She stopped a few feet shy of the surface and continued to swim toward the opposite side of the creek, hoping that the murky waters might still keep her hidden from her attacker.
In her helicopter training, she had been made to swim a length of 100 feet underwater after escaping the Dilbert Dunker submersion simulator. The concept was that immediate surfacing would place you at risk of being burned by the giant puddle of fuel at a crash site. During training, early surfacing resulted in a sharp stab from the drill Sargent’s stick as he prowled the side of the lane next to the escape swim path. This was the first time she’d truly appreciated the wisdom of the training.
Virginia continued to swim underwater until the C-sized oxygen cylinder finally ran out. She held her breath just that little bit longer, and then slowly surfaced with her eyes and mouth just above the waterline.
She glanced around. She was now more than a hundred yards from where her ambulance had been knocked into the Newtown Creek. There was no longer any sign of anyone watching her from the opposite end of the bank.
Virginia turned and faced the Queens side of the creek. She swam quickly until she reached the stone embankment along the wall. Detritus a foot thick, made of trash and rotting shards of timber, blanketed her as she raised up. Looking back across to the Brooklyn side there was no sign of anyone watching. Virginia could see the damage to the fence on the lead in to the hundred-year old swing bridge, but no garbage truck, no emergency responders, nothing. They thought she was gone, and that worked for her just fine.
She climbed out onto the bank of the creek.
Virginia had no shoes and her paramedic’s uniform was soaking wet. None of the eight cars that passed her on 46th, 47th and 48th streets seemed to notice her trudging along the sidewalk. She pulled out her smartphone from her left cargo pocket and glanced at the screen. It still worked. What do you know, the waterproofing on these modern smartphones must be improving? She scrolled through until she found the name she was after, and pressed call.
The answer came halfway through the second ring as she knew it would, from the familiar voice. “Virginia Beaumont!”
Virginia smiled. “Sam Reilly, I need your help.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Sam Reilly pulled his rental into the open space beneath the Brooklyn-Queens Express overpass. It was a white Toyota sedan, the most invisible car he could find. He turned the car so that he could see the Newtown Creek and the adjoining roads. His eyes raked the surroundings for any sign of trouble. There were none that he could see. Some kids were playing street baseball in the flattish land that ran between the two, but apart from that, the place appeared completely devoid of people.
He set the handbrake, but left the engine running.
Sam reached down to his left boot holster and withdrew his concealed carry weapon, a Bersa Thunder 380 CC. With it he carried the required documents, obtained throughout his classified employment to the Secretary of Defense, that allowed him to legally carry the weapon in New York.
He removed the magazine and checked it. There wasn’t anything to do to it, Sam kept the weapon clean and well oiled, ready in case he ever needed to use it. He chambered the first round, cocking the slide to double action for the first two cartridges. The pistol mimicked the concept of the Walther PPK made famous by the original James Bond movies, but this piece was eight ounces lighter and had a polymer grip making it preferable to Sam for concealment. He glanced at his watch. It was 11:05.
She was already five minutes late.
At 11:08 the kids picked up their bat and ball and left. Sam eyed the small field where they were playing, his head slightly tilted as he tried to listen for any sign of trouble. Out the passenger side window he thought he heard something move.
His head snapped around.
With his Bersa concealed under the cover of an open book – The Devil Colony, by James Rollins – Sam swept the safety lever into the fire position.
The clear ground outside the passenger’s window was empty.
His eyes went wide.
Behind him, he heard a female voice say, “Sam Reilly, you don’t know how glad I am to see you!”
He turned to the driver’s side window, where Virginia was now standing.
Sam lowered the handgun and smiled. “Virginia.”
He glanced at her.
She looked a disheveled mess, but otherwise no different than the last time he’d seen her more than two years ago. Her feet were bare and she wore a pair of paramedic blue cargo pants. She’d discarded her conspicuous paramedic top, keeping just her black tank top instead. It revealed her slim figure and muscular arms, the way he remembered her. Her clothes looked like they had recently been wet, but were now close to dry. Her blonde French braids were wet and windswept, giving her a decidedly sexy appearance, that Sam hadn’t quite seen when they were both in the military.
Sam felt the tension leave his body in an instant. His lips curled into a grin. “Well, are you going to get in the car or are we going to have a picnic here?”
Without responding she moved to the passenger side door. She moved with the commanding gait of a professional soldier. Her face was set hard and her eyes determined. She opened the door, climbed in and closed it.
He stared at her for a moment.
She smiled a full set of even white teeth, bare one. Sam recalled it had been knocked crooked during an attack in Afghanistan by a small fragment of shrapnel that ricocheted off a protective wall by an IED blast. She’d once meant to get it fixed when she returned stateside but decided against it, telling everyone it reminded her that she should have died that day, and now every day is a bonus – as such she didn’t want to waste a day of it.
She had a small gold piercing through her left nostril. That’s new. Certainly wouldn’t have met Navy regulations. Her blonde, windswept hair had a pink tinge to it where it appeared she’d taken a blow to the side of her forehead.
