BAD DEEDS: A Dylan Hunter Thriller (Dylan Hunter Thrillers)

by Robert Bidinotto

  “Zak! Here!”

  He emerged from the shadows and limped up. His eyes were wild; his beard, knees, and jacket were covered with dirt and leaves. He’d obviously taken a tumble.

  “You okay?” Rusty asked, grabbing him by the shoulders.

  “Yeah,” he panted. “Just twisted my … ankle … Dawn … where is she?”

  “She ran off. That way, Zak.”

  “Have … to find her.” He began to hobble away, but Rusty seized his arm.

  “No! Zak—listen to me. She wasn’t running away from the guy who was shooting; I watched him drive off. She ran away after he left.”

  Zak looked at him, eyes dull and uncomprehending.

  “Zak … She was running away from us … from you.”

  He blinked, trying to process it. Then his eyes widened.

  “Oh God … she … must have heard …”

  The sound of a siren rose in the distance.

  “Zak! We gotta get the hell outta here, buddy. Now! Can you walk over there to the truck?”

  Boggs looked dazed, but nodded.

  “Then let’s haul ass, man!”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Hunter stayed up into the wee hours of Tuesday morning. He sat at the computer downstairs, drinking cold coffee, flexing his knees now and then, poring through emails, making notes.

  The fake email that he’d sent in Sloan’s name to Weaver, Crane, and Lockwood over the weekend had contained an innocuous-looking email attachment. But embedded in that attachment was a bit of hacking code, courtesy of Wonk. When opened by the recipients, the attachment embedded server routing modification software into their computers. That software secretly added Hunter as a recipient of any future emails that they sent from their private accounts.

  The software already had harvested dozens of emails sent by the four men. Most were to other parties about irrelevant topics. But a few were exchanged among them, and they used only surname initials when referring to each other.

  The first email was from Weaver, apparently sent out yesterday afternoon, right after the office conversation with Crane that Hunter had monitored. Weaver had blind-copied the recipients, so Hunter couldn’t tell who they were. The message read:

  “Want to reassure all about moratorium. C, I know you have special concerns. But I’m so confident I think M shd buy more shares for us before mkt close today, bec. current depressed price fantastic bargain. After moratorium Carb stock will rebound big for us. Do all agree?”

  “—W”

  A message from Lockwood, just moments later, said:

  “Just got off the phone with C and T. They agree w/ you. We’re all in. Will tell M to buy 1K more shares for me. C & T will email M with their own buy instructions within the half hour.”

  “M” would be Robin Manes, who ran the GreenSmart trust for the government employees. “T” most likely would be Trammel, who held substantial CarboNot shares independently. “C” would be Crane.

  He drummed his fingers on the desktop. No, that made no sense. Weaver had just spoken to Crane in his own office about this, moments earlier; he didn’t need to send him a reassuring message. Crane, in fact, had been the one reassuring …

  Of course. Crane had just talked to Kaplan, to reassure Ashton Conn.

  “C” could be Conn, then.

  Something was nagging at him. Something said in an earlier phone conversation he’d overheard. He shuffled through his sheets of notes for a few minutes.

  There. In the call Lockwood made to someone unknown early yesterday morning. The mention of a “senior associate” who had reassured them that the fracking moratorium was a mere “formality.” That had bothered him, and now he knew why.

  He’d been focused on Trammel, thinking that he had to be the ringleader of all this. But Wonk said Trammel wasn’t invested in Capital Resources. The “senior associate” was deeply invested, though—and was upset about the uninsured loss of the building.

  Conn was invested in Capital Resources, through his wife.

  His chief of staff’s brother ran the office.

  Conn also was invested in CarboNot, through the GreenSmart trust.

  Maybe he had it all wrong.

