About half the train’s black-garbed escort also wore dark, blocky visors over their eyes—night-vision goggles. Easing a few inches deeper into the crate, I shifted my feet and got comfortable, knowing I had no choice now but to wait them out.
Another electric golf cart slid past my hiding place, and I tensed. Then I smiled a grim smile. The single passenger accompanying the Navy driver wore no uniform.
I watched Ronald Bennett, from Homeland Security, climb out of the golf cart, where he was met by one of the black-clad train guards—almost certainly their leader, judging from the way the others deferred to him. He greeted Bennett with a handshake and held out a clipboard. Bennett took it, tapping it with a pen while he read, then signed something and handed it back.
With a businesslike follow-me gesture, the black-clad leader pivoted on his booted feet and strode inside the warehouse. Bennett followed a pace or two behind him. A moment later, the last car of the train passed through the doors, and the Navy guys slid them shut, hiding the train from view.
According to my count, sixteen of the short railcars were now inside the warehouse, no doubt being unloaded. I thought about the ventilated horse-trailer compartments I had seen, each accompanied by a pair of black-fatigued guards, and the ultrasecure two-story building hidden inside the warehouse.
Fucking McNulty.
How long had this been going on behind my back?
• • •
Forty-five minutes later, the hangar doors reopened and the train emerged, accompanied by its black-clad military escort. The horse-trailer shapes still sat atop the flatbed cars, but I could tell they were empty now, because the guards in black walked with the relaxed gait of off-shift personnel. Instead of splitting up two to a car, the way they had arrived, they all grabbed the sides of the last car and pulled themselves aboard. As the train slid from sight behind a building, I could see them filing through a door in the last compartment. Their body language was free of tension, as if the hard part of their shift was behind them and they were already looking ahead to some upcoming R & R.
Bennett emerged with the Navy folks. They slid the hangar doors shut again, and all of them climbed into the two golf carts and drove away. Minutes afterward, three of the MPs departed, too, leaving the original lone sentry to continue her circling of the building.
Timing her circuit, I calculated I had a three-minute window to work with: plenty of time. When she disappeared around the corner, I kicked the top of the crate loose, climbed out, and replaced it. Then, walking fast but confidently, like I belonged there, I crossed to the side door we had entered earlier in the day. I pulled out Roger’s key card and couldn’t help grinning.
If Roger had bothered to check inside his key-card holder when I gave it back to him, he would have noticed that it now held a gray engineering card instead of his own white one. He would discover the substitution sooner or later, but he would never say anything to anyone about it—his earlier role in smuggling us onto the base meant that he now had to keep his mouth shut.
I used Roger’s white key card to open the door.
Slipping inside, I pulled my hard hat low on my forehead and reclipped the key-card holder to my engineering coveralls. Thirty seconds later, I stood in front of the small internal building’s steel doors. Keeping my face turned away from the camera above, I inspected the multimode biometric lock mechanism and blew out a breath. There was zero chance I could defeat the lock, with its integrated retinal scanner and palm-print reader. It was cutting-edge stuff, more sophisticated than anything I had seen used anywhere else at Pyramid Lake.
Frustrated, I paced over to the black-painted steel lockers that ran alongside the concrete structure. They weren’t locked. I pulled one open. Staring at the row of orange jumpsuits draped on hangars inside, I saw all the confirmation I needed.
“A necessary element, but only a peripheral one,” I muttered, recalling Bennett’s words. “Well, fuck
me
.”
Gritting my teeth, I slammed the locker shut, thankful that Cassie hadn’t seen the one-piece orange jumpsuits. Because now I knew for sure why Bennett was here. What McNulty had been concealing from me for months. What dear old
Uncle Jim
had been hiding from his niece—from this caring, selfless, wonderful woman who was practically his daughter. I knew why that sneaky fuck Linebaugh had so eagerly agreed to all of Cassie’s education-money demands: to make sure she couldn’t walk away from this.
You’d think they would have at least changed the color.
