Chapter Two
Quinault Rain Forest, Washington State, Pacific Coast
Present Day
THE RINGING IN Walker’s ears was so loud and shrill that it was almost physically painful.
That was fucking stupid, he thought, looking at the books on his shelves as if they would speak to him.
He laid the pistol to his side on the sofa bench seat and leaned forward, setting his elbows on his knees and pressing his palms to the side of his head.
Just some ringing.
The noise shifted in tone and Walker lifted his head, running his fingers through his hair.
His eyes went to the bullet hole in the headliner, thinking that the rain would soon seep into the mattress above and would eventually start to drip into the interior.
Is there anything you don’t fucking ruin?
That bullet is going to come down somewhere, you selfish son of a bitch.
The buzzing in his brain gave way to the sounds of Paladin scratching at the door.
Paladin, from the knights of Charlemagne’s court; a champion for a cause.
Was Walker that cause?
He leaned to the side and opened the sliding door. The dog leaped in, tail wagging, and bound into Walker’s lap, licking his face while whining as if the two had been separated for months instead of minutes.
“Okay, Pal, it’s okay. I’m all right.”
Paladin, not convinced, slid to Walker’s side and curled into a ball, setting his chin on his guardian’s lap, looking up with soulful brown eyes.
Walker stroked Paladin’s head. “Thanks, boy. I’m okay for now.” Then he looked to the phone.
Leigh Ann.
He took a deep breath and dialed her number.
“Chris?” Leigh Ann Staub said after two rings.
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“Thank God.”
There was a brief silence as if neither party knew what to say.
Walker cleared his throat. What did you say to the widow of the man you were responsible for killing?
“Where are you, Chris?”
Leigh Ann had always been inquisitive.
“I’m uh…”
“Out of the country or something? You’re not back with the Agency, are you?”
“I’m still medically retired. Just a little remote. Pacific Northwest.”
“Sounds like there’s static on the line.”
“Rain on the roof. Ocean beyond windows. Storm’s rolling in off the Pacific.” His voice was gravelly and hollow.
“Are you alone?” The concern in her voice evident.
“I’m on an Indian reservation.”
“A reservation?”
“Yeah.”
Paladin gave a slight growl.
“Well, not quite by myself.”
“How are you, Chris?”
Walker’s eyes went to the pistol on the bench seat next to him and replied after two seconds of introspection. “I’m doing great.”
Chris knew the pause did not go unnoticed. Leigh Ann had always been in tune with other people’s mental states, far more so than her late husband. She had been the ballast in the Staub marriage.
“Yeah?” she asked gently. “How are you feeling?”
“You mean, how’s my head?”
“Well, yes. I’m a nurse, remember?”
The traumatic brain injury had been the final nail in his CIA career. “I didn’t forget. Head’s good.”
He glanced back at the gun on the seat beside him, his eyes traveling to the bullet hole in the ceiling. It had started to leak, the hole staring back at him like an accusation.
Leigh Ann’s tone shifted into nurse mode. “Blurred vision? Dizziness? What meds are you on?”
Walker had forgotten that Leigh Ann was a talker.
“Was just about to try a new one, actually,” he replied, his eyes going back to the 1911.
“Which one?”
“Nothing you’d recommend.”
“It’s good to hear your voice.”
“You too. Been a minute, hasn’t it?”
“Too long.”
“Leigh Ann, I’m so sorry, I…”
“No, we’ve been through this and that’s not why I’m calling.”
“Oh?”
“I reached out because something’s going on down here. God, it’s…”
“What?”
She coughed as if stalling for time.
“Connor… is…” A sharp breath.
“Leigh Ann?”
“I’ve got to get used to saying this.” She paused. “Connor’s dead.”
Walker’s spine stiffened. Paladin raised his head, sensing the shift.
Connor Staub. John and Leigh Ann’s son. Dead? Last Walker heard, the kid was headed to a master’s program at Columbia University Journalism School after finishing his undergrad at LSU.
As an NYU grad, Walker respected the move to the Big Apple, the ambitious swing. He had even taped an envelope to the cabinet with Leigh Ann’s name on it, meant to help with Connor’s tuition.
“He’s… how? When?”
Leigh Ann’s voice was muffled, as if speaking through gauze. “A month ago. He was chasing a story, his first real one. Wanted it to be big. An exposé. It got attention from the wrong people. He got too close.”
