The young officer made a sound like he’d been punched in the stomach and toppled toward Journey. Too stunned to speak, Journey raised his hands as if he were hitting a volleyball and pushed Parsons away from him.
From far across the parking lot, he heard a scream.
“Dr. Journey!” Gold shouted. “The document, now! Put it on the ground by the car!”
Journey said nothing, the backpack slipping halfway off his shoulder as he ducked into the open door of the police car.
The radio was squawking. “Parsons? Pete, what the hell happened? Pete, are you on?”
Journey slid into the still-warm car seat and dropped the gearshift down three notches. He didn’t—couldn’t—think. He turned the steering wheel hard left and stepped on the accelerator.
Silver was halfway across the parking lot, running steadily, as he saw what was about to happen.
He shouted into the night. He was still too far away, out of range with no good shot.
He raised the pistol anyway and fired.
* * *
Journey heard the shot from the other direction, but didn’t look. He locked his hands to the wheel and plowed straight ahead.
The man in front of him raised the gun again and got off one more shot. But now Journey was a moving target, and the gunman was a second too late. He looked like he was about to lunge to the right, but the grille of the police car caught him at the waist. He bent like a question mark, whirled halfway around, and bounced onto the car’s hood.
Journey screamed into the windshield. Beside him, the radio kept up a constant chatter.
The police car jumped the curb. Journey twisted the wheel and found the brake. The back end fishtailed around; then the front clipped into the side of Cullen Hall. The gunman’s limp body slid across the hood and slammed into the brick building.
Journey saw blood. He felt nothing. He heard a siren.
* * *
The Judge stood up, knocking his glass to the floor. He’d been watching the split screen feed from both Gold’s and Silver’s cameras, Silver closing across the parking lot, then slowing and stopping as Gold’s feed became a blur of images: the car, the wall, the ground.
The Judge picked up his phone. “Where’s Bronze? Extract, extract! Get them out of there!”
“He’s moving into position,” said the voice, and then the phone went dead.
* * *
Silver turned and ran, circling back around Howell Hall, away from the carnage. He had been trained to leave no man behind, but he had also been trained to think of the mission above any individual loyalty, and the mission—at least this aspect of it—was blown. In two minutes, he had crossed the common and was sitting with Dallas One Bronze in the blue Suburban. In five more minutes, they had left Carpenter Center and were headed south.
* * *
Journey stumbled out of the car, holding on to the hood to steady himself. He pulled the gunman away from the brick wall, feeling for a pulse, finding none.
As he pulled his hand away from the gunman’s neck, he brushed something hard. Journey fumbled around the man’s shirt collar. Underneath it, concealed from view, was a round pin with the letters G.W.
The world tilted. Journey’s mind went fuzzy for a moment, then came into sharp focus: the pin that was found in the ground, a few miles from here; this man, shooting at him, wearing a pin very much like the one from Fort Washita. Connections. History was about making connections.
But maybe this is about more than just history, he thought.
He felt along the back of the pin, unhooked it from the man’s collar, and dropped it in his pocket—the same pocket with the Baggie. Then Journey slumped down alongside the car and waited.
CHAPTER
5
Meg Tolman lived in two worlds. In one of them, the U.S. Government’s Research and Investigations Office (RIO), a jointly administered agency of the Justice Department, Treasury Department, and Homeland Security, she was simply known as Meg. In the other world, she always used her full name, Margaret Isabell Tolman. She couldn’t think of a single successful concert pianist with a name like Meg. So she begrudgingly went for pretense over familiarity. Even with as small a venue as the Falls Church Chamber Music Society, she felt obliged to use her “concert” name.
But, small venue though it was, the Falls Church women had a Steinway in their hall, and they paid better than the average group of old ladies. She stood alone just off the little stage and rolled kinks out of her back. One of the ladies was on the stage introducing her, talking about how Tolman had studied at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, followed by a year in Vienna, and had studied in master classes with Garrick Ohlsson and Emanuel Ax and Mitsuko Uchida.… Tolman tuned it out. She’d heard it too many times. She just wanted the keyboard.
