Point and Shoot (18 page)

Doyle looked no better than when she’d visited him a few months ago. The assault 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 spacecraft 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 space. 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 passion 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 fuck 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 space … 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 fictitious 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 space.

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 cock. 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 button 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 button 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.”

Damn, 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 bitch. 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 assignment was such a nostalgia trip, it should have been code-named
DéJà VU
.

Seven years ago Factboy had assisted 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 déjà 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.

Back in 1917 a Philadelphian named Gustav Weber brought his new bride to Los Angeles on their honeymoon, fell in love with the place and its Spanish mission–style architecture. When he returned to Philly, he bought a triangle of land just outside the city and decided to re-create a little L.A. back at home, with street names like Los Angeles Avenue and San Gabriel Road. Along these streets, he built a bunch of stucco bungalows with red-tiled roofs. Later, others built two-story homes, also in the Southern California style, and filled out the new town, dubbed Hollywood, nicely.

Of course it would have been completely insane if Ms. Hardie’s rental house was on Alta Brea Drive … alas, there was no such road in this faux Hollywood. Instead, she was at the rather boring intersection of Fox Chase and Cedar roads.

Factboy’s assignment was to dig up every last logistical detail that could help Mann lay siege to the home. Utilities, security, neighbors, neighbors’ utilities and security …
everything
. Because at any given moment Mann might be given the green light to breach that home and slaughter everyone inside (whoops, sorry, Ms. Hardie! Sorry, unfortunately named Charlie Jr.!). No scrap of intel was too small, especially if Mann needed it in the clutch.

So Factboy locked himself away in the downstairs bathroom and began pulling everything he could.

As he tried to work, he heard a sudden loud thud. Probably his kids horsing around, with one tackling the other to the ground. They were full-fledged teenagers now but they still acted like idiot toddlers. Any second now Ms. Factboy would enter, yelling, which would be more of a distraction than the original thud.

Factboy went back to the task at hand. Maybe after this assignment, if there was enough money after paying down their cards and catching up on the mortgage, maybe he’d suggest a trip to the wife. Nowhere fancy, just somewhere to assure her that her husband still had earning potential. That the past few years were simply a road bump, not the new status q—

THUD.

What the hell were they doing up there?

Factboy coughed into his fist, then listened. Where the hell was the wife? She was supposed to have come out and tamed these kids by now.

“Hey!” Factboy shouted. “What’s going on up there?”

Nothing but silence. Then, at the bathroom door, a small series of knocks.

“I’m in here! What the hell are you and your brother doing up there, anyway? It sounds like you’re about to come through the goddamned ceiling!”

Then a voice, unfamiliar and creepy, whispered through the crack between the door and frame: “We’re coming through all right, but not through the ceiling.”

The door burst open, wood splintering, and Factboy tried to lift his laptop to serve as a kind of shield against the knife in the guy’s hand that was already—oh God, it was
already stained with blood …

“Families are fun,” Phil said. Jane nodded appreciatively. She was raiding the dead family’s freezer. Phil was thinking about the storyline to go with this Flagstaff slaughter.

To think they wasted all of those years copying other people’s stories. They could have been making up their own fun, crazy stories
this whole time
.

Jane pulled out ice cream, but Phil had to be the one to break it to her: There probably wouldn’t be enough time. They had a private jet to catch and a bigger, even
better
story to write on the way.

S
O THIS IS
where you are, at this exact moment in time:

You’ve got a dying body in the trunk, barely kept alive by life support—and thank Christ for the handy life support system in the trunk.

You’re speeding across the rest of the country, trying like hell to make it to Philadelphia before another death squad tries to cut you down.

Everything is hanging in the balance, an anvil on the head of a pin, teetering between your old life and the new one …

And you can’t help but be giddy.

Because your name is Charlie Hardie, and you’re about to save your family. This is what you were born to do. This is what the military trained you for, spending untold millions molding you into an unkillable specimen of human being. This is the sum of all of your life’s tough experiences, to do this one thing.

Save Kendra.

Save your boy, Seej.

You start to imagine what it’ll feel like when you hold her in your arms. Your lips against hers, soft and full. Her breath, hot in your ear. The texture and scent of her hair. You’ve been imagining it for a year now, ever since they started feeding you information about her. At first it was an academic game. To become Charlie Hardie, you must hate what he hates, love what he loves. His motivations must be hardwired into your nervous system. You relied on your imagination. At a certain point, your imagined encounters started to feel real.