At all costs

by John Gilstrap

  Irene regarded her for a long moment, the exhaustion of the preceding days weighing on her like an anvil. “I’ll see what I can do,” she said finally. The words sounded hollow even to herself.

  Carolyn was done talking; Irene recognized the signals now. The agent closed her eyes and tried to massage away her booming headache. An odd mix of fear and guilt boiled in her gut, making her wish for the first time that she’d chosen a different career. The Bureau was supposed to be the good guys, dammit. If her suspicions were correct, this poor woman who lay tied helplessly to her bed had endured more hardship than anyone should ever bear.

  Over the course of her career with the Bureau, Irene had absorbed a lot of hate from a lot of fugitives, but never before had she felt crippled by it. She wanted to tell Carolyn that she believed her story now; wanted to tell her all about Frankel and to apologize on behalf of the federal government. But that was out of the question. Fact was, they couldn’t prove anything. Yet.

  As if on cue, a gentle rap on the door drew her head around. Paul Boersky beckoned her into the hallway and from there, hustled her into an empty room.

  “I gather from all this stealth that we guessed right?” Irene opened.

  Instinctively, Paul looked over his shoulder. “This is scary as shit, Irene,” he whispered. “Looks like the Donovans nailed it. I talked to a guy in Records-you owe him a hundred bucks, by the way-who dug into Frankel’s files for me. Your rag mag was right. From 1981 to early ’82, our fearless leader ran an investigation out of the Little Rock office into arms sales shenanigans out of Newark. Apparently, there were a few leads that seemed to head back toward the last Army commander of the place-your suicidal buddy, General Albemarle. Seems that the case dried up, though, all of a sudden like.

  “Then Albemarle-a freakin’ war hero, from the Second World War through Korea and even a touch of Vietnam-blew his brains out in 1982, just after the EPA discovered this weapons stash. His note said it was the pressure of the investigation.” Paul looked up from his pad and sighed. “It’s just too close, Irene. I think we got him. He blew up the magazine to cover the missing inventory, and the people to deflect the attention.”

  Irene stared off to a spot on the floor, lost in the meaning of it all.

  “You still with me?” Paul asked.

  “Huh? Oh, yeah, sure. Just getting a headache.”

  He snorted. “Yeah, well, tape it up, because this gets better. Remember Tony Bernard? The guy at the motel?”

  She nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Okay, well, listen to this. He was the only son of a couple of flower children. Real doper types, who dragged baby Tony through all kinds of hippie shit at Berkeley, and later got his picture in the Chicago Tribune as a-and I quote-‘young rioter’ during the Democratic convention back in ’68.”

  She looked confused. “I don’t get it.”

  “Sure you do. What better bio to hang a ‘crazy environmentalist’ tag on? He was the one who was supposed to go down for the whole thing, not the Donovans. They just got tagged because they had the poor taste to survive it all. With them alive, Frankel had no choice but to kill Bernard. Whatever holes the sudden change left in his plan, he just covered over with a little hysteria.”

  Irene’s eyes got wider, and she took a deep breath. “Holy shit,” she said.

  “The holiest,” Paul cheered, still at a whisper. “Here we were worried about career damage control, and instead, we strike gold!”

  Irene shot him a glare.

  “What?”

  “You’re nuts,” she declared. “We don’t have squat here.”

  “Bullshit.”

  She realized she’d made him defensive, and she waved it off. “No, that’s not what I mean. It’s a good case, and I think we’ve found the answer, but Frankel’s not just going to cave. Christ, he’s got a confession and a truckload of circumstantial evidence. Certainly as much circumstantial evidence as we have.”

  Paul shrugged. “Reasonable doubt, right?”

  She laughed. “Oh, yeah, this is great news for the Donovans. They’re home free, if we ever get them to trial. But you were talking about your career. If we can’t put Frankel away, then all we’ll do is set the Donovans free and shoot ourselves in the feet.”

