The Short Drop

by Matthew Fitzsimmons

  The final piece was a short video recording of Gibson sitting at the table with the baseball cap in front of him. Jenn had been against it. She’d wanted to send a simple letter, but he said it was the only way. She would need to see his face if they wanted any chance of a meeting.

  In the video, he spoke directly to Grace.

  “Hi, Mrs. Lombard, this is Gibson Vaughn. It’s been a long time, but I hope you’re well. You made the best sandwich I ever ate. I miss the old days at Pamsrest, and I hope the place is still standing,” he said, pausing as he shifted gears. “Mrs. L., I know this is a strange way to approach you, but I believe you’ll come to see that these are extraordinary circumstances. I’ve learned something about Suzanne, about Bear, that you need to hear. In person. I’ve included photographs that I believe prove the truth of what I have to say. I don’t want anything. Only the opportunity to speak to you, and you alone. To tell you the truth.

  “I’m going to ask you to keep this confidential until we have a chance to speak. Should you choose to involve your husband, then I guarantee that you will never know why your daughter left home or what happened to her. That may sound like a threat, but it is simply the truth.”

  Hendricks had called the plan insane and tried to tear it apart. He was still taking potshots at it tonight.

  “Hey,” Jenn said, “it’s our best shot.”

  They’d been having variations of this argument since Greensboro. Hendricks, to say the least, had been skeptical right down the line.

  “Yeah, but for all we know, she’ll take the message straight to her husband. I don’t care how well you knew her as a kid, Gibson. You really think she’s going to keep something like this secret from him?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s Grace, and this is about Suzanne.”

  Hendricks groaned. “Well, be sure and tell that to the SWAT team when they get here. I’m still in favor of just going public, huh? Go to the media. Post it all over the Internet. The book. The cap. Once it’s out there, then he’ll have no reason to go after us.”

  They’d been over all this in Greensboro. But Hendricks wasn’t the only one who had doubts, and sometimes it just helped to go back over things.

  “That won’t work,” Gibson said in unison with Jenn.

  “Why not?”

  “You were a cop, right?” Gibson asked.

  Hendricks didn’t look inclined to admit to it just at the moment.

  “Well, there’s what you know, and then there’s what you can prove. And what can we prove? The book doesn’t do anything but ask questions. The hat doesn’t prove Lombard is a pedophile. We go to the Internet, we’re just another paranoid theory among a constellation of wacked-out conspiracy theories. It does us no good.”

  Hendricks grudgingly accepted the truth of what Gibson was telling him, but he wasn’t happy.

  “Yeah, but this is insanity. You’re actually talking about walking into that hotel. It’s a fortress. And it is guarded by Lombard’s men. You go in there, you’re a dead man.”

  “I think you’ve got it backward. That hotel is probably the safest place for me.”

  “How you figure that?”

  “Have you seen any stories about us on the news?”

  “No.”

  “Right, because Lombard is playing this one off the books. Secret Service isn’t looking for me. It’s these Cold Harbor guys, and they won’t be anywhere near the hotel.”

  “It can’t be done,” Hendricks said.

  “It has to be done,” Jenn said. “She’s the only one who will believe us. She’s the only one Lombard can’t silence.”

  “If Grace thinks I can tell her something she doesn’t know about Suzanne, then she’ll listen,” Gibson said, hoping the statement didn’t sound as wishful as it felt.

  “Well, what if she knew about it? What if she’s just as twisted as her husband?” Jenn had slid back to Hendricks’s side of the argument.

  “No, I don’t believe that. I knew her. There is no way that Grace Lombard had a part in it.”

  “But what if she’s made her peace with it and likes the prestige and power too much to give it up now? You’ll just be walking into a trap.”

  “Maybe she has, but my father always said she was the most grounded person he’d ever met in politics.”

  “Jesus,” Hendricks said. “Are you really going to hang your life on a twelve-year-old opinion? By a man who, no offense, kind of fatally misread his boss?”

