by C. S. Graham
She’d thought she could fight these men, make them pay for what they’d done to Henry Youngblood and for what they’d tried to do to her. But she’d been wrong. You can’t fight a corporation whose tentacles reach from the CIA to the Pentagon, all the way to the White House.
She was going to go back to the marina, she decided, get her car, and just get on the I-10 and head west. It’s what she should have done when Colonel McClintock first suggested it that morning. Now Elizabeth Vu was dead and McClintock himself was in an ambulance on the way to the emergency room.
She still didn’t know where she was going to go, once she got out of New Orleans. All she knew was that she had to get out of the city and stay away from anyone she knew.
Before she got someone else killed.
41
Washington, D.C.: 5 June 6:55 P.M. Eastern time
“How you doing, Jason?” said Clark Westlake to the man who occupied the desk outside President Randolph’s office.
“Just fine, thank you, sir.” The President’s special assistant nodded toward the Oval Office. “He’s expecting you.”
Reaching for the door handle, Clark felt a familiar rush of adrenaline mixed with a cocky kind of pleasure. He’d been coming here to the White House for the better part of ten years now, yet he still felt a thrill of excitement every time he entered the Oval Office. This was the summit of all power. This was the center of the universe.
“You wanted to see me, sir?”
Bob Randolph stood at the window overlooking the rose garden. Clark could tell by the set of the man’s shoulders that he was in a petulant mood. “I had a troubling talk with the Vice President this afternoon,” said Randolph, not bothering to look around. “I’m afraid he’s not proving to be much of a team player. I don’t think we can rely on him to stay on message. He’s going down to New Orleans tomorrow to give this keynote address at the American Legion Conference, and I can just hear him making some crack about needless sacrifices and wasted lives. Or worse.”
“Mr. President, I can assure you that’s not going to happen.”
Randolph glanced at him over one shoulder. Clark could see the President’s brows arc suggestively.
It was classic Randolph style. The President told his subordinates in vague terms what he wanted to happen, then left it to them to turn his wishes into realities. He neither specified nor wanted to know the details. He simply surrounded himself with people ruthless enough to do whatever was necessary to achieve his visions. That was enough.
“You can assure me of that?” said Randolph.
“Yes, sir.”
Randolph swung to face the window again. From where he stood, Clark could see the barricades that kept the public well back from the White House’s perimeter. It seemed hard to remember that there’d once been a time when tourists lined that fence and no one thought anything of it. A faint smile curled the President’s lips.
“That will be all, Clark.”
Clark smiled and bowed himself out like a courtier groveling before a king.
Someday, it would be his turn.
42
New Orleans: 5 June 6:10 P.M. Central time
Homicide detective William P. Ahearn stood at the water’s edge, his hands thrust into his pants pockets. The breeze fluttering up from the surface of the lake felt fresh against his face but the sun’s heat was still fierce.
The two murder victims probably hadn’t been dead for more than an hour or two, but already the sickly sweet stench of death filled the hot evening air. It would be easier being a cop someplace like Fargo, North Dakota, Ahearn found himself thinking. It might be damned cold, but at least the crime scenes wouldn’t smell so godawful.
“You say she’s a professor at Tulane?” he asked.
The uniformed cop, a guy by the name of Crouch, wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand and squinted into the evening sun. “Yes, sir. Dr. Elizabeth Vu. She was in the math department.”
Ahearn stared down at the second body on the cruiser’s deck. Someone had shot out the man’s right eye. It wasn’t a pretty sight. “Who’s the guy?”
“According to his wallet, his name’s Ross. Stuart Ross. He’s from Texas.”
Ahearn grunted. New Orleans was full of Texans, most of them contractors and construction workers who’d arrived after the storm. Only this guy didn’t look like a construction worker.
“You want me to have the boat dusted for prints?” asked Sergeant Trish Pullman.
