King and Maxwell

by David Baldacci

  He and Wingo had hooked up with Agents Littlefield and McKinney. The man from DHS had been even more skeptical than his FBI counterpart but came around when Sean pointed out the likely scenarios for him. They rescue the kids, they’re heroes. If the kids weren’t there, then they had Wingo, and Sean as an aider and abettor.

  But as Sean made his way slowly up the hillside to where the cabin stood in its tiny footprint, his gut was screaming at him that the kids were inside its walls.

  Wingo was on his right flank. They had their guns inside their rain jackets to keep them dry. McKinney and Littlefield were approaching from the other side.

  Edgar had emailed him the interior floor plans of the cabin that he had dug up somewhere online. It was amazing what the gentle giant could do with his keyboard and a mind filled with more stuff than just about anyone else’s.

  Sean wished they could afford him.

  There were two rooms in the place of equal size. Sean was pretty sure the kids would be held in the back room because the front had the only exit door to the place. You didn’t put prisoners in a room with a way out. And when Sean drew near enough to the cabin to see the rear window, his deduction was confirmed. There was plywood nailed over it.

  He looked at Wingo. “You see that?”

  Wingo nodded. “Problem is, we try and get the boards off, the guards will gun them down.”

  “Not if we take care of the guards first.”

  “There might be one in the room with the kids.”

  Sean eyed the vehicle parked in front of the cabin. It wasn’t Grant’s Mercedes, unfortunately.

  “Four-seater,” said Sean. “Chances are we have two guards. They have to move the kids, that makes four seats.”

  Sean had a comm pack that was wired to units McKinney and Littlefield had. He spoke into his headset.

  “We’re in position.”

  “Roger that for us too,” replied McKinney.

  “Looks like we got two guards and the hostages in the back room.”

  “We have eyes on it. How do you want to do this?”

  Sean edged closer to the cabin. What he was trying to get was a direct sight line through one of the front windows. But the storm, while covering their approach, was making a visual pretty hard to come by.

  He looked back at Wingo and waved him forward. The soldier scampered toward him seeking cover along the way, just as he no doubt had done in the Middle East.

  He stopped next to Sean. “What’s the plan?”

  “Treat it like combat. What would you do?”

  Wingo eyed the surroundings. “Normally, you’d want to draw fire, revealing their position, and then follow up with focused fire or call in an airstrike.”

  “Fresh out of F-16s, my friend. Too bad one of our Federal friends didn’t bring a thermal imager. We could see where the body heat was arrayed in there.”

  A jagged strip of lightning struck a tree in the distance, severing it in half and setting it on fire. A deafening boom of thunder followed. The split tree toppled to the ground, where the flames were quickly doused by the heavy rains.

  Sean watched the smoldering tree for a few moments and then looked at Wingo.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do. Thank you, Mother Nature.”

  Michelle was being escorted to the White House in a black SUV with four Secret Service agents, two of whom she knew.

  “What’s the deal?” she asked one of them as they drove along.

  The man shrugged. “Not my place.”

  The other added, “You’ll know soon enough. The Man will tell you himself.”

  The Man was President John Cole. And from the grim expressions of the four agents, Michelle did not think the Man was in a particularly good mood.

  They had made her turn off her phone. No communications. No pictures. No recordings of any kind. She hoped Sean didn’t call while she was out of the loop.

  They pulled into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and Michelle was taken to the Oval Office. She was told to wait; the president would join her shortly.

  “Tell him to take his time,” Michelle said to herself as the door closed, leaving her alone. She looked down at her phone. She was itching to turn it back on but she knew there were eyes on her in here. This was a White House under assault, with leaks coming from somewhere, and it was making them all paranoid. If she tried to get her communications lines back up, they might just make her disappear. Well, maybe not that drastic, but she didn’t want to add fuel to what looked like a bonfire in the making. She sighed, sat back, and waited for the most powerful man in the world to walk in and further ruin her day.

  Edgar Roy’s fingers were hammering the keyboards with—even for him—unusual ferociousness. But things were not going well. Edgar had almost never been beaten when hunting down something electronically. People tried to hide things from him but they never could. He could stare at a wall of screens with information coming in digital packages from the four corners of the earth, and make sense of it while just sitting there. His mind was uniquely designed to function at a high level in complete chaos. He could bring order, reason, and results to situations that seemed impervious to any of those things.

  He had been able to track Grant’s Mercedes—that was relatively easy. It was right now parked in a very rural spot more than sixty miles farther west from the address of the cabin that he had given Sean earlier. He had emailed Sean with the information and then turned to his next task. The satellite.

