by Gene Riehl
“Get him out of here!” Franklin snapped. “The man’s delusional. He belongs in a hospital.”
“Think about it,” Monk said. “Think about where Sung Kim would have put her bomb … where she would have put it to make sure she got all three of you.”
“What are you waiting for?” Franklin shouted at the agents. “I told you to get this guy out of—”
His voice stopped.
He looked back in the direction of his study, and his body seemed to shudder. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Dear God.”
He turned toward the kitchen door and bolted through it, shouting as he ran.
“Get out!” he roared. “Get out of the house! Everybody get out of the house!”
The Secret Service people dashed for the door, Monk close behind.
Everybody in the kitchen followed.
In the corridor, he saw the president and the Japanese prime minister being shoved by their guards toward the veranda. He sprinted harder to catch up as they ran across the veranda and onto the lawn. Now everyone was flailing toward the golf course.
Everyone, Monk noticed, but Franklin.
Monk paused to look back as he hit the edge of the course.
He saw Thomas Franklin standing on the veranda, looking at the rest of them when his house exploded.
SIXTY-FOUR
Suddenly Monk was flying.
The shock wave lifted him off his feet and hurled him forward. He seemed to be swimming through the air until he crashed to the turf and lay stunned in the grass.
A moment later—or maybe it was longer than that—he was able to lift his head.
He saw the president lying a few yards in front of him, a Secret Service agent sprawled next to his boss, one arm across the president’s back, still trying to protect him. Monk looked to his right. Prime Minister Nakamura was already struggling to get to his feet, but a huge Japanese bodyguard was holding him down, speaking quietly to him in Japanese. Monk turned his attention back to the president. Now he was trying to get to his feet as well. Two Secret Service men tried to hold him down, but he shoved their arms aside.
Monk rose to his knees and fought off a wave of dizziness, then used his arms to push away from the grass and get on his feet.
Now there were loud voices, shouting, screaming, and people running toward them. He turned back toward the mansion. The veranda was gone. Most of the south wing was gone. What remained was engulfed in flames fifty feet high.
Damn it, he thought. How many were still in there? His neck tightened with rage as he thought about the woman who’d done this, the woman who for damned sure hadn’t been in the mansion when it exploded. And that she was getting away as he continued to stand here looking at the remnants of what she’d done.
He needed a car.
Monk saw that the Secret Service cars that had been parked closest to the south wing—only a few feet from the veranda in case of an emergency—had been hammered by the blast and now sat in flames. He looked to his right, toward the front of the mansion. Two of the black Ford sedans sat intact in the driveway. He started toward them, slowly at first, then running, then sprinting. The keys would be in the cars, he knew. It was standard procedure. When seconds counted, cars without keys were useless. A few moments later he was behind the wheel of the first one he came to.
He started the engine and jerked the gear lever into Drive. He couldn’t go out the main gate, the Secret Service people out there were too well trained. They’d want to rush to the mansion, toward the explosion, but they wouldn’t. They would stay where they were and seal the gate. No one would get in or out for hours. He had to find an alternate route.
The golf course was his best bet.
There had to be a separate service road into the course. A golf course required immense amounts of equipment and material, and there was no way all that stuff would be brought in through the main gate. There would be maintenance sheds as well, probably at the far end of the course, far enough away to keep them out of sight. The service road would lead from the sheds out to the road running past the farm itself, and there would be a gate in the fence to take care of that road.
Monk pulled his car out past the matching black Ford ahead, and as he did so he heard a voice behind him.
“Hey!” a man shouted. “Hey!”
In the rearview mirror he saw two men running toward him, guns drawn. He stomped on the accelerator, still watching. They were kneeling on one knee now, lifting their guns. In the next moment his back window exploded, and Monk heard what sounded like angry bees flying past his head. He scrunched down behind the wheel and kept going. He heard more bees, the loud pop-crack of automatic weapons. He turned right, onto the golf course, across the nearest fairway, then right again, in the direction of the fence at the far end of the course.
Hurtling across the turf, he came to a green and couldn’t avoid it. A huge sand bunker loomed in front of him but he jerked the wheel hard enough to get past it. He heard a voice on the radio under the dashboard.
“All units,” the voice said evenly, well trained to show no emotion. “Suspect on the golf course in one of our automobiles. Heading northwest.”
Monk grabbed the microphone. He thought for a moment about identifying himself, telling them who he was and who he was going after, then realized he would just be wasting his time. There’d be another delay while they confirmed his identity, while they questioned him, while they fucked around until Sung Kim was gone forever. So he pushed the button on the mike and kept his voice just as calm as the one he’d heard.
“Suspect sighted,” he said. “On the road heading for the main gate. All units respond to the main gate.”
“Ten-four,” the voice answered, then paused. “Unit calling, please identify yourself.”
Monk continued to rocket across the course toward the fence he could now see in the distance. “Repeat,” he said into the microphone. “Suspect entering road to main gate. All units, close in on main gate.”
But the other voice wasn’t buying it.
