The Patrick Bowers Files - 05 - The Queen

by Steven James

  i am the clever

  architect of oblivion;

  you are the wondrous

  carpenter of hearts.

  She waited for more poetry, more reassurance, but no more words came. The poem was over.

  And please save Amber.

  But the voice did not speak to her again.

  She wiped away the tear that had escaped her eye.

  “Please.”

  The perfume in the air dissipated, and only the pale sanitized smell of the hospital remained.

  Tessa repeated her prayer for Amber, but no matter how earnestly she pleaded out this intercession for her stepaunt, she heard nothing but silence.

  Unsettled by the sudden whiplash of emotions—from the bright glimmer of peace to a tightening knot of fear, Tessa stood and backed out of the room.

  Maybe you were just imagining things. Wishful thinking, making up a divine response in order to cover your shame. To find a way to deal with your past.

  Disheartened, confused, she reached the vending machines. And then, not far from her, on the other side of the lobby, the front doors of the hospital whisked open, and she saw Patrick, her father, emerge from the storm.

  99

  I heard Tessa call my name, and it took only a moment to find her near the soda machines. “Hey”—I hurried toward her—“how’s Amber?”

  “I don’t think she’s doing so well.”

  I felt my heart squirm. “Which room?”

  “220. It seemed like Sean needed a little time alone with her. I came out here.” She paused. “To get some Cokes.”

  Though anxious to get to the room, if Sean needed to be alone with Amber right now, it gave me a chance to catch up with Tessa on what’d happened. “Tessa, tell me what—”

  “The kidnapped lady, did you find her?”

  “Yes. She’s fine. Listen—”

  “How did you save a million people tonight?”

  “No. I didn’t. Iran did.”

  She looked at me questioningly. “A million people?”

  “It’s a long story. I’ll explain later. Tell me what happened with Amber.”

  Finally, Tessa switched gears and, while I hurriedly purchased the cans of soda, she filled me in about the power outage, the overdose, her efforts to awaken Amber, Sean’s arrival, their harried flight to the hospital.

  The final Coke tumbled through the machine, I retrieved it, and we walked to the elevator.

  I was struck by how, at every step of the way—from picking the lock, to waking Amber in the shower, to thinking of the dish soap and remembering to bring the pill bottles to the hospital, Tessa had exhibited clear, quick thinking under incredible pressure.

  Then the elevator doors closed and we were on our way to the second floor. “So how are you doing through all this?” I asked.

  She was slow in responding. “I went to the chapel. Something happened.” She hesitated. “Earlier tonight you told me that somehow forgiveness, or making amends, or some sort of penance, has to be the answer.”

  “Yes.”

  “But if you have to do penance or make amends, then it means the forgiveness wasn’t complete, right? I mean, if it was, there’d be no need for them. If you can make up for the past, why would you need to be forgiven for it?”

  “I’m not sure I know what you’re saying here.”

  She looked heavyhearted, distressed. “Apart from forgiveness, can you think of any way of dealing with your past that doesn’t involve some form of denial or negotiation?”

  I didn’t know how to respond.

  Mental compartmentalization, rationalization, justification, repression . . . all forms of denial or just different genres of excuses.

  “No,” I said frankly, “I can’t.”

  The doors dinged open.

  She took a heavy breath. “Anyway, the nurse keeps telling us Amber’s going to be okay. So that’s good.”

  “Yes.” And, as abruptly as it had begun, our forgiveness conversation was over.

  We exited the elevator. Passed room 210 . . . 212 . . .

  Despite myself, I thought of the conversation I’d had with Lien-hua about twists at the end of stories, how the people who deserve to live don’t always make it. I refused to let myself consider such things.

  216 . . . 218 . . .

  We arrived at the room and I knocked softly. Sean called for us to come in, and when we entered, to my great relief, I saw that Amber was sitting up in bed. Conscious. A nurse was removing her NG tube.

  “Amber?” Tessa stared at her dumbfounded. “How are . . . how do you feel?”

  If Tessa had been right that Amber was unconscious just minutes ago, the turnaround was nothing short of extraordinary.

  “I’m okay.” Amber’s voice was faint and scratchy. The nurse stepped aside. “Thanks to you and Sean.”

  As we gathered at her bedside, Amber tried to apologize for all the trouble she’d caused, for “how stupid she’d been,” for making everyone so upset and scared, but none of us were accusing her of anything, no one was angry, we were just thankful she was still here with us. She shared her tearful, profound gratitude to Tessa and Sean for helping her, but they downplayed their role as “what anyone would’ve done.”

  Then, for what seemed like a long time but might’ve only been a minute or two, no one said anything. Finally, Sean was the one to break the silence, telling Amber plainly that he would change: that he’d give up drinking once and for all, if that’s what she wanted, if that’s what it took—anything—if she’d just give him, give their marriage, one more shot.

  Amber looked past him toward the window, and when she didn’t reply, I was afraid it might be too late for them, that whatever they’d had was over, but then she rested her hand gently on his arm, and the small gesture said as much, if not more, than any words would have.

  “We can do this,” he vowed.

  “Yes,” she replied softly. “Okay.”

