She opened the closet door slowly and cautiously peered into the room. Everything appeared to be as it should. She listened for a while and heard nothing but the whistling of a bird perched in the tree outside the window. She slipped from the closet down the hall to the bathroom. There were no obvious signs that an intruder had been upstairs. She wasn’t sure what signs she might have been able to pick up on, aside from the fact that things just felt right.
In the bathroom, she turned on the cold water and splashed her face to help wake up and to relieve some of the painful throbbing of her head. She fumbled through the medicine cabinet until she found a bottle of extra strength Tylenol. She popped the cap off and took four of the caplets, washing them down by drinking straight from the faucet.
Standing back up, she looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair was a tangled mess in spite of being pulled back in a ponytail, and her face was red and splotchy. Her eyes were even worse. They were puffy and red and underscored by dark, half-moon-shaped blotches, but more than that, the irises looked glazed and unfocused like …? Like a drunk, she forced herself to admit. She didn’t think she was a full-blown alcoholic, but she had certainly been too dependent on booze and pills of late.
As she stood there, taking stock of herself, she found she was ashamed of her behavior last night and, in fact, for the last several months. She should never have put herself in the position of being alone in the cabin after dark. She had been warned, and she knew better; however, her little drinking binge had caused her to lose all sense of rational thought. And this time, it could have cost her her life.
Though she would never have admitted it before, she realized that in some sense, that was exactly what she had been trying to do. Ever since things with Bret had gone bad, she had been doing nothing but going through the motions, waiting for her life to hurry up and be over so she wouldn’t be subjected to the possibility of being hurt again. She had never openly contemplated suicide, yet somewhere, deep down inside her in a place she hadn’t been willing to look, a part of her had been trying to attain the same result in a much more subtle manner.
And, in fact, that deepest, darkest part of her had already succeeded to some extent. She had withdrawn so much that she had stopped living, for all intents and purposes. The vibrant and confident Carrie that her grandmother had worked so hard to resurrect after the death of her parents was gone again, leaving nothing more than a shell of the person she had been, an automaton passing through the days, waiting for the end.
It was that part of her that had hoped that something would happen last night, that she would be put out of her misery by someone else. But when she had thought that someone was actually breaking in, she had been much more terrified of dying than she would have ever thought. Down in that deepest of dark places, along with the fear and despair, hope still lurked as well, waiting for just the slightest ray of sunshine to come into her life so that it might blossom.
Perhaps she had inherited more than just hair and eye color from her mother’s side of the family. That was certainly the way Audrey Gran had seen things.
Carrie made her way downstairs, still on the lookout for someone who might be lurking within the house. In the kitchen, she nearly became sick at the smell of rum that permeated the room from the open bottle on the table. She picked up the bottle and poured the remains down the sink. Standing there, she noticed the other bottles still on the top shelf. She stood there a moment, staring at the bottles. Then, she grabbed three of them and emptied them in the sink as well. By the time she was done, there were eight empty bottles on the counter. She found the garbage bags in the cabinet under the sink and filled one with the empty bottles.
She took the bag, the bottles clinking nosily as they bumped against her leg, and dumped it on the porch outside the back door. She was about to close the door when she noticed the tip of a tree limb hanging just over the edge of the roof. She couldn’t quite reach it, so she went back inside and dragged one of the kitchen chairs back outside with her. When she stood on the chair, she was just able to reach up and pull the limb down. It was larger than she had expected, and it made a hideous noise as it scraped across the roof before it fell over the edge.
Tears welled in Carrie’s eyes as an unexpected realization came to her. She bit her lip, struggling to keep from breaking down as she stared at the cause of her night of terror—a harmless tree limb.
Something within her snapped. Heedless of the cold, she stomped out into the snow, grabbed the limb, and dragged it away from the landing. With a loud scream, she tossed it toward the trees, where it tumbled and bounced into the undergrowth. She tilted her head back and yelled again as loud as she could, the veins on her neck standing out and her face turning red as all of the hurt and anger and frustration surged forth.
