Homefront Defenders

William had already hung up, so Locke tucked his phone back in his pocket. At least he thought this could be a real threat, regardless of what other people’s opinions of him were. How the attack on Alana was connected remained to be seen, but his phone call with William had only cemented the fact he was alone, just like always. He would work to keep her safe, but Alana was his subordinate—and nothing more.

* * *

“Thanks for distracting me with this, Joe.” Alana motioned to her phone and the list of numbers she’d typed into her notes app. Incoming and outgoing calls Beatrice had received on her cell phone. Nothing jumped out at her, probably just cold callers and friends Beatrice wanted to talk to. Likely the information wouldn’t yield a reason why the yakuza had killed her.

“Tell you a secret?” He leaned closer. Alana shrugged. He said, “I don’t like dead people.”

“Neither do I.” She set her hand on his arm. “I’d much rather be surfing.”

“You got that right, sista.” His expression changed, and she caught what it was about when he said, “Seen Kaylee since you been here?” Totally innocent, like he wasn’t trying to father-figure her while Ray was in the room. Her dad had left a hole in her life she hadn’t even begun to figure out how to fill in the years since.

Alana made a face. “My sister wouldn’t answer the door even if I did go over there. Kaylee made it clear she didn’t want to see me again. Ever.”

Joe made a tut sound with his mouth and shook his head. “Shame. I heard—”

“Agent Preston.” Locke’s voice was a bark.

Alana turned to her colleague. Boss. Whatever. She pasted a smile on her face. “Yes, Agent Locke?” It just sounded weird to call him that. The whole team called him Locke, and she didn’t know what his first name was. Surely it had been mentioned when she first met him, but she couldn’t remember. It was bizarre to think of calling him something else, anyway. Like he had a personality instead of just a buttoned collar and tie, shiny shoes and a gun.

“We should make our last visit for the day.”

Right. The marine sniper, the one Locke had wanted to check the file for.

“And that’s my cue to leave.” She looked at her brother. When he didn’t say anything, she decided to go for it. “’Bye, Ray.”

He muttered, “Sounds familiar.”

Locke touched her arm, and she went with him. They were so different, and yet she felt more at home with him than with her family.

Alana wasn’t going to apologize for her brother, no matter how much dichotomy there was in her life. Things were what they were. Alana didn’t regret leaving, but she did regret what things had become. If she could prove to Ray what a good Secret Service agent she was, then he’d see that it had been the right decision for her to leave for the mainland.

Locke turned the vehicle on and got the air-conditioning running, but didn’t pull away from Beatrice’s house. Instead, he grabbed his iPad from the back seat. “It’s him. I knew he looked familiar. I just couldn’t place him.”

“Huh?”

He looked over from the screen, and tilted it in her direction so she could see the photo. Clean-cut, green fatigues. “The sniper. It’s the man I saw in the vehicle this morning. Our yakuza suspect’s getaway driver. Though he looked a lot more like a beach bum, with long hair and a beard.”

Locke drove them to the last house, through the forest reserve to a deserted stretch of mountain. Dirt trail, so much foliage they could barely get through. The SUV would probably get scratched up on both sides.

“Are you sure this is the right direction?” Alana swiped through to a map on the iPad but couldn’t get a strong enough signal for it to tell her where she was.

“I’ve been here before, remember? It was years ago, but this isn’t an address you forget.” Unlike the man’s face. Though years ago Brian hadn’t had facial hair—or looked like a beach bum.

“And this guy—” she found the man’s personal information “—Brian Wells? He lives here?”

“Yes. And if I take a wrong turn, I’ll tell you. I’m not one of those guys you women complain about who can’t ask for directions. There’s no point driving around in the middle of nowhere and getting lost.”

Alana shifted in the seat. What had that been about? It was bad enough being alone in the car with him for hours. Especially now that she knew he only cared about work. Okay, so she’d kind of known that already, but sometimes when he looked at her there was this...flash. That was all, just this spark on his face, or in his eyes, that said there was more than just work under that staid business demeanor.

