Top Ten (28 page)

Yes, for just that brief slice of time she let what Michaelangelo the madman had done fill the reservoir of enmity toward him to overflowing. And then she put it away. Put hate away before it could become grief. Because there was no time for grief. The monster had moved on.

For the moment she would have to as well.

She swung the door back and pushed off of her contact with Romero and sprinted down the narrow hall of the tidy house, bursting through the storm door so hard it flew off its hinges.

*   *   *

Jack Hale lay on the ground bleeding from the gash across his neck. With every useless breath he sucked a spray of blood leapt from the wound.

Michaelangelo stood over him and picked the man’s notes up from the desk as the phone rang on, and on, and on. He skimmed them, and he smiled. He had stood in the shadows and listened. Listened to the FBI agent talk to the fifth most wanted man in America. How interesting. How puzzling.

Or so it had been, until he’d held the pages in his hand. And now he understood. Now he had ideas.

He looked down at Jack Hale as the last of the life spurted from him in a wet mess and said, “I’m afraid I won’t be able to do much with you.”

And with that be bent down and pressed Jack Hale’s pen through his left eye and into his newly dead brain.

*   *   *

She was at her Bureau ride, cell phone to her ear, waiting through endless rings. Tom Romero had come out of the house finally and informed the other agents with them of what they’d found. What they’d feared they would find.

Les Zacks shook his head at the ground, his tears spattering the sidewalk across from 1251 West Lemontree. Jenny Thomas let hers roll down her cheeks, her puddling eyes daggers of rage. Sam Dane, Tony Dominic, and Joe Peck stood with their brethren, eager eyes on Ariel. They were attack dogs right then. Ready for someone to say sic ‘em. And for whatever reasons, that person seemed to be Ariel.

Fifteen rings, twenty rings, and finally she clicked off, dialing another number from memory as she looked to Romero. “Call Oneida Airport and get a charter. I’m going to Atlanta.”

“You?” Tome Romero reacted, the others narrowing looks joining his in not understanding, though theirs was of a more complete nature.

“Look, the way I see it either Jack Hale isn’t home, which means the call I’m making now to the Atlanta Field Office will put enough people on him to keep our boy off of him, or...or he’s already dead.”

“What the hell would Michaelangelo want with the Atlanta ASAC?” Joe Peck asked.

“It doesn’t matter what he wants with him,” Ariel said, sidestepping the minefield that question could expose. “It matters
that
he wants him, for whatever reason.” Her call went through, finally. “Yes, this is Agent Ariel Grace, Task Force Ten, get me the SAC immediately. This is an emergency.” Hold music hummed in her ear and she said, “You all need to tear this place apart. Tear this guy’s life apart. Find out everything you can that will help us. If we all run down to Atlanta chasing a maybe, we’re wasting our resources.”

“There’s plenty of dots here,” Tom Romero said, and Ariel’s heart sank as she nodded.

But there was still no time to grieve—SAC Atlanta was talking into her ear a second later.

*   *   *

Mills DeVane slipped the handset back into its cradle and turned toward the door, moving only one foot in its direction before Lionel stepped in from outside and blocked his path.

“The phone,” the big man said, and Mills felt his blood go to ice. It was all over.

Thirty One

Convergence

“What?” Mills DeVane said, letting loose the only word his suddenly stumbling brain could muster. Another second and he might have managed ‘Don’t kill me’. Another two and he would have slugged Lionel. What did a dead man have to lose, he figured.

Only, it appeared he was not that just yet. At least the pager Lionel Price held up in front of him made him allow that possibility.

“Where’s the phone? I gotta return a page.”

His brain in gear once again—in gear with the engine that was his heart still racing along near the adrenalin redline—Mills gave no affirmative answer. Hell, he didn’t want Lionel to know that he
knew
where the phone was. “I don’t know, check Nico’s desk.”

And with that Mills slipped past the big man and outside. The sun was low in the west beyond a thickening haze of gray. Light weather he could tell, looking to the sky for his weather report. He doubted that Gareth would let him call a flight service station for an update.

“You got a horse’s bladder, number five?” Gareth asked as Mills joined them at the Piper once again. He was still in high spirits. Still holding Nita like she was some prize he’d won at the fair. The kind you threw away after your next trip down the midway.

