by Leigh Adams
“That other one?”
“That Chan Hamilton woman,” Leeds said. “Thought I wouldn’t recognize her. Idiot. My mind is as good as it ever was. Maybe better.”
“Yes, I see, that’s interesting,” Kate said. “Why would Chan Hamilton want to talk to you?”
“How am I supposed to know what idiots like that want to do? She lied to me. I kicked her out of here and slammed the door in her face. If she’d stayed one more minute in the driveway, I’d have called the police. But I wouldn’t have called Flanagan. He wouldn’t have been any help at all.”
“Well, no,” Kate said. “He’s not the right kind of police, is he? He’s a detective. You’d need a patrol car.”
Leeds snorted. “He could have been Superman with a cape for all it would matter. If you ask him for help with something, he just tells you to call nine-one-one. Like I didn’t know enough to call nine-one-one. And then there’s the goings-on at night.”
“At night?”
“He’s only home at night, isn’t he?” Leeds said. “Until the last couple of days. I don’t know what that’s about. Before that he went off in the morning and he came back in the evening and then at night people started showing up. Maybe I should say still show up. Maybe I should say person. It’s always the same one, isn’t it?”
“The same man?”
“The same man. Has a black SUV like the ones they use for the president. Monster of a thing.”
“Do you know who he is?”
“Of course I don’t know who he is. Do you think Flanagan is going to tell me who he is?”
“Would you recognize him in a picture?” She could bring the pictures of Jed Paterson and have Leeds identify them.
But Leeds wasn’t going to be that much help. “Of course I couldn’t recognize him in a picture,” she snorted. “He never gets out of the car, does he? He just sits out there in the driveway until Flanagan comes out, and then they drive off. And when Flanagan comes out, he’s always blind drunk, and he’s always got a bottle.”
“Blind drunk,” Kate repeated.
“Staggering like he can’t stand up straight,” Leeds said. “The man drinks like a fish. Even when he doesn’t get picked up. Goes and drinks in his backyard when the weather is amenable. She went over there too, you know, Chan Hamilton. He threw her out on her ear.”
“Chan Hamilton went to see Flanagan?” Kate was trying to get it all nailed down.
“There’s a lot of funny stuff going on over at that house,” Leeds said. “And now they say he’s going to go build himself a big house in one of those subdivisions. A McMansion, they call it. Where’d he get the money? And why is it so many people are asking questions about him and pretending to be reporters when they do it?”
“Oh,” Kate said. “I—”
“Look, girlie,” Leeds said. “You want people to believe you’re a reporter, you’d better bring a notebook or a little tape recorder or something so you can get it all down. Reporters don’t go jabbering with people without taking it down.”
“But I’m just doing background,” Kate said desperately. “I would have taken it down if I was going to quote you—”
“Give it up,” Leeds said, more than a little triumphantly.
Kate was expecting her to step back into her house and shut the door, but just then the door to Flanagan’s house opened and both Flanagan and Tom came out.
“I know what you’re doing, you goddamned prick,” Flanagan shouted.
***
Kate’s mad dash back to Tom’s car in Flanagan’s driveway was half to get away from Leeds and half from fear of Tom’s reaction when he found out she’d left the car.
At the moment, though, he wasn’t noticing her.
“You framed Ozgo,” he shouted. “You framed him, and I can prove it. You got me taken off that case because you knew I wouldn’t put up with it.”
Flanagan still had his bottle of Glenlivit. He was waving it around in the air and liquid was dropping out of it in arcs.
“You got taken off that case because you weren’t to be trusted, and you damned well know it.”
“Ozgo is a vet, for God’s sake. He’s a vet with PTSD. I don’t care what else is going on here, but I want him off the hook and off the hook for good.”
“You’re the one who’s on the hook, Tommy boy,” Flanagan said. “You’re so on the hook, you look like fish bait. Stop acting like a first-class asshole or you’re going to end up deader than Turner.”
Then one minute Flanagan was standing in his own front door, waving the Glenlivit around with no particular purpose. The next he was out in the yard and heading for Tom.
Flanagan was a big man, but nowhere near as big as Tom, and he was the worse for alcohol. He was also older and out of shape. He still managed to cross the yard to Tom’s car in record time. The punch he threw was wild, but Flanagan’s fist managed to connect to Tom’s jaw with a hard crack. Tom fell backward onto the lawn.
Tom was up in a moment, but he wasn’t heading for Flanagan. He was heading for the car. He saw Kate standing near the passenger-side door and roared, “Get in! Right now!”
Kate did what he told her, and a second later, Tom was in the car, too, locking the door at his side and pulling on his seat belt.
Flanagan reached the car and started pounding on the hood, hitting hard enough so that little dents appeared where his fist landed.
“Son of a bitch,” he screamed. “Son of a goddamned bitch! I’m going to puree your intestines and feed them to the goddamned trout!”
