by Diane Capri
He remembered one instance she related to him last year where a very well-respected—and well-compensated—high-level bureaucrat had been caught stealing toilet paper from a Pentagon men’s room. For years the man had been taking a roll every couple of days, stuffing it inside his briefcase and bringing it home with him. The guy had nearly been fired. Over toilet paper! As it was, he had earned a three-day suspension without pay and been put on probation. The United States government apparently took their lavatory responsibilities very seriously, Lisa had told him with a straight face, before breaking into hysterical laughter.
The recollection made Nick smile briefly, then it occurred to him he would never again share in his wife’s infectious sense of humor. He finished his drink with one deep swallow and chewed on an ice cube. So why did she hide the blue binder? And why hide it from him, of all people? It made no sense.
After finding the binder so cleverly hidden, Nick had expected to find some earth-shattering revelation hidden inside, perhaps somehow involving him, but in reality it hadn’t contained much. There were a list of names and a notation written in block letters that said “Tucson Bliss?” Written below that, also in block letters that were barely readable because they had been smudged before the ink was dry, was another notation that might have said “Stringers” or “Stingers” or maybe even “Singers.”
The binder contained copies of emails that had obviously been taken off someone’s hard drive, presumably someone who worked at the Pentagon. The emails went back and forth between a guy named Michaels and an unnamed person in a coy, roundabout manner, eventually culminating in an agreement to meet last week at a park in Washington. The name of the park hadn’t been specified in any of the emails, but Nick guessed it would be easy for someone familiar with the area to deduce the location. He had been to Washington only a few times, none recently, so it was all a mystery to him.
And that was it. That was the sum total of the binder’s contents. Nick couldn’t begin to guess what Tucson Bliss might mean or what sort of singers (or maybe stingers or stringers) had been involved in Lisa’s investigation. To the best of his knowledge, Lisa had never been to Tucson in her entire life and would not have considered it blissful even if she had. She hated extreme heat, and for that reason alone Nick couldn’t imagine her ever using the words Tucson and bliss together in the same sentence.
All of which brought him back to his original question: Why hide the material from him? It was not like he could decipher the meaning of any of it. Besides, what difference could any cloak-and-dagger stuff going on in D.C. possibly make to an air traffic controller living and working in Merrimack, New Hampshire?
Was it possible Lisa had been involved in something illegal? Instead of the binder’s material being part of an investigation she had been working on at the time of her death, could it be that she had hidden the binder in their home, away from his prying eyes and everyone else’s because it contained evidence of her own malfeasance?
Nick felt a ball of unease forming in the pit of his stomach. His beautiful wife of five years, the only woman he had ever really loved, was dead less than a week, and he was entertaining a possibility he would have considered ludicrous before he had discovered the existence of the binder. Guilt gnawed at him for even thinking it. He knew Lisa better than that.
But still, why else would she have hidden it, and in such a perfect spot? Had she not been run down by that goddamned beer truck, he would never have found the material in the first place. He wished to hell he hadn’t.
He laid a ten-dollar bill on the tiny circular table and walked out of the bar and through the terminal, paying little attention to the throngs of travelers jostling him on all sides. It was time to face the long drive back to his empty house. Nick walked slowly to Logan Airport’s Central Parking garage and slid into his car, his mind hundreds of miles away at a Pentagon building he had never set foot inside.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“It is time to discuss the next step.” Tony gazed into the faces of his men, using his intense dark stare to capture and maintain their full attention. “We have been training and preparing for months—years, even decades, in the case of some of us—to ensure our readiness for this moment.
“No doubt you are all wondering what was inside this briefcase that was so important we spent ten thousand dollars of our valuable resources to purchase it.” Tony didn’t bother mentioning the obvious—that he had then murdered the seller and stolen their money back. “I am sure you are familiar with the expression, ‘information is power.’ If that is the case, then the information inside this briefcase has increased our power exponentially.”
He pulled a simple road map out of the case with a flourish and spread it out on the desk in front of them. “What do we have here, Mr. Waterhouse?”
Brian glanced at it. “It’s a map of a driving route between Tucson, Arizona and Fort Bliss, Texas.”
“Exactly. Thank you. Can you tell me what significance Tucson has to us?”
No one answered, so Tony continued. “Tucson is the home base of the company that is contracted with the United States government to produce Stinger shoulder-fired missiles for the U.S. military. These missiles are manufactured at a plant in Tucson, then delivered to bases all over the world, including Fort Bliss, Texas. Currently the missiles are undergoing minor software modifications requested by the U.S. Army. Thursday night a small shipment of these modified Stingers will leave Tucson in an unmarked Army cargo truck, to be delivered to Fort Bliss for inspection and approval before the full-scale manufacturing process resumes.
“Thanks to my contact—excuse me, my now-deceased ex-contact—at the Pentagon, Mr. Nelson W. Michaels, we now have in our possession all the information we need to allow us to intercept this delivery. We know when the missiles are being shipped to the base in Texas. We know the exact route to be driven by the truck transporting the missiles. We know how many men will be handling the delivery. We even know their names and ranks and exactly what they look like.”