  Paul opened his mouth to argue, then shut it again. “Shit.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Melissa Thomas loved her big old house. She just wished she had the money and time to take care of it the way her mother and father had. The house and its surrounding six and a half acres of woods were her parents’ legacy for their only child. And their curse. Her parents had been dead nearly ten years now, yet Melissa still couldn’t afford to replace the furniture she’d known as a child. Wisely invested, her inheritance would spin off enough cash to pay the property taxes every year, with enough left over for three college educations. But that defined the limit of the Thomas family’s solvency.

  Still, the place was home for her; the repository for all her good memories. And, more recently, for her bad ones as well. Although solidly built at a time when carpenters took pride in their work, the place was beginning to show serious signs of age. The roof needed replacing, the walls screamed for a coat of paint, and the soil had begun to erode away from the foundation out front. It was a real worry. They couldn’t afford to have the work done by a contractor, and Nick was worthless with tools. He couldn’t drive a nail if it had tires and a steering wheel. So the repairs went undone, waiting for that time when they’d find themselves with a few dollars they didn’t already owe to someone else. Nick’s solution was just to sell the place. Typical. Address a temporary problem with a permanent solution. Kill a fly with a shotgun.

  Ticked off as she was about Nick’s being gone at the precise time she most needed his help-she’d received twelve more Christmas orders just this morning-she had to admit that it was kind of peaceful, just her and the kids. At one level, that’s all she ever really wanted out of a marriage, anyway. And if this job interview could somehow jump-start his dead career, then maybe it would be good for all of them. This whole business with the Donovans in the news made her nervous, though. If Nick were anyone but his spineless self, she might even have been worried.

  The pot on her wheel was giving her fits. The Aztec Urn, as it was called in the catalog, had a long fluted neck that ordinarily would have been the simplest thing in the world to fashion, yet for some reason she couldn’t get the proportions right. And this was her third try.

  “Darn it!” She stopped the wheel and hammered the misshapen pot back into a lump of red clay with the palm of her hand. What she needed was a break, but she knew better than to take one. Not just yet. Once this one was molded, she’d have a full load to stick in the kiln, and then she’d reward herself with a late lunch. She should have grabbed a bite when she fed Lauren at noon, but she hadn’t been hungry.

  Come to think of it, Lauren hadn’t made a peep in a long time. Probably still watching her Lion King video. Melissa knew her daughter needed more stimulation, but she just didn’t have time to be a mommy anymore. Next year, though, her baby would start school, and everything would work out just fine.

  Maybe I’m trying too hard, she thought as she started up the wheel again. That was often the root of her creativity problems. Sometimes she’d get so tense about doing it “right” that she’d lose the feel for the clay. She tried closing her eyes this time. The tiny foam earphones on her head filled her mind with the peace of Copeland’s Quiet City, and as the haunting sounds of the solo trumpet ebbed and flowed with the melody, the base of the pot magically formed in her hands.

  A shadow fell across Melissa’s face, and her eyes snapped open. A man she’d never seen before was standing in the archway that separated her studio from the kitchen. He held a package of some sort in his arms. In the green-filtered light cast by the tinted jalousie windows, the package looked almost human. A doll maybe? And it was dressed in the same outfit Lauren had been wearing.

  Melissa scr
eamed.

  Nick slid the telephone receiver back into its clamp and thrust a hand angrily through his hair. “Dammit!” He looked at his watch. “It’s after two, for Christ’s sake. I thought these planes were supposed to be fast!” Under the circumstances, the Gulfstream could have been rocketing through Mach 3 and it still wouldn’t have been enough.

  “Stay off the phone,” Thorne growled for the thousandth time. “Every one of those calls is like a trail of bread crumbs for the feds.”

  Nick responded with an angry glare. At that moment, reinforcements from the FBI didn’t sound like such a bad idea.

  “She could just be out of the house, you know,” Jake offered.

  Nick shook his head. “No chance. She’s buried in catalog orders. She wouldn’t leave the house if it was on fire.” He sat back down in the overstuffed captain’s chair and rested his forearms on his knees. “She does this all the time when she’s really busy. She just turns off the phones. We’ve got one of those answering services through the phone company, and she just checks the messages at the end of the day. Drives me nuts. Suppose one of the kids was sick at school or something, you know?”