She really hoped there was something else. Otherwise the man had a very boring existence. Not that Alana’s life was better, but it was a whole lot more interesting. And when she proved to everyone that becoming a Secret Service agent was what she was born to do, they would know it had been the right choice.

The foliage on both sides crept back, away from the car, over the next few feet as the road widened. Heavy leaves stretched toward them, great palms that bowed low when the rain she’d been caught in so many times hiking poured from the sky. Those camping trips years ago that had been rained out were some of her best childhood memories. Alana had gone all over the world in the last year on protection detail as a Secret Service agent, and before that she’d been assigned to several different US cities. But she’d missed her home state.

They emerged into a clearing, someone’s front yard. The house was an old Airstream with bricks instead of tires that had probably been there for fifty years and weathered every storm Alana had ever been caught in. And then some. The US Marines’ flag flew high with an American flag beside a satellite dish.

“This is it?” She glanced around. “Is he allowed to live here?”

Locke actually smiled. “Technically, no. But what do you think will happen if Uncle Sam shows up with a police badge to throw a veteran out on his ear and the press gets wind of it?”

“So live and let live, is that it?”

“It’s a theory. Brian keeps to himself. He doesn’t disturb anyone and asks for the same in return.” Locke motioned to a ramshackle shed to the right of the trailer. “He carves animals out of wood and then sells them at a souvenir store at the base of the mountain. And then—” He paused. “What? Wakes up this morning and drives a yakuza soldier to the beach so he can try to kill you?”

He opened his door, but Alana didn’t move. “This makes no sense,” he said.

She could barely muster up the will to lift her hand. But she couldn’t let him know that. “So...why are we interested in this guy, other than that he was the getaway driver from this morning?”

“Maybe he and our knife-man are friends now?” Locke motioned to the file, one leg out of the vehicle. “Brian Wells got out of prison five years ago, moved here. A ten-year stint. Good for us he only dislikes what he calls ‘political pawns.’ So long as he’s taking his medication, we’ll be fine.”

She grimaced. “Is it bad that I don’t want to go in there?”

What if they found another body? She didn’t want Locke to see her lose it all over again. It was bad enough he’d seen the aftermath the last time. And why had Brian shown up in her life that morning, if not for a reason that had everything to do with the fact she was a Secret Service agent and he was on their watch list?

His smile softened. “Want to stay here?”

Was he serious? If there was a plot in place, she was going to figure out what it was. Alana stiffened. “No.” She shoved the car door open and strode over the soft mossy earth to the front door.

Locke caught up and stretched his arm out in front of her. “Let me.”

Who was she to argue? If he wanted to catch the bullet first, that was fine with her. “Be my guest.”

He knocked, but no one answered. Locke twisted the door handle and called out as he opened it slowly. This time there was no one inside.

The TV was still on, and a meal in front of the recliner was half-eaten. She’d read in Wells’s file he had a blue Chevy truck circa Bill Clinton registered to him. Alana looked around. “This doesn’t make sense. Did he just leave in the middle of eating and drive off in his truck?”

Locke wandered to the rear and a sliding door. “You’re right. It doesn’t make any sense at all.”

When Locke ducked into the bedroom—not going in there, thank you—she decided to look at the kitchen instead. The sink was full of dishes, and the range top was crusted with charred food. The man needed to crack a window and let in some of that humid hibiscus breeze.

Piled up on the end of the counter was a stack of mail. Magazines. Junk inserts advertising local sales.

A business card.

“Oh, no.”

“What is it?” Locke came close enough to look over her shoulder. Didn’t he trust her? It was only one text to someone she’d gone to high school with. “Kaylee Preston, Hilo Explorer online. Is that—”

“My sister.”

“Why does a missing sniper involved in an attempt on your life have your sister’s business card?”

FOUR

He watched her blow out a breath. “That is a very good question.” Alana unclipped her phone and made a call. After listening for a while, she glanced at the floor. “It’s me. Listen, I need to talk to you about something. Can you call me back...please?”

It almost hurt hearing so much longing in the soft alto of her voice. Did he even know what that felt like? Sure, he called his mom on Sundays, but he didn’t think he’d ever had that much feeling about someone. Even those closest to him. His sisters were so much older, it wasn’t like they’d played together.

