Lisa had been dealing with the situation on her own for the last two weeks, quietly digging and searching for evidence of an extremely serious--perhaps even treasonous--criminal conspiracy.
When she had first contacted Nelson Michaels, one of the men she suspected of heavy involvement in the activity, she had expected a logical explanation, something she had overlooked. What she had gotten instead was a stammering, defensive denial that had immediately raised all sorts of red flags in her mind.
She had decided she would confront Mr. Michaels in his office first thing Monday morning, laying out the evidence she had gathered and giving him one opportunity in person to offer a logical explanation for it all, as unlikely as that seemed. If none was forthcoming, then her next move would be to consult with her boss. She would dump everything in his lap and leave it up to him to figure out how to pursue the investigation. The implications of her discovery were far above her pay grade, and the allegations were so explosive that they could ruin Nelson's life. She knew she would never be able to look herself in the mirror every day if she allowed a man's career to be destroyed without first giving him the chance to prove her wrong.
But there was plenty of evidence. Some of it was tucked securely in the hard drive of her laptop, the one she was careful to keep in her possession at all times--every second--when she was at work. The rest of the materials were stowed safely in the back of the walk-in closet of their home in Merrimack. Lisa had stacked it all behind a pile of sweaters and parkas. Attempting to safeguard the material in her office at the Pentagon would be foolhardy, even if it were kept under lock and key, and the same thing went for trying to hide it in the studio apartment she rented outside D.C.
There simply wasn't any place to conceal the papers in the three tiny rooms.
Lisa didn't like the idea of storing potentially dangerous material in their home, but she reasoned that it would be there for only a few more days. Besides, what was the likelihood that anyone searching for the evidence would even know that she had a husband and a home in New Hampshire, anyway?
By now Lisa had nearly completed the long drive home. It was almost three o'clock in the morning, and she had been so wrapped up in her work problem that the miles had flown by. She knew Nick would be waiting up for her, a cup of steaming tea in one hand and some sexy lingerie he had picked out for her in the other.
"To get to know each other again," he would say with a mischie-vous smile, in what had become a part of their weekly routine they both looked forward to.
Lisa smiled at the picture in her head and accelerated through the traffic light at the end of the long, winding off-ramp leading from the highway to the surface streets of Merrimack. It continued pouring; to Lisa's amazement the rain had gotten heavier over the course of the last eight hours as the storm moved up the East Coast and gained in intensity. She stopped at the red light, even though it was ludicrous to think that any other cars would be out at this late hour, especially in a storm of such intensity.
She pulled through the intersection when the traffic light flashed green, planning to turn left toward her home. As she did, her side window was filled with the bright white headlights of a semi hauling beer from the Budweiser brewery that was one of the town's biggest employers. The massive, fully-loaded truck had run the red light, its driver obviously thinking what Lisa had been thinking just seconds before--that no one would be out in Merrimack this late.
Lisa watched, transfixed, as the oncoming truck rocketed out of control, its own momentum and the water-covered pavement combining to thwart the efforts of the driver to stop. Somewhere far away she could hear the grinding and screeching of diesel brakes.
She hesitated, then jammed the accelerator to the floor, praying that she could shoot across the street in front of the semi; it was her only option. For a second, it appeared that it might even work.
Maybe on a dry road it would have.
But her tires spun, and the drive wheels stuttered for purchase on the slippery road. Lisa watched through the side window in utter helpless horror as the massive truck smashed her Toyota broadside.
Chapter 3
The occupant of the nondescript blue sedan that had been tailing Lisa Jensen's car since leaving Washington--known in the United States as Tony Andretti, although that was not his real name--
watched in amazement as the eighteen-wheeler lost traction on the wet road, sliding out of control and running over the Toyota, the mass of the huge vehicle virtually enveloping the much smaller car. Tony could not believe his good fortune. This unexpected but welcome development would make his job even simpler than it already was.
The force of the violent impact drove the young woman's car--impossibly tiny and splattered all over the grille of the truck like a fly--across the road, straight through the deserted oncoming traffic lane, and directly into a massive ancient maple tree.
Fire erupted from somewhere underneath the car, which was instantly mangled beyond recognition and buried under several tons of beer-laden tractor-trailer. Moments later the truck's driver, apparently injured but only superficially so, tumbled out of the cab to the ground and limped to the front of the vehicle, obviously hoping to be able to pull the other driver out of the wreckage. Tony sat in the blue sedan and watched closely through narrowed eyes as the man skidded to a halt next to the tree and shook his head.
For all intents and purposes, the car had vanished, compacted to a fraction of its original size.
Tony eased his vehicle behind the beer truck and flicked on his emergency blinkers. It would be the worst sort of cosmic irony to have his car rear-ended by some damned fool motorist driving along in the middle of the night not paying attention to what he was doing.
He then put on a light jacket and stepped into the heavy rain.
The deluge instantly plastered his clothing to his skin, but he didn't care. He walked alongside the jackknifed trailer portion of the vehicle toward the cab in time to see the weeping driver of the beer truck flop down on his hands and knees on the pavement and crawl under his rig. The man still hadn't noticed him.
