“I’ve got gigs lined up for the next two months,” Brad said. “I can’t just leave my band.”

  “Napoleon’s Corporal is going to have to wait,” I said. “This is life-and-death serious.”

  “That’s my income, Dad. And I have responsibilities to my team just like you have to yours,” he said. “I didn’t see you abandon them, ever.”

  “Brad, your safety is at play here. Phalanx Corporation is deploying hit squads to come after me and, I believe, us. There’s a connection to Coop that makes things real bad.”

  “Papa Coop? How is he involved? He’s dead,” Reagan said.

  My children had blended a traditional grandfather name, “Papa,” with his military nickname to arrive at Papa Coop. It was cute when they were younger, and like most family monikers, it stuck.

  “I will explain later. There’s an airplane headed to Charlottesville right now. Where are you, Brad?”

  “I’m in C-ville. We had a gig last night at the Rapture. Crashed with a buddy on Albemarle.” The defiance in his voice was replaced with resignation. I imagine the Parizad episode might have triggered some post-traumatic stress. Having a suicide vest strapped to your torso will do that.

  “Okay, go pick up your sister and get to the airport. If you have weapons, take them.”

  There was a chime in the background coming from one of their locations.

  “Hang on, Dad, someone’s at the door,” Reagan said.

  I thought of the video we had watched where Emily Sedgewick and Blair Campbell were attacked in their homes.

  “Yeah, Theo has someone at his door, too. Weird.”

  “Don’t answer it!” I shouted. “Reagan, get your gun and stay away from the windows. Brad, you, too.”

  My heart clenched as Reagan switched to FaceTime on her iPhone. She was running to her nightstand, pulling out her pistol and spinning just as the window shattered above her head. Brad switched to FaceTime, too. He reached into his guitar case and extracted a ZF-5 submachine gun I had purchased for him after his run-in with Parizad. He scrambled into Theo’s bedroom. Theo was asleep and Brad pulled him to the floor with Theo saying, “Dude!” Feathers flew from the mattress as the windows shattered and bullets thudded into the bed.

  Reagan stayed low and took up a shooter’s pose from the prone position as her front door splintered. She had propped her phone against something and reversed the camera. Two men in black uniforms came into her apartment with long guns held at eye level. Reagan’s hand was trembling. She shot the lead man, who doubled over, giving her a face shot on the trail man. She ran into the living room and shot both men in the head. More bullets shattered the living room window as Reagan dove onto the floor. She spun and fired at the drone hovering outside of her window, emptying her magazine.

  Brad’s predicament was equally tenuous. Not nearly as practiced as Reagan, Brad left his phone on the floor so all I could see was the ceiling and some shadows crossing the walls. But I could hear Brad say, “Bad guys. Stay down.” Then the metallic clank of the ZF-5 not firing. “Fuck. Safety.” He had forgotten to turn off the safety and the Phalanx Squad was inside the bedroom, shooting. I heard the ZF-5 rip and shouts from Brad.

  “No! No! No!”

  More gunfire. Then Brad’s phone was picked up and FaceTime was dancing throughout the apartment.

  “Dad! Got them, but Theo’s hit. What do I do?”

  “Check for other attackers first then come back to him,” I said. “Reagan, status?”

  “Drone down. Two dead in my condo.”

  “Okay, grab your go bag and get in your car. Pick up Brad and Theo and get to the airport like your life depends on it, because it does. Do you have an aid kit in your bag?”

  “Yes, yes, moving.”

  The FaceTime continued with her running. She grabbed an aviator’s kit bag filled with a packing list I made her keep beneath her bed. Meanwhile Brad’s FaceTime continued to show the ceiling and provide audio of him breathing heavily.

  “Calm down, Brad. You’re doing great,” I said.

  Evelyn put her hand on my arm. The ladies in the back seats were quiet. Colette had placed her hand over her mouth in horror. Perhaps she was wondering how her own child could be trying to kill my children.

  After a few minutes of indecipherable images from both phones, I heard Reagan’s car starting. “On the way,” she said. She tossed the phone in the passenger seat, and I could see the roof of her car. It was only a few minutes before she was stopped and running up to help Brad.

