Peggy seemed to grow larger, as if there were a big balloon inside of her that someone had pumped with air.
“I need you to tell me what happened last night,” she repeated.
“Why?” he asked. “Why do you think that anything at all happened?”
Peggy turned red.
“Want to know what I think?” Graham taunted. “I think you think that you already know, and you just want me to confirm.”
“There was shooting,” Peggy said. “At your house. People were killed.”
Graham said nothing. He realized what Jolaine had been trying to tell him in the moments before they’d been taken into custody. People don’t really know anything until someone confirms it for them.
“Your parents were involved in the shootings,” Peggy went on. “Your father was killed.”
Those words landed hard, like a slap. He understood that she’d said it to knock him off balance, and as much as he wanted it not to be so, he realized that she’d succeeded. He felt tears press from behind his eyes. “Does this make you feel big?” he asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Does it make you feel big to bully a kid who can’t defend himself? Does it make you feel all-powerful and shit to tell me that my father was killed? What kind of father did you have if you could talk to me that way?”
“Watch your mouth, Graham.”
Graham heard movement on the far side of the door, and then the distinctive sound of a key sliding into the lock. It turned, and the door opened, revealing the brown-uniformed cop who had earlier taken him to the bathroom.
“That’s it,” the cop said. “This interview is over.”
Peggy looked at him like he was a cockroach. “No, it’s not,” she said.
“Yes, it is,” the cop said. “As of right now.”
“Who the hell are you?” Peggy demanded.
“I am Deputy Milford Price,” the cop said. Unremarkable in every regard except for the mole under his right eye, his face was redder than the last time Graham had seen it. “And you are Peggy Darnell, who happens to have no profile in any record I accessed.”
“That fact alone should tell you something,” Peggy said. “Don’t interfere with what I’m doing.”
Deputy Price crossed the threshold and walked to Graham’s side of the table. “He had it right, you know,” he said. “You’re a bully and you prey on kids. It doesn’t get a lot lower than that.”
“I have business to attend to, Deputy.” She said the word deputy as if it smelled bad.
Price smiled. He beckoned Graham with two fingers. “Come with me, son.”
Graham stood. He wasn’t sure what was going down, but he sensed that he was destined to come out on the positive end of it. He felt a sense of peace when Deputy Price placed a hand on his shoulder.
“I’m sure yours is a complicated job,” Price said. “That’s the impression I got from the word that came down not to interfere with you.”
“It’s a good idea to follow orders,” Peggy said.
“Except for the immoral ones,” Price countered. “That was a hard-learned lesson for my father, and he made sure that I learned it, too. He was in the Army, back during Vietnam, when all the lines got blurry. Back when I was a boy—”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, must we really—”
“Yes, we must really,” Price said. “He was never right after that war. He was never able to justify the choices he was forced to make, and he never even confided in me what those choices were. But I knew for damn sure what the lessons were. He drove them into me just as surely as a nail is driven into wood.”
“Oh, good God, I cannot wait to hear.” Backed into a corner, Peggy became 100 percent bitch.
“When my daddy found out that I was going into law enforcement, he told me to pay attention to one thing above all others. And that one thing was the morality of what I was doing. Not all laws are just, he told me, and not all criminals are bad. Sometimes, people do bad things for good reasons. As an officer of the law, my job is to know the difference.”
“This is truly moving,” Peggy mocked. “I’m sure there’s a point here somewhere.”
“I’m sure there is, too,” Price said. “Just as all criminals are not bad, not all folks with badges are good. In fact, some folks should never be given badges in a million years because they don’t respect the power that comes with it.”
Graham watched the discussion like a tennis match, his head pivoting from point to point.
“And you think I’m one of those people,” Peggy said. Her body language said that she was bored and angry.
“I know that you’re one of those people,” Deputy Price said. “What kind of monster does an adult have to be to speak to a child the way you were speaking to this young man?”
“I believe I made it clear to your superiors that I am here on a matter of national security.”
“That’s no excuse for the way you’ve been speaking to Graham.”
“And how do you know what I’ve been saying to Graham?” Peggy said. She stood. “I left specific orders that this discussion was to be off the record.”
Deputy Price gave the kind of mocking smile that told Graham that he was definitely on his side. “Well, you know how it goes sometimes. Word doesn’t always leak down.”
Peggy glared.
“This isn’t your station house, Agent Whatever-your-real-name-is. This is my station house, and we’re in the United States of America, not in some secret CIA prison. The boy asks for a lawyer, you stop asking questions. You start taunting him about the loss of a parent, and I step in. You’re done.”
“You have no idea what you’re messing with,” Peggy said.
“You have no idea how little I care,” Deputy Price replied. “I sleep well at night, and when my journey on this spaceship is over, I expect to have a pleasant eternity in Heaven.” He paused for effect. “I have every confidence that we won’t run into each other there.”
Using gentle pressure on the base of Graham’s neck, he urged the boy toward the door. “Come on,” Price said. “We’ll get you settled down someplace more comfortable.”
This time, there were no handcuffs.
