After sending the messages, Barrientos sent a text to Ann Gray’s cell phone.
The text read: “Message delivered.”
CHAPTER
17
For Victor Zale, there was never a state of being half-asleep or half-awake. He was either fully awake or deeply asleep. When the phone rang at just past four o’clock in the morning, he rolled over, instantly alert. He’d had more than his share of early morning phone calls in his life.
Before he could speak, a man’s voice said, “Turn on your television.”
Zale grabbed the remote from the nightstand. “What channel?”
“Pick one,” said the voice.
Zale turned on CNN. The footage was graphic: ravaged buildings in Albuquerque, Kansas City, and Cleveland—truck bombs detonated simultaneously at 3:00 A.M. eastern time. Casualty reports were coming in, and the commentators breathlessly reported the fact that the late hour of the detonations meant there were few people in the vicinity. The death toll: three in Kansas City—two security officers and a homeless woman who had been sleeping in the shadow of the building; five in Cleveland—three security officers, an overnight data entry worker at the building’s Social Security office, and a worker from a nearby bakery who had stepped outside to take a walk and smoke a cigarette. There were no fatalities at all in Albuquerque, and only minor injuries.
Zale sat up straight in bed as the CNN anchors introduced a graphic of the text of the e-mail they and other media outlets had received a few minutes after the bombings.
“Goddammit,” Zale muttered.
“To say the least,” said the man on the phone. “Get your ass down here. We have to talk in person. The usual place. I’ll have a car waiting for you.”
The line went dead.
Still watching the TV, Zale called Landon. “Come on, Terry, wake up. We have to go to D.C.”
“What?” Landon said, his voice thick with sleep. “What time is it?”
“Doesn’t matter what fucking time it is,” Zale said. “Get dressed. We’ll take the Cirrus. I’ll pick you up in fifteen minutes.”
Zale had been a licensed pilot for more than thirty years, and he kept his current plane, a four-seat Cirrus SR22, at the nearest general aviation airport, across the state line from Hillsdale in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Shortly after sunrise, the plane rose into the sky, leaving behind the shadows of the Berkshires. A little over an hour and a half later, with very little said between Zale and Landon, the plane skirted the edge of Washington, D.C.’s restricted airspace and landed at Manassas Regional Airport in Virginia.
A black Lincoln was waiting beside the tarmac, a driver in a business suit waiting for them. The sun was fully up, and the day would be hot and humid. Zale and Landon ducked into the Lincoln. “You know where we’re going?” Zale said to the driver.
“Yes, sir,” the driver said.
No more was said. Landon tried several times to engage Zale, but Zale simply held up a hand and silenced him. Nearly an hour later, the Lincoln crossed into the District on Constitution Avenue, navigated through the Saturday morning traffic along the north edge of the National Mall, and turned onto Fifteenth Street. Without speaking, the driver stopped by the Washington Monument and let Zale and Landon out. With the shorter Landon trailing him by a few steps, Zale made his way to a bench in the shadow of the monument and sat down.
Within two minutes, another man joined them. Wade Roader was about Zale’s age, midsixties, and like Zale, he wielded incredible power, while most people did not know his name.
“What the hell is happening?” Roader said before he was even seated.
Zale looked around. A couple of men in suits—Roader’s bodyguards—hovered nearby. A young Asian couple with a toddler walked slowly by, angling their heads upward for a look at the majesty of the monument.
“Pushback,” Zale said. “I’ll take care of it.”
“Pushback?” Roader said. “All you can say is ‘pushback’? Christ Almighty, Victor, three federal buildings blown at the same instant. Eight dead. We are damn lucky it was in the middle of the night and it’s only eight.”
“Luck had nothing to do with it. She thinks she’s teaching me a lesson, and Gray being Gray, she didn’t want much collateral damage.”
“A lesson?” Roader’s face was reddening. “A fucking lesson? Victor, are you paying attention? Three federal office buildings bombed, and now the world thinks that April 19 is responsible.”
