Song of the Red-Legged Birds: Chapter 37: Nothing special
Where is Luke?
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With gratitude, Bill
Last week, in chapter 36, Part 2, The crew learned what happened to Wake
Chapter 37: Nothing special
“What do you mean gone? You just found the goddamn thing!” Christo yelled at Desmond, who sat beside Arthur in Christo’s office.
“With all due respect, we didn’t lose it. That much we know for sure. They discovered us, somehow. Then the network was gone. Taken down, moved, or destroyed.” Desmond sat perched on the edge of his chair, fingers digging into his thighs.
“And what makes you say that?” Christo said.
“My full confidence in the skills of our boy Luke. He wasn’t screwing around in there. Once he got inside, he went quiet. That was always our plan. Then we passed all the location info to you, post haste. Within half a day, the network was gone.”
Christo glared at Desmond, then exchanged a look with Arthur.
“Thank you, Desmond. If you’ll excuse us, I’ll follow up with you later. In the meantime, do what you can to track it down.” Christo’s tone lost all its intensity.
Desmond stood and left without a word, closing the door a little too hard.
Arthur and Christo were both quiet for a moment. Finally, the big Hawaiian broke the silence, “You send folks in there, bra?”
Christo drummed his hands on his desk, “Yes.”
Arthur waited for more, “And?”
“The place blew up. The team we sent in, the target, a whole chunk of the Prudential building in downtown Boston, destroyed. The best analysis that we have from the scene is that it looks like the target, this Wake, blew it up himself. Likely it was a self-destruct sequence. We had a helicopter that barely escaped the detonation. No one else at the scene in or around the building was killed.”
Arthur rubbed his unshaven chin, “You knew that was why the Red Foot network vanished?”
“No, I didn’t know that! Ouch!” Christo growled, standing up and banging his hip against the table. “Isn’t all that shit in the cloud or stored on some remote server overseas? How the hell would I know that one, this maniac would blow himself up rather than being taken alive, and two, that he actually housed the network in his fucking home!” He waved his arms at the blue sky projected on the wall as if preaching to a digital choir.
Arthur uncrossed his legs, leaned forward, and wrinkled his nose.
“Come on, don’t do that. Don’t hold back on me now. What is it?” Christo said with frustration.
“You intended on taking him alive?”
“Yes, I did. That was the order I gave, and unless someone else is fucking with me, that’s what I expected to happen. Why does that matter?”
“Here’s what plays out in my head. This dude, who’s been next to impossible to track down for a long time is smart. So, he has contingency plans in case he’s discovered online or in real life. Let’s assume the team went in there with the intent of taking him alive, but something got fucked up. It could be an itchy trigger finger, Wake getting the drop on our guys, or he got scared. You know, with the guns, soldiers, helicopters, and shit. He feels out of options and decides to blow the place up. But, first, he executes a script that deletes or moves his network. I doubt it was located in Boston. Regardless, he ensured no hardware would allow a digital forensics team to figure that out.”
With resignation, Christo flopped into a leather chair. “I shouldn’t have sent them. I thought we had the drop on him. Taking Wake down should have been easy. It was about six hours from the kid cracking the network to the boom in Boston.”
“Should’ve worked. If we could’ve brought him in, that would’ve been sweet. What about the other two? We know where they are?”
Christo put his head in his hands. “We sent Ira. Last we heard, he was in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The girl’s mother lives there. He was supposed to have that taken care of about twelve hours ago. But he’s gone dark.”
Arthur pursed his lips, “Ira? Why didn’t they send Oliver?”
“We used Oliver earlier. Unfortunately, he was made. But, he terminated the landlord.”
Arthur sighed.
“I know. I don’t like taking lives any more than you.”
“Hey, you said Portsmouth. Ira is in Portsmouth?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Tim gave me this. It’s from about eleven hours ago,” Arthur handed the tablet in his lap to Christo.
