Afterburn, page 18
Her father sat across the table, the rifle still pointed in Alton’s direction. He appeared to be older than his wife, maybe seventy, with a gaunt face and Kiara’s high cheekbones and white hair that stuck straight up. The dog, sandy white with rough-looking fur, was his doppelgänger.
“When did they let you out?” she asked him, as she set milk and sugar and spoons on the table.
“They didn’t,” he said. “I escaped. A few days ago.”
“On the one hand, good for you,” said Howard. “On the other, we’re none too pleased that you came straight here.”
“What was it like?” Geraldine asked.
Alton gazed around the kitchen. Fresh-baked bread cooled on the counter, and a tin of cookies sat above the stove. Three or four well-used throw pillows filled out a window bench. The place smelled of mint leaves and tomato soup. “You miss the little things,” he said, absently rubbing his crew cut. It was a strange thing to get used to.
She brought three mugs over and joined them at the table. The warm aroma of the tea made him feel a little less brittle after his virtual electrocution.
“You get that done in there?” Howard asked.
“My augmentation?”
“Yeah.”
He shook his head. “I got this done in Los Angeles yesterday.”
He looked taken aback. “Yesterday?”
“Yes, it was mandatory for me to join the team.” He looked down as he stirred milk and sugar into his tea in case Howard could tell he was lying.
“Where is the team?” Howard said.
Alton took a sip, eyed the rifle over the rim of his mug. “Not too far from here.”
“How many?”
“Ten total.”
Howard looked at his wife as if to say, What did I tell you?
“But we’re not here for you. We just want to find Kiara. She may need rescuing.”
Howard snorted, and Alton got the gist. Kiara never needed rescuing in her life. Geraldine gazed without expression into her mug. It had started to rain, and the drops pattered against the darkened window. The dog scratched its ear.
Finally, Howard said, “You didn’t bring a special ops unit to our front door just to rescue our daughter.”
“We’re after him too. But to bring him in, not to kill him.”
Howard shook his head. “He’ll never let that happen.”
“I don’t think so either. Believe me, this wasn’t my idea.”
“Whose then?”
Alton hesitated, then said, “Rose Áquilar’s.”
Howard scowled, and Geraldine shook her head as though not surprised.
“I thought she and Kiara had a good relationship?” Alton asked.
“Maybe once,” Geraldine said. “But that woman used Kiara. Held her career back. Not that it matters now.”
Alton caught Howard shooting a look of warning at his wife, and he was struck by an intuition. “She’s been here recently, hasn’t she?” he asked.
Geraldine nodded. “A few weeks ago.”
“What did she come for?”
Her face darkened. “To say goodbye.”
“Geraldine!” Howard banged his hand on the table, sloshing tea from the mugs. The dog looked up with a start.
“Not that she said it outright,” she said. “But it was pretty obvious that wherever she’s going—wherever they’re going—it’s meant to be permanent.”
“His team is out there listening!” Howard said.
Now, it was her turn to raise her voice. “Good! Tell them everything, and maybe we’ll see her again!”
“That’s not what she wants!”
“She doesn’t know what she wants! She’s always been under the sway of that boy.”
“No,” said Howard. “She’s just as smart and calculating as he is. More.”
Alton’s mind raced. Had Alex and Kiara planned some sort of suicide mission, some doomed lovers’ final hurrah? Did they think they might not escape the radius of their next bomb? Was Guerrero finally closing in on them? Then he remembered what Sally and Lorna had revealed.
“Kiara told me that she was raised by her grandparents, that her parents were dead,” he said. “I believed that for years. Do you know why she would lie about something like that?”
Geraldine had brought the kettle over to refill their cups. On her way back to the stove, she deftly plucked the rifle from the table and leaned it in a corner. “Because we were dead to her. For a while,” she said.
“What happened?”
She looked at her husband, who sighed and reluctantly began to speak. “Kurt and I were close when we were young,” he said.
Alton remembered Kiara telling him that she and Alex’s parents had known one another.
“Then he went into combat,” Howard continued. “That skirmish over the Yellow Sea, back in the thirties. The war ended quickly, but something happened to him over there because he was completely changed when he came back. Started to get into all kinds of secretive, paranoid shit. Then he met a girl and got married, and they had Alex. He seemed to be back to his old self. For a while, anyway. A few years later, when we had Kiara, they moved near us so we could raise the kids together. It ended up being a bad idea.”
“Why?”
“Alex and Kiara ran around that neighborhood thick as thieves when they were kids. It was a reasonably happy time. But Kurt got restless again. He started to get weird visitors, military types, ex-cons, motorcycle gangs, white priders, who knows what all, and we could tell that Darlene—that was his wife—was scared.”
He paused, seeming lost in the memory, and Geraldine took over. “One day, she was up and gone,” she said. “Kurt swore she had left him for another man, but we knew that wasn’t true. We still have no idea what really happened to her.”
Alton nodded, remembering what Alex had told him in his bedroom that night when they were kids. No place in their home for nonbelievers.
“So, how did you end up here?”
