by Jack Bowie
Damn. He was so close. Why didn’t this banker see the potential? He couldn’t let Flitterman off the hook. “I would be happy to set up a meeting between you and the Senator, Julius. Perhaps that would alleviate your concerns.”
Flitterman paused and contemplated the suggestion. “No, Robert. That is your territory. I’ll review these documents tonight. If you feel this is the right strategy then we should stop arguing and proceed.”
Greystone tried to remain calm. Soon they would all see how perfect the plan was. It would, without question, succeed, and he would be recognized as the genius behind it. “Thank you, Julius. I will work out the operational details over the next few days.”
“Just one thing, Robert. I don’t want to begin implementation for a week or so. We need all the publicity around Lombard to die down. The State Police are still continuing their investigation.”
“Why? I thought they had all the evidence they needed?” Hajima was right! There was a problem with the investigation. How had he found out?
“I don’t know the details, but I spoke with Agent Jefferson and he said there were some discrepancies in times and some unexplained evidence at Charles’ estate. We can’t have any more adverse publicity. No, we have to wait until this clears. For now, you watch the Bill. And pray nothing happens with it.”
“Yes, of course, Julius. I’ll monitor it carefully.” He couldn’t hold Hajima off indefinitely. He needed another deadline to keep Flitterman in line. “Let’s get together later next week and review the status,” Greystone suggested.
“Fine, Robert. Thank you again for coming in.”
That should be enough to keep Hajima off his back. Now he could devote more attention to the other problems.
His mind shifted to Braxton and Goddard as he left the office. The damn consultant was still loose and now he was tied into the Lynch affair. If that went public, Potterfield would be history and the Bill would die. He couldn’t afford to have Nicholson running loose.
“Good bye, Mr. Greystone,” Montonet said interrupting his concentration.
He stopped and looked over to the secretary. “Clarice,” he replied walking back toward her desk. “How is Julius treating you? Well, I hope?”
* * *
The young black man had been on duty since seven that morning. He had read every book from his small apartment, and his bladder was about to explode from the coffee he had consumed. There had been a few strange looks over the past few days, but he had moved among four different surveillance points and had changed his outfit at least twice a shift.
His partner wouldn’t be back for two more hours. The twelve hour schedule he had created was a killer, but it saved him a lot of money. He hoped the target would show up on his shift. The ten grand bonus would be real handy.
He was about to head for the bathroom in the McDonalds down the street when he saw a woman walking up from the Metro station. He pulled the tattered picture from his pocket, made sure he had the image fixed in his head, then jaywalked across the street. Turning at the curb, he walked toward her. They passed as she reached the entrance to the building.
“If it ain’t the bitch,” he whispered.
Chapter 54
Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
Saturday, 8:00 p.m.
GODDARD ARRIVED AT Auberge first, took their table and ordered a bottle of Merlot. She was on her second glass when Braxton appeared fifteen minutes later, out of breath and looking like he’d run a marathon.
“Adam, are you okay?” she pleaded as he sat down.
He huffed for a minute before responding. “Yes, I’m fine. But parking in this city is worse than Boston. I finally found a space five blocks away. I didn’t want to be late so I ran the rest of the way.”
She wanted to jump across the table and strangle him. “Do you realize how stupid that was? You’ve been shot, for heaven’s sake.” After her heart quit pounding she shook her head. “I really can’t leave you alone, can I?”
“Nice to see you again, too,” he replied and gave her a peck on her cheek.
She flashed her most irritated scowl, then filled his glass with the deep red wine.
“To our health,” she said lifting her glass. “It looks like you could still use some.”
“Okay, point taken.” He clicked her glass with his. “Forgive me?”
“I’m thinking about it. How is your shoulder?”
“Not too bad.” He rotated his arm and only winced once. “It’s still sore but at least I can move it.”
“Did you find a place to stay?”
“More or less. I rented a room at an old motel in Vienna. It’s pretty small but the place is isolated and I can come and go without any hassle. And it’s not very far from the Metro in case we need to dump the car. It’ll do for now.”
She squinted at him across the table. He was wearing a blue sports coat, snappy striped blue oxford shirt and Docker trousers. “Where did you get the new outfit?”
“I’m so glad you noticed,” he said with a grin. “I stopped at Wal-Mart and picked up a few things. Those wool shirts you bought in New Hampshire were getting a little scratchy.”
“It looks like you did just fine. Maybe I can let you out on your own.”
A pencil-thin waitress wearing a blonde butch haircut, black lipstick and a black sheath dress appeared at the table and recited a long list of nightly specials with a well-practiced indifference. They looked at each other blankly. Finally, Goddard spoke and ordered a filet mignon for two.
“Thanks,” Braxton said as the waitress left. “I wasn’t up to making any more decisions tonight.”
“That’s what I figured.”
“Did you have any messages?”
“Nothing on the telephone or email. I did get a package from Wilson. It was some background on Nicholson.” She reached into her purse, pulled out a sheath of papers, and handed then to Braxton. “He’s been with Potterfield for over thirty years. They must be really close.”