Tony traced with one finger an area outlined on the map in red marker and trained his intense stare on Joe-Bob Walton. “What are we looking at here?”
Walton returned Andretti’s stare unblinkingly. “Well, unless I miss my guess, that’s where we’re going to take the Stingers away from the army and make them our own.”
Tony smiled and nodded, and as he did, Dimitrios cleared his throat.
“What is it?” Tony asked.
“Ah, I’m sure you would have considered this,” Dimitrios stammered, “but don’t they deliver those missiles in separate shipments? We might be able to hijack portions of the Stingers Thursday night, but won’t they be useless without all of the pieces?”
“Normally, yes, that is true,” Tony answered, appreciating the question. His men were sharp for soft, spoiled Westerners. “It is rare for Stingers to be shipped intact in one vehicle. In this case, though, the missiles are being delivered in one nearly complete package. This particular transport vehicle will contain everything necessary to fire Stinger missiles with the exception of the guidance system, without which the missiles are useless.”
Dimitiros rubbed the back of his neck and shook his head. “So my question remains the same: What good will they be to us if we have almost everything we need?”
Tony chuckled softly. “I said the missiles are useless without the guidance system. I didn’t say we don’t have the guidance system. A couple of years ago a similar military transport vehicle was hijacked while driving a similar route between Arizona and Texas. Would anyone care to speculate as to what that truck was carrying?”
A buzz of anticipation filled the room.
“We have the guidance system for the Stinger missiles already,” Joe-Bon said wonderingly.
“Bingo, as you Americans like to say.”
Jackie piped up, his normally high-pitched voice rising a couple of octaves. “So we’re going to use Stinger missiles to shoot down an airplane?”
&nbs
p; “That is exactly correct,” Tony answered. “But not just any airplane. The president is flying into Logan International Airport in Boston very early next Sunday morning. We will be removing him from office. Permanently.”
“The president? The president of what?”
“What do you think?”
Stunned silence filled the room as the significance of Tony’s statement began to sink in.
“The President of the United States?” Joe-Bob whispered. “We’re going to shoot down Air Force One?”
Tony’s eyes glittered like hard black diamonds as he turned his cool smile on his small band of revolutionaries—the group that would soon change the course of history. “That is correct. President Cartwright is scheduled to celebrate the reopening of a historic church in Boston, which has been closed for renovations. I have learned that he will be flying into the airport around 5:00 a.m. next Sunday in order to arrive at the church in time to attend a sunrise service. He is then scheduled to lunch in the city with some of his major political contributors before flying back to Washington in early afternoon.
“Of course, as we now know, he will do none of those things, because he will be dead, blown to pieces, lying at the bottom of a smoking hole in the ground just shy of Logan Airport. With a little bit of luck, perhaps people in the city will be killed as well, but that remains to be seen and would only be a bonus.”
Chaos erupted and then died down immediately when Tony help up a hand to silence his men.
Brian shook his head. “But how will we know where the plane is going to be, and when to fire the missile? It’s a big sky up there.”
Tony smiled again. “We’ll know because we’re going to tell the pilot where we want him to go.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The full moon shone brightly in the crystal-clear night sky, casting an eerie glow over the scrub brush littering the desert floor. The Arizona landscape was illuminated starkly by the pale moonlight, and although it was past midnight, visibility was close to that of daytime. The Tucson city limits were only few miles northwest, but out here the landscape appeared alien, almost lunar in nature.
Vehicular travel over this portion of the two-lane country road was sparse; most people traveling at this time of night preferred the wide lanes and higher speed limits of the interstate highway following a more or less parallel course just a few miles away.
On this deserted highway, heavy black smoke poured from the scene of a recent automobile accident. Two late-model sedans had collided precisely in the middle of the road, with both cars slewed sideways, apparently from their desperate and unsuccessful last-second attempt at avoiding each other. Now the road was almost completely blocked, with little more than a narrow passageway available on either side.
Two miles east, moving slowly in the direction of the accident, an olive-green military transport truck with a large cargo bed covered by heavy-gauge camouflage canvas lumbered past a roadside billboard advertising Joanne’s Diner—Bottomless Cup of Coffee with Trucker’s Breakfast Special! Immediately after the truck rumbled past, two men emerged from behind the sign, walking quickly through the moonlit semidarkness to the center of the highway.
One of the men carried over his shoulder a large Road Closed sign bordered with reflective tape. He placed it in the center of the road, facing east, while the other man carried an armful of orange rubber traffic cones and placed one every six feet along the pavement, moving outward from the large sign in both directions until the entire highway surface was blocked off.
The men worked quickly and efficiently, and inside of forty-five seconds, they had eliminated vehicular access to the crash scene. To the west of the staged auto accident, identical signage had already been erected, complete with rubber cones, blocking access to the four-mile stretch of highway in between.
Their task complete, one of the men pulled a radio from his back pocket and spoke quietly into it. He advised the person on the other end of the call that the transport truck would be arriving at the scene momentarily and that the road was now clear. The entire operation took just over one minute.
