by Unknown
I was about to make a long drive, and I didn’t want Paladin knowing where I was or where I was heading.
At least, not until I got there.
_____
THE DRIVE took me twelve hours, but I didn’t mind it. I finally got to spend some quality time in the Defender. Alone behind the wheel, in my own head. Listening to music. Burning tank after tank of petroleum. Thinking about my brother, mostly. I still didn’t know what to believe about him, what had happened to him. Whether he’d been taken hostage or had arranged an intricate disappearance, abandoning his wife and son. Why Lauren had been attacked. How much of her husband’s plan she’d known about—or had even been involved in planning.
There were so many questions, and there was one person, I was convinced, who’d have the answers. At least, if my analysis of the network traffic was correct.
Though I knew he wouldn’t exactly volunteer them.
Most of the drive was straight down 95, through Virginia and North Carolina, through South Carolina and finally into Georgia. The Defender is a great vehicle, but it’s really meant for desert maneuvers, not the interstate. It doesn’t like to go much faster than seventy miles an hour.
While I drove, I played a lot of Johnny Cash CDs—I was down South, after all. I listened to “All I Do Is Drive” a bunch of times, and when my mood turned darker, I put on his cover of a Nine Inch Nails song, “Hurt.” That one could always wrench the heart out of me. Johnny—or is it Trent Reznor?—sings about how everyone he knows goes away in the end. How “I will let you down” and “I will make you hurt.”
Outside of Savannah, I stopped at a hunting outfitter and a hardware store. When I got back on 95, I took the exit for Waycross. Route 187 meandered south and then west for a while until it hit 129, at which point I drove south, on a road so straight it must have been drawn with a ruler.
I was in Echols County, in southernmost Georgia, on the Florida border. It’s the least populous county in the state: just over four thousand people. Almost all of it is privately owned. A few unincorporated towns and a lot of pine forest. The county seat, Statenville, used to be called Troublesome. No joke.
Twelve years ago the family that owned most of the county sold ten thousand acres to Allen Granger. It had been advertised as “perfect for a hunt club,” but it became the training facility and headquarters of Paladin Worldwide.
An unmarked road came off of Route 129, cut through the dense pine forest: newly built, freshly paved. According to the handheld GPS receiver I’d picked up in Savannah, it led directly to the Paladin facility. Half a mile down the road, the forest ended abruptly, and a clearing began, as far as the eye could see. The road ended in a large asphalt-paved circular drive.
There were a gatehouse and a barrier arm and a road-spike barrier and a large sign that said PALADIN WORLDWIDE TRAINING CENTER with the Paladin logo, that stylized blue globe.
On either side of the gate was a high chain-link fence, topped with coils of razor wire, cutting through the woods. How far into the woods, I had no idea. Various articles and Internet reports about Paladin had mentioned the chain-link fence and the razor wire, but I had no idea how far the fence extended. A chain-link fence enclosing ten thousand acres? That seemed excessive. Hugely expensive.
It was amazing, actually, how much I did know about the Paladin training center, all of it from the public record, mostly the Internet. The most useful information came from Google Earth, which had overhead satellite reconnaissance photos of the place, even precise geographical coordinates.
But nothing can take the place of what you can see in person. “Route reconnaissance,” as they called it in the Special Forces.
So I turned around and headed back down the freshly paved road until I found a gap in the trees, a natural path, and drove into the woods as far as I could. Finally, some true off-road driving, and here the Defender performed like a champ. I stowed the car in a thicket that was far enough from the road that it wouldn’t be spotted by anyone driving past, but just to be safe, I hauled some downed limbs and branches and managed to camouflage it reasonably well.
Before I set off, I switched my cell phone on and found four voice mails, all from Arthur Garvin.
He picked up right away.
“Nick,” he said. “I reached out to the Baltimore Homicide guys. To get your brother’s remains.”
