Chapter 38: Friends
The guard was leaning against the garage wall with a cigarette, the specific posture of someone who had decided that this corner of the perimeter was adequately covered by his presence rather than his attention.
Simon came out of the dark at a walk.
"Hey — you got a light?"
The guard looked up. Registered the face. Started to register that the face didn't belong there.
The tranq round hit him in the neck before he finished the registration.
Simon caught him on the way down — not gently, but quietly — and dragged him into the landscaping at the garage's edge. He pulled the man's sidearm from its shoulder holster, checked the weapon, dropped the magazine into his bag, and moved to the electrical panel.
The cover came off with the flat blade of his knife. The main breaker was where the layout said it would be. He pulled it, and the villa went dark.
He cut three wires with the knife's scissors blade — not to cause additional damage, but to complicate the reset. Restored electrical service in a property with cut wiring required someone with tools and knowledge, which bought time.
He put on the night vision monocular and moved toward the rear entrance.
The villa's interior was a study in interrupted routines.
Two guards in the kitchen were using flashlights, which was their first problem. Flashlights in a dark space make the person holding them clearly visible and destroys their own night vision simultaneously. Simon moved through the door they'd left open for ventilation, got to the first guard before either of them could turn, took him by the ankle and levered him onto the tile floor with a move that was efficient rather than elegant.
The second guard swung his flashlight toward the sound.
Simon picked up the first guard's fallen light and aimed it directly into the second man's eyes.
The second guard flinched and covered up — the involuntary response, unstoppable regardless of training.
Simon crossed the distance and put him down with the tranq pistol at contact range.
He took both weapons, both magazines, added them to the bag, and moved into the main hall.
Three guards in the living room, moving in a loose formation with the cautious energy of people who knew something was wrong but didn't yet know what or where.
Simon assessed the room geometry in two seconds from the hallway.
He went low, sliding on the hardwood to the ankles of the nearest guard, wrapped both legs around the man's lower legs, and twisted. The guard went down backward — heavy, loud enough to draw the other two.
Simon fired the tranq pistol from the floor.
One down.
He rolled, came up behind an armchair, grabbed a fallen flashlight from the floor and sent its beam directly into the nearest man's face. The man recoiled.
Simon closed the gap and took him with a collar-and-hip dump that deposited him on the carpet with sufficient force to interrupt his interest in the evening.
Third guard: tranq round, two seconds, floor.
Simon collected the weapons, moved to the stairs, and went up.
The second floor was quiet.
Doc was not a man who used security as a substitute for personal preparation. Simon had read that correctly from their first meeting — the economy of the man, the absence of wasted movement or wasted words. He would have a weapon. He would be positioned near an exit. He would have made a decision about what he was willing to do before the situation required him to make it.
Simon didn't go to the bedroom door.
He went to the second-floor corridor window, went out it onto the exterior ledge, moved laterally across the face of the building using the decorative stonework for purchase, and stopped at the bedroom window.
Through the glass, in the green-tinted view of the monocular: Doc in the center of the room, standing, facing the door. A short-barreled shotgun at waist height.
Simon had approximately two seconds of decision.
He went through the window.
The glass broke — more noise than he wanted, less than he'd feared. Doc's response was immediate: the shotgun swung toward the movement and fired.
The bed ceased to be a bed.
Simon was not on the bed. He'd hit the floor on entry, rolling toward the wall, and was already coming up as Doc pumped the action.
Before the second shell chambered, Simon's tranq pistol was at Doc's temple.
The villa's lights came on.
Simon had turned the monocular's auto-brightness function on before the operation. The sudden light didn't blind him. He blinked, adjusted, and was looking at Doc clearly.
Doc stood very still.
He looked at Simon.
Then he lowered the shotgun.
"You're younger than I remembered," Doc said.
"You tried to have me shot," Simon said. "Which tends to make people look older in retrospect."
Doc set the shotgun on the floor and stepped back from it. He raised his hands — not panicked, just acknowledging the geometry. "What now?"
Simon kicked the shotgun under the bed and lowered the tranq pistol.
"Two options," Simon said. "We can make this difficult, or we can make this reasonable."
Doc waited.
"I have no interest in killing you," Simon said. "You're not worth the paperwork. But if you move against anyone connected to me — my neighbors, my girlfriend, anyone in my orbit — I will stop being reasonable. And I promise you the people I work with now are considerably less negotiable than I am."
He let that land.
"What I want," Simon said, "is simple. You leave Los Angeles. Permanently. I don't pursue what you've taken, I don't flag your operation to the people I work for, and we go our separate ways as people who never had a problem with each other."
Doc was quiet for a moment.
Then he moved — unhurried, deliberate — to the bar cart near the window. He poured two fingers of Scotch. Considered the glass.
"You work for an intelligence agency now," he said. It wasn't a question.