Her full lips curled into a grin. “What?”
“You look like hell, Virginia.”
“Thanks.” Her soft blue eyes examined him, noticing differences in him, too, no doubt. “I missed you, too.”
“Hey, you made the news this morning!”
“That’s good. Anything interesting?”
“Not really,” Sam admitted. “They found your Ambulance and they’ve had divers out looking for your body all morning.”
“Well, the longer they think I’m dead the longer I’ll get to live.”
Sam carefully scanned the underpass for people. “You hungry?”
“Starving.”
He released the handbrake and took off. “Good. Let’s grab a bite.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Detective Eric Greentree peered upward past Armstrong through the dirty windshield of the unmarked police cruiser from the passenger seat. There were several rows of cheap houses, not unkept, just decidedly working class living.
“The red brick one here,” he said, squinting through shards of afternoon sun.
Looking toward the building on their left, Armstrong braked and rolled one wheel up over the curb into a space. “1349 Greene avenue, apartment 2. Lodgings of one Charles Michael Beaumont.”
“At least it’s probably ground floor,” Greentree said. He removed his Glock 9 from his shoulder holster, checked it, and replaced it.
“This building looks old, thirties probably, must have survived the blackout here.”
“Our boy probably watched it all burn from the front window.” He said, flicking his cheap suit lapels with a shrug.
“Let’s go see if he’s home,” Armstrong said getting out and slamming the ballistic panel door.
The building appeared run down compared to its neighbors. Graffiti was scrawled on the ajar steel and glass door, and trash bags were piled on both sides of the stoop. A broken security camera hung from its wires above the entrance. “Nice place,” Greentree said, running his eyes across the peeling paintwork and pushing the door with his fist. �
�I thought this area was trendy now?”
“I think Paramedics earn even less than us, if that’s possible – he probably bought this place twenty years ago for a song.”
Greentree placed his ear to the worn black door marked 2, taking care not to obstruct the looking glass, or step in front of the threshold and make a telltale shadow. After a moment he shrugged and withdrew his handgun.
“Timber door,” he said to Armstrong as she pulled her own from its hip holster under her jacket. He looked at Armstrong, stance ready, fearless. He knew she would have his back and would wade straight into battle at a moment’s notice if that was what happened right now, no question. He hoped he wouldn’t be ordered to kill her at some point.
He took half a step back, paused, and kicked the timber door just below the striker with the full force of his body weight. The door crashed straight off the frame and fell open, hanging from the lower hinge.
“Police!” Armstrong yelled as she blazed in and left, Greentree a step behind and moving right.
The unit was dark, and silent. It was instantly obvious to both from the stale air and stillness that they were alone.
“Anyone here?” Greentree called, as he turned and hoisted the door back up into the frame with his left hand. He gently pushed the lock, keeping his handgun in his right hand. With flashlights and gun sights they swept the apartment as they had a hundred others. Both satisfied with the search they holstered their weapons.
Greentree found the lights. “Maybe she’s dead?”
“I watched that water for ten minutes, and nothing came up from that wreck. I told you Virginia was dead.”
“So the cash has to be here somewhere right?” he said, moving toward the kitchen.
“Right.”
Greentree tore at the contents of the cupboards, anything he could grab clattered to the floor beside him. Armstrong had pulled the cushions from the sofa and was dragging a switchblade from one end of the interior fabric to the other when Greentree read aloud from the flight itinerary he had just found on the refrigerator door.
Mr. Charles Beaumont. Thank you for choosing Delta for your upcoming flight from La Guardia to Palm Springs International Airport.
Armstrong snatched the itinerary off the fridge and read a couple lines and smiled. “Well how do you like that?”
Greentree snatched the itinerary from her. And read the intended destination – a medical clinic that specialized in a new type of cancer treatment. “Virginia comes into a million dollars and the next thing you know her father is on a flight to a specialist treatment center.”
“He’s not going to be happy.”
“No. And it gets worse.”
“How?”
“He called last night. Said there was a mix up with the assassin. He said after she killed the Senator and stole the map, she placed it in the duffel bag with the kid’s money. The idea was when we got the duffel bag, we would retrieve the map.”
“But we checked he duffel bag?”
“Exactly.”
“Oh shit. Which means, Virginia accidently stole the map when she took the money.”
“Yeah, and now she’s at the bottom of the river and we have no way of knowing where the damned money and map went.”
Armstrong picked up the itinerary again. “No, but I know someone who’s currently the prime beneficiary of her good fortune. If anyone knows where the map got to, it will be her father.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Sam followed Virginia through the belled door into the diner and they took a seat in a booth on the back wall. Sam scanned the street in the mirror over Virginia’s shoulder while he spoke to the server and ordered coffee for both of them.