  “Grab his legs,” Brad said. I assumed his phone was in his pocket because the ceiling view had disappeared and I could only hear the grunting and mumbling of hurried movements. The hatch to Reagan’s SUV shut, two car doors slammed, and Brad picked up Reagan’s phone. His eyes were wide and his hand was trembling so much the phone barely captured his face.

  “Headed to the airport, Dad,” he said.

  “Anyone following you?” I asked.

  “Not that I can see,” Reagan said.

  “How’s Theo?” I asked.

  “In pain. Shot in the shoulder.”

  “Life-threatening?”

  “Don’t think so,” Brad said.

  “He looks okay, Dad,” Reagan said.

  “Okay, to be on the safe side, use your go bag burner phone to call an ambulance to be at the airport. Call 911 and tell them you’ve got a gunshot victim.”

  “Okay.”

  I stayed with them as they made the quick trip to the airport on the north side of town. Reagan made the call and Brad kept me on FaceTime. Fifteen minutes later they were at the airport.

  “Pulling in now,” Brad said.

  I gave them the tail number that I recalled from my first flight over to France and said, “Park anywhere.”

  “There it is,” Reagan said. “Hawker?”

  “Yes. Ambulance?”

  “Right there,” Brad said. “Coming in hot about a mile away.”

  The ambulance’s sirens blared in the background.

  “Leave the tailgate up and the keys in the car. Get to the Hawker now.”

  Brad said, “You’re going to be okay, buddy,” to Theo, then they were running to the airplane through the private terminal. Someone yelled “Hey!” at them as they ran to the airplane, which had dropped its staircase. They were in the Hawker and taxiing.

  “I’m watching the ambulance load Theo. Feel shitty about leaving him.”

  “You saved his life,” I said. “You pulled him out of that bed before it got shot up. You called him an ambulance. He’s going to be okay.”

  “Might write a song about this,” he mumbled.

  “Do that,” I said. Then to Reagan, “You okay?”

  “Yeah, Dad, but what’s going on? We’re wheels up, by the way.”

  “I’ll tell you. We just went through the same thing.”

  “We?”

  “Evelyn Champollion, her mother, and a woman named Colette, who you will meet. Ask the pilots where you’re refueling and then call me from there.”

  Reagan paused. “Okay, Dad. I don’t know what’s going on and we’re both really scared. I’ve never seen Brad like this.”

  “I’m writing something,” Brad mumbled again.

  “It’s going to be okay, babe. All okay. Take care of each other. Send me an update on Theo when you get one, and when you get to Wyoming, you’ll be with the entire Dagger team. You’ll be safe there.”

  I think about those last words to my children every day now and wonder how I could have been so wrong.

  15

  EVELYN LOOKED AT ME as she banked south.

  “Are they okay?” Evelyn asked.

  “They’re on one of Drewson’s jets headed to Wyoming to hole up in his compound with the rest of my team,” I said. “I can’t think of a better place for them at the moment. Protected by Jake, Randy, Joe, and the others.”

  “Good. What about your parents?”

  “Mom and dad are retired in Fort Myers, Florida. Dad is completely disengaged from everything in life, save a few boards and consulting gigs, which he calls ‘free money.’ Mom sends the occasional birthday card. Coop’s wife, my grandmother, is in a memory care facility near them. I think they’re fine but you’re right, I should probably give them a heads-up.”

  She nodded as I used my OptiPhone’s satellite feature to call my father. It was late afternoon on the East Coast and my dad answered, shouting into the phone.

  “I don’t want any more fucking spam calls!”

  “Dad, it’s Garrett,” I said, trying to catch him before he hung up. I wasn’t sure, though, he might rather take a spam call than one from me. For reasons I never understood, we weren’t on the best terms.

  “Garrett’s in prison. Go fuck yourself, you scum sucking media douchebag.”

  “Seriously, it’s me,” I said. “It’s about Coop.”

