James Patterson - Gone

Parker handed me some gloves and night-vision goggles from a bag of goodies she had brought with her, and we proceeded to toss the house. We were careful not to disturb anything. Not just because we didn’t want Scanlon to know, but because there were guns everywhere. A Taurus.380 in the bathroom cabinet, a.45 M1911 under the sink in the kitchen. A locked-and-loaded, fully automatic MAC-10 was taped to the underside of the night table in the master bedroom.

“Mr. Scanlon seems like a fairly cautious individual,” I whispered as I showed it to Agent Parker.

The treasure trove we found was in the closet of a bedroom that Scanlon used for an office.

On top of a case of printer paper, we found a dozen boxes of portable disposable cell phones. Half of them were empty.

The phones were the unregistered kind that narcotics dealers liked to use and throw away. What got our blood pumping was that the boxes with the missing phones still had the serial numbers on them. Our techs could contact the company, and we could put a trace out on every single one of them. If Scanlon had one in his pocket, we could find him, even if it was off.

“Please let this work,” Parker said as she snapped picture after picture of the boxes.

We spotted some guy crossing the street toward the house just as we were about to go out.

“Is it Scanlon?” Parker asked.

I quickly checked the passport photograph we had. The guy coming toward the gate looked young and was too dark and thin to resemble the blond, bearlike Scanlon.

We fished out our Glocks as the guy punched a code into the keypad beside the gate. It was evident that the guy was in his early twenties as he came through the buzzing gate and up the driveway. He was wearing white iPod earbuds.

“Whoever this guy is, he doesn’t seem to have a care in the world,” I whispered.

We stepped back as the guy keyed open the door.

As he closed the door behind him, I put my Glock to his brain stem. He bolted forward like he’d been Tasered and head-butted the door. A hiss of N-word-laced rap drivel cut the silence as I pulled out his earbuds for him.

“Don’t move,” I said.

“What is this? Who the hell are you?” the young man said.

“Who the hell are we?” I shot back, full of attitude. “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m Donny Pearson, from up the street. Tommy just called and said he’d be out of town for a few days and asked if I’d feed Christobel, man.”

Parker took out his wallet and nodded. I showed the guy my badge and holstered the gun.

“I got nothing to do with anything illegal. I swear to God!” Pearson said.

“Just listen to me, Mr. Pearson,” I said. “Did he call you on your cell or your house phone?”

“My cell,” he said, taking out his iPhone.

Parker took it and quickly compared the phone number Scanlon had phoned in on with the ones we’d found in the closet. Then she gave me a palm-stinging high five.

“Bingo was his name-o,” she said.

We were homing in on Perrine now. We could feel it.

On the way back to the hotel, I drove while Emily disseminated the intel to just about every card in the multi-jurisdictional Rolodex. The LAPD phone people got a call, as did the FBI, CIA, NSA, and even Gray Fox, the army Special Ops communication specialists.

Back in my hotel room, I stripped, sleepwalked through a hot shower, and proceeded to crash like the Hindenburg. I was facedown, still stone-dead asleep in the hotel bathrobe, when my phone rang ten hours later.

As it trilled, I blinked out the window at the bright sky behind a palm tree. Was it morning? Afternoon? I couldn’t figure it out. No wonder they call this place La-La Land , I thought, finally answering my phone.

“The goose just laid a four-hundred-troy-ounce gold bar,” Parker said excitedly. “They just got the signal on Scanlon’s phone. He’s in Orange County.”

Parker clued me in as we raced south down the Pacific Coast Highway.

The signal on Scanlon’s phone was coming from Newport Coast, a ridiculously affluent town an hour south of LA. The Gray Fox army com unit had done a flyby, and the house where they had triangulated Scanlon’s phone was in a development of ten-thousand-square-foot-plus houses off Newport Coast Drive, not too far from the world-renowned Pelican Hill Golf Club.

As Parker drove, I flipped through an old Realtor.com file the FBI had dug up on the massive mission-style mansion. I read in the report how the premier property had been owned by an energy-company billionaire but had recently been put up for rent due to ongoing divorce proceedings.

“Huge pool,” I said, nodding. “Ocean view, check and double check. It also says the interior decor was imported from an eighteenth-century château in Monpazier, in the south of France. This is feeling righter and righter, Ms. Parker. This seems to fit Perrine’s billionaire boulevardier tastes to a capital tee.”

Our rallying point was behind a Trader Joe’s off the Pacific Coast Highway, three miles south of the target. The assemblage of law enforcement officials that came together over the next hour was nothing short of dumb-founding. There was a command bus on site when we got there, and for the next hour, a nonstop wagon train of unmarked cop and federal-agent cars pulled into the lot. And this was just the civilian staging area.

A series of white vans brought in the FBI’s hostage rescue team. Watching them disembark, I noticed that there were two men with them who weren’t wearing FBI fatigues. They stood together, apart and aloof, big, fit-looking men with shaved heads and beards, dark sunglasses on under their drab olive ball caps.

I didn’t need Parker’s help to figure out that they were military, probably Delta Force. They were likely coordinating radio signals and whatnot between the civilian and military forces. Parker had already told me that the military was gathering somewhere else to coordinate an air assault.

As the invasion force mounted, Emily and I touched base with the other task force members. At a card table stacked with ammo, LA-office FBI agents Bob Milton and Joe Rothkopf were busy handing out vests and requisitioning M4 automatic rifles. Despite the obvious building pressure, the young agents were fairly unflappable. Serene, laid-back, California cool. They were acting as if they were waiting for a surfing competition to start down on the beach, on the other side of the PCH, instead of World War III.

I spotted Detective Bassman, on the other hand, pacing around the parking lot like an expectant first-time father. He was completely keyed up. He wouldn’t even make eye contact with Emily and me, let alone talk to us. I could just about read the big man’s mind as he bounced around in a state of semi-shock. He’d had his hands on perhaps the greatest rocket boost his career would ever know, and he’d gone and handed it away to a Feeb and a bum from the NYPD.

If I had any last qualms about how serious the authorities were in dealing with the Perrine problem, they were fully put to rest when I saw what swung into the parking lot just after dark.

On the back of a flatbed truck came none other than a twenty-ton-plus Bradley Fighting Vehicle. I stood there, gaping at the caterpillar-treaded troop-carrying tank, at the 25 mm gun mounted to the front of it.

“Well, well,” said Agent Rothkopf as he polished the lens of a nightscope beside me. “I don’t believe we’ll be getting outgunned on this one.”

“This is impressive,” I said, getting a little nervous at all the commotion. “I mean, we don’t even know if Perrine’s here.”

“Better to have some backup if he is,” Rothkopf said.

“Perrine wanted a war,” Emily said. “Time to see how much he can handle.”