The Escape

by David Baldacci

  you? Or regardless of who is ultimately held accountable?”

  Puller suddenly stood, towering over her. She took a step back as he stared fiercely down at her. “I gave an oath when I put on the uniform, Knox. Bobby is my family, but so is the United States Army. I will follow this investigation objectively and I will hold people accountable. All people.”

  “So what was the point of bringing me here, then?” she asked, looking mystified.

  “To remind you that I’m willing to sacrifice my brother or anybody else if it means doing my job and seeing that justice is done.” He paused, but only for a moment. “So what are you willing to sacrifice?”

  Her eyes widened. “What the hell are you talking about? How did this get turned around to me?”

  “Are you willing to sacrifice your loyalty to INSCOM, NSA? And whoever else you work for?”

  “Puller, I thought we already had this discussion. You dressed me down and I said I’d work with you. So what’s the problem?”

  In a voice like a drill sergeant he barked, “I asked you whether the 902d Military Intelligence Group stationed here had ties to the NSA. And your response was, ‘I’m afraid I can’t get into that.’”

  “Look, you’re pissed and maybe you have a right to be, but bringing me to a cemetery is a little melodramatic, don’t you—”

  Puller interrupted, “So I’m asking you for the last time, do you have my back under all conditions? Because if you don’t then you are useless to me, Knox. And we’re just going to go our separate ways.”

  There was a long moment of silence before she broke it. “Puller, I told you I hate deceiving people like you. And I meant that.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “All I want is an answer to my question. It’s that simple.”

  “I can give you an answer, just not the one you so obviously…want,” she said, her voice dying out at the end.

  He said, “Well, that’s answer enough.” He spun on his heel, marched back to his car, and drove off, leaving her still standing on the final resting place of Thomas Custer, loyal brother extraordinaire.

  CHAPTER

  27

  ROBERT PULLER SAT in his motel room and stared down at the image he’d drawn, photographed, and then transferred onto glossy paper. It was the dead man back in his cell. Puller had gotten no hits on any database that he could hack into. He had finally stopped trying. The man was definitely not in the military. He was not in the federal bureaucracy. He was not a government contractor with a security clearance. He was not in law enforcement. He was not on a terrorist watch list. They would all be in a database somewhere. These days everybody was in a database somewhere.

  So who the hell was he? And how did he end up in my prison cell?

  Puller moved his face closer to the photo. He had spent years of his life examining the smallest details, looking for something of value, sometimes just a speck within a mountain of digital data. He was a twenty-first-century gold prospector, only his equipment was a computer and a bandwidth pipe the size of New Jersey.

  Then his eye caught something, transmitted that something to his brain, and his brain retrieved the necessary information from memory. He looked down at the image with renewed energy and a fresh perspective.

  I got the jawline wrong. It was dark in the cell, but that’s no excuse. I still got it wrong and I can’t afford mistakes. It was more angular. And the eyes, they were more sunken, the forehead a bit fuller, the nose a touch sharper.

  On a sketchpad he made the necessary adjustments in the face. Finished, he sat back and stared down at the new image.

  No wonder he didn’t show up in any database. Any American database.

  Puller had examined many such faces during his career. He had become an expert at reading people’s origins in their features. The man was from Eastern Europe. Maybe as specific as the Balkan region. But clearly not Greek, Turkish, or Albanian. He must be a Slav. Could be a Bosnian, Croat, or Serb. So how did a Slav end up as part of an MP response team to a crisis situation at America’s only maximum-security military prison?

  He sat back and closed his eyes. In his mind’s eye he took a trip through Fort Leavenworth, a place he had been to often in his career. Even though he was Air Force, his particular specialty made working with the other armed forces branches mandatory. And the 902d Military Intelligence Group was stationed there.

  His photographic memory clicking away, Puller kept up his mental stroll until he came to the answer. He opened his eyes.

  The foreign military school at Leavenworth. The man had to have come from there. He thought about it a bit more. But that couldn’t be right. He had heard nothing in the news about the dead man being identified. If he had been enrolled in the school at Leavenworth his face and prints would be on a database somewhere. Either he had been identified that way and the news not publicly released, or he hadn’t been identified, which meant Puller had missed something in his deductions.

  He closed his eyes once more. No, there was another possibility. The foreign military student would have an access card to the fort that would allow him to avoid the main gate. That meant no vehicle searches. That meant the student could have transported onto the base the man who had ended up dead in his cell.

  The man had been sent to the DB to kill him. Puller had known this as soon as the cell door had opened. It was dark, to be sure. But he had suspected something was wrong from the very beginning. The main power might go out because of a storm. But the backup power too? He knew it was fed from natural gas lines buried deeply underground and thus invulnerable to the storm’s power.

  No, the odds of both systems failing at the same time were colossally long. And then there had been the actions of the man. He had come into the cell and closed the door behind him. That was the first suspicious sign. The second was the man taking out a knife. Puller had seen that in the illumination of the man’s helmet light.