“He was murdered?”
Leigh Ann’s voice came through weaker now. “Yes.”
“Who did it?”
“I don’t know, I mean I do know.”
Walker could hear her sobbing.
He waited a few seconds before speaking.
“Leigh Ann, I am so sorry.”
Her sobs turned to deep breaths as she regained her composure.
“If there is anything I can do?” The words felt hollow.
A memory intruded, one of knocking on doors in his service dress blues. He pushed it away. That was a different life.
“There is, Chris.” Her voice was stronger now.
“Anything.” He saw John Staub looking up at him, knowing he would never make it home.
“I need you to find out who did it.”
“What? Leigh Ann, I’m not the police.”
“I know. That’s why I need you.” She paused, selecting her words. “John told me that if I ever needed help, you were the man to call.”
John’s blood pooled in the dust.
“Chris?”
“I’m here.”
“He said I could trust you.”
“You can.”
“Then help me.”
Walker looked back at the pistol. He could barely help himself.
“Do the police have any leads?”
“Yes.”
“Then why do you need me?”
“Because they were in on it.”
Walker closed his eyes. His jaw clenched. The ringing that had subsided surged in conjunction with a migraine, sharp and blinding. He pinched his temples.
“I need help, Chris. Connor was an only child. He was all I had after John died.”
And that was my fault, Walker thought.
He felt dizzy, but inside, the gyros began to turn.
“Tell me.”
“Connor worked on his investigation for more than a year,” Leigh Ann said.
“What kind of investigation?”
“An exposé on overdoses, the drug trade.”
“Fentanyl?”
“Maybe, but maybe worse. I don’t know. Connor thought it was something new. I’ve seen some of those kids rushed into the ER. Maybe a synthetic.”
Walker stared at the envelope, the one marked for Leigh Ann Staub, the one he had meant to be opened only after he was gone. The timing of her call spoke to him. Impossible? Absurd? Divine? Cruel?
Walker’s mind, always a battlefield for long dead philosophers, lit up with arguments.
Spinoza whispered about substance and attributes.
Schopenhauer reminded him that desire was immutable.
The Tao offered no comfort, only inevitability.
The pistol beckoned him. He could almost feel the cold metal that had nearly ended it all. And now her voice, alive, urgent, familiar.
Connor was dead. Just like his dad.
Connor Staub. The kid with ambition. Gone.
Walker couldn’t help but recall the main points of the NYU dissertation he had abandoned after Afghanistan, the debates on determinism versus free will.
His thesis supported the ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer, the German nineteenth-century philosopher who believed that while man’s actions are free, his predetermined, unchangeable desires are not.
A man could physically alter his actions, but not the core drivers of his soul.
As he listened, Leigh Ann’s voice cracked, steadied, and then cracked again as she painted a picture of Connor’s final months, his obsession with the story, the trail of overdoses, the coded journals, the bricks of heroin planted in his car. The cops said Connor was a dealer. The headlines agreed.
Walker closed his eyes.
Somewhere in the heavens, another thunderclap. Paladin barked and hopped off his seat. He stood in the narrow passage between the van’s sliding starboard door and port-side galley. Walker suddenly remembered the call.
The tribal cops. Shit.
“Leigh Ann, let me call you back. Give me one minute.”
He pressed END and then dialed another number.
“Quinault Nation Tribal Police.”
Time to put some of his CIA training from the Farm into use.
“I am so sorry,” he began, explaining that a drunk friend had taken his phone and called them earlier in a poor attempt at a practical joke. He assured them that his friend was now sleeping it off and that all was well. Annoyed, the dispatcher hung up. Walker called Leigh Ann back.
“Sorry about that. You were about to tell me how you know the cops had something to do with Connor’s death,” Walker said, bringing the conversation back on track.
“I have some of his notes, from the story he was working on.”
“Notes?”
“He kept journals.”
“And the journals point to police?”
Leigh Ann paused. “Not exactly. He wrote key items like places and people in a kind of code that I haven’t yet figured out. But there is something to do with bribes to people in high places. I can see that much. I think he was framed.”
“But it’s just notes? Did he ever discuss his project with you?”
“No. He kept me at arm’s length, telling me I’d get the big reveal when he was done.”
“I see.”
“Chris, I would not ask if I thought I had anywhere else to turn.”
