“What do you need?”
“I need you to go back to the office and get some information for me.”
“I never left. I’ve been working your case all night.”
“Her phone records—see who she called in the Bay Area. The guy she went to see, his first name is Freddie. Look for any contact. Fred, Frederick, Winifred...”
There was a pounding of computer keys coming from the other end of the line, then a pause, and Tom said slowly, “Oh man, you’re not going to believe whose number she’s been calling in the Bay Area over and over lately.”
“Whose?”
“Congressman John Tidwell’s.”
Mack shook his head. “Any other calls to the Bay Area?”
“None in the last month.”
He thought for a moment. “That’s it! John Alfred Tidwell, Listen, Tom, can you verify if the last call made from her phone came from this congressman’s address?”
Moments later, Tom reported: “I’m 99% sure her phone is at his address.”
“Text me his coordinates, will you?”
“How are you going to get to San Fran in eight hours? You need to call Bender for help.”
“How do I know Bender’s not involved? He was tight with Utah.”
A sudden howling gust of wind from outside caught his attention.
Mack looked outside. “Tom, just text me the address.”
He left the guest house. The helicopter meant to transport Templeton and his family to safety was landing on the helipad fifty yards away, toward the lake. Mack jogged toward the chopper, with each step becoming increasingly certain of what he needed to do. The wind from the rotors whipped dirt, leaves, and pebbles into his face as he approached. He quickly assessed the twin-engine chopper. It appeared to be equipped for six passengers. It would do. He banged on the cockpit door.
The pilot unbuttoned the hatch. He was dressed in a gray jumpsuit, with his flight helmet still on, and to Mack’s relief he was unarmed. He scowled as Mack pushed his way into the chopper, waving a badge in his face. “FBI. Change in plans. You’re taking me to the San Francisco Bay Area. I’ll have an address for you shortly.”
“I’ll need to get authorization for that,” the man said uncertainly.
Exasperated, Mack pulled out his pistol and aimed it at the man’s head. “Here it is. Now fly this bird.”
123
Running on fumes, the chopper landed in the backyard of Tidwell’s sprawling estate at 7:52 AM. The perfectly-manicured grass leading up to the white stone mansion reminded Mack more of a golf fairway than a yard. The helicopter almost certainly botched any chance at surprise, and he had a long stretch of grass to cross before entering the house.
He hadn’t been contacted by Caroline since the call he had received demanding he kill the Templetons. There were at least two men inside, and in his haste, he hadn’t bothered to grab an automatic weapon before leaving Seattle. Riggs had given him two clips when they had swept the Templeton estate. Two clips and a 9mm. That was all.
He did a full sprint across the open grass, jinking back and forth. If he could just make it into the bushes on the side of the house without being picked off...
But no one fired on him.
Maybe the house was so big no one inside had even heard the chopper land—doubtful. Or maybe they had watched him run across the yard, and were just waiting for him to try and gain entry somehow—slightly less doubtful.
He found a basement window along the east side of the house toward the back. He kicked it in and shimmied inside, leading with his weapon. He was in a wine cellar. He swept his gun across the room, examining the impressive rows of full wine racks.
Mack made his way toward the exit. The door was unlocked, so he opened it. Almost instantly a thick smell rolled over him, so overwhelming he could almost taste it. In one breath, the unknown stink went from sweet to so foul it made him want to puke.
With no exterior windows in the room, a thin arc of light from the wine cellar cast Mack’s shadow into the large rectangular room beyond. Weapon extended, he swept the room from right to left. He stopped and took aim at what appeared to be the outline of a body across the room at the base of a flight of stairs.
The body lay very still, and though it was too far away and too dark in the room to tell much, its posture and smell revealed it to be a burned human corpse.
Mack rushed toward the body, heedless of danger, praying desperately he wasn’t too late; that this wasn’t Caroline. He chanced to see a light switch on the wall, and turned it on.
What he saw in the light made him fall to his knees.
124
The severely-burnt corpse lay on the floor with its mouth frozen wide open in a silent scream. The expression, hideous and unnatural, was what had softened his legs. The body glistened weirdly, as if the fire had been put out by an extinguisher. The faint smoldering and the strong smell suggested the body had burned within the last couple of hours, if not more recently, but Mack’s revulsion turned to a strange relief as he bent to examine the corpse. It was burnt beyond recognition and wizened hideously, but by height alone he could see it wasn’t Caroline. Was it Tidwell?
A loud bang came from upstairs. The noise didn’t sound like gunfire, more like a wrecking ball blasting through a wall. He hurried up the steps, heart thumping in his chest.
He moved quietly, staying low. The difference between being shot or not would depend on his approach. Burned bodies, strange, violent sounds—he was preparing himself for anything.
From a crouched position, he took hold of the knob on the door at the top of the stairs. The adrenaline in his veins made his hands tremble. He swung the door open, and recoiled against the wall, away from possible gunfire.
