An hour later, they crossed the Jersey state line into Pennsylvania. Then just before they reached Allentown, religiously following the speed limit, they swung south on I-81.
He looked at Stick sleeping in the back. He felt terrible dragging him into this. But what a friend, huh? he thought, smiling, as he heard the big galoot start to snore.
He’d shown up at his office with the minions of hell at his back and his old crazy partner hadn’t batted an eyelash, had he? Not only that, five seconds later he was actually swinging a sledgehammer, helping Gannon bust a hole through his own office wall.
Gannon’s smile left as he blinked out at the rushing highway. He couldn’t stop thinking about the four men he had killed in the Cadillac. He thought about their wives, their kids. The phone ringing to tell them Daddy wasn’t coming home.
The men had probably been decent fellas, decent cops. The jackasses behind all this corruption had probably said he was a terrorist or something, lied to them.
Then he thought about Wheldon blown across the hotel carpet.
He wasn’t going home either, was he? he thought. What about his wife? What about his kids?
What an unholy mess, he thought.
“Hey,” Ruby said, suddenly sitting up in the passenger seat.
“Hey,” Gannon said.
He turned the bad wipers up higher and glanced over at her. She seemed different now. Normal. Calm and alert.
Incredible what just a few hours of not being shot at could do for one’s general health and demeanor, Gannon thought.
“You okay?” she said.
“Me?” Gannon said. “Never better. I thought at first that this government-trying-to-gun-you-down stuff wasn’t really my cup of tea, but now I have to say, it’s really getting my blood pumping.”
“You, too, huh?” Ruby said with a small smile. “Even so, you look beat. Let me drive.”
“No, I’m fine,” Gannon said.
“C’mon. You need some sleep,” she said.
“So do you,” Gannon said. “I got this shift.”
“No, for real, Mike. I’ve slept. It’s your turn. Pull over, and we’ll switch.”
Gannon smiled at her.
“You’re pretty stubborn, huh, Lieutenant. Are those navy orders?” he said.
“Yes,” she said after a yawn. “Navy orders.”
“In that case,” Gannon said with a yawn of his own, “aye, aye, Captain. Next exit, I’ll pull off, and we’ll switch.”
60
The snow was starting to turn to rain when Ruby got off the highway. It was just before the Tennessee border, and they took back roads west into hilly southern Kentucky, following the instructions Stick had typed into the Garmin GPS on the dash.
It was still raining at around noon when they finally found the address down a rolling hill in the middle of a tree-filled nowhere. Ruby pulled over onto the shoulder before an old rusty mailbox. Gannon turned and shook Stick’s leg in the back seat.
“Hey? This it?”
Stick blinked and looked around.
“This is it,” he said with a yawn.
“And your uncle won’t be home. You’re sure?”
“Positive,” Stick said. “The lucky son of a gun owns several beer distributors along the Jersey Shore. He’s got hunting cabins all over the country.”
“Any chance he’ll be here?”
“No,” Stick said. “He leaves for his elk-hunting place in northern Arizona day after Christmas.”
“Okay. Here goes nothing,” Ruby said as she pulled off the old road onto a muddy driveway.
The steep slope of the drive leveled off, and then about another half football field in off the road was a double-wide trailer beside a barn the color of driftwood.
Best thing Gannon could say about it straight off was that there wasn’t another neighbor in sight.
Ruby parked behind the trailer, and they sat listening for a moment to the rain drumming atop the car.
“Looks deserted. Good,” Ruby said, finally killing the engine.
The trailer was actually all right. It was furnished with Ikea stuff and had a pellet stove that warmed up the space quickly. Stick turned on the water and the propane tank beside the house that powered the water heater and the stove.
Gannon peeked out the living room blind as Ruby went into the back bedroom to take the first shower. There was an empty field across the narrow road, and in the distance stood a sole old leafless oak tree that was dark and ominous against the gray of the rainy sky.
Staring at it, Gannon tried to gauge his thoughts and feelings about all that had just transpired. What it meant. How he felt. What to do about any of it.
He stopped after half a minute. He’d have to try again later.
He blew on his cupped hands and rubbed them together and stamped his feet.
The only thing he could think about was how much he missed his son.
61
“What do you hunt down here?” he said to Stick, who was turning on the TV.
“Quail and turkey,” Stick said, turning up the volume. “What in the—”
Gannon walked over. On the news channel, there was a helicopter shot of the black Cadillac Escalade he’d shot up, now sitting sideways on the Lexington Avenue sidewalk. It looked like the carcass of a large dead animal that had been brought down. There were half a dozen cop cars around it. A fire truck. Gannon felt like he was going to be sick.
FOUR FEDERAL OFFICERS GUNNED DOWN, it said on the screen crawl beneath.
“And in further developments,” said some male talking head, “to those of you just tuning in, as if the shooting of four federal officers wasn’t shocking enough, we have just learned that three officers of the nearby 19th Precinct, Sergeant James Farina, Sergeant Carla Diaz and Detective Daniel Henrickson, seem to have gone missing during the shooting.”