  And yet he couldn’t find the eye in the sky that Alan Grant had presumably leased. He might have used an alias of course, or more likely a shell company. Edgar had looked at purely commercial satellites and then government platforms and now he decided to look at the category in between—commercial satellites leased to the government. Sean had told him that Grant was mad at the government. So maybe he was trying to get back at it.

  As he was clicking away something caught his eye. He hit other keys, his gaze flitting across two screens. To the casual observer this would be quite a feat, but for Edgar it was actually a break. He was used to staring at fifty screens at the same time. He thought about the request that Sean had made—to track Alan Grant’s Mercedes using GPS. He had done that. Police did that all the time. The GPS chip in a car’s computer brain made such a task relatively simple. The onboard computer systems in cars these days were extraordinarily complex. Yet since they were tied to other systems, they were vulnerable to hacking, just like Edgar had done.

  But as the data kept flying over the screen, Edgar Roy got a very concerned look on his face.

  This couldn’t be possible, could it?

  CHAPTER

  76

  “DO YOU SMELL SMOKE?” THE man said.

  The pair sat in the front room of the cabin. Each sported shoulder holsters. One had been reading a magazine. The other had been playing a video game on his phone.

  The other man looked up and inhaled. “Yeah, I do.”

  They each glanced to the window. “Lightning struck that tree a little bit ago. Could be that.”

  The other man shook his head. “Too far away. And with all the rain coming down the fire went right out. Not much smoke.”

  They both rose and looked around.

  “There!” the first man exclaimed. Smoke was coming through a crack in the wallboard. They both rushed over and examined the area.

  “I’d try to put it out but I think it’s in the walls. Piece-of-crap place. Maybe the storm caused an electrical short.” He looked anxiously at his companion.

  “We better move to the backup place. I’ll get them.”

  He raced into the other room and came out a few moments later with a gagged, blindfolded, and bound Tyler and Kathy. Kathy had a bandage wrapped around her arm where Alan Grant had shot her. He had done so in a way that the wound was only a crease in her arm. The slug hadn’t gone in. But it had burned her skin, bled a lot, and hurt badly.

  “Let’s go,” said the man as he pulled them along. “Move it!”
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  His partner was already at the front door. He said, “I’ll check in on the way, let him know what we’re doing.”

  They stepped outside onto the porch and prepared to get very wet running to the car. They would not have to worry about that, because they were never going to make it to the car.

  A fist crushed the first man’s jaw. He toppled as if he’d been clubbed by a grizzly. The second man yelled, let go of the kids, and reached for his gun. When he saw three guns pointed at his head from inches away, he wisely decided to put his hands up instead.

  Sam Wingo stood over the man he had just knocked out, rubbing his fist.

  He looked at Sean. “That felt really good.”

  “Dad!” Tyler had managed to spit out his gag when he heard the voice.

  Wingo ran to his son and untied him.

  Sean did the same for Kathy. She was teary and holding her arm.

  While Wingo hugged his son, Sean held Kathy. “It’s okay, Kathy. Everything’s going to be okay now.”

  She whimpered and said, “He shot me.”

  Sean looked down at her bandaged arm and then held her tighter. “And he’s going to pay for that. He’s going to pay for a lot.”

  They loaded the kids into the car.

  Sean doused the small fire he had built using rags, papers, and a bit of gasoline that he’d found in a can behind an old lean-to on the cabin property. Wingo came up to him.

  “Brilliant tactic,” he said.

  Sean stamped the last of the fire out and poured some water on it to make sure. Although the rain had left everything wet, he didn’t want to take any chances with the cabin really catching on fire.

  “Any tactic is brilliant so long as it works.”

  Wingo gripped his shoulder. “Thank you, Sean. I…”

  Sean put a hand on Wingo’s shoulder. “I know, Sam. I know.”

  McKinney and Littlefield had the two men cuffed and in their SUV. Sean poked his head in.

  In a low voice he said, “I just checked my email. Got a lead on our guy using the GPS in his car. It was parked at an old AM radio station in the middle of nowhere.”

  Littlefield nodded and pulled out his phone. “Give me the address and I’ll have an HRT team check there ASAP.”

  Sean did so and then added, looking at the two prisoners, “Spilled their guts yet?”

  “They want to lawyer up,” Littlefield replied. “And I don’t blame them. Kidnapping. Attempted murder. Conspiracy to commit a terrorist act.” He said all this in a loud voice so the two prisoners would be sure to hear. He turned to McKinney. “Hey, if we classify them as terrorists or even enemy combatants do they even have the right to a lawyer?”

