Journey looked at her. She was an unusual woman, undeniably brilliant, attractive in a wispy sort of way, more direct and forthright than any woman and most men he knew. “I’m fine.”
“Wrong,” Sandra said. “Try again.”
Journey allowed himself a little smile. “You’re quizzing me, Professor.” He shrugged. “I feel strange, disconnected, out of sorts.” Andrew screeched. Sandra jumped. “Andrew,” Journey said.
The boy didn’t look at him.
“Andrew,” Journey said. “Look at me.” The boy had picked up a straw and pencil and beat them together furiously. “Look at me, Andrew.”
The boy glanced at him.
“Use a quieter voice, son.”
The boy stood up, stamped his feet, and emitted a low, throaty noise. He walked past his father and Sandra, the straw and pencil tapping faster and faster. He disappeared around a corner. Journey heard the door to his bedroom close.
“Excuse me, Sandra,” Journey said, and went to the bedroom to look in on Andrew. He was sitting on his bed, surrounded by white walls. Journey had tried livening the room up with some posters at one point, but the visuals seemed to bother Andrew, so the bare walls returned. “You okay?” he said to Andrew.
The boy hummed, not looking at him. He rocked back and forth.
“Okay,” Journey said. “Sandra’s just visiting for a little while. I’m going to go back to the living room and talk to her. You want your music?”
Andrew rocked and hummed.
Journey touched the little CD boom box on Andrew’s dresser, and soft piano music filled the room. He went back to the living room and sat across from Sandra again. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Must be hard.”
Journey shrugged.
“Okay, that sounded patronizing,” Sandra said. “I actually don’t have a clue what it must be like.”
Journey shrugged again.
“Do the police know anything?” Sandra asked after a moment.
“No. The guy who came after me had no identification, and no one got a close enough look at the other one. It’s … I don’t know what it is.”
“You still have the artifacts?”
“I’m trying to figure out what they mean.”
“You think this was treasure hunters? Except treasure hunters don’t usually carry around assault pistols, I guess.”
“I don’t know. I—” Journey felt himself bending like a small tree, helpless in the face of the prairie wind.
Sandra’s green eyes clouded. “Look, I can go. I just wanted to see how you were.”
“No, I … Look, this document that was buried with the guns. It’s strange.… I haven’t talked to anyone about the contents. I wanted to do the proper research, to see what I had. But I—Sandra, I killed a man.”
She put out her hand to touch him, then pulled it back slowly. “I know. He was shooting at you. It was—”
“Self-defense, I know. But why was he shooting at me?” Journey got out of the chair and crossed to his desk. He scooped up the paper and the two pins. “A cryptic reference to Appomattox and a special ‘clause’ and ‘conspiratorial means’ and a riddle at the bottom. That and a piece of jewelry.”
Sandra was shaking her head. “Riddles and jewelry? Nick, you’re not making sense.” She looked at the pins in his hand. “I thought there was only one pin found at Fort Washita.”
“There was. I took the other one off the man who was shooting at me—the man I killed.”
They stared at each other. “Why are you keeping all this to yourself?” Sandra finally said.
“I don’t know,” Journey said. He rubbed his face. “It’s not academic egotism, if that’s what you’re thinking, that I’m holding out to be the first to publish.”
“I wasn’t thinking that at all. You’re not like that.”
Journey looked at her in surprise for a moment, then lowered his eyes to the artifacts again. He palmed the two pins in one hand. “G.W.,” he said. “Does that mean anything to you? I mean, in a historical context.”
“No, not offhand. When those things were dug up at Fort Washita, I just thought G.W. was someone’s initials.”
“That’s what I thought, too, until those guys came after me. You know what I’ve been thinking since then?”
“Tell me.”
“In 1865, someone buried thousands of weapons in the ground in the middle of nowhere in Indian Territory. Along with them they buried this piece of paper, incomplete, cryptic, and pretty ominous. And they buried this pin.” He tossed the older of the two pins to Sandra. “Now, nearly a century and a half later, these things come to light, there’s a little news coverage, and suddenly my office is trashed and I’m tracked by a couple of guys with guns. One of the guys is wearing this.” He held up the other pin.
Sandra thought for a moment. “So they’re not initials. More of an insignia.”
“Yes.”
“Nick,” Sandra said. She ran one hand over the smooth gold of the pin, tracing the lettering with her long fingers. “I’ve studied a lot of different kinds of movements, dating to the Revolutionary War. This is what I do.”
“I know.”
“And it sounds like it could be some kind of society.”
Journey nodded. “Think about it. Yale, for God’s sake, still has the Skull and Bones Club. As hysterical as people have been in popular culture the last few years about the Masons, one thing is true—they are a ‘secret society.’ The KKK wasn’t the only one to come out of the Civil War.”
“The Knights of the Golden Circle, the Order of American Knights … most of them lived only on paper, but some of them were real forces. The Klan is just the best-known example.”
“And they all had some kind of signature. The Klan had the white hoods.” He held up the gold pin again. “And G.W. had its members wear these pins.”
“And apparently they still do,” Sandra said.
