Ghost Rendition Read online

  “You know who I am, Suzanne. You know me better than anyone else in the world.”

  “And you still can’t answer my questions. You know you can get over the big heartbreaks. They hurt like hell and then after enough time goes by, you get over them. But having your heart broken a little at a time, over and over, after a while, some part of it stays broken.”

  “Suzanne, please . . .” I moved toward her.

  She put up her hand. “It would be best if we stayed away from each other for a while. I won’t stop you from seeing Devon. He needs to know that you’re not deserting him, but make sure we don’t have to cross paths.”

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered one last time and left.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I own a bottle of vodka and a bottle of gin that I can’t remember buying. I dislike the taste of vodka a bit less than I dislike the taste of gin, so I went with that. I mixed it with Capri Sun. I puked three or four times around midnight and passed out.

  I woke up with a nasty hangover. They’re mostly caused by dehydration. Drinking a big glass of water would have helped. I didn’t bother. I deserved the pain. I’d had the chance to bring my family back together. There was nothing more important to me. And I couldn’t have made a bigger mess of it. It was a classic example of critical mission failure. Every decision I’d made had seemed right on its own, but when you added them up, the central objective had been blown. I had mocked the Russians for losing their mission priorities, and I had done the same thing.

  And worse, I had hurt Suzanne again. I had to face the fact that it was selfish to have tried to get her back. My life wasn’t built to accommodate a real relationship and believing anything else was self-delusion. I often heard other suburban dads complain that their jobs were boring, the passion was gone from their marriages, their kids didn’t want anything to do with them, and they had nothing to look forward to. I would have signed up for that in a minute.

  You grow up with all these dreams about how your life will turn out, how you will turn out. At some point you have to admit that they’ll never come true, that hanging on to those dreams brings more pain than letting them go.

  I crawled out of bed and made it to the couch before collapsing. Suzanne used to say that when the house was a mess she felt like her head was a mess, she couldn’t think clearly. I never understood it, but looking around my house, I thought that it did sort of look like I felt. I’m not usually a total slob, but there was stuff strewn everywhere. Starburst wrappers littered the floor. Taco Bell wrappers covered the coffee table. No wonder I had puked half my intestines up.

  When the doorbell rang, I wasn’t completely sure it wasn’t just my head ringing. I would have gone for my gun, but assassins don’t usually ring the bell, and if they wanted to shoot me, I thought, I might be better off.

  I managed to rally enough to let Devon in and sit back down on the couch without puking, but it was close.

  “Don’t tell Mom I came here, okay?” he said.

  “We’re not communicating all that much right now.”

  “I brought this for you,” he said, handing me a Pyrex container full of brown mystery noodles.

  The last thing I wanted to do was handle food, much less eat it, but Devon had come all the way here to try to take care of me, so I thanked him and headed into the kitchen, hoping I wouldn’t retch too loudly.

  “She cried for like an hour after you left,” he yelled to me from the living room.

  “You know that’s the last thing I wanted, right?” I yelled back. This wasn’t the way a heart-to-heart was supposed to play out, but I took what I could get.

  “Then why did you let it happen?” he asked.

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  Opening the Pyrex container almost finished me. I shoved it into the microwave.

  “Does it have to do with Danny and his friends?” Devon asked.

  “Why would you say that?”

  “I don’t know. I came to tell you that I don’t hate you or anything. I know you try your best, but it sucks that things always get screwed up.”

  “You know I love you and your mother more than anything in the world. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you.”

  “I thought people were only supposed to get divorced when they stopped loving each other.”

  “I’m afraid it’s more complicated than that.”

  “Then why does anyone get married?”

  “Because when it works, it’s so worth it.”

  “Was it worth it with Mom?”

  “Every day. And I still screwed it up. I wish I could give you a better answer than that.”

  I dumped the noodles onto my last two clean plates and brought them out to the living room. “I’m sorry, Devon.”

  “Tell Mom, not me.”

  “I did.”

  “Keep telling her. Maybe you can wear her down.” He kissed me on top of the head and got up to leave.

  “You’re not staying?”

  “I don’t eat that crap unless Mom makes me,” he said, and headed out the door.

  I waited until I was sure he was gone, dumped the noodles into the garbage, and melded back into the couch.

  I woke up three hours later, drank a full glass of water, and felt steady enough to pick up the blizzard of food wrappers that had blanketed my living room. When I surveyed the room though, something didn’t feel right.

  I wanted to write it off to being hung over, but I knew better. I sat on the couch, legs crossed, eyes closed, and focused on my breathing. I wasn’t in the mood to meditate. Nachash tried to chime in about how I had been neglecting my practice, and I told him to shut up. He responded that I could not expect results if I did not embrace the process, but I already had the answer, so I didn’t have to listen. It was right in front of me.

  The lipstick messages that Caroline and Danny had left on the coffee table was smeared. But the taco bell wrappers had been cleared off the table and then put back. Devon had played me. He was searching my house for clues about Pratt while we were having our heart-to-heart. I didn’t know whether to be mad or proud. I was definitely scared. Pratt had signed his message with his full name, and Devon had seen it.

