Executive Order (Reeder and Rogers Thriller)

by Max Allan Collins

Hardesy held up his hands in what was not quite surrender. “Wait, guys, wait . . . what if there’s no real connection between these events? What if it’s all just a coincidence? Isn’t it possible we’re rushing to make the evidence fit a theory?”

  Rogers smirked. “How many dead bodies add up to a coincidence in your book?”

  Reeder said, “No, Patti, your friend Lucas here is right. We can’t just jump to conclusions.”

  Her eyebrows went up. “You think that’s what we’re doing? Somebody assassinated a CIA agent right in front of you, and shot a suspect right next to me? And we’re jumping to conclusions?”

  “Easy, Patti,” Reeder said, giving her the faintest smile. “We’re both a little rattled by everything that’s gone down today. We need to get our feet under us again.”

  She let out a breath, and nodded.

  “If, for instance,” Reeder continued, “Amanda was killed for reasons that have nothing to do with what’s going on with the CIA . . . and we try to shove the two cases together . . . we could wind up chasing our tails, or worse.”

  “Worse?” she asked.

  He nodded. “We could add to a climate leading to, no exaggeration, another world war.”

  That sent Hardesy’s eyebrows up, but despite what Reeder had just said, Rogers seemed calmer now.

  She said, “All right—you’re the consultant, the voice of experience, the great American hero—what should we be doing?”

  “Put Altuve on it. Once Mig realizes he may have been hacked, and can use other means to follow up, have him find out everything he can about Amanda . . . then you two chase down every lead. You may even learn that there’s some other reason she was taken out.”

  Rogers was nodding. Then, after a beat, so was Hardesy.

  “What’s your next move?” she asked Reeder.

  “The police’ve had enough time to look at what happened to Len Chamberlain and go through his effects. I want to know if they found anything. And are they viewing it as a traffic fatality or a murder.”

  “And if we do come up with something?”

  “You go to AD Fisk and get your task force assigned to the case.”

  Rogers gazed at him with narrowed eyes. “I have Fisk. But you have the President. That’s one hell of go-to-guy.”

  Reeder nodded. “He’s promised me help, but so far all I can tell him is that someone I talked to on the phone got hit by a car. Not exactly the smoking gun he wants me to find.”

  “Okay,” Rogers said, heaving a sigh. “For now, we dig separately.”

  Reeder said, “One more thing.” He got in his suit coat pocket and handed her the other burner phone. “Use this.”

  “How scared do you want to make me?” she asked, only half-kidding.

  “Very goddamn scared,” he said, not kidding at all. “Because if we’re right, and there’s something big and nasty going on, killing us is easier than dealing with whatever we might find.”

  He finally sipped his coffee. It was stone cold.

  An hour later, Reeder stood in the cool nighttime shadows beside an attached garage in Burke, Virginia. After leaving his car parked three blocks over, he’d taken a circuitous route through backyards and alleys, and felt sure no one was trailing him.

  Pretty sure.

  His clothes were all dark, a black watch cap concealing his distinctive white hair. Leaning against the side of the garage, he rubbed his hands and wished he’d brought gloves. There were stars, a lot of them, and no clouds, with the cooler temperatures they indicated. Finally he jammed his hands into his jacket pockets as he waited. He had no gun but was carrying his ASP telescoping baton, retracted to its 6.3-inch length, its diameter under an inch.

  The quiet of the houses around him was broken by a dog’s indignant barking up the block, then silence. Had the dog been roused by someone else on foot? But no one came along. He could see his breath, and was shifting from foot to foot when he saw headlights.

  He moved deeper into the shadows. A few seconds later, the mechanical hum of a garage-door opener announced the rising of the door, and a black Chevy turned into the driveway. The vehicle slowed and eased inside next to a Toyota. Reeder stepped out of the darkness and inside, as the door lowered itself, its mechanics whirring, a single overhead light going on, automatically.

  The garage was neatly arranged—a workbench along the right side wall, hanging yard tools opposite, shelves of boxed belongings at the far end on either side of an aluminum door to the backyard; three bikes hanging from the rafters, one each for the parents and one for a grown son now in college.

