The Escape

by David Baldacci

  “I truly wouldn’t put anything past her.”

  “If she did have a role in his death, do you think it was for the money?”

  Dan shrugged. “I would hear my dad sometimes in his little den after he’d been hitting the booze a bit.”

  “What would he say?”

  “He had really bad arguments with my mother about things. And when she wasn’t around, he would go to his den and talk to himself.”

  “And say what exactly?”

  “I just caught snatches here and there. And he didn’t seem to be making much sense. But it seemed he had a problem with my mother and what she was doing in her job.”

  “And do you know what that was?”

  “I know she spent a lot of time in Russia.”

  “As part of a START verification team?”

  “I think that’s right, yeah. At least I found out about that later. She never talked to me about her work.”

  “Why would that bother him? She was helping to dismantle nukes.”

  “It didn’t seem like he had a problem with that. I think it was more personal.”

  “Meaning someone she worked with?”

  “All I know is I heard my dad once say he’d kill the guy if he had the chance.”

  “Kill the guy?”

  “Yeah. And my dad was a pretty calm person. I don’t know what he found or heard, but he was definitely pissed off about it.”

  “What does your sister think?”

  “She was closer to our mom than I ever was. She wouldn’t agree with anything I’ve been saying. They see each other a lot. They’re tight. My mom has even helped my sister out financially.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “In Gaithersburg, Maryland. She has a clothing store up there.”

  “She do well with it?”

  “She does okay. Like I said, I know Mom helps her out financially.”

  “Does that surprise you? I mean, given what you’ve told me about your mother?”

  Dan shrugged. “My sister won’t bite the hand that feeds her. So she tells the woman what she wants to hear. But to give our mother her due, if she loves anyone, it would be my sister.”

  Puller wrote some notes down and said, “She told me about making the Olympic team in the biathlon. She said she might have won the gold.”

  “Did she tell you she didn’t compete?”

  “Yeah, some sort of medical issue.”

  Dan laughed.

  “What’s the joke?” asked Puller.

  “ I was the medical issue.”

  “Come again?”

  “She was pregnant with me. They wouldn’t let her compete.”

  “Was she upset about that?”

  “She was so upset about it that she never mentioned it. I only found out from my dad.”

  “Hey, it takes two to tango. She knew what she was doing.”

  “My dad said she claimed he messed with her birth control pills.”

  “Did he?”

  “Who knows? If she wanted to win a medal in the Olympics she knew she couldn’t do it while heavily pregnant. Maybe my dad did do it. She was so controlling. Maybe he wanted to give her a taste of her own medicine. And it might be one reason she never really took to me. I guess I represented her missed opportunity at glory.”

  “It may or may not have been someone’s fault, Dan, but it sure as hell wasn’t yours. You weren’t even born.”

  “Sounds logical. But some people are not swayed by logic.”

  They sat in silence drinking their coffees.

  Puller finally said, “I’m surprised you’ve talked to me about all this.”

  Dan gave a mirthless laugh. “I guess I surprised myself. But when you called out of the blue, I thought, well I just thought—”

  “That the truth might come out and justice would be finally served for your father?”

  The two men locked gazes. Dan said, “After all, it’s why I joined the FBI’s legal office. And I really loved my dad.”

  “Well, I hope I can make that happen for you,” Puller said.

  And for my brother, he thought.

  He thanked Dan Reynolds and headed back to his car. Before he got there his phone buzzed. It was Knox.

  “I was wondering when I was going to hear from you,” he said. He listened for a bit and said, “Shirlington, huh? Okay, it was definitely worth a shot. Why don’t you stay with them and we can hook back up later.” He paused, listening, but she broke off in mid-sentence. His features grew tight. He said, “Knox? Knox?”

  He heard her yelling something, not at him, at someone else.

  When he heard her words he started to run.

  The next sound he heard made Puller redouble his efforts. As he ran full out to his car he screamed into his phone. “Knox? Veronica!”

  She never answered.

  And then the line went dead.

  CHAPTER

  53

  KNOX HAD BEEN sitting in a car she had requisitioned from INSCOM at Fort Belvoir. While she had told Puller that she needed to report in and start filling out voluminous paperwork, her real purpose was to stay behind and then follow Donovan Carter when he left the facility.