  “Look, you may be right,” Gibson said. “It’s probably a stupid idea. But if so, then we have nothing that’ll work. And that means running. And if we run now, we run for the rest of our lives. That’s what I call a stupid idea.”

  That quieted them all. Yes, it was a terrible plan, and it was their only option.

  Hendricks chuckled. “Goddamn, Vaughn. When did your balls drop? I like the new you.”

  The phone rang. They stopped and stared at it. It was painful letting it ring, but that was the arrangement. After a while the phone buzzed to tell them that they had a voice mail.

  Jenn took up the phone and listened to the message. When she was done, she shut it and looked up at them.

  “We’re on.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Denise Greenspan stood on the far street corner, looking less than thrilled. She checked her phone every thirty seconds. Down the street, Gibson watched her from the window of a coffee shop, wishing Hendricks had tried a little harder to talk him out of this.

  “If she’s got a tail, they’re good,” Jenn said through his earpiece. She was on a nearby rooftop that gave her line of sight of the intersection in both directions.

  “That’s very reassuring.”

  “I don’t remember saying anything about ‘reassuring’ when you proposed this crazy plan.”

  “I figured it was implied.”

  “Implied? All right, well, the average life expectancy of a white American male is seventy-six point two years. So statistically, you’re probably going to be fine.”

  “You’re really bad at this.”

  “Look, for what it’s worth, I think you’re a damned good judge of character. I just hope Mrs. Lombard’s still the woman you remember.”

  A long pause came over the earpiece.

  “Any last words?” she asked.

  Nothing leapt to mind. He dropped the earpiece in the trash—wasn’t getting inside the hotel with it anyway—and stepped out onto the street. Time to get accustomed to dangling in the breeze. On the way across the street, he glanced up at Jenn to give her a nod, but she was gone.

  Denise Greenspan stiffened when he walked up to her.

  “You’re that guy from the restaurant. You sat next to me.”

  “Sorry about that,” he said.

  “How’d you get my password?”

  “You sit in the same seat every day. I videotaped you.”

  “Unreal. You take anything else?”

  “No.”

  “As if I’m going to believe you.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  She pursed her lips. “What happened to your neck?”

  “Someone tried to hang me.”

  “Serves me right for asking. Come on.”

  The bruising around his throat had faded some, and his beard was thick enough now to conceal the worst of it, but he pulled his collar up and readjusted his tie.

  “Are we alone?” he asked, trying to judge her intent.

  “What? Yeah, we’re alone, Deep Throat. Those were your instructions. But let me tell you, I looked you up. I know what you did. What you tried to do anyway. So listen, if you’re here to mess with Mrs. Lombard. In any way. I mean, if this is some con bullshit. If that picture of Suzanne is Photoshopped, and you’re just out to hurt her or play on her
goodwill, I will boil water on my stove, tie you down, and pour it down your lying throat. Am I clear?”

  “That was vivid,” he said. “Yeah. You have my word.”

  Her genuine irritation actually gave him hope that Grace Lombard was playing straight with him. Of course, Denise might not even know she was helping to set him up.

  This was going to be tricky. What he had told Jenn and Hendricks was true—he believed Grace was someone he could trust. But obviously that trust only went one way. So if she didn’t trust him, how to convince her that her husband, a man she did trust, was involved with Suzanne’s disappearance? One solitary piece of actual proof sure wouldn’t hurt. Proof he didn’t have any longer thanks to the man in the basement. So how to get her to see the truth? He couldn’t be the one to say it; he knew that. It had to come from her. Grace Lombard had to connect the dots for herself. If she felt she was being manipulated, her open mind would snap shut like a trap.

  The crowds thickened as they neared the convention. Lombard’s acceptance speech was scheduled for that evening, and the city hummed in anticipation.

