Authors: Kathy Disanto
“So where do we go from here?”
Dennis wondered.
Jack scrubbed the back of his neck.
“Damned if I know.”
“Oh, for—” I tossed up my hands. “We
go after Conover! What else?”
“Now, why didn’t I think of that?” drawled
Jack.
“We can’t just
go after
Malcolm
Conover,” Dennis protested.
“Why not? I passed the test, didn’t
I?”
“Looks like,” Eagan admitted.
“Forget
looks like
. I
nailed
it, Eagan!”
As soon as Jack hit the roomful of
agents with the newsflash about the truth scan, we were off to the races. First
that eerie sliding sensation, followed by the soft blur, then Tracey Haskell snapped
in. Couple seconds after that, a fissure started at the crown of her head, gradually
growing longer and wider until it split her face cleanly in half. One half peeled
away from the other, rotating in a slow one-eighty until it faced backwards. So,
two faces—one looking at Jack, white and wide-eyed, etched with fear bordering
on panic. One facing away, foxy and deceitful, lips moving in concert with
Jack’s, apparently repeating his every word.
The Janus-faced apparition was
beyond creepy. But beautiful, too, because she spelled
VINDICATION
in
caps two feet high. I wanted to stand up and shout, “Hallelujah!”
By the time Eagan rejoined Dennis
and me, I was locked and loaded and ready to fire. His buns no more than hit
the chair before I launched into a detailed description of what I had seen and told
them point blank what I thought it meant.
“Tracey Haskell is dirty. Well?” I
prodded after short, supercharged silence. “Am I right?”
The two agents exchanged glances.
Finally, Jack said, “Yeah.”
Not exactly the ringing endorsement I
had been hoping for, but that was understandable. Iceman’s logical mind had to
be spinning its wheels trying to get traction on
this
slippery slope.
“So what’s the story?”
“Haskell shared good information
with a bad customer, and it’s coming back to bite her.”
“You knew this, but you gave her a
new assignment anyway?”
“Complete with enough rope to hang
herself.”
I had nodded and left it at that. Any
other time, I would have kept digging, but Haskell wasn’t my main concern at
the moment. I did, however, make a mental note to revisit this lead after we
took care of Conover.
“I’m willing to admit you made
Haskell,” Dennis said now, “but that doesn’t mean I’m ready to hotfoot it over
to the inner loop to pitch Conover as a suspect. ‘Hey, Director, did you know
the World’s Most Wanted fugitive also happens to be the richest do-gooder on
the planet and one of the President’s closest friends?’” He grimaced. “Like
that’s going to fly.”
“It will after we explain it to her,”
I insisted. Baker’s answering expression read,
Get real.
“I’m serious!
If she doesn’t believe us—and she probably won’t—we’ll convince her to set up
another test.”
“Not gonna happen,” Dennis insisted
flatly. “You start in on how you’re seeing visions, she’ll toss us
all
out
of the building.”
“So what do we do? Twiddle our
thumbs and hope Conover gives himself up before the Ferrymen rack up a few more
kills?”
Jack spoke up. “No. We’re going to
check this out.”
Dennis raised both eyebrows. “We
are?”
“Yeah. Discretely.
Very
discretely,”
he added under his breath, then focused on me. “You haven’t made a convert out
of me yet.”
“But—”
“But what? You’ve been a crime
reporter for how long? Ten years? I’ll bet even
before
your accident you
could spot a baby-faced felon in a room full of choir boys singing
Ave Maria
.
Nothing mystical about it. You probably had good instincts to start with, and
plenty of street time has only made them better. I know, because it’s the same
for Baker and me and every other investigator worth a damn.” He paused,
rubbing his neck again. “Maybe fingering Haskell was instinct, maybe it wasn’t.
Maybe it was exactly like you said. Either way, I figure you’ve at least
earned a shot.”
“Thanks.”
We both looked at Dennis.
“All right,” he sighed after a brief
hesitation, “I’m in. What have you got in mind?”
“Money,” Jack answered. “Based on
their level of sophistication and the choice of high-visibility targets, it’s
safe to assume Ferrymen contracts don’t come cheap. We don’t know who’s been
paying the bills so far, but we
do
know when the hits went down. That
gives us approximate timeframes when money would have changed hands. We’ve
never been able to trace the flow, but if A.J. is right about Conover, we know
where the credits ended up.”