“Kurt kept trying to get me involved in his activities. But I’m not like him. Live and let live, I say. I don’t care about color, nor creed. This garbage has been going on forever. I want this nation healed.”
“And we didn’t want Kiara in that environment,” Geraldine added. “With those crazies. And Alex not having his mother.”
“It must have been tough for her to leave her best friend to move up here.”
They looked at each other. “Which best friend?” Geraldine asked.
“Alex.”
“Son, Kurt is my brother,” Howard said.
Alton’s mouth fell open. Alex and Kiara are first cousins?
“It was easier to overlook how unnaturally close they were when they were kids,” Geraldine said. “But as they got older, not so much, and we could see where things were headed. So, we got her out of there.”
The rain had become more insistent on the window. They sat, listening to it for a few moments while Alton absorbed the news. He thought of that summer evening at the launch, Alex and Kiara on the picnic blanket in a deep embrace. They had seemed to devour one another.
“She wouldn’t forgive us,” Geraldine continued. “Wouldn’t take to this new life. Not that it was much of a life for a young girl. I can see that now.” The regret was stark on her face.
“She started threatening to run away the moment we got here,” said Howard. “We knew she would go to him. When Kurt and Alex relocated to LA, at least it worked out that we could send her to live with Sally and Lorna. Thank God for those two.”
It had started to feel late. He wondered how long they had been sitting there. His head throbbed, and he was suddenly very tired. He noticed the dog had left the room, probably to curl up somewhere. How nice it would be to follow it upstairs to some dusty loft—maybe even Kiara’s old room—pull the comforter up around his eyes and hibernate among her old secrets. Let those fuckers spend the night in the wet cold.
But the fuckers had different ideas. And if the dog had been sleeping, he wasn’t now because he began to bark. Howard jumped up much faster than Alton thought he could at his age and snatched the rifle from the corner.
“Wait!” Alton yelled and ran out in front of him. He opened the door in a whoosh of cold mist to find a dark figure standing there.
“Get down!”
He wasn’t even sure who had yelled it, but he leapt aside and onto the hardwood floor just as Howard fired right through the screen door. He heard the grunt of the wind being knocked out of somebody and then a heavy toppling, like a bag of baseballs being thrown down some cellar stairs.
The ragged screen door was ripped entirely from its hinges, along with part of the frame, and Valeria, glimmering arctic blue, stepped through the threshold. She wrenched the rifle from Howard and sent him tumbling across the room with the flat of her other hand. As though the gun was a Styrofoam prop, she broke the rifle in half over her knee and hurled the pieces into the rain.
Next, she turned on Geraldine, but the older woman had grabbed the dog and was clutching him in a corner. When Valeria saw that they were neutralized, she went out again.
Alton scrambled through the splintered frame after her to find Eli blown off the porch into a jumble of ferns. Two of the team were helping him up. He appeared to be fine, as the TALOS had deflected or absorbed the blast. His chest was dusted with crushed rock salt.
When Alton saw that he was okay, he turned to Valeria. “What the fuck?”
“You’re having tea while we get pissed on in the bushes.”
“I was getting the info we need!”
“Too slowly,” she said, stepping back inside. Geraldine had shut the dog in the kitchen and was attending to Howard on the floor. Valeria leaned over them, glowing like a cobalt demon.
“Where are they?” she snarled.
“Jesus,” Alton said and got between her and them. He crouched down. “Is he okay?”
Geraldine looked grim but nodded. Alton helped her get him up onto a sofa. Eli had entered along with several of the other commandos. Cold rain was pouring into the front room.
“Can somebody close that?” Alton said.
Valeria slammed the door. “Everybody all comfy, now?” she asked. “Then how about some answers?”
Geraldine looked up, defiant. “We don’t know where they are, and we wouldn’t tell you if we did.”
From her wrists, Valeria launched web cuffs onto Howard. When he tried to stand, she launched another pair around his ankles, and he sank back into the couch.
“Goddamnit,” Alton said. “They were helping!”
She turned on him. “Ask Eli how he feels about their help.”
Eli’s face was drained, and he was still too short of breath to respond.
“We got more than enough to pack you off right now,” she said. “Collaborating with the enemy, for starters. I haven’t been in one myself, but I’m sure white boy here can tell you the camps aren’t exactly tailor-made for old folks.”
Geraldine scowled at her. “Maybe my brother-in-law was right about you people,” she spat.
“No, Geraldine,” Howard said. “That’s not who we are.”
Eli stepped forward. “Come on, Val,” he said, still trying to get his wind back. “Let’s not get carried away.”
She shook her head in disgust but extinguished Howard’s cuffs.
“Do you mind if I sit down?” Eli asked, rubbing his chest. He lowered himself into an old wooden rocker and said, “As I’m assuming you know based on his recent transmission, Hagen—Alex, I mean—looks ready to drop his next cataclysm on the world. We would really like to stop him before we all find out whatever it is together.”
Howard leaned forward, massaging his wrists. “You’re wasting time. If you think he’s up here, why not send a battalion?”
“If the president finds out, he just might.”
“What do you mean if he finds out? Didn’t he send you?” Geraldine asked.
