Waller was on the train. He could feel it.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?”
Payne opened his eyes and focused on Waller’s frowning face. “Jon. Have a seat.”
Waller’s body was rigid, as if prepared to pounce. When Payne made no effort to flee, Waller seemed to relax a bit. He glanced around, appearing to look for some trap, some reason why his fugitive was not attempting to escape. Apparently satisfied it was safe to sit, he settled into the seat next to Payne. “I don’t get it, Harper. What’s gotten into you?”
Payne looked at him with heavy eyes. “You want to know what’s gotten into me.” He chuckled. “Fair question, I guess.” He let his head fall backward and he stared at the ceiling as the train lurched slightly from side to side. “You won’t understand... you don’t know what I know. Then again, maybe you do.”
Waller shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Maybe you’re just on overload. We were working at an extremely aggressive pace. Maybe I was pushing you too hard.” He extended his hand. “I need your weapon.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because you disobeyed orders, Harp, because you held fellow agents at gunpoint and stole my fucking wallet, because you’re acting irrationally. You leaped from a moving vehicle, for Christ’s sake. Those good enough reasons?”
“No, they’re not. Not for me, at least.”
“Direct order from Knox, okay? He wants you to see a shrink, find out what’s gotten under your skin. If everything checks out and he gives you a clean bill, you get it back. Right now, it’s just a precaution.”
Payne looked at Waller’s open hand. “Knox has to protect his star witness.”
Waller nodded. “Can you blame him?”
Payne sighed. “No, I guess not. But I’ll want it back.” He reached inside his suit jacket.
“Two fingers! Take it out with two fingers—”
“If I was going to shoot you, Jon, you wouldn’t have gotten out of Scott’s car alive.” Payne pulled out his weapon, pressed it down into Waller’s palm—then wrapped his fingers around the back of Waller’s hand.
“What the fuck—”
In a lightning fast move, Payne slapped a handcuff on his partner’s left wrist. Waller pulled back—but not before Payne had flicked the other end of the restraint around the metal pole that ran the length of the seat in front of them.
Waller reached for his gun with his free right hand—but Payne’s left was already on the weapon and yanking it out of the holster.
Payne backed away and slipped the forty caliber handgun into his own shoulder harness.
“You’re out of your fucking mind—”
“Am I? Do you really think I’ve lost my mind, Jon?”
“I don’t know what to think—”
“Well, I do. Now, give me your set of cuffs. And the key.”
“No.”
Payne chambered a bullet and held his Glock out in front of him.
Waller looked at the barrel of the gun and swallowed hard. “You’re not going to use that on me, you just said so yourself.”
“Truth is, Jon, I don’t know how I’m gonna react. I’m so damned confused... the stress is unbearable. I got hit in the head so hard I don’t even remember my wife. When you’re confused and stressed-out, and your back’s up against a wall, you get paranoid, you do things. Things you may regret later. Do you really wanna push me?”
Waller hesitated, his gaze shifting between Payne’s hollow, intense eyes and the barrel of the gun. He dug into his pocket, produced a small ring of keys, and tossed them at Payne, who removed the long, thin, black key. He dropped the rest to the floor and kicked them beneath Waller’s seat.
Payne motioned him on with the gun. “Now the bracelets.”
Waller reached behind him and pulled out the handcuffs.
“Attach one end to that pole in front of you.” Payne approached cautiously, keeping the weapon as far away from Waller’s reach as possible. He took the free end of the cuffs and fastened them to his partner’s right wrist. He reached into Waller’s inside suit pocket, removed his cell phone, and turned it off.
“Why are you doing this to me, Harper? I’ve been trying to help you.”
“Because I’ve got a whole bunch of questions and no answers. I need those answers to get on with my life. You’ve helped me, yes. You’ve done your job. You’ve shown me who I was. But now I need to find out who I am. Lauren Chambers has the answers I need, and for some reason, you’re keeping me from communicating with her. What are you afraid of?”
Waller sighed, shook his head. “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but Knox was concerned that if you spoke with this woman who claimed to be your wife, we’d be placing her in danger, and you’d lose your focus on the trial. He wanted you to be totally free of any extraneous thoughts or complications. It was just going to be for a few more weeks.”
“That complication is my wife, Jon. I need to know how I fit into her life now.”
“A little while ago, you wanted to stay on the job, remember?”
“What’s that got to do with anything? I’m glad I’m back, I told you that. Believe me, that’s not the problem—”
“Then don’t fuck it up, Harper. Do your thing, take the stand and testify. Then your life’s your own. Stay or go. Your choice.”
“She thinks I’m missing. I need to at least tell her I’m okay.”
“I’ll see about getting word to her. We’ll make things right by you, I promise. But you’ve gotta help us out.” Waller nodded toward the cuffs. “You can start by getting these things off me.”
The train pulled to a stop at the Foggy Bottom station. Payne backed toward the door, then stopped.
“I need to do some thinking. Figure some things out.”
“Harper—don’t leave me here.”
“I need some space, some time.”
The tone sounded and the doors began to close. Payne jumped through them and stood there, watching Waller through the window. Waller’s face was a deep crimson, and he was yelling, using language Payne would’ve taken offense to if this had been some other time.
