by Jan Coffey
“You’re talking a lot, but you haven’t said one thing that proves Murtaugh’s innocence.”
“I’ll try to do better, then.” She turned her back and started up the stairs again. “Nate, the criminal mastermind, wants to pocket forty million dollars of the government’s money. So, rather than sitting tight and waiting for me to give him the date of this bogus auction—which he himself has arranged—he almost gets himself killed going to see the first forger.”
“An accident. Totally coincidental.”
“So you say.” She shook her head. “Anyway, now we have a semiretired antique dealer in Saratoga who must be part of the conspiracy, too, since he’s the one who comes up with the name of Teasdale. But again, we get there and the man is dead.”
“Nate had to kill him. Teasdale had made up the phony Morris flag that was auctioned off in Newport. Covering his tracks.”
“Very thorough of him.” On the landing by her apartment, she turned to Hawes. “I just can’t figure why Nate would be so careless as to leave such obvious evidence as his cell phone number on a piece of paper in Teasdale’s shop…especially since he remembers giving the same piece of paper to McGill the first time he met him. And Tom McGill says he had it in his pocket the night he was run down. More strange, how exactly did Nate arrange to go to Teasdale’s house and kill him Saturday morning while he was on the road with me from Philadelphia?”
“He had help.”
“How could I forget? Accomplices, a forty-million-dollar motive, Swiss bank accounts and a disappearing act. Never mind the fact that he could have sold the flag to Kathleen Rivers for at least that much…oh, I forgot. Nate was so unbalanced from that shooting that he decided to kill the socialite instead of profiting from her desire to have the flag.” She walked inside her apartment. The place was dark.
“Your flippant attempt at wit won’t help him, Ellie.”
“Well, I fell in with a bad crowd growing up.” She stopped and looked at him standing in the apartment door. “But, you know, the part of it that makes no sense at all is, if this whole thing was about money, then why was there some kind of explosive woven into that phony flag? Some high-tech explosive that wouldn’t get picked up in a routine security check?”
“So you have talked to Nate since he left you in Newport.”
“That’s not an answer to my question.”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
“They wanted to kill somebody else.” She crossed the room to the kitchenette and turned on a light above the stove.
“Maybe Nate just wanted to destroy this flag the way he did the Schuyler flag. Covering his tracks again.”
“No. The way Chris described the first one, he could see some gadget on the frame of the Schuyler flag. That was when that bogus museum guard grabbed him.” She switched on the light next to a love seat. “And he said when the guy radioed in, he talked to somebody named Gatz. Now, how strange that you knew he heard the nickname of the second man…because Chris didn’t tell that to anyone until he talked to me on the phone tonight.”
When she turned, Hawes was standing six feet from her with his gun pointed at the center of her chest.
“Where’s the kid?”
Thirty
“Tell him to come out.”
Ellie stared at the man’s stony face. “Did you really think you could get away with it? Killing the President?”
“Get away with it? That depends on Nate. If he stays out of sight much longer, we’ll hang that on him for sure.”
“Just who are the ‘we’ you’re talking about, Hawes?” Nate stood in the doorway to her bedroom, his own weapon aimed at the other man.
“You know me, Nate. I never lost touch with this part of the job. You make a move, and she’s dead.”
“Let me guess,” Nate continued. “That would be you, Wilcox and someone else. Someone with both money and power. Someone who thinks he’s untouchable, whatever the outcome of this little charade.”
“Call the kid out, Nate. I’m losing patience.”
“And what are your plans for the evening, Hawes? A mass execution for some light entertainment? Or are we going for spectacle and blowing up the block with another gas leak?”
“You’re blowing your chance of saving this kid’s life.”
“Christopher is only eight years old,” Nate said calmly. “But he’s got more good sense when it comes to who he should trust than I’ve ever had. That kid knows his life wouldn’t last five minutes in your hands. He’s also smart enough not to put all his eggs in one basket. Ellie and I aren’t the only ones he told about the man called Gatz. But once I heard the name, it all came together. Those two guys who are gunning for the kid and running down cops knew you from the old days. There are still people around who call you Gatz. Short for Gatsby, wasn’t it, Sanford? Well, the word is out now.”
“You’re lying.”
“Believe what you want. But just so you know, the shit is running downhill, and you’re standing at the bottom of it. In the past twelve hours, we’ve been digging through your finances, and we know that Martha’s money ran out a long time ago. The big question is how you’ve been able to afford the life you’ve been living, on an assistant director’s salary.”
“That’s enough.”
“And to make matters worse for you, as soon as Wilcox found out that we discovered the explosives in the flag, he pointed his finger right at you.”
Behind Hawes, a black man wearing a very wet sport coat moved into the doorway with his gun drawn. Ellie knew him now. Nate had introduced her this morning to Mark Carpenter, one of the agents from his own group in New York. Outside the glass door leading to her balcony, the rain had eased a little, though the thunder and lightning was continuing unabated.
“The first thing Wilcox said was that his only point of contact was you. And he’s accusing you of blackmailing him and then recruiting him for this job. He even said you’re the mastermind behind an assassination attempt. Of course, that guy is so scared right now, he’d say you were Vladimir Putin’s twin brother if he thought it would help him.”