  “I listed you as media, doing an interview with Mrs. Lombard,” Denise said. “Just use your real name. Show them your driver’s license. You’re not getting past these guys with a fake. But I’ll walk you through. There won’t be a problem.”

  Jenn had described what security would be like around the convention center, but if anything she’d undersold it. The law-enforcement presence was astounding: Atlanta PD, Secret Service, and elements of the National Guard. The convention hall and hotel had layer after layer of checkpoints. Someone might beat one, but the chances of penetrating all of them seemed nonexistent. After all his talk of this being the safest place for him, he was beginning to realize it was just that, talk.

  A pair of uniforms stared hard at him as he passed by, and it was hard to muffle the paranoid voice in his head telling him to run far and to run fast.

  Turned out Denise Greenspan was a good person to know. She took him around to a side entrance that was just for campaign staff. There was a line of about twenty people waiting to be checked through by security. Denise breezed right to the front, which he expected to cause a riot but didn’t raise so much as an eyebrow. This was Lombard’s party now, and everyone knew it.

  Denise knew every Secret Service agent by name. “Hey, Charlie, I’m taking this gentleman up to interview Mrs. Lombard. Last-minute thing. He doesn’t have credentials, but I put him on the list last night.”

  Charlie scanned a clipboard, nodded, and waved them through the metal detector, where a second agent patted Gibson down, went through his bag, checked his ID, and ran a wand over him. They handed him a temporary credential and wished him a good day.

  Denise took him down a hallway to a bank of elevators. There were eight in total. The first six elevators were for general use. The two on the end were cordoned off, and Secret Service had set up yet another checkpoint.

  “These two elevators are locked out,” Denise explained. “One goes to the vice president’s staff headquarters. The other elevator goes to Mrs. Lombard’s suite. She will see you there.”

  “Out of curiosity, where’s the vice president now?”

  “He’s tied up in meetings. He’ll be busy right up until the speech.”

  “Yeah, but where?”

  “One floor down.”

  That didn’t sound nearly far enough away for comfort.

  The Secret Service stopped them again, and they went through the whole procedure a second time: pat down, wand, ID check. Gibson held his breath, but his ID came back clean again. Fortune favors the stupid, he thought.

  Nah, said the voice, they’re just taking you somewhere quiet, out of sight.

  An agent rode up with them and started the elevator with a key. A claustrophobic sweat crawled down Gibson’s back, and when the elevator stopped on a middle floor, he flinched. Heart beating hard.

  Calm down. Now.

  “Figured Lombard for a penthouse kind of guy,” he said.

  “It varies,” Denise said. “Not advisable to be predictable about where you stay in a hotel. Makes you vulnerable to an exterior strike on the building.”

  She stopped them in the hallway and made a call to say they had arrived.

  “What now?”

  “Now we wait.”

  “Here? You’re kidding me, right?”

  Denise shrugged. “You think it’s easy to clear her entire staff and schedule without raising eyebrows? You wanted private. Private takes time.”

  “It’s a hallway.”

  “Well, then, try not to make a scene.”

  They stood in the hallway for twenty agonizing minutes, during which Gibson learned the true meaning of paranoia. Every staffer who passed them in the hall, every sidelong glance cast his way—he tried to interpret the meaning. Hunting faces for any glimmer of recognition or intent. As the minutes ticked by, the hallway narrowed and stretched out toward infinity. A bespectacled man stopped to consult with Denise about that evening’s itinerary. When they stepped away, Gibson swore he heard his name in their muted conversations.

  Denise graced him with a humorless smile and led him down the hall to Room 2301, knocked once, and without waiting for a response, let him inside.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Jenn watched Denise Greenspan lead Gibson away up the street. It was a brave thing he was doing, but she wondered if he knew why he was doing it. Was it to keep them safe or to get justice for Suzanne and Duke? If he could only have one, which would he choose? Would he sacrifice them to take Lombard down? For all their sakes, she hoped it didn’t come down to that.