But this wasn’t some other time.
Payne turned away and headed toward the escalator. “Like you said, Jon... we do what we have to do.”
48
Scott Haviland stood at the bright opening to the Metro’s Archives-Navy Memorial Station. He stared down at the wallet in his left hand and saw Jonathan Waller’s smiling face looking up at him from the Virginia driver’s license. Not surprisingly, the wallet was nearly empty; photos of Waller’s two brothers were still inside, but the cash and credit cards were gone.
Haviland tucked the wallet inside his suit jacket and walked the length of the platform before descending a level and searching for a sign of either his partner or Harper Payne.
But he really did not expect to find them. He surmised that Payne had jumped on a train and that Waller had followed him aboard.
Haviland sat down on the bench and spread his arms across the seatback. The station manager had thought he recalled seeing two men matching their description entering the station a few minutes apart, but he could not be sure. Haviland turned his headfirst to the left, then to the right, taking in the expansive, high-ceilinged terminal. Very few people were in the station, and it was unlikely any of them had seen anything. If there had been an altercation, someone would’ve called 9-1-1, and police would be all over the place. Bottom line was that if his partner and Payne had been here, they weren’t here now, and that’s really all that mattered.
Haviland again tried reaching Waller’s cell phone, but was forwarded to his voicemail... which meant that either he had turned it off so it would not ring and give away his position, or he was for some reason unable to answer it. The uncertainty gnawed at him.
Haviland called his wife and told her not to wait up for him. He then slipped the phone back in his jacket pocket and began tapping out a rhythm on the cement floor wit
h his foot.
He thought about calling Knox and informing him of their status. But he did not want to take the chance of someone intercepting the call, let alone that, if his partner was successful in apprehending Payne, he would not want the director to know they had lost him in the first place. No, he would hold off a little longer before hitting the panic button.
For the time being, he could do nothing but wait until Waller called him back.
At a few minutes past one in the morning, Haviland and Waller stood at Douglas Knox’s front door. They had called him a few moments ago to wake him and let him know it was urgent they meet with him immediately.
They sat down heavily in the chairs arranged in front of his desk and briefed their boss on the events of the past few hours.
The director wore a burgundy robe and leather moccasins, his gray hair tousled and his complexion ruddy and disturbed. “What am I supposed to do, huh? What the hell am I supposed to do?” he bellowed.
Waller kept his eyes on the desk in front of him. “I’m sorry, sir.”
“Sorry?”
Waller knew it was the wrong thing to say—but he genuinely meant it. He felt responsible for allowing a key witness in one of the most important FBI cases in decades to escape. No matter how he wrote up his report, there was no way to avoid disciplinary action. But how it would affect his career wasn’t his biggest concern. It was saving face in front of the director. “He’s one of us, I thought I could trust him.”
“And the CIA thought it could trust Aldrich Ames,” Knox spat.
Waller cringed at the comparison to one of the most damaging spy cases ever to hit the U.S. intelligence community. He knew the two situations were vastly different, but he kept the thought to himself. “Yes, sir. I blew it. Nothing I say can excuse what I did.”
“I shoulder some of the responsibility as well, sir,” Haviland said.
“Fine, you’re a fuckup, too.” Knox stood, shoved his hands into the robe’s pockets, and began pacing. “How could you let this happen? Do you realize what’s on the line? We’ve got a court date four weeks away. With Payne, I’ve got control over what happens. Without him...”
Waller glanced at Haviland, who was staring straight ahead at the bookcase. Waller felt like reminding the director that they did not have Scarponi either—and without the defendant, the trial would be of limited value. But he decided to keep his thoughts to himself.
“Have you got any idea of where he might be?” Knox finally asked. “Any way of tracking him?”
“Aside from putting out an alert,” Haviland said, “there are no means of tracing him unless he uses one of Jon’s credit cards.”
“We can’t put out an alert,” Waller said. “We still don’t know who leaked the information about Harper’s amnesia. If it gets out that we lost our witness, every TV station would drag us through the stables until we had horseshit coming out of every orifice.”
“Let alone what Scarponi’s attorney will do with it,” Haviland added.
Knox stopped pacing. “He’s not going to use a credit card. It’d give us an immediate electronic trace on his location. He knows that. We’re not dealing with some dumb fugitive here.” There was silence for a moment while Knox stared at his meticulously neat desk. “Okay. Contact Metro PD. Tell them we’ve got a be-on-the-lookout for one of our own, Special Agent Richard Thompson. Tell them we suspect mental instability, and to use extreme caution. We don’t want him harmed. Then have Lindsey put out the same BOLO.” Knox shook his head. “Best we can hope for. Above all else, we need to find him.”
“Since we don’t know who the leak is,” Waller said, “I don’t know how long we can keep a lid on things.”
“I don’t either. But you two have left me no choice. That is, unless you find him fast.”
“We’ll do our best.”
“Make sure that’s good enough. I’m giving you forty-eight hours. If we don’t have him by then, you two are suspended indefinitely without pay.”
Waller and Haviland rose from their chairs and turned to leave.