The woman stopped blathering, there was polite applause, and she walked across the stage. The old ladies—and a few husbands who’d been dragged out on a weeknight for this—were slightly aghast that she wasn’t wearing a dress. Old ladies typically didn’t like her very short blond shag haircut, either, but she would not bow to convention on either count. Dresses were too damn uncomfortable, and she didn’t have time to deal with hair, and if these ladies didn’t think a woman could play Rachmaninov with short hair, in pants and a sleeveless blouse, then to hell with them.
She gave a nod to the audience and sat down at the keyboard, no score in front of her. That was Franz Liszt’s fault—he’d screwed it up for every pianist who came after him, showing off by playing everything from memory. She refused to play Liszt to this day. One of her teachers at Curtis had told her she was being passive-aggressive. She didn’t care.
But Rachmaninov was another matter. And Chopin and Schubert and Brahms and Beethoven and Debussy, and more obscure composers like John Field and Charles Tomlinson Griffes. But she started every recital with Rachmaninov, one of the preludes, a different one every time, each a gem in miniature.
Then there was nothing in the room except Tolman and her piano—while she sat at the keyboard, it was her Steinway—and the incredible and indelible emotions of the music. She played, lots of little pieces and one big one, the Beethoven “Pastoral” Sonata, without taking a break. She played for nearly an hour and a half, pausing only long enough for a bit of applause—which she scarcely heard—after each piece. She played an encore of Mozart’s “Rondo alla Turca,” then threw in a little jazz with the Paul Desmond–Dave Brubeck classic “Take Five.” After a full evening of romantic and impressionistic music, it never failed to bring down the house.
Then she was offstage, steeling herself for the reception of terrible punch and worse baked goods. She collected her check, and one of the husbands insisted on driving her to the Metro station. It was not quite seven o’clock, warm in the District, the sun starting to hang low but still very much in evidence. Might as well go to the office, Tolman thought. There was nothing at home but a deaf cat and dirty laundry.
She got off at Farragut Park, with its famous statue of Admiral David “Damn the Torpedoes” Farragut and walked half a block up Connecticut Avenue to one of the twin office buildings that faced each other across the street. It wasn’t a federal office complex. RIO was a small agency, and when it had been created five years ago, none of the three Cabinet-level departments that coadministered it had wanted to house it. Congress created the office, held a news conference about “data coordination” and “interagency discipline” and “research and investigative support,” and then essentially forgot about RIO. The government leased the office space in this private building.
Tolman took the elevator to the fourth floor, made one turn down a narrow hallway that dead-ended at a wooden door with a small nameplate containing the suite number—427—and the words UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT. In smaller letters just below: RESEARCH AND INVESTIGATIONS OFFICE.
The outer office was dark. Most of the dozen RIO staffers worked on a strict eight-to-five clock. Four of them, including Tolman, were classified as
“Research and Investigative Specialists.” Two were former Deputy U.S. Marshals, one was ex-FBI. Tolman was the only one who’d come straight to RIO from the Academy, where she’d gone after her year in Vienna and another disastrous year spent trying to make a living playing music full-time. She made it through the Federal Law Enforcement Academy in Glencoe, Georgia, and stunned a lot of people, herself and her Secret Service agent father included, by her aptitude for it. Her eye for marksmanship and her endurance in physical training surprised her Academy instructors. Then she’d blown them all away with her investigative use of technology. That was the paradox: a petite woman with eyes the color of blue topaz, who could curse with the big boys, shoot like a SWAT team member, outrun most of her male counterparts, manage databases like a seasoned IT professional, and play piano professionally.
The rest of the RIO staff were “civilian” support people, as was Deputy Director Russell “Rusty” Hudson, who ran the office. Tolman found it curious that a Deputy Director was in charge, because in five years no one at RIO had met or reported to anyone with the title of Director.
