First Family kam-4

by David Baldacci

  "Good for you," Sour Face snapped. He nodded at the house. "In fact, the Secret Service might take some heat for this one."

  "Why?" Sean asked. "Siblings of the First Family don't qualify for protection unless there's been a specific threat. They can't guard everybody."

  "Don't you get it? It's perception. Mom slaughtered, kid snatched. It won't play well in the papers. Particularly after the Camp David party today. First Family goes safely home. Last Family gets run over by a freaking tank. Not a great headline."

  "What party at Camp David?" Michelle wanted to know.

  "I'm asking the questions," he shot back.

  And for the next hour Sean and Michelle again went through what they'd seen and done in minute detail. For all of Sour Face's irritating characteristics, they both had to admit the man was plenty thorough.

  They ended up back in the house staring down at Pam Dutton's corpse. One forensic photographer was snapping close-ups of the blood-spatter patterns, the death wound, and the trace under Pam Dutton's nails. Another tech was typing into a laptop the string of alphabet letters on the dead woman's arms.

  "Anybody know what the letters mean?" Michelle asked, pointing to them. "Is it a foreign language?"

  One of the techs shook his head. "It's not any language I've ever seen."

  "It's more like random letters," suggested Sean.

  "There's good defensive trace under her nails," Michelle pointed out. "Looks like she was able to scratch the perp up."

  "Nothing we don't know," said Sour Face.

  "How're Tuck and the kids?" asked Sean.

  "Heading to the hospital now to get some statements."

  "If they had to knock the guy out because he was fighting with them, he might have seen something," said one of the agents.

  "Yeah, but if he did see something you wonder why they didn't give him the same treatment they gave his wife," said Michelle. "The kids were drugged, probably saw squat. But why leave an eyewitness?"

  Sour Face looked unimpressed. "If I want to talk to you two again, and I probably will, I trust I'll be able to find you at the addresses you gave?"

  "Not a problem," said Sean.

  "Right," said Sour Face as he and his team trudged off.

  Sean said, "Let's go."

  "How? They shot up your car. Didn't you notice?"

  Sean walked outside and stared over at his ruined Lexus before whipping around to glare at her. "You know, you could've told me that before."

  "I've had so much time on my hands."

  "I'll call Triple A, how about that?"

  As they waited for the ride, she said, "So are we just going to leave it like this?"

  "Like what?"

  She pointed to the Duttons' house. "Like this. One of the pricks tried to kill me. I don't know about you, but I take that personally. And Pam wanted to hire us. I think we owe it to her to take the case and see it through."

  "Michelle, we have no idea that what she called me about has anything to do with her death."

  "If it doesn't I'd call that the mother of all coincidences."

  "Okay, but what can we do? The police and the FBI are involved. I don't see much room for us to operate."

  "Never stopped you before," she said stubbornly.

  "This is different."

  "Why's that?"

  He didn't say anything.

  "Sean?"

  "I heard you!"

  "So what's different?"

  "What's different are the people involved."

  "Who? The Duttons?"

  "No. The First Lady."

  "Why? What does she matter?"

  "She matters, Michelle. She just matters."

  "You sound like you know her."

  "I do."

  "How?"

  He started walking off.

  "What about Triple A?" she called after him.

  Michelle didn't get an answer.

  CHAPTER 5

  SAM QUARRY loved his home, or what was left of it. The Atlee Plantation had been in his family for nearly two hundred years. The property's footprint had once extended for miles with hundreds of slaves working it. It now had been reduced to two hundred acres with migrant laborers from Mexico doing the bulk of the harvesting. The plantation house itself had seen better days, but it was still sprawling, it was still livable, if one didn't mind the leaky roof, the drafty walls, or the occasional mouse scurrying across the brittle wooden floors. These were surfaces that had encountered the booted steps of Confederate generals and even Jefferson Davis himself on a brief stopover during the losing effort. Quarry knew the history well, but had never reveled in it. You didn't pick your family or your family history.

