Barrientos was waiting in a car outside and around the corner. “Did you pack a bag for me?” she asked as she slid into his car.
“In the trunk.”
“Good. My husband will take my things home from the hotel here.”
Barrientos nodded. “So what’s happening on the campus? Why here?”
Gray smiled. “Never mind about that. It’s from the other part of my life. Is the second wave ready?”
“Waiting for your word.”
“Good.”
April 19 wasn’t finished yet. And she had other work to do as well. The noose must be tightened around The Associates, and Tolman and Journey must have time to do what she needed them to do.
“Where are you going?” Barrientos asked.
“First to Washington.”
“Really? Is that safe?”
Gray looked amused. “Do not worry about me, Mark.”
“What are you doing in D.C.?”
“Visiting the French embassy.”
“What?”
“The French are about to become very angry with the U.S. government.”
“Jesus Christ, Ann.”
“Don’t be sacrilegious, Mark. It shows poor manners.”
“I mean, are you sure—”
“Yes,” Gray said, and didn’t elaborate.
“So you mean—”
“I mean, to use an interesting American expression, that all bets are off. I’ve finally seen Victor for what he is, and he isn’t going to be allowed to hurt any more families. His power is going to be broken, absolutely and thoroughly.”
Barrientos stared at her for a long, silent moment.
“I know what I am doing, Mark,” Gray said.
“I guess I really don’t understand you. What about after D.C.?”
“Then,” Gray said, “I’m going to Texas.”
CHAPTER
21
Tolman sipped from the Diet Coke Journey handed her and looked at the box on the screen:
“Enter key to open file.”
It made sense. Barry Cable had sent it from his government e-mail account, but he had sent it while men with automatic weapons were in the building, shooting his coworker, destroying the office, coming his way. Panicked, under duress, he’d sent the file to his brother.
But he hadn’t written anything. There was no time.
No time to send Jim a key that would open the file.
After the shock of his brother’s murder had time to wear off—along with his divorce at the same time—Jim Cable began to wonder about his brother’s death. In June he e-mailed his sister and voiced his concern that Barry’s death wasn’t as random as it seemed.
Five days later, he was found hanging on the back porch of this house.
“Maybe he finally started asking questions,” Tolman said.
“What?” Journey said.
Tolman looked around. She’d almost forgotten he was there. “Jim,” she said. “He survived all the crap from his brother’s killing and his divorce and maybe he asked some questions in June about what happened to Barry. He told Dana he was going to check into it. And maybe when he started asking questions, they killed him.”
“Who is ‘they’? April 19 came in with guns blazing in a big public statement. Jim was killed at his house, and whoever did it tried to make it look like suicide.”
“Different killers?” Tolman said. “It still doesn’t add up, and it still doesn’t explain why no one had ever heard of April 19 before they shot up the GAO. Then they quietly kill Jim on his porch, and weeks after that they tell Dana to go to Wilmington and kill her there?”
“Lots of holes in that story,” Journey said.
“No shit, Professor.” Andrew had sat down on the wooden floor, cross-legged, alternately sipping and slurping his drink. He giggled, then laughed out loud.
Tolman looked down at him. What do you think, Andrew? she wondered.
He stopped laughing and looked up at her.
She was startled. His gray-green eyes made contact with hers for a long second, then looked away. But he began to whistle, and it was the same pattern as when she’d stood with him in Journey’s living room. The second pattern, the one with the lower note.
He glanced at her again, and this time held the eye contact longer, almost three seconds.
He associated that pattern of notes with her. Somehow, in Andrew’s mind, those notes were what he knew about her.
Patterns.
She whistled back at Andrew.
He smiled and whistled the same pattern again.
“What’s with you two?” Journey said. “Are you whistling buddies now, or what?”
Patterns.
Jim Cable was right. Barry’s murder wasn’t a random terrorist nutcase. There was more to April 19 than violent antigovernment ideology. Maybe that wasn’t what the group was about at all. Maybe that was a front, a cover for something deeper. What if they killed Barry Cable for some other reason—shooting up the government office and wounding Barry’s coworker to make it look like they were terrorist nutcases? What if they blew up those buildings last night as part of something else?
April 19 was part of a larger whole. If she stopped thinking of them as political extremists and started thinking of them as an instrument of some other agenda, some other plan, some other pattern, there would be answers.
Some other plan that involved Napoleon III’s Silver Cross, and whatever Barry Cable was working on at the GAO when he was killed … and the woman in the cemetery at Cassville, coolly handing her a 150-year-old letter and then vanishing down a country road.
Andrew whistled again, but he was playing with the straw of his drink, looking at the floor.
Tolman whistled the notes, and Andrew smiled without looking up.
Tolman glanced at Journey. “I’m going to forward this file to my own e-mail. Could I stay with you another day or two? I think Andrew inspires me to think in different ways, to look at things in ways that aren’t obvious.”
Journey smiled with genuine pride. “Amazing how he reaches people, isn’t it?”
Andrew looked up. “Yes, you,” his father said, looking down at him.
“Yes, it is,” Tolman said.
Journey pointed at the computer. “How does this fit with what I found out about the Silver Cross?”