Ten years ago, the jumpsuits were an image the media had grabbed on to. The bright orange was eye-catching in the pictures that had galvanized so much public outrage. Pictures taken at another Navy Base—that one
also
on foreign soil.
Because foreign soil was the only place where this could legally be done. And despite the fact that Pyramid Lake lay within U.S. borders, it was not really part of the State of Nevada at all. No, it was the territory of a sovereign government, one that had long-standing treaties with the United States. A sovereign government that was no doubt receiving a great deal of money right now to let its land be used for something the U.S. Government couldn’t legally do within the jurisdiction of its own States: the detainment and interrogation of suspected terrorists.
Machine-aided
interrogation now, with Frankenstein’s help.
“Guantánamo motherfucking Bay,” I said to the empty warehouse. “Shit, Jim, I guess you and Linebaugh had to come up with
something
, didn’t you, since you’re stuck here in Bumfuck, Nevada, where Indian gaming doesn’t bring much to the table. But how could you do this to your own fucking
niece
?”
I thought of Cassie’s sweet, earnest face, so overcome by emotion as she stared up at her future computer-literacy schoolhouse, and I wanted to cry. Their sickening, cynical lies had turned the accomplishment of her generations-long dream into a corrupt and hypocritical travesty. I couldn’t tell her about this—I knew that already—but she was bound to find out eventually. And it would break her heart.
I wasn’t about to let that happen to her.
H
uman Rights First was originally founded by a bunch of lawyers—something I found pretty hard to imagine. The nonprofit organization’s sole purpose was to promote laws and policies that defended universal human freedoms and rights. Supposedly, they received no government funding whatever, to protect their independence from compromise.
But in the cesspit of hypocrisy that was our nation’s capitol, I knew that they had been compromised nonetheless. A single glance at the agenda of Human Rights First’s 2014 Global Summit was enough to tell me that today’s keynote speech would be a cynical mockery of everything the organization purported to stand for.
The scheduled keynote speaker was Senator Grayson Linebaugh.
Which was why, sixteen hours after I had crouched inside an empty crate watching a heavily guarded midnight train pull into the warehouse at Pyramid Lake, I now found myself in Washington, D.C., standing on the open-sky terrace of the Newseum’s crowded eighth-floor Knight Conference Center.
Half a mile away, the Capitol Building dominated the southeast-facing view as I mingled with the crowd, wearing my borrowed white caterer’s outfit. A black baseball cap, inscribed with Wolfgang Puck Catering’s logo, was pulled low on my forehead. From beneath its brim, I watched Linebaugh, standing fifty feet away.
The Summit was the perfect venue to make a scene and expose the senator’s hypocrisy to the group most likely to take issue with it, but I wasn’t here to do that.
The time for that kind of subtlety was long past.
I had tried being subtle with Linebaugh before, only to find out that he had already turned the tables on me before we sat down to play. I no longer had any illusions about the kind of person I was dealing with or what he was capable of.
This time, I had a more direct approach in mind.
Linebaugh stood at the terrace rail, chatting easily with a group of visiting foreign students as cameras flashed, with the Capitol dome a photo-op background behind him. The murmur of the surrounding crowd and the traffic noise from Pennsylvania Avenue seven stories below drowned out his voice.
The railing behind Linebaugh was only waist high. It was a long way down.
Working my way closer so I could get a better angle, I paused behind a group of lobbyists.
I watched Linebaugh pause in mid anecdote to lift the single remaining chocolate-covered strawberry from the tray that Melissa held out to him. He took a bite, and I turned away with a grin.
Frankenstein had helped me locate Melissa, recently fired from Puck’s restaurant a floor below us, by hacking into the D.C. Department of Unemployment Compensation’s records. When she met my flight at Dulles Airport, she turned out to be an attractive young woman, and one who clearly enjoyed the party life a bit too much for stable employment.
Both those qualities were things that her employment history—short stints as a cocktail waitress, video game convention booth worker, Hooters hostess, and exotic dancer—had led me to expect. After I offered her three thousand dollars for two hours’ work the next day, then politely declined her own offer of a wild night on the town to celebrate, she turned out to be a pretty competent partner.
