Gregg Hurwitz - Prodigal Son

“Appreciate it,” Evan said.

“Hey, it’s good to have an uncle in the furniture business.”

Evan loaded his magazines, slipped them into his cargo pockets, and snugged the ARES into his Kydex holster.

“I want a pistol, too,” Joey said. “I prefer a subcompact like a SIG P238, same reliability as a large frame—”

Evan said, “No.”

“You never let me do anything .”

“You’re standing in a semi-trailer filled with enough munitions to take out a Panzer division, and we’re riding off next to break into a military installation.”

“Right.” Joey popped her mouth. “Fair point.”

Evan squared to head out. “Tommy, you know anything about Creech North?”

Tommy paused, palm resting on the handle of the vault door, his face suddenly serious. “Where’d you hear about Creech North?”

“Thing I’m looking into.”

Tommy’s bird-nest eyebrows rose. “You’d best watch your taillights. We’re talking Area 6 now.”

“Area 6?” Joey said. “That like Area 51—Nevada and alien remains?”

Tommy nodded somberly. “Best way to cover a conspiracy is with a conspiracy. And 6 has long been a high-security testing site for unmanned aerial vehicles. Deep-black R ’n’ D with lots of private-sector overlap. That place doesn’t exist.”

“That’s okay,” Evan said. “Neither do I.”

“So where is Area 6?” Joey asked.

“Remote detachment northeast of the Yucca Flat test site,” Tommy said. “Right in that big expanse of bumfuckery between the 93 and the 95. Undeveloped, unincorporated, short private-jet flight to the geekdom of Silicon Valley and all that tech. You playin’ around with drones?”

“No,” Evan said. “But they’ve been playing around with me.”

“Hold up.” Tommy ambled past Evan, flattening him to a rise of crates with Hebrew lettering, and started digging through a trunk in the back. “Hold this.” He handed Joey a rocket-propelled grenade, which she admired gingerly. “And this.” Now she bobbled a white-phosphorus grenade. “Ah. Here we are.”

He walked back to Evan and pinched a thin rubber device no bigger than a money clip to the hem of his shirt. “You’re dealing with drones, you need infrared sensor protection.”

Joey came over. “No way. Is that a miniaturized coarse head Laser Warning Receiver?”

Tommy’s wiry eyebrows rose, his forehead wrinkling. “You ain’t the average girl.”

“No shit.”

He frowned respectfully. “It is. Since pretty much all military targeting systems use a short-wavelength IR laser—”

Joey: “—that are around 1550 nanometers—”

“—this tiny receiver here”—Tommy thumbed up the clipped device to show a pinhead lens—“uses Indium Gallium Arsenide sensors—”

“InGaAs, right!” Joey said.

“—to detect if you’ve been lit up by a covert illuminator, and then…” Tommy squeezed the device between thumb and finger stub, and it gave off a three-note bugle salute.

“Taps?” Evan said. “Really?”

Tommy shrugged. “Hey, they let me customize it. Besides, when it’s warning that you’ve got incoming, you think your ass is gonna get finicky about musical selection?”

“Like you have any taste in tunes anyways, X,” Joey said.

They were shoulder to shoulder, staring at him, their heads on parallel derisive tilts. They even blinked in tandem.

“Your sudden rapport is alarming,” Evan said.

Together they said, “What do you mean?”

Then they cracked up.

“Hey,” Tommy said. “It’s just refreshing to be around someone without a room-temp IQ for a change.”

Joey said, “Seriously.”

Evan turned to open the metal door, realized it was locked.

“What’d I tell you?” Tommy said. “Case in point.”

He held up a four-and-a-half-finger hand, and Joey high-fived it.

40Proper Identification

Evan left the truck a few miles from the California Veterans Reintegration Center at a Zipcar location where Joey had reserved a homely white Nissan Sentra under a fake name. He locked the holstered ARES and his ammunition in the truck vaults in anticipation of high security at the military compound.

Sure enough, as they passed through the exterior parking lot, two layers of chain-link rose into view, thirty-foot barriers encircling the center. Armed military police officers oversaw all points of entry, showing off blue berets and impressive firepower. A soft wind spiraled gusts of dirt up off the ground.

As Evan approached the main guard station, he pulled on a cheap pair of gas-station sunglasses and clicked on the radio, scrolling through until he found an easy-listening station. Air Supply leaked through the crappy speakers. Joey shot him a pained look.

Evan said, “It’s hard to find someone who listens to crap like this suspicious.”

“Copy that.” Joey mussed up her hair, removed her shoes, and propped her bare feet on the dashboard. Cranking her seat back, she popped a piece of gum into her mouth, converting herself into a disaffected teen with alarming authenticity.

Evan coasted into the sally port. The gate rattled shut behind them, trapping them inside. He eyed the half dozen armed air force MPs within view. “You’d better hope they don’t ask for ID,” he said.

Joey smiled at the approaching MP, talking through her teeth. “I uploaded everything to their preclearance system.”

“I’d prefer backup behind that,” he said, grinning back. “The Second Commandment: How you do anything is—”

“—how you do everything.” Joey rolled her eyes. “Gawd. I can’t wait to take over for you so I never have to hear another Commandment again .”

The MP knuckle-tapped the window, and Evan rolled it down, smoothing his face into an expression suited to a middle-aged dad from Carlsbad, California.

“Howdy,” Evan said. “I’m Harold Blasely, and this is my daughter, Almudena.” He did his best with the accent but out of the corner of his eye he could detect Joey’s smirk. “We’re here to visit my brother-in-law.”

“His name?”

“Rafael Gomez.”

The MP exhaled a breath that smelled of sunflower seeds and withdrew into the station, where he stared into a computer monitor, the greenish glow uplighting his features.

After a moment he lumbered back out. “See some ID?”

“Oh, darn it,” Evan said, offering Joey a grin rife with disguised told-you-so irritation. “We left our personal stuff back at the hotel. We were told that we’d be okay since we uploaded everything into the preclearance system.”

The MP rested a beefy forearm on the roof of the Sentra and leaned down. “It’s never a good idea to drive without ID,” he said. “In fact, it’s illegal.”

“You got me there, sir,” Evan said. “We woke up so early this morning to catch the flight up that my head isn’t screwed on right.”

“I can’t let you onto the base without confirming proper identification.”

“But I was told”—Evan risked another veiled glare at Joey—“that our passports uploaded to the system would be sufficient. Can’t you just check us against those?”

“Go back to your hotel. And get your ID.”

“Our hotel’s all the way in San Jose,” Evan said, “where we flew in. And our flight out’s this afternoon. If we go back to pick up ID, we won’t have time to make it back down.”

The MP looked away, swallowed. “Not my problem, sir.”

“Such a bummer,” Joey said, leaning forward, suddenly speaking with a full-blown Latina accent. “We haven’t been able to see Uncle Raffy since Mom’s diagnosis. And I made him this.”

She twisted around to her overnight bag in the backseat, producing a folded poster board covered with LaserJet-printed color pictures. Evan did a double take at the images of himself and Joey with Rafael and a Hispanic woman Evan figured for Rafael’s older sister, Consuelo, Harold’s wife. There they were—in a Jacuzzi together, enjoying a meal on a backyard patio, standing on what looked to be a Caribbean beach with various other family members scattered around. The tableaus of Evan and Joey inserted into a regular American family were surreal and seamless, like a vision of some prior life. It took a moment for Evan to register fully that they had been Photoshopped.