Authors: David Vinjamuri
I realized that the man had probably bled on me. I lifted fingers to my chin and felt a familiar stickiness over the day’s stubble.
“Do you mind if I wash up?” I asked.
“Not at all. I called the District Attorney’s office. They’re sending someone over to talk to you, but it’ll take a spell. Just come on back out when you’re done,” Sheriff Casto said. He opened up his notebook and turned to Collins.
I had my hand on the doorknob to my room and the key in the lock when I froze. Something was missing. Something important. Two little pieces of cork I’d left wedged in the hinges of the door were gone. It’s a little bit of tradecraft that tells you if someone has been in your room. Not so useful in a high-end hotel, where you can count on a maid or mini-bar checker to eventually violate the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door, and pros can generally spot the telltales if they’re looking for them, but in a little motel, the odds of someone having entered my room for a legitimate reason after it had been cleaned for the day were miniscule. I carefully withdrew the key from the lock and backed away from the door, toward Casto and Collins.
“Someone’s been in my room,” I said.
“Housekeeper?” Casto asks.
I shook my head. “I was in the room right before dinner. I’m pretty sure they don’t have turndown service here.” Collins chuckled at that. “Maybe one of these thugs broke in, but I’m not going to bet on that. None of them looks smart enough to pick a lock.”
“I’ll call Charleston,” Casto said. I looked at Collins quizzically.
“With all the attention we’re getting right now, we need to play it safe. There are only two bomb squads in West Virginia,” he explained. “One for the Kanawha County Sheriff’s Office—they cover the capitol—and one for the State Police, also based in Charleston. It may take them a little while to get here.”
“If there’s actually something behind the door, I’d really like to get a peek at it before the bomb squad carts it off,” I told Collins.
“What do you think the odds are that anyone who set an explosive charge would have set a trigger on the window?” Collins asks.
“Anything’s possible. But it would surprise me. Someone who’s smart enough not to open the door isn’t going to break a window to get inside his motel room. And rigging a device with a vibration sensor in a busy motel is tricky.” I answered the question reflexively. The look on Collins’s face told me I’d displayed a little too much expertise on the subject of bomb making.
“Well let’s hope the staties think I’m dumb enough to not bother trying to get me fired for this,” Collins replied. He turned and walked over to the window, sliding his baton from his belt as he did. He covered his face with his jacket sleeve and hit the corner of the window hard with the end of the baton. The lower portion of the glass shattered and I ducked, instinctively covering my eyes. Nothing happened. I let out a breath that I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. Collins raised the baton higher and hit the section of window above the jagged gap. He cleared the glass from the sill, then pushed back the curtain and shone his flashlight inside the room. After a second he whistled. He turned to me slowly.
“When’s the last time you saw an IED?”
11
“The FBI investigates street fights?” I asked the brunette in the expensive suit.
“That was hardly a brawl, Mr. Herne. The injuries were one-sided.” She was distractingly attractive, with eyes just greener than hazel, high cheekbones and an angular, exotic face that suggested a bit of Native American ancestry in her ethnic mix. Her name was Nichols. Special Agent Harper Nichols.
“You do realize there were four of them, Agent Nichols? And that they jumped me? I defended myself. There were witnesses.” Federal employees play “Whose Turf Is It?” I was bound to lose because I wasn’t in West Virginia on government business. But backing down too quickly would have invited Agent Nichols to come down even harder on me.
“You made sure of that, didn’t you?”
Deputy Collins stifled a laugh and turned away quickly when Nichols glared at him. She obviously hadn’t been told that the witnesses were the couple whose door I’d wrecked. They’d been
in flagrante delicto
when I pushed the big guy through the door to their room. Apparently they were married—but not to each other. “And if you’d defended yourself any more vigorously,” Nichols continued, “we might be investigating a murder.”
“Which would still be a state matter.”