  The moment was heartfelt and moving but short-lived because then Sean looked my way. “How’s your jaw?”

  “It’ll be fine. But you throw one mean punch.”

  “You deserved that, you know.”

  “Yeah.” I searched clumsily for the right thing to say. “I’m glad everything’s out in the open.”

  Sean took Amber’s hand in his own. “The past is past, all right?”

  “I hope things can be—”

  “We move on, okay?”

  I gladly accepted the offer. “Yes. Thank you. We move on.”

  Amber nodded as well, then asked if she could have a few minutes alone with Sean, so Tessa and I slipped into the hallway, and, almost immediately when we were alone, Tessa said, “I need to tell you something, but I don’t want you to make fun of me or anything.”

  “Of course not.”

  “You know how Mom used to say that I needed to learn to believe in grace, in forgiveness, stuff like that?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think maybe I’m starting to.”

  “Tessa, that’s fantastic. Why would you think I’d make fun of you for that?”

  She was quiet. Then, rather than answer my question, she said, “You remember how you told me I was good at beating myself up?”

  “I was only trying to—”

  “No. It’s okay.” A nurse passed us, carrying a food tray toward a room farther down the hall. “But here’s the thing: I’m not the only one. You’re a world-class self-beater-upper. You never slept with Amber, right? And Sean’s not gonna hold your little emotional fling against you, so you need to accept that. Like he said, move on.”

  I was quiet.

  “All right?” she pressed.

  “Okay.”

  “And this whole deal with believing or not believing him about the accident. Under the bridge.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “There’s a chapel down on the first floor if you need to use it. Take care of business.”

  “Um. Thanks.” I wasn’t sure if she was being se
rious or not.

  She looked as if she were going to respond, but held back. “You told me Iran saved a million people.”

  “They shot down a ballistic missile that was heading for Jerusalem.”

  “But Jake told me you saved them?”

  “He was exaggerating. I just shared some thoughts on why it would be a good idea for them to stop the missile.”

  She looked at me dubiously. “What are you talking about? Iran hates Israel.”

  “Well, think about it like this: if you were Israel’s president and a nuclear missile was coming at you from the general vicinity of Iran—”

  “You’d assume they fired it.”

  “Sure, and you’d respond immediately, send missiles, bombers, whatever you had, against the country whose president had, for years, threatened you with annihilation.”

  “So you told Iran—”

  “Well, the Secretary of State did, actually, it might’ve even been the president. I don’t know who exactly—”

  She rolled her eyes at me. “Whatever, you know what I mean—told them that the only way to save themselves—”

  “Was to save their worst enemy.”

  She let that sink in, then shook her head. “No. That doesn’t seem like enough.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. “I wasn’t sure it would be either, so I sent word for the Secretary of State to contact the Supreme Leader of Iran.”

  “The religious leader.”

  “Yes. As a matter of fact, in many ways, he has more influence than the president.”

  “I know that,” she said impatiently. “I’m not completely in the dark about the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East.”

  “Oh. Right.” Yeah, this is Tessa, remember? “Anyway, I suggested Nielson remind him that doing this would give Iran credibility on the world stage, a seat at the table, so to speak. And they could save face in the Muslim world by portraying the US as a rogue nation with nuclear weapons that it couldn’t control—”

  “But that they could,” Tessa said, completing my thought.

  “Precisely.”

  “And they come out looking more powerful than America.” She nodded. “Nice, so you appealed to Iran’s self-interest and pride.”

  “In a sense, I suppose.”

  “So, motives.”

  “Motives?”

  “Right. You had to accurately assess their motives, then—”

  “No, it was just logic.”

  She put both of her hands on my shoulders, looked me squarely in the eye. “Patrick, you helped stave off war in the Middle East only because you thought like a profiler. Lien-hua is gonna be so proud of you when I tell—wait.” Tessa dropped her hands. “Is she okay? Where is she?”

  “She’s fine. She’s still at the top secret underground military base helping round up the eco-terrorists.”

  Tessa blinked. “Oh.”

  I thought again of Valkyrie, who it might be—Cassandra? Becker? Manoji? Rusk? We could sort that through soon enough.

  In the hallway beyond Tessa, I noticed the elevator doors glide open. “You should know that I told Lien-hua tonight I was going to marry her.”

  “You what?”

  “I told her I was going to marry her.”

  “No, I mean you didn’t ask her if she’d marry you?” Tessa said incredulously. “You told her you were gonna marry her?”

  “Um . . .”

  Jake Vanderveld left the elevator and came striding toward us.

  “Oh.” Tessa shook her head. “You screwed that one up big time.”

  “How’s Amber?” Jake asked, eyeing the door behind us.

  “Recovering.” I was surprised to see him here. “Did you go to the base?”

  “Without a snowmobile there wasn’t any good way to get out there; I couldn’t reach you by phone, and when I spoke with Lien-hua, she said I’d find you here. I decided to come and check on everyone.”

  His marked concern surprised me and made me wonder if maybe I’d misjudged him all these years.

  “Tessa,” I said, “can you give us a couple seconds?”

  “Sure.”

  She knocked on the door to Amber’s room, and Sean invited her in. As soon as she was gone I asked Jake, “What do we know about the base?”