Tom started the car and put it in reverse. Flanagan seemed not to have noticed. He was still pounding, moving along the car, smashing more and more dents and heading for the driver’s side window. Flanagan hit the windshield but to no effect. Tom hit the gas and careened out of the driveway and back onto the street, leaving Flanagan lying flat on his stomach on the driveway’s asphalt.
“For God’s sake,” Kate said as they sped back the way they came.
Tom didn’t look at her. Kate was convinced he didn’t know that she had been talking to Leeds or even that she’d been out of the car before he came out of the house with Flanagan on his heels. He was staring straight ahead and concentrating on the road.
“If that asshole thinks he’s getting away with this,” he said.
“Getting away with framing Ozgo?”
“Well, I told you that was what I thought from the beginning.”
***
Close to an hour later, Kate pulled into her driveway, got out of the car, threw her tote bag over her shoulder, and entered through the side door of the townhouse. Jack was home. She could see his backpack on the kitchen table. Frank was home, too. She could hear him talking, a little too loudly, in the living room. She put her bag on the kitchen table and headed through the house toward her bedroom.
“Kate?” Frank asked tentatively.
“Hi,” Kate said.
“We were talking about getting Chinese,” Jack said. “You want some Chinese?”
Kate was still in that place where she couldn’t have eaten if she’d wanted to, and she didn’t want to because it would take up too much time.
“You two get Chinese,” she said. “I’ve—ah—I’m going out.”
“Going out?” Jack said.
“It’s just like I said,” Frank told him. “It’s that Tom from yesterday. They’re going out.”
“It’s not Tom,” Kate said quickly, “and it’s not a date. I’m just going out to the Barnes and Noble to hear Alice Hoffman speak. I meant to mention it before, but things have been crazy the last couple of days.”
“Alice Hoffman?” Jack said. “She wrote Practical Magic. Can I come?”
“You hated Practical Magic,” Frank said.
“You need tickets,” Kate said. “She’s a big draw. You had to reserve in advance. It never occurred to me you wanted to go.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “I’ve never been to hear a writer, that’s all. I thought it might be in
teresting. You know . . .”
“Right,” Kate said. “I’m sorry.”
She rushed to her bedroom, closed the door behind her, and then locked it. She stripped out of her clothes and started opening drawers right and left. She didn’t wear a lot of dark things. Dark clothes made her depressed.
She found a black sweatshirt. Completely black. No writing on it. No symbols. She put on dark jeans to go with it. Then she hit a snag. She had black shoes, but they were all dress shoes. Her running shoes were a gleaming, glistening white. She had no black socks of any kind. All her socks were also white.
That could be a very big problem.
She put on the socks and running shoes anyway. Then she headed on out again. She’d been so intent on making sure that everything was dark enough, she hadn’t considered how odd she must look, but she considered it as soon as she saw Jack and Frank, who couldn’t seem to help staring at her.
She tried to ignore it.
“I’m off,” she said, as brightly as she could.
“In that?” Jack demanded.
“I shouldn’t be too late,” Kate said.
She reached the kitchen at close to a run. She stopped long enough to get her wallet, her keys, and her cell phone out of her tote bag. She stuffed it all in the jeans’ two shallow pockets and headed for the car.
She took off in the car, not slowing down until she was three blocks past the townhouse. She made a left turn. Then she made two more rights, another left, and another right, and pulled into the lot of the Target.
Kate had about three hours to wait until full dark. In the meantime, she’d get herself black socks and black running shoes.
After the shoes problem was the parking, because if there was one thing Kate knew she couldn’t do, it was drive into that parking garage and pull into a convenient space. She couldn’t park on the street in front of Almador’s headquarters, either. In all the time she’d been working for the company, Kate had never once seen a vehicle parked at the curb.
Unfortunately, the nobody-parks-at-the-curb thing wasn’t specific to Almador’s street. All the streets in the vicinity were the same. You didn’t just drive up and park willy-nilly in suburban Virginia.
What she needed was a convenience store, a gas station with a side lot, or someplace cars might park for long intervals. Looking for a spot ate up a chunk of time. In the end, she found a gas station with just three small spaces to the side of its concrete, one-story building, all of them unoccupied. Unluckily, there was a sign on the building just above the middle space: “Parking for Shell Customers Only. Others Will Be Towed.”
There was nothing she could do. She would just have to risk it. She got out and locked up. Then she had to pull out her phone to find the GPS to figure out where she was.
She was as far out of the way as she could be and still be considered walking distance: 1.2 miles. It was going to take forever to get back to Almador. She was going to be caught on every security camera in the several neighborhoods she was going to have to pass through.
And in the end, it wasn’t going to matter, because she’d get to the door and her security code wouldn’t work. Or she’d get in and get to a secure computer station and her security code wouldn’t work with that.
Even Harvey Ballard couldn’t be stupid enough not to block her access when he’d thrown her out of the building.
***
As it turned out, Harvey Ballard could be that stupid. A competent manager would have closed down all her clearances as soon as he’d thrown her out of the building. Harvey, being Harvey, would more probably have spent that time running around hyperventilating and forgotten all about it.
