Luthecker (9 page)

He closed his eyes just as the first strands of the music began to play. He would have to leave the city again, he thought. The Black Hats had wanted him badly after he managed to escape them in Los Angeles three years ago, and he knew that staying free meant staying one step ahead of them. He had accepted this reality long ago. He would visit Master Winn in the morning, and ask about being the courier for the message to New York. A journey to the east coast would be two week’s travel. It was summertime, a good time to be on the road, he convinced himself. And Alex liked New York. The underground community there knew him well, and was very supportive. He would miss training for a while, miss his loose band of friends, but the trip would do him some good, he decided. He took a deep breath as a wave of fatigue suddenly swept over him.

By the time the violins of Bruch’s second movement began, he was fast asleep.

BLACK HATS

V
incent Wolfe hated ghost-hunting ops.

It was seven a.m. and he waited in the car for his partner to return with the coffee. He turned at the sound of the passenger door of his black Dodge Charger being yanked open.

Marcus Stern, his partner on this assignment, climbed in carrying a cardboard coffee cup holder with two cups of coffee.

“Did you get me extra sugar?” He asked.

“What? No.” Stern responded.

“I asked for extra sugar. I was very specific.”

“Sorry. I forgot.”

Vincent stared at him.

“What?”

“Go back and get me my extra fucking sugar.”

“You go back and get your extra fucking sugar. I don’t go and “get” extra fucking sugar.”

“You do today.”

“I did two tours. I didn’t agree to this shit.”

Vincent didn’t answer, and the men engaged each other in an adolescent stare down before Vincent watched as Marcus, twelve years his junior, defiantly set down his coffee, got out of the car in a huff, and marched back inside the coffee shop.

He and Marcus, the latter a former United States Marine Corporal and fresh hire, worked for Coalition Assurance, a private security firm that was subcontracted by both large corporations and the U.S. Military itself for a wide arrange of assignments that required both aggressive tactics and total discretion. It was primarily staffed with ex-special forces officers looking to work their craft for more pay and less rules and as such, Coalition Assurance had attracted considerable talent. Wolfe was former Delta Force himself, and contrary to what some believed, the military was happy to see the battle-hardened vet go. For them the transition to private security was a perfect combination of less accountability and reduced payroll. They could farm out specific black ops to Coalition, claim no responsibility for tactics used, and all the while assert to Congress that they were actively reducing their personnel budget requirements.

Wolfe was considerably higher up the food chain in both military experience and Coalition rank than his partner, and every once in a while, like this morning, he felt compelled to billet the younger agent in order to remind him of it.

Stern was a shooter, combat vetted muscle fresh from the war in Afghanistan, and a third generation soldier. His father had been in a telecom unit and was fortunate enough to never be required in an active theatre, but his grandfather had served in Task Force Alpha during the Vietnam War, and as such had completed two tours of frontline combat. Growing up, his grandfather’s personality had dominated the household over that of his father, and although the man passed before Stern was a teenager, it was not before the eldest Stern spun stories of heroism in combat that left a strong impression on the youngest. So much so that the young boy decided that he too, would be a soldier for freedom. And when his time came, Stern had paid homage to his grandfather and his stories with a tattoo of the Task Force Alpha unit sword and crest, along with his name and dates served on his left forearm, to go along with the Screaming Eagle insignia of the 101
^st
Airborne, his unit, on his right.

But today the world was a far different place than the one his Grandfather had successfully fought for, and military contract work was becoming more and more the accepted direction of service. Now an employee of Coalition Assurance, the higher-ups at the firm wanted the 3
^rd
generation Stern to be broken in on the private side of paramilitary operations, the task for educating the young soldier falling on Wolfe’s shoulders. Private security required a certain amount of entrepreneurial thinking that strict military doctrine forbade, so a training and adjustment period to this new reality was always required of new hires. And management felt one of the best initial training exercises was a tracking tour for parent company Coalition Properties President and CEO Richard Brown’s “White Whale”, one Alex Luthecker.

