He heard a low whistle. It was Jessica, whistling a Christmas carol, “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” He smiled, raised the weapon, cocked to fire. The sound of the whistle grew louder as she walked to the bottom of the stairs.
Calibrisi now sat alone in front of the computer terminal. He had told Ashley Bean to take a break. He finished watching the clip of Vic Buck walking down the brick walkway for what was the twenty-eighth time in a row.
Then, he saw it. He knew he would see it, and he did. He paused the video. He marked a square around Buck’s hands, then zoomed the image out and in. Then, in a split screen, he quickly replayed the video from the day before. He performed the same exercise, squaring off the hands, then zooming in. He studied only the hands. The gloves. Yesterday, big, thick, ski gloves. Winter gloves. Today, the gloves were different. And this is what had eaten at him since the first time he’d seen the clip. Today, Vic Buck’s gloves were not winter gloves. No, he knew what they
were because he himself had owned several pairs of these gloves. They were standard-issue CIA gloves. They were the gloves every agent was given, the gloves that were worthless in any sort of weather. They had but one purpose. Today, Vic Buck had set out to take someone’s life.
Calibrisi lurched for the phone, dialed Jessica’s office.
“Deputy Director Tanzer’s office,” said Rosemary, her assistant.
“Is she there?” asked Calibrisi, panic in his voice. “It’s Hector.”
“She went home, Hector. Then she’s headed to New York. Call her cell.”
Calibrisi hung up, then dialed Jessica’s cell phone and waited for the ring.
BATH IRON WORKS
BATH, MAINE
The sharp, fishy aroma of clams hung on David’s fingertips. He sniffed them, almost unconsciously, as he drove to work, the soft drone of Rush Limbaugh in the background. It was Friday, just before shift change. As he drove the pickup truck across the Winnegance Bridge, he took another whiff. He couldn’t explain exactly why, but he loved the smell of clams.
“Why do you keep smelling your hands?” asked Dickie. Dickie Roman worked with David. They lived on the same street in Phippsburg, in a row of neat, double-wide trailers just off the main road near Sebasco.
“Clams,” said David, smiling. “I went clamming again today.”
“You’re fucking crazy,” said Dickie, shaking his head and lighting a Winston Light. “It was practically zero today.”
“I love them,” said David. “I love the feeling when you hit a big one just under the mud. They squirt saltwater at you. It’s a game. And the taste. I just love it.”
Dickie exhaled, shaking his head. “Yeah, well, I guess where you towel-heads come from they don’t have clams, do they?”
“No,” said David. “God saved the clams for the saltwater hillbillies up in Maine, saved you from starvation.”
An odd pair to say the least, a fifty-five-year-old, chain-smoking high school dropout from Maine and a twenty-eight-year-old, clean-cut, light-skinned Jordanian, they shared a laugh at their own expense. Dickie was David’s only friend in Maine. Dickie was a hideous creature. They bonded over a steady diet of racist jokes, cigarettes, cheap beer, and, of course, work. Always the work. They had worked together now for more than three years. David and Dickie were part of the day crew at Bath Iron Works, two of the 1,300 men who worked, in two shifts, around the clock to build and assemble the engine works on the
Aegis,
America’s most elite warship. The
Aegis
was a nimble, fast ship that nevertheless carried a complex array of highly sophisticated, advanced weaponry. There were more than 800 Aegis destroyers that patrolled the seas under the American flag, from the coast of Taiwan to the Persian Gulf.
David pulled the silver Ford F-150 into a parking lot, next to the massive green warehouse and drydock facility of Bath Iron Works, Maine’s largest employer, the most important manufacturer of warships in the United States, a division of General Dynamics, one of the U.S. defense industry’s giants.
They walked inside and punched their cards into the clock next to the door. They walked down the long, covered hallway to the men’s locker room. David opened his locker and put on a worn pair of overalls. The locker room was crowded. It always was. He’d learned that fact long ago.
