Gregg Hurwitz - Prodigal Son

“What are we looking for?” Andre said.

“Eyes up,” Evan said. “Watch the street.”

He rose so his gaze came level to the desk. Crumbs, mouse pad, keyboard, outdated Dell Inspiron desktop, chipped coffee mug, legal pad shaved down to a few sheets and covered with doodles. He checked behind the computer and then turned, frustrated.

The file cabinet.

Rising on tiptoes, he gazed across the dust-layered metal top.

There it was, resting toward the back, expended.

He reached carefully, picked it up by a fragile metallic wing, and placed it on his palm.

When he pivoted in the tight space, Andre was waiting, his stare locked on the item resting in Evan’s hand. “Did you just find a motherfucking metal dragonfly ?”

“It’s a KAM.”

“Come again?”

“A kamikaze assassination microdrone.” Evan gazed down at the delicate robot on his palm. Amazingly lifelike, easily mistaken for an actual dragonfly. It weighed no more than an AAA battery. The slender body, the size of a snap pea, wore a tiny processor like a backpack. Beautiful translucent wings veined with carbon-fiber, camera and microphone mounted on the head, copper electrodes visible beneath the metallic blue polyamide coating.

Protruding from the face was a wicked-looking stiletto blade, about an inch and a half in length, its silver tip colored with bright arterial blood.

Hargreave’s.

Andre reached a finger to poke at the dragonfly but couldn’t seem to muster the courage to actually touch it. “They stabbed him with this ?”

Evan pictured the surveillance footage Joey had produced, Declan holding out his hand as a launch pad, the near-invisible KAM taking flight from his palm. And his attempt to recall it after it had taken out Hargreave.

“Yes,” Evan said, tilting the wings to the light. On the underside a tiny etched logo featured an M with wings sprouting from the letter’s outer downstrokes. “These things can fly, hover, and perch. Some of them can even store a solar charge and stay afloat indefinitely. We got lucky that you locked it inside the kiosk. And that you weren’t in there when it came in to puncture your throat.”

“Who the hell are these people?”

Evan slid the microdrone into one of his cargo pockets and pressed past Andre, relieved at the rush of fresh air greeting his face. “That’s what we have to figure out.”

Andre skip-stepped to hold pace at Evan’s side. “So drone people killed Hargreave. And drone people blew up my house. And Hargreave was a drone pilot.”

“Which is why I have to talk to his sensor operator ASAP, find out why they were discharged a few months ago.” Evan approached the wrecked Bronco bookending the nearest row of vehicles. It was a sorry lineup: a VW Bug missing two tires, a Ferrari with a front trunk twisted open from a collision, the carbon-fiber lining giving off a stoical gleam.

“I’m going with you,” Andre said. “To talk to the sensor operator.”

A MINI Cooper puttered by on the road ahead, and Evan halted, reaching back to put a hand on Andre’s chest. He waited for the car to pass and then resumed walking.

“No,” Evan said. “And watch the street.”

He passed in front of the Bronco’s smashed grille, his Original S.W.A.T. boots grinding over glass pebbles. He tugged at the passenger door, which gave with some resistance.

Andre hovered at his back. “What are you doing now?”

“This is where Hargreave was looking before you interrupted him.”

“Right,” Andre said.

Evan knuckle-tapped the pine-tree air fresheners dangling from the rearview, sending them into a twirl, and then searched the top of the dashboard. Nothing.

His gaze caught on a sticker adhered to the inside of the windshield. He swung out of the truck and looked at it through the glass. An elaborate security hologram of the air force base’s insignia—a robotic set of wings rising from a five-pointed star.

He leaned close. The hologram was elaborate and—given the drone innovators’ capability with and fondness for lasers—no doubt embedded with covert laser readable imagery. The features hidden inside the hologram could be verified only at a security checkpoint with a control device endowed with proper input illumination.

They’d let Hargreave keep it on his windshield to lure him back.

It had worked.

Rendered in white against white at the bottom corner, as subtle as a watermark: INS NORTH.

It took a moment for Evan to recognize the capital letters as the Federal Aviation Administration three-letter identifier for Creech Air Force Base.

But this was slightly different.

Not Creech. Creech North . Evan had never heard of it.

He whipped the Strider out of his pocket, the refined-grain particle blade clicking open, and Andre took a step back. “Whoa, Nelly,” he said.

“Watch the street.” Evan leaned back into the cabin and gently sawed the knife beneath the sticker’s edge. The corner popped up, and then he was able to pinch it and peel it free intact.

It disappeared into another cargo pocket.

Andre slapped one hand with the other. “So that’s what Hargreave came back for.”

Leaning back, Evan saw that the Little Tree air fresheners had stopped spinning, revealing a visitor parking pass hung in their midst.

He slipped the permit hanger free. CALIFORNIA VETERANS REINTEGRATION CENTER. One-day pass. The heavily guarded compound in Fresno where Hargreave’s sensor operator was being rehabilitated.

Something behind Evan clicked, shifting the shadows.

His head snapped over, his hand moving toward his holster, but it was just the motion-sensor lights turning themselves off in the kiosk. He untensed his back muscles, then straightened up.

Over Andre’s shoulder a set of headlights flared at the intersection. As the car continued in the direction of the open front gate, Evan made out the model.

A Tesla Model S.

Tinted windows.

Like the one that had passed them earlier.

Midnight silver instead of pearl white. Different license plate. Los Angeles was lousy with Teslas.

And yet the First Commandment spoke up in the back of Evan’s mind: Assume nothing .

His body stayed on alert, Andre keying to it. “What?”

“I told you to watch the street,” Evan said.

At the far end of the facing road, another Tesla turned into view. And then another. The third plate Evan recognized.

The vehicles sped up, converging on the open front gate.

33Search and Destroy

Evan’s pistol was in his hand instantly, his Woolrich tactical shirt still gaping at the belly where he’d reached straight through it for his holster. The faux buttons were held together by magnetic closure, the halves now refinding their mates, the shirtfront clapping back together.

At his side Andre made a strangled noise that barely emerged from his lips.

Evan pulled him down behind the Bronco and ran a quick calculation. Eight rounds in the magazine, one in the spout. His cargo pants had low-profile inner pockets on either side hiding an extra mag, which put twenty-five rounds within reach.

He’d recently upgraded to Gorilla Silverbacks. The Silverbacks had excellent terminal ballistics with huge cavities in the ogive and premachined fracture lines that allowed them to expand rapidly to two and a half times the original caliber. When the hygroscopic effect was elicited, they basically turned into grappling hooks, punching a hole big enough to vastly increase the chances of hitting something vital. A downside of the expansion was that they didn’t always defeat soft body armor, which called for precision shooting—throat, head, pelvic girdle. But he preferred them in situations with noncombatants present, since he didn’t want his rounds going through walls into the next room or through the intended target into a no-shoot.