Chapter 28
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Houston
Flint heard the garage door roll up and Scarlett’s SUV pull inside, meaning their phones were instantly squelched. Scarlett had established the protocol long ago. The safe house killed every signal that crossed into the garage.
“You don’t answer your phone anymore?” Scarlett said as she came through the garage door to the kitchen first.
Patterson followed, lugging his duffel. He dropped it against the wall and headed down the corridor to the bathroom.
Scarlett poured a cup of coffee from the fresh pot and stood in the kitchen. “What’s wrong with your phones? I tried both of you several times today. Were you on vacation or what?”
“Something like that,” Flint replied. “Let’s wait for Patterson so we don’t have to repeat.”
She cocked her head and gave him a quizzical look, but she didn’t object. Drake brought coffee to the table and took the seat he’d occupied earlier closest to the exit. He could watch the entire house from there, which Flint knew was the point.
Patterson returned, but he didn’t sit. “We’ve been in the car all day. I need to stretch.”
“You first,” Flint said. “Our report will take a while.”
“Okay. The hospital had the records I went down there for.” Scarlett sipped the coffee. “Nancy Bishop Keane was a patient at that hospital thirteen years ago. Confirmed. She was admitted for a drug overdose. Arrived by ambulance, spent four days as an inpatient, and then she was discharged.”
“Discharged means she walked out on her own,” Drake said. “Nobody picked her up?”
“We don’t know. All we know for sure is she was a patient there under the name Nancy Bishop, and she left alive.
I’ve got a file.” Scarlett inclined her head toward her bag.
“Nancy married Craig Keane. So we know now, for certain, that the woman who became Nancy Keane was alive in El Paso thirteen years ago and walked out of that hospital under her own power. That much came up in my deep dive into her pre-Gulfstream explosion background and now it’s confirmed by a second reliable source. ”
Flint said, “And the DNA report you used as a pretext for the interview with hospital personnel?”
“The autopsy samples from the Nora Weiss death were run and reported. If we ever find anything to match them against.” Scarlett nodded. “It’s a tool for later.”
Flint said, “You’ve got more, I’m sure. What’s the rest of it?”
“Oakley told me a woman in an El Paso bar gave her my name. Dark hair, about her own age. She said that’s how she knew to find me in Houston. She sent the envelope with the USB on the Gulfstream explosion that started all of this.” Scarlett said.
“So of course, you found the bar?” Drake grinned.
“Beto’s Bar,” Scarlett nodded again. “He’s owned the place twenty-six years. I showed him a photo of Oakley. He knew her on sight. She waited tables for him a couple of weeks, he paid her out of the register, and then one day she didn’t come back. He called her Carla.”
“What about the dark-haired woman who sent Oakley to find you?” Drake said.
Patterson responded this time. “There was no woman. The bar owner was clear on it. Oakley kept to herself, worked her tables, and went home. Nobody handed her Scarlett’s name. She made that part up.”
“But the rest was true?” Drake asked, draining his coffee cup.
“We confirmed what we could. She was in El Paso recently.” Scarlett looked from Drake to Flint. “She worked Beto’s Bar as Carla and sat at this table as Oakley. Positively identified from a photo I showed him.”
“And we also got something else,” Patterson said.
“The bar owner remembered two men coming through some weeks after Carla left. Same two guys who broke into my car in front of Flint’s place.
They showed him a photo of Nancy Keane. Beto said he’d never seen her before and we believed him. Seems like they did, too.”
“You mean the two goons who abducted you? The dead ones?” Flint said to confirm.
“Exactly,” Scarlett said. “But we now know there were six of them, including the pilot. Five are dead. Now we know they were in El Paso weeks before any of this, walking Nancy Keane’s photo around trying to find her.”
“Which means they thought she was still alive. Not dead on the Gulfstream,” Flint said, thinking it through. “They were looking for Nancy Keane and Kyle Patterson. So far, they haven’t found either.”
