Private L.A. Read online

  “And you’re sure you haven’t been made?”

  “One hundred percent,” Hernandez said.

  “The squid?”

  “Still in place.”

  “Police presence?”

  “Nothing beyond the ordinary patrols. Beach is quiet. Too quiet. It would be easier to stay hidden if it was hot and wall-to-wall bodies.”

  “Fall back, then, Mr. Hernandez. Thousand meters if you can.”

  “Straightaway, Mr. Cobb,” Hernandez said, clicked off.

  Scouts, thought Cobb. But before he could ponder that, Watson got up from his desk with an iPad in one hand. “I’ve got positive ID on the two men on the pier with Fescoe. The big guy with the surfer’s build was Jack Morgan, owner of Private Investigations Worldwide, fastest-growing security firm in the world. Cutting edge, and known to cut corners to achieve his objectives. The other one’s Rick Del Rio, also works for Morgan. Both of them are Afghan vets. Marines.” Watson handed Cobb the iPad. “It’s all there.”

  Cobb scanned the documents pulled up on the screen, military records, evaluations, various articles about Morgan and the company he’d inherited and reimagined after his father was convicted and sent behind bars.

  “Chopper pilots,” Cobb grunted, then gave a dismissive flick of his sinewy hand. “Stellar safety records until they got shot down. Both have courage, tried to get back in the bird to save the other men, but neither man has any special-forces training that I can see.”

  “Unless the training was obtained privately,” Watson offered.

  “That kind’s no good. It’s never tested in the crucible,” Cobb said, handing the iPad back. “We are tested in the crucible, Mr. Watson. Hard tested. They have no chance. We’re twenty moves ahead of them in this game.”

  Chapter 39

  AT A QUARTER to nine that evening, the wind was coming hard out of the northwest, gusting to twenty knots, churning the Pacific off the Huntington Beach Pier into a roiling charcoal-colored beast that kept trying to rise up and snatch Del Rio and me.

  We hung from linemen’s belts on opposing pylons, twelve feet above the crashing sea and two pylon rows back from the western edge of the pier. Below us, two Sea-Doo water sleds strained and pitched at ropes that moored them to the pylons. The Sea-Doos were the fastest, nimblest sea vessels money could buy. Del Rio had found them at a dealer a few miles from the pier. We’d launched them right at dusk and had been up on the pylons in the deep shadows ever since, wiping the spray from our goggles, peering out toward the electric halos of light shining down from the pier. No fishing lines dropped to the sea. The weather was just too rough.

  We counted down the minutes listening to the minimal chatter on the channel used by the law enforcement lurking at the perimeters of the operation. Two sheriff’s helicopters were bucking the wind, moving in arcs two miles offshore, running with no lights, ready to respond. Two police helicopters were cruising at high altitude two miles inland.

  Three high-speed boats, two from the sheriff’s detail at Marina Del Rey and one from the county’s Baywatch lifeguard unit, lurched in the swells about a mile out, ready to intercept any vessel trying to head to sea or run the coast.

  “Chief’s on his way,” the Kid said in my earpiece. He was posted on the roof of a building across Highway 1 from the pier entrance.

  “Nothing within five hundred yards,” said Bud Rankin, who was up on top of Ruby’s Diner, using an infrared scope to scan the surroundings.

  My right leg was starting to cramp when I heard the chief say, “Almost to the diner.”

  In my mind I could see Fescoe, head down into the wind, walking toward Rankin and Ruby’s Diner carrying two black dry bags, one on each shoulder.

  Chapter 40

  COBB WORE A convincing fake beard, dark this time, to hide his scars. With the hood of his green rain jacket up, he left a pizza joint a mile north of the Huntington Beach Pier. For a moment he was back in those desert mountains hearing the children and women cry, hearing their husbands begging for mercy when pity was long dead and gone. What had they wanted from him? What had they expected?

  They expected us to die, Cobb thought coldly. They all expected us to die and crumble to dust.

  That thought turned to blazing anger. They abandoned us. They tried to bury us. Well, guess what, we’re not dead, and we’re taking what we’re due.