Breathing heavily, she listened with satisfaction as the yell echoed down the valley. The cold air in her lungs felt good, and her head felt clearer. After she brushed off her wet cheeks, she turned and marched back inside.
She still hadn’t decided what she was going to do with the place; however, she had decided on one thing she was going to do, and she started back upstairs with a renewed sense of purpose.
In the office, she began going through all of her grandparents’ paperwork that hadn’t been taken away by the feds, looking for anything unusual, relying on her reporter’s nose for the suspicious in an effort to find out why someone might have had a reason to kill her grandparents. The computer and appointment books for the trips they had booked for the coming year as well as the two previous had been confiscated, which didn’t leave her much. She went through all of the invoices, letters, tax returns, and any other paperwork for the last two years that had been filed away in boxes in the closet, but she didn’t find anything that seemed out of the ordinary.
After an hour of fruitless digging, Carrie decided there was nothing of significance to be found. Undaunted, she had already decided on her next course of action. Going downstairs, she found the keys to the Hummer hanging on a pegboard on the wall next to the phone in the kitchen—right where she had known they would be.
As she lifted the keys from the peg, she was almost overcome by emotion once again. Grandpa Bill had always been bad about misplacing his keys, and so at Christmas one year just after Carrie had moved in, she and Audrey Gran had given the little pegboard to Bill as a gift. The board was painted yellow, the varnish old and crackled. There were little squiggles that Carrie had painted to look like flying birds across the top, and Grandpa Bill’s keys painted in colorful letters across the bottom.
Clutching the keys in her hand so hard they dug into her skin, Carrie bit her lip and hurried out the door.
CHAPTER 37
Maryland
A cold drizzle fell on Baltimore. Splashing through the puddles in the rutted roadway, a black Lincoln rolled slowly past row after row of warehouses along the waterfront. The Lincoln’s brilliantly polished surface and mirrored windows reflected the lead-gray color of the sky and the bay, which caused the car to appear more silver than black.
The car slowed and then turned and pulled up to the concrete wall of the loading dock in front of warehouse number thirty-seven. Two closed-circuit cameras mounted innocuously on each corner of the warehouse pivoted toward the car.
A security guard wearing a vinyl rain slicker stepped out from a door to the left of the car. Unlike most contract security employees, old men, or washed-up police officers with big guts hanging over their belts, this one was young and built like a linebacker. He was tall, at least six foot two, with broad shoulders and a thick neck. The small amount of hair that could be seen beneath his hat was cropped short on the nape of his neck and above his ears. He didn’t slouch or waddle or tug on his belt to hike up his pants as he walked toward the car but remained perfectly upright, moving with a self-assured precision learned only in the military.
The driver’s side window slid down. Warm air smelling of cinnamon spilled out. Inside, Nathan nodded at the gu
ard, who bent down to look inside the car.
“Welcome, general,” the guard said with a tip of his hat to the passenger in the backseat. Satisfied, he returned inside the warehouse. Moments later, a steel ramp tilted up in front of the car, and the loading dock door slid open. The Lincoln pulled up the ramp and disappeared inside.
On the outside, the warehouse had looked as old and weather-beaten as all the others along the wharf, but inside was another matter. Inside, the cinder-block walls, structural steel, and underside of the roof were all perfectly white. Row upon row of high-intensity, mercury-vapor lights ran the length of the building, reflecting off the highly buffed, clear-coated seal on the concrete floor. The overhead door, which had appeared to be old and rickety from the outside, actually consisted of three large sections of one-inch-thick plate steel with weathered and paint-chipped wood bolted to the outside to give it the desired effect.
Inside, three steel barricades operated by hydraulics in the floor had been raised, one on each side of the car and one in front, allowing just enough room for it to pull into the warehouse. Nathan put the car in park and killed the engine as the overhead door slid shut behind them.