  He had a black Town Car and a driver. And Knox could see the man accompanying him.

  It was Blair Sullivan, the internal security man who had gotten so heated about their investigation of Susan Reynolds.

  As they exited out of the DTRA complex, Knox fell in behind them. They got on Interstate 95 and Knox kept a few car lengths back. They exited onto Interstate 395 and headed north toward D.C.

  Knox had no idea if this would lead to anything, but there was a chance and she felt she had to take it. She had nothing to lose. They exited at Shirlington and she followed. A few minutes later the car pulled to a stop in front of a small outdoor mall of upscale eateries and shops. The driver parked the Town Car, and Carter and Sullivan went into one of the restaurants.

  “Great,” said Knox out loud to herself. “An early dinner. Just my luck. And I can’t go in because unless they suddenly go blind, they’re going to see me.”

  She backed into an open space across the street and waited. She listened to the radio and answered emails but continually kept her gaze roaming over the street. She was drumming her fingers on the steering wheel when a white van pulled in next to where the Town Car was parked. A burly guy opened the passenger door and in doing so clipped the side of the Town Car.

  The window of the Town Car came down and Carter’s driver stuck his head out. Knox could hear him yelling at the guy. The guy yelled back.

  The driver got out and the two men stood toe to toe, still yelling and jabbing fingers in each other’s chests.

  Knox was hoping this was not going to escalate into something bad, because she was pretty sure the driver was armed. Her gaze drifted to a teenager rolling down the sidewalk on a skateboard. He had long curly hair, a ball cap turned backward, and was wearing a bulky hoodie, jeans torn at the knee and thigh and sneakers the size of small dogs with no shoelaces. He was riding low, and then he attempted a complicated jump and fell on his ass right next to the Town Car, disappearing from her line of sight.

  Knox’s gaze drifted back to the two men. They were still arguing, only now Carter’s man was showing his creds to the burly guy. She hoped that would put an end to the confrontation.

  Knox shifted back to the kid, who was rising up next to the Town Car. He dusted off his pants and looked sheepishly around as he gripped his board.

  Not such a hotshot on the board, thought Knox.

  As he dropped his board, stepped on it, and pushed off he passed by the two men. Then he gathered speed, turned the corner in a tight curve, and was gone from her view.

  The burly guy climbed back into the van, still scowling and yelling, and the van reversed out of the space just as the restaurant’s door opened and Carter and Sullivan emerged. His driver yelled one more thing at the van as it pulled away, honking its horn. The driver turned and saw
Carter and Sullivan and hurried to open the car door for the DTRA head.

  Knox pulled out her phone and called Puller. He answered on the second ring.

  She told him what she was doing, and also where she was. He replied to her information in a few succinct sentences.

  “Roger that,” she said. “But I think that—”

  As if someone had pushed a secret button in her brain, Knox started to piece together what she had just seen.

  No, not what she had just seen.

  What had really just happened.

  She heard Puller say, “Knox? Knox?”

  She didn’t even hear him. What she had just seen was a diversion.

  The guy in the van bumping the Town Car on purpose.

  A kid who wasn’t a kid sailing by on a skateboard while the driver was distracted by the van guy.

  Then a planned fall that allowed the kid access underneath the Town Car out of sight of anyone.

  Then the kid had disappeared.

  As if on cue the burly guy had given up on the confrontation and the van had raced off.

  She snapped back from these thoughts and saw that Sullivan and Carter were in the car.

  The driver started it up.

  Still holding the phone, Knox kicked open her car door, leapt out, and started to sprint across the street.

  “Get out of the car!” she screamed. “Get out of the car! There’s a—”

  The ground moved violently under her feet, the pavement seemed to whipsaw like a snake on crack. Everything took on the elements of a world reduced to slow motion. She staggered, braced herself for what she knew was coming and could do absolutely nothing about. Visions of Mosul came roaring vividly back to her. Sitting in an armored Humvee one second. Lying far away in the dirt another second later and having no idea how she had gotten there, not knowing whether people were alive or dead, whether she would die here too. Whether her legs would ever function again.