Over the course of the next half hour Virginia filled Sam in with every detail of the past twenty-four hours, since her life had been turned upside-down. She told him about the young drug dealer who appeared to have taken his own drugs only to overdose and about stealing the money so that she could fund her father’s experimental treatment. She then explained how the next day she discovered her partner, Anton, had been killed by a stolen garbage truck, finally finishing with the rundown of how she’d been attacked by a different garbage truck on her way to another ambulance station, which was how she ended up in the river.
Sam waited and listened, letting her get it all out. When she was finished, he said, “All right. I have some questions, then we’re going to decide exactly what we’re going to do about all this.”
“Shoot.”
“How old was the kid?”
She raised a curious brow. “The drug dealer?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know. Mid-twenties. Possibly late twenties.”
Could it be Senator Perry’s kid?
“Describe him for me. What exactly did he look like?”
A wry smile formed on Virginia’s lips, but she thought about it for a second before she answered. “He looked well groomed, wore an expensive gold watch… a Rolex or something grotesquely expensive. Definitely didn’t look like he’d been doing it hard.”
It definitely could have been the Senator’s son…
Sam persisted. “Was it a gold Rolex or something similar?”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Something about a gold Rolex. I’ve seen it on someone recently. I can’t remember where.”
She paused, thought about it. “Yes. It was definitely a gold Rolex, I recall the distinctive five-pronged golden crown, the emblem associated that’s often advertised when you watch tennis.”
“Interesting.” Sam tried to think back to where he’d seen it recently. The Senator was wearing an expensive watch, but nothing stood out in his memory as it being a Rolex. He’d seen photos of David Perry. Had the man been wearing a Rolex?
“What are you thinking?”
“Nothing. It doesn’t matter. I’m just trying to work something out. Tom and I were recently asked to help track down someone who recently went missing. For a second I thought the two events might be related.”
“Really. Why?”
“The kid was twenty-eight and the sort of rich kid who’d probably wear a Rolex. It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t him.”
Sam turned his focus into a different direction. “What about the rest of your shift?”
She cocked her left eyebrow. “You want to know what I did on a fourteen-hour shift as a paramedic?”
“Sure. Maybe you were attacked because of something else you did? You have an interesting job. You see a lot of people in vulnerable positions. We already know this has something to do with what you and your work partner did yesterday, so maybe it’s something else. Did you have any unique cases?”
“No. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary. We saved a five-year-old kid’s life after she had a bout of severe asthma. We returned a ninety-five-year-old woman with dementia back to a nursing home, after she was found walking along Fifth Avenue without any clothes on. We attended a guy who was found dead in the gutter.”
“Anything suspicious?”
She smiled. “No. A heart attack.”
“Anyone important?”
“No. Wait… we did look after someone pretty high up in the government who died, but there wasn’t anything suspicious. It just looked like he’d had a heart attack. The detectives only became interested when they recognized the congressional pin.”
Sam sat up and went rigid. “Who exactly was it that died?”
“His name was Arthur… something… Parry I think…”
“Senator Arthur Perry?”
“That’s it.”
“Senator Arthur Perry’s dead?”
“Yeah. He died of a heart attack first thing yesterday morning. Why do you look so concerned? The guy was the epitome of gluttony. It was only a matter of time before he dropped dead.”
“Sure. But I don’t think that’s what killed him yesterday.”
‘You don’t?” Virginia asked
“No. He was murdered.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Virginia let those words hang there silently for a moment.
The waiter arrived through the port-holed kitchen door and placed their lunch in front of them. Burgers, fries, and a soft drink. She took a bite. The burger was fantastic. One of those genuine hand made burgers with a thick patty, tomatoes, lettuce, beetroot, and cheese. It probably went a fair way toward clogging her arteries, but right now she didn’t care.
She finished two more bites and then said, “So, you want to tell me why you think Senator Perry was murdered?”
“The Senator approached me four days ago to search for his son who’d gone missing nearly three weeks ago. Something we found in our investigation frightened the Senator. He said that if the message got out, he and his family would be dead. Then he told us to stay where we were and pretend nothing had ever happened, while he caught the next flight out of there to New York, to go and put things right.”
“And so you thought maybe the drug dealing kid was his son and had been targeted, too?”
“The thought crossed my mind.” Sam took another bite of his burger. “But then I dismissed it. The Senator said that his son was an adventurer. There was nothing about him being a drug addict, much less one from New York who made money dealing the stuff. God knows the Senator was wealthy enough that his son never would have needed to make money selling drugs.”
Virginia recalled the Senator’s Hermes shoes. Any kid of his would never have needed to sell drugs. But she also knew with experience that drug addicts didn’t always come from broken families. Some of the wealthiest and most successful people she’d known had become hooked on some sort of addiction. The only difference between them and those who aren’t so well off was that the rich could afford good quality drugs.
Rich kids don’t generally overdose.
Her focus kept shifting fractionally in and out. The shape of her mouth changing, as if she was constantly thinking. There was something important there, she just couldn’t quite reach it. Rich kids buy high quality drugs, which aren’t laced with additional chemicals, and as a consequence, they don’t die as frequently as the drug addicts on the street.
The Ironclad Covenant Page 12