by Jan Coffey
“What’s wrong?” Ellie asked quietly.
“Want to go for a ride?”
Ten minutes ago she would have given Nate a hard time for the suggestion, convinced that he had an ulterior motive. But right now she knew something much more serious was on his mind. “Where are we going?”
He got to his feet and pulled Ellie with him. “We’re going to ride by Mr. Teasdale’s place.”
“He was pretty definite about not wanting to see us until Monday.”
“I know. We’re not going to drop in for dessert.” He gathered up the bottles and the plate from the table. “I’m just going to tell the guys inside we’re going off to neck by the lake.”
“Don’t you dare.”
He kissed her and disappeared inside.
Ellie grabbed her sweatshirt off the railing and put it on. She understood how Nate felt. To start with, this job should have been a simple one. No matter how valuable an offered artifact was, whether stolen or legitimately owned, the auctions were generally hyped with more bells and whistles than this one. The secrecy about the whole thing was getting on her nerves. And since they’d started looking for someone to duplicate the flag, there was a feeling of doom hanging over them.
She thought back to when she’d felt this first. It had all started with the SUV heading right for them. In all the years of her life, living in the city, Ellie had never had a car come that close to running her over.
“Are you ready?”
Also available from MIRA Books and JAN COFFEY
TWICE BURNED
TRUST ME ONCE
Jan Coffey
Triple Threat
To Larry & Gail. You are loved!
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Epilogue
Authors’ Note
One
Fort Ticonderoga, New York
Friday, June 18
A field trip in the last week of the extended school year had sounded good when they’d planned it back in April, but after a full day of loud shrieks, complaints and tireless bursts of energy, the adults accompanying the second-graders were now questioning the sanity of the decision.
Chris Weaver separated himself from the line of other noisy eight-year-olds and started toward the back of the waiting area, where his teacher was talking with one of the museum guides.
“Stay in line,” one of the chaperones said wearily, reaching for him. The boy skipped wide of her and rushed to Miss Leoni’s side.
“And when are they taking the flag?”
“Tomorrow morning, as I understand it. In fact, we’re closing the museum early this afternoon for security reasons. You were lucky to get your class—”
“Miss Leoni?”
“Just a minute, Chris.”
The guide glared at Chris when he reached up and tugged on the teacher’s sleeve.
“Wait.” She placed a firm hand on his shoulder and returned her attention to the museum worker. “You were saying?”
“You and your class may just be the last group to see the Schuyler flag here. The way things look, we’re not even a pit stop on President Kent’s Spirit of America celebration tour.”
“Have they already told you as much?”
Chris watched the fat guide push his thick glasses up on his nose and glance quickly at the reception desk. “The truth is, we can’t get an answer. All we know is that the tour starts next month, and at present we’re not on the itinerary.”
“But how about when this whole thing is over?”
“You mean after the election?” The man’s bushy brows went up meaningfully. “If you ask me…”
Chris crossed his legs and tugged harder on his teacher’s sleeve. “Miss Leoni?”
“What is it?” She glared down at him.
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
The young teacher bent down until she was at eye level with him. Her voice was reprimanding and low. “Christopher, you were given a chance to go not even fifteen minutes ago. Now we’re ready to get on the bus. There is no time. You can wait until we get back to school.”
“But I can’t wait,” he whined.
“Yes, you can. Now, get back to your place in the line,” she ordered, straightening up and turning to the museum guide. “Sorry.”
“There’s one like this in every group.”
“Not like this one…”
As he backed away, Chris saw his teacher say something behind her hand to the guy. He didn’t have to hang around to know what she was saying. Foster kid. Mother’s a drunk. Father’s in jail. Living in a car for a month before they found him the last time. He’d heard it all before. The teachers talked about it. The kids and their parents pointed at him like he was a zit ready to pop. But he didn’t care what they said. Summer vacation was coming. He could take care of himself.
Right now, though, he had to go to the bathroom.
The waiting area by the glass doors was packed. Kids from one of the other schools were filing onto a bus outside. Glancing toward the doors, Chris figured that their bus would be a while. He looked behind him at the two hallways that came into the waiting area. He tried to remember which one of them led to the small lunchroom. The bathrooms they’d used before were right next to it.
The problem was they’d been in and out of too many darn rooms. After the scavenger hunt in the fort, they’d looked at old newspapers and books and paintings in the museum until he was ready to puke. There’d been some cool swords and guns in one of the rooms, but they wouldn’t let him touch anything. And in another one, there was this flag framed inside a glass case. Named after some General Schuyler who used it in the war. Possibly the oldest American flag still around, Chris remembered the fat guide telling them. One of the first ones made by Betsy Ross. Chris had heard about her.