Braxton reviewed the documents. “Hey. Nicholson went to MIT. So did Chamberlain.”
“Are you sure that’s where he went?”
“Absolutely, he wouldn’t let anyone forget it. Chamberlain could have known Nicholson from school. Can you check the library tomorrow and get some more detail? Attendance dates, previous employers? Maybe we’ll find more that ties them together.”
“Sure. Georgetown’s got a great library. I’ll go over first thing in the morning.”
“What about Chamberlain’s flash drive?” Braxton asked as he handed the papers back.
“Unfortunately, it wasn’t very helpful.” She reached back into her purse and set the drive on the table. “There was only one file and it was nearly ten megabytes. I tried to print some of it out but all I got was gibberish.”
He picked up the drive and stuck it in his shirt pocket. “What was the name of the file?”
“Journal dot pee gee pee.”
“A journal! Warren must have kept a history of everything he did. That would be just like him. It could explain why he was killed.”
“And why he wanted you to have it. But I couldn’t read any of it.”
“It was encrypted. That’s what the PGP means. He didn’t even trust his own systems.”
“What’s PGP?” Goddard asked.
“PGP stands for Pretty Good Privacy. It is the name of a set of programs that perform encryption and decryption. PGP is based on a technology called public key encryption. It was developed in the nineteen-nineties by three academic researchers. It was so good the NSA tried to get the algorithm declared secret because they couldn’t break it. There were a lot of legal battles, but eventually so much documentation was made public, NSA just gave up.
“Now PGP is used for email, files, databases, all kinds of information. If used correctly, and I’m sure Warren did, it would take years to crack the encoded text. That’s what you saw when you tried to print out the file.”
Braxton had obviously recovered from hi
s run. His eyes were twinkling and his cheeks were flushed with pink. He was really cute.
“Thanks for the lecture, professor,” she said with a smile. “But does that mean we can’t read it?”
“Without some help, probably not. But I’m sure Warren tried to give me a clue to the passkey. I’ve got some routines in my account in Boston that we can use. I’ll get them tomorrow.”
“How can you do that?”
“I was thinking I’d go back to GW and use their systems. I can route through Ramal’s account to access my Cambridge files and the archive at CERT.”
“What if someone is monitoring the accounts?”
“I’ll be hiding behind the GW computers. I can cover my tracks pretty well.”
“I hope so. Just be careful.”
Their dinners arrived and they turned their attention to the skillfully prepared meal. The conversation drifted off into more mundane topics, both of them badly needing a few moments away from the tension of the past days. As they were finishing their entrees Braxton noticed that his companion kept looking past him toward the door.
“Is something wrong?”
“I don’t know,” she replied. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “There’s a man at one of the tables in the front. He keeps looking over this way.”
“He’s probably just flirting with the very attractive lady sitting across from me.”
“Adam, I’m serious.” She gave him a very hurt look.
“I’m sorry. But there’s no way anyone could know we’re here. And if it was the police they would have arrested me by now.”
“I’m not worried about the police. I think it’s Barclay Nicholson.”
Braxton started to turn around but thought better of it. “Are you sure?”
“I think so.” She pulled out the papers Lexington had sent her and found the photograph. “It’s him, Adam. How did he find us?”
“If he was able to discover who you are, he could have been watching your apartment. Let me see the photo again.”
She handed it over. “I’m so sorry,” she pleaded. “I didn’t think anyone was following me.”
“It’s all right. There’s no way you could have known. Besides, he could have tracked the rental and identified me. We don’t know how he found us and it doesn’t matter. We just have to find a way out of here that he won’t notice.”
He motioned for the waitress and asked for their check. As he turned to pay, he looked across the room. A stocky, well-dressed black man was busily eating a plate of pasta at a corner table. He was a little bit older than the picture in the photograph, but it was clearly Nicholson.
The waitress took the bills and Braxton turned back to his companion. “You need to go to the ladies’ room.”
“What?”
“Go on. It’s in the back to the right. I’ll meet you there in a few minutes. Then we’ll find another way out.”
“Okay, but don’t be long or I’ll be back to get you.” She stood and headed for the rear of the restaurant.
He considered leaving without her to draw Nicholson away. But he couldn’t be sure the aide would follow him. Goddard was his most likely target.
Braxton waited three minutes then followed her to the back. The man in the corner didn’t move. He went down a narrow hallway and knocked on the door marked “Madame”. Goddard emerged looking as frightened as he had ever seen her.
“Now where are we going?” she asked.
“The servers come down this hall when they deliver food. The kitchen has to be this way. And there’s got to be a delivery door there we can use to get out.”
He took her hand and they followed the hallway around the corner. In front of them was a pair of swinging doors.
They pushed through the doors into the kitchen. The room was filled with huge stainless steel tables and rows of cooking paraphernalia. An immense gas stove filled the left wall where four white-hatted chefs attended to the preparations. The smell of garlic and frying oil permeated an atmosphere already heavy with heat and humidity. Braxton felt a wisp of cool air brush past him and headed for its origin. Next to a gigantic built-in refrigerator was an open exit door, the cooler night air providing some relief to the employees stuck in the sweltering heat.