“You know what?” I said softly. “I don’t really care about that. No offense—”
“Listen to me. Did your brother have a hip replacement?”
“A what?”
“The Maryland ME’s Office found something interesting in the wreckage. A piece of a high-grade stainless-steel alloy called Orthinox. It’s a stem used in a total hip replacement.”
“No,” I said. “He never had a hip replacement.”
“I didn’t think so. Also, Washington Hospital Center reported a body missing from their morgue. A sixty-nine-year-old white male.”
I said nothing for a long time.
“Nick?” he said. “You there?”
“Yeah,” I finally said. “I’m here.”
“Oh, and listen. We got a warrant for the guy in the Marjorie Ogonowski murder,” he said. “Nice work on that. The photo match thing.”
“Not me,” I said. “Friend of mine. Like I said, we have some fancy databases at my high-priced firm.”
“Still,” he said. “Good going, there.”
“Do me a favor,” I said. “Keep an eye on Lauren Heller and her son, please?”
I disconnected the call and set off through the woods to do my reconnaissance.
89.
Lauren picked up the phone in the kitchen.
“Is this Ms. Heller?” A pleasant baritone, halting in its delivery.
“You don’t know me, but my name is Lloyd Kozak, and I’m Leland’s financial adviser?”
She remembered suddenly: that homely man who’d come by one day to get some disks from Noreen. “Yes? What can I do for you?”
“It’s just that—well, I know you’re Leland’s personal assistant, and you probably know him better than anyone, but I really hope I’m not sticking my head someplace where it doesn’t belong.”
“I’m not sure what I can do for you,” she said.
“Something’s not right with Leland,” he said. “I need to talk with you if you have a couple of minutes.”
“What’s this about?”
“I’m in Chevy Chase. I could come by soon, if you’re not busy. I think we need to talk.”
“About what?”
“About Leland,” he said. “I think—I just think something’s wrong with him.”
THE DOORBELL rang around half an hour later.
Lauren went to the front door and looked out the fish-eye and saw a pockmarked face, oversized horn-rimmed glasses. She opened the door.
Lloyd Kozak stood on the other side of the screen door in a sad-looking suit and tie. Parked in the driveway was a Buick that had to be at least ten years old.
“Thank you so much for seeing me,” he said, and she opened the screen door and let him in.
The foyer was dark and chilly. The central air-conditioning was set too high. She led him down the hall toward the kitchen, her default meeting place.
“Leland’s told me so much about you,” he said. “He admires you so much. Trusts you so much. I figured you were the one person I could talk to about him.”
“You’ve got me worried sick,” she said. “What’s the problem?”
“You,” he said, and suddenly he was next to her, and he placed a hand over her mouth.
90.
My first response was anger, of course—great, towering fury toward this most contemptible of men. But as I walked through the woods, my anger subsided enough for me to realize that my brother had learned from a master, after all. Nothing he did should have surprised me.
Like a great illusionist, he was always one step ahead of his spectators. He understood that magic is all about misdirection:
that sudden burst from a flash pot that gives us retinal burn so we don’t notice him palming the queen of hearts.
A professional magician once told me that the greatest magic tricks are never, in fact, a single trick at all. They’re always a sequence of tricks, and the true magic lies in how they’re presented. The audience watches a magic act in a state of high suspicion. They’re fully expecting to be fooled, and they watch, gimlet-eyed, convinced they know how the magician’s going to pull it off. But what they never know is that it’s this very suspicion that enables them to be mystified in the end. The magician directs their scrutiny away from what he’s really up to and toward a phony explanation of how it’s being done. They think it’s going to be one sort of trick, but then it becomes something else. And just when they’re sure they’ve got it figured out, it’s over, and they’ve been totally fooled.
I thought about Victor and the way he had misled me so cleverly. Maybe that was the real reason why Roger and he had talked so many times. Roger wanted to make sure Dad knew what to say. How to point me toward Paladin in such a way that I would believe I’d figured it out on my own. Roger wanted me to investigate Paladin. He wanted them to feel the hot breath on their necks.