“I was throwing my fucking guts up, Gareth,” Mills lied, dragging his sleeve across his mouth for effect. “I ain’t never been so scared in my life out there.”

“Hey,” Gareth said. “You’re alive. Alive and rich.”

“That was too close Gareth. Too damn close.”

Gareth let go of Nita and came to Mills now. “But now it’s over, number five. Over. Just one more little hop and you can—”

The smile drained instantly from Gareth Dean Hoag’s face as he looked past his pilot. Mills turned halfway around and saw a similarly glum look on Lionel’s face as he approached.

“What is it?” Gareth asked.

“They won’t be ready for us,” Lionel told his employer.

Gareth pushed past Mills and stepped close to the big man, his red hair starting to dance in the rising but gentle breeze. “What do you mean they won’t be ready?”

 “They’re going to be delayed,” Lionel explained. “That’s all they said.”

“Delayed?” Gareth repeated, his face contorted as if speaking some alien word with indecipherable meaning. “Delayed why?”

“They didn’t say.”

Gareth’s hands came to his hips, and he shot both Mills and Nita a disbelieving glance before looking back to Lionel. “I’m bringing these people the toy of their dreams and they can’t make it on time?”

Lionel shrugged.

Nita shook her head and sneered in sympathy with her man.

Mills tried not to react at all. Instead he let this new wrench have its way into the works while he tried to figure how it would affect what he’d worked out with Jack Hale. Minimally, he thought. He hoped.

“Well, did they happen to say just when they might be ready to take delivery?” Gareth asked with dripping and dangerous sarcasm, enough so that Mills was surprised to see Lionel Price hint at a meek side for the first time in his presence.

“They said they’d be about four hours late.”

“Four hours,” Gareth repeated, nodding and crossing his arms. He turned back to Mills and Nita. “Four hours. Wonderful.”

“What are we going to do?” Mills asked.

“Do?” Gareth sniffed sharply. “We’re going to waste four hours sitting here watching our cargo, that’s what we’re going to do. Unless, number five, you can tell me this aircraft is capable of circling over North Dakota for four hours while we wait for ‘Sorry We’re Late Militia’ to show themselves. Can you tell me that?”

Mills shook his head.

“I didn’t think so,” Gareth said, and stomped off toward the hangar, yell back toward them, “Nita, get some damn burgers or something while I take a leak.”

Once he was inside Nita looked to Mills first. “You want cheese or onions or what?”

“I’m not hungry,” he said, and went to the Piper and sat by himself beneath the left wing.

*   *   *

The charter was a Gulfstream Executive, one which under ordinary circumstances Ariel Grace would never be able to justify as an ‘acceptable and necessary expense’. But these were no ordinary circumstances. The call that reached her on the Gulfstream’s satellite phone was but one more confirmation of that.

“Atlanta PD found him,” the Atlanta SAC told her. He was in his own car, hurrying to the scene of his number two’s murder. “They were the closest to his house.”

“Right,” Ariel said, staring down at the closed high school yearbook on her lap.

“His throat was cut.”

Ariel didn’t need to hear that. Didn’t want to hear any more than that. “Right.”

“Our people have only been on scene a few minutes. Forensics will run his house through the sieve.”

Ariel wondered if that would do any good. She wondered that and other things. Did Michaelangelo know now? Was Michael Angelo Strange able to get from Jack Hale the truth about Mills DeVane? Or, more properly, the lie that was Mills DeVane? And, if so, what did that mean?

“Agent Grace?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Atlanta PD did find one thing right away. Jack Hale’s weapon and ID are missing.”

She thought for a minute before asking the obvious. “What good is that going to do him?”

*   *   *

The knock came at the door a little later than Arlo Donovan had expected, but late was better than never, and he stood from the table where he’d laid out the cards and the chips and even a green felt cloth he’d found in his basement and went to the door. And though he was anxious to see his boy, he did as he had learned to do. He did not open right up. He used the peephole, just to be safe.

When he looked through the tiny lens he saw a set of bright FBI credentials filling the view.

“Just a minute,” Arlo Donovan said, and opened the door to the darkness.

*   *   *

The Gulfstream landed in Atlanta after a two hour flight. A waiting car from the Atlanta Field Office got her to Jack Hale’s house twenty minutes after that. She didn’t find what she was expecting.

