Deeper Than Red (Red Returning Trilogy) (29 page)

“Who are you?” Vandoren growled, in his own voice.

“Don’t say anything else to him,” Agent Stetz instructed Ian, stepping up beside him. “He’ll get an earful from the feds. They’re on their way now and they’re very anxious to talk to the witch doctor here about the meaning of capital crime.” Ian saw the path Stetz was taking and why. Since this night hadn’t gone according to plan and there was a boat with a GPS on it that wasn’t going to lead anybody to Volynski, someone would have to scare his—and the bomb’s—location out of Vandoren. Ian was happy to oblige.

“Oh, you mean he’ll get to choose between the chair and the needle? I don’t think Florida hangs ’em anymore, do they?”

Stetz cast a let’s-not-overdo-it glance toward Ian, but it was Vandoren who spoke up. “What do you mean ‘capital crime’?”

“Try attempted assassination of a U.S. president, collaboration with a foreign enemy to transport and detonate a weapon of mass destruction inside the U.S., and other crimes against the state.”

Even in the glow of the fire, Ian watched Vandoren go pale. The man was in shock.

They heard a thrashing through the trees and saw two beams of light strafe the glade. Agents Thomlin and Jakes rushed in, weapons drawn. After quickly appraising the situation, they holstered their guns. Some from the mass séance on the commons had begun to drift toward them, curious at the distant sounds coming from the woods. “We need to contain this immediately,” Agent Jakes snapped. There’s a patrol car waiting to take him to the nearest holding cell. We’ll head that way.” He pointed away from the commons.

Vandoren struggled to get up. “I’m not going anywhere. You’ve got no right and no evidence to hold me for anything.”

Agent Stetz jumped on that. “Oh, I think a certain tractor-trailer rig that left your warehouse early this morning will provide all the evidence we need.”

Disbelief swept over Vandoren’s face. His body slumped as though the full weight of his collusion, like an anvil, had just dropped on his head. It didn’t take long, though, before he straightened defiantly. “I demand to see my lawyer.”

“We can arrange that,” Agent Stetz said. “But here’s your choice. You can sit around with all your rights to legal counsel and let innocent people die, or … you can help us stop that bomb now and maybe they won’t strap you to a chair and fry you.”

Vandoren said nothing more as they led him away. But hours later, he told them plenty.

“It seems the big mystic hadn’t exactly been a willing host to a WMD,” Agent Jakes later informed Ian. “His lawyer advised him to cooperate in locating the thing.”

M
ona Greyson had fled all the way to the bay before Ian and the sheriff’s deputies found her. They’d tracked her after finding a shred of her clothing caught in a bramble not far from the now doused fire. The agents had dispatched two of the three deputies reporting to the scene to find the tormented woman before she harmed herself or her daughter. They were almost too late.

Arms bleeding, her face and hands smeared with mud, Mona was knee-deep into the bay waters when the deputy lunged for her and dragged her back onto the beach, her writhing body and flying fists almost more than the two men could contain. The deputy had to cuff her hands and feet for her own protection until help arrived. She was incoherent except for one phrase uttered repeatedly between wild and frightened cries. “Raja, you lied! You lied!”

Tally had allowed Spencer to lead her to his cottage on the camp property where he ushered her to the sofa and covered her with a warm blanket. She was trembling and crying, exhausted from the ordeal. But moments later, she threw the blanket aside, insisting she had to find her mother. Before she reached the door, though, Spencer caught her arm and gently pulled her to him. “You’ve had a terrible fright, my child,” he said, folding her into his arms. “Let the authorities and Ian take care of your mother for now.” He gently led her back to the sofa. “We’ll go to her soon enough.” He paused. “You’ve seen your mom in a condition you’ve never seen before, right?”

“Yes,” came a small, weak voice, not the one Spencer was used to hearing from her. “What happened to her?” Tally asked, clutching the blanket tightly around her, as if it were a shield.

Ian looked into the eyes of a young woman and saw the innocent fright of a child. “Tally, do you remember the first time we met? At the store when my coworker responded so rudely to your wearing the cross necklace?”

“Yeah.”

“When I took you aside, I told you that those in the camp knew things that were important for you to know.”

“And you never told me what they were.”

“I think you know now,” Spencer replied gently.

Tally stared at him as if watching the answer materialize on his face.

“Just like I told you about myself, that because of what I was forced to see in my wife and others like her, I had to run the other way—to the cross. Because finally, I understood what God meant when he said that our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against evil forces in the heavenly realm. Tally, you just witnessed those forces and how they can overtake someone like your mom, even using her voice to say things that she, in her own right mind, would never have said, especially to you. But she opened herself willingly to them. At first, I believe, it was to find and persecute the father who’d abused her, maybe raped her. To find some emotional relief from that trauma. But she didn’t know who was on the other side. That it wasn’t her father, but someone far more evil.”

As tears slid down her cheeks, Tally replied, “At my house last night, Mr. O’Brien said he was going to ask God to protect me and Mom. Why didn’t God do that?”

“I believe he just saved you both from greater harm, Tally. We’re going to help your mom find her way back from a very dark place. And if you’ll let him, God will build a new life for both of you.”

It wasn’t long before Spencer received word that Mona Greyson had been found and taken to the regional hospital. She’d been sedated and would be held over for psychiatric evaluation. Before he took Tally to see her mother, he excused himself long enough to make a quick phone call.

When they arrived at the hospital, another car was just pulling up at the curb. Denise Northcutt jumped from the back seat and rushed to hug Tally. “Mr. Fremont called us, Tally. You’re going home with me tonight, after you visit your mom.” Denise’s parents climbed from the car and started for Tally.

