“Enemies,” I said, as much to myself as the doctor.
“Here’s an outside possibility,” said Leising. “A few years ago, Kenny told me he had been quoted in The Washington Post. A Sunday feature article about the new esprit de corps that the USAF was fostering within the unhappy RPA community. The drone teams were being encouraged in friendly competition against each other. They were allowed to give themselves combat team nicknames, and to create morale insignias for their uniforms. In the article, Kenny told of creating the Headhunter name and patch. There was even a picture of it — a grinning skull with wings of fire. Toward the end of the piece, he deflected questions about widespread dissatisfaction among RPA personnel. And refused to comment on a drone strike alleged to have gone wrong at a field hospital in Aleppo. The Post tallied the dead, citing research by the British group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
“Kenny was furious when the story ran. But there was his name, in black and white, and a picture of the Headhunters patch, associated with the dead doctors and nurses. He ill-advisedly threatened a lawsuit.”
“But the camel’s nose was already inside the tent.”
“It most certainly was.”
This was bad news, and the more I considered it, the worse it got. A casual newspaper reader might or might not link Kenny Bryce to a drone attack in Aleppo. But, fueled by the possibility of that connection, a determined actor could discover that Kenny and his Headhunters had fired the missiles. And from Kenny, it was two short lines to Marlon and Lindsey.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” I said. “Please welcome the Headhunters, as inadvertently presented in The Washington Post.”
Leising leaned toward me. “Caliphornia read the Post article?”
“Any fourth-grader can find the Post article.”
“Okay, but why?”
“Nine innocents and one terrorist killed in a drone strike,” I said.
“So Caliphornia might be a friend or a relative, taking revenge for IH-One?”
“Yes.”
“Or is he a terrorist taking on the U.S. Air Force?”
“Both.”
He frowned, peering at me through the small round lenses.
Hall Pass 2 churned through the cold post-storm air as I flew southwest for home, the engine droning and gently buzzing my bones. I thought about Zkrya Gourmat losing control of his motorcycle and the catastrophe this had led to.
I had only faint memories of the attack at IH-One, as reported by the media. The story had broken at nearly the same time that Justine’s sudden death was sweeping me down its dark, deepening tunnel. The fate of the innocents on IH-One had barely registered on me.
Now, as the green hills of Fallbrook eased by beneath me, I considered that a major player was missing from the story of Zkrya Gourmat and IH-One. Someone who had taken the life of one Headhunter and threatened two more.
Caliphornia.
Astride the world with a knife in each hand, I imagined, with one foot in Aleppo and the other in Bakersfield.
Look for him where he started, I thought. Look for him in the rubble.
Rather than go straight home from the airport, I drove the hour south to Point Loma, paid my admission to the Cabrillo Lighthouse Monument, parked, and climbed my way to the whale observation area. The late afternoon was blustery and cold, and the dauntless tourists were few in number and thickly wrapped. I stood at the wall and looked west out over the Pacific, heaving, gray, and endless. I looked for whales as I always do up here, saw none, which is how many I always see. As I strolled past the lighthouse, a peregrine falcon dropped into a hundred-mile-an-hour stoop and out of sight behind the wall in front of me. I figured that some elegant sea bird was about to become the falcon’s meal. Around me, the sage and brittlebush shivered in the wind and the gulls cried and wheeled.
I looked out to the approximate place where Justine had gone down. I lit a cigarette and watched the sun set, an orange ball melting on the curve of the far horizon.
A moment of peace, or something like it.
Until an arriving Telegram message chimed on the phone from the depths of my pocket. It was from Bakersfield detective Marcy Brown, who wrote only “Courtesy of JT.”
I touched the link, saw the brief “Property of Bakersfield Police Department” statement, and then the video played.
Taucher had been right about grainy. The Tuscanola apartments parking area. Poorly lit, filled with vehicles, locked in shadows.
Caliphornia was just as she had described him. Indeterminate race. Twenties or thirties by his posture and movement. Six-feet-plus or-minus, average build, one hundred seventy to two hundred pounds. Dressed like a surfer or boarder, the baggy pants and cloddish board shoes. A flannel shirt under the Air Force sweatshirt. Hood up. Light on his feet in spite of the shoes. Athletic. The two seconds of Caliphornia in profile suggested sharp features and heightened alert.
I watched it again.
Went back for thirds but the screen pixelated brightly, then self-destructed to black. Like one of the Headhunters’ targets, I thought.
I tried to find it again, but it was gone.
15
Late that night, in the privacy of my home office, I poured an assertive bourbon and put on some waltz music. I sat in front of my computer monitor, entered my search words, then closed my eyes and let the music move through me. Stood and took a few three-beat turns before opening my eyes to the “Syria improvised hospitals” search results waiting for me on the screen.
As the waltz went undanced to, I read the thirty-five-page list of articles, news broadcasts, radio stories, books, videos, and blogs related to my search. Each page contained approximately a dozen entries, and each entry’s first sentence. I opened and read the most promising. Many contained multiple references and links to source material. Most were related to the bloody 2016 siege of Aleppo. But I was after something on the IH-One drone attack of a year earlier.
An hour passed slowly. Another. I sipped and scanned, clicked and read, translated and printed, followed links on hunches, detoured, closed and opened anew. At one point I launched myself in my wheeled chair à la Joan Taucher, rolling across the old hardwood floor to land at the western window of my office. Where, looking down from the second floor, I saw the glassy black pond and the staunch palapa and the horseshoe-shaped barbecue and the chaise longues and the Ping-Pong table covered by a tarp against in-blowing rain. Grandma Liz had convinced Grandpa Dick to string Christmas lights along the edge of the palapa roof. The little twinkling bulbs seemed lonely against the vast dark beyond.
Surprisingly, Lindsey reclined on one of the chaises, facing the pond in profile, wrapped in a heavy coat, a watch cap over her ears. She took a drink from a coffee mug that did not steam, though the breath from her nostrils did. Even from this distance I could see she had the thousand-yard stare again. I felt equal parts pity and alarm.
I knew that she had left the property this afternoon, in her car, for approximately one and a half hours.
This intel courtesy of Burt. He’d tailed her from here to a nature preserve in Fallbrook called Los Jilgueros. It’s a pleasant place, big sycamores and lots of native plants, some trails and ponds. I fly right over it, in and out of Fallbrook Airpark.
According to Burt, Lindsey had parked her Mustang, gotten a backpack from the trunk, and headed into the preserve. Burt followed covertly, letting a “loud family of five with two dogs” run interference. Lindsey had strolled to a bench overlooking one of the ponds, unslung her pack, and taken out her phone. Burt hunkered cross-legged in a thicket of matilija poppies and watched Lindsey while a weasel watched him. She worked the phone, fussed with the backpack.