Nothing. No gunfire, no voices, no alarm—only silence. Fearing it was a trap, but with no other choice, he moved forward. He sprang into the room and looked around frantically. To his left was the grand living room, with massive arched windows giving way to a storybook view of the property behind the house. He spotted another body on the floor in the far-right corner, halfway in the room and halfway in an adjoining hallway. It looked to Mack as if he was killed in the process of either entering or leaving. The man had a military bearing. Tall, with a fit build and close-cropped hair.
Keeping his back to the wall, Mack made his way to the body. He swung his gun frantically as he crept, trying to cover all the points of possible attack.
The man’s head was turned over his shoulder at an unnatural angle. His neck had clearly been snapped, the head nearly detached from the neck. Mack reached out and touched the man’s skin. Killed just moments ago. The violence of this death horrified him, with his hope of finding Caroline alive motivating him onward, however dimly the possibility now seemed to be. He stood quickly and entered the hallway leading toward the front of the house.
Immediately to his left, he cleared the dining room. Loose plaster fragments scattered across the Oriental rug caught his attention. The plaster fragments were concentrated in an area on the far side of a wide china cabinet, which partially obscured them. He stepped deeper into the room to investigate.
The sight he saw on the other side of that cabinet once again left him weak in the knees. A man’s bloody, misshapen head protruded from the wall beside it. It had been rammed through from the other side. The wrecking ball, Mack thought crazily.
A sound of struggling from the adjoining hallway. He left the dining room and cautiously peered around the corner.
Having prepared himself for anything, he found now that his imagination had come up short. Before him was a sight to him as shocking as the second coming of Jesus. He felt weak, giddy, and found he had to grip the wall over the impossibility that now confronted him.
When you shot people, they were supposed to stay dead.
The fiery red eyes pierced deep into his soul.
125
Bic Green stood in the hallway of the congressm
an’s mansion, holding a smaller man by the neck in his massive right hand. The man dangled bonelessly, like dead prey in a falcon’s talon.
“Freeze!” said Mack, feeling as if it were useless to even suggest such a thing.
Bic let go of the man’s neck. The body hit the floor with a thud.
“You don’t belong here.”
“Yeah? Look who’s talking. I saw you die with my own eyes.”
Bic’s eyes became even more intense. “This doesn’t concern you.”
Mack awkwardly glanced at the dead man at Bic’s feet, then toward the other, whose body still dangled from a bloody hole in the wall.
“I told you. It’s not your conc—"
“Put your hands on your head!”
Bic ignored the command, saying, “There’s a girl here. You need to get her out, both of you need to get out.” Bic’s expression turned impatient. “Or do you want to try me again?”
“Where is she?”
Bic gestured to the door on his left.
“I can’t just let you go.” Mack tensed his jaw as he said, “You have to go down for what you did.”
“I already have.”
“You don’t look so dead.”
Bic took a step toward Mack.
Mack held his ground and began to squeeze his trigger finger.
Bic pulled down the collar of his black V-neck T-shirt to expose his chest. In the middle was a light patch of salt-and-pepper hair, but not a single scratch. “I’m not dead,” he said quietly. “I’m not even real.”
Mack shook his head in disbelief, knowing two things were real: he had shot Bic in the chest, and he was positive Bic hadn’t been wearing a vest when he did it.
Bic took another step toward him. “John Alfred Tidwell, the man you saw burned alive in the basement, is the mastermind behind this whole thing.”
“What whole thing?”
“All of it. The billionaires.”
“Lies,” said Mack. “He can’t possibly benefit from these deaths.”
“You’re not looking in the right place.”
“Stop right there, Bic! I mean it!”
“It’s over now. I’m dead. Everyone is dead. This case is solved.” Bic turned away. “Now, go save the girl. You won’t have much time. Tidwell had allies. I’ll keep them busy until you go.”
“Why would you do that?”
“You killed me,” said Bic darkly. He turned back and glanced at the agent. “It’s the least I can do to repay you.”
He turned at last and started down the hall. With each step Bic took, Mack considered a thousand different scenarios. The Black Ghost had been stopped, the Black Ghost hadn’t been stopped, the Black Ghost had to be stopped—but then Mack glanced at the other room, thought he heard the faint thrum of helicopter rotors, and concluded that yes, the Black Ghost would have to be stopped.
Soon. Not today. But soon.
He stood and watched as Bic walked down the hall and disappeared into the darkness. Mack took two quick steps the opposite way and threw open the door to the study.
He ran to Caroline, whose eyes grew wide when she saw him. She was bound to a chair with duct tape over her mouth. He carefully peeled the tape back.
“I knew you wouldn’t fail.”
“I couldn’t,” he said, as he gently cupped her face with his hands and then pressed his lips against hers. Mack drank in the moment, magical, powerful. “I won’t ever let you down,” he said at last. “I will never let you go.”
126
“There was only one glaring difference between Colin Shepard and all of the other billionaires,” Mack said to Bender. “Shepard had all his money going to a foundation he set up a few years back.”
“All of it?” said Bender.
“All his money. It was a tax haven. Not one cent for Uncle Sam. If money was the motive behind these murders, the only logical reason for killing the other billionaires and not Shepard would be to generate revenue for the government in the form of estate death taxes.”
Bender sat, lips pursed in deep thought for a moment. “Do you know what this means?”