Hudson would still be here, Tolman knew, for at least another couple of hours. He had no life. He was in his early fifties, an accountant and a lawyer, a career government employee, who by choice had no family. Tolman passed by his office door, which was open, and kept going. The suite was a narrow maze with offices that branched off it. Hers was at the end, which her coworkers found appropriate. Underneath her nameplate, someone had taped a piece of paper that read WHERE CASES GO TO DIE.
She tossed her purse and keys onto a spare chair, sat at the desk—institutional, fake wood, a half-moon shape that accommodated her computer—and let her mind work its way back from Rachmaninov and Beethoven to the world of RIO.
Within half a minute, she heard Rusty Hudson’s heavy step in the hallway. The man was a study in contradictions: he was huge, at six feet seven and over three hundred pounds. But he had very fair skin, small, delicate features, always wore a suit, always spoke in soft and very precise tones. Yet he professed a love of Washington Nationals baseball and reality TV.
He towered over her. Hudson towered over most people, but Tolman, at five-one, felt especially dwarfed. In the annual departmental photo, they always stood next to each other. One of the wits in the office pointed to them as “diversity.”
“How was the performance?” Hudson asked.
“Not bad,” Tolman said.
“And the Beethoven piece? Wasn’t this your debut with it?”
“Better than I expected. A little rough in the second movement, but I don’t think the old ladies noticed.”
“You’ve been working on it for several months. I know you were anxious about it.”
Tolman looked up at him. Hudson wasn’t really a classical music listener, but he never failed to talk with her about her music. “Rusty, you’re the only person I know who gets it.”
“Gets it?’”
“Me. The music. RIO. All of it. My father is supportive, but he still doesn’t really understand it. My musician friends don’t get RIO, and the rest of the people here don’t get the music.”
Hudson looked embarrassed. “I have enormous respect for the fact that you are able to function so well in two completely different spheres.”
“Different spheres,” Tolman said, and smiled. “I like that. So what are you working on tonight?”
Hudson dropped a thin file folder on her desk. Tolman arched her eyebrows.
“Do you remember hearing a few days ago about that discovery of Civil War–era rifles in Oklahoma?”
“No,” Tolman said.
“You don’t watch television?”
“Not if I can help it.”
“More than five thousand rifles from the Civil War were found buried in the ground near an obscure fort in rural Oklahoma. There was also some sort of document and a strange old piece of jewelry buried with them. The artifacts were turned over to a history professor at South Central College of Oklahoma. The contents of the document were not released to the public.”
“So?”
“The professor returned from an evening class to find his office ransacked. He says two men with guns chased him. A campus police officer entered the fray, was shot and killed. The professor ran down one of the gunmen. The local police in the town investigated. The dead gunman had no identification of any kind. Local police contacted the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation. No leads. The gun was an H & K MK23.”
Tolman looked up. “Special Forces.”
Hudson nodded. “Untraceable. Gun and gunman alike do not exist. OSBI called FBI, though on the surface it appears no federal laws are involved. Remanded to us for review.”
“So what’s in the papers? These documents the professor has.”
“No one knows. Build a book on the professor. See if it leads anywhere. Write the report, send to the FBI, and they can then remand it back to state and local jurisdictions.”
“Our kind of case,” Tolman muttered.
“It would seem so,” Hudson said. “Unsolved and unsolvable. Our reason for existence.”
“Was that sarcasm, Rusty? From you? Surely not.”
“Far from it.” Hudson pointed down at the file. “Work him. Write the report. Create the paper trail.”
Hudson turned and headed back to his office. Tolman opened the file. “Well, Professor Nick Allen Journey, it certainly looks like you’ve attracted someone’s attention, haven’t you?”