  All of this took a millionth of a second to pass through her mind. And that was good, because even with that, she was out of time.

  She had looked away at the last moment, and it was a good thing she did. Looking directly at an explosion of sufficient magnitude could blind a person. But it didn’t really matter. People close enough to be blinded by such a flash didn’t usually live anyway.

  Her last conscious thought was a surprising one to her.

  Sorry, Puller. It’s up to you now.

  The concussive force of the explosion lifted her right out of her shoes, throwing her twenty feet through the air like a pellet from a slingshot, until she smashed against the plate glass window of a linen shop. She managed to cover her head with her hands right before impact as her phone flew from her, landed in the street, and broke apart. Knox ended up on the floor of the shop in a heap of limbs.

  The Town Car had been obliterated. What was left of the three men inside was no longer recognizable. The explosion had shattered windows up and down the street. People were lying on the sidewalks, bloodied, battered, unconscious, and some of them would never be waking up.

  Others were moaning, groaning, and staggering around. Some were in shock, others badly injured, and others, though unhurt, could only stare in horror at what had happened.

  It was like a street in Baghdad or Kabul, not an affluent area a few miles from Washington, D.C.

  Car alarms triggered by the blast were going off up and down the street. People were running now, some toward the blast site, others away from it, no doubt terrified that more explosions were going to take place. A police officer who had been pulling security guard duty in a jewelry shop did his best to help the injured and direct people to a safer area.

  Inside the linen shop Knox was lying facedown on the floor in a pile of glass shards, covered with sheets and pillows that she had crashed into after cracking through the window. Her eyes were closed, her breathing was tight and shallow, and the blood was flowing down her face.

  In another minute the sirens started to wail, people started to scream louder, survivors tried to help the injured and the dying. Then there were the dead. They had come here for a meal, or to do some shopping or run an errand, unaware that it would be the last time they would ever do any of those things.

  Inside the shop, Veronica Knox didn’t move. The blood just continued to flow down her face.

  CHAPTER

  54

  WHEN VERONICA KNOX opened her eyes the first thing she saw was a blindingly white light.

  That convinced her that she was truly dead. And that somehow, despite having committed a mortal and venal sin or two, she had ended up up rather than down, ecclesiastically speaking.

  It’s a bloody miracle, she thought. And she was being literal about that.

  The second thing she saw were transparent tubes running into her right arm.

  That drove the ecclesiastical element and the thought of miracles forcefully from her head.

  The third thing she saw was John Puller hovering over her.

  That brought her fully back to earth. And life.

  She saw him breathe a sigh of relief, and then he flicked his finger against his eye as though to rub something away.

  A tear, her groggy mind thought. But no, men like John Puller did not shed tears. If they did shed anything, it would be blood, not water.

  She tried to sit up, but he put a big hand on her shoulder and held her right where she was.

  “Just chill, Knox. You took a big hit. Doc says it’s a miracle you’re still here.”

  She suddenly looked wildly down at her body. “Am I here? Am I all here?”

  He gripped her shoulder tighter to calm her. “Two arms with hands attached, though two fingers on your left hand are broken, hence the splints. You have two legs with feet attached. One head with brain intact, though concussed. And a lot of superficial cuts to your scalp, arms, and legs, hence the bandages. And enough blood loss that they had to give you a replacement bag.”

  “But can I move everything?”

  “See for yourself.”

  She tentatively moved first her right and then her left arm, and then wiggled her fingers, even the ones with splints on them. Drawing a deep breath, she looked down at her legs.

  Puller saw tears cluster in her eyes and knew she was thinking back to the Middle East when her legs had not worked. He slipped the sheet up a bit, revealing her feet. He squeezed one of her toes. “Feel that?”

  She nodded.

  “Now wiggle your toes.”

  She swallowed, prepared herself, and did so. She felt them, saw them, and sank back on her pillow with a grateful, “Thank you, God.”

  He put the sheet back over her feet. “Legs are just fine, Knox. With that said, you were lucky as hell.”

  “I remember flying through…glass,” she said slowly and groggily.