“That’s a post scraped from Vainprop. A teenager was riding a solo-flyer down a road in Portsmouth when he took that picture that he refers to as a ‘bird tornado.’ It got 300 likes before we had it flagged and removed.”
“Crap,” Christo said, swiping the photo to transfer it from Arthur’s tablet to his computer. He got up from the comfortable chair and sat at his desk. Christo pulled up a picture of Diane Johnson’s house. “Dammit, it looks like it could be the same place, right?”
Arthur leaned in, and Christo pulled back to give him room. “Yeah, man. The worn patches on the ground here and here look almost identical,” he pointed at the screen.
“Arthur, have you ever heard of the birds or trees hurting someone?”
Arthur looked at the ceiling for a moment. “Can’t say that I have. We can look into it deeper though. You think that’s why Ira went dark? Think that’s a picture of him getting iced?”
“Feels like it, doesn’t it?” Christo said, taking a sip of water from a bottle. “Ira’s a pro. He wouldn’t go dark for this long, especially on such a simple mission. For god’s sake, he went to shake down an old woman. So, the Pru blows up, the network disappears, Wake is dead, these two,” he pulled up photos of Holly and Takeda, “are on the run, up to her mother’s house, and then we get this photo.”
“Yeah, I guess that could be the case.” Arthur kept looking at the screen. “Thing that bugs me is, how do I phrase this, the way you describe it, are they taking sides now? Maybe the birds weren’t involved. Maybe it was the mother or one of these two.” Arthur shrugged and laughed, “Shit, I’m not even convincing myself. Can’t we send someone else into the field?”
“There is no one else. I took a ton of shit for requesting another asset after Oliver fucked up.”
“What about sending a local cop over to check on things,” Arthur made air quotes.
“I don’t have a better option. I hate involving the local PD though. Inevitable questions. Can you take that?” Christo said.
“Sure, will do.”
“Thanks. What do you have worldwide? Anything interesting? I hope not.”
“Nothing. Per our discussion,” he pointed to Christo and back to himself, “we communicated the Boston disturbances without adding our level of concern. Of course, someone will do the math and find a connection between the explosion, the network disappearance, and our report. No doubt we’ll have to be a little more straightforward in the coming days,” Arthur added.
Christo sighed, “I guess. This might turn out to be nothing at all—a few coincidences with some random people and the grid pulsing change. I’m worrying about it too much. Tomorrow Ira will check-in, having taken care of the targets. Desmond will let me know that our wunderkind has found where the network came back online. We’ll suck the data out of that thing and shut it down. The grid will return to its normal pulse rate, buying us more time to figure it out.”
Arthur opened his mouth to speak, but Christo held up a hand. “Hang on a moment. After you make a statement like that, shit usually gets worse.” Christo made a show of looking at his computer, then his phone. Finding nothing, he stood up and shrugged.
Arthur flashed him a shaka hang loose sign.
They turned their heads to the sound of approaching footsteps from the hall.
“What’d I just say?” Christo said, throwing up his hands.
Tim knocked on the door; he was breathing hard. “Excuse me, gentlemen, may I have a moment?”
Christo nodded with the inevitability of a wave about to crash. “What’s up, Tim?”
“The Grid, it’s pulsing hourly now. It’s not only our intel anymore. Reports from several nations are corroborating the findings.”
Christo knocked his coffee cup over by accident but paid it no attention.
“Dammit,” he whispered. “Reports of anything hitting the grid? Increased sightings or other phenomena?”
“No, sir. Except, uh, there was an inquiry from the United Kingdom. They’d like to know if we see a connection between the Prudential bombing and the Red Foot network disappearance.”
Christo and Arthur shared a look.
“Wait a second. Why didn’t we know about the faster Grid pulse first? Why the shit am I hearing about it after the rest of the world? Did Luke fuck up somehow, for the first time in his career?” Christo said.
Tim pursed his lips, looked to Arthur first, and then to Christo. “Sir, Luke seems to be missing. No one has seen him in three hours.”
Next week in Chapter 38, “I’m on a plane,” Luke is on the run.