And maybe because you know I can’t possibly say no, not after what I did to your husband. He pushed the thought from his mind.
You owe her, Chris. And you owe Connor.
Is that why you didn’t put a bullet in your brain?
“Journals,” Walker whispered.
“What? I think the connection is breaking up.”
“Nothing,” Walker said, thinking of the intercepted phone calls that had led to the deaths of terrorists on the Agency’s target list over the years. “Leigh Ann, give me your address. I’ll be there in a few days.”
After Walker had written down the address and said his goodbyes to a tearful and grateful Leigh Ann Staub, he stroked Paladin’s head, the rain still coming down in torrents.
I owe them.
“Dein platz,” he ordered, pointing to the front passenger seat.
Paladin sprang to the front of the van but positioned himself so as to keep a watchful eye on his master. The passenger seat worked on a swivel, facing aft when the vehicle was parked as it was now.
Walker removed an aluminum rod from under the table that allowed him to fold it out of the way, then he pushed himself off the bench seat that separated the cabin from the rear cargo area where a SCUBA tank was strapped against a thin vertical closet.
Fins, mask, snorkel, weight belt, and wet suit were in a nylon duffel under a deflated free-diving buoy and a Riffe Marauder speargun with a breakaway system and Kinetic Grip he had customized with his friend Brendan O’Malley for a trip down to Mexico was strapped to the ceiling.
He flipped the thin backrest into the cargo space and pulled the rectangular seating cushion off the bench seat to reveal a storage compartment with a push-button cipher lock.
Walker had constructed it himself. He punched in a four-digit code and swung open the hatch.
A traditional Osage orangewood bow, backed with western diamondback skins, he had crafted by hand with his SEAL teammate Trevor Thompson was seated in a cutout section of foam, along with arrows made from dogwood fletched with wild turkey feathers and wrapped in elk sinew, their points chipped from Texas chert and Oregon obsidian.
Stacks of cash separated by denomination sat in their own rectangular silos.
He lifted the foam insert out and set it in the rear cargo area.
The second layer held a 12-gauge Winchester Model 1897 trench gun with bayonet, a pre-64 Winchester Model 94 .30-30, a Colt Single Action Army “Peacemaker” in .45 Colt, and an empty right-angle cutout for the 1911 that had been pressed to his head twenty minutes earlier.
Walker picked up the pistol he had almost used to end his life, felt its weight in his hand.
He heard Paladin growl behind him.
“Not today,” he whispered as he pressed it into the foam.
He let his fingers linger on its cold steel a moment.
The final layer was one he had not visited since he had hidden the items there years earlier when he returned home after he had lost John Staub.
He hesitated. He had used the bow and the .
30-30 many times over the years, hunting as he explored the country.
The 1911 had been his carry pistol, yet he had never gone into the last layer of his vault.
Much like what was hidden in his soul, he knew what was there, but he dared not expose it.
The tools of his previous life opened the door to darkness.
Then why had he kept them?
Maybe because it was fate that he would need them again?
He took a breath and pulled the heavier second layer out, sliding it on top of the first one in the rear cargo area. Then he looked down at the final tier.
Embedded in the foam were the weapons of his former trade.
He set his hand on the Bravo Company Recce-16 rifle in .
300 Blackout with Huxwrx suppressor topped with a Vortex Razor 1-6x24 scope and throw lever.
Affixed to the top rail was an L3Harris ATPIAL infrared aiming device, and on the left side was a SureFire Mini Scout light.
A Viking Tactics sling was attached. Just below and to the left of the rifle was his Ops-Core ballistic helmet with PVS-14 monocular night optical device, a NOD.
He found himself wishing he had snagged a PVS-15 or 31 or, even better, a GPNVG18 panoramic four-tuber before he left the Agency, but someone may have missed that one.
He had sometimes used the monocular as a staff officer at GB because as the ground force commander he found it easier to manipulate the radios in the vehicles to communicate with the Agency’s experimental manned and unmanned aircraft when on target.
No helping that now. Next to the helmet and NOD was a Glock 19 with Trijicon HD Night Sights and an Al Salvitti–designed Regiment Blade with wood grips in a low rider sheath.
He removed the pistol and knife and set them to the side.
Then, with the bench seat lifted, Walker grabbed the envelopes from the galley cabinets, the envelopes that contained his death letters, and raised the last layer of foam, stuffing them underneath.
“For another day.”