  Reeder knew the owner, and this space, very well. He and his friend had often sat at the workbench talking sports, shooting the shit, and sipping beers out of the mini-fridge in a nearby corner. Now it held only Cokes.

  Balding, beefy Carl Bishop, detective with the Homicide Bureau that covered the entire DC area, stepped out of his Chevy and reared back a little.

  “Jesus, Peep!” Bishop said, finding Reeder right in front of him. “You wanna give me a heart attack, maybe get yourself shot?”

  Bishop, a friend for over two decades, had for all that time used the nickname bestowed upon Reeder by his peers at the Secret Service, due to the then-agent’s kinesics-schooled ability to read people. Reeder didn’t like the moniker much, but pointing that out to longtime friends who used it seemed less than gracious.

  “Tell you the truth, Bish,” Reeder said, “getting shot is something I’m trying to avoid.”

  The homicide cop stood there, hands on his hips, in an unmade bed of a suit, his tie a loose noose the hangman hadn’t tightened yet. The end, obviously, of another long day.

  He said, “Skulking around dressed like a burglar, especially around an armed detective’s domicile, does not seem like the best way to stay un-shot, Peep.”

  Reeder took off the watch cap and shrugged. “You call it ‘skulking.’ I call it waiting.”

  “To get shot,” Bishop said, but he was already over his surprise and annoyance. “You want to come in and have a beer? I keep a few cans for my friends who aren’t on the wagon.” He shut the car door. “Stacy would love to see you.”

  Reeder doubted that—it was Melanie who’d been tight with Bishop’s wife. The petite blonde was nice enough, but he hadn’t seen her since the divorce.

  “Not a good idea, Bish. This isn’t a social call.”

  Bishop frowned, nodded, and ushered his friend to the workbench, where high-backed stools awaited. They sat facing each other, swung sideways at the bench, Bishop leaning an elbow and folding his hands.

  Almost shyly, Reeder said, “I probably shouldn’t even be here . . . but I needed to talk to you, away from your desk, and phones are out of the question right now.”

  “Just tell me, Peep.”

  “This is probably outside your sphere, but I need you to check up on a hit-and-run out at Arlington.”

  The detective’s eyes widened and it didn’t take a kinesics expert to read them. “You’re shitting me.”

  Shaking his head, Reeder said, “No, there really was a hit-and-run out there, and—”

  Raising a traffic-cop hand, Bishop said, “Peep, I know. I know. It’s been all over the news.”

  “It has?”

  “The hit-and-run itself didn’t attract attention. But tourists got cell phone footage of FBI and Homeland agents at the site—two federal agencies send their people to a hit-and-run? That’s news. No one is saying who got killed but—”

  “Len Chamberlain,” Reeder cut in.

  The name meant nothing to Bishop. “You knew the guy?”

  Nodding, Reeder said, “I saw it happen. He was CIA. The real deal, but lately just riding a desk. He was coming to Arlington to give me information about the slain US citizens in Azbekistan.”

  “Hell you say.”

  “Hell I say.”

  Bishop’s expression would have seemed blank to most people, but not Reeder.

  The detective said, “What can I do to h
elp? You’re talking high intrigue. I’m just a simple DC gumshoe. You were there—what did you tell the cops?”

  “Nothing. I left. What could I give them that a dozen witnesses couldn’t? And if Len was worth killing, then maybe I was a target, too.”

  Bishop’s eyes were wide again. “Jesus, man. What about Melanie and Amy? These don’t sound like people who would stop at much.”

  “They’re safe.”

  “Good. Good.” He took some air in, then let it out. “So . . . we’re back to the beginning. What can I do to help?”

  Reeder held Bishop’s gaze. “I’m curious as to what evidence the cops took from the scene.”

  “And you want me to find out what that might be.”

  “If they found anything,” Reeder said. “But be goddamn careful, Bish—the forces in play may already be responsible for the deaths of seven people.”

  A deep sigh. “Consider your point made, Peep. Look—was this guy Chamberlain bringing you a package? Is that what you hope to find?”

  Reeder shrugged. “I hope to find anything that gives me some small piece of daylight. We set up the meeting textbook careful, yet Chamberlain is still wearing tire tracks. Whether he had something to tell me, or to give me, I have no idea. But us setting up a meet got somebody’s attention enough to warrant killing Len.”