He squirmed and crossed his legs and looked again at the glass doors, hoping it was their turn to go outside. The other school was sending another of their classes ahead of them. He wanted to yell and complain. But none of the chaperones or Miss Leoni seemed to care.
He didn’t want to think about how embarrassing it would be if he wet his pants here. No kid ever dared to make fun of him face-to-face just because nobody wanted to keep him. But peeing in his pants would be something else.
Chris was getting a wicked sharp pain in his side. He knew he wouldn’t make it. He decided that the hallway on the left was where they’d seen the room with the flag. Chris thought he’d seen a bathroom near the flag room, and it had to be closer than the lunch area.
He slipped to the back of the waiting area. Miss Leoni was still yapping with the guide. Seeing his chance, Chris turned and ran down the hall. No one called after him, and the voices faded behind him like the end of a TV show.
Halfway down the hall, another corridor joined in on the right. Everything
looked the same. Gray flooring, white walls, all kinds of framed pictures and display cases, rooms opening up on either side. Suddenly, he wasn’t sure which way it was to where the flag was.
Panic gripped him as he started to go in his pants a little. Chris grabbed himself and ran down another hall. By an emergency exit door at the far end, there was another smaller sign that he couldn’t see. The school nurse had given him a note to take home about needing glasses, but Chris had lost it. It might be a bathroom, he thought, running toward it.
Just then, a woman hurried out of a room on the left, and Chris had to let go of his crotch. She looked quickly up and down the hallway before focusing on him. Chris slowed down and glanced over his shoulder at the empty hallway. She wasn’t wearing one of those badges that people who worked here wore. As she came toward him, though, Chris told himself he hadn’t done anything wrong.
She was young and kind of pretty with short dark hair, but had that uptight look about her that Miss Leoni had a couple minutes ago when she’d been scolding him. Just then, the bag she was carrying over one shoulder started to ring, and she reached in and pulled out her phone.
Chris stuffed his hands in his pants pockets and moved quickly toward the sign, hoping it was a bathroom.
As he approached her, he could hear the woman talking fast.
“Yes…no…three o’clock…can’t talk. Bye.”
They were right next to each other, and he hugged the wall as he hurried past her.
“Are you lost?”
She was talking to him, but he pretended she wasn’t and quickened his steps. His underwear was starting to stick in certain places. If he stopped, he was a goner.
“Where are you going?”
He started to run when she reached out for him. But the stupid stick figure picture on the door to his right came too late. By the time Chris threw himself against it and rushed in, the pee was running down his leg. His face burned with embarrassment, and he rushed into a stall. He didn’t want someone coming in seeing him like this at a urinal.
His pants smelled wicked. Even his socks were wet. Pulling down his briefs, Chris sat on the toilet and finished. He felt sick, and his chin started to quiver. He didn’t want to cry, though. Only babies cried.
This wasn’t his fault. He never waited to the last minute. But there was this astronaut food Allison had bought at the gift shop, and when everyone else was using the bathroom, she’d been showing it to him. Chris didn’t know how it tasted, but he’d been thinking how perfect this stuff would have been for his mother and him when they were living in the back seat of the old Dodge Dart. No need to cook it or put it in the fridge, Allison said. It didn’t take much space, and you could keep it for a hundred years.
Chris plunked his head of dirty-blond hair on his hands and tried to swallow the knot in his throat. He was eight years old, and he couldn’t remember when was the last time he’d peed in his pants. There were no portable johns near the Dodge Dart. He’d learned to do his business from nine in the morning to nine at night in the old railroad station, two streets away from the lot where the car was parked. If he’d had to go anytime after that, then it was tough luck.
His pants were wet now, though, and he knew he was going to have a hard time explaining it to Mrs. Green, his latest foster mother.
The PA speaker on the ceiling crackled to life, startling him. “The museum is now closed. Remaining visitors must exit by way of the…”
Chris jumped to his feet. Taking fistfuls of toilet paper, he wiped his legs. His underwear was a mess. Peeling off his pants and underpants, he tried to flush the briefs down the toilet. When he pushed down the lever a second time, the water backed up in the toilet fast and flowed over.
“Jeez!”
Standing in the running water, he pulled his wet pants back on, opened the stall door, and carefully tiptoed through the flood.
The kids would laugh at him. No one would want to sit next to him on the bus going back. Chris went to the sink. Using a few sheets of paper towel, he tried to dry the front of his pants the best he could. If he could only get rid of the smell, maybe they’d believe him if he said he got water on himself when he was washing his hands.
He came out of the bathroom feeling beaten. The hallway was quiet, and they’d shut off every other light. The woman was gone. His shoes made funny squishing sounds on the tile floor.
