He glanced at the curve of her Swan Lake throat, perfect and smooth and pale between the stark black collar of her coat and the salon-perfect line of her dark hair. She was wearing a most-enchanting scent. A hint of peach over something mysterious and sumptuous that Reyland couldn’t quite name.
“At the base here? No. I’m so sorry,” Reyland finally said. “The civilian funeral home representatives need to take him straight from the plane in order to make the final preparations.”
Reyland glanced over to where the hearse waited. A marine honor guard was standing at attention in the doorway of the hangar beside it, starched white gloves and the black patent leather shining.
He certainly couldn’t complain about the optics, he thought. Even Dunning, who was a hard-ass stickler in just about everything, would have approved.
“C’mon, Mother,” Belinda said. “I can see the plane. Father’s coming in.”
“It’s perfectly fine if you need more time. We still have a few minutes,” Reyland said, bringing his hands together as if in prayer.
“Okay,” Catherine Dunning finally said. “Okay.”
The vice president’s retinue showed up as the plane made its taxiing turn. The president, still on his Asian trip, couldn’t make it, but he would be back just in time for the funeral. The VP came over and gave Belinda a hug and patted Catherine’s hand, whispering to her. He smiled at Reyland as they nodded at each other.
“Nice to see you again, Ron,” the VP said to him.
“You, too, sir,” Reyland said, not correcting him that they had never met before and that his name was actually Robert.
It didn’t matter. DC was a kinetic place. Factions were already making movements, readjustments.
He wouldn’t make that mistake twice, Reyland thought in the roar of the approaching plane.
The turboprops roared even louder in the cold as the big plane crawled over to where they stood. Its back ramp was already down as it finally stopped before them. The marines, on the march, entered and went up with robotic precision.
The casket they came out with was straight lined and much smaller than Reyland expected. Under the flag, it looked like the kind of cardboard box that ready-to-assemble Walmart furniture came in.
The pallbearers stopped before the widow, and two of the marines from the honor guard marched over, giving the flag the required thirteen folds. As they did this, Reyland looked at himself in the limo’s tinted glass and smoothed his black tie. When he glanced over at the photographers in the media pen set up beside the hangar, he could see that they were going stone-cold bat shit.
Roll ’em, boys, and don’t forget my good side, Reyland thought, raising his chin high.
And why not? It was a moving performance. Solemn, austere. All of it. A splendorous display of reticence. Emerson had suggested taps, but Reyland had nixed it. Better to save it for the burial.
As the soldiers finally slid the boss into the dead-mobile, Reyland nodded to himself, pleased. There were still some long hard miles to go before he slept, but at least the press was already swallowing the Rome thing like a widemouthed bass. By tomorrow, the arrow of the bullshit wheel would be firmly landed upon one of the grandstanding press’s all-time favorite chestnuts, A Nation in Mourning.
As the marines headed back to the hangar, Reyland glanced over at the tears flowing freely past the soft bud of Belinda’s brilliant diamond-pierced earlobe a foot in front of him.
As she began to tremble, Reyland leaned ever so slightly forward and placed his hand on her perfect shoulder, careful to keep his chin up for the photographers as he mournfully closed his eyes.
30
It was coming on 3:00 a.m. when the vrooming Honda Ruckus moped slowed and came to a puttering halt on a dirt road on the southeast outskirts of Culiacán, Mexico.
There was a fork in the high-desert country road, and the handsome middle-aged man astride the rumbling bike sat for a moment before it with a ruminative look on his face.
He sat studying the two roads, the moonlit plains of chaparral they carved through, the mountains in the far distance. After a moment, he removed a pair of reading glasses from his crisp shirt’s breast pocket and carefully consulted the GPS on the phone in a holder between the moped’s handlebars. Then he put the glasses back and kicked up some dust as he rolled up the right-hand branch.
The small up-country compound he stopped before ten minutes later had a solid steel plate gate in the center of its nine-foot-high cement block outer wall. He unlocked the gate with the key from his pocket and squealed it open. Then he rolled in the moped and squealed the gate back and firmly relocked it.
The small building inside had once been a gas station. Before one of its old rusted pumps was a portable gasoline generator with a cord that went in under the station’s closed door. He ripcorded the generator on and unlocked the old station’s front door and came through its unlit empty front room into the back.
Beneath the tarp he pulled back was a steel cellar door built into the concrete slab floor. It was secured with a thick Master key padlock that he unlocked with his key ring. The well-oiled hinges made no sound at all as he opened the door up and out.
He squatted, looking down into it. Seven feet below was a dirt-walled cell that looked like a large grave dug into the earth. Light from the standing floodlight below fell across just the legs of the prisoner in the corner.
One couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. It was just a figure, a small pale bare-legged figure with the knees drawn up and the arms hugging the shins. The feet were black with filth.
Good, the torturer thought as he saw how the prisoner was shivering.
He adjusted the floodlight as he got to the bottom of the ladder. As he did this, the figure raised a thin arm up as if to ward off a blow. The torturer looked at the bright green of the shamrock tattoo on the American’s hand. He had spent some time in America and knew the symbol was supposed to stand for good luck.