Three years ago in Los Angeles, then U.S. Army Colonel Richard Brown had picked up a suspected terrorist, a twenty-two-year old kid who had intel on an alleged subway bombing plot. They brought in an experienced interrogator with a particularly ruthless reputation to question him, and exactly what happened after that had been the subject of much debate. Allegedly, after a brief initial questioning, the interrogator promptly left the Precinct building and killed himself in the parking lot. At the same time Brown and a unit had been waiting for the interrogator, a man named David Lloyd, at his hotel. There was something about rape and murder charges against Lloyd, but it had never been made clear, and all tapes and files regarding the incident had been classified. When Brown got the word that the interrogator had blown his own head off, he was allegedly furious, and he raced back to the Precinct saying that this Luthecker kid was the devil himself, and had ordered him locked down in isolation as soon as possible. The only problem was, by the time this was communicated back to the Precinct, the kid was long gone.

Amid the chaos, Luthecker had somehow managed to get possession of the cell guard’s firearm. Wolfe had read the guard’s explanation of how this had happened in his report, “Everything started to happen so fast. I went in the cell to check on him, and he spooked me and got the jump,” and sometimes wondered what that man was doing for a living now.

Once he had possession of a firearm, it was relatively easy for Luthecker to clear the building. No one was going to confront a man with a loaded gun who wanted out. What wasn’t so easy to do and yet somehow he managed to, was evade police helicopters, dogs, SWAT units, and Federal agents. Although he was still on the FBI’s Most Wanted, after that day, he had never been seen again. Three weeks after his escape, the sidearm was found in a dumpster in Colorado. There had been no trace of him at all in the three years since. Many in the intelligence community thought that there was a good chance he might be dead. Richard Brown was absolutely sure that he was not.

Wolfe himself had begun to wonder if this Luthecker character was even real. But he knew that as Chief Executive Officer of parent company Coalition Properties, Richard Brown was one of the most powerful men in the country. Coalition Assurance was just the enforcement arm of a much larger organization, and Brown was the head of all of it. He had met Brown only once, and the man’s presence was formidable. If he told Wolfe that Luthecker was not only real, but living with the circus, and he had tasked Wolfe to find him, without question Wolfe would seek out every person on the continent who had ever worked as a circus clown and brace the living shit out of them.

Which, in Wolfe’s mind, was exactly what was happening here. A ghost-hunting op. He didn’t believe they’d find this Luthecker character. No one could stay completely off the radar like this. Not after three years. The intel experts were right. The kid was dead.

Wolfe watched as Stern approached the car, a fistful of sugar packets in each hand. He shook his head. The one thing he hated more than ghost ops, was babysitting.

Stern got in the car, threw all of the packets on the console, and looked at Wolfe.

“Is that enough?”

Wolfe selected three packets, and stirred them into his coffee.

“Now what, “extra sugar”?” Stern asked, clearly not happy.

“We canvas.” Wolfe answered.

“Canvas? We should be kickin’ in doors.” Stern replied, as he opened up a sugar packet himself, and poured it into his own coffee.

“We’re not in Afghanistan hunting down “terrorists”. Discretion is required.”

Stern reached into the back seat, and pulled one of the fliers from the service file on Luthecker. He looked at the artists’ rendition of a scraggly haired, barely beyond puberty boy.

“He doesn’t look like much.”

“If you ever have the pleasure of meeting Richard Brown, don’t ever say that to his face.” Wolfe responded, shifting the Charger into gear. “But on the flip side, if we were to actually find him, it would do more for you than winning the lottery.” He added, before steering the muscle car from the curb and merging into the traffic.

“We’ll fucking do it.” Stern responded.

Wolfe looked at him.

“We’ll be the ones. We’ll totally fucking find him, and we’ll get the bonus.” He asserted with increasing aggression.

“Whatever you say.” Wolfe replied, a hint of futility in his voice. “Let’s start with the Seven Elevens…” He added, happening to eye one on the corner, and figuring it was as good a place to start as any.