A six-foot-long aluminum tube with evenly spaced holes along its length descended from the ceiling. It looked like one of the attachments at an automatic car wash that might spray down the car with soap or wax. From somewhere overhead came the high-pitched whine of a large fan and motor building up speed. Then the arm began slowly making its way around the front, sides, and rear of the car. There was a loud sucking sound as the arm passed the windows on each side of the car.
The general recognized the device as a sniffer—a high-powered vacuuming system that took air samples from around the car and passed it through an analyzation chamber where the air was checked for minute traces of explosive chemicals other than those found in gasoline.
In the year and a half since he had accepted his new position, General Colquitt had prided himself on the new security measures he had instituted at his company. In fact, some people had claimed they were so extreme as to seem paranoid, but this was so far beyond anything they had implemented—or anything even currently available on the open market—that it made their system seem archaic. And that was something the general did not like.
After the sniffer retracted, the barricade on the left side of the car lowered to the floor with a boom that echoed throughout the cavernous interior of the building.
“Stay with the car, Nathan,” General Colquitt said as he got out. “Make sure no one gets near it.”
“Yes, sir, general,” Nathan replied.
The general paused, taking the time to adjust his tie and straighten the wrinkles from his jacket before stepping across the lowered barricade. Once across, the hydraulics lifted it back into its upright position.
Across the warehouse in the right-hand corner of the building, two brand new, black Kenworth semis with long, silver trailers sat parked side-by-side. They looked like something that might be seen on the NASCAR circuit were it not for their obvious lack of company logos plastered over every square inch or, for that matter, any identifiable markings whatsoever.
In front of him, two chain-link fences topped with razor wire ran the length of the building. The guard escorted the general to a golf cart sitting in the wide aisle between the fences. Rows of cameras hanging from the ceiling in domed enclosures tracked the golf cart as it made its way down the aisle toward the far end of the warehouse.
Behind the fences were row upon row of steel racks, stacked to the ceiling with various containers. There were large wooden crates and pallets of cardboard boxes tightly shrink-wrapped with heavy-gauge plastic and woven, hundred-pound sacks of rice and flour and sugar.
Colquitt knew that nothing stored on this level was out of the ordinary. This level was for the tents and blankets, building materials, tools, water and food rations, and nonsensitive medical supplies, such as Band-Aids, bandages, cotton balls, tongue depressors, Q-tips, splints, crutches, and wheelchairs—everything that an incredibly well-funded humanitarian relief group would have.
The really interesting stuff was stored several stories below in a cavernous vault filled with containers of every imaginable size and shape, ranging from as small as a shoebox to as big as a railcar. There were industrial-size refrigerators, freezers, hundreds upon hundreds of unmarked black fifty-gallon drums, and even farther below in a specially sealed vault, row upon row of gleaming, vacuum-sealed, titanium canisters. All of this, much of which were items developed by his own company, were kept where they were safe from prying eyes or—though highly unlikely—an ill-intentioned intruder who might somehow manage to make it inside the warehouse.
At the end of the long aisle was a single door. Colquitt’s escort inserted his hand into the boxy palm reader beside it. The general smirked. At his facility, they had already moved beyond the old-fashioned readers. Then he noticed the mirror above the reader, no doubt concealing a thermal-imaging camera behind, and the smirk slipped from his face. There was a beep, and the door in front of them slid open, revealing an elevator cab. Inside, the guard pressed the bottom one of three unmarked buttons.
There were no lights to indicate the direction of movement or what floor they were on, but the general knew they were going down. After several seconds, the doors slid open again. It was as if they had been magically transported onto the executive level of a Wall Street brokerage firm. The walls of the corridor, unbroken on each side by doors, were covered floor to ceiling with panels of dark mahogany. Gold sconces housing halogen lamps spaced evenly along the walls lit the expanse in soft blue-white light. At the far end, a pair of mahogany doors with gold hardware awaited. Colquitt had never been here before—in fact, very few people even knew of its existence—but he was suitably impressed.
