“Where the hell were you,” he called out to D’Angelo, expecting not to hear an honest reply. “You’re gonna get us both fired.”
CHAPTER
33
The two Americans went straight to the airport and waited standby for the next BA flight out of Tripoli. It wan’t the prescribed emergency route, but better to do it in public. They were able to fly to Cairo, make a change of planes to Amsterdam and then onto Heathrow. Neither men talked about what had occurred earlier that day until they had landed and rented a car to take them to Crowley Road in Oxford, home of the Collingsworth Publishers. However, the bruises on D’Angelo’s face had already told Roarke everything he really needed to know.
They arrived at 2015 hours and said their good-byes. The building was still open. D’Angelo remained at Collingsworth for another hour in the research department, biding his time in the archeological department, reading up more on Isthmia, the ancient city that saved his life.
Roarke, on the other hand, wanted to get back to Washington as fast as possible. After nursing a Coke from a vending machine for twenty minutes while perusing Collingsworth’s winter catalogue, he ordered up a lift to the train station for the 2 hour 45 minute ride to London. He checked in at Grosvenor House as Giannini, slept for two hours, then discreetly left through a service entrance. His double from Heathrow, still in London, would check him out three days later.
Roarke made his way to Devonshire Terrace changing cabs three times, taking the Underground, and walking two blocks before finding another cab. He liked the hotel, a popular three-star establishment with a comfortable bar. It was not known to most tourists and the location afforded him any number of ways to disappear through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens.
It was now 0500. After settling in he dialed up Shannon Davis at home.
“Hello,” Davis answered.
“Hi. It’s Roarke.”
“Jesus, it’s about time. Where the hell have you been?”
“Getting a tan.”
“Well, get the fuck in here. I’ve been trying to reach you,” the FBI agent complained.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, late afternoon.”
“Good, because I’ve got some stuff you’re going to want to see.”
Washington, D.C.
J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building
Monday 11 August
“So, where were you?” asked Shannon Davis.
“Out.”
“Really, Roarke? Out? Out of the city? Out of the district? Out of the country? I couldn’t get bubkis from the White House. So…”
“I was just out. Busy.”
“I see nothing much has changed. I ask questions and never get an answer. You ask me to get information for you and I never know why.”
“And your problem is?”
“Oh nothing. It’s just good to see you.”
“You too.”
The FBI man gave him a genuine bear hug. They both counted on each other. If the situation were reversed, Roarke would be the first to help Shannon.
“Well then, let me bring you up to date. I’ll start with Alfred Nunes. He’s still dead.”
“Very funny, Shannon.”
“But you’d be interested to know that he may not have died from a heart attack. Come with me to the lab. We’ll walk and talk and see if there’s anything new on the toxicology report.”
They left Shannon’s office on the 5th floor and walked down the hall to the elevator that would take them to the basement lab.
“No visible puncture wounds, no trauma to his body except when he fell off the rock he was sitting on. But we’re looking into the possibility of drugs. Honestly, I didn’t give it a second thought even though you were suspicious, until one of our guys, a fairly aggressive rookie found a footprint down stream.”
“A footprint? Not much to go on,” Roarke said.
“No, but we’re running it anyway. Looks like a boot. A man’s. Size 12ish.”
“You have a file of boot prints? Like fingerprints?” Roarke asked.
“Some, not many. But you go with what you have. We’re running it for potential matches now.”
They changed the subject in the elevator when two other people joined them. They were in the headquarters of the FBI, but as recent history had shown, they might as well be telling the Russian president directly. Secrets were hard to keep and security was always playing catch up to spying.
While most of the toxicological work was done in facilities at Quantico, the FBI still kept a lab in Washington. This is where a sample of Alfred Nunes blood was analyzed.
“Anything showing?” Shannon Davis asked a technician.
“Very hard to tell Shannon.” He acknowledged Roarke with a nod.
“It’s all right. This is Scott Roarke, Secret Service. He started us on this science experiment.”
“Thank you for your help,” Roarke offered.
“Don’t thank me yet. But I may be getting some positives for Sodium Morph.”
Roarke stopped him. “Sodium Morph?”
“Sorry. Sodium Morphate. It dissipates into the body damned fast so it’s hard to read this far out. I’m still working the probabilities since there’s no clear evidence left.”
Shannon leaned over and whispered to Roarke, “Sodium Morphate is lethal stuff. The kind of thing used by the mob and others.”
“Others?” Roarke said curiously.
“Assassins. From all countries. You fill in the blanks. We’ve got a list as long as the Washington Monument is high on suspected hits using the drug.”
“It’s nasty,” the technician offered while working on a computer model of Nunes blood compared with the characteristics of Sodium Morphate. “Painful and slow with all of the outward signs of a heart attack.”
They continued to talk about the deaths attributed to SM and those that were hinted about in the halls of the agency. After another fifteen minutes, the technician pulled back from the screen as two overlapping pictures merged as one.
