by Gene Riehl
From her left, Lisa heard a car pull up to the curb out front. Despite the industrial thickness of the glass in the doors, she heard the deep boom of rock music from the car’s radio. She turned toward the sound, saw the passenger door open and a beautiful young woman emerge. It was Jillian, from the penthouse loft at the top of the building. Jillian’s husband, Rick, was dropping her off before parking the car downstairs. Jillian was laughing as she leaned in toward her husband, saying something Lisa couldn’t hear, although she could see Rick laughing in response. They were having a great night, and suddenly Lisa didn’t like either one of them very much.
She stepped up closer to the elevator and whacked the button with the heel of her hand, and all at once—almost as though it had been reading her mind—the damned thing arrived. Lisa darted inside and pushed the CLOSE button before Jillian could see her, then leaned against the wall of the elevator and looked forward to going to bed.
SIXTEEN
“Go back?” William said, half an hour later, across the desk in his undercover office.
His tired eyes had grown more and more narrow as Monk told him what had happened back at the mansion, and now his voice was downright hostile.
“You want to go back to Thomas Franklin?” William shook his head. “You’ve got to be crazy.”
Hearing the words—the same words he’d been saying to himself in the limo all the way back to the District—Monk had to admit that William could be right. But that didn’t mean he was about to agree.
“Do I want to go back? Hell no, I don’t.” Those were the words William would want to hear. “I have to, is what I’m saying.”
“But you saw the Madonna … you just told me you saw it.”
Monk looked away for a moment. “I just can’t be sure. Franklin’s guards were all over me. The security camera was panning too fast. Five seconds … I had maybe five seconds.” Monk shrugged. “I can’t sit here and tell you I’m certain.”
“But it’s possible, right? The secret room was definitely a stash.”
“It was private, that’s for damned sure … And it was certainly secret, the way the guards rushed me out of there. Hell, I suppose you could call it a stash.” Monk hesitated. “But what difference does it make? I’m almost certain I saw a Madonna, but I can’t tell you for sure it was Lyman Davidson’s da Vinci. Not sure enough to go after a man as connected as Thomas Franklin.”
William looked away, toward the window to his left. Monk followed his gaze. At two-thirty in the morning the sky was lit by a moon partially obscured by a thin patchwork of clouds, their edges silvery against the darkness. The sort of night sky you see in the opening credits of a horror movie, Monk couldn’t help thinking. Add a clap or two of thunder, you’d have the whole thing. He turned back to see William watching him. Monk leaned forward in his chair.
“It won’t be long until Franklin knows about what happened with me in his vault, if he doesn’t already know. His security people might wait overnight to make their report, but we can’t count on that. They’ll identify me as Derek Towne, but Franklin will put it together. He’ll remember Lisa and me from the reception line.”
“So let him stew. We wanted him to know you were at the party, and you made damned sure of that.” William paused. “Actually, your getting caught upstairs might work to our advantage. Franklin’s got to be wondering what’s coming next.”
“What’s coming next has got to be me. Straight up, straight into his face.” Monk heard his voice quicken. “You want him to stew, give him even more reason to. Give him a chance to make a mistake. If your mole is telling the truth, if Franklin’s really buying stolen art from Sung Kim, he has to be scared shitless about what happened with me. He has to be contacting her. By going back, I’ll make it even more necessary for him to talk to her.”
“The Madonna won’t be there, Monk.” William sounded like a tired schoolteacher with a particularly dull child. “If the mole is right about him, Franklin’s already moved the Madonna somewhere we’ll never find it.”
“But we can’t know that for sure unless I go back, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. We can’t get a FISA wire with what I think I saw, and we’ve got to have the wire. It’s the only way we’ll ever get to Sung Kim.”
“Carter will never go for it.”
“Then I’m afraid we’ve got a problem.”
“With you there’s always a problem.”
“The Madonna robbery is still my case. Regardless of your Sung Kim, I’m still the case agent on Lyman Davidson’s da Vinci. I may have been ordered to stay away as long as you were working Trevor Blaine, but that ended when you took your FISA wire down. Now it’s back to business as usual, and that means I keep looking for the Madonna. Thomas Franklin is my best lead. With you or without you, I’m going back to him.”
William sat back in his chair. “You’re bluffing. I’ve played enough poker with you to know.”
Monk raised his eyebrows but said nothing, happy to stand pat with the cards in his hand. The silence grew longer, and Monk wasn’t about to break it.
“You made a deal,” William said at last. “You agreed to the deal.”
“When do we talk to Carter?”
“Goddammit, Monk, I told him this would happen if we cut you in.” William leaned forward. “But this time you’re going to lose. You pull this shit with the director of NSA, you’re going to—”
Monk raised his hand like a traffic cop. “Forty-eight hours. With Philip Carter’s permission or without it, I go back to Franklin in two days.”
They hadn’t talked about Bethany Randall.
But Monk knew they would.