“What?” Stick cried.
“Investigators are looking into it, but there are some still unconfirmed rumors that the police department coworkers used the emergency to ransack the precinct’s evidence locker of a drug cache and have fled to places unknown.”
Stick started actually laughing.
“Me and Diaz and Farina just became the Jesse James gang or something?” he said, wide-eyed. “That’s what they’re trying to sell?”
“They’re both dead, Stick,” Gannon said.
Stick turned to him wordlessly.
“They shot them when they came in to get us, and then they took the bodies with them,” Gannon said. “You can’t think of these guys as just bad cops, Stick. This was a military operation with highly trained soldiers and helicopters. This was straight-up covert urban guerrilla warfare.”
Stick was silent for a moment.
“We’re like Fallujah now, Mick? Or Somalia? Except instead of crazy warlords, the FBI is gunning after the NYPD?”
“No, it’s not the entire FBI. Just a rogue group within it. Hell, the guys I shot might not even be Americans. They’ve got multinational mercenary contracting companies now.”
“Government special forces murder American citizens now,” Stick said, nodding, absorbing this new reality. “Reporters and even cops. Then the press spins it. These damn feds. Top secret, my ass. Makes sense now why I quit the JTTF. Politicians and all that corporate cocktail party news network anchor reporter bullshit. Money, money, money. Pack of pencil-neck jackasses. I knew something wasn’t right.”
Gannon went into the kitchen. There was some instant pancake mix in a cupboard, and he poured it into a plastic mixing bowl with some water. He began beating it with a big fork he found in a drawer.
“This is some pretty unacceptable shit, Mick,” Stick said, following him into the kitchen. “Farina was kind of a jerk, but he was our brother, man. And the Spanish kid had just started. I’m not sitting still for them
getting whacked. I need to...I need to call people.”
Gannon looked at his friend.
“No, Stick,” Gannon said, shaking his head slowly. “They know from the precinct video they scrubbed that we were in your office, that you helped us and left with us. Your house phone, your cell phone, all of it is tapped now. You try to contact someone, hell, you put your battery back into your phone, they’ll be here in an hour.”
“What the hell are we supposed to do, then?”
“Nothing,” Gannon said.
“Nothing?” said Stick.
“Not yet. We rest up for a while. Stay hunkered down. They’ll be looking for a moving target,” Gannon said.
62
When Reyland woke up at his house, it was eight in the evening. He went down into the empty kitchen and put on some coffee. A note on the granite kitchen island said that everybody was at Sadie’s clarinet performance. His knuckles cracked as he balled the paper into his fist.
Two hours later, he had his driver let him off at the Hoover Building’s 10th Street side.
“Evening, Deputy Assistant, or is it Director now?” Harry Naylor, the most veteran of the FBI security cops on the night shift, said quietly as he came into the lobby.
Reyland stopped and looked down at the mustached veteran’s poker face. Like everyone else there at the puzzle palace that was FBI HQ, even the damn security guards were coy and cryptic masters of innuendo and rumor.
“When I become director, first order will be purging the deadwood,” Reyland said coldly as he passed the desk. “So believe me, Naylor, you’ll be among the very first to know.”
Off the elevator on seven, instead of making a left down the long corridor toward his office, Reyland immediately made a right.
He came around a deserted corner and key fobbed himself in through an unmarked gray door.
Five feet from the hall door inside stood a white steel box that almost looked like a small shipping container. There were thick beige-colored electronic cabinets attached to the front of it, and to the right of the cabinets was a small shiny silver metallic door.
The antiseptic white walls and fluorescent light inside the box gave it a look of a doctor’s examination room. In its center was a rolling office chair surrounded by three computer terminals and two huge black flat screens.
The room inside a room was called a SCIF, short for Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. Sound-baffled with electromagnetically sealed steel plate walls, it thwarted even the most sophisticated remote electronic eavesdropping methods.
He wouldn’t have come in to the office at all except that he wanted to return a call from London. Technically, it had been a text message. One with three long-awaited, very intriguing words.
Very Good News, it said.
He closed the door and typed the required coding into one of the terminals. The closest of the two screens blinked on a moment later, and a short sixtysomething woman with overdone glamour-puss makeup and big owl-like spectacles was staring at him.
“Well, you’re looking cheery, Robert,” the woman said.
The woman’s name was Brooke Wrenhall, and she was his contact at MI6. He had worked with Wrenhall several times over the last fifteen years and liked the feisty, extremely sharp, bitchy Brit.
“It’s this wonderful lighting,” Reyland said.
“Long day?” she said.
“Long career,” Reyland said. “Just trying to keep it going. Getting harder and harder these days.”
“Well, hopefully my tidings will help on that front.”
“News?”
“The doctor picked up our package.”
Reyland fell back into the office chair as if he’d been shot.
“No!” he yelled.
“Would I lie to you, Robert?” Brooke said, smiling.
“When did this happen?”