  He was now sixty-two years old with a cap of thick snowy hair that seemed even whiter because of his sun-beaten skin. Long-boned and strongly built with a big, commanding voice, he was an outdoorsman both by choice and necessity. He made his living off the land but also enjoyed the rustic trappings of the hunter, fisherman, and amateur horticulturist. It was just who he was; a man of the earth, he liked to say.

  He sat behind his cluttered and scarred desk in the library. It was at this same desk that generations of Quarry men had perched their behinds and made important decisions that affected the lives of others. Unlike some of his ancestors who'd been a bit freewheeling in their oversight, Sam Quarry undertook this responsibility seriously. He ran a tight ship as much to provide for himself as for the people he still employed here. Yet in truth, it was more than that. Atlee was really all he had left now.

  He stretched out his six-foot-four-inch frame and settled wide, callused, and sun-reddened hands over his flat stomach. Gazing around at the bad portraits and grainy black-and-white photos of his male ancestors hanging along the wall, Quarry took stock of his situation. He was a man who always allowed the time to think things through. Almost nobody did that anymore, from the president of the United States to Wall Street barons to the man or woman on the street. Speed. Everybody wanted it yesterday. And because of that impatience the answer they got usually turned out to be wrong.

  Thirty minutes went by and he didn't move. However, his brain was far more active than his body.

  He finally hunched forward, slid gloves on, and under the watchful eye of the portrait of his grandfather and namesake Samuel W. Quarry, who'd helped lead the opposition to civil rights in Alabama, he started tapping the faded keys on his old IBM Selectric. He knew how to use a computer but had never owned one, though he did have a cell phone. People could steal things right off your computer, he knew, even while they were sitting in another country. When he wanted to use a computer he traveled to the local library. To get his thoughts from his Selectric, though, they would have to invade his domain at Atlee and he seriously doubted they would walk out alive.

  He finished his two-fingered pecking and pulled out the paper. He read over its brief contents once more and then placed it inside an envelope, sealing it not with his saliva but with a bit of water from a glass on his desk. He was not inclined to give folks any way to track him down, from DNA in his spit or otherwise.

  He slipped the envelope into his desk drawer and locked it with the turn of a nearly one-hundred-year-old key that still worked just fine. He rose and headed to the door, out to daylight to oversee his little crumbling kingdom. He passed Gabriel, a skinny eleven-year-old black boy whose mother, Ruth Ann, worked for Quarry as his housekeeper. He patted Gabriel on the head and gave him a folded dollar and an old stamp for his collection. Gabriel was a smart boy who had the ability to go on to college and Quarry was determined to help him try. He had not inherited any of the prejudices of his grandfather or those of his father, who'd hailed George Wallace, at least the unrepentant George Wallace, as a great man who "knew how to keep the coloreds in their place."

  Sam Quarry believed all humans had strengths and weaknesses and they weren't tied to pigment type. One of his daughters had actually married a man of color and Sam had happily given his daughter away at the wedding. Th
ey were divorced now and he hadn't seen either of them in years. He didn't blame the breakup on his former son-in-law's race. The fact was, his youngest daughter was damn tough to live with.

  He spent two hours going over his land, riding in a battered and rusted Dodge pickup with over two hundred thousand proud miles on it. He finally pulled to a stop in front of a dented decades-old silver Airstream trailer with a tattered awning attached. Inside the trailer was a tiny bathroom with toilet, a propane cook top, a six-cubic-foot under-the-counter fridge, a hot-water heater, a miniscule bedroom, and an air conditioner. Quarry had gotten the trailer in a barter exchange off a produce wholesaler short of cash one harvest season. He'd run an underground power line to it from a junction box cabled to the big hay barn, so it had electricity.

  Under the awning sat three men, all members of the Koasati Indian tribe. Quarry was well versed in the history of Native Americans in Alabama. The Koasatis had inhabited parts of northern Alabama for centuries with the Muskogee, Creek, and Cherokee to the east and the Chickasaw and Choctaw tribes to the west. After the Great Indian Removal during the 1800s most Native Americans were expelled from Alabama and forcibly moved to reservations in Oklahoma and Texas. Nearly all who spoke the Koasati language now lived in Louisiana, but some had managed to return to the Yellowhammer state.