David reported to his shift and picked up where the night shift had left off. He and his nighttime counterpart were responsible for forging a custom piece of one of the large steel rods that would, in a few months time, constitute the warship’s drive shaft. He inspected the work of his counterpart, Tim. He knew Tim. Tim did excellent work; David felt an obligation to work his hardest, to produce quality craftsmanship, for Tim mainly, but also for Bath Iron Works, his employer; he felt obligated to match Tim’s excellent work, to live up to his end of the bargain. He ran his hands along the six-foot section of steel and nodded to himself. “Today,” he thought to himself, “I will finish grinding the six shank. It’s almost done. Tim will be surprised.”
After an hour and forty-five minutes grinding the toaster-sized
sander against the metal rod, David let the switch go. He turned the sander off and took off his mask and helmet, then his gloves. He nodded to Mark Jonas, the foreman. He had to hit the head.
David walked through the pit to the bathroom. It was located in the middle of the warehouse. He peered casually down at the ground. The stalls were empty. He went to the fourth stall. Once inside, he shut the door and unhitched the clasps on his coveralls. He let them fall to the ground. Then, he let his underwear fall on top of the overalls. To anyone looking from the outside, from the sinks or the urinals, it looked as if he was sitting down on the toilet.
But David was looking up.
There you are,
he thought. It had taken him almost a year to find a good place, a place no one would discover, ever, under any circumstance. He’d been trained to use his locker, but that wouldn’t work here. He knew it the day he’d walked in. So he’d had to improvise.
Standing on the john, he reached up and pushed the square ceiling tile up, until it sat freely on his hands above the thin aluminum ceiling frame. As he’d done at least once a week for more than two years, he slowly rotated the ceiling tile so that it flipped over. He lowered it down and then sat down. He then reached down, felt the large lump taped to the underside of his scrotum and pulled it quickly from the tape. It was a small hunk of soft material, grayish, with small hard objects peppered throughout, like pieces of orange glass. He knew what it was. He’d learned how to use it. How to set the detonator. He saw the movie that showed the explosion, the film they showed all of them, of the explosion in the laboratory. Octanitrocubane. He stared at it for a moment, then added it to the pile that now resembled a small pillow. Finally, he checked the detonator. It was still in place; two stainless-steel tubes within a glass cylinder, a pair of small red wires sticking up into the air; the two wires that would receive a cellular transmission from somewhere and blow all of Bath Iron Works, and half of the small city of Bath, into oblivion. He’d set the detonator up on a weekend shift over three separate trips to the bathroom. He smiled at the sight of the device.
Suddenly, the door opened. He heard footsteps. He peered down and saw two running shoes. He didn’t recognize them.
He looked up at the empty rectangle in the ceiling. Could the stranger see the missing square? Probably. This wasn’t the first time. Unless it was the maintenance man, Joseph, nobody would care. Even Joseph probably wouldn’t care. Still, the empty rectangle, the black abyss of the missing rectangle, sent shivers down his spine.
He waited as the man took a pee. If someone were to come in and have to take a crap, he would have a problem. So far, in two years, that hadn’t happened.
The toilet flushed. The man walked out without washing his hands.
David stood. He raised the ceiling tile up to the ceiling and gently moved it into place.
“Soon,” he whispered out loud. He smelled his fingertips once more, the odor of the clams. “Soon.”
88 TWENTY-FOURTH STREET, N.W.
GEORGETOWN
Jessica’s whistling grew louder as she reached the landing halfway up the stairs.
Buck listened, hidden behind her bedroom door. He had always liked the song. Why do some people like certain songs and not others, he asked himself. For example, he hated “Silent Night.” But “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” which she now whistled, now
that
was a classic. He grinned as he considered this. Such a significant moment in the life of one person—her last moment on earth, in fact—and here he is, thinking of something so utterly trivial as which Christmas carols he preferred. Well, it made him smile, at least.