  In a blind rage now, he punched in a number on a throwaway cell phone, said, “You ready, Mr. Stern?”

  “We’re going to rip this,” Stern promised.

  “We’re counting on it,” Cobb said. “And tell Mr. Allen, go big or go home. We’ll find someone else.”

  Stern’s voice cooled. “You just make sure you hit the record button.”

  “Oh, we will,” Cobb assured him. “Twenty-five seconds.”

  “Synced, ready to launch.”

  Cobb hung up, checked the time. It was eight fifty-eight.

  He punched in a second number, poised his thumb above SEND.

  We go big here, he thought. Or we all go home the hardest way possible.

  Chapter 41

  “CHIEF’S BY ME, moving along the rail north side of Ruby’s,” said Bud Rankin in the earbud tucked beneath the hood of my wet suit. “It is eight fifty-nine and forty seconds. He’s preparing to drop.”

  I said nothing, just swept my attention out and along the perimeter of that electric halo of light, looking for an intruder.

  “Bags are gone,” Rankin said.

  I saw the bags fall. I saw them hit the churning water forty yards in front of me. The dry bags slapped and spun on the writhing ocean surface. My attention darted away, back along that perimeter of light.

  “Anything, Chief?” I asked. Fescoe was supposed to remain on the rail, advise us of any effort to retrieve the dry bags from below the surface.

  That was going to be difficult in the extreme in any case. Inside the bags, Sci had placed two small pressurized CO2 tanks hitched to a switch activated by a pressure gauge. Deeper than six feet and the tanks would expel their charges, inflate the bags, and drag anyone holding them to the surface. If the pressure-gauge trigger failed, Sci could activate the tanks by radio.

  Fescoe cleared his throat, said, “Not a goddamned—”

  The explosion came without warning, a brilliant flash, crack, and roar that threw a ballooning plume of flame that witnesses later described as flat blue with a central core that burned as bright as mercury.

  Del Rio was on the pylon almost directly below the explosion.

  For a split instant I saw my friend backlit, jerked, and bent backward against the waistband of his lineman’s belt before the force of the blast struck and body-slammed me. The hit tore my feet from the pylon, caused my rope to lose purchase. I was aware of falling.

  Chapter 42

  IN RETROSPECT, I was lucky to have dropped off the pylon and plunged into the Pacific. The cold water stung my face while currents and eddies swung me at the length of the lineman’s rope. I fought to free myself, unclipped the carabiner that held the rope to the belt, kicked toward the surface.

  The pier lights were still on. Dark smoke boiled thick in the air to the south, billowing out toward the darkness. Police sirens were gathering from multiple directions. There was enough light for me to see Del Rio hanging from his belt twelve feet up the scorched pylon.

  “Rick!” I shouted.

  Del Rio rolled his head toward me. “Burned, Jack,” he grunted through the earbud. “Back’s broken, I think. Can’t move my—”

  “Don’t move anything!” I screamed. “Don’t move at all!”

  My instinct was to swim straight to him, to get him down and in the water. But I held on to my reeling sea sled and shouted into the microphone, “Del Rio burned and injured on pylon below explosion. Probable spinal injury. Rankin, report. Do you see anyone coming from your position? Chief Fescoe?”

  But there was no answer, only the soaring chatter of the L.A. sheriff, police, and fire departments being summ
oned to the scene. Then the Kid came on, choked up. “It’s Bud, Jack. I saw him thrown off the roof. I think he’s—”

  In my peripheral vision, I caught a large, swift, dark blur, like some huge bird swooping out of the night just northwest of the pier. He rode a short, stubby black surfboard. He’d kicked his feet into bindings of some sort and was dressed much as I was, head to toe in a black wet suit.

  But instead of a lineman’s belt, he wore a full harness that connected him to a taut black sail about six feet by four that bellied out like a spinnaker in front of him. I figured he was traveling forty, maybe fifty miles an hour, some kind of kiteboarding genius; he knifed into the light surrounding the pier, spotted the dry bags, tacked hard toward them, leaned into his harness, and snatched the first bag up. He blew south into the smoke before I could utter a word.