“Yup,” the technician offered. “Your boy should have lived another good five to ten years. This was no natural heart attack. In my estimation, he was poisoned. I’d say he probably got a hefty swig of Sodium Morphate in something he drank.”
Roarke sighed. “What’s all this mean, Scott?”
“It means my life is going to be sheer hell for the next few months.”
The president’s mouth was full of prime rib when Roarke walked into the White House dining room. Morgan Taylor acknowledged him with the wave of his hand. Roarke automatically turned to the first lady.
“Hello, Mrs. Taylor,” Roarke politely offered. “Mr. President.”
“Hello, Scott,” Lucy Taylor answered.
Mrs. Taylor invited Scott to join them for dinner, which he gladly accepted.
“Well, you look like shit,” the president finally said.
Mrs. Taylor didn’t flinch. She was used to her husband’s language.
“Nothing that an early retirement wouldn’t solve.”
“Tell me about it,” the president said reaching for a roll.
Through the next few minutes they traded sports stories and caught up on movies the president and the first lady had seen, since neither man could discuss the more sensitive work issues yet.
“Morgan tells me that you’ve met a woman in Boston.”
Roarke gasped. He wasn’t used to personal questions.
“Well, yes.” Roarke said.
“And?” Mrs. Taylor continued.
“And what?”
“And do you like her?”
“Well, yes,” he answered positively squirming. He hadn’t spoken with Katie since he left Boston. She probably hated him, or worse yet, she forgot about him.
“Look honey, Scott’s obviously not quite ready to talk about this. We’ve got to give him time,” the president stated. Roarke appreciated Taylor letting him off the hook. “Anyway, we’ve got some business to catch up on, so…”
The first lady
took her cue. “And I have some reading to do,” she said as she stood up. “You take care, Scott. And let me know when I can meet her.”
Roarke looked down, embarrassed.
“Oh, and take care of my husband, too,” she said. Roarke looked at the president. He telegraphed a look that seemed to say Mrs. Taylor had her sources as well. She kissed Roarke goodbye and they waited to speak until the door was closed.
Roarke looked at the president for an explanation.
“She probably just put things together, my boy.”
“It seems to run in this family,” Roarke joked. Then it was time for business. First he covered his trip to Libya, then a different topic, the likely cause of Alfred Nunes’ death. As he ran through the facts, the president did his normal pacing across the floor. He lit a cigar, smoked it, often stopping to examine the ashes as they accumulated at the end. It was a habit of the president’s whenever he listened intently. Roarke knew what would come next. A barrage of questions. Some rhetorical.
“Nunes was the attorney for the Lodge estate?”
“Yes sir.”
“And he lost representation to…” he trailed off allowing Roarke to fill in the blank.
“To Haywood Marcus in Boston.”
“Yes, your lady friend’s boss.”
“Yes.”
The president studied the ashes and flicked them in a crystal ashtray, the gift of the Chinese premier.
“Nunes dies. What does that suggest to you, Scott?”
“The end of a trail. Quite intentional.”
“Perhaps so. But from what you say, not completely provable.”
“Yet,” Roarke stated.
“Stay with the facts for now, Scott, because I have another interesting tidbit for you.”
The president wasn’t playing it out for theatrical sake. He was weaving meaningful pieces together himself.
“The gentleman you encountered in Boston along the Charles? You remember him, Scott?” the president remained intentionally vague.
“Yes,” Roarke responded.
“Apparently he was from out of town with prints that brought up a nice long record. Well, not exactly nice.”
Roarke laughed at the president’s delivery. He was obviously having fun but saving the best for last.
“He carried a cell phone,” Taylor said, again pacing. “Which led to his telephone records, which have proven very enlightening to the FBI, and will soon be in the Attorney General’s hands. We know for sure who called him and set him on his merry way.”
“A Mr. Haywood Marcus?” Roarke volunteered.
“Give the man a cigar.”
Boston, Massachusetts
“Scott Roarke. No, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone by that name.”
“Well then, perhaps you should. I just arrived from abroad and I understand that you’re the sexiest woman in the Boston law community.”
“Well, you heard right,” Katie Kessler said through a chuckle. “And you, Mr. Roarke, have quite a compelling voice. I bet you make all the girls cry.”
“There’s only one on my list,” he bravely added.
Katie prided herself on being quick on the uptake. This time she stuttered and then confessed, “Scott, where were you? What happened?”
“Not over the phone. I have one stop first, then I’ll see if my boss will give me a few days rest.”
She smiled to herself. “You come up here, but I guarantee you won’t get much rest.”
Quantico, Virginia
FBI Laboratories
Duane Parsons typed in his password, jumped over three security fences he’d built, and called up his finished j-pegs. Roarke peered over his shoulders.
“I think I have a pretty good extrapolation here, based on the predictable variables,” he told Roarke. “But I still need those other pictures I told you about.”
“I’ll try to come up with something,” the Secret Service agent answered. “I’ve just been busy.”
“Family, the kid’s family at various ages. Anything that would help me input some…any genetic influences. Anyway, here it comes.”