On his way back to Lisa at the loft—and despite his tired brain—he had no trouble bringing up the images of that night in the hot tub, the worst part of the night, at any rate. The quick jolt of humiliation at getting caught … Bethany’s leap off his mostly naked body as William stood over the two of them with a gin and tonic in his hand. The shouting, all three of them yelling, mostly a slurred and drunken mixture of threats, apologies, and promises. Then William throwing him and Bethany out into the night … and Bethany’s desire to keep the party going at her house. Finally, Monk’s better angels coming to the rescue and taking him home.
Christ.
He and William hadn’t talked about it yet, but it would happen.
Sooner or later it had to happen.
SEVENTEEN
Thomas Franklin loved this room.
Which made the thought of losing it all the harder to take.
His study was the only part of the mansion he’d designed himself. From the two-story floor-to-ceiling windows—arched and mullioned windows, framed in flawless maple, that stretched all the way across the far wall—to the built-in bookshelves that occupied two of the other three walls, Franklin’s imprint was all over the room. He’d brought the antique cherry desk in the center of the room from France, the red, blue, and green carpets from a Persia that no longer existed, and the custom-made club chairs from North Carolina. The red oak floor was local, straight from the Pennsylvania forest surrounding Battle Valley Farm, and this morning the wide planking took on a fiery glow as it reflected the sunlight streaming through the windows.
Franklin settled into the high-backed swivel chair behind the desk and sat quietly, tipping back in the chair and closing his eyes for a moment before starting to work again on the Nakamura problem. He couldn’t go back to the Hill, that much was certain. The president would never forgive his meddling a second time, and he needed the president more than ever, especially in the next four years. If he got another four years. And Franklin couldn’t argue directly with the man again, the president had made that pretty damned clear. Which left … which left what?
Franklin opened his eyes and swung toward the desk. There had to be something. Some way he could still save this thing. He reached for the phone. If he couldn’t use Congress, he could try something more powerful. He could go straight to the money behind the law
makers. Global wasn’t the only company at risk should the president give Ishii Nakamura what he was asking for. Maybe the way to do this was to go directly to the people who really ran the country.
He reached for his private phone directory, the beige leather notebook with numbers few people in the country would ever dial, but before he could open his desk drawer he was interrupted by a knock on the door.
“Yes,” he called. “Come in.”
The door swung open and Manny Johnson walked in. Franklin motioned for Battle Valley Farm’s chief of security to approach the desk.
“What is it?” Franklin said. “I’m busy.”
Johnson shifted his weight from foot to foot, lifted his hand to his face to stifle a short cough. “It’s the panic room,” he said. “I didn’t want to bother you with this at the time, but it happened again. At the party.”
Franklin stared at him. “Damn it, Manny, what’s this make? Four … five times?”
“Six, I’m afraid. I’ve already talked to the factory rep. We can recalibrate the door, but that’s about all they can do.”
Franklin shook his head. The panic room had been Johnson’s idea, but it was turning into a giant pain in the ass. Installed to keep bad guys out, it was turning out to be a lot better at keeping good people in.
“What about the lock on the bedroom door?”
“The guy said it wasn’t locked. That the doors were wide open.” Manny Johnson paused. “He said you told him to feel free to look around.”
Franklin grunted. “I tell everybody that.”
“Our log shows that the door was locked at nine o’clock. Did you go into the bedroom after that?”
“Of course not. I was downstairs the whole—” Franklin stopped. “Wait a minute. I did run upstairs for a second, but I locked the door again when I left.” At least he thought he had. “You said you didn’t want to bother me with this when it happened. So why’re you bothering me with it now?”
Johnson looked at the floor for a moment before his eyes came back up. “Uh …,” he began, then stopped. “Uh … This time … Well, it wasn’t just the panic room this time.”
Franklin glanced at the phone, impatient to get back to his own problem. “Yeah, I know. The bedroom lock. You just told …” His voice died as he realized what Johnson was saying. “The collection? Goddammit, Manny, the collection?”
“I don’t know how he did it. No way he could have known.”
“And you didn’t come for me?”
“He wasn’t in there ten seconds. We caught him on the monitor downstairs … he just barely got through the door when we nailed him.”
“What was he doing up there? When you got there, I mean.”
“Just standing in the doorway. Didn’t say anything about what he saw. Probably figured every house like this has a secret room filled with art.”
“Who was he?”
“Derek Towne, according to the driver’s license he gave us. We ran him through Maryland Motor Vehicles. License checked out.”
“Towne,” Franklin said. “Derek Towne. Never heard of him.” He paused. “You checked the guest list, of course.”
“He was on it. His girlfriend, too.”
“His girlfriend?” Franklin looked past Manny Johnson, in the direction of the great room down the hall. Girlfriends were unusual at such a formally diplomatic function. Lots of wives, but not many lovers. He would have thought he’d remember a girlfriend. He closed his eyes again, but opened them immediately when he felt a tightening in the back of his neck. He sat forward, his eyes on Manny again.
“What did this Towne look like?”