  “Pickup!” I shouted at last, scrambling to get aboard the Sea-Doo.

  I was straddling the sled, hitting the start, when the second kiteboarder appeared from the northwest and snagged the second dry bag in a move as brilliant as the first rider’s.

  The Sea-Doo roared to life. I tugged a knife from a calf sheath, cut the mooring line, drifted, and then hit the throttle. In a split second the sled gathered power, blew seawater through its turbine, and leaped from beneath the pylons like a bucking horse freed of a chute.

  Chapter 43

  THE SEA-DOO LAUNCHED off the first roller at an odd angle, which caused it to cant hard left and down, the turbine whining against the air. Throwing my weight the exact opposite way, I managed to level it before skipping up the face of the coming wave and out into the air again.

  I’d ridden a similar sled chasing the three sisters who’d gone on a killing spree at the London Olympics four months before. But then I’d been out on the Thames, a tidal river, not in this chaos of waves that surrounded the pier.

  The kiteboarders had danced across swells. I crashed through them past the pier, glancing at the scorched, smoking breach on its southern flank and the blown-out windows at Ruby’s Diner. “This is Morgan,” I shouted. “Two of them riding black kiteboards, bearing southwest of the pier. In pursuit. Need support.”

  “We are one minute out, Morgan,” came the voice of one of the sheriff’s helicopter pilots.

  “Baywatch vessels converging on your position,” came a second voice. “Time of intercept two minutes ten.”

  Del Rio had had powerful search lamps mounted on the handlebars of the Sea-Doo. I flipped them on the second I broke free of the halo of light surrounding the pier. Rick’s back’s broken, I thought as I disappeared into the darkness.

  I’d called in Del Rio’s condition and position. But there was nothing more I could do for him other than make sure the people behind the killings, the extortion, and now this bombing were made to pay.

  I kept the throttle wide open, peering along the brilliant beam of light that shot almost a quarter mile out in front of me. Had they stayed on this same bearing? Or had they tacked? And if they had tacked, were they heading inland, or farther out to sea? Was there a boat waiting for them? A vehicle? Where …?

  The beam picked up a shadow ahead of me in the waves. It was moving to my left, heading east for shore about two hundred and fifty yards out. I arced after the shadow, found the waves at my back, and surfed down them so fast that it felt like flight.

  At one hundred and fifty yards I caught one of the kiteboarders fully in my beam, his back to me. He was cutting across the face of the swells. I could see the dry bag lashed there beside him on the board.

  He looked over his shoulder, back at my light, and for a second I was sure he was going to draw a weapon and open fire. Instead, he tacked hard, came about, came right at me as fast as I was bearing down on him. It was a game of chicken I felt sure I’d win. The Sea-Doo weighed more than four hundred and fifty pounds. I doubted the board and kite weighed more than thirty.

  I could hear intensifying chatter on the radio inside my wet suit hood. There were fatalities back on the pier. I also could hear the choppers closing now. Their searchlights joined mine, throwing a near-blinding glare on the kiteboarder, who never hesitated and never slowed.

  At thirty-five yards, I ducked down, preparing myself for impact.

  At twenty-five yards, a wave came between us. I lost him for a second.

  At ten yards, he reappeared, launched off the crest, soared up and over me at least three stories, dangling below the kite, as calm as a bird.

  Chapter 44

  THE MOVE FLOORED me. I’d seen kiteboarders in action before, but this guy was a superstar.

  I down-throttled, drifted the Sea-Doo one hundred and eighty degrees, and accelerated, following the beams of the helicopters playing on the boarder. He’d landed and was speeding out to sea.

  “This is the L.A. Sheriff’s Department!” one of the pilots barked out of a loudspeaker. “Drop your kite.”

  The boarder never slowed, but I was gaining ground again. Fifty yards separated us when the other kiteboarder appeared out of nowhere, launching from a wave to my left, and tried to take my head off with the steel fin that jutted from the bottom of his board. I ducked and almost dumped the sled but managed to keep it upright, right there on the verge of disaster.

