Gregg Hurwitz - Prodigal Son

Like, say, breaking and entering at the house of a murder suspect in a high-profile case.

Reconsidering the consequences, he veered off from the front door to the side of the house. He’d just check the backyard, peek in a few windows, nothing invasive.

Blackout shades protected the panes, giving up nothing. The small backyard was a work in progress, too, the crumbling patio replaced at one corner with new tiles. The remaining tiles waited in a lowboy dumpster puddled with rainwater. A jungle gym, half assembled by the rear fence, collected spiderwebs. As with the rain gutters, these projects had been halted abruptly sometime ago—certainly well before Duran had disappeared. What had caused him to abandon the home repairs? And the jungle gym, clearly purchased with eleven-year-old Sofia in mind?

A yellowed newspaper fluttered beneath an unlit citronella candle on the patio table. It was written in a foreign alphabet rich with circles and right-angle strokes. Korean.

Was Duran dating a Korean woman?

Did he have a Korean houseguest?

Keeping an eye on the drawn shades of the back windows, Evan stepped beneath the lattice roof of the porch and slid the newspaper free. The date at the top was rendered in both Hangul and English. Five weeks old. Beneath the paper was a junk flyer with a yellow post-office sticker forwarding the mail of Chang-Hoon Baek to this address.

Evan assembled a theory. In need of money, Duran had sublet his house to Mr. Baek, abandoning his home-improvement projects when he moved out. Judging from the take-out menus accruing on the front porch and the five-week-old newspaper, Mr. Baek had been out of town since before Duran went underground.

The cops would’ve already searched the house for Duran, figuring out what Evan was only now learning: that they were in the wrong place.

Evan paused abruptly, sensing something amiss. Was someone watching him from the darkness at the yard’s edge?

He looked for a crack of light beneath the drawn shades. A breeze picked up, whispering through the yellow leaves gathered at the base of the porch. They silenced.

He heard it then, a telltale buzz branded into the memory center of his brain.

You never forgot that sound.

Not even here, wildly out of context, eight thousand miles and an ocean away.

It was as faint as a bee, now a touch louder.

Incoming.

He stood frozen, staring up through the lattice roof at the clear night sky.

Then his knees unlocked.

He took three big strides across the porch and launched himself at the lowboy dumpster.

A whooshing noise filled the air all around now, as if the sky itself had drawn a massive breath.

He cleared the 18-gauge-steel lip and crashed down on top of the stacked tiles an instant before the house exploded.

15A Million Pieces of Evan

The lowboy dumpster rocked up nearly onto one side and then crashed back down, a cascade of tiles battering Evan’s shoulders. He boxed his head with his arms, blinking against the dust. The sky had turned desert brown, the air filled with flecks and splinters.

He dragged himself over the edge of the dumpster and flopped flat on the ground, his head throbbing. The house was gone, a heap of tinder and flame in its place. Half a bathtub nosed up from the rubble like a breaching whale. A tangle of ducting, twisted improbably into a yarnlike ball, smoldered inside flapping sheaths of insulation. A crater dented the earth at the center where the house had taken the full force of the missile. Black smoke lingered over the site, a miasma of gloom.

Shrapnel was embedded in the outside wall of the dumpster, protruding like porcupine quills. The jungle gym by the rear fence was gone, as was the rear fence itself; the wreckage of both floated in the neighbor’s pool. The air tasted poisonous. It smelled of burning rubber and plastic, a scent familiar to Evan. The only thing missing was the acrid reek of burning flesh. His head hummed, his eardrums throbbing distinctly enough that he could feel the pressure of each heartbeat.

A drone strike. On U.S. soil.

He pictured it circling invisibly two miles overhead waiting for the blossoming smoke to clear, a seamless extraterrestrial aircraft the size of a Volvo, held aloft by a modified snowmobile engine. A silver-gray assassination weapon with a smooth windowless bulb where a cockpit would be, at once eerily blind and all-seeing. Gauging the blast radius, he figured the missile to be a Hellfire launched from a Predator. Fifteen to twenty meters of damage meant they were intent on getting the job done. Even if that meant deploying a seventy-thousand-dollar missile.

They could have gone with a Reaper, faster and smaller, and its Small Diameter Smart Bomb, which could kill a man in the bedroom while sparing his wife in the neighboring kitchen. But here at Andrew Duran’s house, they clearly didn’t want to take any chances.

The ultra-high-resolution infrared camera in the rotating sensor ball beneath the Predator’s nose would be scanning the area now, heat-sensing body outlines, while other surveillance gear searched cell-phone signals, logged SIM cards, even read license plates on the surrounding streets. At the first sign of life, a software program aptly named BugSplat would calculate the best angle of attack and analyze collateral damage. Then a pilot in a trailer somewhere would be cleared hot to deploy the second Hellfire, a sensor operator would sparkle the target with an infrared flash, and a million pieces of Evan would join the incinerated debris filling the air.

Unless he moved fast.

The dust cloud continued to mushroom, and Evan knew he had to stagger free before it dissipated. His shirt was torn, the brim of his baseball cap scorched. He reached into his pocket and thumbed the RoamZone off, removing any digital signature from consideration. Rather than stumble out of the splash zone, he clawed his way into the heart of the wreckage, using the smoke as cover. His palms and knees burned as he fumbled around for what he was looking for. Over the sound of his own hacking, he could hear people shouting from the street, tires screeching, car alarms shrilling all up the block.

A crowd would be useful to lose himself in.

Grit lodged in his eyes, tears streaming down his face. At last his hands sank into something soft and scratchy.

The duct insulation.

One-inch fiberglass with foil facing.

He tore a massive sheet free. Wrapped it around himself to block his body’s heat signature. The fiberglass dug at his raw skin and his scalp as he hobbled across the ruins, finally reaching level ground.

He moved across the backyard, through the blown-down fence, past the neighbor’s pool, and up the side yard. Emerging on the far street, he shot up an alley, drawing a few stares. Ditching the fiberglass cape, he tossed his baseball cap into a trash can and popped out another block over, walking leisurely up the sidewalk, keeping tight to the storefronts, tucked beneath awnings.

He imagined the Predator ten or fifteen thousand feet up, watching bodies streaming around the accident site in real time, trying to locate which one was Evan.

And that’s when it occurred to him.

They hadn’t been aiming at Evan.

With his hat pulled low, his long-sleeved shirt, and his average build, he resembled Andrew Duran. They’d been watching the house from above, waiting on Duran’s return. And the instant he’d surfaced, they hadn’t been willing to delay to deploy an assassin for a controlled neutralization. They were willing to risk tens of thousands of dollars and a massive cover-up just to take Andrew Duran off the chessboard.

Which prompted the question, what the hell did that guy know?

They’d no doubt watched Evan circle the house earlier and disappear beneath the roof of the back porch.