“Tall. Six-two, maybe. Brown hair, blue eyes. Forty-five years old, according to his driver’s license.”
“And his girlfriend?”
“Dark hair. Red gown. Legs a mile long. Gorgeous, but not too happy.”
Franklin closed his eyes, trying to see the woman in his mind’s eye. “But you say this guy was alone upstairs.”
“Up in the vault he was, but we put him and the girlfriend into a limo afterwards.”
“You threw them out?”
Manny shook his head. “He couldn’t wait to leave. I’ve never seen anybody so embarrassed.” He chuckled. “His date was giving him a pretty good ass-chewing when I closed the car door.”
Franklin leaned back, his mind racing, before he told himself to relax. It couldn’t have been those two … That just wasn’t the way it worked. He swung forward again. “You’ve got video, of course. From the panic room.”
“I made a cassette in case you wanted to see it.”
“I do want to see it.” Franklin rose from his chair. “I most certainly do.”
EIGHTEEN
Legal training went the whole two hours.
Despite the claustrophobic afternoon heat that the antiquated SOG air-conditioning system had no chance against, the agent who’d been sent over from WFO to lecture on the latest federal criminal court decisions took every last second of his allotted time. Monk and the rest of the special operations group people sagged with relief when the clock finally hit five. Fifteen minutes later he was climbing into his Saab, anxious to get to the loft, where it would be at least ten degrees cooler. But before he could turn the ignition key, his cell phone rang. It was Lisa.
“Don’t wait for me,” she told him. “I’ll be lucky to get home by nine, so go ahead and eat.”
“What’s going on?”
“Gotta run over to Dulles. One of the Customs dogs smelled out an explosive in an air-freight shipment. ATF says it’s C4.”
Monk frowned. “Why call you guys? Surely they don’t have anybody under arrest.”
“They don’t, no, but we have all these new protocols. If the shipment involves certain countries, the Customs people at the airport have to call us immediately. Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria … the usual suspects.”
“Which one we talking about this time?”
“North Korea.”
Monk felt himself frowning. “A shipment from North Korea? We don’t do business with them.”
“The flight originated in China, but it stopped in Pyongyang on the way.”
North Korea? Suddenly Monk didn’t feel the heat.
“I’ve got an idea,” he said. “Instead of going home, why don’t I tag along. We can go to dinner in Alexandria when you finish.”
“Are you sure? Could get late before I break free.”
“If it does, I can go out and get us some food, bring it to you at the airport.”
Lisa laughed. “Doesn’t sound like much of a date to me, but sure. Do you good to get away from the SOG. See how the real bureau works for a change.”
It took Monk almost an hour in the going-home traffic to get to freight terminal building 5, at the far edge of the immense runway system at Washington Dulles International Airport. Lisa was already inside, the Customs agent at the door told him when Monk presented his credentials. She and two other members of her counterterrorism squad from WFO were still with the suspect shipment, although the ATF people had taken the C4 back to their lab already.
Monk stared into the cavernous warehouse, lined on both sides with immense steel racks filled with containers, and saw Lisa standing with a man and woman in business clothing about halfway down the building. He dodged his way among a number of beeping forklift trucks and stacks of freight until he got to them.
“Puller,” Lisa said when he walked up. She gestured toward the agents with her. “Do you know Laura Ridley and Henry Benitez?”
“I don’t think so,” Monk said. The beefed-up counterterrorism program had brought scores of agents into Washington from all over the country. It was impossible to keep up with the new faces. He stepped over and shook hands.
“Puller Monk,” he said. “From the SOG.”
Lisa pointed toward the wooden container to their right, a shipping crate the size of an SUV. It had been opened, and the contents laid out on the concrete floor.
“Shipment star
ted out in Taipei,” Lisa said. “Consumer electronic gear … DVD players. The plane made a stop in Pyongyang to off-load freight before coming straight to Dulles.” She paused. “Customs did their routine, ran the sniffer dogs around the container to check for drugs or explosives. The drug dog didn’t react at all. The other one didn’t signal, but was acting funny about the container, so Customs opened it up and transferred the individual boxes to the floor here. The drug dog still found nothing, but the bomb sniffer signaled when he got to the box with the plastique.”
Lisa led the way to a table that had been set up next to the container. Monk could see the suspect DVD box, lying open on the table.
“ATF X-rayed the box,” she said. “There was no DVD inside, no electronic or mechanical devices of any kind. What they saw was a brick-size container with a lump of something inside it.”
Lisa glanced back toward the front door of the warehouse.
“They cleared the area outside, then used their robot to open both the DVD box and the one inside it, the one with the plastique. It was an aluminum container, sealed with a dozen layers of duct tape. It had been cleaned with some kind of solvent before being placed in the DVD box. That’s why the dog didn’t catch the C4 while it was inside the air-freight container … not until he could put his nose right up next to the DVD box itself.”
“And it was C4,” Monk said. “We’re sure it was a plastic explosive.”
