Chapter 94: A Potential Threat
"Casey, I'm in position. Four targets including Amando. Ready when you are."
The rooftop was a logistics building across from the parking lot — flat, no obstructions, forty degrees of angle on the center of the space below. Simon had the MK14 assembled and the scope dialed in before the principals were in position.
"Hold," Casey said through the earpiece. "Chuck got Amando's account number. The play worked."
Simon lowered his eye from the scope for a moment. "Chuck got the account number."
"By himself," Casey said. There was a pause that communicated something. "Not bad."
"He'd be very happy to hear you say that."
"Which is why he won't," Casey said. "Stand by."
The engine noise of Casey's car was audible through the earpiece as he pulled into the lot — the specific sound of a vehicle driven with purpose rather than speed. Then a door, then Casey's voice taking on a different register: authority without warmth, the particular flatness of a law enforcement tone.
Simon put his eye back to the scope.
Casey had the look right — the badge visible, the posture deliberate, the approach of someone who had every institutional right to be in this space and knew it. Amando's people, from the way they held themselves, were uncertain. Uncertainty was the objective.
Casey moved Chuck and Sarah toward the car.
At the car's hood, out of Amando's direct line of sight, Simon watched Casey pass Sarah her weapon from somewhere inside his jacket.
They turned together.
Two weapons up, facing Amando's group across the open lot.
Then Sarah fired once.
The round caught Burton in the arm — precise, controlled, enough to put him on the ground without lasting damage. The drop was immediate and convincing.
Behind Amando's position, one of his backup people raised a rifle.
Simon adjusted, breathed out halfway, and fired.
The 7.62 round hit the rifle's barrel. The impact knocked the weapon sideways and broke two fingers on the man's grip hand. He sat down against the column behind him, cradling the hand.
The second shooter was behind a concrete pillar, mostly concealed. Simon could see the right leg below the pillar's edge.
He adjusted his aim and fired.
The man went down.
Simon's follow-up shot disarmed him before he could recover the weapon.
Casey and Sarah handled the third man between them in the time it took Simon to confirm the second was neutralized.
Amando was the only one left, already in the DeLorean, already moving.
The DeLorean was a 1981 model — a car that, even in its original condition, had not been remarkable for its acceleration. This one had clearly not received significant mechanical attention in the intervening years.
Simon tracked the vehicle.
"Sorry, Morgan," he said quietly.
He shifted his aim to the engine compartment and fired once.
White smoke came from under the hood. The car slowed, shuddered, and stopped approximately five hundred meters from where it had started.
Casey was already running.
He reached the car, pulled the door open, and extracted Amando before the man had completed his calculation of remaining options. Casey had the cuffs on him in eight seconds.
He looked up toward Simon's position and raised a thumb.
Simon stood, held the rifle vertically, and raised a hand.
The Amando arrest wrapped quickly — NSA assets arrived to take him into federal custody, which meant the parking lot cleared of everything except three disabled vehicles and the memory of what had happened there.
They drove back to Burbank.
At the Buy More the next morning, Morgan found Chuck and Simon near the Nerd Herd desk with the expression of a man carrying news.
"Interesting thing," Morgan said. "I got a call last night. Apparently my car was impounded as part of a federal investigation."
Chuck and Simon exchanged a look.
"I mean, obviously that's unfortunate," Morgan continued. "But here's the thing — when the government takes your vehicle for an investigation, they compensate you. Blue book value, plus processing." He paused. "After I pay Simon back with the check he gave me, I'm actually coming out ahead."
Chuck stared at him.
"We're coming out ahead," Anna said, appearing at Morgan's elbow. She looked at Chuck and Simon with the satisfied expression of someone whose plans had just become more executable. "Morgan and I are moving in together. I'm redoing the living room."
She left.
Morgan watched her go with the expression of a man simultaneously delighted and slightly overwhelmed. "I'm a homemaker now," he said. "Kind of."
He handed Simon a check. "For what I borrowed. Thank you."
"You paid early," Simon said. "Interest-free, as agreed."
"A deal is a deal," Morgan said, with unexpected gravity, and went back to work.
Casey found Simon twenty minutes later, near the back of the home theater section.
He looked around the floor, confirmed the proximity of anyone who might overhear, and lowered his voice.
"Intel came through this morning," he said. "Fulcrum activity in the area. Multiple contacts, at least one confirmed surveillance operation."
Simon kept his expression neutral. "My profile?"
"Unknown. Walker and I are burned, or will be soon — our operational history is too long to stay dark. You've been in proximity to our operations consistently for months." Casey held his eye. "Fulcrum doesn't give the benefit of the doubt. Anyone associated with a known asset gets looked at. If they look at you and they don't like what they find—"
"They don't let it go," Simon said.
"They don't let it go," Casey confirmed. "And they're not gentle about the follow-up."
He reached into his jacket and produced a weapon — a Glock 19, compact, standard configuration — along with two spare magazines. He handed them to Simon without ceremony.
"I cleared it with Beckman," Casey said. "That's yours. Carry it."
Simon accepted the weapon, checked the action, and secured it.
"Thank you," he said.
Casey put his hand briefly on Simon's shoulder — one of the very few times Simon had seen him make that gesture without it being tactical.
"These people are not going to back down because you're eighteen," Casey said. "They're not going to back down because you talk well or because you've been useful. The moment they identify you as a threat, the calculation they run has exactly two outcomes. You need to be prepared to match that."
"I understand," Simon said.
"Don't tell Bartowski," Casey said. "He'll panic, and panicking Bartowski is an operational liability."
"Agreed."
Casey moved away.
Simon stood in the home theater section and let the noise of the floor settle back around him — the ambient sounds of a retail store on an ordinary Tuesday, customers and products and the routine machinery of a place that sold televisions.
He thought about what Casey had said.
He'd been operating, for the past several months, with the low-level awareness that the work was dangerous but the recurring experience of it going well. That combination produced a specific kind of drift — not complacency exactly, but a gradual recalibration of the baseline toward optimism.
Casey's warning was a correction.
Fulcrum was real. They were in the area. They were methodical, well-resourced, and operated without the institutional constraints that the CIA and NSA nominally observed. If they identified Simon as something worth eliminating, they would eliminate him with the same professional thoroughness they applied to everything else.
He was going to have to be more careful.
Not paranoid. Careful. There was a difference, and maintaining the difference was part of what made someone functional in this kind of work rather than paralyzed by it.
He went back to the floor and spent the rest of his shift doing his job and paying attention to every person who came through the door.
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