  I ran to my computer and checked the spyware I had planted on Pratt’s home router. I didn’t have to look at the logs for long to find a trace of Devon’s hack.

  Armed with Danny’s full name, Devon had found where he lived and hacked his router. That wouldn’t help him find Danny, but it would certainly help Westfield’s techs find him. They would be monitoring the router, and they would have no trouble tracking Devon’s intrusion right back to him. My name was still on the house. They would assume I still lived there. They were going to come for my family. It was only a matter of time and not much of it.

  I sent messages to Pratt and Caroline. I sent encrypted texts to all of Rob’s cell numbers, but none went through. He must have dumped them. I should have set up a way to contact him, but I had been too angry.

  What had he said as he was leaving? “You always know how to contact me.” Rob never said anything casually. He was giving me a way to find him, and I could only come up with one thing that he could have meant. I posted a position-wanted job listing on Health Matters for a clinical supervisor, a special person looking for a special mission, in-person meeting requested. It was the reverse of our protocol for how he was supposed to reach me in an emergency.

  I jumped in the Camry and got to the phone booth where he had hidden when he first gave me the rendition. I stood next to the car, exposed, as a sign of trust. I was going to give it two hours. If he didn’t show up after that, I’d have to figure out another plan.

  All sorts of fun thoughts popped up while I was waiting. Why was Devon fixated on finding Pratt? Had my absence left him that much in need of a male figure to look up to? Pratt was a genius hacker. As far as Devon knew, all I did was write books for morons. No wonder he was looking for a better role model. And those were some of the kinder thoughts.r />
  A bit less than an hour into my tortured watch-and-wait, I picked up Rob’s approach. He carefully circled the site, presumably to make sure it was clean. I pretended not to see him. Human intelligence agents aren’t known for their field skills or their combat ability. His spin and kick to my solar plexus was meant to knock the wind out of me. I blocked it easily and hit him with a counter strike to the sternum. It wasn’t meant to hurt him, just knock him back. His knees buckled, but he managed to stay upright.

  “Not bad for Hum Int,” I said.

  “Don’t patronize me.”

  “Right, that’s your job.”

  “We can argue when this is all over. What do you have?” he asked. He was right to business, no apologies, no regrets. I had to love that about him.

  “My family’s blown,” I said. “Any chance you can bring in reinforcements?”

  “No one’s going to touch us with Westfield against us,” he confirmed what I already knew. Without proof that Westfield had framed Rob, we were on our own.

  “All right, I have a plan, but no more bullshit. No more manipulation. You follow it to the end.”

  “I haven’t heard it yet.”

  “Now you know how I always feel. Yes or no.”

  “Then I’ll say yes, for the same reason you always did. I trust you.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I’d had nightmares about running an operation out of the Big House, my work life infecting my home life. This was worse. I was using the Big House as bait, literally inviting the bad guys to my family’s home. But I didn’t see any alternatives, and Westfield had the address as soon as Devon hit Pratt’s router. I had to get ahead of events or I’d lose any chance to control them. Caroline had called Suzanne and all the neighbors within a ten-house radius, pretending she was from the local Chamber of Commerce and offering a free dinner for that evening, each at a different restaurant. Every one of them accepted. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, everyone loves free stuff. It was going to cost me a fortune, but it would limit collateral damage.

  Suzanne and Devon were at the Mediterranean restaurant that Suzanne and I were supposed to go to for our date. I hoped it would make her think of me and start to feel a little less angry. Either that or it would make her angrier. The fact that I didn’t know probably meant I didn’t deserve to be forgiven.

  The Pratt-a-likes were at my house in my fortified garage where they couldn’t be snatched. Their job was to track Westfield so Rob could get to him before his contractors got to us.

  Pratt was in the attic with the feeds on his computer from all the webcams I had planted. Having Pratt on site was extremely risky. If Westfield got him, then Tiresias would eventually belong to him, the Agency would line up behind him, and Rob and I, and our families, and the Pratt-a-likes would all be hunted down and disposed of. But if you want to catch a big fish, you have to use real bait. Not that I ever fish or know anything about it, but I did know that if Westfield found out that we didn’t have Pratt with us, he’d blow up the Big House and call it a day.

  I was in Devon’s room on the second floor set up with my MSR. Caroline was on the roof with her MTAR-22 configured as a 5.56-mm assault rifle with armor-piercing rounds. We all had wireless earpieces and push-to-talk microphones to communicate with each other. They rotated frequencies randomly to make them harder to crack.

  We dressed the property for Christmas Eve in November. Festive lawn gnomes dotted the front and back lawns, red and green lights ringed the house, and Santa and Rudolph stood side by side on the roof. It hadn’t been easy to procure all of the goodies on short notice, but Rob had managed the logistics. Caroline supervised the installation. She was every bit as good as Suzanne at home improvement. It seemed to be my lot in life to be paired with competent women who made me question my manhood.

  Rob was at the restaurant to keep an eye on Devon and Suzanne. He had bribed the hostess to slow down their service and had reported that they hadn’t been served appetizers yet.