Roarke watched as the image of the original Boy Scout picture appeared on the 19” flat screen.
“Okay, here’s your newspaper clipping.” He typed in a command and an enhanced picture appeared, which Touch Parsons then added to a split screen with the first.
“You see I cleaned up the picture. The grain’s gone. It’s sharpened. I’ve doubled the pixels and played with the gray scale. Next, I zoomed in on the boy’s face and cleaned it up more.”
Another pair of images appeared on the screen as Parsons quickly typed. These were close ups with enhanced facial detail. Roarke could just about see the pores.
“This is the one I modeled. The real challenge is not to impose my aesthetics on the subject, but to focus on what’s unique in the character. Otherwise, the individual would disappear during the digital aging process.”
Touch blew up the clear picture on the right and then slowly put it through a series of dissolves. In an extraordinarily dreamlike progression, the boy aged, with the face elongating, then broadening, his hair growing, then thinning, the eyes narrowing, the nose expanding. “Honestly, there’s no software that can guarantee we’ll come up with ‘the’ most accurate picture, but the developmental characteristics should be within a range of acceptable. I use a PhotoShop 9.0 on a Wacom tablet. The files use a helluva lot of RAM and a project this complex takes hours to render. After I saw where I was going, I added other variables like stress, possible weight gain, the effect of exercise or the lack of it. You name it. I threw out some of the choices the computer offered and took some guesses on the features including eye and hair color.”
The age progression continued. Roarke watched in amazement. The face aged from the teenager to college student to a twenty and thirty-something in slow two-year increments. At last it dissolved to a 47-year-old man wearing a suit and tie of Parson’s choice.
“I thought you’d like the clothes. They say they make the man.”
Touch hit Ctrl-P on his computer and an Epson Stylus Photo inkjet whirred. A minute later, a full-color glossy 8x10 photograph sat in the tray. It depicted a strikingly handsome man with a broad distinctive smile, high cheekbones, and slightly almond eyes.
Roarke silently examined it for what seemed like an eternity to Parsons.
“Well?” the photo expert asked.
“This is absolutely incredible. Are you sure you’ve got him nailed?”
“Am I sure? Well, no. You’ve got to get me more family pictures. But I think I’m within striking distance. Anyway, it’s the best I can do for now.”
Roarke continued to look at the photo in amazement. “Thank you, Touch. Do you have an envelope I can put this in?”
“Sure and I’ll throw in another print or two.”
As the images printed out the FBI photo expert asked, “By the way, you know what’s a lot of fun to do?”
“What?”
“Going in the opposite direction. Taking an older person and regressing him.”
“What do you mean?”
“Going backwards. There’s not a lot of call for it. But it’s fun.”
Roarke laughed. “I bet.”
When the photos were completed, Parsons slid them in an envelope backed by a cardboard. “You don’t have to come back in. You know you can scan and e-mail me whatever other pictures you find.”
“That’ll help. And thanks again. I had no idea how this whole process worked.”
They shook hands and Roarke left with the age progression photographs of a man he had never seen before in his life.
CHAPTER
34
Boston, Massachusetts
Wednesday 13 August
They came together like a furnace. So much heat and intensity had been building for weeks. No longer able to deny one another, Katie and Roarke melted together, seeking each other’s tastes and finding unknown pleasures. The two individ
uals as one in total, exquisite rapture.
Katie surrounded Roarke in every imaginable way; first with her arms and with her legs. And then with all of the tenderness she had. He was lost in her deepness, and she felt how he expanded within her. Roarke explored her feelings, taking Katie to the edge and holding her there with delicate moves and long kisses.
Katie’s breasts cupped perfectly in his hands. Her body, beautifully matched to his, moved rhythmically and sent waves of excitement through both of them. She tightened around Roarke and was aware that he seemed weightless above her; his arms supporting his sculptured body, making loving effortless.
She whispered to him, “You’re a perfect fit.” It was the first complete sentence in more than an hour.
Neither partner had ever experienced such pleasure, with an insatiable desire to give more. Four hours went by suspended in time and outside of reality. Finally, Roarke fell asleep inside of Katie, snuggling from behind her after an intense explosion. But Katie would not let him rest for long. She woke her lover by gently pressing against him and he grew to love her again.
At nine o’clock they showered. It gave them the opportunity to use their eyes and feast on their bodies another way. This brought more gratification and in turn, satisfaction as their gentle caresses turned to petting and rubbing. Scott had never known such a woman. Katie had never given herself in such a way to any man.
They hungered for each other, but Katie insisted on preparing some actual food, which they ate, dressed only in T-shirts. The pasta was complemented with a Kendall Jackson Cabernet. They didn’t finish any of it.
“I love getting lost inside of you,” Roarke said as he slid back.
“You’re not lost. You’re found,” Katie whispered. She pulled her legs tightly around him, transferring all of her pleasure to Roarke. This wasn’t just sex. She experienced beautiful sensations when he was inside her, but more than that, she could feel his love. With the intensity of both she came again.
Executive Actions Page 28