“Change a Life,” I agreed. “It’s
the perfect setup. Big donations pour in all the time. Lucky for us, the
amounts are a matter of public record, even if the donors want to remain
anonymous. The Foundation itself is like a clearing house. Or a spigot. Turn
it on, and funds cascade down from headquarters until they’re spread out among hundreds
of subsidiary charities, some of them ten- and twenty-man operations.”
“DIY money laundering,” Dennis
concluded. “Slick, safe, and easy.”
“We might be able to the match hit
dates with large anonymous donations,” Jack figured. “If we can find a pattern
….” He shrugged. “It’s not much, but it’s a start.”
“Not to be a wet blanket,” I
interjected, “but doesn’t this kind of investigation usually involve major resources?
An army of treasury agents? A phalanx of geeks?”
“Don’t worry, we’ll get what we
need,” Jack assured me.
Baker cocked his head. “Mind
telling me how we’re going to do that without the director’s authorization?”
“Who said we won’t have her
authorization? Once I tell her we got a tip claiming drug cartels are washing dirty
money through legitimate charities—unbeknownst to the nonprofits themselves, of
course—she’ll pull out all the stops. But we don’t point fingers or name names
until we’ve got solid evidence.”
Like he said, it was a start. Too
bad Shuki had taken herself out of circulation; she would have been the perfect
bloodhound for this hunt. Unfortunately, nobody but
nobody
would find
Shady Lady if she didn’t want to be found, which, for obvious reasons, she
didn’t.
Jack was finally moving on the intel
I had given him. I should have been doing my happy dance, but the Victory
Waltz wasn’t playing yet. What were we missing? I mulled it over while he and
Dennis discussed the assets they would pull in—who was a team player, who might
balk and ask too many questions. I turned the plan over in my mind, taking it
apart and putting it back together again, trying to nail down what was
bothering me. I was about to table my uneasiness until later, when I spotted
the hitch.
“There’s a problem,” I announced
abruptly.
Jack was ahead of me. “Conover hasn’t
missed a step so far, but he’s too smart to forget Murphy’s Law.”
“Meaning?” said Dennis.
“Meaning he’s hedged his bets,” Jack
replied. “Set up a healthy cushion of plausible deniability between himself
and the blood money.”
Dennis nodded. “I get it. You’re
saying even if we trace the hit money to Change a Life, so what? The
Foundation employs thousands of people. Conover would claim he didn’t know jack
about those funds. Reputation like his, he would get away clean. Go
underground, wait us out, and start all over again.”
“There has to be a way to tie him in.”
I nibbled my lower lip for a second, then said, “And I think I know what it is.”
“What?”
“Dangle some irresistible bait and nail
him when he goes for it.”
“Great idea,” said Dennis, “except we
don’t
have
any bait.”
Jack was tracking perfectly, as
usual. He was already shaking his head. “Don’t go there, A.J. Not again.”
Too late. I had already arrived.
“Sure you do,” I informed Dennis,
ignoring Eagan. “You’ve got me.”
“Tell me, Jack, are you always this
pigheaded?”
We were two hours into our flight
back to the safe house, nearing the final approach, and I hadn’t made a dent. The
man simply would not listen to reason.
“I would rather be pigheaded than
have a death wish.”
“I do not,” I assured him through
gritted teeth, “have a death wish!”
“Okay, how about more guts than
sense?”
I swallowed a pithy retort and took
hold of that last frayed thread of patience. “I don’t understand your problem.
The bait card is already in play. You
do
remember my broadcast?”
“How could I forget?”
“See there? If you can’t forget, you
can bet Conover won’t. He’s going to come after me. I saw it in those eyes. But
he doesn’t know I’ll be expecting it, because he doesn’t realize I’m onto him.
Life doesn’t hand you an advantage like this every day, pal. We need to make
the most of it. Dangle me like a fat, juicy worm and trick him into coming for
me on our terms.”
“On our terms? This guy can take
out—correction,
has
taken out—targets from thousands of miles away. He
doesn’t have to
come
for you.”
“Thanks for reminding me.” I
stepped on the worm of vulnerability that tried to rear its anxious head,
insisting, “There has to be a way.”
“Maybe, but why dive in over your
head, when you can sit on the bank and fish? Let the task force run the
numbers. If the hit-date/donation connection turns out to be a dead end, maybe
we’ll revisit your idea.”
“Meanwhile, we all cross our fingers
and hope the Ferrymen don’t murder anybody else,” I muttered to the
passenger-side window.
We started our descent, bumping through
gunmetal gray clouds that thinned here and there to offer patchy glimpses of
the forested slopes below. I spied a hawk circling lazily in the distance off to
our right, wings canted slightly and held almost motionless as the bird rode
invisible currents. The rocky spines of the Selkirks rose around us, dappled
in snow and fir.