Journey nodded. He heard Andrew humming again.
“You have to tell someone this,” Sandra said. “You have to tell the police.”
“You think the Carpenter Center Police Department is going to do something with this? No, what I have to do is find who G.W. is, and find the rest of this document.”
“You mean there’s more to it? Where?”
“It’s incomplete. This page has lots of ‘whereas’ and ‘what if’ types of statements, but doesn’t say what happens when ‘what if’ comes around. I think that whoever was behind this in 1865 was very smart, but didn’t trust the others who were involved. I think he hedged his bets, and the rest of this document was hidden somewhere else. This little bit of nonsense at the bottom tells us what to do to find the rest of it. That is what I think the riddle is.”
“You have to go to the police,” Sandra said again.
“You think if I go in there with those two little pins and say, ‘I was attacked by a secret society that has been around since the Civil War and is up to something, but I don’t know what,’ that the police are going to drop everything and launch a full-scale investigation? They would think I was nuts, and they’d be right. I need a full picture, not just a sketch.”
Sandra stared at him. “You can’t.”
“I’m not calling the police. Not yet.”
“Then I will.” Sandra stood up. “You can’t just—”
“Yes, I can just. Please, I have to work this out. That’s the only way I can protect Andrew and myself.”
“And what if G.W. comes after you again?”
“Then I’ll be ready for them,” Journey said.
CHAPTER
9
Meg Tolman didn’t own a piano, but she had an arrangement with the Alexandria campus of Northern Virginia Community College to give one lecture per semester, and in return, she enjoyed unlimited use of their prize Bosendorfer. She took no salary from the college, only traded her time for piano time. She had a key to the studio where the piano was kept, and was able to come and go as she pleased.
The NVCC campus was half a mile from her apartment.
She played for two hours on Saturday morning. Her next paying gig was tomorrow afternoon, a wedding reception in Chevy Chase. She hated wedding receptions—they were worse than piano bars, and she spent hours playing love songs while no one listened. She tried to slip in a little Chopin when she could, but people didn’t notice that, either. Still, she took whatever paying jobs came her way, like them or not. The money was secondary. Maintaining a status as a professional musician, albeit a part-time one, was vital.
After rehearsing, she took the Metro across the river to the office. Saturday was just another day as far as she was concerned—if she could get something done, she got it done, the calendar be damned.
Dr. Nick Journey had been much on her mind since she did the preliminary workup on him. From a purely objective standpoint, she didn’t think federal resources could do much for the case. She could write the report and send it on to the FBI, and that would be the end of it. But something about the case made her stop, made her think, made her wonder. The cases in RIO that did that were few and far between.
As she expected, Rusty Hudson was in the office, clicking his mouse and talking on the phone. What a sad pair we are, Tolman thought, waving as she passed.
As she sat down at her computer, Tolman thought of Nick Journey again. Maybe she identified with the history professor because of her own history. Her own “fistful of tragedy,” as Hudson had said. She thought of Nick Journey’s family on the California highway when the boy was seven years old, and then of her mother turning to shout at her from the driver’s seat—“You watch your mouth and show me some goddamned respect, Margaret! I don’t care if you can play the goddamned piano like Franz Fucking Liszt himself. If you can’t get through geometry, then you are a failure and all the piano scales in the world won’t change it!”—and of herself screaming, “Mom, look out!” as the car swerved off the Rock Creek Parkway and down the embankment toward the Potomac.
Her mother’s last words: “You are a failure and all the piano scales in the world won’t change it!”
“Stop that shit,” Tolman said aloud. Nick Journey had nothing to do with her, and the fact that she was mentally connecting the two probably meant she either wasn’t getting enough sleep—true—or wasn’t playing enough music—also true. She resolved that when she was finished here today, she would go back to NVCC and play for another hour or two.
She logged in to her e-mail, then opened another window and navigated to the file she’d created for the Journey incident. At the tail end of it, as was her custom, she’d placed contact information for the case’s principals. She had Journey’s address, phone numbers, and e-mail address.
She thought for a moment, then typed [email protected] in the address line. In the subject line, she put Incident at South Central College. That should at least get him to open the e-mail. She typed a quick, polite message informing Journey that the local and state authorities had requested federal assistance, and that she was the officer in charge of evaluating that request. She asked if he could provide any additional information about the materials he believed the gunmen were trying to steal, and encouraged him to contact her at any time. It was more or less a form letter, but it was still more contact than she made in 92 percent of her cases. She pressed SEND.
She sat back and closed her eyes for a moment, running through Rachmaninov’s “Variations on a Theme by Chopin” in her mind. The final section had been giving her fits. She’d added the piece to her repertoire only in the last few months, and was going to play it in recital for the first time next month at James Madison University. That was a good paying gig, and her father had said he might even drive out with her. Dad was completely tone-deaf, and she knew he was still disappointed in her job at RIO, but he’d learned to hold his tongue about that as they both matured. He was trying. She had to give him credit for that.