The question was why.
In the end, I drew strength from my anger.
STILL, YOU never want to let your emotion, your impatience, get in the way of an operation. It’s always the times when you most want to rush to the finish line that you need to slow down, take stock, do it right.
That was why I spent the night in the woods.
I did a loop around the Paladin compound—ten thousand acres, which meant a perimeter of close to sixteen miles. Too long to circumnavigate on foot. I took the Defender out of concealment and managed to zigzag through the woods, stopping periodically to approach the fence.
Remarkably, the entire property really was fenced in. The apparent excess confirmed what Neil Burris had told me, that Allen Granger was a man with something to worry about. Why else would he spend so much money to put up a fence sixteen miles long? I’d been to top secret government areas before, located in places that weren’t nearly so remote, and none of them was so well protected.
Allen Granger, who hadn’t been seen in public in over a year, was known to be a recluse and intensely private. I realized he was also probably paranoid.
As far as I could see, there weren’t any fiber-optic sensors buried in the ground next to the perimeter fence. That would have been outrageously costly. Unnecessary, too. Instead, the facility was protected by a twelve-foot chain-link fence, six-gauge galvanized steel—extremely difficult to cut through—and topped by coils of razor wire.
But that wasn’t all. There were guards, too. One guard was stationed at the gatehouse at the main entry and was relieved every six hours. Two others made a circuit just inside the fence. Their shift changed every six hours as well, and every half hour they radioed in to a command post.
I knew that because I listened in on their traffic using my handheld Bearcat scanner. That, and a pair of good German binoculars, were all the instruments I needed to learn what I had to about the place. There were an airstrip and several helicopter landing pads, a high-speed driving track and a running track. Rock-climbing walls and drop zones. There was a pound for bomb-sniffing dogs: I could hear the baying of the hounds late into the night. There were barracks for the trainees, a mess hall, administrative offices, and a club where the trainees could go for drinks. It closed down at two in the morning. The lawns were luxuriant and regularly irrigated and mown short like a golf course. There were a few man-made ponds. In fact, the place could have been a country club—if not for the shooting ranges and the ammo-storage bunkers. And the mock village, used for assault exercises, and a fake town with a plaque that said LITTLE BAGHDAD, even though it looked nothing like the real Baghdad and we weren’t fighting there any longer. So far as I knew, anyway. And the black Hummers that came and went at regular intervals.
Fairly close to the entrance was an impressive two-story lodge, the sort of faux-rustic home you might see in Aspen.
Granger’s house.
I paid particular attention to the patterns there. Which lights went on in which rooms and when. What time they were switched off. How many guards—two, one inside and one outside—and when their shifts ended. Allen Granger was guarded twenty-four/seven—within the well-protected confines of the compound. Like paranoid old King Herod, ruling from a fortress within the fortress city of Jerusalem, a moat and drawbridge protecting him from those he feared most of all: his own subjects.
Granger lived here alone, I was fairly certain, though I never once saw him emerge. I knew what he looked like from photographs: a clean-cut, handsome young guy, early forties. Sandy brown hair cut short, but not enlisted-man short.
The radio traffic indicated that the boss was in residence. The cook—a tiny Hispanic woman—arrived a few hours before dinnertime and went in through a separate kitchen entrance. There were meetings throughout the day. Vehicles pulled up to the front of the lodge—black Humvees for Paladin officials, and the occasional black Lincoln Town Car bearing politicians, some of whom I recognized—and were always greeted by the outside guard.
I got several hours’ sleep in the woods, in a sleeping bag in a pup tent, with enough food and water to get me through. Once I knew which room Allen Granger slept in and when his bedtime was, I put away my Leitz binoculars and my Bearcat scanner and prepared to make my move.
91.
You need to tell me,” Lloyd Kozak said softly, gently, “how to reach your husband.”