  I’d had enough by that point, and I had immunity, so I tore open the shoulder holster, freed the Glock, and went back after the first boarder, mindful that the second might reappear at any moment. These people had caused mass death. I would not hesitate to shoot one of them, aim for the legs, break them down for capture. But then I remembered what else was in the dry bags.

  “This is Morgan,” I shouted. “Tell Kloppenberg to blow the tanks. Repeat, tell Sci to blow the tanks.”

  Before there was any response, the second kiteboarder flew through the air and landed in front of me, skimmed up beside his partner, both heading straight up the face of the oncoming, cresting wave, a ten-footer easy.

  I instantly realized I’d probably be thrown into a backflip if I stayed on their course, and I cut the sled left where the shoulder of the wave wasn’t breaking yet, watching the two kiteboarders reach the crest. The helicopter search lamps were on them when they exploded off the wave and out into space, sailing on their kites, thirty, maybe forty feet in the air.

  Right at the apex of their flight, Sci triggered the CO2 tanks.

  They released with such force that the dry bags instantly inflated, straining against the cords that held them to the boards. The sudden change in aerodynamics threw both kiteboarders out of control.

  The gusting wind caught the kites at the same time the dry bags burst, throwing a small amount of currency and a large amount of cut newspaper out into the sky like so much confetti. The boarders went flipping through the night, board over kite, somersaulting until the blade wash of one of the helicopters caught and hurled them like rag dolls straight down, twenty feet, through the swirling paper bills.

  They crashed hard against the sea.

  I sped up, sure now that I was looking for bodies, injured or dead. I spotted the first one facedown, partially covered by his kite. One of the Baywatch boats was on the scene now, heading for the other kiteboarder.

  I grabbed mine by the back of his harness and yanked him up out of the water alongside the Sea-Doo. He hung there a second, then started choking and hacking. After several moments, he looked up at me in a daze.

  “What the fuck, dude?” he moaned. “Blowing us out of the sky was definitely not part of the script.”

  PART THREE

  A TIME FOR TRAUMA

  Chapter 45

  AT TEN O’CLOCK that evening, forty minutes after I’d pulled one of the kiteboarders from the sea, county lifeguards and fire-fighters began to hoist the backboard and litter bearing Rick Del Rio up over the south railing of the Huntington Beach Pier, twenty yards east of where the bomb had detonated.

  The smoke was gone, doused by the rain and fire hoses, but a harsh, charred chemical stench hung in the air as investigators worked to co
rdon off the area and document the carnage the explosion had wrought. Media helicopters circled the pier, filming the aftermath for the eleven o’clock news.

  Six people were dead, including my surveillance specialist Bud Rankin, who’d been nearly decapitated by flying chunks of cement. The other five were an entire young family from Oxnard, the Deloits, husband, wife, and three kids under the age of ten. They’d been inside the diner at a table by the window having ice cream sundaes.

  Another ten were injured, including Chief Mickey Fescoe, who’d been briefly knocked unconscious and had suffered cheek and arm lacerations. But he’d refused to be taken to the hospital and had just started toward me with a stone-faced Sheriff Lou Cammarata when Del Rio’s litter appeared at the railing.

  “Morgan,” Cammarata growled at me.

  I held up a finger and went to Del Rio’s side.

  His face was burned, contused. He was in a lot of pain but alert. He focused on me immediately.

  “You good?” I asked, feeling the enormity of the moment now. Del Rio was more a brother to me than my own brother. We’d been through hell together many times and had always survived and recovered. But he’d had a feeling about this gig. He’d tried to stop me from taking it on. The idea that now he might be paralyzed was almost more than I could take.

  He shook his head stoically. “Nothing from the waist down, Jack.”

  I felt my stomach drop forty stories. “Nothing yet,” I said. “Stay positive.”

  “Kind of hard when you’ve been on the wrong end of a yo-yo,” he replied. “You get them?”

  “Yes and no. I’ll explain later. I’ll see you at the hospital. Semper Fi.”

  He nodded, said with little conviction, “Hoorah, Jack.”

  Two EMTs lifted Del Rio onto a gurney and slid him into the rear of the latest ambulance to back down the pier. The doors closed and he was gone.