“Not a bad day’s work, even if it doesn’t get us where we need to go. Yet,” Scarlett finished his thought. “Your turn.”
“The Gulfstream first.” Flint kept it short and quick. “Gaspar confirmed the explosion was fast and started inside the cabin. Definitely a bomb. Sabotaged the plane before it took off and detonated over the Pacific where no one would ever find the pieces.”
“No doubt now. Craig Keane and the two pilots on board were murdered,” Drake said. “Our working theory is that Nancy Keane was an intended casualty.”
“Everyone on that airplane was murdered.” Flint looked at Patterson. “That’s the first thing.”
Patterson didn’t say anything. Flint figured he was waiting for the rest.
“The second thing is the phones we pulled off the goons. All four are the same handset. Gaspar says they have custom boards, custom hardware, most likely bespoke and built by one source. The phones have been trying to reach their network since we bagged them, and they keep a log of every address they reach for.” Flint held Patterson’s eyes.
“Gaspar searched the logs for your number. It’s been in there for weeks. ”
Patterson set the cup down without drinking.
“They’ve had access to your phone,” Flint said. “The calls made, numbers saved, maps pulled, records searched. All of it went through the network for those four phones. Probably since before you retired. Which means all the way back to Carterville.”
“Since I put Kyle’s SIM into a burner phone to read it.” Patterson said flatly. “That’s what put me on their radar.”
“Gaspar’s still checking. But the safest bet includes Kyle, all of your old contacts, Scarlett, Drake, me, and anyone else you’ve connected with since then.” Flint confirmed. “Every move you made, they tracked.”
Outside, a car went by on the street and the sound of it faded.
Scarlett spoke first. “Which means they know everything we did today, too.”
Patterson rubbed a hand down his weary face.
“Nobody at this table knew either, until Gaspar opened those phones,” Drake said.
“That’s a generous way to put it,” Patterson replied.
“Put your phones in here,” Flint handed them a shielded bag and didn’t let him sink into despair over it. They didn’t have the time. Patterson and Scarlett dropped their phones inside. “It’s done. We’re on new equipment from here on out. To be safe, everything before this moment is radioactive.”
“So where does that leave us?” Patterson said, asking for the next step.
“Here’s where I land on your brother. There are still three possible explanations.
” Flint pushed his cup aside. “One, the people Quinn sold drugs for found out he’d been hiding all these years as Craig Keane.
They killed Keane to bury the connection, and Kyle, chasing Quinn, walked straight into the middle of it.
Two, WITSEC had Quinn under protection as Keane.
Kyle got too close, so they shut Keane down to protect what they’d built.
Three, it was a private operation. Hired to make Quinn into Keane in the first place, and willing to kill anyone, Kyle included, who threatened to undo the work. ”
“You think it’s a private operation, don’t you?” Scarlett said. “We’ve never run into something like that before. Surely we would have, given our line of work.”
Flint was about to answer her when he saw Drake alert quickly at the end of the table as if he’d heard something suspicious.
“What is it?” Flint asked.
“Not sure yet,” Drake slipped out of his chair, pulled his weapon, and moved toward the sound.
Flint heard it then. A low mechanical rumble, coming through the wall the kitchen shared with the garage. The heavy garage door rolling up on its track.
Nothing should have been moving that door. Scarlett’s SUV was already inside. The four of them were in the kitchen and the seal should have kept the door down.
Flint moved to the kitchen window at the back of the house. He put the back of his hand against the blind and bent one slat down.
A man moved through the narrow run between the house and the fence. He was past the gas meter and moving toward where a back door would be, if the safe house had a back door. Which it did not.
He wore dark clothes, gloves, and carried a flat bag across his body. His head and face were covered with a balaclava revealing only his eyes.
“One man, side yard, coming around the back,” Flint said.
The intruder was still moving toward the garage door, but the door was rising for him anyway. Which meant he had a way to open the door from the outside. What was in the bag?
“Garage,” Flint shouted. “Let’s go. Grab whatever is essential and get into the SUV. Now.”