Kate got to the Almador building right about the time she thought her knees were going to crack in half. The trip had been not only long but accomplished on road shoulders that were uneven and sporadically filled with debris she couldn’t see in the dark and kept stumbling over. Kate was in good shape, but the walk was still murder. When it was over, she found herself looking up at the building she knew so well and thinking that if she had to make the walk all the way back with nothing gained, she was going to start screaming.
There were two security cameras above the front door, one on either side. There was nothing she was going to be able to do about them.
She got out her card, went up to the front door, and slid it into the slot. She entered her code and held her breath.
The door popped open.
Just like that.
Kate hurried through the door and closed it behind her. Inside, the main lobby was expansive, constructed to impress visitors. Kate moved quickly through to the elevators. The elevators were not security-code protected, at least on this floor. It was getting off them that was going to pose the next problem.
She got on, pushed the button for the sixth floor, and made herself breathe normally as the elevator ascended. There had been security cameras in the lobby and above each of the elevator doors. There were more security cameras in the elevator car with her. This place had better coverage than a reality show.
The car stopped on six, and a red light began flashing next to the door, demanding her card. Kate put in her card, waited for the flash that demanded her code, and then put that in. It all went without a hitch. The elevator car doors opened. She stepped out onto her own floor.
Kate passed the door to the secure computer room she’d been using at the time Harvey jumped in on her. The next secure computer room was on the other side of the building. She closed it behind her without turning on the overhead lights and sat down at one of the computers.
Kate brought up the authorization screen and went through the routine: name, authorization number, PIN, clearance code, security code.
The authorization screen disappeared, and she was on the secured Internet. Two more authorization screens and she was into the Pentagon.
Kate was pretty sure that this thing would not let her launch a nuclear weapon. At least, she told herself she was sure, because she didn’t want to contemplate the possibilities if it would. But short of that, she could find out anything she wanted.
She could find out what happened to Rafael Turner and Kevin Ozgo and what Jed Paterson had to do with all of it.
Two hours went by without Kate noticing it, and in those two hours, she found out everything and nothing. Once she’d gotten into the personnel records, it was easy enough to establish that both Turner and Ozgo had been in the army and that Ozgo had been honorably discharged nearly two years before the attack was supposed to have happened for reasons that were vague but telling. She’d found that there had been an attack, that Turner had been in the attack, but that the attack was more than a year and a half earlier than had been reported by the press.
She started opening more and more windows, trying to get the information in a form she could use to straighten out the time line, but she didn’t write anything down. Being here without authorization got you sent to prison; being here and writing it all down probably got you executed. It was a good thing she had a decent memory.
The screen was clogged with open pages, so many that the system was severely slowed down.
She’d found an incident that involved Ozgo and Turner, but it was a month earlier than the one that was supposed to have resulted in Turner’s death, and it was all the way over in Herat, Afghanistan. And there were no Afghan insurgents. There was a truck with members of Turner and Ozgo’s unit. There was a drone that had bombed the hell out of a complex of buildings where Turner’s unit was working. Then there was a group of people who seemed to be General Solutions contractors led by Jed Paterson. Kate knew General Solutions. They were a huge military contracting firm.
Kate looked at it again and again and again. What seemed to have happened was that the drone strike hit, and then the contractors showed up, and then, and only then, did people start dying.
Could that be right? The way it should have worked was that the drone killed the people, and then Paterson’s group had come in a
nd tried to help. But no matter how many times she looked at these sequences, she couldn’t make it come out that way.
She took another tack and looked up the contracts the military had with General Solutions. They were all for reconstructions. When facilities were destroyed, General Solutions rebuilt them.
She went at it one more time.
She’d just started moving windows around to put them in roughly chronological order when she suddenly became convinced that she was not alone. She hadn’t heard the door open, but she might not have been paying attention. There couldn’t be anybody but the security staff here this late at night. Even the cleaning staff wasn’t allowed in any of these rooms alone.
She closed her eyes. She would count to ten and then turn around to see if there was somebody there.
She got to four before the sounds of motion in the room became unmistakable.
Then a voice said, “I believe it’s Miss Ford, isn’t it? I suppose I should have suspected.”
Kate nearly sank through the floor right there.
There was no mistaking that voice: it belonged to Richard Hamilton.
Kate swiveled her chair in his direction and opened her eyes. Hamilton was there alone. He was completely calm. The man had a legendary temper, a coldhearted boil that ripped adversaries to shreds and reduced errant employees to dust, but he was displaying none of it.
He wore chinos and a bright-red cotton sweater that looked expensive enough to use for currency. He had his hands in his pockets and was leaning back against the door.
No escape that way, Kate told herself.
She croaked, “Mr. Hamilton.” She couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Hamilton looked up at the ceiling and then down again.
“You do realize you are on a Department of Defense secure computer,” he said.
“Yes,” Kate said. “Yes, I do realize that.”
“And you do realize that you are in this building without authorization of any kind to be here. In fact, in contradiction to a direct order from this company not to be here.”
“Yes,” Kate said. This was definitely going where she thought it was going.