Gone (Michael Bennett)

room, I stripped, sleepwalked through a hot shower, and proceeded to crash like the Hindenburg. I was facedown, still stone-dead asleep in the hotel bathrobe, when my phone rang ten hours later.
    As it trilled, I blinked out the window at the bright sky behind a palm tree. Was it morning? Afternoon? I couldn’t figure it out. No wonder they call this place La-La Land , I thought, finally answering my phone.
    “The goose just laid a four-hundred-troy-ounce gold bar,” Parker said excitedly. “They just got the signal on Scanlon’s phone. He’s in Orange County.”
    Parker clued me in as we raced south down the Pacific Coast Highway.
    The signal on Scanlon’s phone was coming from Newport Coast, a ridiculously affluent town an hour south of LA. The Gray Fox army com unit had done a flyby, and the house where they had triangulated Scanlon’s phone was in a development of ten-thousand-square-foot-plus houses off Newport Coast Drive, not too far from the world-renowned Pelican Hill Golf Club.
    As Parker drove, I flipped through an old Realtor.com file the FBI had dug up on the massive mission-style mansion. I read in the report how the premier property had been owned by an energy-company billionaire but had recently been put up for rent due to ongoing divorce proceedings.
    “Huge pool,” I said, nodding. “Ocean view, check and double check. It also says the interior decor was imported from an eighteenth-century château in Monpazier, in the south of France. This is feeling righter and righter, Ms. Parker. This seems to fit Perrine’s billionaire boulevardier tastes to a capital tee.”
    Our rallying point was behind a Trader Joe’s off the Pacific Coast Highway, three miles south of the target. The assemblage of law enforcement officials that came together over the next hour was nothing short of dumb-founding. There was a command bus on site when we got there, and for the next hour, a nonstop wagon train of unmarked cop and federal-agent cars pulled into the lot. And this was just the civilian staging area.
    A series of white vans brought in the FBI’s hostage rescue team. Watching them disembark, I noticed that there were two men with them who weren’t wearing FBI fatigues. They stood together, apart and aloof, big, fit-looking men with shaved heads and beards, dark sunglasses on under their drab olive ball caps.
    I didn’t need Parker’s help to figure out that they were military, probably Delta Force. They were likely coordinating radio signals and whatnot between the civilian and military forces. Parker had already told me that the military was gathering somewhere else to coordinate an air assault.
    As the invasion force mounted, Emily and I touched base with the other task force members. At a card table stacked with ammo, LA-office FBI agents Bob Milton and Joe Rothkopf were busy handing out vests and requisitioning M4 automatic rifles. Despite the obvious building pressure, the young agents were fairly unflappable. Serene, laid-back, California cool. They were acting as if they were waiting for a surfing competition to start down on the beach, on the other side of the PCH, instead of World War III.
    I spotted Detective Bassman, on the other hand, pacing around the parking lot like an expectant first-time father. He was completely keyed up. He wouldn’t even make eye contact with Emily and me, let alone talk to us. I could just about read the big man’s mind as he bounced around in a state of semi-shock. He’d had his hands on perhaps the greatest rocket boost his career would ever know, and he’d gone and handed it away to a Feeb and a bum from the NYPD.
    If I had any last qualms about how serious the authorities were in dealing with the Perrine problem, they were fully put to rest when I saw what swung into the parking lot just after dark.
    On the back of a flatbed truck came none other than a twenty-ton-plus Bradley Fighting Vehicle. I stood there, gaping at the caterpillar-treaded troop-carrying tank, at the 25 mm gun mounted to the front of it.
    “Well, well,” said Agent Rothkopf as he polished the lens of a nightscope beside me. “I don’t believe we’ll be getting outgunned on this one.”
    “This is impressive,” I said, getting a little nervous at all the commotion. “I mean, we don’t even know if Perrine’s here.”
    “Better to have some backup if he is,” Rothkopf said.
    “Perrine wanted a war,” Emily said. “Time to see how much he can handle.”

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