  But Puller had not given the man the opportunity to stab him. He had disarmed him, grabbed him by the neck.

  And, well, the end had come quickly.

  Thanks to the teachings of his little brother.

  Apparently the Slavs had never heard of snap-crackle-pop.

  It was fortunate that he was close to my height and build, yet they never thought of the possibilities there. Not for one second. I’m certain of that. They never imagined that I would end up killing him and taking his place to escape.

  The questions, though, were numerous, and Puller was not finding any ready answers.

  Why kill me now? Who would want to? And who could have orchestrated such an event at DB?

  Puller sat back feeling distressed. He knew that the part of the brain that triggered emotions brought on by pain was the anterior cingulate cortex. Interestingly enough, it didn’t distinguish between emotional and physical pain. Thus it could be set in motion as easily by a broken heart as by a damaged limb.

  He closed his eyes and started concentrating, turning slow-moving alpha waves into beta waves that cycled through his mind at twice the speed of the alphas.

  Eastern Europe.

  Foreign military student.

  Assassination attempt at Leavenworth more than two years after he had been imprisoned there.

  What had been the catalyst? Simply the time for planning? He doubted that. It would take time to do so, but hardly more than twenty-four months. What had occurred in the interim?

  All the rest, the power outage, the noises of guns and bombs, even the man sent to kill him, were all part of the “effect” of the cause and effect. They were just filler. Now he needed to get past the fluff and zero in on the root of it all.

  His initial instinct had been to set out for a location connected to his old position at SRATCOM. That was still his inclination, but he didn’t have the luxury of gallivanting off to multiple places. He had to narrow it down.

  So what had been the trigger for all this? If he coul
d find that, he could narrow the number of places to which he might have to travel.

  While in solitary confinement, he had had access to the news. He had read as many newspapers as they would provide him. He had seen the TV. He had no Internet access but he had listened to the conversations of the guards. And his brother had brought him news as well during his visits.

  Daughtrey had joined STRATCOM four months ago. The man was now dead. Had his joining STRATCOM been the reason for what had happened at the DB?

  There was also talk that the intelligence community was going to be undergoing some radical structural changes, bringing more order and a streamlined approach to a sector that had been sorely lacking in those areas. Was that the reason for the events at the DB that had nearly claimed his life? But he had no connection to that world anymore.

  He kept blasting the problem with cycles of beta waves.

  Five minutes later he slammed his fist against the wall in frustration. His brain, the one thing that had never failed him, just had.

  CHAPTER

  28

  JOHN PULLER HAD gone back and checked out of his motel. His plan was to spend the rest of the day following up leads, and then he was going to head back east, check in, and then report his findings to his new “bosses.” As he drove along the surface streets of Fort Leavenworth, to his left was the Missouri River, also known as “Big Muddy.” He knew that the currents were tricky and drownings all too frequent. And some of them were not accidental. A few years before, a platoon sergeant had dumped his unconscious wife’s body in the river late at night after she had discovered his affair with a subordinate. Whether the poor woman had regained consciousness before she drowned was unknown, but her body had eventually been recovered far downriver where it had snagged on a downed tree. Puller had been put on the case and kept on it for a month. The platoon sergeant was currently in the DB for the rest of his life and his two children would grow up without either parent.

  That case he had solved. With this one he still seemed to be at the starting gate.

  He pulled to the curb and put the sedan in park. About a half mile from here was the DB. The Castle—the old prison—had had its own farm and dairy cattle operation, where “installation trusty” inmates would work. That had all gone away with the demolition of large parts of the Castle and the completion and opening of the DB. No more milk cows were needed. And who said the DoD didn’t know how to cut costs?

  Although there were no cow teats to pull or tractors to drive, the inmates at the DB could lift weights, play softball or soccer, or run on the track outside. They could play basketball in the indoor gym, which was named after a sergeant major who had collapsed on the court and later passed away. They could visit with family and friends. They could perform jobs and learn skills in the commercial laundry, the barbershop, sheet metal and welding facility, woodshop, textile repair section, graphic arts studio, and even an embroidery shop that made nametapes for various military purposes.

  As an inmate in solitary confinement, however, Robert Puller could not lift weights or play basketball or softball or work in any of those shops. He was designated as maximum custody, at the top end of the restricted grade. His existence at the DB was a solitary one. And, truth be known, he probably preferred it that way. His intellect was so advanced that he might have found the conversation of other inmates and the rigidity of the routines at the prison more harmful than beneficial. Puller had no doubt that his brother could lose himself in his own mind. And that might be the best way for him to survive in prison.

  When Puller had first visited his brother at the DB, it had been conducted in the noncontact visitors’ area, typically reserved for inmates on death row. There a wall of thick glass separated visitor and prisoner and a phone system was used to communicate. Robert Puller had largely been an exemplary prisoner, however, and the more recent visits had taken place in the general visitors’ area, which was open and pretty nice for a prison.

  Puller knew that he would never again set foot in the DB’s general visitors’ area if his brother was caught and returned here. He might never be able to visit Bobby again at all, in fact.

