by James Phelan
“They put a star for him in the lobby.”
“A gesture as erroneous as his decision to go to Yemen in the first place.”
McCorkell and Somerville shared a look.
“He has some interesting things to say,” Somerville said. “About Yemen. About Asad. About his CIA guy turning on him . . .”
Heller’s face gave a slight tick.
“You really should hear it from him,” Somerville said.
“I’ve heard that dead men tell tall tales,” Heller replied, smiling, leaning forward. “I’m sure he’s got some outlandish story about how the drone strike in Yemen was a hit, to cover something up. Am I right?”
McCorkell looked to Somerville and smiled. “Why don’t you bring Walker in?”
•
“Thanks for this,” Walker said, waving the phone on his way out of tech services. “I was never here. You didn’t see me.”
“And you never got that from me, Walker,” the tech said.
Walker paused, took a moment, nodded in appreciation. “You know me?”
“I ran that pass number. You’re not Durant—I know him, unfortunately. So I brought up your file via facial rec.” The guy looked around, pointed to a security camera above, then whispered, “I heard rumors, you know. You really are alive, hey?”
“That’s what they tell me. You gonna rat me out?”
“Should I?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
The tech nodded. “Is this some All the President’s Men kind of op?”
“I think you’ll find that, once all this dust clears,” Walker said, “you’ll be on the right side of this one.”
Walker looked at the phone’s screen.
“What is it?” the tech asked.
“Oh, so now you want to know?”
“Occupational hazard,” he said. “I want to know everything.”
“The head-case info . . . it’s a stock listing,” Walker said, scrolling through the pages of stocks. “And a directive, for certain clients, to buy before nine-twenty-nine am tomorrow Eastern Standard Time.”
“What’s so special about nine-thirty tomorrow?”
“That’s my deadline.”
•
Somerville came back into the office empty-handed.
“He can’t be far,” McCorkell said, turning to face Heller. “Probably went to the bathroom.”
“He’s here?” Heller said, and stood behind his desk. “Walker’s here? In the building?”
“Yes. In archives, getting the transcript of your order of the drone strike.”
“And that’s just for starters,” Somerville added.
Heller looked hard at McCorkell, as if trying to read his thoughts. He spoke slowly. “You brought Jed Walker into Langley?”
“Yes.” McCorkell returned the stare.
Heller picked up his phone and dialed security.
•
“Nine-twenty-nine is a weird time. Why not nine-thirty?” the tech said.
“Timing is everything, apparently,” Walker replied. “Especially on the stock market. Can I print this?”
“I’ll do it,” the tech agent said, taking the phone and hooking it up to the printer. “Something’s happening?”
Walker nodded, reading the two printed pages. “At nine-twenty-nine, the bell is rung to start the day’s trading at the NYSE. Have to get these in before then, so they say.”
“Well, you’re in good company,” the tech said, his fingers flying over his keyboard as he Googled the New York Stock Exchange. “INTFOR’s going public tomorrow. You know who’s going to ring the bell?”
Walker looked at him expectantly. Something inside him started to churn. “Dan Bellamy?”
“Yep, and a special guest.” The tech turned the screen around for Walker to see. “The Vice President of the United States.”
Walker looked at the screen in a daze.
“The Vice President!” the tech said. “Man—you need help on this op? I’ve got clearance. My shift leader always promised I could go out in the field and—”
“No,” Walker said.
“No? No I can’t tag along? Or no—”
A constant, no-nonsense alarm started to wail.
“What’s the quickest way to the car park?” asked Walker.
The tech smiled. “The quickest, or the sneakiest?”
64
Walker bought two pre-paid cell phones from RadioShack and used the first to call Marty Bloom.
“Thanks,” Walker said.
“It worked?” Bloom said.
“Like a treat. McCorkell brought me to the US, totally bought that I didn’t know you fed him information.”
“What can I say?” Bloom said. “I’ve still got it. And your ID switch at Langley?”
“It worked—just. I gave them the slip thirty minutes ago.”
“Nice. What now?” Bloom asked.
“Now I finish this.”
“What about Heller?”
“He can wait. Got a bigger fish to fry first.”
“Good luck, buddy. Keep your head down.”
“See you for a drink once this has all blown over.”
“Some place like Dubrovnik?”
“Yeah, some place like that.” Walker ended the call and tossed the phone, then took the car and headed north.
•
McCorkell and Somerville made their way through the car park at Langley. The security alarm had died down after four minutes of wailing and a biometric sweep had accounted for every person and corresponding security pass in the building. Walker had disappeared.
“Heller will wait,” McCorkell said. “We’ll pick him up tomorrow once this blows over. It’s better we get to Bellamy.”
“Where did Walker go?” Somerville said.
“New York,” McCorkell replied.
“How?”
“Not flying. Train, or bus.” McCorkell stopped and looked around the car park full of Fords and GMCs and Toyotas. “Didn’t we park here?”
Somerville raised an eyebrow as McCorkell patted his pockets—the car keys were gone.
Walker.
“Son of a . . .”