  Sean said, “Well, I used to practice law. You guys might have a shot at taking them straight to Gitmo.”

  “I’m an American citizen,” yelled one of the men.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said McKinney. “If you were planning to attack this country, there’s precedent.” He smiled at Sean. “This might get really fun.”

  “Maybe,” said Sean. “But he’s still out there.”

  “But we got the kids back,” pointed out Littlefield.

  “I know. And that’s the most important thing.”

  “But?” said McKinney.

  “But kidnapping wasn’t the real plan, was it?”

  Alan Grant stared at the computer screen for what would surely be one of the last times. He was inside the vault at the old radio station. The frenetic activity in the other part of the station had ceased. It was empty. He was the only one left. His team had done what they came to do.

  He looked at the itinerary one last time and confirmed the schedule. He checked his watch. Soon it would all be over. His decades-long nightmare finally laid to rest. He had not escaped unscathed. And he wasn’t sure he would be able to avoid a jail cell. But in the end, it would be worth it. His kids would still have their mother. She had plenty of money. They would be okay. Scandalized by what he’d done, but only he could understand truly the justice in all of it. But he felt fortunate in a way. Fortunate that the current president had made the same blunder as his predecessor all those years ago. But for that, this moment might never have come.

  He called the cabin to check in. There was no answer. He called again. No answer. Slightly panicked now, he downloaded what he needed to his laptop, grabbed his keys, and ran to his car. A semi and accompanying crew would arrive in twenty minutes to undo everything that had been done here, leaving the place scrubbed.

  He drove to a prearranged spot in D.C. near the Virginia side. He would do what he needed to do from this spot using a remote feature he had built into his plan. From here he had a nice view of the capital city. Soon it would be a capital city in chaos.

  He readied his optics and checked his watch. Nearly there.

  Edgar had just finished clicking keys and now he sat back stunned at what he was seeing. It was an electronic back door the likes of which he had never encountered before. He had to marvel at the ingenuity of the people who had done this. They had taken what amounted to electronic DNA fragments from a satellite once leased by the government and used that to disguise themselves, almost like a virus or cancer cell, in order to infiltrate another satellite, a very special satellite, that was relegated to one user, and one user only. And for a very good reason. Otherwise something catastrophic could happen.

  It might already have.

  CHAPTER

  77

  “I’M SORRY TO KEEP YOU waiting, Ms. Maxwell.”

  President Cole looked harried and distracted as he entered the Oval Office.

  “No problem, sir,” Michelle said, quickly rising to her feet.

  “And Mr. King?”

  “Not here. We split up. You just get me today.”

  Cole nodded, but said nothing. He looked deeply preoccupied.

  “Bad day, sir?” she said, trying to bring his thoughts back around to this meeting.

  He started, turned to her, and attempted a smile. “You could say that. But in this job, it’s all relative. A really bad day is sending off brave young men and women to die for their country.”

  “So I guess a garden-variety scandal isn’t so bad.”

  “No, but it is distracting. And it gives my political enemies powder for their guns. Not that they seem to need any to fire away at me.”

  “What can I do for you, sir? I know every minute of your day is planned out.”

  “Well, I’m afraid that we’re going to have to make this meeting a mobile one.”

  It was then that Michelle fully focused on the fact that Cole was wearing a tuxedo.

  “Sir?”

  “Formal event in Virginia tonight at Mount Vernon. I’m the keynote speaker. You up for a ride in the Beast?” He smiled. “My people will give you a lift back.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  As she walked out to the waiting motorcade she slipped her phone out, powered it up, and quickly thumbed in a group text to Sean and Edgar. She hit send, smiled, and put the phone back in her pocket.

  A Secret Service agent she knew held open the limo door for her. The president always got in last. When his butt hit the seat the motorcade would leave. Michelle couldn’t hide her smile as she climbed inside and took the seat opposite the president, facing backward.

  As soon as he climbed in the door thunked closed and all outside noise vanished. It would not reappear until the doors opened once more, because the phone-book-thick windows did not roll down. The motorcade started off.

  The Beast looked like the Caddy DTS it was on the outside, but it was unique in all other respects. Three hundred thousand bucks allowed some interesting optional features. It weighed more than eight tons and was completely sealed in case someone tried to hit it with biochemical weapons. The fuel tank was foam-sealed. Even if it got struck, it wouldn’t explode. It had an oxygen supply and fire extinguishers in the