The men disappeared into the night behind the billboard.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“I’m tellin’ ya, the Cubbies are never going to win a World Series.” Private First Class Eric Young pounded his fist on the truck’s steering wheel to emphasize his point to the man in the passenger seat, Private First Class Milt Stanley, who seemed utterly uninterested in the fortunes of the Chicago Cubs, or in anything else Young had to say, for that matter.
“Yeah well,” Stanley said in his distinctive Alabama drawl, “baseball’s a pussy sport, anyway. Who gives a shit about the Cubs? You wanna talk sports, let’s talk Crimson Tide football. Nick Saban’s brought that program back to where they belong, which is on top of the heap in the SEC. They might just be better right now than they have been at any time since the Bear.” He referenced the late, great coach of the University of Alabama football team, Bear Bryant, the way a devout Catholic might discuss the Pope, with awed reverence and maybe a hint of fear.
“You know,” he continued, “I could have played for the Tide if I hadn’t blowed out my knee my senior year of high school.”
Young snorted. “Christ, Milton, you couldn’t have gotten into ‘Bama on the best day you ever had, even considering the virtually nonexistent admissions standards they have for football players, you dumb fuck. I’ll bet you can’t even spell ‘football.’”
Stanley’s expressive black face took on an aggrieved look. “I can spell ‘kick your ass,’” he answered without any real conviction, his attention diverted by what looked like a serious car accident a few hundred yards ahead on the lonely road.
Young slowed the truck as the glare of the headlights brought the scene into focus. There had definitely been a two-car wreck, and it looked as though it must have occurred just moments ago, as acrid black smoke hung thickly in the desert air. It billowed heavily from beneath one or both of the damaged cars.
Standing in front of the accident scene were two men, clearly the drivers of the vehicles that had been involved in the wreck. They were trading punches, completely oblivious to the camouflaged U.S. Army transport truck slowing to a stop a few yards away.
“Just go around these two dumb motherfuckers,” Stanley drawled. “Let them beat the crap out of each other. What the hell do we care?”
“I don’t think I can make it without going off the road and into the desert,” Young answered, “and I don’t really want to take the chance of getting stuck in that sand. If that happens, we’re screwed.”
At that moment, the confrontation between the two men escalated. One caught the other with a roundhouse right and knocked him to the pavement. That man immediately leapt back to his feet, swinging from the heels.
Young reluctantly stopped the truck a few feet away from them. He opened his door, leaving the truck idling, its big diesel engine rumbling softly in the desert night. “What the fuck are you doing?” asked Stanley.
“What does it look like I’m doing? We can’t get around these idiots, so we’re going to have to break up this fight and help them push their cars to the side of the road. It’s either that or be stuck here until one of them kills the other. I like watching mixed martial arts as much as the next guy, but we don’t have time for this.”
Stanley grunted noncommittally.
“You stay here and I’ll be right back,” Young told him, following protocol, which dictated that at least one soldier remain with the vehicle to safeguard its contents at all times. He climbed down out of the cab and approached the two men, barking authoritatively, “Hey!” to get their attention.
It didn’t work, as they continued pounding on each other as if he were not even there.
Young hesitated, placing his hand on his sidearm but leaving it holstered. There was no way on God’s green earth he was going to draw down on two unarmed civilians, especially on two men who didn’t pose any kind of threat, at least not to h
im. His military training had included nothing even remotely resembling instruction on how to deal with the situation he found himself facing now, and he was unsure how to proceed.
On one hand, this truck and its contents were expected at Fort Bliss, Texas, first thing tomorrow morning, and if it was late getting there, they would catch hell. The circumstances contributing to the late arrival would not be given much consideration, if any.
But on the other hand, getting involved in a fistfight between two civilian motorists would likely be viewed as a mistake in hindsight, especially if he were to injure one of them while trying to break up the fight. And what if one or both of them became belligerent and refused to move their damaged vehicles? What then?
All these considerations ran through Young’s head as he cautiously approached the pair. He considered calling the base for guidance, but finally decided the best thing to do would be to take decisive action and get moving again. It was late, he was tired, and he had no desire to get his ass hauled into the woodshed when he got back to Bliss because he couldn’t decide how to handle a freaking traffic accident.
The problem was these two guys were really going at it. He had mentioned mixed martial arts to Milt and an MMA bout on Pay-Per-View was exactly what the scene resembled. Fists were flying. Now that he was up close, Young could see that both guys were pretty good-sized dudes. Young reluctantly waved Stanley down from the cab to help him subdue the two guys, since it was patently obvious he couldn’t take them both himself, at least not without drawing his weapon, which he had already determined would be a very bad career move.
With Stanley’s help, though, these two clowns would be disabled in a matter of seconds—his partner was six foot six and two hundred eighty pounds of sculpted muscle. Young had no idea whether Stanley had actually received a scholarship offer from Alabama or not, but he was definitely big enough to have been one hell of a football player.