  He paused. It wasn’t a well-advertised nickname for his father. I could hear wind blowing and the roar of motorized golf carts in the background.

  “Okay fuckstick, tell me what Ranger battalion my father served in during the war,” my father said.

  “Dad, Coop served in Second Batt. He scaled Pointe du Hoc. I used to help him fix his Caddy, which is where he got his nickname.”

  After a long pause, he mumbled, “Just a sec, I gotta take this. Give me a par on this one.” Then to me: “Where are you? Saw something about an explosion at the DB and then suddenly there’s nothing on it?”

  “Phalanx Corporation is attacking family members. Brad and Reagan were almost killed. They’re on their way to a safe location. I’d offer the same to you, mom, and grandmother.”

  “What are you talking about? Is this some prison bullshit? Brad and Reagan were fine last time I talked to them a couple of months ago. You’re locked up. What do you know?”

  It had been more like a couple of years, but I wasn’t going to quibble.

  “They’re fine now. My point is to warn you that Phalanx is attacking a list of people.”

  “A list? Who’s on the list?”

  I thought I heard him chuckle. The wind was blowing in the phone speaker so I couldn’t be sure but it would have been on brand.

  “I’ve got someone who’s going to decipher all of that in the next twenty-four hours.”

  “Sounds like a bunch of bullshit to me. I don’t see any of this on the news. There’s no mention anywhere on the talk shows. I just traded in my iPhone for a LanxPro phone because it has a better international business suite for my consulting gigs. But thanks for the heads-up.”

  “Roger that, Dad.”

  “Hey, let me finish this putt. Might be a birdie after all,” he said away from the phone. Then to me: “Anything else?”

  “Negative,” I said.

  He hung up.

  Evelyn, who had heard the conversation over the headset, said, “I’m sorry, but I’m glad that Brad and Reagan are okay.”

  I shrugged and shook it off. No matter the compartmentalization, it still stung that my dad didn’t care about his grandkids. I had long ago reconciled his lack of empathy for me, but it was unforgivable the way he had cut out Brad and Reagan, who desired a relationship with their grandfather. His selfishness and self-serving nature were legendary in the army, leaving me to sweep up the broken glass of relationships he had damaged all the way up the chain. And today, he cared more about a putt he’d probably miss than the fact that his grandkids were in danger or, for that matter, that the world was about to spin out of control. He would argue that he’d done his duty and indeed he had. Do we ever give up responsibility to use our talents to make the world a better place for those we love? I didn’t think so, and so here I was compartmentalizing and changing the topic so I could refocus on the tasks at hand.

  “What about our rear seaters here? What are we doing with them?”

  “Dropping Mama and Colette with Charles, and then we will make a decision about how best to continue,” she said.

  “Continue where?” I asked.

  “You know where,” she said.

  I didn’t know but I suspected what she wanted to do was confront Blanc, wherever he might be.

  “So, if we’re going to engage Blanc, do we know where he is?”

  “My team has pinpointed Monsieur Blanc in his New York City flat,” she said.

  I nodded and said, “So the purpose is to confront him and say, ‘Here he is, see, he’s not such a bad dude’?”

  She smiled. “Something like that.” Then, “You should know that one of the pictures you saw, in which he and I were adolescents, was after I saved his life.”

  “If you saved his life, why would he want to capture you? Harm you?”

  “I don’t think he wants to harm me,” she said. “Aurelius is a weird guy. Has this devout sense of loyalty and yet sometimes gets lost in his own genius and blocks everything out. When he’s focused, he exclusively shuts out everything but the singular thing he is focused on. I can tell you more in due time, Garrett, but please be patient with me.”

  “Patient? One of his teams kidnapped you in Denver. Brought you to France under duress. Locked you in a dungeon,” I said. It made no sense.

  “Like I said, it requires some imagination to understand. Was I unhappy with what was transpiring? Yes. Was I ever concerned for my safety? I don’t think so, but maybe. If he was going to kill me, he would have done it on the spot. One of my captors, who were all respectful, by the way, told me that Aurelius was coming to see me. You got there first, though, and I’ve learned my security team tracked the tail number of his airplane, which never took off from New York.”

