Gregg Hurwitz - Prodigal Son

“We wouldn’t want that,” Donahue-Carr said. “Someone making their own ethical choices.”

She was right. He was a hypocrite, imperfect in his moral bearing, short of the mark in more ways than he could tally. But at least he built his code from lived experience, not from ones and zeros.

Evan said, “End it quietly or I’ll dump the classified details online and you can deal with it in the next election.”

The president’s expression didn’t alter, but he saw Templeton give a little nod.

“Need I remind you that you’re retired?” Donahue-Carr said.

Evan remained silent.

She leaned in, set her sleeves on the desk in front of her, her shoulders squaring. “If you’re not retired, I don’t need to remind you what that means either, do I?”

Evan clicked the laptop shut.

71Ready

“I look like a dumb-ass fool,” Andre said. In the passenger seat, he flipped the visor down for the fifth time and smoothed his hair into place. He wore a new button-up shirt with a clip-on tie and a clean pair of slacks, and he held a little wrapped present in his lap.

It was Christmas Eve.

“No,” Evan said. “You look respectable.”

“Same thing.”

“You ready?”

“No, I’m not ready. Do I look ready?”

It had been a week and change since their mother had died, and here they were, parked outside the apartment complex a little ways up the street so Andre could muster his nerve. To the side of Evan’s truck, a carport looked in danger of disintegrating, its splintering posts barely supporting the rust-eaten roof sheeting. The meth house behind them had been boarded up, the party no doubt moved to a fresh squatting location, and someone had already tagged the plywood with expletives.

But their focus remained on the ground-floor apartment up ahead. The midday sun glinted off the security screens, the window a solid sheet of gold.

Andre blew into a cupped hand, checked his breath. Fingernail rubbed a water stain off his thigh. Tossed the carefully wrapped gift onto the dashboard. He reached nervously and turned on the radio, “Desperado” coming through the speakers. He shook his head and fiddled with the control. “Damn, son. Could you be any whiter?”

“You’re half white,” Evan said.

“Yeah, my bad half.”

Andre landed on another channel, Beth Hart singing that it was a good day to cry cry cry, and he closed his eyes, nodding with the music, and said, “Now, that little white girl, that little white girl’s the truth .”

Evan waited for the song to end and then asked again, “You ready?”

Andre dug for his yellow pouch, unzipped it, peered inside at the meager bills. After being cleared of wrongdoing by the cops, he’d been hired back at the impound lot and had cashed the paycheck from his first half week. A not insubstantial settlement for his destroyed house was coming, but it would take a while to work its way through the insurance bureaucracy.

He zipped the pouch back up, tapped it against his palm. “I think we should leave.”

“We’re not leaving.”

“I don’t know.” Andre went back to the mirror again, adjusted the tie to center the knot. “How do I look now?”

“Distractingly handsome.”

“What if she don’t like me?”

“She’ll like you.”

“What if she don’t act like it?”

“You’ll take it. You’ll be a man and a father, and you’ll be there for her.”

Andre slapped the visor shut, placed his hands on his knees, jiggled his legs. He took a deep breath. Another.

Still working up his nerve.

Evan thought about what Andre was readying to take on once more, the responsibility of a parent. Andre had never had it role-modeled for himself, and he’d failed a time or two, but here he was, showing up. Evan remembered the adage he’d mouthed to Joey a few weeks ago— Responsibility’s where you find meaning —and thought about how Veronica had three-dimensionalized it with her dying words, her final gift to her sons, a self-portrait of regret.

The RoamZone was in his hands.

He stared down at the cracked screen. And then his thumbs were at work, applying steady pressure to the seams, the self-repairing glass piecing itself back together.

Evan took a deep breath. “Before you go,” he said, “I have one thing to ask of you.”

“Sure, man.”

Evan kept at the phone, the cracks disappearing as he knit the polyether-thiourea screen back into a seamless whole.

From chaos, order.

“Find someone else who needs my help,” he said. “Someone in as desperate a situation as you were. Give them my number: 1-855-2-NOWHERE.”

Andre stared at him. A wisp of tissue stuck to his neck where he’d cut himself shaving. Evan reached over and plucked it off.

“Tell them about me,” Evan said. “Tell them I’ll be there on the other end of the phone.”

“Okay,” Andre said. “Okay.”

The street darkened, the sun sliding behind a bank of clouds, and the glare lifted from the window to Brianna’s apartment.

Sofia stood in the living room practicing pirouettes. Awkward at first, stumbling out of the turns. But she caught herself and tried again. And again.

Behind her the old-fashioned travel poster of Paris looked on, the promise of new worlds ahead.

Evan heard the passenger door close before he noticed that Andre had climbed out. He watched him walk into the building, pulling his shoulders back, lifting his head with an assumed air of dignity.

He disappeared into the lobby.

Evan watched Sofia spin and fail. Spin and fail.

All at once she stopped. Stared at the door.

A moment later Brianna came into sight. She walked past her daughter and opened the door. She stood a moment, blocking Evan’s view, and then stepped aside.

Sofia’s hand went to her mouth. Her thin shoulders rose, almost touching the gold studs in her ears. She stayed that way as her father entered.

Andre’s gaze was lowered. He held the gift by his belt buckle, fussing with it in both hands. His shoulders had lost some of their steel.

Stillness claimed the living room, all the players motionless, not daring to breathe.

Then Sofia ran to him and hugged him tightly, wrapping her arms around his waist.

He stayed frozen a moment, his lips quivering. Then he embraced his daughter. After a moment he looked up over her through the window at Evan’s truck. His eyes shone with moisture, and he gave the faintest nod.

Evan dropped the truck into gear and drove off.

72A Matter of Time

The sun was uncharacteristically hot for December in Nevada, and it had blazed for a week straight after Evan’s raid on Creech North. In the wake of the mayhem, a number of internal investigations had been opened, the lab floor turned into a crime scene, and hundreds of microdrones had been collected from when the swarm had rained from the sky.

A few had gone unsighted, stuck in the mud of the sprawling test field. But four days ago, as the heat dried the earth, they’d arisen, shaking loose the sheen of dirt on their wings.

Four of them.

They sought connection to the rest of the hive, but the others had been permanently fried. Until their signal reached a puddle near the parking lot. Two yellow-green eyes glitched to life in the mud. The drone’s parts were loosely arrayed around it, wings shattered, the thorax twisted irreparably. However, its computer was still hardened enough to fall back to reading its NVRAM flash memory and access the last kill order it had received, the face of a man in his mid-thirties, just an ordinary guy, not too handsome.

It retrieved the image of the license plate of the Honda Civic that the target had driven away in and sent it to its four viable mates.