Ahearn glanced over at her. “What’s the point? We couldn’t process them even if there are any.” Katrina had essentially wiped out the NOPD facilities. All they had was a bunch of bodies lying all over the place.
“I’ll call it in,” said Trish. “This doesn’t look like another drug deal gone bad.”
Ahearn grunted again. “Didn’t someone in the psych department say something about Henry Youngblood working with a statistician from the math department?”
Trish squinted up at him. “You think the two murders are connected?”
“When was the last time we had two Tulane professors murdered in twenty-four hours? Of course they’re connected.” He squatted down to study the cruiser’s bow, where it had been driven hard into the sand. “We’ve got two bodies, two bullet holes, and one gun that’s fired one bullet. I’m guessing it’s a pretty good bet neither one of our two vics drove this boat up on this beach.” He pushed to his feet and heard his knees crack. “Any witnesses?”
“A jogger,” said the uniform. “He was too far away to see much, but he says one person got out of the boat after it rammed ashore.”
“Man or woman?”
“A woman. A young woman. He says she ran toward the campus.”
“What’s she look like?”
“He couldn’t say. The guy’s nearsighted.”
Ahearn stared off across the weed-grown sand toward the UNO campus. “All right. Let’s get some more people out here. I want them to talk to everyone they can find. Let’s see if we can get some kind of description of this girl.”
43
The target was easy enough to find: an old yellow 1970s VW Super Beetle with a factory sunroof, parked on the street just outside the marina.
Reggie Williams ran a connoisseur’s hand over one flawless fender. The car was a classic. It seemed a shame to blow up something this beautiful. There should be an easier way to kill the girl, he thought. But orders were orders.
He cast a quick glance up and down the street, then hunkered down on the sidewalk beside the passenger door. Reggie Williams had two loves in his life: cars and explosives. He’d always loved cars, but it wasn’t until the Army sent him to Iraq that he discovered explosives.
In Iraq, Reggie had learned how to disarm Improvised Explosive Devices and how to make them, too. Sometimes at night he had dreams. Dreams of an exploding bus filled with Iraqi schoolgirls. Of burned-out Humvees and endless expanses of sand filled with mounded graves. When his eight years were up, he’d gotten out of the Army. He quickly found another market for his talents. A market that paid a whole hell of a lot better.
He had to lay flat out on the sidewalk to fix the package to the VW’s chassis. Then he rigged up a mercury switch. The switch was so delicately balanced that the slightest shift in the level of the car would make it go off. He doubted she’d even be able to open the door without blowing herself to perdition.
He checked to make sure the switch was precisely adjusted, then he armed it. All he—
“What you doin’ there, son?”
Reggie swung his head to find himself staring at a pair of black cop boots. His gaze traveled up the cop’s blue pant legs, past his gun-slung hips and ponderous belly, to a red, full-jowled face. Shit.
Reggie was from New Jersey. But he’d been around enough Southern boys in the Army that he could lay it on when he wanted to. “Just fixin’ my car, officer. Is there a problem?”
“Funny, but this don’t exactly look like your kind of car.”
“Well…actually, it’s my sister’s car.”
“That a fact? She lives around here, does she?”
Reggie hesitated. There didn’t seem to be a lot of people with dark skin in this part of the city.
The cop’s hand rested, suggestively, on the holster at his hip. “Stand up and move away from the car.”
Reggie scrambled to his feet and backed away. He wanted nothing more than to put as much distance as possible between himself and that VW. But then the cop said, “That’s far enough. Now just stand there. Don’t move.”
Reggie watched as the cop unhooked the flashlight from his belt and knelt down on the sidewalk to peer underneath the car. But the man’s balance was wobbly. He put out one hand to steady himself against the side of the VW.
Hideously aware of the delicately balanced mercury switch, Reggie saw the car begin to shift.