“When a federal employee with a Top Secret security clearance from a department of the Executive Branch with no domestic jurisdiction arrives in our state and starts asking questions that relate to an ongoing federal criminal investigation, we notice,” Nichols countered. “When this federal employee continues to cross our investigative path, we pay special attention.” She was fairly tall, only a couple of inches shorter than me. Her straight hair fell near to her shoulders. I wondered if she pulled it back at the office. The suit she was wearing fit her well enough to mark her an athlete. She fit that part of the profile, anyway.
“And when my SSA is in a meeting with the Governor and they’re interrupted so the commanding Colonel of the State Police can report an explosive device has been discovered in this federal employee’s motel room, then it becomes the business of the FBI,” Nichols concluded.
“Your SSA was in a meeting with the Governor of West Virginia at 10 p.m. on a Friday night? I hope he wasn’t losing too much money,” I said dryly. Deputy Collins snorted loudly and started coughing into his fist. Nichols glared at him for a second, then grabbed my arm and pulled me a few feet further away.
“Does it matter?” Nichols asked. Her response confirmed what I suspected. FBI agents are among the most territorial creatures on earth. After needling this young, aggressive agent, I had just taken a shot at her boss. I gave Nichols an ideal opportunity to threaten me, but she hadn’t; I knew she’d been ordered to play nice. Since my job with the State Department is at roughly the same level and pay grade as a municipal dogcatcher, Alpha must have already reached out to the FBI. It also hadn’t escaped me that they’d sent an attractive young female agent instead of a couple of surly, seasoned old pros to question me.
“So how did you draw the short straw?” I asked.
A small smile pulled tightly across her lips. “This is my case, Mr. Herne.”
“Then I’m sorry to have ruined your evening, ma’am.”
“Perhaps you could fill me in?” she suggested.
“Is there any place we can get coffee at this hour?”
* * *
I sat across from Special Agent Nichols in a booth at a truck stop a mile out of town. I had my hands full following her Suburban on the wet roads from Hamlin. The woman could drive a truck. She projected a highly specific brand of self-confidence. It was one I recognized.
“Naval aviator?” I asked.
Her smile reached her eyes for a moment. “That’s right. Annapolis, then wings plus eight.” So she had fulfilled her eight-year service commitment after finishing at the Naval Academy and completing flight school.
“What did you fly?” I asked. There weren’t many women in the Tier One Special Ops community when I served, but women have flown combat in jets for years.
“The F/A-18F Super Hornet.”
I let out a low whistle. Flying a fighter for the Navy is about as easy as making the starting roster on an NFL team. “That’s a serious job. When did you get out?”
“Two years ago. I applied to the FBI when I made Lieutenant Commander. I started at the Academy three weeks after my discharge.”
“I thought you needed a law degree to become a special agent.” Every D.C.-based agent I’d met through a friend at the FBI—who holds a J.D. himself—was a lawyer by training.
“No, but having a law degree or a law enforcement or accounting background is useful.” I heard an edge in her voice. Her looks were undoubtedly a double-edged sword. She’d have had to work twice as hard as an average-looking woman to prove her competence in a conservative outfit like the FBI. And carrier pilots are a very specific breed. You have to have a lot of nerve to land a jet plane on a runway that pitches and rolls while you’re trying to set down.
“I know what you mean. I’m an intelligence analyst without a master’s degree working in a department full of PhDs. I take it you’re not from around here?”
She shook her head. “Arizona. But the FBI is like the Navy. You go where they send you. You?”
“New York State, south of Albany. But I haven’t lived there since I was eighteen.”
“And where did you serve?”
“Special Agent Nichols, I think you’ve already seen my service record.” I smiled.
“I scanned the file,” she admitted without hesitation, “but I don’t believe that you sat behind a desk for half your time in the Army.” Our waitress ambled over with two cups of black coffee. I’d suspected all along but the confirmation shook me all the same: I’d been in West Virginia for just over twenty-four hours and the FBI had already pulled my service record.
That file, even the one the FBI can access, is intentionally incomplete. It correctly notes the time I spent as a Ranger and in the Special Forces, as well as some of the things I did in Afghanistan. But it lists me as having been partly disabled, finishing my enlistment as a Master Sergeant in a logistics support unit based in Arlington, Virginia. The fake logistics unit was the operational cover for the Activity.