The place was nearly deserted, considering. Considering that a ranking FBI Special Agent had been murdered there just hours before. Sure, there was a good contingent of Atlanta Police there—some of the same one’s who’d been on hand for the Proper Peach debacle she’d orchestrated some weeks back. Only, it hadn’t been that way at all. Dozens of local cops, at least, were outside the two story Tudor, and a few inside hanging back from the Bureau forensic teams that had arrived and were starting their meticulous sweep of the crime scene.

But where were the rest of them? The Bureau troops? There should have been a sea of dark blue windbreakers on scene, each with that distinctive F B I in gold on the back. But there weren’t. She didn’t get it. Not until she had cotton booties over her shoes and was shown by one of the lab boys into Jack Hale’s den where he still lay with his pen sticking from his eye. Standing over him an agent she recognized from the Atlanta Field Office was talking on a cell phone, getting information from Bell Atlantic on calls made to or from the Hale residence.

“Yeah, okay. Got it. Got it. Just that one, right? And none out after that? Okay. Got it.” He clicked off and looked to the new arrival. “Ariel, hi.”

“Woodsy, hey,” she said in greeting.

“Not a good day,” Special Agent Dick Woodson said, then punched in a number on his cell phone, pushing his bifocals up on his nose once his finger was free. “Give me a minute. I’ve gotta get this to the SAC.”

“Where is he?” Ariel asked. “Where is
everybody
?”

“On the way to North Dakota, I’d say,” Dick Woodson answered, holding his hand up to staunch any more questions as the SAC came on the line. “Yes sir, I just got the phone traces. One call in from an airfield in the north of Florida and...”

Ariel’s ears perked mightily at that.

“...no calls out after that. The call came in...” Woodson looked at the clock on the dead man’s wall. “...a little over four hours ago.”

As Woodson listened, Ariel motioned to him. “I need to talk to him.”

Woodson held up a single finger to hold her off. “Right sir, I’ll make the call. Tallahassee’s closest, I think. They could be there in twenty minutes, half an hour. Or I cou—”

The finger could hold her back no longer, and so Ariel reached fast toward Woodson’s face and snatched the phone from him mid sentence. He half-glared at her over his slipping bifocals as she took over the conversation. “Sir, Agent Grace here...”

“Grace, what happened to Woodsy?”

She glanced at the half-confused, half-peeved agent, then turned away. When her eyes fell upon Jack Hale’s dead and abused form, she shifted her focus slightly again. “Sir, what’s going on with DeVane?”

A breathy pause came her way from who knew how many miles away and how many feet up in some Bureau jet. “It’s odd hearing someone talk about him. Someone who knows. Hell, I guess everyone will know by morning.”

“The phone call from an airfield, sir. Was it...”

“It must have been. We found a note on Jack Hale’s desk, something to the effect of ‘it’s going down’ and ‘Hoag with him’ and ‘North Dakota’.” Another pause here, but there was no hint of relief in this brief interlude. “Also something about a nuke, Grace.”

“As in nuclear?”

“Jack Hale’s computer was logged on to a Bureau database dealing with weapons of mass destruction, apparently at the same time as this call was coming in. Apparently Hoag wasn’t buying missiles. If only he had...”

Ariel gave the room a look, her gaze settling upon Hale’s dark computer screen, an orange light glowing at its base. A move of the mouse would power it up again, bring it to life, but what would that tell her? Something more about this nuke? That was Mills DeVane’s mission. One he was apparently succeeding at, if all of what she was hearing and piecing together were true.

“Do you have any location on DeVane?” Ariel asked.

“The Air Force is putting an AWACS up in the path he’d likely take to North Dakota. We’ve got five hundred people converging on the area. A thousand in another hour. We’ll have a good picture of things, Grace.”

So they didn’t know where he was. That wasn’t comforting. Not to Ariel. Not in the least. She’d been within shouting distance of Mills not that many days ago—as the dull ache in her sides could attest to—and Michaelangelo had still gotten to him. Had nearly
gotten
him.

No, she wouldn’t feel half comfortable until those thousand FBI agents the Atlanta SAC was promising were on Mills like a second skin. Not all the way relaxed until her bad boy was in cuffs.