“I don’t need your permission, you
know.”
“Don’t make me arrest you, Gregson.”
I turned to face him. “You wouldn’t
dare.”
“Try me,” he shot back, checking the
rearview display. Whatever he saw behind us evidently caught his attention,
because his eyes narrowed. A few seconds later, he nodded toward the 3-D image.
“What do you make of that?”
I leaned in for a look and saw the
hawk ghosting in and out of the clouds back in our wake. “The hawk? Yeah, I noticed
it a while ago.”
“Did you notice it’s following us?”
I leaned in closer. “Maybe it’s curious.”
He didn’t answer. “Come on, you don’t actually believe ….” I shook my head. “God,
you’re paranoid!” But I had to admit the hawk’s course
was
uncannily
straight.
Looks like we’re towing the darned thing on a long rope
, I
reflected uneasily.
“You know what they say. You’re not
paranoid, if they’re really after you.” He activated a scanner that wasn’t standard
equipment, even on the Shrike. Unless you’re an overzealous fed, of course. “And
they’re really after us.”
“So, you’re saying—”
“I’m saying Mother Nature didn’t
give birth to our feathered friend back there. Hold on.”
I wrapped my fingers around the
armrests. “What are you going to do?”
“Try to buy us some time and space.”
Between one heartbeat and the next,
the Shrike arrowed heavenward, slicing through the clouds and slamming me back
against the seat. What felt like twenty Gs later, the craft shot out of the
overcast and into the sunlight. We nosed over, blue sky and clouds
cartwheeling outside the windows as the Mark-VI went belly-up to the sun.
Jack nodded toward the display. “Check
it out.”
I had to uncross my eyes first. I
blinked hard, my vision cleared, and I looked. The breath caught in my throat
when I realized the “hawk” was mimicking our aerial back flip.
About the time that bizarre sight registered
Eagan ordered me to, “Hold on!” again.
He threw the car into a screaming
dive. As the Shrike pierced the clouds like a needle through cotton, the
prefab ham-and-cheese cafeteria sandwich I had for lunch rose in inverse
proportion to our descent, butted against the fear lumped in my throat, and hung
there. Meanwhile, I kept my eyes glued to the display and the tiny UAV still
back there on our tail. Eagan leveled out, juking right and left, up and down,
as we flashed through the clouds wreathing the saw-toothed peaks. The diminutive
hunter mirrored our every move … only now it had company.
“Jack?”
“Yeah, I make it three in a narrow
V-formation.”
“All tailing us.”
“I was wrong about that. They’re
not tailing us,” Iceman countered, as the Shrike popped over a crest. Freezing
rain slashed wetly across the windshield as we streaked over a river, Jack banking
the car sharply to parallel a slab-stacked granite rock face. “They’re trying to
waste us.”
He sounded cool and calm. Clearly,
the man wasn’t human.
Who
they
were was never in
doubt. But how had they known when and where to strike? I quickly decided that
answer would have to wait.
The burning question now was, “Then
why haven’t they?”
“According to the computer, the
delivery vehicles are Falconiform-3Ls ... ‘L’ as in laser. Right now, the only
thing standing between us and a one-way ticket to a one-point landing nobody
walks away from is the weather. Rain and clouds scatter the beam. Long story
short, we need to wind up this game of tag before it stops raining or they get
so close the rain doesn’t matter.”
I darted a glance toward the sky, searching
for unwelcome holes in the cloud cover. “Can’t you shoot them down?”
“With what, my sidearm?”
“The house has a weapons system, but
your car doesn’t? Great! Just great.” I forced myself to draw a calming
breath. “Okay, we can’t blast them. Got any other ideas?”
“Working on it,” he said as the Shrike
knifed into the forest.
Eagan dropped the craft so low, I
had to resist the urge to raise up in my seat as we blew over the forest floor.
We whipsawed through don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-them gaps between tree trunks
at the tip of an explosive rooster-tail of snow and pine needles.
“Stay with me,” Eagan crooned to our
pursuers. “This party is just getting started.”
I flinched instinctively as
something green and bushy slapped my window. “Either you’ve lost your mind, or
you’ve got a plan.”
“I wouldn’t call it a plan,
exactly.” We banked ninety degrees, sliced between a pair of boulders, and
leveled out again. “More like a half-baked idea. But it might work.”
“I don’t supposed you would care to
share?”