  “They have a place to go, though, right?” Jake asked. “I mean, once you get word to them, they can leave right away?”

  Nick opened his mouth to answer but closed it. He hadn’t thought that far ahead. “I guess they’ll just stay in a hotel.”

  “Make sure they pay with cash,” Thorne warned. “If we miss this guy, he’s gonna be pissed. The last thing you want is another electronic trail.”

  Nick’s features sagged. “I don’t know that I have that kind of cash.”

  “Don’t worry,” Jake said. He patted the ever-present gym bags. “I’ve got you covered there.”

  A speaker popped overhead, and the pilot asked everyone to return to their seats and to fasten their seat belts. They’d be on the ground in about ten minutes. Their destination was the Manassas Regional Airport, a discreet commercial airstrip in the far-west Virginia suburbs of Washington; large enough to accept corporate jets yet small enough to allow passengers to remain anonymous.

  Thorne crossed his legs comfortably and folded his fingers over his knee. “So, ace, what about you? Now that you’re fishing for sharks, what happens when you pull one in?” His lips bent back into the condescending smile Jake had come to hate so much.

  “I’ll make him talk,” he said, simply enough. He tried to sound decisive, but they all knew he was in over his head.

  “Uh-huh,” Thorne grunted. “And suppose he doesn’t want to cooperate?”

  “He will. He has to.”

  “But suppose he doesn’t?”

  Jake looked at Thorne carefully, knowing exactly what he was driving at, but refusing to address it. “He’ll talk,” Jake said. “Most people’s tongues loosen when they have a gun pointed at their heads.”

  Thorne smiled, stared out the window. “The question is, is our man ‘most people’?”

  Melissa shot to her feet, sending both her potter’s wheel and the Aztec Urn crashing to the floor. “Oh, my God!” she yelled. “Lauren!”

  The whole room shook as she bounded across the floor of her studio, the cord from her headphones dragging the CD player to its death off the edge of its little table. “Lauren, baby! Oh, God, honey, are you all right?”

  The little girl didn’t move, her body so still and limp that the man seemed to have difficulty holding on to her. As he passed her on to her mother, they both tried to scoop up a dangling arm, but it seemed intent on staying free. Melissa was gone in an instant, hurrying past the stranger without so much as a thank-you.

  The man followed without an invitation.

  Melissa ran as best she could over to the high-ceilinged great room and laid her treasure gently on the sofa. “Lauren, honey, wake up. Wake up, sweetie…”

  “She’ll be okay,” the stranger offered.

  His voice startled Melissa, she’d forgotten about him. “How do you know? What happened to her?” The first thing she noticed as she looked up was the coldness of the man’s eyes. The second thing was his gun.

  “She’s not good at following orders, is she?” he said.

  It had been years since Jake was in an airport, and even this little one out in Virginia’s boonies had five times more people milling around than he was comfortable with. This kind of travel should have been done only at night, but Nick was such a basket case that they’d had to come back early. Thorne insisted it was the most foolish thing they could do, that professional killers only worked at night, but Nick was equally adamant that they had to warn his family. With the telephone unplugged, the only alternative was to fly in. It wasn’t like he could call the local sheriff’s office and have them deliver the message.

  Jake tried his best to stay invisible, wearing his sunglasses and baseball cap. He stood outside as Thorne took care of the rental car details. If Nick paced any more frantically, people were going to start looking for the maternity ward.

  Finally, Thorne emerged from the sliding glass doors, car keys in hand, and they followed him across the parking lot to the cluster of five rental cars: four Escorts and a Grand Marquis. Thorne treasured his comfort. “Put your gloves on, people,” he instructed as he thumbed the remote to unlock the Grand Marquis’s door.

  “I’ll drive,” Nick said, stepping in front of Thorne. “I know where we’re going.”

  Thorne held his ground-and the keys. “Good. Then you sit up front and tell me where to go.”