Tony sighed deeply and squatted as well, peering under the frame of the truck. Thick black smoke poured out of and around the engine compartment of the eighteen-wheeler, issuing from where he assumed the car must now be, as flames licked their way around the fenders on both sides of the cab. He could see the beer truck's driver, outlined by the rapidly expanding fire against the twisted metal barely recognizable as a car. "Are you okay? Hello?
Is anybody there?" the frantic man shouted in the direction of the ruined Toyota.
Tony listened for any sound that might indicate someone was alive in the wreckage. There was nothing. All he could hear was the crackling of the spreading fire, greedy and grasping, consuming everything it could reach and still searching for more.
He began to smell the unmistakably sharp odor of gasoline and considered the likelihood of explosion. He knew it was unlikely, something that happened a lot more in the movies and television than at accident scenes in the real world, but he also was well aware that it wasn't unheard of, especially when the fuel tank of one of the vehicles was nearly empty. The fumes, not the actual gasoline, were the truly explosive component, and a tank with very little gas left in it was by definition filled with potentially deadly fumes. Tony had been following this car since D.C., and he knew it had been hours since Lisa Jensen had stopped for fuel, meaning it was critical he finish this now before he became part of the tragedy himself.
Tony stood and strode along the muddy shoulder to the maple tree. The battered car, now flickering in the eerie glow of the expanding fire, was crushed up against it. The driving rain slicked his curly black hair flat against his skull, and he gagged from the stench of burning rubber as he clambered up the hood of the Toyota, careful not to slice his skin open on a razor-sharp edge of crumpled sheet metal. It was an easy climb; the entire front section of the car had been compressed down to about a four-foot square.
The im
pact of the crash had smashed the vehicle's windshield, and Tony nodded appreciatively. The safety glass had come completely dislodged from the frame, giving him easy access to what was left of the vehicle's cabin, which was not much. Lisa Jensen lay motionless, pushed by the devastating impact mostly into the passenger's side of the ruined Toyota. Her eyes were closed, and she was covered in blood. Tony wondered whether he could possibly be so lucky as to discover she was already dead.
Then she moaned, the sound thin and quavery. Her eyes remained closed, so Tony knew she was unconscious, but there was no longer any question about whether she was alive or dead. Tony shook his head and sighed again. Nothing in this life was ever easy.
He had to admit, though, that this accident was an incredibly lucky break. It would take the authorities quite some time to discover that Lisa Jensen had not actually been killed in this hor-rendous car wreck; she had been murdered. And by the time they pieced it together, it would no longer matter, at least not to Tony.
This unexpected bit of good fortune had saved him from being forced to follow the Jensen bitch to her home and killing her there, which had been the original plan. This was better.
He fumbled in the pocket of his Windbreaker--it was woeful-ly inadequate against this weather, but how could he have known he would be spending so much time outside in the storm?--for his switchblade, finally wrapping his fingers around its heft and yanking it out. He was beginning to shiver quite heavily but tried to ignore the chill. This would be over soon, and then he could climb back into the toasty warmth of his idling car, where he would have hours to dry off while driving back to D.C.
The switchblade snapped open with a snick, sounding as loud and clear as a lightning strike to Tony, which was impressive considering how much noise the rain and wind made as it whistled in his ears. He reached into the passenger compartment of the Toyota, moving slowly and carefully to minimize the risk of slicing his arm open on a stray shard of glass, supporting himself with his right hand on the crushed frame of the vehicle's windshield. With a practiced flick of his wrist, Tony deftly sliced Lisa Jensen's throat, opening a gash that ran from the right side of her jawbone to the left.
Blood spurted. It was not the cleanest kill Tony had ever made, but under the circumstances, he was satisfied with the result. After the initial burst of bright crimson arterial spray added more of Lisa Jensen's blood to the interior of a car already soaked with it, the volume rapidly slowed, then ended entirely.
Within ninety seconds, Lisa Jensen was dead, and Tony no longer had to worry about this particular loose end--he had tied it up into a very nice, neat bow.
Chapter 4
Crying hard, the driver of the beer truck--whose name was Bud Willingham, a never-ending source of amusement to his fellow drivers, who thought it was the funniest thing in the world that a guy named Bud was driving a truck filled with Bud--crawled out from under the wreckage and struggled back into the cab of his truck. He was soaking wet and freezing and certain he was about to lose his job. Oh yeah, and he had probably just killed someone.
If you looked at the scene from the inside of the truck, you would never know there had just been a horrible car accident were it not for the smells of burning rubber and melting plastic. The minimal amount of damage his big rig had sustained and the Toyota he had rammed were mostly invisible from this vantage point.
Bud grabbed his cell phone from where he kept it clipped to his sun visor and punched in 911, giving his location to the dispatcher.
The operator asked him to stay on the line until the ambulance arrived, but he hung up. He then removed the portable fire extinguisher from the back wall of the cab directly behind the driver's seat and leapt back down to the wet road. He began spraying the base of the fire in wide arcs around the carcass of the smashed car trapped beneath his vehicle.