“You’ll figure it out.” He checked
the rearview, but our snowy backblast shrouded the scenery behind us. He
eyeballed the scanner and nodded. “Still on our six. Come on,” he muttered,
“close up. Closer ... closer .... Okay, that’s good, that’s real good. Stay
with me. Just a little farther now.”
A little farther to what,
I wondered as the world whipped by
in a dizzying green-and-brown blur. I wasn’t left guessing long.
Rilled and weather-beaten, the
craggy wall of rock seemed to erupt out of the earth ahead of us. Skirted by
tumbled boulders and sparsely blotched with olive-drab brush, its soaring gray
bulk all but blotted out the sky. I no sooner registered its immovable presence
dead ahead when the Shrike’s collision alarm shrilled and red lights popped on
all over the cockpit. I wondered when Jack would make a course correction, then
realized he had nowhere to go with trees crowding in tunnel-close on both sides.
That’s when it finally dawned on me.
We were playing chicken with a mountain.
Ten seconds later we were
practically on top of it. As tons of granite filled the windshield, I yelled,
“
Jaaaaaaaaaaaaack?
”
“Hold on!”
“Oh, my God! Not again!”
I got a white-knuckled death grip on
the armrests, Eagan whipped the Shrike’s nose skyward, and we rocketed up the
cliff face. My heart battled the ham sandwich for the right-of-way in my
throat. I chanced a quick glance down. Bad move. Now I knew a few feet of
air were all that stood between us and a fatal keelhauling. We were almost at
the top when a detonation echoed through the valley and sent rocks clattering down
the mountainside. I tore my gaze from the cheese-grater surface threatening to
make mincemeat of our undercarriage and zeroed in on the rearview display. A trio
of rapidly receding black-smoke mushrooms boiled off the rocky face behind us.
A second later, the Shrike shot past the lip of the cliff into blessedly clear
airspace.
I released the breath I hadn’t
realized I had been holding and peeled my fingers off the armrests, one by one.
“Okay, that was interesting.”
Eagan’s lips twitched as we leveled
off and resumed course toward the safe house. “Well, it worked.”
“Yeah. Better yet, we lived to tell
the tale. How did you know it would go down that way?”
“I didn’t. Not for sure. I gambled
on the precip and creating a snow-blower effect to generate enough interference
to blind their weapons systems and topographical sensors. I figured the odds
were better than fifty-fifty in our. Favor.”
He had turned to look at me as he
spoke and tacked the last word on almost as an afterthought when our gazes
collided and locked. A charged silence spun out between us. We must have
reached the same
Trouble with a capital T
conclusion at the same moment,
because we broke eye contact by unspoken consent.
Jack cleared his throat and busied
himself with the controls. “You did good, by the way.”
I revisited the view out the
passenger-side window. “You expected me to scream like a girl?”
“I wouldn’t have blamed you. Hell,
if I hadn’t been busy dodging pine trees,
I
would have screamed like a
girl.”
“Umm.” I surveyed the wilderness
below, a thousand rugged miles of nowhere. “How do you think they found us?”
“Good question. Only three people knew
we would be in the neighborhood.”
“So Ellison, Sidorov, or Stanhope.”
Fifteen minutes ago, a mole among us
would have seemed farfetched. Now? Not far at all. Hard to believe any of
the above-named suspects had opened a direct line to the Ferrymen, but
exploding UAVs didn’t lie. So did the snitch sign
on
as an accessory to
attempted murder, or was there some other motive for dropping a dime on us?
Maybe Hank hadn’t been totally up
front about what he had told Conover. Maybe after hearing about my vision, he decided
to give his new, multi-billionaire gardening buddy a heads-up. Cement their burgeoning
friendship. Loose lips have sunk ships for less.
Or maybe Stanhope decided to parlay a
less than stellar career with the Service into a new identity and a beachside
cabana in Pago Pago. He didn’t have to believe my story to sell me out. All
he needed was my whereabouts.
And what about Tanya Sidorov? How
much did a civil-service housekeeper earn in a year? Answer: Not nearly as
much as she could collect from Conover with a five-minute call. But how would
she have known to call him in the first place?
“Which one of them gave us up?” I wondered
out loud. “How? Why?”
Checking our coordinates, Jack
signaled the safe house’s computer. The structure did a slow fade-in ahead of
us, remaining visible just long enough for Eagan to pilot the Shrike into the
landing bay.
“No idea,” he admitted, shutting
down the engines. Then he turned to me and smiled. It was the kind of happy-hungry
smile a great white might wear as it daydreamed about a school of plump Bluefin.
“What do you say we go find out?”