  Bishop grunted a non-laugh. “Great. Any advice for me?”

  “Yeah. Watch your ass.”

  They just sat there for a moment.

  Then Bishop said, “With the feds already on this, I may not be able to get you a damn thing, you know.”

  Reeder shook his head dismissively. “Don’t sweat that. I’ve got people at the FBI who’ll help me on that end. But I want to know if the local cops got anything before the feds shut them out.”

  Bishop was nodding. “I’ll take care of it, Peep . . . and I’ll watch my ass. Anything else I can do for you? We’re full service here at Bishop Motors.”

  “Sure.” Reeder slid off the stool. “Lock the door behind me. I’ll go out the back and through the neighbors’ yards.”

  As Reeder headed that way, Bishop followed, saying, “Fine, but be careful. The Smiths, three houses down, have a mouthy little blue heeler. It’s penned up, but you might soil yourself if you’re not expecting that kind of welcome.”

  “Yeah, I heard him earlier. Sounded like a bigger dog.”

  “No, just a little son of a bitch, but a big pain in the ass.”

  Reeder shot his friend an over-the-shoulder grin, his first in many hours, and ducked out into darkness.

  “History and experience tell us that moral progress comes not in comfortable and complacent times, but out of trial and confusion.”

  Gerald R. Ford, thirty-eighth President of the United States of America. Served 1974–1977. The only person to serve as both Vice President and President of the United States without being elected to either office.

  EIGHT

  Patti Rogers, in her favorite gray suit with a black silk blouse beneath, strode with purpose into the Special Situations bullpen at the J. Edgar Hoover Building. Though she’d barely slept, Rogers had been up early, ready to go—or anyway, ready after grabbing a tall coffee from the Starbucks in the lobby of her apartment building.

  First order of business: talk to the team’s resident computer expert, Miggie Altuve, who was as good at his specialty as anybody the FBI had.

  He was in the office next to hers, at the back, first in, the other desks empty. He was using his private tablet, not his work computer. The small space had windows onto the street, his door always open because he could focus in a hurricane, and anyway, he was always welcome for more input.

  “Hey you,” she said, strolling in without knocking on the jamb.

  “Hey you,” he said, not looking up.

  While his razor-cut hair was “Werewolves of London”-perfect, his navy suit coat was already draped haphazardly over the back of his desk chair, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up a couple turns. Formerly a pudgy nerd, Miguel Altuve had lost weight and ditched his wire-frame glasses, but inside this handsome, diminutive man a nerd still lurked. Right now his eyes were red-rimmed—likely his contacts had been in too long—and his dark complexion looked uncharacteristically sallow.

  She lowered herself into the chair alongside his desk. “How long have you been up?”

  “Twenty-four . . . uh, twenty-six hours.”

  She almost felt guilty, having dropped Reeder’s suspicions on Miggie last night . . . using the burner phone of course. Almost guilty.

  “No sleep at all?” she asked.

  “I was working,” he said, as if that explained it, and actually it did. “I napped for an hour or two. Hey, I’m fine. My blood is thirty percent caffeine.”

  “How far did you get?”

  “I’m still on Tony Evans.”

  Her eyebrows tried to join each other. “You spent all night tracing an alias?”

  He leaned back in his swivel chair. “That was part of it. But I was also looking into the fascinating life and times of Anthony J. Wooten.”

  “And just who is Anthony J. Wooten?”

  With a sly smile, Miggie said, “He and Tony Evans are one and the same . . . at least according to the fingerprints from the DC Homicide morgue.”

  She was on the edge of her seat, like a kid at a horror movie. “What do we know about the late Mr. Wooten?”

  “Ex-military. Black ops stuff in Afghanistan.”

  “So, he’s CIA?”

  “Not so you’d notice. But clearly an asset.”

  She shifted in the chair. “Okay, back up. How do you even know Wooten did ‘black ops stuff in Afghanistan’? That’s got to be classified.”

  “Oh, it is. Way down deep.”

  “Then you found out how?”

  He folded his arms, shook his head. “We’re in that if-I-told-you-I’d-have-to-kill-you area. Or even worse, if-I-told-you-they’d-have-to-kill-me.”