“All units stand by,” it said. “Unit reporting suspect’s position identify yourself.” Then the calm vanished. “Who the hell is this?” A pause. “All units, suspect’s using our radio! Disregard any voice you don’t recognize!”
Monk flipped the microphone into the seat next to him. He hadn’t gotten away with it for long, but maybe long enough. He was at the maintenance sheds now, bouncing over the undulating ground between the towering oaks and sycamores, weaving in and out of the bushes as he approached the blacktop service road leading from the sheds to the gate in the fence up ahead.
Swinging the Ford onto the road, he took dead aim at the center of the chain-link gate, then tromped on the gas. The big sedan jumped at the gate, struck with a tremendous crash. Bits and pieces of shattered metal flew toward the windshield as the gate collapsed. Monk recoiled, but the debris flew over the top of the car as he turned up the road toward State 15, heading for Maryland.
SIXTY-FIVE
Sung Kim was careful to obey the speed limit.
Three miles clear of the farm on State 15, she slowed to make the turn into a small road on her right. She drove down the road for a half mile before she saw the gray Lincoln sedan parked off to the side. She passed the Lincoln, pulled the Dodge van over and parked. Opening the door and sliding out, she didn’t bother to take anything. There was nothing in the van that could lead anyone to her.
She walked back to the Lincoln. The driver nodded as she approached, then opened the door and got out of the car.
“It’s ready?” she asked him.
“Of course,” he said. Despite the fact that the man was Japanese, that every aspect of his ID and legend linked him directly to Tokyo, his English was perfect. “The plates are untraceable,” he added. “The registration checks out perfectly.”
“And the van?”
“By tonight there will be no evidence it ever existed.”
Sung Kim nodded, went past him, and got into t
he Lincoln. She closed the door and watched the man as he walked to the van and climbed in behind the wheel. She started the engine and pulled up to the side of the Dodge, then reached across to the glove compartment and pulled out a small brown leather purse. She got out of the Lincoln and walked around to the driver’s door of the van. The driver’s eyebrows rose as he lowered his window.
“Did I forget something?” he asked.
Sung Kim moved up close to him, kept the purse down by the side of her leg where he couldn’t see it. From the purse she withdrew a Sig Sauer nine-millimeter semiautomatic with an attached silencer. She kept it out of sight as long as possible before swinging it up and shooting him directly above the line of his eyes. The man seemed to stare at her for a moment before he fell to his right across the center console.
Sung Kim threw the gun into the seat next to him, closed the door and went back to the Lincoln. She glanced at her watch on the way, and as she did so she heard a tremendous explosion from the direction of the mansion. The Secret Service and the FBI would be on their way soon. They would find the Japanese man. Later they would find the Japanese fibers in the ammunition bunker.
It wouldn’t hold up over time, of course, but it would create doubt. The conspiracy wackos would do the rest. No matter what facts the bureau came up with, the crazies would never believe them. The talk shows would keep the rumors alive for years. It would be decades before the Japanese recovered.
He didn’t have long, Monk knew.
Back at the mansion the Secret Service would be dashing around in a state of confusion. They would have verified his identity by now, but they’d be unable to fathom why an FBI agent had broken into the golf course and popped out of the dumbwaiter. They’d be trying to figure out his confrontation with Thomas Franklin—and how his doing so had saved the president and the Japanese prime minister—but that didn’t mean they’d stop coming after him.
And he had another problem as well. An even bigger one.
Weapons. He didn’t have any.
He’d needed only his mouth with Franklin, but it would take more than words for the rest of this.
Monk reached for the telephone hanging on the dashboard and punched Lisa’s cell phone number. He listened to it ring, then her voice asking him to leave a message. Damn it. He checked the clock in the dashboard. Seven-twenty. Could she still be at the office? He tried the phone at her desk. She answered after the first ring.
“Puller?” she asked before he could get a word out.
Hearing her voice, Monk’s body sagged. He released a breath he wasn’t even aware he was holding. Thank God, he heard himself murmur. Dear God, thank you. He hadn’t believed for a moment that she was dead, he told himself, but suddenly he was so weak with relief he thought he might have to pull over to the side of the road.
“Puller?” she repeated. “Is that you?”
“I need you, Lisa. I need your help.”
“Christ, Puller, what are you up to? I just came out of the assistant director’s office. He wants to know what you’re doing at Franklin’s—”
“Not now!” Monk snapped. “Just listen!”
A brief pause. “What do you need? Where do you want me?”
SIXTY-SIX
He’d never make it in time.
Monk’s leg ached with the pressure of his foot on the gas pedal, but the Ford just wasn’t fast enough to make up for the head start Bethany had. And he didn’t even know how big a head start that was. Best case, she’d managed to get out of Franklin’s farm only a few minutes before the explosion. Worst case, she’d been gone half an hour before he even got there.
And it wasn’t like he knew for certain where she was going, either. His best guess was just that, a guess. If he was wrong …
Monk told himself to shut up and drive.