Hawes’s weapon was still pointed at her heart. Ellie took strength from Nate’s calm words and his confident stance, but she tried edging a little to the side, anyway.
“Don’t move,” Hawes growled. “This is bullshit, Murtaugh. If you know so much, why wasn’t I arrested before coming in here?”
“We had to get you to show yourself, but we also wanted to give you a chance,” Nate said quietly. “You’re the only person who can incriminate the one behind it all. You weren’t arrested earlier because we didn’t want them to shut you up. You and I both know how it works. You would have been dead before we got you anywhere near a police station. We set this up, Sanford, to offer you a deal.”
After a moment, Hawes’s gaze drifted away from Ellie for the first time. The muzzle of the pistol remained pointed at her chest. His other hand went under his coat, and she heard a single clicking sound. She realized that if it was a wire, then that meant there were others close by.
“What kind of a deal?”
“Help us take Graham Hunt down. Testify against him and you could walk away. I’m not just talking about a reduced sentence. I’m talking immunity. That’s never even been considered in a situation like this.”
She moved slightly as Hawes lowered his gun a couple of inches, but suddenly the glass in the door behind her shattered.
Ellie felt as if she’d been hit hard with a red-hot poker, and the blow knocked her to the floor. Carpenter raced past her from the doorway with another agent on his heels. In spite of his bad knee, Nate was on the balcony ahead of the others.
Her arm was throbbing, and she knew that something had hit her, but Ellie’s gaze didn’t move from what she could see of Nate’s back. She’d been losing her mind with worry during the hours following their separation in Newport. He’d hinted to her that different levels of investigation were in progress. After that, though, she hadn’t he
ard from him at all until this morning, after she’d gotten off the phone with Hawes.
Her home and business phones were being monitored by Hawes’s men, but instead of disturbing the unauthorized wiretap, Nate had called her through Vic’s cell phone. They had met an hour later by the art museum. That was when she’d been introduced to Agent Carpenter. That was when Nate had told her about tonight’s plan.
Hawes was down, and Ellie could see blood pooling quickly under him. Sirens erupted from the street, and the cry of the storm mixed with the sounds of shouting and bullhorns. The female agent who had arrived in the cab, impersonating Chris, came back from the balcony and ran across to Hawes, securing his weapon. Ellie managed to move to the side of the wounded man, as well.
There were shouts that the shots had come from the building across the backyard. The agent next to her was working frantically to slow the bleeding from Hawes’s chest and back.
Ellie looked at the man’s pale face. She removed the bent glasses that were sitting crooked across his nose. His lips moved, but he was having difficulty getting the words out.
The agent fired instructions into her radio set. “Get those EMTs up here now, or we’re going to lose him.”
Ellie watched his fingers tap helplessly on the wood floor. She reached out and took hold of his hand.
“Martha,” he whispered, closing his eyes.
He knew how many square tiles covered the floor, and where the chrome-and-fabric chairs had chafed marks into the paint on the walls. Nate knew this waiting room better than he wanted to. He’d been here for more than two hours, and the news coming out of surgery was not too encouraging.
While they operated on Hawes, Mark Carpenter was Nate’s only means of contact with the cleanup at the house. Lou had been keeping him informed about Ellie, who was being patched up down in the ER. One of the bullets intended for Hawes had cut through Ellie’s upper arm. Nate had been down in the emergency room with her, but she’d sent him back here, promising to call as soon as the doctor was done with her.
The thought of how close she’d come to being seriously injured…or killed…was driving Nate crazy. He would always regret his lunacy in accepting her offer to help, in actually placing her life at risk. He’d knowingly put her at the killing end of Hawes’s pistol.
But they’d come so close. They still were so close to nailing Graham Hunt. Sanford had to pull through, though.
It had been a winding road that led Nate from the Schuyler flag business to Hunt and the plan to kill the President. Even though no group was taking credit, laying the blame for the fire at Ticonderoga on terrorists was not completely unreasonable until the explosion took out Theo Atwood. After that, with each coincidence, Nate had become more certain that something was beginning to smell very bad. Then, after talking to Tom McGill last Monday, he became certain of a conspiracy. For what purpose, though, he still hadn’t been able to guess.
He didn’t think Chief Buckley was knowingly a part of it. He was too insignificant to be anything but a pawn. Wilcox, on the other hand, was a prime candidate for involvement. A background check into his past showed a few gray areas, where some questionable purchases and losses of Smithsonian artifacts had occurred during his watch. He lived beyond his means, and if he was involved with the loss of artifacts, then he was a candidate for blackmail. But he still wasn’t strong enough or knowledgeable enough to organize such a large-scale operation.
But as the days passed, it was becoming apparent that this scheme had been laid out and arranged long before the fire in Ticonderoga.
Sanford Hawes had been the surprise, and a painful one for Nate. Christopher had been the one to link Hawes to the destruction of the flag. Last Monday, when Ellie and Nate returned from New York, Chris had told him about the man at the other end of the walkie-talkie…a man the fake security guard had called Gatz.
