The Blood of Patriots

by William W. Johnstone

  It was a half-hour ride to the airport. He still had enough time to do one thing. It was risky, but they had left him no choice.

  “Do you think Muscle would mind if I had a few minutes alone to call my daughter?” Ward asked.

  “I can make that happen, as long as you promise you won’t try and go out the window,” she said. “I’ve never had a fugitive and I’ll be real disappointed if you’re my first.”

  “I won’t go anywhere without you,” he promised.

  She chewed her cheek while she looked at him. “Okay. Five minutes,” she said, turning and walking toward the entrance.

  “Thanks.”

  She paused and pointed at the bundle of clothing. “And you might want to change your shirt. You look like you bodysurfed the sidewalk.”

  “I did.”

  When the police chief had left—she had not gone far, was chatting with the man at the desk—Ward took out his cell phone. It had survived the fight and he quickly scanned the directory. He was about to play his one option.

  He called Angie Dickson.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  As she made her way toward the deliveries on Homestead Drive, Angie couldn’t stop thinking about John Ward.

  It wasn’t just about what had happened to him but how he made her feel—safe. It wasn’t just that he looked after her, the way he chased her from the scene of the fight. It was his manner. Unlike her father, who was uncharacteristically wary, jittery, and gloomy this past year, John Ward was consistent, confident, and level. She knew Joanne pretty well but now she wondered how well she really knew her. Megan’s mother seemed so put together, but she didn’t understand how anyone could be unhappy with John Ward.

  She hoped that nothing was going to happen to him. She didn’t know what she could have done any differently, not without getting into trouble—

  Her phone sang Lady Gaga. Ward’s name came up. She felt a rush of excitement and hoped, prayed it was good news. She pulled over.

  “Mr. Ward, how are you?”

  “Fine, but the police chief wants me to go back to New York. That means these guys are going to continue getting away with assaulting people and destroying property. Unless you’re willing to do something for me, something that’s a little risky.”

  “Risky how?”

  “I don’t know, Angie. I wish I did. I do know that if we do nothing, the risks could be serious for your dad. I hate to drop that on you but—”

  “It’s all right. I’m in.”

  “Good girl,” he said. “First, check your rearview mirror. Is anyone following you?”

  She glanced back, saw well along the straight, darkening road. “Not that I can see.”

  “Fine,” he said. “I’m going to ask you a big favor. You can tell me no and I’ll understand. I need you to look in the bag of laundry you’re taking home.”

  “Now?”

  “I’ve got about three minutes before Chief Brennan comes to get me.”

  That overrode any concerns or reservations the young woman might have had. Holding the phone to her ear with a shoulder, she twisted from the seat and went through the van into the back. She pushed away bundles until she reached the ones that were going to her house. She pulled them out. There were three in all.

  “I assume you want my dad’s?” she asked.

  “Please.”

  “Opening now,” she told him.

  “Can you do it in such a way that it can be resealed ?”

  “I’ll try,” she said.

  It was dark in the back of the van, her body blocking most of the light from the front window. She turned around, placed the parcel before her. It was wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. She slipped the rope off by working it back and forth. Then she carefully pulled one taped end open and sat the parcel on its side. She saw her father’s white shirts stacked endwise, folded neatly. She slid her hand between two of them in the center.

  There was a bundle of paper inside. And another beside it. And more between two other shirts. She slipped one of the little packages out, working it back and forth until it came free. It was a business envelope. She slid a finger carefully under the pre-pasted flap. It came up easily. She looked inside.

  “Holy crap,” she said.

  “What is it?”

  “Money,” she told Ward. “Cash. Like, a lot of it.”

  “Denominations?”

  “Hundreds.”

  “Are the serial numbers consecutive?”

  She flipped through them. “No.”

  “New or old bills?”

  “Old.”

  “Not counterfeit,” he said. “How many bundles are there?”

  She poked through the shirts. “Feels like ten.”

  “And how many bills would you say are in each stack?”

  “I don’t know—I’d guess twenty-five?”

  “Laundering twenty-five thousand a day,” Ward said. “A quarter million every ten days. Can you take a picture with your cell phone?”

  She hesitated. “Is someone going to use this against my dad?”

  “God, Angie—I hope this can save him,” Ward said. “Your dad’s going to be in serious trouble when he’s found out, and he will be. If we can use the picture to get him to cooperate, that may be his only way out.”

  “I have to trust you,” she said, more for herself than for him.

  Angie held the money in front of her, took a picture, then took additional photos of the shirts, holding them apart as wide as she could with one hand so the camera could see the ends of the envelopes tucked inside.

  “Done,” she said.

  “Can you send the photos to me?” Ward asked.

  “I will when I get back up front. First I want to close up this package.”

  “Okay, but I don’t have a lot of time.”

  “I understand,” she said.

  Angie was about to put the cell phone down and get to work when she heard the sound of a car. She froze as it passed, honking, the driver complaining loudly about something as he went around the van.

  “Jesus,” she sighed.

  “What?”

  “A car went by, almost gave me a heart attack,” she said. “I shouldn’t have pulled over here. It’s, like, not very wide.”