“You know how it goes,” I responded, because while I couldn’t tell her the truth, a lie would have insulted her intelligence.
“Yeah, I’ve met your type before.” Her tone was clipped.
“Well I’m just a civilian now. Or a civil servant, anyway.”
“Perhaps you can tell me what you’re doing in West Virginia, then?” She was suddenly all business. I realized she was following good interrogation technique. She’d established rapport by sharing something personal. Then she started the interview with a question whose answer she already knew.
“It’s all about a girl,” I responded. The corners of her mouth twitched before the impassive mien returned. “A friend asked me to find her. She came here over the summer to protest the Hobart Mine, but her parents weren’t able to reach her after the incident.”
Nichols pulled out a notebook and, after slipping the black elastic band off the cover, withdrew a silver pen from a worn-looking soft leather briefcase and started to jot down notes as I spoke.
“When I arrived at the hospital in Charleston last night, I learned that the girl—Heather Hernandez—was never admitted. Then this morning I went to visit the protesters and found that she’d parted ways with them six weeks ago.” Nichols glanced up from her notes momentarily to stare at me with green eyes.
“So you’re not investigating the murders?”
“No, I’m just trying to find this particular girl,” I answered, watching Nichols closely as I did. She scribbled for a second and met my eyes again.
“Then why is someone trying so hard to kill you?” she asked slowly. I had to stop myself from giving her a flip answer because it was the same question that had been eating me.
“I don’t know. I picked up a tail this morning after I visited the meadow where the Reclaim activists are camping. It was two guys in a pickup truck—amateur thugs like the bunch I ran into tonight. They didn’t just follow me; they tried to run me off the road. From what I can tell, they were blind-hired to do the job. It could be someone was worried I was investigating the attack, but since the police and fifty journalists are doing the same thing I don’t know why they’d pick on me. On the other hand, nobody but me is looking for this girl, although it’s hard to imagine why anyone would care. The cheap muscle who attacked me tonight nearly made me miss the signs that someone had been in my room, which makes the whole job look more professional in my book.”
“Do you have any insights you’d like to share on that?” Nichols asked carefully.
“Off the record?” I hadn’t been able to call Alpha yet, and I was reluctant to tell an FBI agent something I hadn’t told him. On the other hand, they’d track the signature of the device sooner or later, and telling Nichols directly would establish trust that I might need down the line. I wondered whether Nichols’s job description really gave her the latitude to protect a source. I was counting more on the uniform she’d once worn than the suit she had on at the moment.
She put down her pen. “Fine.”
“The man who built that device was trained by the U.S. Army, probably at Fort Bragg.”
Nichols nodded and I knew that she understood what I meant. “You’re certain?”
“Pretty sure. The signature’s distinct.”
“That puts things in a different light,” she said, drumming her fingers on the linoleum tabletop. Her nails were unpolished and cut nearly to the quick, but they still looked manicured.
“Yes it does. I was lucky I didn’t open that door.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I’m a careful guy.”
“That’s good, because your actions are being watched. I’d ask that you keep me personally apprised of your progress.”
“Happy to. I’d value your opinion,” I said and meant it. She moved on, asking me an increasingly specific set of questions about what I’d seen and heard since I’d started looking for Heather Hernandez.
12
Deputy Collins approached me as I stepped out of my car, back in the motel parking lot. The state’s bomb squad had departed, but a few police cruisers and the Sheriff’s SUV lingered in the parking lot.
“I forgot to tell you. We ran the name of the boyfriend—the one who took your girl away from that commune.” Collins fished a small notepad out of his uniform shirt pocket. “Harmon. Anton Harmon.”
“You found him?” I asked, feeling a ray of sunshine break through the clouds hanging over my head.
“There was nothing in our records or the state databases. But we put the query through CODIS and the National Sex Offender Registry and we got a hit. I should have told you earlier,” he admitted.
“Bombs are distracting.”
“Harmon served time for a sexual battery charge in Illinois. He’s been in this state for about three years,” Collins said, withdrawing a booking photo from a second envelope. Anton Harmon had straight brown hair and a piercing stare.