“Oh, I sure do,” said Mack. “It means Tidwell had quite the little operation going.”
“It means,” said Caroline, standing in the doorway to Bender’s office, “that this is a government conspiracy that makes Watergate look like a party game.” She was battered and bruised, but there was a strength in her gleaming green eyes that could not be extinguished for anything.
“That’s one way to put it,” said Mack, rising. He walked over to her, looked into her eyes, and embraced her.
“Welcome home, Agent Foxx,” said Bender, a glisten in his eye. “You and Mack have done some outstanding work together.”
Mack turned back to Bender. “Caroline’s right, though. This thing is bigger than we think. Somebody high up in the government needed to generate revenue, and fast. They hired an assassin to kill the wealthiest people in America. The death taxes would then be used to fund their project.”
“About this project,” said Bender.
“A Siberian pipeline. In a nutshell, Tidwell killed a bunch of innocent people for oil money.”
“I guess oil is as good a motive for murder as any other.”
“Sadly, yes,” said Mack.
127
For Mack and Caroline, the next day was complete chaos. Details about Tidwell’s scheme were leaked to the press before they even turned in their completed reports, and the media had a field day with the story. As one pundit put it, the facts were too outrageous to be anything but true.
Mack became the country’s golden boy. He had solved the case and taken down two assassins. Hijacking a chopper to Tidwell’s mansion was met with mixed reviews, but the hunch had paid off. Mack had dealt with a mansion’s worth of mercenaries, whose deaths he couldn’t explain, and thankfully in the wave of praise, he didn’t have to. Of course, in none of his press conferences and interviews did he mention the fact that Bic Green was still alive and at large—if, in fact, he really was. What he did mention was how he only had saved Caroline’s life one time, but she had saved his three times in the last couple of weeks. And he was quick to give her equal credit for solving the case.
Early in the morning on the second day after the showdown, Mack woke suddenly. It was a little after four in the morning. Caroline, who had spent the night, was on her side, sound asleep. Mack stared at her long, toned legs poking out from under the white sheets. He smiled widely, recalling the things she had done to him the night before, and imagining how he would return the favor.
As he tried to go back to sleep and forget about Bic, the information he had received late the previous day wouldn't allow him to. He tried to take it at face value and just accept what had happened—to forget about Bic. But come on, all the men who had been killed at Ralston Templeton's estate, including Bic and Publio, had supposedly been cremated the day after they were killed, before anyone from any reputable government agency saw or confirmed the dead bodies, of course. What really set Mack off was the sham story they'd used to burn the bodies right away: Corporal Crooker, one of the dead men, had allegedly come directly from an area in Africa where there had been an outbreak of the Marburg virus. How Mack would love to get his hands on the postmortem blood report that supposedly confirmed the presence of the virus. All this just screamed conspiracy.
He quietly crawled out of bed and went into his kitchenette for a glass of water. A week’s worth of mail, which Caroline had stacked neatly on the kitchen table, caught his attention. Perhaps some return to normalcy would settle his muddled mind. He began thumbing through the mail. A direct mail postcard from a local paintball field caught his eye. All those colorful splats on the shirts in the postcard.
Red splats, like blood.
That dirty dog, he thought, and the light of pure reason suddenly blazed in his brain.
I shot Bic with the weapon he gave me.
128
He sprang from the kitchen table to the three-drawer hutch up against the wall in the living room. In the top drawer was the 9mm he’d used to shoot Bic.
He released the magazine and pushed the top bullet out into his palm.
The bullet sure seemed real. It had to be.
He pushed a second bullet out of the magazine. This one was different than the first. He looked at the first bullet more closely. On the casing was a deep scratch.
He went back to the drawer and grabbed a pair of pliers. Very carefully, he pulled the first bullet from its casing. The casing was empty. Devoid of propellant. He thanked God he hadn’t tried to shoot Bic at Tidwell’s house. One jammed bullet later and Mack too would have dangled like a dead chicken in Bic’s massive choking hands.
Corporal Riggs, he thought.
He remembered Riggs asking him if he was low on ammo and offering to trade him the new magazines for the one he had used to shoot Bic and Publio. He’d asked Mack if he was low on ammo, not out of ammo.
Mack’s entire body went cold. Riggs had carried a shiny silver .357 as his sidearm. Why the hell would the corporal just happen to have two clips for a 9mm?
He rehashed what had happened at the Templeton mansion. The first two men who were killed, Anderson and Stevens, had run behind the boat house. He hadn’t actually seen what had happened to them. From the radio silence, he had assumed they were dead. Next, there was the kid burned alive by Gabriel’s Molotov. That wasn’t fake.
But then he remembered seeing a fire-retardant suit in the supply room. The kid could easily have put on the suit while Mack was in the forest with Bic setting up watch.
The more he thought about it, the more it made sense. He hadn’t actually seen the other four men in the team get killed. He’d just heard Riggs report to O’Donnell that they were dead. That left Gabriel, Publio, and Bic.
He had no doubt that Gabriel was dead. He had seen Bic pump at least twenty M-16 rounds into the desk Gabriel was underneath, and the grenade made short work of the rest.
Black Ghost Page 27