65
Walker ditched the car three blocks from the train station and left the driver’s window down and the keys in the ignition. As he sat in a window seat on the second carriage, he mapped out what he knew, a mental list.
Louis Assif. A double agent, working for Al Qaeda and the French. Dead not because he was a double, but because he was unraveling this. He had told Walker to follow the money. His cell phone had given Walker the date and time of the Zodiac attack.
The money had led to Felix Lassiter. To Hong Kong. To the put options being put on the New York Stock Exchange that morning. Walker thought back to the put options placed in the days before the 9/11 attacks. Some people made a lot of money from those attacks.
Dan Bellamy and INTFOR. His company was having its IPO today. He would be there, at the Stock Exchange, with the Vice President.
Ringing the bell.
Were they working together? The Vice President was Bellamy’s biggest supporter in Washington, but what kind of attack would help them secure support for INTFOR? Or was it the aftermath that mattered rather than the means: the established, government-run and -funded agencies had failed, yet again, to stop a terrorist attack, this time focused on the very heart of America—its money and its executive government?
But wasn’t this administration against the expansion of INTFOR?
The put options meant that someone was betting against the market.
Bellamy had the world’s best bomb-maker on his payroll.
Walker rubbed his temples, popped another pain-killer. He checked the departure time for the next train to New York.
Twelve hours to deadline.
•
Hutchinson figured that Walker would arrive by train.
Airport security was too much trouble, and wit
h the Vice President due in town in the morning, the security services at JFK, Newark and LaGuardia would have been beefed up for the past forty-eight hours, the cost billed back to the Secret Service.
The roads—well, the roads getting in and out of Manhattan were chaos at the best of times.
So, Hutchinson figured the train. Quicker than the bus. Still, he had a couple of agents from the New York field office at the Port Authority Bus Terminal just in case, along with a detachment at Grand Central.
He bought a takeaway coffee and waited for the Amtrak Acela Express to roll in to New York City’s Penn Station. He touched the thick wadding of plaster gauze over his forehead under a loose Yankees cap, the wound courtesy of Pip Durant’s .38 slug. He had been patched up in the Texas Medical Center before speaking to Bill McCorkell and commandeering a Bureau helicopter to take him to the FBI’s New York City field office. He was then driven into Manhattan, to Penn Station, where he stood now, waiting, sipping his coffee, watching for Walker.
•
Walker made Hutchinson first, but the latter was hardly trying to avoid being seen. He looked like hell. Worse than hell. The whole left side of his face was swollen, his bottom lip was threatening to explode with pressure and had angry black stitches in it, and the plaster above his left eye pushed his cap up and was weeping blood.
For his part the federal agent was waiting at the end of the platform and scanning the faces of every male over six feet two inches tall.
“Let me guess,” Walker said to the FBI agent. “Andrew Hutchinson.”
Hutchinson left Walker’s outstretched hand hanging.
He said, “You ditched McCorkell back at Langley.”
“He can handle himself.”
“And the SAD Director?”
“Heller? What about him?”
“You didn’t want to talk to him about Yemen? Get some kind of retribution?”
“No, not yet. I’m on a deadline. He’ll get what’s coming to him.”
“And what’s that?”
“The full force of the law, I would hope. What is it that they do to traitors these days? Or what—you worried he’s going to run away to Ecuador? He’ll keep.”
Hutchinson smiled. “But why ditch McCorkell?”
“He was surplus to my needs.”
“Which are?”
“Fairly minimal.”
“What do you hope to do?”
“Hope? No. Not hope. I’m going to kill the guy who killed me.”
“You’re going to kill Dan Bellamy?” Hutchinson said, slightly out of breath as he kept up with Walker, headed south on Seventh Avenue.
“Yep.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“Whichever way first presents itself.”
“And you think that’ll stop whatever’s coming at nine-thirty?”
“It’s his show, so I don’t see why not.” Walker stopped at the red light at West Twenty-Ninth. “Have you got a better idea?”
“Lock the city down. Get the NYPD to call in National Guardsmen to sweep the place for our bomb-maker.”
“Really?”
Hutchinson shrugged. “It’s a start,” he said. “It’s an option.”
“It’ll drive them underground at best. You’re not going to catch these guys like that. You have to end things, first chance you get. If we had got bin Laden when we knew where he was, 9/11 would never have happened.”
“So, what—just go bump off Bellamy?”
The walk signal changed, and Walker set off. “Cut off the snake’s head,” he said. “Something like that, yeah.”
“Jesus, Walker, wait up.”
“Walk faster.”
“No, I mean in your mind, in your—I’ve gotta tell you something.”
Walker stopped on the footpath.
Hutchinson looked uneasy.
“Can we sit, get a coffee?” Hutchinson said.
“Out with it.”
Hutchinson nodded, then, a little uneasily, said, “It’s about Eve.”
66
Hutchinson and Walker were in an all-night diner on Twenty-Eighth.
“Eve is all right?” Walker said.
“Completely,” Hutchinson replied.
“What were you doing there?”