  She set the cell phone on the floor of the van as she carefully replaced the money—checking first to see which way the others were facing so she didn’t slip it in the wrong way. Then she ran her fingers along the sides of the shirts to fluff them, covering the indentations her fingers had made. She carefully folded the paper back over, had a tougher time getting the cord to go back around it, but finally put everything together. If she stumbled when she went in the house and dropped it, that would explain the wrinkles in the paper. She scooped up her cell phone.

  “Going back to the front now—”

  There was another sound, louder than the car. She jumped into the driver’s seat to move the car as an ATV pulled up beside her.

  The driver throttled down. It was Javad, Mrs. Fawaz’s cousin. He motioned for her to roll down the window.

  “Hello, Angie,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  “Mr. Fawaz got a call from Mrs. McCrea wanting to know, ‘Where is my dress?’ He asked me to come and see if you got a flat or something.”

  “Oh, no, no,” Angie said. “Some, uh—some bundles fell over. I stopped to fix them.”

  “While you were talking on the phone?”

  “A friend,” she explained, then said into the phone, “I’ll call you later,” and snapped it shut. “Hey, I can multi-task,” she added.

  “You know, Mr. Fawaz doesn’t like when you drive and talk like that.”

  “I wasn’t! I called while I was fixing the bundles.”

  The young man looked at her darkly. She didn’t wait for him to say anything else. She just started the van and drove off. Angie watched in her rearview mirror. He didn’t leave. He had pulled over and flipped out his phone.

  Proba
bly calling Mr. Fawaz to tell him I’m on my way, she thought.

  She hoped.

  The McCreas were the next stop. She decided not to call Mr. Ward until she had made the drop that had caused that little commotion. Ringing the bell, Angie handed the dress to their teenage son Cabot.

  “Tell your mom I’m sorry,” Angie said.

  “For what?”

  “For being late,” the girl replied.

  He shrugged. “No foul,” he said, his words like an electric wire held to her spine. “She’s not home from work yet.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Ward jogged over to Brennan and pulled her aside.

  “You’ve got to find Angie Dickson,” he told her.

  “What are you talking about?” The police chief took his arm and walked him back toward the den. “What have you done now?”

  “She opened a dry cleaning parcel that was going to her house,” Ward explained. “She found twenty-five thousand bucks inside.”

  “A payoff? From Fawaz?”

  “I don’t think so,” Ward said. “This has the earmarks of a scheduled drop. Money laundering, more likely.”

  Brennan was incredulous. “Earl—his own daughter a mule?”

  “Hell, I’m not sure he’s thought it through. Any of it. From the Muslims’ point of view, though, she makes a perfect hostage.”

  “If everything goes as planned, she never finds out,” Brennan said. “If Dickson gets cold feet, she suffers frostbite.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You said I have to find her?”

  “Angie was on her route, hung up before she could send me photos of the cash—I think someone may have been checking up on her.”

  “You called her.”

  “Yeah.”

  Brennan made a sour face, but only for a moment. “Where was she when you spoke with her?”

  “I don’t know. She was making her rounds and pulled over.”

  “That could be anywhere.” Brennan considered the situation. “Even if they suspect her they probably won’t act now. They’ll talk to her father first.”

  “You must deal with a different breed of smuggler than I do,” Ward said. “How do you know they won’t take her back to the shop and interrogate her with a leather strap?”

  Brennan recoiled. “Where do you live, in the Roaring Twenties? The lifestyle is different out here, even for criminals.”

  “Tell that to Scott Randolph.”

  “Mr. Ward, our perps knocked Scott Randolph out and killed some pigs as a last, desperate move. From the bulletins I read, you’ve got homeless people in New York who do worse with a brick, on a whim.”

  The police chief had a point. Ward was just panicking over the box he’d persuaded Pandora to open. Yes, her father was in danger. But that wasn’t the only thing that prompted him to use her. He wanted these guys. He didn’t feel too good about moving her more directly into the kill zone.

  “No, she’ll get home just fine,” Brennan said. “And before you go off on ‘What did I get her into?—’”

  “Too late.”

  “—It was her father who got her into this. You opened the girl’s eyes. I’m not condoning how you did it, or the fact that you pulled a fast one on me, but if we can procure the evidence you say she has and convince Earl Dickson to cooperate, you may be responsible for sparing him a life term.”

  “Cell phone photos won’t be enough,” Ward said.

  “I know. We’ll need the cash. But he can get us that.”

  “True. And there’s the larger issue of where it’s coming from and what it’s being used for, though I think that’s obvious.”

  “Oh?” Brennan said. “Enlighten me.”

  “I’ve been researching Gahrah’s Chicago group MRI,” Ward said. “The corporation buys property, a lot of it here. A single-enterprise firm that makes a lot of foreclosure purchases which are then being sold to individuals and institutions more or less at cost has to buy that property with loans or profits from another sector. This company has no other ties, at least none that I can find.”

  “Couldn’t it come from mosques? They’re tax exempt. If they can shoot money to terrorists, they can surely buy a few houses in town.”