In his right hand, down at his side, the silenced Glock 36. He felt his heart rate pick up, ever so slightly. He’d killed so many people, in so many places, that it had become routine. But this one was slightly unusual, and on some level he knew that. He’d terminated people he’d known before, even liked. But never before had he killed someone who represented such a grave threat to his own personal well-being. If his heart raced, he realized as his breathing quickened, it was because he wanted it now; wanted to be on that beach, to be away from it all, to have his money. He was so close now. He would leave the country soon,
perhaps tonight. And he’d insist Fortuna pay him the rest,
now.
And if Fortuna wouldn’t, then Buck would turn him in and make do with what money he had. He at least had received the other $5 million now. Survival on only $15 million. He smiled again. But first he had to get away. And in order to buy the time to get away, he had one piece of unfinished business.
Jessica’s footsteps grew louder on the wooden stairwell, the soft, perfect pitch of her whistle grew louder too. Suddenly, her phone beeped, a sharp, insistent ring that stopped her whistling. He heard the phone flip open. Her footsteps drew closer. The hall light flipped on. Her shadow drifted into the frame of the room, her outline suddenly appearing on the green oriental carpet directly in front of the door, which Buck stood silently behind. He watched from the crack near the hinges.
“
Tanzer
,” she said.
Calibrisi held the phone to his head. He squeezed the plastic handset so hard he thought he might break it. Finally, the cell signal picked up and Jessica’s phone began to ring.
“Thank God,” he said aloud, to no one.
The phone rang half a dozen times, no answer.
“Pick up the phone, Jess,” he pleaded out loud. “Pick up the fucking phone.”
Then, the slightly Irish inflection of Jessica’s voice came on.
“
This is Jessica Tanzer and you’ve reached my voice mail. If this is an emergency, please call.
. . .”
“Yes, Lou,” Buck heard Jessica say as she entered her bedroom, flipped the light switch.
Buck remained behind the door, motionless, silent.
“I leave in ten minutes,” she said. “It will have to wait. We have two separate leads in New York City and I’m heading up after I take a quick shower.”
Buck watched through the crack at the end of the door. He steadied
the Glock against his right leg, but held. He could not terminate her while she was on the phone with anyone, much less the director of the FBI. Jessica moved through the bedroom into the bathroom. He suddenly couldn’t see her. But he heard the sound of the shower come on.
“The target is mid-coast; Portland, Freeport, somewhere in the vicinity. The team is all over it. I don’t know what the target is; tell the senator she’ll be the first to know.”
She returned to the bedroom. Buck watched as she cradled the cell phone between her shoulder and ear. She took a black blazer off, unbuttoned her white blouse, removed it, then took her bra off. Then, she unzipped her black pants, let them drop in a pile at her ankles. She now stood in front of Buck in only a pair of pretty red panties. She removed those too, leaving them on top of the pants, then turned and walked toward the bathroom door, where the shower was blasting away.
“That’s incorrect,” she said as she walked through the bathroom door. “You need to explain to the attorney general that there
are
precedents.”
Calibrisi redialed three times, typing away at his computer screen as he did so, looking up Jessica’s home number, which he then tried. No answer.
Then, calmly, he thought,
Could I be wrong?
He’d known Buck for a long time. Would he commit treason? Could he betray his country?
Could he, God forbid, kill Jessica?
Over the years, Calibrisi had learned to trust no one. To trust nothing. There was only one thing he trusted. Only one thing he could always trust and rely on. It was his gut, his instinct, his frank assessment, above all else, of people.
Buck had almost surely cut Jessica’s home phone line. Calibrisi tried her cell again, then again, and still a third time. He slammed the phone down. He stepped out of his office, looked at his assistant, Petra.
“Call Bill Baker at Georgetown PD. Tell them to get as many men as they can to 88 Twenty-fourth Street, N.W. Tell him it’s an emergency.
Now.
”
Calibrisi grabbed his coat and sprinted down the hallway. He didn’t need to grab a weapon; the only time his Glock wasn’t strapped to his shoulder was when he was sleeping or taking a shower.