  Nick shook his head, eyes desperate. “But…”

  “I’m driving, Nick,” Thorne said simply. “Now, we can argue about it, or you can fight me for it, but when we’re done, I’ll still be behind the wheel. You’re wrapped way too tight to drive anywhere.”

  “We’re wasting time, boys,” Jake chided as he climbed into the backseat.

  Defeated and deflated, Nick settled into the shotgun seat. While Thorne slid in behind the wheel, Nick gave his instructions in a burst. “Left out of the airport onto Nokesville Road. Follow the signs toward Warrenton.” He checked his watch. “And for heaven’s sake, step on it.”

  Melissa’s mind was a complete blank. She felt dizzy, and her legs wobbled as she tried to figure out what she’d really heard. Not good at following orders?

  “You look confused,” the man said with an odd smile. “Let me clear it up for you. I’m here to let you save your children’s lives.”

  “Who are you?” Melissa breathed.

  The man chuckled. “Everyone always asks that. Like it matters.” He smiled. “You can call me Wiggins, if you’d like.”

  She still couldn’t move. “But why… What…” Her brain refused to function in complete sentences.

  “I know it’s confusing,” he said apologetically. “But I really don’t want to hurt your children any more than I already have.”

  Her eyes grew huge, and they shot back to her helpless little girl.

  “Really,” he said. “She’ll be fine. I’m afraid I had to get a little rough with her as she tried to squirm away. Once she got a whiff from my magic handkerchief, though, she settled down. She should be under for at least an hour.”

  Melissa’s face lost all color.

  “You know, you really shouldn’t let such a little girl answer the door,” he chided. “No harm done, though. She’ll be awake just in time to greet little Nicky and Joshua as they come home from school.”

  Melissa’s world started to spin, and she sat down hard. She figured she’d fainted, because barely a second passed before he was right there, his face just a few inches from hers, his pistol pressed against her temple.

  “Now don’t go wimpy on me, Melissa. There’s no time. We’ve got a lot of work to do before the boys get home.”

  “Please don’t…” she sobbed.

  “Just think of your children as Thanksgiving turkeys,” he whispered. “And how awful it would be to be carved alive.”

  “Something’s wrong,” Nick whined
. “I can feel it.”

  To Jake’s eye, the scenery hadn’t changed in the last twenty minutes. Hell, it hadn’t changed in a year. Heavy woods just led to more heavy woods, the monotony of the landscape broken only by the occasional house or gas station. Rural Virginia was no different than rural South Carolina or rural Arkansas. Only the terrain and the foliage changed. The isolation was a constant.

  From Route 28, they took Vint Hill Road to cross over to Route 29, and from there, on into Warrenton. After that, the turns and the route numbers came too quickly and too frequently for Jake to keep track. No one even bothered to name the roads out here. They just stuck a number on a post.

  Soon the woods began to give way to fields and rolling hills. Stone walls took the place of barbed wire along the roadside, some of them in pristine shape, others crumbling under a century of neglect. Multimillion-dollar mansions alternated with more modest farmhouses and barely habitable shacks.

  “How much farther?” Jake asked. Anything to cut the tension.

  “About three miles.”

  “Now sign it,” Wiggins instructed. They were in the master bedroom upstairs, gathered around a tiny antique writing desk.

  “No one’s going to believe any of this,” Melissa sobbed. Her tears dropped heavily onto the mauve stationery, smearing the ink of her suicide note.

  He smiled. “You’d be surprised what people will believe. Now hurry up and sign it. You’re running out of time. It’s after three.”

  But the note was all wrong! She didn’t hate herself, and she wasn’t hopelessly lonely. She loved her children, and they loved her right back. Even the stuff about Nick was all wrong. He wasn’t the best husband in the world, but she could have done a lot worse. This whole thing made no sense.

  If she signed the note-every word dictated by this madman-what would her children think of her as they grew older? They’d spend their entire lives hating her for abandoning them; for filling their minds with memories of finding her dead body.