  I paused for a moment, thinking about the insanity of what I just learned about Blanc and his connection to not only Evelyn, but me. Choosing reason over emotion, I proceeded.

  “Two questions,” I said. She banked the airplane over the coastline and began a descent toward Bordeaux. “What did you save him from and how much contact have you had with him since?”

  “Fair questions. When we were kids, he used to like to go down the bluffs and onto Normandy Beach. He was never an athlete, certainly not a swimmer, and, well, I was always an athlete. I was running on the beach one afternoon after school training for a track meet and saw him playing around in the shore break. Normandy Beach has a mean riptide because of all the Allied equipment that sank in the ocean. The water funnels in and sucks out through these man-made canals. Sharp edges everywhere just below the surface from all the mangled and destroyed equipment. It’s very dangerous. Aurelius got pulled out to sea and I jumped in—the water was freezing—and let the rip pull me out until I caught up with him. He was basically dead, limp, floating in the water doing the one thing you’re not supposed to do, which is fight the rip.”

  “Yes, never fight the riptide,” I said.

  “In all matters, indeed.”

  She looked at me pointedly before continuing.

  “Have you remained friends?” I asked.

  She played with a few dials on the cockpit dashboard and then responded.

  “Off and on but not lately,” she said. “He’s a bit of a recluse. I’m still puzzled by how Drewson’s Zebra team found this kill list and neither Misha nor myself have been able to crack the rest of the code they gave us. Some of the people on the list are now dead. Others have been chased, like your daughter’s friend, Blair Campbell. I find it hard to believe that Aurelius is having people killed, though. It seems … out of character for the Aurelius I know.”

  “Who are these Zebra people?”

  “Mitch’s skunk works people, is what I’m told. I’ve never actually met them.”

  “How can you be sure this code is real? That it was Blanc’s guy or gal? Or even his stuff?”

  “All coders have a fingerprint. They leave their mark. Some even leave calling cards, or Easter eggs, data packages. It’s an ego thing, like when killers leave a calling card. An ‘I was here’ sort of statement. Among other things, the code said, ‘We will execute the Web 3.0 developers if Optimus does not reveal the code in open source.’ From what I can determine based on this limited information provided by the Zebra team, Aurelius wants Drewson to share the Project Optimus code so that all can have access to it. Drewson, of course, wants a monopoly on all Web 3.0 activity. Who wouldn’t?”

  “That doesn’t explain the Easter bunny, or whatever,” I said.

  “Easter egg. From what I was shown, the coder, a woman named Ximena Alcaraz from El Salvador, created a unique ‘X’ that is like the crossed sabers in the Phalanx logo when she coded the word ‘execute.’ It’s how she signs her name in the metaverse. It’s as distinct as her own fingerprint. Subtle and hard to notice, but I saw it with my own eyes.”

  “You used your cryptological skills to do this?”

  She smiled beneath her headset microphone.

  “Yes, that I can confirm.”

  Changing the topic, I asked, “What was the big building we saw near your home?”

  “Ah yes, very controversial. Aurelius is building a plant between Sainte-Mère-Église and Carentan-les-Marais that manufactures semiconductors. Many protested two years ago when it was built. Others cheered. It creates jobs for everyone in that part of France but is also in the middle of a very historic part of the world as you know. Other than the two nuclear plants on the south side of the peninsula, it is the largest facility in the region.”

  I thought about that for a second and asked her, “What does Drewson have in North Carolina that you were going to see?”

  “Something very similar. He either makes the chips there or imports them,” she said. “I never got there, as you know.”

  “Two of the biggest billionaires in the world are facing off on the world stage and creating their own means of semiconductor manufacturing?”

  “Perhaps, but it doesn’t seem all that odd to me. Mitch is working on Web 3.0 that needs chips for the Internet of Things, decentralized Wi-Fi, decentralized finance, and the like. Aurelius needs chips for his augmented and virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and lord knows whatever else he is working on. Why have someone else build the core of your business if you can do it yourself?”