  One of the Koasatis had come here years ago, long after Quarry had inherited Atlee from his father, and he'd been here ever since. Quarry had even given him the little trailer as his home. The other two had been here for about six months. Quarry wasn't sure if they were going to stay or not. He liked them. And they seemed to tolerate him. As a rule they did not trust white men, but they let him visit and share their company. It was technically his land after all, though the Koasatis had owned it long before there were any Quarrys or any other whites in Alabama.

  He sat down on a cinderblock chair with an inch-thick rubber mat over it and shared a beer and some rolled cigarettes, and swapped stories with them. The one whom Quarry had given the trailer to was known as Fred. Fred was older than Quarry by at least a decade or so, small and stooped, with straight white hair and a face right out of a Remington sculpture. He spoke the most of the group, and drank the most too. He was an educated man, but Quarry knew little of his personal background.

  Quarry conversed with them in their own language, at least as best he could. His Koasati-speaking skills were limited. They would accommodate him by talking in English, but only with him. He couldn't blame them. The white men had basically crapped all over the only race that could call itself indigenous in America. He kept this sentiment to himself, though, because they didn't like pity. They might kill a man over pity.

  Fred cherished telling the story of how the Koasati had gotten their name. "It means lost tribe. Our people left here in two groups long ago. The first group left signs for the second group to follow. But along the Mississippi River, all signs from the first group disappeared. The second group continued on and met up with folks who didn't speak our language. Our people told them that they were lost. And in our language Koasai means 'we are lost.' So the folks wrote it down as my people being Koasatis, meaning the lost people."

  Quarry, who'd heard this story about a dozen times, spoke up. "Well, Fred, to tell the truth, in some ways, we're all lost."

  About an hour later, as the sun blazed down on them, filling the flimsy awning with furnace-like heat, Quarry rose, dusted off his pants, and tipped his hat at them, promising to come back soon. And he would bring a bottle of the good stuff and some corn on the cob and a bucket of apples. And smokes. They could not afford but liked the store-bought cigs over the rolled ones.

  Fred looked up at him, his face even more leathery and wrinkled than Quarry's. He took the homemade cigarette out of his mouth, went through a protracted coughing spell, and then said, "Bring the unfiltered ones next time. They taste better."

  "Will do, Fred."

  Quarry drove on for a long way over dirt trails that were so rutted they knocked his old truck from side to side; the man barely took note. This was just how he lived.

  The road ended.

  There was the little house.

  Actually, it was not really a house. No one lived there, at least not yet, but even if they did, it would never really be a place where anyone could live for an extended time. It was really just a room with a roof and a door.

  Quarry turned and looked in each direction of the compass and saw nothing but dirt and trees. And the slice of Alabama blue sky of course that was prettier than any other sky Quarry had ever seen. Certainly nicer than the one in Southeast Asia, but then that horizon had always been filled with anti-aircraft fire aimed squarely at him and his U.S. Air Force-issued F-4 Phantom II.

  He walked toward the structure and stepped up on the porch. He'd built the place himself. It wasn't on the Atlee property. It was several miles from there on a plot of land his granddaddy had bought seventy years ago and never done anything with, and for good reason. It was in the middle of nowhere, which fit Quarry's purposes just fine. His granddaddy must've been drunk when he bought this patch of dirt, but then the man had often been drunk.

  The building was a mere two hundred and twenty-five square feet but it was large enough for his purposes. The only door was a standard three feet wide with no raised paneling and set on ordinary brass hinges. He used a key to unlock the door but did not go inside right away.

  He'd built all four walls two and a quarter inches wider than was normal, though one would have to possess a keen eye to discern that construction anomaly. Encased behind the exterior walls were thick sheets of metal welded together, giving this little house incredible strength. He'd done the welding himself with his own acetylene Oxy-fuel welding flame torch. Each seam was a work of art. It would probably take a tornado landing right on top of the place to knock it over, and even that hammer of God still might not do it.