Locke walked through the trailer again to give her a minute to gather herself. He stared at the half-eaten meal. Turned off the TV.

No pets. He trailed back to the bedroom. The gun safe in the closet was open, half the racks missing items. Brian had taken at least six weapons—handguns, rifles and a shotgun—assuming no one had looted it since he’d left. Plenty of boxes of shells remained. Clothes spilled out of the drawers, and a green duffel lay crumpled in the corner. With some people, it was hard to tell if they’d been burglarized or if that was just how messy they lived.

Alana said, “Anything?”

Locke glanced around. “He’s armed, but he didn’t use any of the weapons this morning when I saw him. He just drove.”

A loner ex-sniper takes his guns to act as the getaway driver for a yakuza killer? It hardly made sense.

“I called Joe Morton,” Alana said. “Get this. He knows this guy, said all the cops do. Apparently he disappears all the time, shows up all over the island drunk and usually raving about political pawns and corruption. All that antigovernment, ‘we should live free and not under their thumb’ stuff. Joe said they usually take him in for the night and then drive him home the next day.” She paused. “I told him you’re sure that he’s the getaway driver. He’s going to update the BOLO to include that information. He said not to worry, they’ll find Brian Wells.”

Locke motioned to the room around them. “Brian is a drunk, but he’s never broken protocol before. Not when he knows the president is coming. He’s supposed to be here for this visit, and he’s supposed to stay home while the president is in town. That’s the arrangement.” He shook his head. “Can’t put a detail on a man we can’t find.”

“I know.” Alana’s look turned dark. “And what’s with that half-eaten meal and the TV being on? Did he come back after this morning? The truck is gone, but why walk out in the middle of dinner?”

“We don’t have time to look for Brian before the president gets here.” Locke motioned to the food, his agent brain spinning with possibilities. “All this could be misdirection, getting us to spin our wheels trying to find him while he’s off getting up to no good. He could be plotting something for when the president shows up.”

She pressed her lips together.

Locke ran his hand over his head and then squeezed the back of his neck. “We need to reconvene with the team, see if anyone else has had any weird experiences this morning. Something fishy is going on here.”

Locke continued, “The only problem is, they don’t seem to be connected. There’s nothing here that links back to Beatrice’s death. He could simply have given the yakuza guy a ride this morning. That could be his only link to this.”

* * *

Alana turned her phone over and looked at the screen, but it hadn’t made a noise. Her sister hadn’t returned her call. She clipped her phone back on her belt and went to the couch, where a newspaper had been discarded. “This is dated four days ago. I wonder if he reads it regularly.” She glanced around. “I think it would smell more if this meal had been here that long, or there would be animals in here by now.”

She worked her mouth side to side as she thought, then flipped the newspaper over. “This has been circled.” She brought the paper to him. “It’s an ad, a flyer in his paper. There’s nothing on the back, but it must have caught his eye. I don’t think I even look at these inserts.”

“I thought all that stuff was online now,” Locke said. “But I guess he doesn’t have internet all the way out here, and there’s nothing about a cell phone in his file.” His eyes scanned the ad. “Cash for work at a gun shop.”

“Hang on.” Alana tapped the page, the phone number. “That callback number...” She swiped on her phone to a list of numbers. She’d seen that number before. Today, in fact. “Beatrice’s cell phone call logs. That number is on there. She called it, as well.”

Alana showed him the notes app on her phone, where she’d transcribed the same number on both the ad and her list. “How’s that for a connection.”

Locke nodded. “It certainly is one.”

“He circled this ad, and Beatrice called that number.” She read off the date and time. “Day before yesterday.”

Another way Beatrice, Brian Wells and the yakuza member were connected. But her sister as well? She couldn’t figure it out.

Locke said, “We don’t have time to run down this lead before the president gets here. We already need to get to the team at Hilo airport.”

“Get ready to bring the city to a standstill.” She sent him a wry smile. “I used to hate when the president came to town. All the roads closed, can’t get anywhere, late for everything. Such a pain.”

Locke smiled back at her, his look understanding more than amused. “And now we’re the ones causing the mayhem.”

