when she did, she insisted on being the one to help the team insert it into Charlie Hardie's skull. She oversaw every detail. Which made sense, because Doyle would have insisted on the same thing.

They launched the heart inside Hardie's head into s.p.a.ce ... and turned their attention to saving their organization from the threats attacking it from every direction.

Except Doyle had a side task. One he didn't tell Abrams about.

When you build something you believe is unbreakable, there's only one way to test it. And that is to find the smartest people in the world to attempt to break into it.

Banks routinely hire former heisters to test the security of their high-tech alarm and vault system; this was no different. Doyle set up a fict.i.tious wing of the NSA (he picked the intelligence affiliation more or less at random), then tasked them with one goal: breaking into the heart in s.p.a.ce.

It was disappointing that Doyle's satellite wasn't as impenetrable as he'd thought.

But it was so much better knowing that soon the heart would be in his hands, and there'd be no more need for Abrams.

For an awful minute Abrams thought Doyle was going to pull a gun from beneath his blanket, or worse ... his c.o.c.k. She flinched and reached down for her own piece, tucked away in her jacket. After Hardie had shoved a gun in her mouth, she never traveled without one. She never went to the bathroom without one, in fact.

But, no, it was just a small plastic trigger meant to release morphine into Doyle's IV drip. Go ahead, buddy. Ease back into that narcotic bliss.

"Forgive me," Doyle said.

"Do what you have to."

When Doyle thumbed the b.u.t.ton on the trigger, something cold and wet hit Abrams in the face. She had only a second or two to realize that the spray had come from the IV bag itself and had been aimed perfectly at her eyes, nose, and mouth. The next moment she was on the floor, trembling for a few moments before settling down into paralysis.

Doyle didn't bother to peer over the edge of the bed. He'd invented this rig; he was sure it would work in exactly the manner he wanted.

"This is what I have to do, dear Abrams."

Abrams tried to reply, but all she could manage was a sloppy, stuttering "Suh. ... suh. ... suh. ..."

"We're going to keep you alive until we disable the kill switch. We'll keep you as comfortable as possible until then. This isn't personal, you know. Though I think I will try that thing you're always talking about. You know-with the wood chipper? I guess I'll have to rent Fargo. Do you know if it's available on demand?"

Another press of another b.u.t.ton brought in his support staff, who'd been preparing for Abrams's arrival. One of his staff members brought him his secure phone and even helpfully placed the buds inside his ears and dialed the number of a lawyer in Century City.

"Send your people now."

Flagstaff, Arizona d.a.m.n, it felt good to be an info gangster again.

Working with someone like Mann was always a trip. Don't get Factboy wrong. She was a total b.i.t.c.h. He loved to complain about her. Vowed never to work with her again. Complained to his wife about her-even though he had to disguise things, claim Mann was merely a "client" and not a crazy psycho death squad leader.

He had a large array of digital tools at his disposal, same as now, and his weapon of choice was still the national security letter, invented by the FBI over thirty years ago but really used to its fullest extent in the post-9/11 days. Hand someone an NSL and, boom, you had instant access to all of their files, no questions asked. Your tracks were covered by a built-in gag order, lasting until the subject's death. Factboy was a master of the NSL. It took him only a few minutes to put together a realistic digital version of one, and within an hour the answers would come gushing out like vomit.

No name, no voice, no trace ... Factboy prided himself on being a digital ghost.

But in truth, Factboy was a forty-two-year-old man with a wife, two kids, an underwater mortgage, and a crushing amount of debt.

His family had no idea what he did for a living. He kept it that way by feigning irritable bowel syndrome whenever he had to respond to a request. The request for information could strike at any time, just like the sudden urge to use the facilities. Only with the bathroom door safely closed and locked could he relax enough to work his digital magic. There was nothing like the adrenaline rush of a Mann job. Or the money. Lately, the work had dried up so much that Factboy's wife was under the impression that the irritable bowel syndrome had cured itself.

But Factboy was back. And this new a.s.signment was such a nostalgia trip, it should have been code-named DeJa VU.

Seven years ago Factboy had a.s.sisted Mann in detailing the background of one Charles D. Hardie, a house sitter who interrupted a huge gig on Alta Brea Drive in the fabled Hollywood Hills. Now he was doing the same for his estranged wife, Kendra Hardie. They'd been apart for a decade. Ms. Hardie and their son, Charlie Jr. (how original, Factboy thought), had bounced around, address to address, trying to stay under the radar with the help of the FBI. Like that wasn't easy to see through. Their latest address was a rental under a few cut-outs and sham realty companies, but that was easy enough for Factboy to sort out.

And here was the deja vu part, which cracked Factboy up: Ms. Hardie?

She moved to Hollywood.

Not the one in California. No, the one right next to Philadelphia, about a mile from the city line.

There was such a thing; Factboy had the details within seconds. There was even a goofy science fiction novel from a few years ago partially set in this weird little enclave.