  He scrolled through a fresh flurry of emails, sent late Monday night. Sudden panicked exchanges over the revelations he published in last night’s Inquirer. He grinned as he read through them. That Hunter s.o.b. had raised questions about NLA’s study possibly resting on faked data—then tied it to the “mysterious murder” of the very scientist who was preparing to challenge it. It looked bad. “W” admitted that the article might very well affect the SAB decision about the moratorium after all. He, “C,” and “CC”—who had to be Crane—all agreed that, at the opening bell, “M” had to dump the trust’s CarboNot stock, to avoid far deeper, perhaps irretrievable losses. “T,” “S,” and “L” said they, too, would notify their brokers first thing in the morning, and do the same with their own CarboNot stock.

  A final email had arrived around midnight to Sloan’s inbox:

  “If only you or T had followed through with our action plan re that guy, we wouldn’t be here.”

  “—C”

  Well, well, well …

  His eyes were dry and burning from the long hours at the screen and poring over all the paperwork. He desperately needed a couple of hours of sleep.

  Then he would have to take a closer look at Ashton Conn.

  Dawn heard Zak’s voice calling for her. She ran faster, staggering on through the dark, through the scratching tangle of branches that whipped by her.

  After a few minutes, out of breath, she slowed her steps. She felt dazed and drained. She had no idea where she was going, what she would do whenever she got there. Wherever there was …

  She pressed on, stumbling often, getting her clothes caught on bushes. She fell once, her knee striking something hard and sharp. She sucked in her breath, suppressing a cry of pain. She didn’t know if Zak was behind her, or how close. She got up, staggered forward. Felt a wet warmth spreading down her shin.

  After a time, she didn’t know how long, she saw light flickering far ahead. She weaved through the trees, heading for it. The light became several. Bright and high in the treetops, like street lights.

  The knee was beginning to ache. She limped toward the lights.

  She finally emerged in a clearing. It was an area of bare, frozen earth. The lights were to her right. She continued, feeling dizzy, weaving toward them. She passed a small paved parking lot on her left, continuing down its driveway toward a building. Some kind of barn-like thing, with what looked like a corral beside it.

  A car sat in front of the building. She limped closer, then saw what it was.

  And halted in her tracks.

  At that instant, the front door opened and a man emerged, holding a cup of coffee. He spotted her and stopped, a shocked look on his face.

  Terrified, she turned to run, but her knee gave out and she fell face-down. She heard running steps behind her and tried to get up, but heard breathing and a rustle of cloth, and then felt a strong hand grip her upper arm. Then yank her over onto her back.

  Hovering over her, the astonished face of a young officer of the National Park Police.

  She began to shake again.

  Then cry softly.

  Hunter’s watch beeped him awake at four-thirty. Less than three hours’ sleep, and he felt it. But he had a lot to do. In the bathroom, he splashed cold water on his face, scrubbed it hard with a face cloth to get the blood flowing. In the kitchen, he put on some coffee. Then he went back to the computer.

  He navigated to Ashton Conn’s official website. Topping the home page, a photo of the smiling senator in his office, seated behind a big desk next to an American flag. The sight sickened him. He mouse-clicked the “Biography” tab. A photo popped up of Conn with his plastic-pretty trophy wife. Name “Emmalee.” Plastic name, too. Her eyes looked at the camera the way a snake looks at a mouse.

  He scrolled down the
page to read about Conn’s background. The bio was topped by an overview paragraph touting his role as “Washington’s most passionate champion of the environment,” followed by bullet points about his multitude of achievements. His New York Times bestseller. A list of major pieces of legislation he had sponsored. His major charities. His church. His educational background—first in a Philadelphia prep school, then Harvard, where he eventually received his J.D.

  Then his internship at Nature Legal Advocacy …

  He took a moment to digest that.

  Then reread the previous bullet point about Harvard.

  Contemplated the span of years that Conn had been a student there. In Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  He felt the familiar tingle on the back of his scalp. Like the feeling he’d had out in Woodrow Wilson Plaza that day.