  He climbed out of the car and looked back in the direction he had left Knox. She was turning out to be a real problem. It had started off bad, gotten better, and after she had shown Puller her scars of war, he thought they had reached some level of détente. But then she’d pulled the “I can’t go there” BS with him, which had been the reason for the verbal drubbing he’d given her in the cemetery.

  So right now he was going solo on this. He leaned against the hood of his car and went through some mental notes of where he stood now in the investigation.

  He needed to follow up on the Croatian Ivo Mesic. He still had to interview the captain and first sergeant who had headed up the response team at the DB. He needed to make some inroads on the sources of the gun and explosion noises in pod three at the DB. If he didn’t hear back from Shireen Kirk, his JAG contact, by tonight, he would call her. This was despite her telling him that if he didn’t hear from her that was the end of it. Once Puller had a thread to follow he didn’t give up on it.

  Then there was Daughtrey’s murder. And finally, at some point he would have to sit down with General Aaron Rinehart and James Schindler from NSC. It was clear that much was murky at both ends of this case, and he didn’t believe Rinehart’s and Schindler’s explanations for being interested in this case. For that matter, he didn’t really believe anyone connected to this case about anything.

  And then there was the matter of who had kidnapped him. And who had fired the shots that had saved his life.

  As he stared toward the DB in the distance he wondered if his brother would ever return there. He might never be found. Or he might be killed rather than captured.

  And if I’m the one who runs him down? What do I do if he doesn’t want to go back to DB? What do I do if he puts up a fight?

  Puller’s thoughts drifted back to the standoff in the alley behind the bar in Lawton, Oklahoma. The result was he had walked out alive and PFC Rogers had gone down with a ruined limb.

  Could I pull the trigger on Bobby? Could he pull the trigger on me?

  “No” and “hell no” were the answers that readily leapt to his mind. But on the other hand, his brother had been in prison for over two years. He had quite likely killed a man during his escape. If he were recaptured they might sentence him to death for the murder, even if there was evidence it was in self-defense. Under that scenario, his brother might want to go down fighting. Or he might just let his brother kill him. Puller didn’t know which one was worse.

  Shaking his head clear of these numbing thoughts, Puller decided to do what he did best.

  Move forward. Whether it was on the battlefield or during an investigation, if you weren’t moving forward then what good were you? He got back into the car and drove off.

  He spent two hours with Captain Lewis and his first sergeant. Neither one had counted the soldiers as they formed the response team. The platoons had simply been called up and deployed to restore order at the DB. Both men seemed genuinely surprised that there was an extra man aboard. Once in the prison the MPs had fanned out to each pod, executing orders previously given.

  Puller had asked about pod three, where his brother’s cell had been. Neither man could give a ready answer as to what had gone down in that pod. They had not known about the dead man until long after the fact. None of their men had reported seeing anything out of the ordinary and certainly did not know that Robert Puller might have left the prison in the uniform of an MP decked out in riot gear. In fact, they were astonished at the possibility. Yet when Puller explained how it could have happened, both men conceded that they could not prove that it hadn’t happened.

  He examined the area where the staging had been for the response team. It was big, open, and on that stormy night probably totally chaotic. He searched the quarters where Mesic had stayed, but a cleaning team had come in to get it ready for the
next occupant, so Puller couldn’t even find a usable fingerprint. He had already determined that the rental car the Croatian had used had been leased out and was currently somewhere in Montana. Another dead end.

  Puller next moved on to the DB. He sat in his brother’s cell on the bed where his brother had been reading his book before the power had gone out. He looked around the small room where his brother had spent twenty-three out of every twenty-four hours of his life. Small room, big mind. It was a wonder that one could contain the other. He eyed the door, trying to imagine what his brother was thinking when the lights had been extinguished.

  Did he know what was about to happen? Did he prepare for it when the door opened? He had only a few seconds to determine what was going on. How could he have been sure the soldier who came through that door was there to kill him? Maybe he hadn’t been sure. Maybe he saw it as an opportunity to make his escape. Maybe he would have tried to kill whoever had come through that opening that night.

  Puller tried to meet with Captain Macri, but she was not on duty. Mike Cardarelli, the officer who was at the command desk, agreed to answer a few questions. There was nothing that was helpful until Puller asked one last query about Cardarelli’s whereabouts on the night Robert Puller had escaped.

  Cardarelli said, “I was actually supposed to be on duty that night, but Captain Macri switched places with me.”

  Puller came fully alert. “Why was that?”

  “She was supposed to be on duty the next night but had a family commitment that had changed. So we switched nights. I guess I should consider myself lucky. Everyone here that night took a professional hit.”

  “What was the family commitment?” asked Puller.

  “What?” asked Cardarelli.

  “Macri’s family commitment that changed? What was it?”

  “I…I don’t know. I mean, I didn’t ask.”

  “Does Captain Macri have family here?”

  “I don’t believe so. I just assumed they were coming in from somewhere else.”