CHAPTER
6
“Where Cases Go to Die” was not entirely in jest, when applied to RIO. Cases filtered down to the office from one of the three coadministering departments, cases that made little sense but weren’t necessarily worth solving, either. Of course, neither the departments nor RIO ever actually said or wrote anywhere that a case wasn’t worthwhile, as cases were often referred from local or state jurisdictions before the lower-level agencies asked the federal government for help.
In suite 427 of this unassuming office building, away from the seats of Justice, Treasury, and Homeland Security and their notorious turf battles, the databases of the three departments talked to each other with great regularity, while Meg Tolman and her colleagues essentially gathered information that would explain to someone, somewhere, exactly why federal resources would not be committed to a given case.
It was nearly ten o’clock when Tolman felt she’d constructed a solid basic picture of Nick Allen Journey, Ph.D., of Carpenter Center, Oklahoma. Starting with just his Social Security number and driver’s license, she’d made her “book,” thirty-seven pages about the man. This case was different from some because Journey wasn’t easy to classify. He’d been a victim of burglary and assault, but in defending himself, had killed another man. He wasn’t being held, since the Oklahoma authorities had a credible witness from the parking lot who corroborated Journey’s account that the two men had been chasing him and shot at him first.
Still, he held Tolman’s interest. She printed out her book, added it to the file, and walked to Hudson’s office. He was watching a Nationals baseball game with the sound off. Tolman glanced at the little TV.
“Winning?” she said. She had no interest in baseball, but enjoyed hearing Hudson’s laments about “his” team.
“They’re being destroyed by the Phillies,” Hudson said. “It has been another long season, but such is life.”
“Shouldn’t you be at home by now? This is late even for you.”
“And you?” Hudson said. They shared a wry smile. Neither of them particularly cared for their respective homes. At least Tolman had her deaf cat—Hudson didn’t even have an animal.
Tolman settled into the chair across the desk from the big man. “Nick Allen Journey. Not Nicholas, just Nick.”
“Anything interesting?”
“Lots that’s interesting.”
“I’ll rephrase: What will our report say?”
“Hard to tell yet. I’ve worked him up, but I’m not sure.
Might be worth a phone call or a couple of e-mails.”
Hudson looked at her. “Really? Now that is interesting. You follow up only eight out of every one hundred cases with contact.”
“You tracking my contact rate?”
“You know I am. I am a bureaucrat, Meg. I do what I must.”
Tolman smiled again. “Our man Journey is forty-two, born in San Diego. Father was a civilian laborer at the navy base, mother a homemaker. Two older brothers. On New Year’s Day the year our man was seven, his family was driving in a 1968 Chevy station wagon along the San Diego Freeway. They were northbound toward L.A., approaching mile marker 67, which is the location for the San Clemente Border Patrol Station.”
“I’ve driven that highway,” Hudson said. “All northbound traffic is stopped for inspection in the center of the road, and some are directed into the station itself for a secondary inspection.”
“According to the report from the California Highway Patrol, the Journeys had just gone through the on-highway inspection and were accelerating when a truck merged in from the secondary inspection lane. The truck cut off the station wagon, Journey’s father lost control, then two other cars hit them. They spun off the highway, flipping end over end. Nick was riding in the back of the wagon. Remember, this was in the days when they still made real station wagons. Based on that model of wagon, the rear gate apparently flew open and it probably saved Nick’s life. He was thrown twenty feet out of the car when it first rolled. The rest of the family never made it out of the car. They were all dead at the scene, massive trauma and internal injuries. Nick received only cuts and contusions and a broken clavicle. I viewed the accident report, some insurance forms, the death certificates, even a couple of newspaper stories about it.”
Hudson shook his head. “If you dig deeply enough, you always come up with a fistful of tragedy. That’s a depressing aspect to our job.”
“Kid stayed with various relatives in California, Missouri, North Carolina, and Florida. Graduated high school in Fort Myers. Four-point-oh GPA, but he got a baseball scholarship to Florida State.”
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