Zale sighed. He put his hand over his eyes, shielding them from the murderous sun. “I know, Wade. But this is for my benefit. That line about ‘the federal government and those who conduct business on its behalf.’ She might as well have written my name on it. She thinks she’s got the moral high ground or something.”
“For God’s sake, why?”
Zale slapped his hand down onto his knees. Landon, sitting beside him, jumped at the motion. “I sent a man to take her out. She’s pissed about that.”
Landon shook his head silently. Roader said, “She’s pissed you tried to kill her? Imagine that. Maybe you should have taken a little more care in your hiring.”
“We had some mutual professional acquaintances. She came highly recommended. She’s gone crazy now, but she managed the project well in the beginning.”
“But she’s off the reservation now,” Roader said.
“Totally,” Zale said. “We’re tying it off. All the people at the site have been given pink slips. They all think it’s something corporate, and we’ll put out a press release with the local media to that effect.”
“You’re hardly tying it off if your ‘manager’ is running around blowing up buildings,” Roader said. “The country can’t stand this, Victor. Last year we lost the Speaker of the House and the chief justice of the Supreme Court to violence, followed by President Harwell of a heart attack. We don’t need this. President Mendoza’s been rebuilding this nation, and this kind of thing pushes people to the breaking point.”
“You talking politics at me now?” Zale said, half-turning on the bench. “Don’t you get on the moral high horse, too. If you’d ever really served your country, if you’d done anything that required a little more effort than walking down the hall to get another bottle of mineral water, you might have a little more understanding about what it takes.”
“What do you mean, ‘if I’d ever really served my country’? What do you think I’m doing now?”
“Shit, Wade. You sit in a fancy office and you talk a lot about theories and poll numbers. You think that’s the real world? You’re not near as smart as you think you are. The fact is, this country doesn’t run without someone like me. There’s always someone like me who makes it possible for someone like you to do things. You’ve benefited from this project, so don’t you talk to me about rebuilding this nation.”
“It’s getting messy, and I want to know what you’re going to do about it.”
“Gray has to die.”
“Agreed,” Roader said. “She was a great asset but now she’s a liability. If she really wanted to, she could topple everything.”
“She’s connected everywhere,” Landon said. “I don’t know if killing her—”
“We’ve been over this, Terry,” Zale said. “Because she is connected everywhere, she has to go. A freelance operator with a fucking conscience. That’s a new one on me.”
“Conscience?” Roader said. “Three federal buildings destroyed, eight dead, a threat of more. All that to send you a message. That’s conscience?”
“She’s a complicated individual,” Landon said.
Zale laughed. “Well, I think we can all agree on that. But we’ll find her and we’ll get her.”
“Then there’s the matter of the RIO woman and her history consultant,” Roader said.
“I had people on her starting in Wilmington the day after Dana Cable,” Zale said. “I knew something was wrong when she started working with the locals. Who knew Cable was friends with someone in an agency like t
hat?”
“And she’s quite good,” Roader said.
“Not that good,” Zale said. “So she went to see this professor and they’re working on it. We’ll see that the trail stops there.”
Roader took off his glasses and wiped his brow with a handkerchief. He was already sweating, long elliptical stains showing on his shirt. “You’ve said that before.”
“Don’t fuck around with me, Wade,” Zale said.
Roader poked Zale’s leg. “And don’t you fuck around with me, Victor. I’ve been patient with you for months. You keep telling me the trail’s going to stop, and it hasn’t. If it doesn’t, sooner or later someone is going to connect the dots. Whether it’s your manager or Tolman or the history professor or none of the above. Do whatever it takes, but end it.” He glanced at Landon. “You’re tidying up the accounts?”
“In progress,” Landon said, and he glanced at Zale. “At least my part of it is going smoothly.”
Roader smiled, but there was no humor in it. “I believe your partner just took a serious dig at you, Victor.”
Zale waved his hand. “Bullshit. People are more complicated than money.”