“Six hours ago.”
“And everything is in there?”
“Yes,” she said. “All of it. He took it back to his apartment. He stared at it for quite some time. There was some crying. When he put it away, he hid it in his closet in an old suitcase.”
“So the wife doesn’t know?” Reyland said, pumped.
“Presumably.”
“That is very good news. He’s committed. He’s really going to do it.”
“It certainly looks like it.”
Reyland found himself suddenly smiling.
“So we’re still on.”
“Yes. Full speed ahead. We seem to have him on the hook now. Congratulations. I knew you’d be pleased. How long have you been planning this? A year?”
“And a half,” Reyland said.
Reyland, still smiling, shook his head at the white walls as he pondered the ways of fickle fortune. Even after everything. Even after the disaster with the plane and Dunning’s death, the last phase of the operation had just clicked into place.
They could still pull it off, Reyland thought. They really, really could. They just had to seal up everything.
“Okay. Very good. But don’t pop the champagne yet, Brooke.”
“I know full well. We still have what? Six days?”
“Yes. We just need to keep everything under wraps for six more damn days,” Reyland said.
“How’s things on your end with the crash management?” Brooke said.
Reyland looked at her. She obviously hadn’t looked at the news in a while.
“Still not one hundred percent, but we’re getting a cover on it.”
“I thought you said you had eyes on the issue,” Brooke said, raising an eyebrow.
“We did but...”
Reyland thought of Mr. X factor, the way he took out his contractors. The fact that they had completely lost the trail on him and Everett.
“But what?” Brooke said.
“Don’t worry about it, Brooke. Don’t spoil my good mood. We’ll sew everything up on this end. Especially now that the good doctor has shown his fresh new commitment to the cause.”
“Shall I give word to our special friends of the latest happy developments?” Brooke said.
“No,” Reyland said as he glanced at the text on his encrypted phone. “Please allow me, Brooke. I’m actually meeting with them in the morning.”
63
Gannon didn’t know what time it was when something woke him.
He was in the trailer’s living room on an air mattress they’d found, and it squeaked as he sat up in the complete darkness.
“What is it?” Stick said from the couch.
“I don’t know,” Gannon said, standing.
He crossed past the kitchen into the hall. He knocked on the back bedroom door and waited a moment then opened it and turned on the light.
The bed was empty. The pillows and blanket were gone. He crossed past the bed and checked the bathroom. Ruby wasn’t there either.
“What’s up?” Stick said as he came back out into the hall.
“She’s gone.”
“Gone?”
Gannon lifted Stick’s Glock off the kitchen table as he pushed out the door.
He’d been sleeping in his clothes, and he stepped down the stairs in his boots into the yard.
He scanned the cold, open, dark outside and glanced over at the truck. She wasn’t in the cab. It was dead silent. There were no cars on the distant road. No lights anywhere.
“Please,” he said.
He was quickly crossing the yard for the barn in the starlight when Ruby stood up from where she’d been sitting in the bed of the pickup.
“Oh, hey,” she said.
“What the hell? Are you okay?” Gannon said, rushing over.
“I’m sorry. I’m fine. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“What are you, um, doing?” Gannon said, slipping the Glock into hi
s coat pocket as he arrived. He could see she was fully dressed in her hoodie and boots and had brought out her blanket and pillows.
“I woke up to get a glass of water, and I saw all the stars, so I came out to take a look.”
“The stars?”
“Yeah,” she said, smiling. “See for yourself. They’re really incredible here.”
The screen door creaked.
“Mike, what’s up?” Stick called over.
“I’m sorry,” Ruby said. “Now I’ve woken everybody up.”
“Nothing. It’s fine. False alarm,” Gannon called back. “Ruby was just getting something from the truck. It’s all good.”
“I can go back to sleep?” Stick called.
“Yep,” Gannon called back.
The screen door creaked again.
“I’m sorry,” Ruby said again.
“Nothing to be sorry about. We were just a little worried for a second. So you’re into astronomy, huh?”
Ruby nodded, looking up at the sky.
“From my father. He was a high school science teacher, but space was his passion. Every summer we’d camp at stargazing places all over Ohio. My little sister about died with boredom, but I actually started to get into it. It’s all about getting away from light pollution from cities and highways. There’s hardly any here. It’s pretty perfect.”
Gannon looked up at her, at the light in her eyes as she gazed up.
“Don’t you need a telescope?” he said, watching her.
“Actually, no. I mean, it’s good to have one, but you don’t need one. To me, it’s more exciting with the naked eye. More, I don’t know, old-school.”
She looked at him, almost blushing.
“I know what you must be thinking. ‘The whole world is after us, and she’s out gazing at the night sky. This chick has lost her marbles.’”
“If anyone has lost their marbles, it’s me,” Gannon said as he helped her down out of the truck bed. “I got myself into this by taking that money. What did you do? Just your job?”
“Not even,” Ruby said as they walked in the cold. “They wouldn’t even let me near the plane.”
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