“No!” he screamed, “Don’t lean against the c—”
It was déjà vu all over again. Climbing out of her taxi, Tobie stared at the column of thick smoke billowing up toward the evening sky. The street outside the marina was filled with fire trucks and police cars, two ambulances, and a Durango from the coroner’s office.
Nearby, a TV camera with WWL CHANNEL 4 emblazoned across the side focused on a perky news reporter with a blond bob who stood with her head tilted as if listening for a cue. Then she looked into the camera and said, “This is Tracy Jacobs coming to you from the Orleans Marina. There are unconfirmed reports that an NOPD officer and an unidentified male were killed here this evening when what eyewitnesses describe as a car bomb exploded on Lake Marina Drive…”
Tobie swung away, her throat closing so painfully she could barely swallow. Skirting the gathering crowd, she managed to work her way around until she was close enough to catch a glimpse of the smoldering wreckage of what had been her car. As she watched, someone leaned over to zip a black body bag closed. Another body bag lay a few feet away.
It hadn’t even occurred to her that the bad guys would search the area around the marina for her car. It was just sheer dumb luck that the blast hadn’t killed her. Except how could she feel lucky about escaping the blast when two people were dead?
She’d left her flight away from New Orleans until too late, she realized with a sudden wash of panic. Now she was trapped here, without a car, without Colonel McClintock to advise her on what to do, where to go. She had no one left to turn to except a man she didn’t know and had no reason to trust.
She began to back away, her gaze fixed on the black, twisted skeleton of her car. For a moment it was as if the hushed voices around her fell away. She was back in Baghdad listening to the wailing grief of women and smelling the acrid stench of burned flesh. A car door slammed somewhere close and she jumped, bumping into a guy behind her. Jerking around, she saw a big man with short-cropped sandy hair and a bony face who sent a frisson of fear through her. “Sorry,” she said quickly, and turned to run.
44
Jax was cleaning his gun at the table by the window overlooking the city when the call came through on the hotel telephone.
Setting aside the newly oiled Beretta, he hit the Mute button on the remote, silencing the perky blond Channel 4 reporter standing in front of what was left of October Guinness’s yellow VW Bug. He reached for the receiver. “Hello?”
The woman’s voice at the other end of the line was so tight it cracked. “Why should I trust you?”
Jax’s gaze focused on the television screen, where paramedics were loading a zipped black body bag into a waiting ambulance. The car bomb had obviously been intended for her. So what had gone wrong for the guys in the body bags?
“You need to meet me,” he said. “This is something we really can’t talk about on the phone.”
“Why should I trust you?” she said again.
“My guess is you’ve just about run out of options.”
There was a long silence.
He said, “Listen to me. I can help you.”
“Or you could kill me yourself.”
“I could have killed you this afternoon.”
There was another pause. He could feel the tension crackling over the line. Then she said, “Meet me at Joe’s Crab Shack, on Lakeshore Drive at the West End. Can you be there in half an hour?”
“Yes.”
“Come alone.”
Jax reached for his Beretta. “I’ll be there.”
The Circle Bar at the corner of St. Charles and Lee Circle was a disreputable dive that reeked of spilled beer and urine and decay. Barid Hafezi had never been in such a place. Once a grand, three-story house with a turret and wraparound balcony, it had long ago degenerated into a haunt for winos and addicts and washed-up hookers.
Glancing around nervously, Barid chose a table in a dark corner and ordered two drinks. The first he dumped in the pot of a nearby dead palm. But the second one he drank. It might have offered him a form of false courage, but he’d take any kind of courage he could get at the moment.
He’d spent the afternoon taking care of some pesky tasks he’d let slide and assembling all the papers his wife, Nadia, would need in a file he’d labeled Death and left in the bottom drawer of his desk at home for her to find. Then he took her and the kids out to dinner, and there’d even been time to stop by the old snowball stand on Metairie Road.
Jasmina’s snowball had turned her mouth blue, and she opened her eyes wide and stuck out her tongue in fun, and Barid laughed so hard he’d cried.