  “Torres and his men disarmed the explosives, and it looks like they caught all the Eco-Tech militants, but Chekov is missing.”

  “What!”

  “Somehow he overpowered the MA who was guarding him. The guy’ll survive, but by the time SWAT got to the control room, Chekov was already gone. Listen, we’ll get him, though, right? Lien-hua told me you put a GPS ankle bracelet on him, so as soon as he surfaces we should be able to nail him.”

  Don’t bet on it.

  He saw the skepticism in my eyes. “Those things are a bear to get off, Pat.”

  “Yes, they are.”

  “You think he’s still in the base?”

  I shook my head. “He has a gunshot wound in his shoulder that needs to be treated. Also, he’d anticipate that the longer he waited, the more backup would arrive.”

  I doubted Chekov would use the Schoenberg tunnel to escape, since, after leaving a kidnapped victim at the Inn, he would know there’d be a heightened law enforcement presence there.

  He could possibly be hiding in one of the other tunnels, but since they lacked rail tracks, there was no indication that they surfaced anywhere. Also, after his disappearance he would know law enforcement would search them eventually and he’d be trapped.

  That left the tunnel to the sawmill, and what better place to cut off a tamper-proof, steel mesh GPS ankle bracelet than a sawmill?

  “Jake, are you up for a drive?”

  “To where?”

  “Let’s go catch us an assassin.”

  100

  I drove.

  Jake sat beside me, his iPad 2 on his lap, a tracking application for the GPS ankle bracelet open on the screen.

  Before we left the hospital, Amber had assured me that she was fine, that I didn’t need to worry about her; and Sean had been glad to let me borrow the pickup: “As long as it doesn’t end up like my sled.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Now, Jake and I were about ten minutes from the sawmill, but so far, nothing had come up on the iPad’s tracking program. Nothing at all.

  So maybe this was a fool’s errand. Another dead end.

  Maybe.

  Maybe not.

  I’d spent the first part of the drive giving Jake my account of what happened at the base. In the end, he suggested that Rusk was probably Valkyrie. “He’s a hacker,” Jake said. “He’s got a Carnegie Mellon computer science degree.”

  “But it doesn’t fit. He’s a hacktivist, that’s all. There’s nothing else in his background that matches Lien-hua’s preliminary profile for Valkyrie.”

  “And what profile is that?”

  “She believed Valkyrie would have law enforcement or covert operative training, be highly intelligent, well-traveled, midforties, linguistically skilled. Male.”

  “That’s not much, Pat, hardly anything. Maybe Valkyrie is just a code name Manoji was using, or it could’ve been Cassandra after all.”

  “That doesn’t explain how Valkyrie showed up in Russia last May. Terry was in a coma and Cassandra was in prison at the time.”

  Jake quietly monitored the iPad, and I had the sense he didn’t want to discuss Valkyrie’s identity anymore just then.

  Wait.

  The mind has to deal with guilt somehow. When it’s overwhelming, escaping reality is sometimes the only choice.

  Alexei might still be in the tunnel and offline. Or, he might not be.

  Yes. Bait.

  “Send me an email,” I said, “asking me to confirm that I know Valkyrie’s identity. Make it seem like I’m about to reveal to the Bureau who Valkyrie is.”

  “Send you an email?”

  “To my Bureau account. Go ahead. Let’s see how often Alexei checks my messages.” />
  I found my thoughts flitting through the events of the night, and I remembered that earlier I’d made a mental note to follow up on any videos that might’ve been found of people in the Midwest being killed while Basque was in prison.

  “When you’re done with the email, pull up the Federal Digital Database. There are a few things I’d like you to check.”

  A couple moments later he finger-scrolled to a browser. “What do you need?”

  I gave him the search terms I had in mind—the dates, the locations, the types of weapons, the victimology.

  “What are we looking for, exactly?”

  “Reiser’s killer.”

  We tried a variety of searches but in the end didn’t find anything helpful. If there were more victims, more videos, they hadn’t been found.

  Dead end.

  “Think this through with me, Jake. Fourteen years ago we discover two sets of DNA at the scene of Basque’s murders but aren’t able to identify the second set until the homicide last June when you matched it to Reiser. Lien-hua and I were wondering if the records could have been falsified.”

  “But how?”

  “Once Basque got out of prison, if he reconnected with his old partner and that person had access to the records, they could’ve set up Reiser by faking or switching the DNA analysis.”

  Jake considered that. “We could pull up a list of people who’ve accessed the case files or DNA records. See if there are any red flags.”

  With all of the lawyers, officers, and agents involved, I knew the list would be extensive, but it was worth a look. “Do it.”

  We could cross-reference the names against work schedules, the timing of the crimes, their locations, travel times from the crime scenes to people’s residences . . .

  Jake finished typing but said nothing. There was a stalled moment of silence.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “One person’s name keeps coming up.”

  “Who?”

  “Torres.”

  “What? Antón?”

  “Yeah. He’s been in there half a dozen times. Including earlier this week. On Tuesday.”

  “That makes sense,” I said, defending Torres. “He was doing prelim work for the mission on the trailer park.”