“So they are,” Roader said, standing up. “The car will take you to the airport. Have a nice flight back to the Berkshires. Beautiful up there this time of year, and not so damned hot.” He looked thoughtful. “You may have forgotten, Victor, that I was a history professor once. My specialty was the colonial era, up to the American Revolution. I was pretty damn good at it. But that was a long, long time ago.”
The Asian family passed them again. A tour group of twenty or more, all older people, went by going the other direction. Zale heard the droning voice of the guide, like listening to a bee buzzing in one ear.
“You have all the information you need on Tolman and the professor?”
“I’m assembling a dossier on the professor,” Zale said.
“Don’t,” Roader said. “I have everything you need.”
Zale looked surprised.
“I can play the game, too,” Roader said. “But I play it in a different way.” He dug in the pocket of his wrinkled khakis and pulled out a USB drive, handing it to Zale. “There’s your dossier on Nick Allen Journey, and a more complete look at Margaret Isabell Tolman. They also contacted a colleague of Journey’s, a Professor Graham Lashley, within the last few days.” He started toward his bodyguards, then turned back after half a dozen steps. “End it, Victor. End it now.”
Zale and Landon watched the rumpled, stoop-shouldered man walk away. An idea was blowing through Zale’s brain, and for a moment Ann Gray and April 19 and the Silver Cross and the imminent protest/counterprotest in Chicago and President Robert Mendoza were all jumbled together. He began to sense an opportunity, perhaps a way to deal with more than one problem at a time. Victor Zale was nothing if not a problem solver. When Roader had disappeared, Zale pulled out his phone and began calling his people in the field. They had work to do, and they had to do it quickly.
* * *
A little over a mile northwest of the Washington Monument, Tolman stepped off the Metro at Farragut Square North and walked briskly to Connecticut and her office building. She’d been listening to her iPod all the way in from her apartment across the river in Alexandria, trying to stay centered, to keep her mind from straying into dark corners. Her taste was eclectic—jazz to singer-songwriters to bluegrass—but there was one notable absence in her music collection: no classical piano. Tolman had felt for many years that listening to other pianists’ interpretations of works she might someday play interfered with her own reading of the piece.
So by the time she stepped onto the fourth floor, she was listening to a bluegrass band from the D.C. area, The Seldom Scene, tearing through a semi-gospel song called “Going Up on the Mountain.” She was surprised to see a light on in suite 427 when she unlocked the door. “Hello?” she said, pulling out ear buds as The Seldom Scene started on its final chorus.
“Hello?” a voice came back.
Tolman turned left down the hall and found RIO’s resident financial analyst, Kerry Voss, in her office. “Hey,” Voss said, looking up and smoothing back her hair, which was reddish-brown and in a ponytail today. Tolman thought it had been black earlier in the week. Voss was wearing a Bob Marley T-shirt and denim shorts. “If I’d known the boss was going to be here this morning, I would have worn grown-up clothes.”
Tolman smiled. “I still have a hard time getting my head around that whole ‘boss’ thing. You’re probably more qualified than I am to do that, since you follow money for a living.”
“Wouldn’t have the job if you offered me a million a year,” Voss said.
“Uh-huh. Kids must be with your ex this weekend.”
“That they are, and I didn’t even have a date last night. So here I am, finishing up a couple of cases. Hopping down the old money trail. You? You still distracted by the North Carolina thing?”
“You could say that.” She waved. “I’ll be in my office.”
She went to the office, turned on the computer, and while it booted up, she went to the break room to start coffee. Voss wasn’t a coffee drinker—“I get my caffeine from twelve-ounce cans,” she liked to say—so Tolman knew there wouldn’t be any ready.
She took a cup to her office and logged on to the Web. She checked a few news sites, and all the news was the same, with images of burning buildings filling the screen. She settled on ABC, which was streaming live video in a three-way split, with the anchors in the fourth corner of the window-type shot. “What’s this?” Tolman said.