He sprayed the fire-retardant foam until the canister was empty and then threw it to the pavement in frustration where it bounced once and skittered to the side of the road. He had made virtually no dent in the still rapidly expanding blaze. Helpless to do anything else but wait, Bud trudged to the side of the deserted road and waited for the emergency vehicles to arrive, which he fervently hoped would happen soon. He jumped in surprise when out of the corner of his eye he saw a dark sedan drive slowly away from the scene toward the interstate's southbound ramp.
Bud had assumed he was all alone except for the poor victim trapped inside the car he had T-boned, but it was obvious from the position of the departing sedan that it had been parked right behind his truck. How long the sedan had been there and what its driver had seen Bud had no idea, but he was a witness to a major automobile accident. Bud knew the driver of the other car should not be leaving and yet there he went, driving into the darkness, swallowed up by the rain.
He shook his head, spraying water in all directions, trying to comprehend what could possibly have compelled the anonymous witness to stop at an accident scene and drive away without attempting any sort of help.
Then he forgot all about the odd occurrence as his attention was drawn in the direction of Merrimack proper, where he could see a string of emergency vehicles speeding toward the accident site. Within seconds they arrived, their strobes jaggedly slicing the 3:00 a.m. darkness in brilliant flashes of red, white, and blue.
Chapter 5
Lady Bird Johnson Memorial Park was unseasonably warm for mid-May as bright sunlight flooded the Washington, D.C. area on the heels of the departure of the massive overnight storm, which had featured torrential rains moving slowly up the eastern sea-board, snarling last evening's rush hour traffic in cities all the way from Washington to Philly to New York to Boston. Now, though, the rainfall was just a memory, and people crowded into the park, eager to enjoy the unseasonably early taste of summer.
Young mothers pushed strollers along walking paths, stopping and chatting and cooing over each other's babies. Joggers of all ages pounded the paths, weaving around old folks leaning on canes and walking sticks as they shared the same routes. College students tossed Frisbees back and forth, running and leaping and shouting.
Tucked into the southeast corner of the park, backed snugly against a row of neatly trimmed ficus bushes, was a wrought-iron bench. On this bench sat Nelson W. Michaels, a balding middle-aged man in a rumpled blue suit, maroon rep tie loosened to enable him to unfasten the top button of his robin's egg blue dress shirt.
A briefcase rested on the ground next to his nervously tapping left foot. The man was a good thirty pounds overweight, carrying extra baggage which made him appear at least a decade older than his forty-eight years. He was sweating heavily, although not as a result of the unseasonably warm temperatures.
Nelson hoped he looked just like any other anonymous government bureaucrat passing the time on his lunch hour by ogling the throngs of sexy young women in the park. He pretended to read the newspaper, which he had opened randomly to the sports section. The Washington Nationals, widely considered the worst team in baseball, had just won their seventh consecutive game, leading fans to begin hoping maybe the team was actually better than they had been led to believe.
Nelson raised his face to the sun and tried to slow his racing heartbeat through sheer force of will. He was just one of hundreds of guys in the park, plain and invisible. There was no reason to work himself into a stroke over an illicit lunch hour rendezvous in the park for Christ's sake; what he was doing had been going on in D.C. since the days of Washington and Jefferson.
Without warning, a man dropped onto the other side of the worn bench, legs splayed, sweat glistening on his olive skin. He seemed to have materialized out of nowhere, making the already jumpy Nelson yelp out loud.
The man looked younger than Nelson by a decade and had a full head of thick, wavy black hair that he wore slicked back from his high forehead. The man wore stonewashed jeans and an Ox-ford shirt with the top two buttons unfastened and the long sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He carried a brown leather briefcase, which was almost an exac
t replica of Nelson's. He leaned forward and placed the briefcase on the ground to his right.
The new arrival sat without moving, saying nothing and staring unabashedly at the young women, many of whom were barely half his age, walking and running past the bench in a more or less steady stream.
He made no effort to hide his interest in their forms, especial y the ones outlined nicely in tight-fitting T-shirts and Lycra running shorts.
Nelson felt his stomach clench in an unwitting visceral response to the man's arrival, and he tried to examine his newspaper with renewed interest, reading the same sentence about the Nationals three times but absorbing nothing. He knew the man sitting quietly a couple of feet to his left was the one he was scheduled to meet with today, although he had never seen him before and had no idea what he looked like. Obviously it was impossible to get a sense of the man's appearance from a few e-mails and a whispered phone call or two.
Nelson began to sweat even more profusely and wanted nothing more than for this meeting to be over, the sooner the better.
He had been assured in a telephone call to his contact that the suspicious auditor--Lisa Jensen, her name was--would be "taken care of," an assurance that had done little to calm his nerves. Then this morning, he had arrived at work to discover the very same auditor had been killed over the weekend in a car accident. Nelson desperately wanted to believe the two events were unrelated, but he knew deep down they were not and in any event did not possess the courage to ask.
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