“That’s the thing,” Hutchinson said, stirring sugar into his coffee. “The past couple of days I’ve been asking around about you, to get a better picture of what your motivations could have been for faking your death.”
“You thought I wanted to be KIA?”
“I had to look into it.” Hutchinson leaned back in the booth as the waitress topped up their coffees. “I looked into your old jobs, that sort of thing. I spoke to some people. I spoke to Eve.”
Walker gave Hutchinson a look he reserved for special occasions, the kind he was waiting to level on Bellamy.
“Hang on there, hermano,” Hutchinson said. “I told her nothing about you being alive and all; it was purely for background.”
Walker gritted his teeth.
“The thing is,” Hutchinson said, “I wasn’t the only one to pay her a visit.”
“Who was it?”
“Durant.”
That surprised Walker, and it didn’t, in equal measures. “Eve—did he tell her about me?”
“I’m pretty sure he didn’t,” Hutchinson said. “I didn’t give him the chance.”
Walker nodded. “How’d it play out?”
“Let’s just say he won’t be paying house calls anymore. At least not in this world. Two rounds in the SOB, he got away, they found his car, crashed into a road pylon and burst into flames. Guy’s barbecued to charcoal.”
Walker saw Hutchinson in a new light. “And that’s how you got your face and arm banged up?”
“Yep,” Hutchinson said, looking at the hard plaster cast.
“Eve?”
“FBI have her secured. She’s fine. I spoke to her on her protective agent’s phone before I flew here. I told her that Durant had gone rogue, that we have to watch over her a couple days.”
Walker nodded and sipped his coffee. “Thank you. I owe you.”
Hutchinson smiled. “Normally I’d say forget it . . . but not this time.”
Walker knew what was coming.
“Work with me here,” Hutchinson said. “Tell me what you know. What you’re going to do. It’s better that the two of us go up against this, together.”
“You sound like McCorkell.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“And what, you’re some kind of boy scout for him, running around collecting patches?”
“No. I’m just like you—I like getting the bad guys.”
“How’s that going for you?”
“We do all right.” Hutchinson looked around. “You know, you and I have something in common. What we do—this—we can’t walk away from it. We have to keep going till the job’s done.”
“Who says?”
“Me. I know it. Knew it as soon as I started talking to people about you.”
Walker watched Hutchinson for a moment before he spoke. “You don’t know me.”
“You’re chasing this on your own. You can’t let go. You don’t see the world as gray and flexible; it’s black and white. You’re a blunt instrument. You see the division of good guys and bad guys and nothing in between. And you can’t rest until you’ve tallied it up when you die. I know that, because that’s me.”
Walker paused. Not so dumb, this Hutchinson.
“You believe you can change things?” Hutchinson continued. “You’re smarter than that. It breaks you, no matter how good you are. You’re content to go and fuck up the bad guys; life goes on, the sun rises, a new day is born. But what have you really achieved? They’re still out there. Shit still goes down, every second of every day. So, you go back, start it all over again. And again. It’s addictive.”
“That’s a nice story. Excuse me, but I’ve gotta be someplace.”
“Not without me yo
u don’t.”
“I don’t play well with others—ask McCorkell.” Walker drained the last of his coffee and stood. “You’re good people, Hutch. Don’t make me add you to the wrong pile.”
“Let me tag along. No harm in that.”
Walker checked his watch.
Less than five hours to deadline.
67
“I don’t like it,” Hutchinson said.
“What’s not to like?” Walker replied. They stood on the dark corner of Sixth and White Street, looking at the entrance to the Tribeca Grand Hotel, a six-story brick structure that was probably once a warehouse when America still made stuff, and was now a place where you could sleep for five hundred dollars a night. “I know he’s staying there.”
“And he’ll probably have security. Better we wait until the sun’s up and he comes out; take him in the open.”
“I get you now,” Walker said, a sideways smirk. “You’re a one-armed, one-eyed lawman who likes fucking up bad guys. Nice. The thing is, in another hour from now this city starts to wake up good and proper. In another two, you’re going to have thousands of people streaming along this footpath. Our window’s now.”
Hutchinson grunted. “Damn it. Come on.”
They walked into the hotel lobby. Behind the reception desk stood a young hip guy. He looked at the two disheveled newcomers like they were something stuck to his shoe.
Hutchinson showed his FBI badge. “We need the room number for Dan Bellamy.”
“Yeah,” the clerk replied, sliding his large black-rimmed glasses up his nose. “My roomy sells those IDs on Houston Street for ten bucks apiece. You crackers can go back outside; we don’t want what you’re selling.”
“What about this?” Hutchinson said, removing his Glock and placing it on the counter.
“Yeah, my roomy sells them too,” the clerk said.
Walker smirked, looked to Hutchinson and then to the clerk and said, “What, we don’t look like Feds to you?”
“He does, a little, if it weren’t for all that Frankenstein shit with his face and arm. You, not so much.”
Hutchinson re-holstered his weapon. “It’s Frankenstein’s monster, shit for brains.”