“Don’t know yet. But it’s there.”
“You’re sure?”
Tolman looked at Andrew again. “I’m sure.”
“You realize that everyone who’s touched this file, whatever it is, has been killed,” Journey said.
Tolman patted her purse. “The SIG is right here. You really should get yourself a gun.”
“I’d shoot off my foot, probably. And with Andrew in the house, I think it might be more danger than protection. But the bat is under the seat of the van, and maybe I’ll start keeping it by my bed at night.”
Tolman returned to the computer. She forwarded the message, in the knowledge that it had been sent by a dead man to a dead man. As they left the house and dropped the key in the realtors’ lockbox, Andrew took his father’s hand. With his other hand, he reached out and held Tolman’s elbow, and the boy walked between them that way, all the way to the car.
CHAPTER
22
The last of the light was gone by the time Journey steered the van toward the Madill city limits. “We’ll be in Carpenter Center in ten minutes,” he said, then glanced in his rearview mirror. A pair of headlights appeared behind him. He had slowed as he approached Madill, expecting the other car to pass. But the driver stayed put behind him, the lights creeping closer.
“Come on, driver, pass or back off,” Journey said, glancing in the mirror again.
“What’s going on?” Tolman said, sitting up in her seat.
“Some guy riding my tail. Big times on a Saturday night.”
With his acute hearing, Journey heard the roar of the powerful engine accelerating behind him. The vehicle behind him was large,
some kind of dark-colored SUV. It was closing fast.
“Hey!” Journey said.
Tolman turned and looked. “Oh, shit,” she said.
The SUV slammed into the minivan’s back bumper. The steering wheel pulled to the right. Journey shouted without words. Tolman began digging in her purse, wrapping her hands around her SIG.
The van’s tires touched the gravel shoulder of the road as Journey stepped hard on the brake. He felt the right front tire blow out as the big SUV followed him and tapped the van’s bumper again. Journey locked his hands to the wheel. Andrew hooted.
Tolman shouted, “Goddammit!” and the minivan careened off the road. Journey saw yellow in his field of vision, and he knew they were heading straight for the abandoned brick building that had once housed KMAD, the town’s only radio station. The van dipped into a narrow depression, what the locals called a “bar ditch.”
“Andrew!” Journey shouted, then he was fighting the steering column. He spun the wheel to the left; the van fishtailed and slammed sideways into the building, the passenger side flush against the radio station’s long-broken front window. Glass shattered on that side of the van, bits of safety glass raining down on Tolman. In the backseat, Andrew was on the driver’s side, directly behind his father. The force of the crash pulled at him, but the seat belt snapped him back.
Journey’s head banged against the steering wheel. His vision went black for a few seconds, then he could see in his headlights the faint outlines of the letters “KMAD” and the numbers “1550” on the front of the building. He put his head down on the wheel. Blood trickled from under his hairline.
Then, footsteps. He turned in time to see the man racing down from the SUV. He held a gun in his hand.
Journey’s vision blurred. “Can you—,” he said to Tolman.
She was fumbling with the latch on the seat belt. “It’s stuck, and I can’t get out this side!”
Journey’s vision cleared, then blurred again. The van was spinning. Blood ran into his eye. He slapped at the seat belt latch with the palm of his hand, pressing it three times before letting go.
Air bag? he wondered, then he remembered: the van was old enough to not have mandatory air bags.
He freed himself and reached under the seat. He pulled out the Louisville Slugger as he heard the driver’s side door behind him slide open.
“No!” he shouted, turning.
The man grabbed Andrew, and in one swift, well-trained motion, released the latch on his seat belt and dragged the boy out of the van.
“Let him go!” Journey shouted. “I don’t know who you are, but you let him go now!”
The man said nothing, wrapping one arm around Andrew’s neck and pulling him backward. With the other hand he jammed the muzzle of his gun against Andrew’s temple. Andrew hooted once but was otherwise silent—maybe it was a game to him.
Journey tumbled out of the van, scraping his knees on the concrete sidewalk that ran along the front of the building. He heard Tolman behind him. “I’ll cover you,” she said in a hoarse whisper.
But all Journey could see was Andrew, the man’s muscular arm around his neck, gun to his head. Andrew said nothing. His hands flapped, patting at the air around him, then slapping the legs of his jeans.
Journey rolled, gripping the bat, and came up in a crouch.
“I’ll kill him,” the man said, his voice low and calm. “He wasn’t part of my assignment, but I will kill him if you don’t drop the bat.”
Tolman crawled out of the van, the SIG snapping upward.
“And you drop the weapon,” the man said. He hadn’t moved a muscle. “This boy dies right now if you don’t drop it. Butt first, and throw it out to your right, toward the parking lot. Do it now.”
Tolman tossed the SIG into the darkness.
“Let him go,” Journey said. He took a step forward, the bat tight in his left hand. “He has severe autism. He’s nonverbal. He doesn’t understand what’s happening.”
“You don’t get it,” the man said. “See, I have a job to do.”
“I bet you do,” Tolman said. “Who sent you? The woman in the cemetery? Tall woman, midforties, refined voice?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man said. He pulled back the hammer on his weapon. It hadn’t moved from the side of Andrew’s head.