She looked up at Spencer, then threw both arms around his neck. “Thank you for caring what happened to me and my mom,” she whispered. “You’re part of us now, do you know that?” she asked with wide, teary eyes.

“Perhaps I am,” he answered with mild surprise, and the small entourage filed into the hospital.

J
ust after midnight, President Noland lifted from his pillow to take the call. FBI Director Rick Salabane had been cleared through to the residence, where the president had just drifted to sleep.

“Sir, we’ve located Ivan Volynski.”

The news snatched the president from bed. “Where?” He was up and moving.

“On a yacht off the north Keys. We have the coordinates.”

“And the bomb?”

“Nothing on that yet, sir.” Salabane detailed the events leading up to the arrest and interrogation of Vandoren earlier that night. “What we have so far from him is this: Volynski arranged for the truck to transport the bomb from Anhinga Bay to a ship on the Miami River. Vandoren doesn’t know which one or when it’s departing. Our teams are scrambling now to gather surveillance camera footage of the river docks and any trucks making deliveries early this morning. We’ve calculated the travel time to the Miami River,” Salabane continued, “and the likelihood that the bomb was off-loaded immediately. But sir, at this point, we have to consider a wide-scale evacuation. We don’t know the stability of that weapon or the vessel receiving it. Or if the bomb’s still sitting in the heart of Miami.”

The president’s mood grew darker. “What if surveillance tapes show the transfer to a boat that, by this time, has already left port?”

“Homeland Security is already on it. The Coast Guard will soon dispatch boarding teams to search every cargo ship that’s left Miami since early this morning. There’s one thing we do know, sir, if Vandoren’s confession is reliable. We know where the weapon is headed.”

Noland knew it, too. His brother’s last message had made it clear. “It’s coming here.”

“Straight up the Potomac, sir.”

Now in the living room, the president gazed out over the city, the seat of government, the bane of “the son so ingloriously born.” What had Ivan just done to destroy his brother’s “temple”?

“Sir?” Salabane prodded after too many silent moments.

Noland glanced at the grandfather clock beside him. “Listen to me, Rick. There will be no deployment of any kind to Ivan’s boat. Not yet. No communication with it, no risk he’ll spot any ship or aircraft the least bit suspicious to him. No hint whatsoever that we see him. Understood?”

“But sir, we need to—”

“Those are my orders, Rick. Now, I’ll be in my office in thirty minutes. Get here as soon as you can.”

By four that morning, the president’s secretary—fetched by Secret Service from her Georgetown apartment—had dispatched Vice President George Sievers and the White House press secretary to the Oval Office. There was much to prepare for the coming hours.

They arrived just moments after Rick Salabane. After a hasty briefing and a round of objections, all three now stood before the president, who was seated at his desk busily stuffing files and one brown envelope into a metal briefcase.

“George, you’re on standby only so don’t be eyeing this chair yet,” the president cracked with a half grin. Turning to Salabane, he said. “They’re waiting for the three of you in the situation room. Better get going.”

“Sir, again, I must strongly advise against this,” the vice president protested. “It’s far too dangerous.”

Snapping his briefcase closed, the president stood to leave. “Until we locate that bomb, I’ll do what I have to do.”

The first smudge of morning appeared on the eastern sky as Marine One lifted off the south lawn of the White House with Travis Noland on board. From Andrews Air Force Base, he would fly to U.S. Coast Guard Station Miami Beach and the cutter that would take him to his brother.

The lights of the city receding beneath him, Noland cradled the briefcase in his lap, hoping that its contents would hold a madman at bay. Long enough.

I
van was up early Wednesday morning for his usual breakfast of smoked salmon, hard-boiled eggs, and chilled mango, whose sweet nectar always soothed him. The rising sun had cast a pavé setting of diamonds over the surface of a gentle sea and kindled a memory incongruent to the sparkling lights before him. Ivan set down his fork and sat back.

He’d been twelve when his mother took him with her to a temporary cleaning job on the Black Sea near Gelendzhik. The American embassy in Moscow had hired her to clean a seaside dacha for one of its high officials, a middle-aged man from Boston who’d often taken his family for vacations at the house high above the rocky shoreline. Galina Volynski and Ivan had spent the week before the family’s arrival scrubbing and scouring the old stone house until, to them, it shone. But the man and his wife didn’t think so. Soon after they arrived, the woman complained so bitterly that her husband refused to pay Galina. Ivan and his mother were ordered to leave the following morning.

At first light, though, Ivan saw the man leave by the back door with a fishing pole and tackle box. No one else in the house was up. The young boy followed him down a steep switchback path to the water where nothing stirred at that hour but the hunched pines that rooted along the windy shore. The man headed for a half circle of aluminum chairs gathered about a campfire site, no doubt where he and his young sons had spent time together, and probably planned to do so again. Maybe even that night. But when the man dropped heavily into one of the chairs and busied himself with the fishing line and bait, Ivan Volynski changed the family’s plans for the evening.

He’d never slit a man’s throat before. It would have gone easier if the knife he’d grabbed from the butcher’s block in the kitchen had been sharper. But it had done the job, silently and completely. Not one more American would insult his mother, his country, or him without retribution. They would all pay and keep on paying.

“Sir, was the breakfast not to your liking?” the steward asked, coming up beside Ivan and noting the little-touched food.

“No, the food was very good, but you may take it away now.”

After the steward had cleared the table, Ivan rolled himself to the railing and looked down into the placid waters. He felt for the handle of the small revolver in the pocket of the light fishing vest he wore. Like the one the American embassy official had worn that morning by the Black Sea.

Ivan’s thoughts churned to a halt when the phone in another pocket vibrated. So many pockets, so many complicated instruments. The knife had been so simple.