Chapter 46: The Fugitive
"Chuck. You look great."
Simon said it without irony because it was true. Chuck had made an effort — pressed shirt, actual shoes instead of the worn sneakers that were his standard floor footwear, the specific tidiness of someone who understood that first impressions were transactional and had prepared accordingly.
"Thanks." Chuck glanced toward the floor. "You should see Morgan."
Simon followed his look.
Morgan Grimes was at the television display, talking to a customer, wearing a collared shirt tucked into actual slacks with a belt, his beard trimmed, his posture attentive. He looked like someone who had arrived at the Buy More from a completely different life trajectory and was visiting.
"What happened to him?" Simon said.
"I genuinely don't know," Chuck said. "He texted me last night saying he'd had a realization. This is the realization, I think."
"It's a good realization," Simon said. He looked at Chuck more carefully. Something was slightly off — Chuck was present but not quite settled, the way he got when he was managing two things at once and one of them was winning. "Everything okay with you two?"
"What makes you ask?"
"You're watching him the way you watch something you're not sure about."
Chuck was quiet for a moment. "We had a thing. It's—" He shook his head. "We'll work it out. We always do."
"He's a real friend," Simon said. Not elaborately. Just stating it. "Those are harder to come by than they look."
"I know." Chuck pulled out his wallet to badge in.
The wallet hit the floor.
Chuck reached down for it — and then Harry Tang appeared from between two display units with the energy of someone who had been waiting for an entrance.
"Hey!"
Chuck startled. The wallet went skidding across the linoleum.
Harry Tang, dressed today in what appeared to be his interpretation of frontier-casual — jeans, a button-down, boots with modest heel elevation — looked down at Chuck and smiled with the satisfaction of someone who had achieved a very small victory and was going to let it mean something.
"You flinched," Tang said. "I just wanted you to know — I've been preparing for this interview for three weeks. Solid prep. I'm going to nail it, Bartowski."
He looked at Simon, who was giving him the neutral expression of someone declining to engage. Then he walked away.
Chuck retrieved his wallet and stood up.
Simon looked at him. "Don't let him—"
"I'm not," Chuck said.
"Good." Simon started toward the floor.
"Simon."
He turned.
Chuck was looking at something in his wallet. A small piece of paper — an index card, or a receipt, or something handwritten. His expression had shifted in the way it shifted when something internal was happening.
Simon looked at the paper. A hand-drawn map — rough, quick, but recognizable. The pier. The carousel end. The arcade.
His brain processed the image before he'd consciously decided to look, and the Intersect gave him a fragment: a name, a file number, a classification. Someone connected to that location.
"What is that?" Simon said.
Chuck looked up. "Santa Monica Pier. Somebody left this in my wallet. I think—" He was already making the calculation Simon could see happening behind his eyes. "I need to go."
"Chuck." Simon stepped forward. "You have an interview in—" He checked his watch. "Three hours."
"I know. But there's something I have to deal with first." Chuck's voice had the particular quality it had when something had moved from the should I category to the I have to category without fully passing through this is a good idea.
Simon looked at him.
"Tell me what it is," he said. "And I'll handle it. You stay for the interview."
"Simon—"
"Tell me."
Chuck hesitated. Then: "There's a fugitive. His name is Laszlo Malov. He got away last night because of— it's complicated. He's at the pier, I think. He was recruited there originally, it's a specific location for him."
Simon felt the Intersect give him more: recruited at eleven, university graduate at fourteen, doctorate at seventeen. Weapons design. Government intelligence applications. The specific combination of genius and instability that made someone simultaneously invaluable and extremely difficult to manage. Roughly equivalent — in function and profile — to Q from the Bond films, except younger and with considerably less institutional loyalty.
"I'll call Sarah and Casey before I go," Chuck added. "You just need to make sure he doesn't leave the pier before they get there."
"Does he have weapons?"
Chuck looked slightly uncomfortable. "Probably. He's resourceful."
"That's a yes." Simon was already moving toward the exit. "Stay. Do your interview. I'll contain him until the team arrives."
"Simon—"
"Chuck. If you leave now, you lose the interview and you probably also lose the fugitive because you'll do something well-intentioned and counterproductive." Simon stopped at the door. "Stay. I've got it."
Chuck opened his mouth. Closed it. Nodded.
Simon went.
He was in the Mustang and moving when his watch vibrated.
He put the earpiece in.
"Lewis." Casey's voice. "Bartowski just called. Laszlo Malov, Santa Monica Pier. We're twenty minutes out from the city."