The keys she had failed to return to her former employer had gotten us into Puck’s Newseum restaurant kitchen, where we had dressed appropriately in borrowed clothing before heading up the single flight of rear service stairs.
Now Melissa’s work was done. She brushed past me on her way out. I slipped the second half of her cash payment into the pocket of her caterer’s outfit, receiving in return a friendly thigh-pat that felt more like a grope. Ignoring her whispered invitation to celebrate together at her place tonight, I left the terrace and headed the opposite direction.
Ten minutes later, I could see neither Linebaugh nor the Capitol dome. In fact, I couldn’t see much at all from where I lay, stretched uncomfortably across three joists in the ceiling crawl space above the men’s restroom.
I quickly exchanged encrypted texts with Frankenstein, who assured me that every single petaflop of his expanded processing power was focused on analyzing psychiatric videos right now. No ghosts in the machine, no interference. His last test run of a thousand cases had yielded a diagnostic accuracy of 92 percent.
Satisfied that we were in good shape for Monday’s session with my daughter, I returned my attention to the task at hand: solving the problem that Linebaugh represented. What I had planned would settle things decisively and finally.
My phone’s screen gave me a clear wide-angle view of the bathroom below, seen through the two-millimeter borescope camera I had poked through the acoustic ceiling tile. What I had inadvertently learned so far, about the lack of hand-washing hygiene among our nation’s political elite, was troubling.
Fifteen minutes later, the activity on the screen brought me out of my jet-lagged bleariness to full alert. A big, fit-looking guy in a dark suit strode into the bathroom, brushing past an exiting foreign dignitary in a turban. The thick white coiled wire between his ear and his collar told me he was part of Linebaugh’s security detail. Giving the sink area a quick scan, he checked both stalls and withdrew.
A moment later, Grayson Linebaugh entered the empty bathroom. His heels clicked against the floor tiles as he rounded the sink counter with some urgency, crossed to one of the stalls, and closed the door. The clack of the latch echoed through the bathroom below me.
Leaving behind the discarded caterer’s outfit, which I had used to pad the joists, I lifted the acoustic ceiling tile aside. I silently lowered myself through the opening to balance on the sink counter. Timing my movement with the rustling from Linebaugh’s stall, I hopped lightly to the floor.
Two quick paces took me to the outer door. I slid my black coat sleeve over my hand to cover my fingertips and slowly rotated the deadbolt above the knob, locking the two of us inside the bathroom.
Linebaugh’s glossy black Oxfords were visible through the foot-high gap beneath his stall door. Approaching on silent feet, I reached into the pocket of my tuxedo jacket and grasped the twelve-inch length of metal whose hard edge had been pressed against my ribs as I lay across the ceiling joists.
Pulling out the school-style steel ruler, I dropped it to the floor, and slid it with my foot through the gap under the stall door.
“Just checking the width of your stance,” I said. “I don’t want you getting in trouble like your colleague Larry Craig did a while back—although, I must admit, it’s nice to see you can actually maintain an honest stance on
something
.”
“Hello, Trevor.” The calm lack of surprise in his tone reminded me just how dangerous Linebaugh was. “I assume I have you to thank for my current digestive discomfort?”
“I’ve heard a guilty conscience can do that to you,” I said. “I wouldn’t know.”
“What brings you to our nation’s capital?” he asked.
“The cherry blossoms are nice this time of year, especially in Arlington National Cemetery. I thought I might take you to see them.”
“Subtle.” I heard paper rattle on the roll. “By the way, I called the Wynn in Vegas to approve your friends’ little weekend stay.”
Cassie must have phoned him about it, I realized. Had she asked him to approve the expenses? Or had Linebaugh done it on his own?
I felt a momentary chill. Even now I might be underestimating the person I was dealing with here. But then I thought of what they planned to make Cassie do against her will, and my jaw hardened.
“Decent of you to let my friends enjoy exercising their right to participate in the democratic process,” I said. “Another universal human right is having unrestricted access to our elected representatives. It’s good to see that I can exercise
that
particular right
anytime I want to.
”