He stared through the windshield as he raced south on State 15, thinking about the best way to get to Frederick, Maryland. There were no metropolitan areas between here and the airstrip, just this side of Frederick. At a hundred miles an hour he’d be there in twenty minutes. He thought about calling ahead, but the airstrip was not controlled, or it hadn’t been the dozen or so times he’d been there with William and Bethany. There was no tower. Most likely there wouldn’t be anyone around at all except the people who ran the gas pumps.
She couldn’t get there without a red light and siren.
It had taken Lisa ten minutes to go to the gun vault on the third floor at WFO, grab a shotgun and a box of rifled slugs, and get down to the basement to her car.
Ten precious minutes.
In the garage, behind the wheel of her Grand Prix, she reached under the front seat and pulled out the magnetic red emergency light, then hopped out of the car and attached it with a heavy “chunk” to the roof. She fed the coiled black cord back through the window and plugged it into the cigarette lighter. She backed out of her parking space and raced to the exit. She pounded on the steering wheel as she waited for the gate to rise, before she zipped up the ramp and out into the street.
Lisa reached to a toggle switch under the dashboard and flipped the siren on, then did the best she could on the surface streets, darting from one lane to another, slipping in and out of traffic. Even so, she was rigid with frustration by the time she managed to get on the Interstate and head north toward Maryland.
He’d made a mistake, Monk realized.
Bethany wasn’t coming here.
She wasn’t going to use her airplane after all.
Parked at the edge of the airstrip property, hidden by a stand of oaks from the view of anyone near the gray metal hangers, he could see both the hangers and the tarmac taxiway that led out to the runway. There was no sign of her. He chewed on the inside of his cheek. No matter how slowly Bethany had driven, she had to be here by now. Maybe she was using a safe house instead. Maybe she was going to stay in Washington until she could be spirited away.
Monk’s stomach began to hurt.
She wouldn’t need much hiding, he admitted. She was a chameleon. In a matter of hours she’d be another person, a completely different woman. No one would even know where to start looking for her.
He reached for the cell phone to call Lisa. There was no longer any point in her breaking her neck to get here. But he hadn’t punched in her number before he saw a gray Lincoln sedan pull up to one of the hangers, and a moment later Bethany get out of the car. There was no mistaking her long red hair and the way she walked. His muscles tightened. Despite the fact that he was unarmed, it took all his strength to keep from going after her. He finished dialing. Again Lisa answered after the first ring.
“She’s here,” Monk told her. “I need you … I need you right now.”
“Ten minutes. Traffic’s awful.”
“Too long. She’ll be gone by then.”
“Get off the phone and let me drive.”
He hung up and watched.
A few minutes later the big hanger doors swung open, and Monk could see the same blue and white Beechcraft Baron that Bethany used to fly. He saw her come out of the hanger carrying a long metal tool. She attached the tool to the nose of the plane and began to pull. The Baron rolled out of the hangar and when it was completely out on the taxiway, she detached the pulling tool and took it back into the hangar. When she came out, she went directly to the plane, stepped up on the wing, opened the door, and got into the cockpit. She had no luggage, no briefcase, nothing in her hands, as she closed the door behind her.
Monk looked around, hoping somehow that Lisa had been wrong about how long it would take her to get here. That she might show up early. But she didn’t. Damn it. He was going to have to ram the plane to keep it on the ground.
Then he shook his head.
Ramming her with his car wouldn’t work.
The Baron wouldn’t be able to fly, but his Ford might very well be disabled as well. Bethany would climb down and shoot him dead. Then she’d use the Lincoln to escape.
Maybe he should call the cops. He cou
ld report her tail number. The police would put out a call to anywhere she might land. But again he shook his head. There was just no point. By the time he got the cops to understand what he was telling them, made them believe what he was telling them, she’d be three hundred miles away. Landing at any one of a hundred dinky private airstrips like this one. Before he could get anybody organized to go after her, she’d be on the ground again, this time in another state and on her way to Canada. She’d have resources across the border. Bethany Randall would cease to exist, but that didn’t mean the woman herself would. Sooner or later she’d surface again. A world leader would die, then another, and another.
Monk thought about William’s investigation, about what he’d called the ipyanghan.
There could be another American-born assassin in Washington already, another sleeper standing by for orders once Sung Kim set up shop elsewhere.
Suddenly he heard the sound of ignition from the Baron and saw the propellers of the starboard engine begin to turn, to spin faster and faster until they were a blurring roar. Then the port engine fired up. Monk’s legs began to twitch. The engines would be warm in another minute. Bethany would taxi out to the runway. Monk reached for the phone to call Lisa again, but realized there was no point. She was already coming as fast as she could. The Baron began to taxi toward the head of the runway. Monk started the Ford.
He would have to ram the plane after all.
SIXTY-SEVEN
He’d have to wreck the plane and take his chances afterward.
Bethany was at the top of the runway now. He could hear her running up the engines, testing first one then the other, spinning them to maximum thrust as she checked the oil pressure and vacuum systems. He turned to look for Lisa, saw nothing, then pulled the gear lever into Drive and started toward the Baron. A hundred yards later, he heard the honk of a car horn.