The walls of the hallway were made of the same yellow-brown brick as the interior of the meeting room. The floor tiles were the same brown-flecked white, too, only out here, the floors had a sparkle. Graham suspected that had something to do with people caring enough to clean them from time to time.
“Where are you taking me now?”
“We’re going to get you a warm bed in a house with nice people.”
Graham stopped, took a step backward. “I don’t know anybody here,” he said.
Deputy Price smiled. “I know plenty of nice people,” he said. “Trust me.”
Graham felt a flash of panic. Trust me. He couldn’t imagine anything that he could less afford to do. He couldn’t trust anyone. Everything about the past two days had proven beyond any doubt that no one was worthy of his trust.
He sensed movement behind him, and he turned to see that Peggy had stepped out into the hallway. Whatever about her had pretended to be nice before was all gone. All he saw on her face was anger as she glared past Graham and through Deputy Price.
“Listen to me, Barney Fife,” she said. “I think it’s time to place a call to your chief. You are way, way over your head right now.”
“Been there before,” Price said.
Graham made his decision. No matter what the other options were, all of them had to be better than sticking with Peggy.
“Think of the boy,” Peggy said. “You’re just going to make it all more difficult for him.”
Graham saw something flash behind Deputy Price’s eyes. She’d just pissed him off. “Just what are you suggesting?” he asked. “Are you threatening this young man?”
Graham took a step closer to the deputy.
Peggy walked toward them. A stroll, really—unhurried and deliberate. Graham pivoted around Deputy Price
, keeping the man’s body between him and the dragon lady.
She stopped when she was just a foot away from the deputy and she glared. Graham could feel the reflected heat of it, but Deputy Price seemed unbothered.
After a few seconds, Peggy walked on down the hall and disappeared out the door on the far end.
Graham’s heart raced, and he found himself trembling. “Who is she?”
Deputy Price patted him between his shoulder blades. “She’s nobody,” he said. “Just a lady who thinks she’s way more important than she really is.” He gave Graham a nudge. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you that comfortable bed I promised you.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Scorpion, Mother Hen.”
Jonathan keyed the mike on his portable radio. “Go ahead.” They were only two hours into their three-hour drive. He sat in the shotgun seat as always, and he turned the volume up so that Boxers could listen in.
“ICIS is beginning to light up about our friends,” she said. “Graham is going to be transferred to a foster home in the next half hour, forty-five minutes.”
“Do you have specifics?” Jonathan asked. If they could get a name and an address, they could lie in wait and grab the boy as he arrived at the foster home. Typically, that was the simplest kind of snatch, when the parties thought they were beyond any danger.
Venice relayed the name of the foster family—Markham, in Lambertville—and the address.
Jonathan wrote it down on the pad that always resided in the pouch pocket on his right thigh. “And the girl? Jolaine?”
“That’s a little more interesting,” Venice said. “She’s scheduled to be transferred from her current location in the adult detention center in Lambertville to a federal facility in Chicago.”
Jonathan exchanged confused glances with Boxers. “Any word yet on the specifics of the charges?”
“That’s a negative,” Venice said. “But it gets better. On a whim, I decided to call the federal facility in Chicago. They don’t know anything about the transfer.”
Jonathan scowled. “You just called them?” he asked. “An inquiry out of the blue is going to get a don’t-know response nine times out of ten.”
“I told them I was calling on behalf of Andrew Barron, an AUSA from Chicago.”
Jonathan recognized the acronym for an assistant United States attorney, a federal prosecutor. “And you think they bought it?”
Venice did not respond to the question. Of course they bought it. Venice had a telephone voice that was unlike any other that Jonathan had ever heard. It pissed her off when he called it her phone-sex voice. Fact was, she could talk anyone into believing anything over the phone.
“Okay,” Jonathan said, breaking the silence. “What should we conclude from them not knowing about the transfer?”
“I think we have to assume that the transfer isn’t real,” she said. “I think we have to assume that the bad guys are going to take her when she’s in the car.”
Jonathan recoiled in his seat. That was a hell of a leap.
“I have a hard time connecting those dots,” Boxers said. Because Jonathan hadn’t yet pressed the mike button, his comment did not go out over the air, but Scorpion could not have agreed more.
“Help me with logic,” Jonathan said on the encrypted channel.
“I assume we’re hunting for ducks,” Venice said.
Jonathan laughed. In that one sentence, she’d spoken paragraphs. If a creature looked like a duck and walked like a duck and quacked like a duck, it was unreasonable to conclude that it was a penguin in disguise.
He got her point. Someone was after Jolaine with the intention of doing her harm. She was in custody on a nonspecific charge that now involved a transfer that no one know about.
“I got it,” Jonathan said. “When does the transfer happen?”
“That’s unclear,” Venice said. “The best I can estimate is when they get their stuff in order enough to make it happen.”
“Tell you what,” Jonathan said. “Get your new buddy Maryanne on the phone and patch her into this conversation. Let’s get her take on this.”
Hesitation. “You know I object, right?” Venice said.