  A soon as I had realized that my family was exposed, I’d had Pratt spoof a message to himself from Devon asking to meet him for dinner at seven o’clock at Dominic’s, an Italian restaurant on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. I knew that Westfield’s techs would pick it up, and he would send his troops to scope it out. At six, I had Pratt spoof another message from Devon, to meet him at the house instead. Westfield would have to scramble to get his crew to the Big House. That way, I had a tight window on when they would show up. The Russians thought they had Pratt’s computer, and Rob had warned off the Israelis, so hopefully we could control the field.

  Rob called my burner cell. Aside from Nachash, Rob is as unflappable as it gets. But now he sounded panicked. “They’re headed your way.”

  “I know they are. Pratt sent the message.”

  “Not Westfield. Suzanne and Devon. She got a call, looked angry and hauled Devon out of there.”

  “You have to stop them.”

  “How?”

  “Manipulate her. That’s what you do.”

  “I pretended I was from the Chamber of Commerce and begged her to stay. I did everything short of tackling her. She’s much tougher to handle than you are,” he said.

  I couldn’t argue with that. “Go to secondary position. I’ll deal with them here.”

  I ran out front and got there as Suzanne and Devon drove up.

  “Hi! This is great, isn’t it?” I said.

  Suzanne looked at the Christmas decorations and back at me as if I had come out of a flying saucer.

  “I wanted to surprise you with something special. But it’s not done yet. Why don’t you and Devon go out for dinner and let me finish? You’re going to love it.”

  “Is this a joke? Because it’s not funny,” she said.

  “I know it’s a little early, but I’m really excited about the holidays this year. Why don’t you go to that dessert place we used to go to in the City? Devon’s never been there. He’d love it.”

  “We’re not going anywhere. I got a call from the headmaster. The servers at school were hacked again. They can’t use their SMART boards, the alarm system’s going off, all their student records are gone. They can’t open the school tomorrow.”

  “So you’re going on a hunger strike until it’s fixed?” I asked.

  “What’s wrong with you? They’ve accused Devon and his friends of doing this. I’m grounding him until we know for sure.”

  “That’s not fair. What happened to innocent until proven guilty?” Devon asked.

  “That’s in a democracy. You live in a dictatorship, and I’m the dictator,” Suzanne said.

  “I have to agree with Devon here. He was with you. How could he be involved?” I said.

  “Gib, I don’t know what you’re doing, but I’ve had a long shitty day and I’m going into my house to lie down. If you want to be useful, talk to your son about why he’s trying to destroy his future.”

  Suzanne dodged around me and went into the house. I had no choice. I had to tell her what was going on and get her and Devon out of there.

  When I heard Caroline’s voice in my earpiece, at first I thought it was Nachash whispering in my head. “It’s too late to get them clear. Two cars are headed down the block. You need to get inside now.”

  “The school put spyware on my computer. They’re trying to frame me. I had to hack their system to get proof,” Devon said.

  He had found the spyware I had planted on his computer and he was looking for Pratt to help him trace it.

  “We’ll talk about that later. We have to get in the house.”

  “Why?”

  “No more questions. I need you to do exactly as I say and I need you to do it now.” It was a tone that I had never taken with him. It was operational mode. Devon’s eyes went wide, and he followed me into the house.

  “Go into your mother’s room and lock the door. Tell her you need to talk to her alone. Sit on the floor by the foot of the bed. She’ll come down and sit next to you. I d
on’t care what you say, but keep talking. At the sound of the first explosion, convince her to hide under the bed with you. And no matter what you hear, don’t come out and don’t go near the windows, either of you. You got that?”

  “Why can’t you tell me . . .”

  “Have you got that?” I interrupted him.

  He swallowed hard and nodded.

  “Then go,” I said.

  I was relieved that Devon wasn’t fixated on Pratt because of some kind of abandonment complex, but on the bad side, I had planted spyware on my son’s computer, made him paranoid and might have gotten him expelled. If I survived, I was going to have to do some serious self-reflection.

  I ran up the stairs and dragged Devon’s heavy wood desk chair across the hall and wedged it under the door handle of Suzanne’s room. I didn’t want Devon and Suzanne running out of the room when the shooting started. The plan had been to keep Westfield’s guys from getting in the house anyway; now it was critical.

  I went back across the hall to Devon’s room, looked out the window and saw two cars disgorge nine men in body armor, carrying M4A1 carbines. They fire a high-velocity 5.56 mm round that would cut through my vest like paper, perfect for urban, or in this case suburban, guerilla warfare. They advanced in groups of three, firing at full burst.

  “Let’s see how they like our lawn gnomes,” I said into my microphone to Pratt.

  I imagined him pounding his keyboard and saw the gnomes explode. Stuff a handful of C4 with a detonator into a hollowed-out gnome and the carnage is impressive. The first three men who had advanced onto the lawn were dead instantly. The three behind them were in bad shape. The three in back were blown off their feet, their body armor in pieces. Caroline pumped shots into them from the roof to finish them.

  I didn’t delude myself that this was Westfield’s full attack. It was likely a feint. I ran to Suzanne’s bedroom and yelled through the door. “Are you under the bed?”