Nobody asked him why. Drake was already through the door to the garage with his weapon still in his hand. Scarlett came out of her chair, snagged the folder off the table, and grabbed Patterson by the arm. Flint came behind them. He left the kitchen door open.
The SUV was the safest place available. Armored body, armored glass, built to take a blast and keep its passengers as close to whole as possible. And there was nothing else.
The reinforced garage door rolled up like a freight train confined. Conversation was impossible. Weak light filled the widening gap at the bottom.
The SUV waited where Scarlett had parked it. Drake had the driver’s door open.
Scarlett went into the back and Patterson dove in after her.
Flint took the front passenger seat and pulled the door shut.
In the gap under the rising door, out in the yard, the man threw something in under the door. It skidded across the concrete, and Flint lost sight of it.
Drake already had the engine going. He put the SUV in reverse and stomped the accelerator.
The SUV rushed back and slammed into the overhead door which was still climbing its track. Steel ground against steel. The vehicle stopped instead of knocking the heavy door off the opening.
No time left to try again. Drake’s foot came off the gas and he braced for impact.
“Brace,” Flint yelled as he pushed his body into the seat and his head back against the headrest.
A moment later, the explosive detonated.
It blasted from the left with immense force.
The explosion lifted more than five tons of armored Mercedes off the concrete and hurled the vehicle sideways into the garage wall.
Flint’s body slammed against his harness and then against the door as the vehicle slid and the right side hit the wall and stopped.
The noise was enormous, beyond anything his ears could take in, and the pressure of it came through the armored glass and the armored panels but did not get inside.
The glass beside Drake went white with edge-to-edge cracks and held in its frame.
Then the SUV’s roof took the first weight, something heavy coming down on the armor above their heads and hammering it, and more behind that, and more again.
The vehicle settled under the load of it. Whatever was coming down on them kept coming down, until it slowed, and then the damaged roof held only the weight, pressing down, and it was still.
The SUV had held.
It sat canted on a floor that was no longer level, buried under what had been the house. Flint’s ears had quit. There was a high steady tone where his hearing had been and nothing under it. He pushed himself up off the console.
Scarlett was sitting up in the back seat.
There was blood on her face from a cut along the jaw where something inside the cabin had caught her, and she was wiping it out of her eye with the back of her hand.
She was moving, and the folder was still in her other hand.
Patterson was beside her, low in the seat, both hands pressed flat to the sides of his head, but upright.
Drake had his hands off his head and back on the wheel.
Four of them. All four moving.
Flint looked through the windows. The windshield was a pale broken web with the dark weight of the collapsed house pressed against the far side of it.
The side glass showed the same. Brick and splintered timber and the underside of a section of garage roof, packed against the vehicle on three sides.
The light in the cabin was what little of the day had worked its way down through the wreck through the rear window.
The man Flint saw in the back of the house had stood on the driveway. He threw the device under the door and walked away. He did the job. The house came down.
Except all four of them were still alive.
Drake put the SUV in gear and tried to move it.
Flint felt the engine take the load and the tires turned against the rubble. The vehicle didn’t move. Drake tried again, working the SUV forward and back. The SUV rocked in its place but didn’t climb out.
Scarlett leaned forward between the seats. She put her mouth close to Flint’s ear and pitched her voice to carry through the deafness.
“We’re not getting it out of here,” she said.
Flint looked at the wreck pressed against the glass.
Above the SUV, the house was burning. The street would soon be filled, first with neighbors, then with first responder trucks. How long would it take to reach them down inside the armored shell of the SUV?
They came for the house and everyone in it. Which meant they’d intended to finish all four of them at once.
Drake said something. Flint watched his mouth and got most of it. “They damn near killed us.”
Flint sat in the wrecked vehicle, buried in the wrecked house, with the three of them alive around him. They’ll find out their explosion didn’t work. And then they’d send the next thing.
There was nowhere to go and nothing to do but breathe in the dark and the dust and stay alive.