  The first forwarded call from Danika came through at 7:50 a.m. It was for the burner phone labeled for Robin Manes. He waited for her to leave her message, then he accessed it and listened:

  “Hello, Ms. Manes. This is your answering service. I have just found three waiting messages—all urgent—from a Mr. Weaver, a Mr. Crane, and a Mr. Kaplan. Let me read you the one from Mr. Kaplan, who called twice: ‘Urgent that you sell CarboNot at the opening bell.’ The other two gentlemen said essentially the same thing, about selling CarboNot stock. They left phone numbers and asked that you call them back to confirm as soon as you make the sales.”

  She read off the numbers, repeating them; Hunter jotted them down.

  “That’s about it. Thank you for using Crown, Ms. Manes, and please have a nice day.”

  “Not likely,” Hunter said to himself, swiveling back and forth in his chair before the burner phones.

  The one marked “Trammel” rang a minute later. He picked it up, disguising his voice.

  “Marcus and Reilly Financial Services. This is Robin Locksley. May I help you?”

  “This is Avery Trammel. I need to speak to Mr. Marcus immediately.”

  “He’s not here yet, but he’s due in at any moment. May I take a message for him, Mr. Trammel?”

  “Yes. This is urgent. He is to place a sell order right at the opening bell for my CarboNot stock. All of it. At whatever price he can get. Right at the opening. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, sir. Let me write that down … All CarboNot shares for Avery, that’s A-V-E-R-Y, Trammel, that’s T-R-A … Is that one ‘m’ or two, sir?”

  Trammel’s voice sounded like cracking ice as he spelled it out.

  “Very good, sir. I’ll give him this message as soon as he enters the office, marked ‘urgent,’ and also tell him in person what you said. Would you care to leave your phone number, sir?”

  “He has it. Tell him to call me as soon as he has done what I told him to do.”

  Ten minutes later the burner labeled “Lockwood” rang, and he went through the same routine.

  At 8:25, he repeated it again with Sloan. He hung up, amused at the thought of the CEO dumping shares of his own company stock. Or believing that he was.

  At 9:00, he turned on the Fox Business Channel and, as he chewed a toasted English muffin, enjoyed their reporting about his article and its anticipated devastating impact on CarboNot stock today.

  At 9:30, he watched the opening bell ceremony. A group of Boy Scouts from Kansas did the honors, while people around them applauded and the bell clanged. Appropriately, it sounded like an old-fashioned firehouse alarm.

  Immediately, the anchor went to the business reporter on the floor. As the dire numbers crawled across the bottom of the screen they discussed the CarboNot selloff. “Frankly, I don’t know where it’s going to find its bottom,” the reporter said, shrugging. “We’ll soon see,” the anchor said, sighing.

  At 9:31, within seconds of each other, all four burners began to ring.

  Six powerful men, desperately seeking reassurance from their brokers that their stocks had indeed been dumped.

  Dylan Hunter rocked back and forth in his office chair, enjoying the sight of the flashing red lights on the phones. Letting them ring, and ring, and ring …

  He was back upstairs napping in the early afternoon when his burner beeped—the one only Wonk and Annie could reach. He rolled over in bed, snagged it, looked at the screen.

  Annie.

  “Hi, you,” he said.

  “Hello, Dylan.” Voice flat. Hesitation. Then: “I need to see you tonight. We need to talk.”

  He closed his eyes. “Yes. We probably do.”

  She said nothing.

  “I won’t be at the apartment tonight, though,” he said. “I’ll be out at the house. Probably from about five until about eight or nine. Will that be a problem for you?”

  “No. I’ll be there … See you then.”

  Automatically he wanted to say, “Love you.” But her coolness warned him not to.

  “See you tonight,” he said.

  He clicked off. He lay there with his eyes closed.

  He knew what this meant.

  He beat most of the rush hour traffic out of D.C. to the Bay Bridge, then waited behind a line of cars for a couple of minutes so that he would pay the toll-taker in cash. Waiting in line was always a drag, but an EZ-Pass that logged his travels was out of the question.