“Forty-eight hours,” Knox called after them as they made their way to the door.
49
Payne was sitting in a cab, his head resting against the cold window. After leaving Waller cuffed to the subway car, he had boarded another train headed in the opposite direction. He then switched to the Red Line, took it into Maryland, and called a taxi service. He directed the driver to drop him at a small independent motel near Bethesda he had located in the yellow pages.
As the cab glided along the George Washington Memorial Parkway, he closed his eyes for a moment and saw the face of a woman in her midthirties, large brown eyes, and brunet hair. Full lips. “Lauren,” he said, opening his eyes. “That’s Lauren.”
The driver glanced at him in the rearview mirror. “You talking to me?”
Payne sat up straight. “No, no. I just... I just remembered something.” He tried to lock on the memory and suddenly saw himself surrounded by snow-covered mountains with a group of men. They were wearing backpacks and skis... and then the image was gone. The harder he tried to concentrate, the more distant the memory became.
After leaving the interstate, the cab hung a few turns and pulled into a pothole-infested parking lot. The driver called out over his shoulder, “Hey, buddy, this is it. Presidential Motor Lodge.” He paused a moment, taking in the state of the motel. “You sure you don’t want something a little nicer? There’s a Best Western a couple miles up the road—”
Payne craned his neck and squinted out the dirty front windshield at the run-down structure. “No, this is perfect, thanks.” He pulled a roll of bills from his pocket and paid the man, courtesy of Jonathan Waller. “Remember, I want a cab here at eight o’clock tomorrow morning.”
“Boss already knows. Someone’ll be here.”
After the cab drove away, Payne waited outside the office door, pressing a buzzer and peering at the front desk through the cracked window. It was a small room, perhaps ten by twelve, crammed with tourist brochures and guides, a well-worn brown Formica counter, and a small black-and-white television propped in the corner, its antenna a twisted wire coat hanger.
An unshaven man with a torn white undershirt stretched across his large belly appeared from behind the counter. He stepped as close as he could get to the door. “Yeah?”
“I called forty-five minutes ago, about a room for tonight.”
The man nodded, then waddled over toward the counter and pressed a button connected to a buzzer. Payne pushed on the door and entered the office.
“Payment due up front,” the man said as he slapped a clipboard and registration form on the counter.
Payne filled in the blanks with completely false information. He produced his credentials and flashed them, hoping the man wouldn’t take the time to read the name. “I’m a federal agent,” he said, closing the case and shoving it back in his suit jacket pocket. “I’ll give you my credit card number, but I don’t want you putting it through till I’m ready to check out, is that clear?”
The man nodded.
“I’m doing surveillance on a suspect who’s staying in your motel. But he’s very clever and has an electronic linkup to the credit card companies. If you put this through, they’ll alert him within seconds that I’m here.”
The man nodded again. “It’s that guy in eighteen, isn’t it?”
Payne looked around. “I can’t divulge that information, sir. But you seem like a pretty sharp guy.”
The man nodded, a half smile breaking through his unshaven face. “So I guess you want either seventeen or nineteen.”
Payne reasoned that in a dive like this, both rooms were probably open. “I’d prefer nineteen. Better angle.” The more detailed the lie, the more believable it was.
“I got ya.” The night manager turned to a board with keys dangling from bent nails. He chose a set and handed it to Payne. “Charge won’t go through till mornin’.”
Payne thanked the m
an and walked around to room 19. As the door swung open, the strong odor of mildew flared his nostrils. “Great,” he said, flicking on a light. He hung his torn suit on the lone wire hanger in the closet, cleaned his oozing thigh wound, washed his abraded hands and face, and sank down into the soft mattress.
Within minutes he was asleep, again dreaming of the brunet woman he knew only as Lauren Chambers.
50
A chilling drizzle misted the air along the path that rimmed the Tidal Basin, but Hector DeSantos did not mind it. The way he saw it, the thick air made it more difficult for someone to electronically eavesdrop on his conversation. Sometimes all it took to defeat high technology was good old-fashioned Mother Nature.
DeSantos’s legs had a spring to them this morning, giving him the impression he could run twenty miles if he wanted to. He sucked in a mouthful of moist air and blew it out, enjoying the solitude of the moment. As it currently stood, life wasn’t too bad for him.
He increased his pace and streaked past the Jefferson Memorial, where another runner joined in stride beside him. It was Brian Archer, dressed in gray sweats and a Redskins ball cap pulled down low over his brow.
“So what’s the urgency?” Archer asked. “And why here?”
“Thought we’d go for a run, spend some quality time together. We haven’t done this in months.”
“I could’ve slept another hour, Hector. This better be good.”
“Good isn’t the word, bro.”
Archer waited a few strides, then said, “Well, you gonna share the news or did you invite me out here to play games?”
“You’re uptight this a.m., my man! Loosen up!”
“You’re in too good a mood, Hector. You had some bizarre session with Maggie this morning, didn’t you?” Archer puffed. “I can tell.”
“I got some answers on that document.”
Archer kept his gaze straight ahead. “Oh yeah? That con came through?”
The Hunted Page 26