The torturer had to catch himself from tsking at the irony of it, at the cruel difference that often arose between one’s hopeful expectations and the actual brutalities of blind uncaring fate and chance.
The torturer stepped over slowly and looked down at the naked man. He had fought them from the very beginning, raged. You wouldn’t think a man his size could reach such volume.
Now, after leaving him without food or water here in the dark for twenty-four hours, it was time for a new tack.
“My name is Dr. Segurro. I am here to tend to you. Are you awake? Hello?” the torturer said in his excellent English as he knelt beside the American.
The torturer was wearing a nice dress shirt and slacks and had a stethoscope. He warmed it in his palms before he put it to the man’s chest.
“Put out your tongue,” he said.
The prisoner did so, snorting and gasping.
“Yes, very good. Very good,” the torturer said, shining a penlight into the man’s eyes.
“Listen to me very carefully,” the torturer said. “Something in you has ruptured. It’s your spleen. Do you understand? You’re broken inside, and if we don’t get you to a hospital, you’re going to die. These men obviously want something from you. If you tell them, I can get you out of here. But if you do not, you will die. This is your final chance.”
“Okay, okay,” the American said immediately. “I’ll tell you.”
The torturer smiled at the man’s instant reversal. He had seen this happen more than once. Twenty-four hours in the dark with the rats was incredibly effective. One of his very favorite techniques. It was heartening to build up a store of knowledge of his craft.
“I copied the videotape of the dive,” he said. “It’s on my phone. The passcode is 6543. I showed the video to the lieutenant from the navy. She watched it twice. Now, please, some water. Please.”
“I have water outside. I will get it in
a moment. Just please speak louder. You’re running out of time,” the torturer said, putting his recording phone to the American’s bruised face.
“The girl fr-fr-from Naval, Naval Safety. The pretty brown-haired girl. I showed her the video,” he said again.
“Lieutenant Everett, yes,” the torturer said, remembering his memorized notes. “You showed it to Ruby. Yes.”
“Yes. Ruby. I showed her. Now help me, please. Please. I don’t want to die. Save me. I need water.”
“Yes, of course, of course. You have done well. What’s your passcode again?”
“6543.”
“I will tell them. I will be right back.”
The torturer went up the ladder, relocked the cellar door, placed the tarp back over it, went outside and killed the generator.
He had a little kit bag beneath the motorbike’s seat, and from it, he removed a sanitary baby wipe that he used meticulously on his hands and face before he took out his phone.
“Mr. Ruiz?” the torturer said, lighting a cigarette as he sat on the moped out in the silent country under the glittering starlight.
“Yes. Good news,” the torturer said. “There’s been a breakthrough.”
31
Out in the cool of the morning off Interstate 10, Gannon watched his son raise his left arm, turning the baseball in his long, graceful fingers.
They were in Arizona now, somewhere west of downtown Phoenix. It was just after sunrise, and they were standing in the open desert a couple of miles from their hotel beside an empty truck stop pull-off.
The early morning workout had been Gannon’s idea. In full coach mode now, he had gotten Declan up and moving the second he woke up.
Nothing like getting the blood pumping, to smooth out any pretryout jitters he might be having, Gannon thought.
“Ready, Dad?” Declan said.
Gannon was about to say yes when a car came off the two-lane highway into the strip of truck stop beside them. Gannon watched it. It was a silver sedan.
He kept watching as it pulled to a stop in front of their rented Silverado truck. There was only one person in it. He couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman.
Shit, was it a Ford? he wondered suddenly. Didn’t the feds drive Fords?
No, he saw. It was too small. It was some kind of Honda. He stood silently watching it anyway. After a moment, it pulled away again and was gone back onto the road.
“Dad?” Declan said again.
Maybe his son wasn’t the only one who needed to work out a jitter or two this morning, Gannon thought as he punched his catcher’s mitt.
“Okay, let’s go. Batter up! Play ball!” he yelled as he finally crouched down.
They went for almost an hour, then piled back into the rented Silverado. They were heading off the exit ramp back for the hotel when they saw the Starbucks sign.
He’d left Declan in the truck and was inside waiting his turn in the crowded morning rush line when his eyes glanced off the newspaper in the rack by the door.
Gannon stared. When he suddenly realized what he was looking at, he couldn’t decide which was making his suddenly kick-started heart beat faster.
The above-the-fold page-wide photograph.
Or the huge three-word headline above it.
He zombie-shuffled numbly back through the people behind him to the rack and lifted up the paper.
He stared at the photograph some more. The thick white hair. The somber and austere expression.
No. There was no mistaking it.
FBI DIRECTOR DEAD, Gannon read again and then stared back at the face of the old white-haired man he’d seen dead under the water on the crashed jet.
FBI Director Dunning Dies of Stroke in Rome.
32
Fenwick’s on 13th Street across from Franklin Square had a gleaming mahogany bar and tufted leather banquettes and waiters who wore white tuxedo jackets even at breakfast service.