“Christ, they’re a damn splinter cell,” Howard said.
“That’s right,” Eli said. “Some of us would prefer not to desecrate American soil with yet another battlefield if we can help it. Our group is trying to prevent that.”
Howard nodded.
“We want to capture him and let the courts do their jobs,” Eli continued. “The hope is that by doing this with minimal violence, we can leverage enough public and political will to close the camps, start doing some healing.”
Healing. It was the second time the word had been uttered that evening, and it struck something unexpected in Alton.
“Why wouldn’t Hagen’s men just keep on fighting without him?” Howard asked.
“That’s a possibility,” said Eli. “But let’s start with the head of the snake and see what we can accomplish.”
“They’re up in the mountains somewhere,” Geraldine said. “We’ve never known exactly where.”
“You’ve never known?” Alton asked. “How long have they been up there?”
“Kiara didn’t want to have anything to do with us when she first moved away,” she said. “But the summer after high school, and whenever she had a break at college, she would base camp here for a few days, then backpack up into the mountains.”
That would have been just after the attack on the Torreses’ compound, Alton thought, when everybody was hunting Alex—LAPD, FBI, ATF, DHS, probably other acronyms he didn’t even know existed. They hadn’t found him because he’d been way up in the backcountry. Alton was back East at college by that time and had no idea what was happening with either of them.
Eli wrinkled his brow. “Base camp?”
“Visit with us. Have meals. Pretend we were a family again. But it was all just to keep things civil between us so she could use this place as a jumping-off point to get up there, which she would do for days or even weeks at a time.”
“And she was going to see him?” Eli asked.
Howard nodded. “She must have been. Even though she claimed to be camping alone.”
“And you were okay with that?” Alton asked. “It’s got to be pretty harsh terrain back there.”
“Like I said before, Kiara does what she wants. And she was an adult by then.”
“You’ve known all this time where he was, and you didn’t report it?” Valeria said.
“You don’t have children,” said Geraldine. It wasn’t a question.
“Doesn’t change the fact that you have blood on your hands.”
Eli gestured at her to back off. “I have children,” he said. “I get it.”
“Anyway, we only suspected where they were,” Howard said. “That’s not the same as knowing. There’s five hundred thousand square acres of wilderness back there.”
“All we can do is point you in the direction she went on those trips,” Geraldine added. “We have no idea how far back they are.”
“Will you do that for us?” Eli asked.
They looked at each other and came to an unspoken agreement.
“Bring him in if you can,” Howard said. “It’s time for all this to end.”
CHAPTER 34
Two of the team stayed behind to watch Geraldine and Howard in shifts, to make sure they didn’t try to warn Alex or Kiara or alert some other authorities to their presence in the area. That left eight of them to start up the wet, dark mountain. A meager force, and woefully insufficient for what likely lay ahead, Alton thought, as they picked their way into the black woods behind the house where Kiara had set off on her journeys to meet Alex.
He imagined what it was like for them, fleeing the world, just the two of them, the sky and the stars and the snow. Kiara would have known what Alex was capable of by then, after Bernardo. Clearly, she was all in by that point. But if she was willing to overlook Alex’s moral culpability, Alton had been just as willing to overlook hers when the two of them later got together in DC. People will justify any desire, he thought.
He felt sick at the thought of his own selfishness but not as sick as he felt thinking of them together up here, making love at the top of the world. It was crazy, irrational thinking, but it did make him wonder again how much of his hatred for Alex was based not on outrage but envy, jealousy, and regret.
He shook it off and put one foot in front of the other as they ascended the steep grade. Drones would be detected, so this was purely a walking gig, and a mostly blind one at that. One of the team, Gagné, of French Canadian descent—preferred pronouns they/them—knew mountain country well. They led the way, mapping the terrain and transmitting the route back on a closed channel into the team’s virtual map feeds. Built-in night vision allowed the group to see what was in front of and around them, but they still had little idea of where they were going without Gagné guiding them.
Even then, the route Gagné created was only a guess drawn from a slightly worn path that may or may not have been human-created. The team’s augmented hyper-senses were attuned to sounds and even smells that might point them in the right direction. But Alex had been disguising his tracks for years, with help from animals and weather and changing seasons.
“We could be out here for weeks doing this,” Alton groused. He had fallen behind, and Eli had fallen back with him.
“Yeah, so much for my kid’s birthday,” said Eli, kicking a rock.
Alton looked up the path to make sure they were relatively alone, then said, “We don’t have anything to worry about with Valeria, do we?”
“Like what?”
“She said she wanted to kill Alex at Áquilar’s. She believes in the camps. After what happened back there . . . I mean, do you think she might go rogue or something? Put us in danger?”
“We’re already in danger, and we’ve already gone rogue too. I suppose she could go double rogue?” He chuckled. “She can be a hothead, no doubt. But I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“Did something happen to her?”
“She doesn’t talk about herself much, but she doesn’t have to,” Eli said. “Things have been better for our generation, but all of us have family who were second-class citizens at some point. She’s probably still carrying a grudge for somebody.”