Nate had made the connection immediately, but accusing one’s superior, based on an eight-year-old kid’s statement, was a bumpy road. Nonetheless, keeping Chris tucked away and safe, and making sure that the lines of communication with Sanford stayed open, they’d started digging into Hawes’s private life.
The assistant director’s financial burdens offered the motive, and his decision to allow Wilcox to bring in former criminals to acquire the flag was questionable by Bureau standards. Going around Hawes to the Bureau’s director with the plan to flush out the conspiracy, Nate had received full cooperation. From the very top, the shared goal had been to find out who was involved. The decision had been made to let the plot unfold with the hope of catching even bigger fish.
Prior to that, Nate had gotten Mark Carpenter and the other agents from his New York group involved. They’d moved Tom McGill to a safe hospital. They also were the ones who took Chris into safekeeping after he was moved from Sister Helen’s convent. The murder of Kathleen Rivers could not have been anticipated, though Nate regretted it bitterly.
The moment Nate had the flag, the pieces of the puzzle had fallen into place. It was clear that Hawes and the others wanted this particular flag used in the Spirit of America celebration. Taking no chances as to what might be the reason, the Bureau lab people went over it with a fine-toothed comb.
An explosive material woven into the fabric to which the flag had been mounted within the frame was immediately detected by the munitions experts. The explosive would be detonated by laser and the glass frame would have provided the pressure to make the explosion deadly for anyone standing in front of the flag. Realizing that the President had been the target, the FBI had called the White House.
President Kent himself pointed to Graham Hunt as the most likely candidate for funding and masterminding the assassination plot. At Nate’s suggestion, they’d even tried to throw a monkey wrench into Hunt’s plans with a phone call from the President, notifying the businessman of his change of heart regarding the Water for America program. But there was still no proof. They had to find someone who was willing to cooperate.
With the explosives neutralized, Nate had sent the flag on to Wilcox. When the artifacts director immediately “discovered” that the flag was a fake, they knew that Hawes and Wilcox had been advised by Graham Hunt of the change in plan. Now Hawes was directing an investigation that attempted to incriminate Nate for everything.
After taking Wilcox into custody and questioning him, it was clear that Hawes was the direct link to Graham Hunt. Ellie had suggested playing her part in the dangerous cat-and-mouse game. As they’d already guessed, her apartment and phone had been tapped by Hawes’s people for some time.
This was when Christopher’s role became critical. With agents accompanying him, the eight-year-old had called Ellie’s shop from a pay phone. The boy had played his part flawlessly. From that point on, Chris had been taken to safety, and a female agent had taken his place in the cab going to Pine Street.
Nate would never have come even this close if it weren’t for Ellie and Chris.
The elevator doors opened and Ellie stepped out. Her left arm was bandaged from her elbow to the shoulder, and she looked weary. He went to her.
“Anything?” she asked as he took her into his arms.
Nate shook his head, taking comfort in just holding her. “How’s the arm?”
“They wanted to amputate, but I wouldn’t let them.”
“That’s my girl.” He walked her to a bench in a corner and they both sat down. “Where’s your father?”
“He went to phone Sister Helen and Vic. Did you let Chris know that everything is okay?”
Nate smiled thinly. “The kid was really excited about being included like this. His only complaint was that we didn’t bring him back to your place in the cab. With Hawes in custody, maybe we can move him back to Sister Helen’s by the end of next week.”
“I’m sure everyone would like that. What’s the news from the shop?”
“Two people on the top floor of the building across from you. Empty because of renovations, I’m told. My guess is their ins
tructions were to kill Hawes if it looked that he might fail. When he shut off his transmitter to talk about a deal, they decided to take him out.”
She shivered. “Where are they now?”
“They made a run for it, but we had the neighborhood swarming with agents and cops. The two tried to shoot their way out, but they didn’t make it.” Nate rubbed Ellie’s back and gathered her closer to his side. “Hawes is our last chance. If he doesn’t live, this whole assignment was a failure.”
“No, it wasn’t,” she quietly corrected him. “Think about it. You defused a triple threat. You saved Chris’s life, preserved a moment of national unity and you stopped a presidential assassination. Besides, there’s always Wilcox.”
“Sanford was the only one Hunt ever dealt with. Wilcox can’t help us.” Nate rubbed his chin against her silky hair. He inhaled her scent. Life was just more bearable with Ellie at his side.
“Maybe I can get Ray to think a little harder. Maybe there’s something else about his payoff that could somehow connect it to Graham Hunt.”
“Sure. We’ve got to pursue every angle we have.”
“Just tell me what to do, and I’ll be right there with you.”
“My fearless little detective.” Nate looked into her upturned face and kissed her.
“What was that for?” she asked with a smile.
“Just a reminder of how much I love you.”
Ellie wrapped her good arm around him, and she kissed him in return.
“And that?” he asked.
“A reminder of how much I love you back.”
Nate looked into her dark eyes and felt himself overcome with a dozen different emotions. “I know what I was missing in my life. I also know what I want for always. That’s you. Whatever I have to do, I’ll do. We’ll make it work for us, Ellie.”