She gave up on Chopin/Rachmaninov and went back to work, logging in to the Department of Defense’s human resource database. Hudson was right—DOD didn’t like to play well with the civilian departments, and she had to tread lightly. The wrong sorts of inquiries could set off a “bureaucratic crisis,” a term Hudson had coined. She smiled a little at that.
She pulled up the head-shot photo of the first gunman, the one who was dead at the scene at South Central College. OSBI had e-mailed it to her. It was a crime-scene photo, and there was blood on the guy’s face. Still, it was enough of a close-up for her purposes.
Then she opened the second photo, a still that had been taken from one of the parking lot’s video surveillance cameras. It showed the second gunman, though at long distance and not good quality. Cheap-ass video, Tolman thought.
She zoomed in on the second gunman, resized the photo, sharpened up the definition, and tried to get in as tight on his face as she could, minimizing the parking lot surroundings. It still wasn’t great, but might suffice. The second gunman looked a little younger than the dead man, with lighter hair and a more muscular build—the first one had been more slender, a runner’s physique. Tolman couldn’t tell eye color on the second one, but hopefully she had enough detail.
With Homeland Security as one of its “parent” departments, RIO had the latest facial-recognition software, the same program used by the Transportation Security Administration at airports to compare the faces of people moving through checkpoints to a database of known criminals and terror suspects.
Three-dimensional facial recognition was immeasurably more accurate than the older 2D programs, in that it measured the actual geometry of the face’s features, which negated such variables as differences in lighting, facial expression, and the positioning of the head in the video or still image. The main challenge for several years had been to actually acquire three-dimensional images, but newer software solved that problem by projecting a grid onto the face and integrating the video into a 3D high-resolution computer model.
Tolman overlaid her grid onto the faces of the two gunmen and built the 3D model, admiring the graphics on her flat screen. When the models were ready, she began her search in the Pentagon database.
Over the next hour, she finished paperwork on a couple of minor cases and rearranged her desk while the computer flashed SEARCHING, PLEASE WAIT. When the search finished, 2 MATCHES FOUND scrolled across her screen.
“Now we’re talking,” Tolman said, then frowned when she clicked on the icon.
YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO ACCESS THIS FILE.
“Oh yes, I am,” Tolman said, and confirmed the password she’d used to log in to the database.
YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO ACCESS THIS FILE.
“Now, that’s fucking rude.” She clicked and typed a little more with no luck. Fifteen more minutes got her into a large directory with the matching file numbers highlighted. But she still couldn’t reach the files themselves. It was a bit like getting a ticket into a movie theater, but being able to go only as far as the lobby, and not into the theater itself. “You’re pissing me off,” she said to her monitor.
She copied down the file numbers, then exited the database and shut down the facial-recognition program. She’d already suspected that the two Oklahoma shooters might have been ex–Special Forces, due to their choice of weapon. But she’d fished in the human resource database before and found Special Forces files, both active and former personnel, and never had access issues on those occasions.
She went back through the process of getting into the DOD system and this time found herself completely locked out of the database. This is horseshit, she thought.
Tolman tried three more times to access the Pentagon database and found herself blocked at every turn. DOD may not have liked to play with the other children, but its resources were usually available, however grudgingly, to other government agencies with legitimate requests.
“Rusty!” she shouted down the hall. “I’m about to provoke a bureaucratic crisis.”
Hudson stomped into the room, towering in
the doorway. “You went fishing at the Pentagon.”
“I got matches on the Oklahoma photos in DOD, but they wouldn’t let me look at them, and then locked me out totally.”
Hudson moved to one side of the door. “Is this worth pursuing?”
“It is now.”
“Meg.”
She looked up, recognizing the tone.
“Don’t pursue it because you’re irritated that DOD wouldn’t let you play around in their systems. If the case has merit on its face, that is a different story.”
“The very fact that I can’t get into their system is merit. We have two shooters in West Nowhere, Oklahoma, one of them DOA, using Special Forces weapons of choice. If this is some weird DOD black op, at least we need to know that we have to stay out of it.”
Hudson waited a moment. “I don’t like being in the dark. I don’t like being shut out of information. Go a bit further and we will talk again.” He turned and moved off down the hallway.
Tolman pulled up her government agency phone directory on the computer and navigated through a Department of Defense labyrinth before finding a listing for the office that dealt with active-duty personnel files. She would start there.
She glanced at the clock—nearly noon on a Saturday. But Tolman knew that the Pentagon had people in its offices, even the mundane ones, seven days a week.
On the third ring, a female voice said, “Ann McAdams.”
“Ann, this is Meg Tolman at RIO.”
“RIO?”
Tolman sighed. “Research and Investigations Office. We’re a joint office of Justice, Treasury, and DHS. I need to access a couple of files for an investigation we’ve been asked to review.”
“Glad to help. Do you have a DOD authorization?”
“No, as I told you, I don’t work for DOD.”
“But you should still have an authorization to get access.”
Tolman stared at the phone. “Can’t I just tell you the file numbers and you look them up and e-mail them to me?”
“Hold on.”
Tolman listened to badly synthesized music while on hold for sixty seconds, and then McAdams was back. “I wasn’t entirely sure what RIO was.”
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