Lies bounced around in Chris’s head. He could say he slipped and fell in a puddle in the washroom. Or the sink faucet was busted and soaked the front of his pants when he turned it on. Chris stuck his hands in his pockets, ballooning them out, hoping they’d dry out a little by the time the bus showed up.
As he passed the opening to the room on his right —the one the lady had come out of—he thought he heard a sound from inside. He paused in the doorway. The room with the old flag. He remembered what the guide had been telling Miss Leoni about their class being the last one to see this thing here. He looked at the faded red and white stripes. He stared at the circle of stars and moved closer to count them.
That was when he saw it. A small, funny-looking gadget stuck to the bottom edge of the wooden frame around the flag. He moved closer and stared at it. A little box of some shiny things and a tiny digital watch held together with black tape. The whole thing was stuck to the frame with something that looked like chewed-up gum. Chris was sure it wasn’t here the first time they’d come through. He’d been standing in the same place he was standing now. It definitely wasn’t there before.
It looked like something from a spy movie, and he reached up to pull it off.
“Don’t touch it.”
Two
Saturday, June 19
“The flag is totally destroyed and there’s nothing we can do about it. What’s important now is to put the rest of this situation in context.”
Sanford Hawes planted his mitt-size hands on the conference table of the Fort Ticonderoga Museum. His shoulders were hunched. The FBI assistant director’s broken nose—easily the dominant feature of his rugged face—was beet red. Piercing dark eyes peered through bifocal lenses at individual faces around the table. He had their attention.
“This recession has been dogging us all for some time now. The unemployment rate is at a ten-year high. People are out of jobs, and a lot of folks who still have jobs feel disgruntled with their own situation. Added to that, we’ve got cable and network news shows flashing pictures of ten thousand American flags being burned all over the world this past Tuesday.” His heavy frame leaned forward. “As a country, we cannot afford this disaster with the Schuyler flag to get out. That’s the bottom line.”
A dozen people—firefighters, police officers and Department of the Interior museum employees—sat around the oblong table. The door was closed. The venetian blinds on the long windows were shut.
As Hawes finished talking, Nate Murtaugh leaned over and spread one of the blinds with his fingers. He peered at the news camera crews from Albany waiting on the sidewalk outside. Still here. Instincts like a pack of wolves. Turning his back to the window, Nate tried to settle his six-foot-three frame more comfortably in the swivel chair. He jotted down some notes on a pad of paper he was balancing on his bum knee.
Eric Wilcox, director of artifacts at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum, sat forward in his chair. “Gentlemen and ladies, this could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back when it comes to the nation’s morale.” Wilcox tapped the table nervously with his pen and looked up at Hawes. Receiving a curt nod from the assistant director, he charged on. “The Spirit of America celebration is a huge undertaking, unlike anything ever attempted by any past U.S. president. In the scope of its planning, this far exceeds the bicentennial celebration, in fact. In bringing so many of our country’s national artifacts together, President Kent hopes to once again unite this country with a common purpose. He is trying to reinforce that bond that we share as Americans, the sense of purpose that overarches all differences of race, class or ethnic heri
tage. Regardless of restlessness and hostility elsewhere, he refuses to allow us to become a country divided against ourselves. We are all Americans, and we need to rededicate ourselves to the ideals these artifacts represent.”
Nate cursed silently as he banged his knee for a second time against the chair next to him. Downing the last of his coffee, he tossed the foam cup into the nearby wastebasket.
Wilcox continued to quote from the president’s speech from last fall. Nate had heard it firsthand on the September 11 anniversary last year in New York, and too often in media clips since then. The government would spend a billion or so and bring things like the Schuyler flag, the Liberty Bell, the Declaration of Independence, George Washington’s sword, Abe Lincoln’s law book, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Bible, and tons of other stuff together in Philadelphia on July 4 and then send it all on a month-long national tour—with the president leading the parade.
Nice. The concept was darn good. Even the patriotic underpinnings had value. But Nate was too jaded to overlook the coincidence that this was all happening in an election year. He glanced up at the hatchet-faced director of artifacts. Those on the inside knew that Wilcox had been the originator of the idea. But the White House was taking the full credit for it. It was just the responsibility of the bookworm to put the collection together. Nate’s feeling was that they should have gotten Steven Spielberg or the guys from Disney to do it. But what did he know? He was just an FBI agent.
The air-conditioning made the conference room feel like about ten above. Still, when Wilcox stopped talking, he took out a handkerchief and wiped the beads of sweat from his bony forehead.
Hawes stood up again. “From our preliminary investigations, it’s clear that the fire that occurred here yesterday was a professional job. The remnants of the incendiary device on the flag’s case and the disabling of the security cameras in the room both point to this. What we don’t know at this point is whether or not the incident was the act of a terrorist organization, though we have notified Homeland Security.”
