Line of Fire

by R. J. Patterson

  He sighed and shook his head, unsure of what to do. The one thing the feds had asked him to do was to keep an eye on Tony Acworth. And he seemed fine for the first couple of days, but after lunch when Ridgecrest stopped by the welding shop to chat, Tony was gone. According to his sister Kay, he had just received an emergency call at a facility out of town.

  Ridgecrest requested more details, but Kay had slammed her planner shut before snapping at him. She’d told him to get a warrant if it was all that important. Ridgecrest wasn’t about to do something like that, so he put his detective skills to work and followed one of the other office workers to a bar right after 5:30 p.m. After a couple drinks, the worker divulged where Acworth had gone.

  Acworth was headed to Washington, D.C.

  CHAPTER 27

  GARY NEWTON PACED in a room beneath the main stage at the Kennedy Center and wondered if Blunt’s and Besserman’s warning was legitimate. Ever since reporting Wellington and getting his program shut down, Newton sensed the man was out to get him. As a senator, Wellington used his power to make life difficult on Newton wherever he was serving. But murdering him? That seemed like a stretch to Newton.

  Given that President Michaels was on hand, security was extra tight. Secret service personnel were stationed at various checkpoints throughout the building and scanned access badges as facility personnel moved from one section to another. As a result, the green room for all other guests was tucked in the bowels of the building.

  A handful of Hollywood actors were present, some of whom had portrayed FBI agents in the past. Newton, who preferred books over movies as a form of entertainment, only recognized one of the actors and was told by a member of the catering team who the others were. Newton shook a few hands of others who recognized him and even posed for some pictures.

  One of the waitresses offered him a bottled water. Newton glanced around the room.

  “You’re serving bottled water to Hollywood elites?” Newton asked with a wry grin. “You’re going to get hammered for such blatant disregard for the environment.”

  The woman shrugged. “It’s recyclable and bottled at the source of a pure river in Tibet.”

  “In that case, I better drink two of these,” he said.

  “Help yourself, sir.”

  Newton took an extra bottle and set it on a nearby table. After some more polite conversations, he asked a guard at the door about the location of the restroom.

  “Just down the hall to your left, sir,” the man said.

  Newton found the men’s room, pushing open the door by putting his shoulder into it. The urinals were all vacant, and the stall doors were all unlocked. The only person inside was a man dressed in a maintenance suit. He wore a welder’s hood and was working on an exposed pipe in the far corner of the room.

  “Fixing some leaks?” Newton asked.

  The man lifted his shield. “Maybe, or maybe I’m making some new ones. You never really know until you turn the flow back on.”

  “Is it safe to flush?”

  “All the urinals in here are waterless, so unless you have other business to attend to, it shouldn’t matter.”

  “Good to know,” Newton said with a nod.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed the welder walk behind him to the door. A click echoed through the room. Newton hurriedly zipped up and then spun around just in time to see the welder draw his gun. Newton froze.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” he demanded.

  “Simmer down,” the man said. “I’m not here to kill you. But if it becomes necessary, I will use the appropriate amount of force.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I need your time-based password generator.”

  “I don’t have it with me,” Newton said.

  “Like hell you don’t,” the man replied. “You carry it around wherever you go in case you have to read an encrypted message on your phone. Now, stop trying to play me for the fool, and hand it over.”

  Newton patted his pants pockets. “Sorry, not here. You’re either going to have to kill me, which I wouldn’t recommend since prosecutors always go for the death penalty when you kill a fed, or you’re going to turn around and walk out of here empty-handed and pray I don’t ever catch you. Not a lot of great options.”

  “I’m not buying your charade. Now give it to me or else I won’t hesitate to exercise option one.”

  Newton shook his head and fished the device out of a pocket inside his blazer. “You’re going to regret this. As soon as you walk out, all I have to do is make a phone call and tell someone what happened.”

  The man snatched the device from Newton’s hand. “Actually, you’re not going to do any such thing.”

  “You sure are confident for someone who’s about to go on the run.”

  The man chuckled. “I’m not going on the run. In fact, I’m going to walk out of here like nothing ever happened. And you’ll do the same if you know what’s good for you.”

  “What’s good for me? Are you crazy?”

  “Oh, that’s right. I misspoke. I meant, you’ll do the same if you know what’s good for your wife.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Everybody knows who Natalie is, Mr. Newton. Even my boys.”

  The man held up his phone, which showed a video of Natalie gagged and bound in a closet.

  “Now, if you want her to live,” the man said, “I suggest you not whisper a word of this to anyone.”

  Newton set his jaw and glared at the man. “You’ll never get away with this.”

  “Just watch me.”

  CHAPTER 28

  NEWTON GROWLED AS he returned to the greenroom with all the celebrities and other participants in the evening’s festivities. He glanced at his watch. Five minutes remained before the ceremony was scheduled to begin.

  “Mr. Newton, if you’d please follow me,” a woman wearing a headset said to him.

  He nodded in agreement, walking behind her out of the room. Once they reached a quiet part of the hallway, he stopped.