“At least I’m not trying to get somewhere else, I guess.” She shrugged. “So what do we do about this?”

Locke made his way to the front door. They stepped outside, and he scanned the area while Alana shut the trailer door. “Huh.”

He turned back. “What is it?”

“This lock is broken. Maybe someone came in and abducted him. Took some guns,” she said. “It explains the food he left. And the clothes. Maybe it was after you saw him this morning. He could have returned home, and then it happened?”

Locke shrugged. “Or he had a visitor other than us.” His phone beeped. He read the message aloud. “‘Air Force One is four hours out.’ Let’s get over to Hilo.”

She nodded, and they walked to the truck. Alana’s phone started to ring, and she whipped it out. Then sighed.

“Not your sister?”

“Nope.” She shook her head. “My neighbor in DC. I’ll call her back later.”

When she was quiet for a while, he apparently decided he needed to get her to talk. Locke said, “So you surfed in competitions, isn’t that right?”

She nodded.

“What happened, if you don’t mind me asking?” She was sure he knew the story but he must have wanted to hear her tell it.

“Maybe I do mind.” In the couple of seconds he took his eyes off the road in front of him, he probably saw the flash of pain in her eyes. She wasn’t going to hide it. “What are you doing, Locke? Why the personal question all of a sudden?”

He shrugged one shoulder and flicked his wrist so his watch was straight again. “Just making conversation, getting to know someone I work with better.”

“I was so good I was getting approached by swimwear companies, board shops that franchise all the way to New Jersey. Then, bam, I get hit by a swell and my knee kisses the bottom of the ocean while my leg is twisted...” She shook her head. “There was something down there. I still don’t know if it was an old board or wreckage from something. All I know is the pain was so bad I wanted them to cut my leg off. I’m pretty sure I screamed at everyone on that beach and cried uncontrollably until they all walked away in embarrassment, even my sister. I was so out of it with pain I don’t remember.

“She made sure I knew, though. Told me all about how I screamed in her face to get away from me. I was in the hospital nearly a week, and she didn’t come to see me. Then when I got out, she was gone for days, busy studying. When I did see her, she’d barely talk to me.” Alana took a breath. “We were never the same after that.”

* * *

Locke hardly knew what to say. “She didn’t know it was the pain talking, not you?”

Alana shrugged.

“And now you’re back home?”

“Now I’m back.”

Neither of them said much on the drive to the airport, though Locke made a few calls on the car’s speakerphone. Alana made notes on her phone for him and sent emails to update their team.

In a break of quiet, her phone rang. “Your neighbor?”

“Nope.”

“Your sister?”

“Nope.” She answered it. “Mikio Adachi. How are you?” Alana sent Locke a smile as she spoke. They were a good team.

Secret Service work was a team effort, and not just those standing between the president and whatever lone gunman wanted to kill him this week. Their biggest nightmare was a threat that originated with a group. Multiple points of attack, an IED or some other split-second attack that cared nothing for collateral damage.

It was a dangerous world they lived in, and the Secret Service was in the thick of it. Not like frontline soldiers who were shot at every day, but the threat to their lives was very real. Like a police officer who left for work not knowing if today was the day he might not come home.

“Thanks, Mikio. I’ll find out what the boss wants to do and get back to you.” She hung up. “Okay, so that was interesting. Mikio Adachi was in my graduating class in high school. Everyone knew his dad and his uncle were yakuza. Guess it runs in the family. He said he’s the boss now, just volunteered it up like it’s no big deal.”

“Does he know you’re Secret Service?”

“Yes. Though I don’t know how.” She frowned. “It was like two old friends chatting. I’m not sure why he’d be like that with me. It was a little weird.”

The guy probably thought he had a shot at a relationship with her. Like that would make him more powerful, getting a Secret Service agent in his pocket—and his life. “And the yakuza guy we saw at Beatrice’s house?”

“That was where things went downhill. Mikio said he couldn’t be sure which of his men it was, even though I gave him a pretty good description.” She made a face as Locke pulled into the airport and passed through security.