"What makes you say that."
"Because six weeks ago you were a car thief and a street racer and a very capable driver with no institutional backing. Tonight you walked through my security like it wasn't there." He sipped the Scotch. "That's not just talent. That's current support."
Simon said nothing.
"I don't fight intelligence agencies," Doc said. "I've operated for thirty years by understanding which opponents are worth engaging and which aren't. Federal intelligence is not worth engaging." He set the glass down. "I'll take your terms."
"Good," Simon said.
"One condition of my own."
Simon waited.
"I don't leave empty-handed." Doc moved to the bookcase. He pulled it forward — it swung on a hinge, revealing a floor-to-ceiling safe built into the wall. He worked the combination with the practiced ease of a man who had opened this lock thousands of times.
The safe opened.
He removed a travel bag and set it on the floor between them.
"One million," Doc said. "I'm not in the habit of making enemies for free. Since we're becoming something other than enemies—" He nodded at the bag. "Consider it a retainer. For future goodwill. If I ever need a contact inside an intelligence structure, I'd rather have one who owes me nothing and chooses to help anyway."
Simon looked at the bag.
He thought about what a million dollars meant practically. He thought about what it cost to have Doc as a dormant asset rather than an active liability.
He picked up the bag.
"I'll hold onto the phone you gave me," Simon said. "If you need to reach me, use it. If something comes across my desk that you'd want to know about — I'll make a judgment call." He looked at Doc directly. "But I don't work for you. We're clear on that."
"Crystal," Doc said.
"Then we're done." Simon moved toward the door.
"One more thing," Doc said.
Simon stopped.
"I maintain what people in my position call a contingency arrangement," Doc said. "If I die by unnatural causes, certain funds are released to certain people with certain instructions. It's a deterrent rather than a plan." He said it with the neutrality of a man reciting a policy. "I mention it only so that the information is complete."
Simon stood at the door for a moment.
"If I wanted you dead," he said, "you would already be having a different kind of morning." He pulled the door open. "Drive safe."
He walked out.
The lower floor was navigable — most of the security was sleeping peacefully in various rooms, and the two who weren't had apparently decided that the sounds from upstairs indicated a situation above their pay grade and retreated to the front entrance.
Simon went out the rear.
He walked the property's edge to the gap in the fence he'd identified during reconnaissance — a maintenance access point that the security layout had deprioritized — and was through it in under a minute.
He walked half a mile to his car, put the travel bag in the trunk alongside the first bag already there, and sat in the driver's seat for a moment.
He had 1.7 million dollars in his trunk.
He had a promise from Doc to leave the city.
He had a job with a federal intelligence agency.
He had a graze on his arm that needed proper attention, a destroyed bedroom window on a Bel Air villa that was going to raise questions with someone's insurance company, and a training session with Meg in six hours.
He started the car.
A van was parked fifty yards up the road — dark, nondescript, facing out. Simon had clocked it on the way in and left it in the back of his awareness.
He pulled up beside it and tapped his window.
Casey's window went down.
They looked at each other.
"You were here the whole time," Simon said.
"When did you make us?" Casey said.
"When I got out of my car," Simon said. "Government vehicles park facing out. Habit."
Casey absorbed this. "The operation?"
"Resolved. He's leaving the city."
"You're sure."
"He's a businessman," Simon said. "He doesn't fight battles he can't win. The calculation changed — he understood that." Simon paused. "He also gave me money."
Casey looked at him.
"He wanted a contact," Simon said. "I didn't commit to anything except holding his number. I thought you'd want to know."
Casey was quiet for a moment. "Keep the number. Don't initiate contact. If he reaches out, route it through me."
"Understood."
A pause.
"Your arm," Casey said.
"I'll handle it."
"Medical kit in the back. Take it."
Simon got out, took the kit from Casey's van, got back in his car.
"Casey," he said, through the window.
Casey looked at him.
"You followed me out here to make sure the operation went cleanly," Simon said. "Not to help — just to watch."
"Correct."
"And if it had gone wrong?"
Casey considered this for a moment with the expression of a man reviewing a policy.
"Then I would have made a decision," he said.
Simon nodded. That was probably the most honest answer Casey was going to give, and it was honest enough.
He rolled up his window and drove.
The city opened up ahead of him — the long straight boulevards, the orange lights, the mountains dark in the distance.
The problem was solved.
He'd handled it himself, which was the only way it could have been handled.
He drove home, cleaned and bandaged his arm in the bathroom mirror, and was asleep by two AM.
At five, his alarm went off.
At five fifteen, he was standing on Meg's front walk.
At five thirty, they were running.
[Reader Support Milestones]
500 Power Stones → +1 Chapter
10 Reviews → +1 Chapter
Enjoyed the read? Leave a review.
20+advanced chapters on P1treon Soulforger