  “Excuse me, miss, but I need to make a quick phone call,” he said.

  “Right now?” she asked with a scowl. “The show is about to begin, and you’re one of the first people scheduled to be on stage.”

  “It’ll only take a minute,” he said, ignoring her passive protest.

  He ducked into a small corridor and dialed Blunt’s number.

  “What are you doing calling me now?” Blunt asked.

  “You’re not gonna like this, but some maintenance guy cornered me in the men’s room a few minutes ago.”

  “Cornered you?”

  “Yeah, he locked the door and then threatened to kill my wife if I didn’t give him something.”

  “What’d he want?”

  Newton sighed. “My time-based password generator.”

  “Are you serious?” Blunt asked. “He didn’t even try to kill you?”

  “Didn’t lay a hand on me, which I think is more terrifying, to be honest. The guy was like a psychopath.”

  “Was it Preston Vogle?”

  “It didn’t look like him in the pictures that you sent me. This guy had a welder’s mask on, but he lifted the shield to talk to me.”

  Blunt cursed.

  “You know who he is?”

  “Unfortunately, I do. He’s a prisoner who was recently released. We’ve been keeping an eye on him.”

  “Well, it wasn’t a very close eye because that guy can now get access to all of the FBI’s personnel records and anything else he wants.”

  “I’ll call your director and get him—”

  “No, don’t do that. They have Natalie.”

  “Who has Natalie?”

  “Whoever is behind this,” Newton said. “They kidnapped her and are holding her somewhere in what appears to be a closet.”

  “Okay, so we’ve got a lot of moving parts here with this one. But don’t worry. We’re going to find Natalie and get her to safety.”

 
“Please,” Newton begged, “I don’t care about anything else. I just want her home. The guy warned me if I told the authorities, that he’d kill her. J.D., I don’t know what I’d do without her.”

  The woman with the headset eased near Newton and tapped her watch. She gestured for him to go, but he held up his index finger and mouthed wait one more minute.

  “Good thing we’re not the authorities,” Blunt said with a faint chuckle.

  “Just do whatever it takes.”

  “We always do,” Blunt said. “And good luck tonight. No man is more deserving of the Medal of Honor tonight than you are.”

  “You’re too kind, J.D.”

  “I’ll be in touch,” Blunt said before he hung up the phone.

  Newton resumed his march with the woman toward the main stage. He felt helpless and lost. He wanted to rip his tie off and dart out a side door in pursuit of the welder guy. But he’d thought through his plan and was clearly two or three steps ahead of Newton.

  Newton said a silent prayer.

  Please, God, just don’t let them hurt her.

  It’d been a while since he’d joined Natalie at mass, but he was making all kinds of promises about what he would do if she returned home unharmed.

  Newton stopped behind the woman in the stage wings and waited for the person on stage to finish introducing the evening’s program. He wanted to run. He wanted to help. He wanted to do anything other than what he was doing at the moment.

  Yet he had no say in the matter.

  * * *

  ALEX DUNCAN WAS SCROLLING through files on Wilson Wellington when Blunt entered her office with wild eyes.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “We’ve got a big problem,” Blunt said. “And his name is Tony Acworth.”

  “Acworth? But Black got a report from the deputy in Bedford Springs right after lunch that Acworth was working at the family business today.”

  “Apparently, that’s the not the case anymore. Newton just ran into him in the men’s room at the Kennedy Center. And Acworth stole Newton’s password device.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Yeah, he’s fine.”

  “Then have the DEA shut it off,” she suggested.

  “It’s not that simple,” Blunt said. “Someone working with Acworth, presumably Preston Vogle, is holding Newton’s wife hostage, threatening to kill her.”

  “We have to put an end to this.”

  Blunt nodded. “How? I don’t know. But we need to figure out what Acworth and Vogle are doing … and fast.”

  “We tried that before when Vogle stole all that information from Director Quinn at the CIA.”

  “But that was onsite, remember? They’re going to have a helluva hard time covering their tracks remotely, right?”

  “Yeah, it’s damn near impossible.”

  “Good,” he said, handing her a card. “Call the man and tell him you need to see all remote accessing of DEA computers in real time. Tell him you’re working for me, and he’ll verify it and then get you what you need. But be quick about it. We can’t let them get any more ahead of us than they already are.”

  Alex took the information from Blunt and promptly dialed the number. After going through the verification procedure, five minutes later she was monitoring the remote access from Newton’s password.

  Mouth agape, she watched as file after file was copied over. She wanted to put a stop to all the sensitive information being whisked off the DEA’s private servers. Where it would end up, she could only imagine. But she knew the outcome wouldn’t be a good one.

  She noted every personnel file that was copied over and started adding them to a spreadsheet. Analyzing each agent by name, location, and division was where she started. After a few minutes, a picture began to emerge about what Acworth and Vogle were after: undercover agents working with the DEA.

  Blunt ambled back into the room. “Find anything yet?”

  “I’m beginning to think that this has something to do with drugs.”