She couldn’t have replied even if she’d wanted to, not with the duct tape over her mouth. All she could do was shake her head and give him her fiercest glare. She couldn’t move her arms or legs.
She hadn’t expected him to be so strong, to subdue her so easily.
He had taped her into one of the dining-room chairs, her arms bound to her side, and wound silver duct tape around and around her torso. No matter how she twisted her body, she couldn’t move, couldn’t get the chair to move, and he kept talking to her in that soft, gentle voice as he unfolded a cloth parcel, the jingling of metal inside, instruments of some kind.
She grunted—angry, defiant.
The sound of a key in the lock of the front door, and she thought, Oh please, not Gabe, not now, not with this madman here.
Kozak—or whoever he was, whatever his name was—turned. “Maybe Gabriel will know how to reach his father,” he said.
She tried to scream, to warn Gabe, but nothing came out.
He had something in his hand, something shiny that glinted, caught the light from overhead. Something that looked like a blade. A razor? No. A . . . scalpel?
Fear wriggled deep inside her, a living organism, cold and scaly and serpentlike.
She felt the cool sharp edge of the scalpel as he placed it against the delicate skin just beneath her left eye. She closed her eyes, tried to scream again.
She couldn’t move, couldn’t shout, couldn’t warn Gabe to stay away.
Where was he?
Maybe he’d gone right up to his room.
But he must have noticed the strange car in the driveway. Or the light on in the kitchen, which would tell him that someone was home. Or the fact that the alarm tone hadn’t sounded, which would tell him that it had already been disarmed by someone, and wouldn’t he wonder why?
She heard a series of high electronic tones, faint but distinct.
Had to be Gabe, punching in the alarm code. Spacey as he always was. He was disarming the alarm even though it was already off.
Which told her that he hadn’t even noticed anything wrong. Hadn’t noticed the strange car in the driveway, or if he had, he hadn’t wondered about it.
Please don’t come in here, she thought. He’d be overpowered in a second by this lunatic.
Unless . . .
Unless he walked into the kitchen and saw his mother bound to a chair with a strange man there, and
he turned and ran, out of the house, ran to get help. That he could do. Get help.
She didn’t even know what she wanted him to do.
But it made no difference anyway. She didn’t control her son’s actions. She could no longer keep him safe and wrap him up in his baby blanket like an egg roll. She could no longer pick him up in the palm of her hand.
She heard him go upstairs. Up to his bedroom.
Maybe that was for the best.
“Lauren,” the man murmured. She felt the prick of the blade against her eyelid, cold and hot at the same time, then warm and wet and terribly painful. “If I have to remove your eyes, I will.”
For a moment she didn’t think she could possibly have heard him right.
She squeezed her eyes tight, but it didn’t stop the pain because he just pressed the blade in harder and slid it slowly to one side and she screamed but the sound that came out was a keening, small and frightened.
“You’ll never look at your son’s face again,” he said.
“Back off,” someone said, and for an instant she didn’t recognize Gabe’s voice. It sounded deeper, as if his voice had suddenly changed.
The voice of a man.
But Gabe’s voice. That she knew for sure.
She opened her eyes and the scalpel was no longer there, and Lloyd Kozak had turned around to see what she now saw, too.
Gabe, standing in the doorway, holding the Taser. Pointed at Kozak.
The weapon was shaking in his hand.
92.
At that point it was mostly a matter of timing.
I needed at least a fifteen-minute window to enter the compound. When the radio traffic indicated that the perimeter guards were at the far end of their circuit, and my Leitz binoculars confirmed they weren’t in sight, I unfolded the lightweight, portable aluminum ladder next to a section of the fence by the rifle-shooting range. The backstop was easily twenty feet high, which provided good cover. Placing a big square of carpet on top of the razor wire coils, I climbed up, straddled the top of the fence, and hoisted the ladder up after me. Then I set it on the ground on the other side and climbed down.