She turned up the volume, listening to the chatter about “overnight explosions in three federal office buildings.” She froze when she saw footage she recognized, footage she’d watched again online yesterday, a clip of the GAO office in Rockville, and Barry Cable’s body being removed from the building.
“April 19 is the same militant antigovernment group that claimed responsibility for the fatal shooting at a government office outside Washington last spring,” said the reporter. “They have been silent since that incident, but they are apparently back, and in a big and frightening way.”
Holy shit, Tolman thought.
Thoughts tumbled through her. Did that mean her hypothesis about April 19 existing only to murder Barry Cable was totally off base?
But why now? Why blow up federal buildings across the country now?
Tolman pushed herself away from the desk and ran down the hall to Kerry Voss’s office. The door was closed and Voss was listening to something loud—crashing guitars, bass, drums, screaming vocals. Tolman didn’t recognize it. She didn’t bother knocking—Voss wouldn’t hear her anyway.
Voss looked up and turned down the music. “What?” she said, seeing Tolman’s face.
“April 19,” Tolman said.
“Yeah, did you hear about those buildings? Good thing it was the middle of the night or a lot more people might have been hurt.”
“April 19,” Tolman said again, her mind racing.
“You’re repeating yourself, Meg. What is it?”
“Can you find their money? They had to have money to orchestrate something like these bombings.”
Voss folded her hands into her lap. “Here we go again. Is this a RIO case?”
“Not yet,” Tolman said. “Then again, it may already be.”
“What? You’re not making sense.”
“I know,” Tolman said. “They may be connected to this investigation I’m already working on.”
“Oh, not cool. What do you want to know?”
“Anything. Find their money. No one blows up three federal buildings at the same time without having money behind them. They’re claiming responsibility all over the media. Maybe they’re not phantoms after all. Maybe I was wrong … hell, I don’t know.”
“You’re babbling,” Voss pointed out.
“Yes,” Tolman said. “I’m going to Norman, Oklahoma.”
“What does that have to do with April
19?”
“I don’t know yet. I have to go. Call me on my cell when you get something. This is top priority.”
“Of course it is,” Voss muttered as Tolman dashed down the hall.
“He sent me something,” Jim Cable had written.
Time to find out what, Tolman thought.
CHAPTER
18
Sandra wasn’t due at the house until nine o’clock to watch Andrew, so Journey held to Saturday morning tradition and took his son to a small donut shop on the square. After breakfast, they stepped out onto the bright sidewalk in front of the Donut Chef, and Journey looked across the square in time to see his ex-wife stepping out of the Carpenter Center branch of First Southwest Bank.
Andrew looked up and saw his mother, hooting as loudly as he could. He stamped his feet, waved his arms, and broke into a run toward her.
“Andrew!” Journey shouted.
It was no use—whenever Andrew saw his mother, he ran as fast as he could away from his father, oblivious to all else, including danger. He pounded down the steps by Maskil’s Discount Store and into the street. “Andrew!” Journey screamed again.
Amelia turned when she heard his voice, her hand still on the bank door, her black and white banker power suit perfectly tailored, nails and hair and makeup just right, nothing out of place. She smiled at Andrew, but it quickly evaporated into the hard-edged look she had cultivated in her forties to go along with her professional and material success. She took a step forward, hands outstretched. “Andrew, no!” she shouted. “Not in the street! Go back!”
He reached the median, making happy vocalizations, flapping both hands wildly in the morning breeze. Journey looked both ways and scrambled into the street. “No, Andrew, no!” Journey shouted, and Amelia repeated the words.
Andrew bounded across the street. Amelia dashed down the steps and grabbed a handful of his shirt, pulling him onto the curb. Journey let out a breath, and seeing Andrew in his mother’s arms with no cars on the square, jogged across the street.
“Don’t ever do that,” Amelia was saying. “You could get yourself killed. Don’t ever do that, Andrew!” Her voice rose, and Andrew stepped back, his vocalizations turning angry.
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