BEN

W
ithout breaking stride, Nikki removed her black Oakley Radar Path sunglasses from her face just long enough to wipe the sweat from her eyes before putting them right back on. Roughly half way through her six-mile beach run, her breathing was more labored than she expected it to be at this distance, and she briefly glanced at her watch. She was surprised and a bit annoyed to see she was about forty-five seconds off her normal pace. She chalked it up to the intensity of the Southern California sun in the late afternoon, something she was still getting used to, and picked up her pace.

She had come to out Santa Monica California less than two weeks ago, literally the day after Michael Kittner had fired her from Kittner-Kusch. After the initial shock and disorientation of losing both her job and her boyfriend in less than twenty-four hours had subsided, she realized that for the first time in her life, she was at a complete loss as to what to do next. So the first thing she did was call the only person in her life she felt she could trust, her little brother Ben.

Unlike his older sister, Ben Ellis lived entirely for the moment. A tall, good-looking man with an excess of social charm, Nikki’s twenty-three year old sibling made just enough money to support his relatively carefree lifestyle as a bartender at the popular W Hotel in the up scale collegiate enclave of Westwood Village, California. He was an avid surfer, and although he worked at a bar, he never drank, never had touched a drop in his life, because of both what he saw from his mother growing up, and never wanting to miss the surf at dawn when the waves were high. Nikki sometimes wished he were more ambitious, but he seemed happy, and thus she never judged him negatively for the choices he made. Ever the more analytical and disciplined of the two, she had at one point accused him of moving to California and becoming a bartender, the temptation of alcohol just a reach away, only to “prove he wasn’t like Mom”, but he took no offense to the accusation, and simply smiled with the reply, “One of these days, I swear to God, I’m gonna get your butt to stand upright on a surfboard.”

It was this easy-going nature that convinced Nikki, when she called her brother the day she was fired to tell him that her world as she knew it had essentially ended, to get on a plane the very next day and come out to Cali.

Nearing the end of her run, Nikki turned left off the bike path that ran along the beach and cut through an empty parking lot before sprinting up the stairs of a pedestrian overpass that crossed above the Pacific Coast Highway. She wound her way up more stairs on the other side of the PCH and onto Ocean Boulevard before jogging East on Montana Avenue, then South on 2
^nd
street, finally coming to a stop in front of her brother’s vintage eighties two-story apartment building.

She took a moment to stretch her calves, then her hamstrings, before removing the apartment key she had tied to her shoelace and unlocking the door to the small one bedroom unit that her brother called home.

A loft-style design, it was essentially an open space, rectangular in shape, and loosely partitioned by furniture, with the bedroom a separate room. She went straight to the kitchen area, opened the refrigerator, and grabbed a bottle of water. She had drunk nearly half of the bottle before she eyed her cell phone sitting on the kitchen table. The LED of her iphone blinked with the indication that she had messages, and she took a deep breath before picking the device up to check it. She had seven voice mails, all from Michael, along with three emails, and over a dozen texted messages. She ignored them all, replying only to a text Ben had sent, telling her he would be home in less than an hour, and asking her if she would like to have lunch. She texted “yes” in reply before putting the phone back on the table.

Michael had been trying to reach her nonstop within hours of firing her, but she had yet to take his call or listen to any of his messages. Sooner or later he would figure out that she was no longer in New York, and there was a good chance he would track her whereabouts to Los Angeles. She knew he wouldn’t hesitate to hop on a plane to come out west to find her, but she was still furious at him, and in her mind if he were smart, he wouldn’t dare. And until she felt otherwise, she would continue to ignore his attempts to reach her.

Despite her reputation on the Street as a single-minded and battle-hardened futures trader, she had been deeply hurt not only by Michael’s lack of hesitation in choosing money over her, but also by his and the entire firm’s cold mourning over loss of profits all the while showing little awareness and no visible remorse regarding lives lost in the refinery explosion. That lack of humanity under duress had completely shaken her view not only of Michael and their relationship, but of her own motivations as well. It had thrown everything she believed in and worked so hard for into question, and contributed greatly to her current loss of direction.