"I'm five minutes out," Simon said.
"Do not let him leave the pier. Do not engage him directly if you can avoid it. He's not violent by training but he's inventive, and inventive unpredictable people are worse than violent predictable ones."
"Understood. Any other context?"
A pause. "He's a weapons designer. Government contractor. Left voluntarily after — a disagreement. He's been operating independently for approximately fourteen months. He's not hostile to the agency. He's just not cooperating with it."
"So he's a genius who doesn't want to be managed," Simon said.
"Essentially."
"I understand that impulse," Simon said.
"Lewis."
"I'm not sympathizing, I'm characterizing." Simon took the exit for the pier. "I'll call if the situation changes."
He ended the call.
The Halloween carnival at Santa Monica Pier was exactly as crowded as Halloween carnivals at Santa Monica Pier always were — which was to say, comprehensively, with the specific chaos of families, teenagers, and tourists all occupying the same space with different agendas.
Simon parked, tucked the Beretta under his jacket, and looked at the crowd.
He called Chuck.
"The pier is packed," he said. "If you just know he's somewhere here, I'm going to need you to narrow it down."
"Right." Chuck was quiet for a second. Simon could hear the Buy More ambient noise in the background — Laszlo had escaped, but Chuck was still in the store, which was the right call. "He likes arcades. That's where they first— that's where the recruitment happened. The arcade at the end of the pier, the one with the classic machines."
"Got it."
"Simon — he may have built something. He tends to build things when he's working through something emotionally. Just — be aware."
"Define built something."
Chuck paused. "I'll let you assess when you get there."
Simon ended the call and moved toward the arcade.
The car was parked at the far end of the arcade's exterior — a Nerd Herd vehicle, identifiable by the logo on the door, which had been somewhat modified. The driver's side door was open. The hood was up. Both of these things had been done deliberately rather than through mechanical failure.
A man was leaning against a support pillar beside it, looking out at the ocean with the meditative stillness of someone working through a complicated problem.
He was younger than Simon expected — early twenties at most, slight, with the disheveled focus of someone for whom appearance was a resource drain he'd decided not to allocate toward.
Simon raised the Beretta and kept it at his side.
"Laszlo," he said.
The man turned.
He looked at the gun with the specific interest of someone who found the tool itself more engaging than the threat it represented.
"You're not with the CIA," Laszlo said. "You're too young and you're holding the weapon wrong for their standard training."
"Contractor," Simon said. "Does the distinction matter?"
"Somewhat. It suggests they're improvising." Laszlo tilted his head. "Are you going to shoot me?"
"Not if you cooperate," Simon said. "I'd prefer not to. There are a lot of people around."
"That's actually the point," Laszlo said. He reached into his jacket and produced a car remote — the kind that came with a keyless entry system, but modified. Additional circuitry visible on the housing. A small LED indicator.
Simon's eyes went to the open hood of the Nerd Herd car.
He walked to it and looked.
A timer. A small device connected to the car's fuel system with what appeared to be a very compact initiating charge.
Simon looked at it for three seconds with the specific attention of someone assessing whether a thing is functional.
It was functional.
"Let me understand the negotiation," Simon said, walking back to his previous position. "You detonate that if I don't let you leave."
"That's the structure, yes," Laszlo said. He seemed neither aggressive nor agitated — more interested in how Simon was going to respond to the problem than in the outcome specifically.
"There are maybe three hundred people within forty meters of that car," Simon said.
"Which is why it's an effective negotiating tool," Laszlo said. "I'm not trying to hurt anyone. I just need thirty minutes to be somewhere else."
Simon looked at him.
Laszlo looked back with the patient attention of someone who was used to being the smartest person in a room and had become comfortable waiting for others to catch up.
"Here's my problem," Simon said. "I believe you when you say you don't want to hurt anyone. I also think you know that I know that, which means you know the threat is more complicated than it appears." He kept his voice even. "A man who doesn't want to hurt anyone has built a device that could hurt a lot of people. That's a contradiction, and I think you're aware of it."
Laszlo was quiet.
"So either you're genuinely willing to detonate it," Simon continued, "in which case you're not who Chuck thinks you are. Or you're not willing to detonate it, in which case the remote is theater and we can have a different conversation." He paused. "Which is it?"
Laszlo looked at him for a long moment.
Then he looked at the remote.
Then at Simon.
"You're smarter than the last three people they sent," he said.
"I'll take that," Simon said. "Now tell me which one it is."
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