“Duly noted. The way I look at it, there’s no harm talking. Surely she’s as dialed into ICIS as you are.”
“You know that begs a different question,” Venice said. “It’s counterproductive for anybody on her side of the equation to know that we are even aware that ICIS exists, let alone that we have access to it.” Access to ICIS was among Venice’s early victories as a brilliant tickler of electrons.
“Then we won’t mention it,” Jonathan said. “Get back to us when you have the patch ready.” He didn’t want to discuss this anymore.
“We’ve got ourselves a dilemma, Boss,” Boxers said. “It’s entirely possible we’re going to have two transfer events happening at the same time.”
Actually, it was close to a certainty, Jonathan thought. The question was, on which event should they focus their intervention?
“The kid is the one with the information,” Boxers said, reading his mind.
Jonathan nodded. Graham was for sure the primary target in terms of national security. He was the one with the photographic memory, and, presumably, the arming codes that so many people were willing to kill to obtain.
“Jolaine’s the one who’ll be most under guard,” Jonathan said. “And the guards will likely be cops. We’re not in the business of endangering cops.”
“But apparently the kid is stable,” Boxers said. “At least he’s being taken to a place of safety.”
“Unless he’s not,” Jonathan said. “If the enemy—whoever they are—is coming at Jolaine, doesn’t it make sense that they’ll come at the boy, too? Why go for her and not for him?”
“Agreed,” Boxers said. “But we need to choose, and our single best opportunity to get Jolaine back will be while she’s in a vehicle being transported between points A and B. Once she’s ensconced in another secure facility, we won’t have many options. You worry about tangling with law enforcement personnel, well, that would be one hell of a fight.”
On the other end of the easiness factor from snatching people from a home where they least expected it was snatching people from a facility designed specifically to prevent snatchings.
“It would help to know where they intend to take her,” Boxers said.
“It would help to know who intends to take her there,” Jonathan countered.
The radio popped to life. “Scorpion, Mother Hen.”
“That was fast,” Jonathan said. “Maybe we’re about to find out.” He keyed his mike. “Go ahead.”
Venice said, “Kit, you are on with Scorpion and Big Guy. I am Mother Hen. Scorpion, I have filled Kit in on what little we know.”
Jonathan got right down to it. “So, what are your thoughts, Kit?”
“That’s us,” Maryanne said. “We’re taking her to safety. It’s over.”
Jonathan looked to Boxers. “What do you mean, it’s over?”
“It means mission accomplished,” Maryanne said. “Uncle Sam thanks you for your service, and wishes you a good day.”
“This feels way too easy,” Boxers said off the air.
Jonathan agreed. “When did you intend to tell us?” he asked.
“I’m surprised you knew,” Maryanne said. “I didn’t even know until a few minutes ago. I won’t ask how you pulled that off because Wolverine cautioned me about asking too many questions about how you do what you do.”
Jonathan found himself silently cursing the doubt that Venice had planted in his head about Maryanne. This should be good news, but he found himself not trusting it. The fact that she was blowing sunshine up his ass didn’t help at all.
Jonathan keyed the mike. “Was it you guys who swore out the warrant for interstate flight to avoid a noncrime?”
“Say again?”
Jonathan said, “The PCs were pulled over and taken into custody—but not arre
sted—on a charge of interstate flight to avoid prosecution. Was that you guys?”
“How do you know about all of this?”
In his head, he could see Venice getting mad. “Remember what Wolverine told you,” Jonathan said.
“I don’t get the sudden change in attitude,” Maryanne said.
“You know you’re not answering my question, right?”
“At what point in what parallel universe did the FBI start owing answers to its contractors?” Maryanne said. Clearly, Jonathan had thumped a sensitive button.
“Was that a yes or a no?” Jonathan pressed.
“We’re done,” Maryanne said, and there was a click.
“What the heck was that all about?” Venice asked. “Why dial her in and then piss her off?”
“Yeah,” Boxers said, “I was kind of wondering that myself.”
This wasn’t a discussion for the airwaves. “Mother Hen, I’ll be back to you in a while.” To Boxers, he said, “This just doesn’t feel right. It was a simple enough question. Did they cut the warrant? Why wouldn’t she answer it? I think she got pissed when she found out what we knew. But why wouldn’t she want us to know? If we’re all on the same team—and that’s what she promised from the very beginning—why is she trying to shut us out?”
“Maybe because she’s with the FBI and that’s what they do. They compartmentalize.”
“I keep coming back to Venice’s question,” Jonathan said. “How did Maryanne know so quickly about what happened to the Mitchell family? If you think about it, the gunsmoke must still have been hanging in the air when she reached out to Venice and me at the concert. How could she know so fast?”
“Well, it could have been a telephone call,” Boxers said, “but I don’t think that’s where you’re going. You’re thinking that the pretty hot thing is in on this somehow.”
“I certainly think it’s worth looking into. In fact, Venice’s looking into it as we speak.”
Boxers rumbled out a laugh. “And I bet she’s having a ball doing it, too. Full cavity search?”
End Game Page 19