It was always ranked in the top five of DC’s oldest and most highly regarded establishment institutions. The joke was that the old Fenwick waiters had served not just Washington’s senators but also the actual Washington Senators, the black-and-white-TV-era American League baseball team that had been disbanded in 1971.
At a quarter after nine in the morning, Reyland sat center court, smoothing down his silk Hermès tie between the bespoke lapels of his best Hackett of London navy suit. He glanced to his left, where Emerson sat looking the way he had ordered him to, neat and lean and preppy and highly polished.
Prep School, he thought, glancing at him, pleased. He hired only people who could pull off that throwback J. Edgar Hoover FBI look.
He looked around the room ever so casually. He usually did his power noshing at the Hayes across from the J. Edgar Building on E Street, but he needed to be seen in the legend seats now that he was a shoo-in for deputy director.
And so far, his PR appearance seemed to be coming off pretty well. He’d been there only ten minutes before the UN ambassador to the Conference on Disarmament had come by to kiss his ring as well as the senior adviser to policy planning at State. Richie Dempsey, the famous four-hundred-pound owner of the legendary eatery, had waddled out of the kitchen to say hello and even his hardcase elderly mother had texted as he was leaving the house to give him a rare upvote for his debut appearance on the front page of the New York Times.
That wasn’t even the best news, he thought, as he dabbed some country ham into the yolk of his perfectly runny poached egg.
Last night, Ruiz’s Mexican contractor had finally broken the diver.
As they had already been theorizing, the diver, Stephen Vance, had in fact copied a backup video of the dive onto his phone. Not only that, as they had also been theorizing, Vance had indeed shown the video to the female naval inspector, Ruby Everett, who had left the base.
That the diver had done this was quite troubling now that the cat had been let out of the bag about Dunning.
But the good news was that Vance hadn’t given her the video. They had done a full forensic on his mobile phone, and the video of the dive had not been uploaded to anyone.
So in essence, there was no proof. The leak was still very much sealable.
It was now just a matter of picking up the naval inspector, some surprisingly attractive hick nobody out of Ohio coal country named Ruby Everett.
Ruby, the rube, was out on leave to points unknown, but that wasn’t going to be a problem since his team had been on it since three this morning.
Speaking of which, Reyland thought, stifling a smile as he saw one of Emerson’s zonked-looking computer guys come in and stand at the end of Fenwick’s storied mahogany bar.
Reyland touched Emerson’s elbow as he stood to leave the banquette.
“Tell that stooge he can’t come into a place like this looking like that. He wants to work for me, he better buy a tie, shave, and maybe start eating some salads.”
“C’mon, boss, cut him some slack just this once. That’s Billy Rayne, my MIT ace in the hole. He’s a genius.”
“Rayne,” Reyland mumbled. “Rain Man is more like it.”
Emerson came back to the table three minutes later, all smiles, with a folder in his hand.
“Good stuff, boss. We’ve found our errant little naval safety inspector.”
“Finally! Where?”
“She has a sister that just squatted out a new hillbilly,” he said, smiling as he placed the printed Google map onto the table. “The sister’s house is here just north of Pensacola Air Station.”
“And, oh, look. She even bought some goodies from Party City. Isn’t that special?” Reyland said, flicking the report page to her USAA credit card statements.
“The arrest team will be out of where? Jacksonville?” Reyland said.
“No, Mobile,” Emerson said, taking out his phone as the old t
uxedoed grandfatherly waiter refilled their water glasses.
“Shouldn’t take them more than an hour to get there,” he said.
33
Sweating under the overcast morning sky, Ruby chugged along doing a long, lazy loop, jogging the Pensacola neighborhoods north of the naval base.
She’d let out an hour before from Lori’s house, where she was still staying over. She’d lived in the modest neighborhood when she first joined the navy and could have practically done the familiar five miles past the sunburned bungalows blindfolded. Lake Charlene north to Glendale, Glendale to Fairfax Terrace, then out to the strip of New Warrington Road that they just called Navy Road because it led into the base.
She jogged steadily at an easy pace past the curving blocks, not pushing it. She always loved running in the morning, that pleasant, still half-asleep hopeful feeling of being outside in the freshness of the new day. She’d run cross-country track in high school well enough to get a partial scholarship to the University of Miami and tried to keep it up. She’d sprained an ankle the year before and then work got busy, and she just kind of let it go for a bit. But now she was gradually coming back after the layoff in fits and starts.
As she ran, her mind wandered to all the crazy phone calls she had gotten.
She still hadn’t done anything about any of them. What could she do? Were Mark and the diver actually sick? Which seemed fishy. Or had the government gone nuts? Which seemed even fishier. Or was it something else?
She thought about the reporter. His YouTube videos. His advice on taking the battery out of her phone.
No, she thought as she ran. No way.
From personal experience, she knew the government was often careless, often even stupid. But it wasn’t crazy. It wasn’t actually malevolent. There had to be some rational explanation.
But she had to do something, didn’t she?
She suddenly stopped and began jogging in place to let a minivan back out of a driveway.
Once she got back, she thought, as she began running again, she’d bite the bullet and call up Wally and ask again about Mark.
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