  When Gibson passed out of sight, Jenn slipped a cell phone and battery out of her pocket and turned it over and over in her hand. She’d taken it off one of the bodies at the lake house in Pennsylvania. Neither Gibson nor Hendricks knew she had it, and Hendricks would have her committed for what she was about to do. Might be right too. But the bad guys had George… She didn’t know who they were, maybe Cold Harbor, maybe some other outfit, but they had George, and they were going to give him back.

  She didn’t know if he was still alive, but if he was, then the clock would be ticking the second Gibson entered that hotel. There was no telling how Lombard would react if he felt cornered.

  Jenn slid the battery back into the phone and powered it up. They’d be able to track it now. If they were looking. She thought for a second and dialed Abe Consulting’s disconnected main line. She called Hendricks’s cell next, wherever the semi had driven it. The call went to voice mail; she left a message of dead air and hung up. Finally, she called George’s cell. It was a number she hadn’t dared try since the lake house; she held her breath while it rang and only exhaled when she heard George’s outgoing message.

  She kept it brief. “George. Had to put down some strays in Pennsylvania, but we’re clear and safe. We found what we were looking for. Awaiting instructions. Four. Zero. Four.”

  That ought to give anyone listening something to think about. The Atlanta area code was 404. A bit obvious, but she wasn’t in a subtle mood. She was banking that they wouldn’t be either. They’d lost a lot of men at the lake house, and payback was a powerful motivator. She tucked the phone into an air vent and took the stairs to the sidewalk. Down the block she entered a parking garage; from its third level, she had a clear view of the main entrance to the building where she’d left the phone.

  She didn’t have long to wait—someone had anticipated them showing up in Atlanta.

  A black SUV rolled to a stop in front of the building and sat idling at the curb. Minutes passed. They weren’t storming the building, so Pennsylvania had taught the bastards something.

  Good for them.

  A back door opened and a man in a Windbreaker and combat boots got out and went into the lobby. There was only one reason to wear a loose-fitt
ing Windbreaker on this still Atlanta morning.

  She saw no further movement for five minutes; then two more doors opened and a pair of men walked briskly into the building after their colleague. That left only the driver.

  Perfect.

  Movement down on the street caught her eye. The green hood of a car nosed to a stop at the mouth of the alley beside the garage. They’d brought backup. That was smart. She couldn’t see how many were inside, but a car in an alley would be infinitely easier to take than an SUV on a sunny street. Christmas had come early.

  Jenn crossed the parking garage to the rear stairwell. As she reached for the door, it opened and a man with a gym bag stepped through. She stepped aside, and their eyes met for a moment. He hid it well, but she caught the slight stutter in his stride as his brain recognized her and forgot about walking for a millisecond. He took a step past her and nodded politely, fumbling with the zipper on his gym bag. She snapped her telescoping baton down along her thigh to its full twenty-one inches.

  He heard its metallic rasp and gave up on the zipper, instead swinging the bag into her. He was a big guy, and it was a heavy bag. It caught her hard in the shoulder, and she stumbled sideways, falling to one knee. He dropped the bag and took a swing at her. She blocked it with the baton as he stepped in close. With his size and weight, grappling would be a lost cause. Instead, she drove the heel of the baton into the peroneal nerve of his thigh. The leg went dead, and he staggered backward. She was up before he hit the ground, and stomped the ankle of his good leg—she heard the tendons snap as she stepped over him. The baton whistled through the air again and again until he lay motionless. She raised the baton again, adrenaline pumping, and breathed to control her fury. The sensible fear she felt before a fight had fled. Now she simply wanted a pound of flesh, and his would do. She spun the weapon in her hand and used his face to retract the baton.

  While she caught her breath, Jenn zip-tied him, wrist and ankle, and dragged him behind a parked car. In the gym bag was a sleek black CZ 750—a short-barreled Czech sniper rifle that was far from standard issue for federal agents. She could see how it might come in handy and shouldered the gym bag.