Ignoring the startled looks of the kitchen staff, they shoved their way through the aisle and escaped into the fresh air behind the restaurant.
* * *
Antonio, the head chef, was appalled. Sure that the impolite diners had chosen to leave his establishment without paying, he yelled something in Italian at them, then left a skillet of simmering osso buco to his younger brother and stormed into the main dining room.
The black man in the corner didn’t understand French, but he observed the commotion and gesturing between the chef and the maître d’ attentively. He threw a pile of bills on the table and ran out the front.
Chapter 55
Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
Saturday, 9:15 p.m.
BRAXTON QUICKLY LOOKED around. They were in an alley alongside the restaurant. It was littered with trash cans and empty produce boxes, the waste products of the businesses that lined the narrow access way. Light streaming from the restaurant’s kitchen provided the main illumination. To his right, the alley opened back onto M Street. On his left, the pavement sloped down to an area behind the buildings. The deserted passage was no place to be if Nicholson came to look for them.
“This way,” he whispered, grabbing Goddard’s hand and running down the incline.
The alley ended at a foot path that paralleled M Street and ran along the old Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. The C&O Canal was the last intact example of the great canals of the nineteenth century. Originally George Washington’s dream to connect the Potomac to the West, the C&O had only gotten as far as Cumberland, Maryland before it lost its economic advantage to the railroad. Established as a National Monument in 1961, the canal and its banks were now frequented primarily by jogging enthusiasts during the day and strolling lovers at night.
A rusty pipe guard rail was all that separated the foot path from a six foot fall into the early spring mud. Braxton and Goddard took a right at the end of the alley trying to put as much distance between them and the restaurant as possible. The spill-over glow from M Street provided enough light for their flight down the old brick way.
They couldn’t stay on the path. They were too conspicuous by themselves and the alleys and building corners left too many places for an attacker to hide.
“Let’s get back to M,” he said between breaths. “We can lose him in the crowds, then circle back to the car.” He started to pull her up the next alley.
She resisted his lead. “Not this way. It’s too dark. Wisconsin is only a little way farther, it’s more public.”
He took her suggestion and they continued down the foot path. They were about a hundred yards from the cross street when a tall shadow stepped into their path. His hands were in his pockets and he slowly walked toward them.
Goddard pulled them to a stop. “It’s Nicholson!”
“You can’t be sure. It’s too dark.”
“It’s him. I just know. We’ve got to turn around.” Her voice was near panic. She spun around and headed up the alley they had just passed. Braxton had no choice but to follow. They saw the traffic of M Street only fifty yards ahead.
Beams of light suddenly shot out from the gloom. They shielded their eyes and saw a huge truck rolling down the alley toward them. There was no room on either side for them to squeeze past. Braxton was not about to second guess the delivery van and pulled Goddard back toward the canal path.
He hoped Nicholson had seen them enter the alley and had gone back up to M to cut them off. If he had, they could go back toward the restaurant, then cross the canal farther down. He would never be able to follow them that far.
They had nearly reached the foot of the alley when the truck’s lights disappeared. They kept running as their eyes adjusted to the darkness.
T
he trash can rolled directly in their path. Braxton managed to side-step it, but it struck Goddard’s right foot and she went down hard on her knees. She grabbed for Braxton and pulled him after her, both ending sprawled on the rough brick surface. Goddard’s legs were bleeding, and Braxton’s jacket and trousers were ripped. Both were gasping for breath and partially dazed from the fall.
The can continued down the slope, clattering all the way to the railing.
“Mr. Braxton and Ms. Goddard,” a deep resonant voice said from out of the shadows. “Or should I say Lynch? How nice to finally meet you. I have been looking for you for weeks.”
Nicholson calmly stepped in front of the pair. He was wearing a long grey coat that billowed in the light breeze. As they started to get up, he pulled a huge-looking automatic pistol from one of the coat’s pockets. His face was relaxed; his expression one of a man used to being in control.
Braxton stood up first, then helped his companion. “Are you okay?” he whispered.
“Fine.” She said bravely. “So far.”
Goddard’s hands were bloody and she was shaking badly. Braxton put his arm around her and she clung tightly to his side.
“What now, Mr. Nicholson?” Braxton asked. “Another accident on the streets of Georgetown?”
“Unfortunately yes, Mr. Braxton. Crime is getting so out of hand in the District. It will be just another senseless murder.”
“You’re the murderer!” Goddard cried, pointing a bloody finger in his direction. “You killed my father!”
“As I remember he did that to himself, Ms. Lynch.” Nicholson’s face was impassive.
The words sliced at her heart. “But you destroyed him. You and all the lies.”
“He was a politician,” Nicholson replied, as if that was a satisfactory explanation. “He understood the game. But apparently not well enough. He simply wouldn’t listen to reason.”
“Someone will stop you.” The words spit from Goddard’s mouth.