Neither spoke as they strode toward the doors, their heels clicking sharply on the polished marble floor.
At the end of the hall, the escort opened the door on the right, waited for the general to step inside, and then shut the door behind him.
General Colquitt found himself in a large conference room. A long polished mahogany table ran the length of the room, with burgundy leather chairs at each end but none in between. Across the room, opposite the general, another set of double doors led into the room.
The general sat down in the nearest chair and tugged his jacket taut to remove any wrinkles. After five minutes, the general began to feel agitated, but he refused to let it show. He knew he was being monitored. He remained seated, his posture perfect.
After fifteen minutes, he was furious, but outwardly, his appearance remained unchanged.
Then after twenty minutes, the door at the far end of the room swung inward, and Thomas Wade stepped into the room.
Thomas Wade was a tall and lanky man with a dark complexion, dark brown hair streaked with strands of gray, and a thin, crooked nose. It was the middle of winter in Baltimore, but he had a deep bronze tan. His face was ruddy with acne scars still clearly visible in spite of the store-bought tan. His hair was slicked back, and he wore an expensive, custom-tailored suit that hung on him like a pair of baggy warm-ups. He might have been trying to look like a high-toned NBA coach, but to Colquitt, he came off looking more like a low-budget porn star.
A cigarette with a long ash dangling precariously at the tip hung from Wade’s thin lips. Smoking was not allowed in any public buildings these days, but Thomas Wade and his organization were not subject to such petty rules. They were above the law—or so Wade thought. The only laws his organization obeyed were the ones they made for themselves.
General Colquitt despised Thomas Wade, but like any good soldier, he kept his opinions to himself. Everything about Wade annoyed him, not the least of which was the fact that he demanded that everyone call him “Thomas,” as if that made him more respectable. He was loud, brash, arrogant, cocky, and rude. But worst of all, he was a civilian. He had no military training and no discipline whatsoever. He was full of hims
elf and full of shit, which meant he fit right in with the movers and shakers in DC. And it was through his connections with those people—some of the most powerful and influential political figures in the country—that he had managed to wheedle his way to the top of his organization. And now the general was forced to deal with him.
Wade carried a black plastic ashtray with him, which he sat on the table and knocked his ash into. It was the only thing he had brought with him to the meeting.
That was another thing about Wade’s organization that irritated the general. Nothing was ever written down, taped, or otherwise documented. It was just one of the ways they were able to maintain complete deniability. There was never any incriminating evidence to worry about, and the few witnesses who might exist were always easily persuaded or simply eliminated.
“Anderson, this is some fucked-up shit you’ve got us into,” Wade said as he sat down.
The general bristled. Even though he had retired from the military, everyone still referred to him as “General Colquitt.” Everyone except for Wade.
“I would remind you that the situation existed before I took over,” the general said, doing his best to hide his indignation. “That is why I was brought in—to ensure that mistakes were eliminated.”
Wade leaned back and pursed his lips as if he were considering whether or not to accept the general’s statement. “And you think the only way to clean this one up now is by sending in one of my teams again.”
“Yes.” Believe me, you sack of shit, thought Colquitt, if Nathan could handle this by himself, he would already be on his way, and I wouldn’t be here listening to your ignorant ass.
Wade blew out a cloud of smoke and squinted at the general. “How certain are you about what’s going on? This is a damn risky operation you’re proposing. I’ve already hung my ass out for you on this. Do you have any idea the strings I had to pull to get the forensic evidence suppressed?” he asked, pointing at the general with his cigarette. “I practically had to get on my hands and knees and blow the director myself, and that’s not something I care to repeat anytime soon. I’m in the business of granting favors, not asking them. I collect the IOUs, not the other way around. I don’t like owing people. And now you’re asking me to lay my dick out on the chopping block again. I’m not sure I want to risk exposing my organization, if you know what I mean,” he said with a wry grin.
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