  “They’re tax exempt, but they know they’re being watched—closely,” Ward said. “That’s one reason we’ve cut off a lot of sleeper cell funding. If a government-affiliated mosque in Iran wants to get money to terrorists, it’s got to go to Yemen or Iraq and from there to here. Slipping it into the country and getting it to terrorists has a lot of moving parts. They have to make sure all of them work; all we need to do is tag one of them to stop it.”

  “I see. But I still don’t get the MRI–Earl Dickson connection.”

  “They’re getting him cash somehow, he’s putting it in accounts, they’re transforming that into property, and instead of funding terror directly they are establishing beachheads from which terror can be launched and directed.”

  “Holy crap. And you’re saying one of the ground zeroes—the ground zero—is right here in Basalt.”

  “Which explains your cautious criminals,” Ward said. “As long as computer programs are watching them they’ve got it covered. No red flags get raised. As soon as real live eyeballs get involved, looking for the cash, they have problems.”

  “Then why risk the Randolph attack?”

  “They want that property. A lot. I’m guessing it’s got to do with psyops.”

  “You lost me.”

  “It’s the high ground, the highest in the region,” Ward pointed out. “It’s got a view of the entire town. More important, the entire town can see it, especially if you build something big and Muslimy up there.”

  “A mosque.”

  “Not just a mosque, or even just a mosque on the high ground,” he said. “It would be a mosque on the ruins of a pig farm, an animal expressly forbidden by the Koran.”

  Brennan’s expression showed that she understood just how much bigger this situation had become.

  “I’ve got to admit, it’s clever.”

  “Deviously,” Ward agreed. “That’s what some of these guys do for a living, think of ways to muck us up.”

  “But there’s nothing we can use to call in state or federal authorities,” she said.

  “I’ve got colleagues in Homeland Security, but no one who’d lift a pinky to help me while I’m toxic,” Ward said. “We need to nail down that money trail.”

  She nodded. “And I’ve still got to get you to the airport.”

  Ward looked as though she’d hit him with a sock full of quarters. “You’re not serious.”

  “I am,” the police chief said. “I’ve got to take you there. Maybe not to stay, but we’ve got to go.”

  The detective considered that. She was right. “Fair enough. Let’s grab my stuff,” he told her.

  “You’ve got a plan?”

  “Getting one,” he said.

  They walked to his room; from the corner of his eye Ward saw Hamza standing just outside the inn, watching. They reached the room and Ward left the door open as he packed his few belongings.

  “They know my Prius,” he said. “I have to drive that and you’ll take your car. I’ll turn the rental in, you’ll see me to the gate. We have to assume someone will be watching me that far. I don’t board but change my clothes in the bathroom in case someone’s still there. Standard undercover procedure. I rent a car from a different company and come back when it’s dark. When I need to, I’ll sleep in the car in some out-of-the-way spot. I’ve done it before.”

  “And probably enjoyed it,” Brennan guessed.

  He grinned. “I love it.”

  “Then what?” she asked.

  “Well, before that I’m going to camp outside Angie’s home tonight, make sure they’re not watching her,” he said. “Someone may go to see her father—it would help to know who on the totem is talking to him, whether it’s through a messenger or the community center director himself.”


  “Right. They may feel safe again, get a little bold with you out of town.”

  “Exactly,” Ward said. “I’ll call you at sunup. Hopefully, Angie will have sent those photos. If not, one of us will have to convince her to do so. We need to get a serial number and see if we can trace the cash.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Since 9/11, banks are required to scan and track at least three notes of every big-bill packet they make. If that comes up empty, we’ll have to get a warrant to search the van and get one of the bundles themselves.”

  “Poor kid,” Brennan said.

  “Yeah, but we’re pushing her through this so she’ll come out the other side. Right now, with her dad as the only buffer, she’s in serious danger.”

  The police chief was getting a little restless. “We’d better go before—what’d you call him?”

  It took a second for Ward to come back. “Who? Oh, Muscle.”

  “I like that,” she said. “We’d better go before Muscle gets antsy and figures out that we’re plotting against his boss.”

  Ward shouldered his bag and followed her out. The desk clerk handed him his receipt as he passed, the onlookers who had stayed around continued to obser ve—except Debbie, who had her calls to make. He was glad. He felt embarrassed, her seeing him like that. Muscle was still standing there, watching him.

  “You follow. I’m going to give you the flashing lights on the way out of town,” Brennan said. “It’ll show these guys I’m taking this seriously.”

  “Good call,” Ward said. It would also have a psychological impact that went beyond the constabulary display. The detective picked that up from the look of satisfaction that redefined Muscle’s expression as they drove past him.

  You think this is over? Ward thought as he headed toward the highway. So did Pharaoh when he banished Moses, you son of a bitch.

  Hoping that God didn’t smite him for that, Ward figured he couldn’t do any more damage by noting that, thanks to the patrol car in front of him, traffic parted for them all the way to Aspen.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  When Angie got home she did not send the photographs. She didn’t know why, other than that she just didn’t. Outwardly she had a sleepwalker’s glaze; inwardly she was in turmoil. She sat through dinner with the family—a Dickson custom, now without exception since it was the only time both parents were around—all the while avoiding eye contact with her father. He, too, seemed distracted and appeared not to have noticed her own evasion.