The staff knew Locke’s face, so he only had to flash his badge ID and up went the gate. He drove around the building. “Once we look at mug shots and identify the guy, we’ll be able to visit this Mikio and get a lot more specific.”

“He did say he hadn’t heard of anything going on regarding the president’s visit. Though he mentioned he had enough problems with his guys. He wasn’t surprised we saw one at a murder scene, but he hasn’t been all that attentive to whispers circling outside his people.”

“So if there is a plot, this guy hasn’t heard about it.”

“I can talk to him again, find out if there’s anyone else on this island worth talking to.”

Locke parked beside their other vehicles and pulled the team in for one last briefing. Alana wasn’t the only woman on Secret Service protection detail, but he knew she didn’t know the other—much older—female agent all that well. He talked them through what had happened and got their reports on every person they had seen. Each pair had emailed him after their visits, but Locke never discounted the personal telling of an experience. He saw things in the inflections and their emotions that he never saw in the body of an email. The two could hardly be compared.

“Okay, you all know where you’re supposed to be.”

Each team member had a position for the president’s arrival. They all hooked up earpieces to their belt radios and checked that communications were working. It was a complicated setup that took all the time from when they arrived at the airport until the plane arrived, and they were each only a piece of the puzzle.

Alana walked beside him as they left the group. “Do you think it’s weird no one else on our team had problems with their visits while we found a dead woman and a missing man?”

“Sure, it’s weird, but whether it means anything is another matter. There’s nothing we can do about it this minute. We run the president’s arrival just like we do everything else. By the book. Stick to what you know. Remember your training, and if something happens, we’ll all deal with it. All of us, together.”

Alana nodded.

“When you get a minute later on, call Officer Morton. Find out if the cops discovered what that call in Beatrice’s history relates to. Maybe they’ll know whose number it is, because I certainly don’t believe she’s answering an ad for work at a gun shop like Brian Wells. It’s a solid link between them, and the police have the jurisdiction to look it up. If we prove there’s a link, then it’ll help us when they find Brian Wells.”

“Okay, I can do that.” She looked relieved, probably because he hadn’t asked her to call Ray.

“And don’t worry. We’ll get to the bottom of it.”

They walked toward the tarmac as the plane came into view. The sleek lines of Air Force One gleamed in the setting sun as the plane’s brakes engaged and the president’s aircraft descended to the tarmac. It was a textbook landing, the arrival of the president signaling Locke’s team’s switch from preparation to action as they aided in guarding POTUS on his vacation.

Locke prayed as the plane slowed to a stop. For the whole trip, for all the personnel, for his team. He prayed for their investigation into Beatrice’s murder, and for the missing marine—that he wasn’t hurt or planning to hurt anyone.

Locke keyed his radio. “Air Force One is on the ground.”

FIVE

Alana stood beside Locke while the president descended from the plane. The entourage—which included the governor of Hawaii, a number of her staff members and local FBI agents—each took their turns shaking hands with the president. He’d been traveling all day, but his suit wasn’t rumpled and his gray hair looked freshly cut. The barber was probably on the plane.

Locke was at attention, like some military sentry guarding his liege lord. Alana didn’t quite know how to pull that off, but she’d probably have to learn it.

As the president made his way down the line, he made small talk with the governor, who nearly tripped over her feet just to keep up with the man’s athletic stride.

Sweat beaded on Alana’s forehead. The temperature had risen as they’d waited for the plane to land and then taxi its way over to them. She glanced around, knowing exactly where each Secret Service agent was located. It was a reflex, assessing the area for danger even though every position was covered.

When she’d least suspected it, that hand had reached up and grabbed for her foot. Her abdomen still stung—she should have brought her painkillers with her, or taken some before they got out of the car. But then Locke would have seen it, and he’d have known she was hurting.

The first lady descended from the plane hand in hand with their twelve-year-old son. The boy was one of Alana’s favorite people. Their paper airplane competition had been running for three months now, but she hadn’t decided if his using paper with embossed lettering on the top that he’d retrieved from his father’s desk gave him an unfair advantage. Her origami paper was lighter, but those gold letters weighted down the rear of his plane.