  “Or both of us?”

  He sighed and thought for a moment. Rocking a little, he said, “Let’s just say I know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who could get me the answers we wanted.” He stopped rocking. “Are you planning to take this to court?”

  “Not in the immediate future.”

  He started rocking again. “Then we’re on a need-to-know basis . . . and you don’t need to know.”

  “For now . . . okay. So, Evans . . . or I should say Wooten . . . was, what? A mercenary?”

  Nodding, Miggie said, “In that he got paid to do some bad shit, yes . . . but he was never open to the highest bidder. Never was a part of Air America or anything so mundane. He was, it seems, a contractor, but only for very specific employers.”

  “Then we are talking CIA . . . ?”

  “Mostly . . . but also the occasional freelance job for employers within the government.”

  “What kind of employers?”

  “Highly placed ones. Generating the kind of classified activities that don’t get talked about even in congressional hearings.”

  She processed that for a while. Then: “And this CIA asset, this governmental handyman, is who befriended Glenn Willard, to gain access to Secretary of the Interior Yellich . . . to assassinate her?”

  “Sure seems that way.”

  She stared past him at Washington, DC, out his window. “You’re saying . . . we’re saying . . . that someone within the United States government dispatched Wooten to kill Yellich. That simple.”

  “That simple,” Miggie said. “That terrible.”

  Her eyes went to his. “You’ve shared this with no one else.”

  “Of course not.”

  She nodded toward the monitor on his desk. “Is there a government computer that has any record of your searches?”

  He made a face. “You don’t have to be insulting.”

  She twitched the tiniest smile and rose. “We need to tell Hardesy.”

  Miggie looked up at her in surprise. “He’
s in Reeder’s inner circle on this?”

  “He is. And with you, that makes four of us.”

  She fetched Lucas from the bullpen, where he and the others were trailing in, and led him into Miggie’s office to hear what the computer expert had learned.

  When Miggie finished, Hardesy—in the chair Rogers had vacated—was shaking his shaved head, making the overhead light reflect. “Un-fucking-believable,” he said.

  Standing next to him, arms folded, looking down at him like a teacher checking a student’s paper, Rogers said, “You don’t buy it?”

  Hardesy’s smirk was humorless. “No, I don’t want to buy it.” His sigh was deep and sounded like somebody had opened a distant boiler door. “So, there’s a rogue element in the government? This shadow group that Reeder posits?”

  Rogers said, “Looks that way.”

  “And they assassinated a member of the goddamn cabinet?”

  “Yeah.”

  He turned up both hands. “To what end?”

  “It would be nice to know,” Rogers said.

  “And nice to know,” Miggie added, “who in this rogue group put the Yellich murder in motion. Have to be somebody pretty high up.”

  “Maybe as high up,” Rogers said, “as someone capable of getting CIA agents sent to Azbekistan.”

  The color had drained from Hardesy’s face and wasn’t coming back very fast. “Do we think this case is tied to Reeder’s presidential mission?”

  Her shrug was barely perceptible. “You tell me—or do you still think it’s a coincidence, dead CIA agents here and abroad, a mercenary taken out with extreme prejudice, and an assassinated cabinet secretary?”

  “You had me at dead CIA agents,” Hardesy said dryly. “Okay, let’s say I’m convinced. Where do we go from here?”

  She let a grave look travel from Hardesy to Miggie and back again. “I go to AD Fisk with what we know,” she said, “and with what we suspect . . . and ask her to assign our task force to this case.”

  Miggie asked, “Do we empty the entire bag on her desk?”

  “We hold nothing back,” Rogers said, nodding.

  Hardesy frowned. “Should we run all this past Reeder first?”

  She shook her head. “We’ll fill him in at the next opportunity. But Wooten’s identity only confirms what Joe’s already thinking—he knew coming into this investigation that there must be some kind of government involvement, when the President’s own directive was ignored. Those four CIA agents didn’t just suddenly decide to check out Azbekistan as a vacation spot on the eve of a Russian invasion. No, Reeder’s already got a mission from the President, and he’s staying off the grid as he carries it out. Meanwhile, we need to get the Bureau to stand behind us on our side of it.”