  He let fresh air fill the place before he stepped inside. He'd made that mistake before and had almost passed out going from full oxygen on the outside to barely any on the inside. There were no windows. The floor was two-inch-thick wooden planks. He'd sanded the boards down fine; there wasn't a splinter anywhere. What there was, though, was an eighth-of-an-inch gap between each floorboard; again barely discernible to the naked eye.

  The subfloor was also special. Quarry could say with great confidence that probably no other floor of any home in America had an underbelly such as the one he'd built here. The interior walls were covered in hand-applied plaster over chicken wire. The roof was tied down to the walls as tight as anything on an oceangoing tanker. He'd used incredibly strong bolts and fasteners to ensure strength and to prevent any settling or movement. The foundation was poured cement, but there was also a sixteen-inch-high wrapped-in-cement crawlspace that ran underneath the structure. That lifted the house up by the same amount, of course, but because of the porch it was hardly noticeable.

  The furnishings were simple: a bed, a ladder-back chair, a battery-powered generator, and some other equipment, including an oxygen tank that sat against one of the walls. He stepped off the porch and turned to face his creation. Every mitered cut on the walls was perfect. He had often worked under the generator lights as he lined up the studs and joists on his sawhorses, his gaze a laser on the cut-line. It was hot, tiring work, but his limbs and mind had been driven with a determination wrought from the two strongest human emotions of all:

  Hatred.

  And love.

  He nodded in appreciation. He had done good work. It was solid, as perfect as he was ever going to make it. It looked unexceptional, but it really was an extraordinary bit of engineering. Not bad for a boy from the Deep South who'd never even gone to college.

  He looked to the west where in a tree shielded from both the burn of the sun and prying eyes was a surveillance camera. He had designed and built this too, because nothing he could afford was good or reliable enough. With a bit of careful pruning of leaves and branches the camera had a good
sightline of all that needed to be seen here.

  He'd notched out a hole and a long trench in the bark on the rear of the tree and run the cable feed from the camera down it, and then glued the bark strips back over it, concealing the line completely. On the ground he'd buried the cable and run it several hundred feet away from the tree, to a natural berm that also featured one man-made attribute.

  There was another underground cable running from this same spot up to and under the little house inside a PVC pipe that Quarry had laid in before he'd poured the foundation. That cable line had a dual end splitter with more cable running in two routes off it. All of it was concealed behind lead sheathing he'd overlaid on the metal sheets in the wall.

  He locked the door to the house and climbed back in his old Dodge. Now he had somewhere else to go. And it wasn't by pickup truck.

  He looked up at that perfect Alabama sky. Nice day for a plane ride.

  CHAPTER 6

  AN HOUR LATER the decades-old four-seat Cessna raced down the short runway and lifted into the air. Quarry looked out the side window and down as the end of his land raced by. Two hundred acres sounded like a lot but the fact was it wasn't much.

  He flew low, keeping an eye out for birds, other planes, and the occasional chopper. He never filed a flight plan so a good lookout was essential.

  An hour later he dipped down, landed softly on the tarmac of a private airstrip, and refueled the plane himself. There were no fancy corporate jets here. Just sheet-metal hangars with open fronts, a narrow strip of asphalt for a runway, a windsock, and aircraft like his, old, patched together, but looked after lovingly and with respect. And as cheap as the plane had been when he'd bought it thirdhand years ago, he couldn't have afforded to buy it today.

  He'd been flying ever since he'd joined the Air Force and raced his sturdy F-4 Phantom over the paddy fields and dense waterlogged jungles of Vietnam. And then later over Laos and Cambodia dropping bombs and killing folks because he'd been ordered to in a phase of the war that he only found out later hadn't been officially authorized. Yet it wouldn't have mattered to him. Soldiers simply did what they were told. He wasn't second-guessing anything riding that high up while people were shooting at him.