Journey hadn’t prayed in thirty years, but he thought, Dear God, Dear God, over and over again, and then he didn’t know what else to think. He thought of the cross Sandra Kelly always wore. Give me strength, he thought, and opened his eyes.
He stamped his foot and shouted “Andrew!” in a sharp voice.
“Keep your fucking voice down,” the man said. “And you better drop that fucking bat.”
He’s cursing now, Journey thought. He’s starting to feel rattled. Good.
“Andrew!” Journey said, his voice rising to a shout.
Andrew stamped his foot.
“Hey!” the man shouted.
“Nick, your tone of voice,” Tolman whispered. “But he’ll—”
“Yes,” Journey said, and made his voice as angry as he could. “Andrew, look at me!”
A light went on in the building next door, behind them.
“Drop the bat,” the man said.
Andrew emitted a low, throaty voice and spat toward his father.
“What the fuck—,” the man said.
Andrew reached up, grabbed the hand holding his neck, and raked his fingernails down the man’s arm.
The man jumped and the hand holding Andrew moved. He looked down, his grip on the gun loosened for a split second. Andrew spat again.
As soon as the assassin cut his eyes downward to Andrew, Journey moved. He saw Andrew spitting, reaching up to scratch the man again, and the gun, an inch or two from where it had been. He would only have an instant.
Journey sprang forward, circling toward the side away from Andrew. The assassin saw the movement.
“Don’t—,” he said, and his gun hand came up again.
Journey swung the bat, crashing it into the assassin’s kneecap. He heard the bone crunch.
The man grunted. His knee buckled, but he didn’t fall. But his grip on Andrew loosened further.
Andrew stamped both feet, raked the man’s arm with his nails again, and spun away from him. Behind him, Tolman broke into a run, grabbed Andrew around the waist—even though he was nine inches taller than she—and wrestled him to the ground. She covered his body with her own.
Journey raised the bat and aimed it at the crook of the assassin’s arm. Wood connected with bone and the gun flipped out of the man’s hand. Journey swung again, breaking the elbow, then went for the knee again. The man grunted and his legs went out from under him.
“What’s going on out there?” a woman’s voice shouted, from the building to the north of the old radio station.
“Call the police!” Tolman shouted.
Journey rammed his knee into the man’s chest and poked the barrel of the bat against his eye. “So help me God,” Journey said, his voice shaking, “give me one good reason not to beat your brains in. You sorry son of a bitch. He’s a child!”
“Fuck you,” the man whispered. “They’ll send someone else, you know. You’re dead, both of you. When they want someone dead, they’re dead.”
“You shouldn’t have touched my son,” Journey said, and he realized tears were streaming down his face, mingling with the blood from the cut on his forehead. He swung the bat and broke the man’s other kneecap.
“Nick!” Tolman screamed.
“You don’t know me very well,” Journey said.
“Nick!” Tolman screamed again.
Andrew shrieked. Journey heard sirens.
“Don’t kill him, Nick!” Tolman said, rolling off Andrew and helping the boy to his feet. “He can talk!”
“I don’t know anything,” the man said. “They don’t tell us anything. You’re nothing to me. You’re an assignment.”
Two Ma
rshall County sheriff’s units arrived, an ambulance close behind. One of the deputies was Scott Parsons, whose younger brother had died last year coming to Journey’s aid. “Professor Journey?” he drawled.
“He tried to kill us,” Journey said. “He had a gun to Andrew’s head.”
“Where’s your boy?” Parsons asked.
“Over here,” Tolman said. “He’s safe.”
“Is that Meg Tolman?” Parsons said. “Well, this is a fine little reunion, isn’t it?”
Andrew shrieked again. Journey stood and watched as the paramedics tended to the assassin. “He tried to kill us,” Journey said again.
“All right, Professor,” Parsons said. “You stay over there. We’re going to sort this out.”
More deputies arrived on the scene. Journey dropped the bat and ran to Andrew. He lowered his voice and threw his arms around his son. Andrew spat on his father’s arm, but then the aggression seemed to drain out of him. “It’s okay,” Journey said. “You’re okay.”
“Damn,” Tolman said. “You surprise me more all the time. You’ve got balls of solid rock.”
“He shouldn’t have touched Andrew,” Journey said.
CHAPTER
23
Journey and Tolman and the woman next door gave statements to Deputy Parsons. The assassin, whose New York driver’s license identified him as Matthew Jackson, was transported to the Madill hospital, then transferred to the trauma center at Medical Center of Southeastern Oklahoma in Durant. Journey called Sandra, and she met them at the hospital in Madill, staying with Andrew while Journey and Tolman were treated for cuts and lacerations.
In the front lobby of Integris Marshall County Medical Center, standing beside the darkened gift shop while Andrew high-stepped and vocalized, Tolman held up one hand and said, “I need to make a call.”
With small bandages on her arm and one on her cheek, she walked out the automatic doors and into the hot August night. Andrew clung to his father’s arm. Sandra watched Tolman go.
“You like to show a girl a good time,” Sandra said. “And I thought you were only picking her up at the airport.”
Silver Cross Page 16