  Blunt drew back. “Drugs?”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s a real head-scratcher at the moment, but that’s the common link I’m seeing between all the stolen files.”

  “Where do we go with that?”

  “I’ve got an idea,” she said. “But make sure that Shields doesn’t lose Acworth on the security feed. We need to keep eyes on him since he’s likely relaying all this information to someone else.”

  * * *

  SHIELDS EXPANDED HER NETWORK of cameras as she watched Acworth leave the Kennedy Center.

  “Black, we’ve got a situation,” she said.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  She caught him up to speed on what had happened.

  “Ridgecrest told me that Acworth was there this afternoon,” Black said.

  “Either he was lying or something changed. Either way, there’s nothing we can do about it now. I’m tracking Acworth right now.”

  “Should I stick around?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure what the best course of action is, but I think you should sit tight for a little bit longer until we know what’s happening. Even if you went after Acworth right this instant, he’s got such a huge lead on you that I don’t think you’d be able to run him down. And then there’s the problem of our pursuit triggering Natalie’s murder.”

  “Okay, I’ll stay here until you get more actionable intel,” Black said. “But hurry. If they’re stealing FBI personnel records, trouble will brew soon enough.”

  “Roger that.”

  Alex rushed into the conference room where Shields was still monitoring Acworth as he drove out of the parking lot in a white Honda Accord.

  “I found something,” Alex said. “And I wanted to run it by you to see what you think.”

  “Fire away,” Shields said, refusing to take her eyes off the screen.

  “If Wellington planned all this out, there have to be ties to him or his interests. Agree?”

  Shields nodded, still fixated on Acworth’s movements.

  “Well, I think I found one.”

  “Oh?”

  “Get this. Since all the files had links to drug agents, I decided to cross-reference some of the major drug kingpins inside the U.S. and outside who were connected loosely in one way or another with Wellington. He regularly communicated with these leaders as a way of mitigation.”

  “What you’re saying is that he was complicit in the crimes?”

  “Yep.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me,” Shields said. “The man was a slime bucket.”

  “There’s no arguing that point, but what he was doing was using his information about upcoming raids and warning drug lords that they were coming. During Wellington’s time in office, the crime related to drugs dropped dramatically. In reality, he was simply working with heads of different groups to ensure that even more drugs reached certain areas. So, while the crime went way down, the amount of drugs brought into the country tripled that first year.”

  “This is hardly surprising.”

  “But wait. It gets better. With the number of arrests sinking, the FBI suspected that someone was tipping off the drug lords. So, the bureau shifted the way it communicated with their agents that raids were coming. Six months later, the arrests swelled, more than doubling what they were before.”

  “And you think Wellington wanted to tip them off?” Shields asked.

  “Not just tip off the drug lords, but kill the agents working with these vermin. Once the agents are outed, their undercover status is burned forever, allowing the drugs to flow more freely. And good luck recruiting the necessary agents to stem the tide when a handful of them have just been murdered.”

  “So, this move could open up our borders for not only drugs but anything?”

  “That’s one potential outcome,” Alex said.

  “Anything else?”

  “I think I know who Acworth and Vogle plan to give this information to.”

  “And who’s that?�
��

  “A Saudi prince,” Alex said. “Abdullah Alsheri.”

  “Alsheri? The one building a terrorist community within our own borders as well as abroad?”

  “That’s the one. And get this—Alsheri is arriving here tonight on his private plane.”

  “Do you know where?”

  “Of course,” Alex said with a wink before handing Shields a piece of paper with all the information written on it. “According to his flight status, he’s scheduled to land at Potomac Field in about half an hour.”

  “Good work,” Shields said. “Now, let’s stop this sonofabitch before he finishes what he’s started.”

  CHAPTER 29

  PRESTON VOGLE HUDDLED in the backseat of Natalie Newton’s Infiniti sedan and pulled a blanket over his body. With his gun pressed into the back of the driver’s seat, he gave her specific orders about what to say and where to drive. The garage door hummed as it opened overhead.

  “If you do anything to tip them off that I’m back here,” he said. “I won’t hesitate to pull the trigger. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, her tone filled with contempt.

  She eased onto the gas.

  “I always wanted to get in the backseat with a fitness model, but I never imagined it happening like this,” Vogle said.

  “You think you’re a real wise guy, don’t you?” she said. “My husband will hunt you down and kill you. I don’t think you have any idea who you’re messing with.”

  Vogle chuckled. “Oh, I probably know more about your husband than you do. Especially the multiple mistresses he’s juggling right now. It’s what happens when you stay locked inside, afraid of crowds. Your husband takes advantage of you.”

  “Enough,” she said. “I need to speak to the guard.”

  Vogle listened intently to Natalie’s exchange with the man.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Newton,” he said. “Where are you off to tonight? We were under the impression that you weren’t planning on leaving.”

  “Who told you that? Gary? Plans can change.”

  “We were under strict orders to keep you here in case you decided to leave.”

  Natalie sighed. “Look, Dax. I just wanted to surprise him at an after party.”