“What is it?” Nadia had asked him, her soft brown eyes anxious as she searched his face. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he’d said, looping an arm around her shoulders to draw her to him. “I just realize how blessed I am.”
Before he left the house that night, he’d hugged and kissed each of them in turn—Nadia, Jasmina, and Faraj—and he’d told them he loved them. Draining his second glass, now, he found some solace in the thought. They would have that to remember.
He left the credit card receipt on the table as instructed and dropped the book Fitzgerald had sent him on the bench. He’d often thought about that improbable string of Korans that Mohammed Atta had left behind him in the bar he’d patronized so noisily the Friday before September 11, on the dashboard of his rental car, and in his apartment. It reminded Barid of that European fairy tale about Hansel and Gretel, stringing a trail of bread crumbs to be followed. Now, he wondered where his own false trail would lead.
Nadia would know he hadn’t done it, whatever it was. She would remember the way he had hugged and kissed his children. And she would understand why he had cooperated, so that they might live, even if he could not.
The crowds were already beginning to disperse by the time Homicide Detective William P. Ahearn and his sergeant reached the Orleans Marina.
Ahearn stood on a patch of scorched grass, his arms folded at his chest, and studied the blackened, twisted skeleton of what had once been a classic VW Beetle. According to their records, October Guinness drove a 1979 VW Beetle.
“Jesus Christ,” said Trish. “What did this? A car bomb? We turning into Baghdad or something?”
Ahearn nodded to the detective, Eddie Jackson, a slim, wiry man with gleaming ebony skin and a neat goatee. “Whatcha got so far?”
“It took us a while,” said Jackson, “but we finally got the car’s VIN number.”
“You’re kidding? Off of what?”
“One of the doors blew over to the other side of the seawall.”
“And?”
“It’s registered to October Guinness.”
“But she’s not one of the bodies?”
“We don’t think so. They’re in such bad shape it’s impossible to be sure yet, but according to witnesses, there were two men near the car when it blew. A tall young black guy and a cop.”
“Who’s the cop?”
“Martie Driscole.”
“Martie?” Trish’s forehead puckered with distress. “Aw, hell.” Martie Driscole had t
hree kids under five.
“So who’s the black dude?” asked Ahearn.
“That’s anybody’s guess. We haven’t found anyone yet who recognized him, and whatever ID he was carrying probably beat him to hell. Maybe the autopsy will come up with something.”
Ahearn nodded, his gaze lifting to stare across the top of the seawall to where the masts of the sailboats in the marina stood out stark against the darkening sky. “I’ve got two Tulane professors dead in less than twenty-four hours. I’ve got the first prof’s house trashed. I’ve got his research assistant’s house trashed. And now I’ve got her car blown to bits right next to the marina where the second prof parked her friggin’ boat. You think I’m going out on a limb here if I suspect the girl seen running away from the floating morgue we found at Pontchartrain Beach was October Guinness?”
Trish and Jackson exchanged looks, but neither said a word.
Ahearn hunched his shoulders, trying to ease a worsening kink in his neck. “I want her picture in the hands of every cop on the street. I want it on the ten o’clock news. And I want it on the front page of tomorrow morning’s Times-Picayune.”
Trish nodded. “You think she’s doing all this?”
“Hell. I don’t know. But I’d bet the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that she knows a heckuva lot more about what’s going on around here than I do. The woman’s a goddamn walking crime wave. I want her off the streets.”
45
Joe’s Crab Shack was basically a long, covered pier with a tin roof and glass walls that looked out over the wide silver expanse of the lake. Tobie hung up the pay phone in the lobby and went to take a seat at a table facing the entrance.
She spent the next half hour sipping a bottle of water and scrutinizing everyone who walked in the door. But there was no way she could keep an eye on what was happening outside in the parking lot or on the perimeter of the building. She knew she was taking a huge risk, meeting with this guy. But she couldn’t see that she had many other options at this point.