Page 91 of Into the Fire

The First Commandment: Assume nothing.

Or in the case of this mission: Assume it can always get worse.

“One of my associates uncovered new files,” Evan said. “We’re going to go through them entry by entry and make sure there are no more surprises.”

Max said, “You have associates?”

It was, to be fair, an inflated term for a sixteen-year-old and an injured rescue dog in a Westwood one-room apartment. But Evan would take Joey over an NSA cyberwarfare group any day of the week.

Evan moved on. “When this is over, you’ll say that an assassin in Petro’s operation carried out the assault on the police station, that he killed Nuñez and Brust as part of the cover-up. He took you to force you to give up the thumb drive’s hiding place. But you managed to escape.”

“No one’ll believe that.”

“When we hand over files tracing all the payments to Nuñez and Brust, they will.”

“I don’t know,” Max said. “Every time you put down a threat, another pops up. And this thing, it keeps getting bigger and bigger.” His face, sallow in the ambient light, held a worn-through dread. “Imagine if Grant had never given me that thumb drive. Hour after hour I replay that scene in my head, and I think what if I’d just stood up for myself? What if I’d just said no? Was I that desperate for his approval? That desperate to show everyone that I wasn’t … I don’t know, useless? ‘Come on, Mighty Max. For once in your life, maybe step up, shoulder some responsibility.’” A bitter laugh escaped him. “And now I dragged Violet into it—Christ, just seeing me she has to relive it all, and I swore I’d never put that woman through anything ever again.” His voice quavered, his eyes brimming. “Now everywhere I look, someone’s trying to kill me, and I can’t do anything but hide in this fucking house.”

His voice rang off the walls. He lowered his head, eyes on the floor, his face coloring. Water dripped somewhere, an unnerving plink-plink-plink. The lights were off, the walls receding into darkness, so it seemed the space stretched out forever, a dank underworld.

“I’m sorry,” Max said. “You don’t need this.”

“Pick your head up,” Evan said sharply.

Max wiped at his eyes roughly.

And then he lifted his gaze.

“You had my back in that interrogation room,” Evan said. “Show yourself the same respect.”

“What’s that mean?” Max asked.

“‘Act like the person you want to be.’” It was one of Jack’s favorite quotations; just thinking of him put a rasp in Evan’s voice. “If we want to get through whatever’s coming, we’re gonna have to face it head-on.”

The protracted silence was broken only by more drops against the subfloor. When Max spoke again, his words were little more than a whisper. “I can’t see a way out anymore.”

Evan said, “Then I’ll find it for us.”

38

Worse to Come

Dog the dog backed into Evan, shoving his rear end into his thigh, demanding to be petted. It was crowded enough inside Joey’s workstation without a Rhodesian ridgeback wedged in along with them.

Evan scratched just below the ridge, and the dog curled his back with pleasure, his mouth wrinkling into a smile. His wounds looked to be healing nicely, the stitches almost ready to come out. A tube of Neosporin and a scattering of Q-tips lay on the floor in the corner; despite her objections Joey was taking good care of him.

Joey kept on at the keyboard resting in her lap, her shoulders rippling beneath a wife-beater tank top. “God, you two,” she said. “Get a room.”

Evan returned his attention to the monitors rising three high around the circular pod. Joey had hacked into reverse directories to source the 213 phone number Detective Nuñez had dialed. It belonged to a preloaded SIM card that had been bundled with a batch bulk-sold to an LAX shop three months prior. Now she was backtracking to see which cell towers had been pinged during the call, hoping to approximate a location for the recipient.

Petting the dog, Evan did his best to quell his impatience. The mission had turned into a game of Follow the Turing Phones. Terzian’s had led to Petro’s had led to Nuñez’s, each electronic slab a nerve-racking blank slate that held the promise of worse to come. Bathed in the unstirred heat of the apartment and the steady clacking of Joey’s progress, Evan felt a familiar unease. Like they were reeling up a lure from the shadowy depths, unsure of what was tugging on the line.

The slats of the vertical blinds were angled skinny. Wee-hours blackness blanketed the panes, pinpricked by a few streetlamps. The room had the sticky-sweet smell of convenience-store food—candy bars, Red Vines, Dr Pepper—with an overlay of canine funk. Evan was debating how to extract himself from Dog to open a window when Joey said, “I can’t believe you busted into a police station.” She shook her head and grinned, that hair-thin gap in her front teeth making her look once again like a goofy kid instead of the young woman she was slowly, relentlessly becoming. “Damn, you a maniac, X.”

“That’s the job,” he said.

“To boldly go where no man has gone.” Joey looked at him over a shoulder sculpted with muscle, still typing away. He wondered how she ate the way she did and maintained her rock-solid form, and then he remembered she was sixteen. The rat-a-tat-tat of the keys took on an aggressive edge. “To do anything for your clients. To go anywhere.”

The caustic note caught Evan off guard. “Sure,” he said.