  He crossed the bridge behind a sluggish, fuming eighteen-wheeler. As he approached the Kent Island side he watched a small plane taking off from the Bay Bridge Airport over the gray water, into the gray sky.

  It made him think of her eyes.

  He went across the island to its east side, then over the arc of the Narrows Bridge. Another few miles and he turned off onto the road that led out to Connor’s Point. He left the CR-V in the driveway and went inside.

  The place felt quiet and still. Like him.

  He took the inside entrance into the garage, then went out its back door. The pine trees there blocked anyone’s view of him as he opened the padlock and entered the nearby shed. He closed and latched the door behind him. Yanked on the drawstring for the overhead bulb. Went through the pre-mission ritual of moving aside the stack of boxes filled with meaningless papers, which covered the trap door. Levered it up and open with a screwdriver.

  Descended the wooden ladder into the small cinderblock room, where he stored his guns and gear.

  He had what he needed spread out on the floor of the den when he heard her unlock the front door.

  No more lies he had promised her. He wouldn’t hide anything from her, now. She had to see who he was. Then decide.

  He sat on a recliner near the unlit fireplace, waiting. She emerged from the hallway. She wore a long, light brown cashmere coat and dark brown boots. She had pulled off one dark brown glove, and her fingers were tugging at the other when she saw him.

  Then her eyes took in the gear on the floor. She stopped all motion. Her eyes rose to his.

  “Going out, I see.” Her voice was tight.

  He got to his feet. Nodded—just once.

  “That’s right.”

  She nodded, too—more than once.

  “Like some coffee? Wine?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I won’t be here long.”

  He came over to help her with her coat. He didn’t touch her. Didn’t try to kiss her. He went to hang the coat on the rack near the front door, then returned.

  She was seated at the end of the sofa closest to his recliner. He returned to it. Then waited.

  “I got a call today from Cronin,” she began.

  He hadn’t seen that one coming.

  “I can only imagine what he had to say.”

  “I’m sure. He’s certain that you destroyed the Capital Resources offices.”

  “Ed Cronin is a very good detective.”

  She shut her eyes an instant. Then opened them and gestured at the items on the floor.

  “So, what else are you planning to do?”

  “I’m going to bring them down. All of them. In fact, it’s already started.”

  She lowered her
gaze. Nodded slowly. Then looked up at him again.

  “What about Boggs?”

  “I’m going to hunt him down. And kill him.”

  She swallowed, visibly. “I see.”

  He waited for her to continue.

  “You know what this means, Dylan.”

  “Yes, Annie. I know what this means.”

  She gestured at the gear. “But you’re going to go ahead and do it, anyway.”

  “You know why I can’t let this go. First were their attacks on all those innocent people up in Pennsylvania. Then the bomb that almost killed you. Then the murder of Adam Silva—which is entirely on me. Then the attack on me by their goons. Then the bomb at the Inquirer office. This won’t stop. They won’t stop. The government won’t stop them—because they are the government.” He paused a few seconds. “Annie, I’m doing this because somebody has to stop them. But there is nobody else to stop them. There is nobody but me.”

  “You promised …” she began, then hesitated.

  “I promised to try, Annie. And I truly did. I tried to let it go. But they won’t.”

  “I know you did. But I didn’t mean that. I meant that you made a promise at Adam Silva’s funeral. To his widow and children.”

  He didn’t see that coming, either.

  “Yes,” he said softly. “I did.”

  She closed her eyes. “If only I could deal with this. With the constant nightmares. If only I could get past it.”

  “But you can’t. And it was cruel of me to expect you to stay with someone like me. Annie, I don’t know exactly why I’m this way. Why simple justice matters so much to me. But it always has. And it always will. That part of me will never change.”

  When she opened her eyes, they held tears.

  “I know, Dylan. And I don’t want you to change. Because if you weren’t as you are, I wouldn’t love you as I do.”

  It felt like another stab wound, this one to his throat. It was all he could do to continue looking at her, steadily. At the stunning face, twisted with grief; at the wide gray slanting eyes, spilling tears.