The Escape

by David Baldacci

  to reach.”

  “Then how the hell does anybody keep all of it straight?”

  “I think that’s the point. They don’t want anyone knowing enough to keep things straight. Then they might have to start answering some tough questions.”

  “Makes congressional oversight damn difficult.”

  “Damn near impossible,” amended Knox. “Which, again, is the central point.”

  He eyed her curiously. “These are puzzling observations coming from someone in the intelligence sector.”

  “Just because I work there doesn’t mean I have to drink all the Kool-Aid. And have you wondered about something else?”

  “What?”

  “What your brother was sent to prison for.”

  “He was charged with national security crimes. Treason.”

  She said in a scolding tone, “And you weren’t curious about the exact circumstances? That’s surprising for an investigator.”

  “I did wonder. I wondered a lot. As soon as I got back from deployment overseas I checked into it. My brother was already in prison. But I did investigate.”

  “And?”

  “And the file was sealed. I couldn’t get anyone to even return a phone call or meet with me. Everything was completely hushed up. Not even the media really got wind of anything. It didn’t make any of the newspapers and I only saw one item about it on CNN, and then it just went away like dust in a black hole in space.”

  “So you don’t know what he was convicted of?”

  He glanced sharply at her. “Why? Do you know anything about it?”

  “I think we might want to find out about it.”

  Puller kept driving as he thought about this.

  She said, “Or do you not want to know if your brother is really guilty or not?”

  “He was convicted.”

  “And in your experience an innocent person has never been convicted?”

  “Not that many.”

  “One is too many,” said Knox.

  “But if the file is sealed on my brother’s case?”

  “You’re the investigator. You must have some ideas on how to find out things. And if I’m going to stick my neck out about these transformers gone missing, you can do the same with your brother’s case.”

  And she said no more as they drove along right into the gathering storm that might as well have been inside the car as well as outside it.

  CHAPTER

  20

  HE AWOKE AT noon and slowly looked around.

  Robert Puller had been dreaming that he had escaped from the DB. So when he woke, he thought he would see the interior of his prison cell.

  But I did escape. I am free. For now.

  A few minutes later he showered, careful to keep the soap and water off his altered face, and changed into his one other set of clothes. He would have to go shopping soon if he managed to maintain his freedom. He looked at himself in the mirror, if only to confirm that he still didn’t look a thing like himself. He just needed to avoid being arrested, because he couldn’t change his fingerprints, DNA, or retinal marker. His belly grumbling again, he drove to a twenty-four-hour diner and ate at the counter. Over his scrambled eggs, bacon, and buttered biscuits he read the local paper, a copy of which was sitting on the counter. The story he stumbled on had not made the front page and he wondered why.

  Air Force General Found Dead in Motel Room in Leavenworth, Kansas.

  He read on. Timothy Daughtrey, age forty-three and a one-star general in the Air Force, had been visiting the area on military business. He had not been staying at the motel. And there was no information on how he got there or the motive for his death, nor were there any suspects. There was a hotline number for people to call with information.

  Puller searched his memory. Daughtrey. Timothy Daughtrey. He didn’t recall the name, but then again the Air Force was a pretty big entity. It might be totally unrelated or it might be directly connected to what was going on with him.

  He finished his breakfast and carried the paper with him back to the motel. He got online and did a search on the dead general. There were numerous references to him, including a Wikipedia page. He ran his eye down the page.

  There it is.

  He was with U.S. Cyber, a command component of STRATCOM.

  Daughtrey had been assigned there just over four months earlier, well after Puller had gone to the DB.

  His career looked pretty straightforward. There was even a YouTube video of the man pontificating about military matters on some obscure show that probably only people in uniform, and only certain ones of those, would bother to watch. He seemed intelligent and straightforward on the video. Stupid people did not get assigned to STRATCOM. But he was assuredly not straightforward. Such people also did not get assigned to STRATCOM. In fact, reading between the lines of the video interview, Puller came away with the impression that Daughtrey had learned more about the interviewer than the journalist had learned about him, or, more importantly, about STRATCOM.

  Yet now he was dead and they had no leads. Murdered in Leavenworth while there on military business. And what business would that be? U.S. Cyber Command was headquartered at Fort Meade in Maryland. The closest Air Force base out here was McConnell in Wichita. But if he were doing STRATCOM business in this part of the country he would have likely gone to Offutt AFB in Nebraska. The satellite office that Puller had worked at in Kansas had closed and the operation had been consolidated at the partially renovated Offutt.

  So why was he in Leavenworth, Kansas? The answer seemed suddenly obvious.

  Because that’s where I escaped from.

  As he looked at the face of the dead man on the YouTube video, Puller nodded. That had to be the connection. He had to be the connection.

  He looked at the newspaper article once more. The motel where the body had been found was a relatively short drive away. He was making no progress with his database searches on the dead man back at the prison. He was still debating when to head out of Kansas and on to another location that might yield answers. But he had time for a side trip. In fact, in some respects, he had all the time in the world.

  He left his room and got into his truck and drove back to Leavenworth. He found the motel, passed by it, and noted the military guards posted out front to secure the crime scene. The motel was like the one he was staying in right now in KC. Cheap, run-down, as well as off the beaten path.

  A one-star’s travel allowance would have paid for a much nicer place. Puller also knew Daughtrey could have stayed, as a professional courtesy, in officer quarters at Fort Leavenworth. The various service branches were nothing if not hospitable to each other, if only to show off what they had.

  He parked on the street and doubled back, walking slowly past the motel’s entrance before heading on. He reached the corner and stepped partway into an alley, keeping the place under observation. He felt his heart beating faster and knew that being out in the open like this was still a new thing for him. He had been on twenty-three and one at the DB: solitary confinement for twenty-three hours before being allowed out of his cage for a single hour. Now to be freely walking the streets and filling his belly in a diner in the middle of dozens of people was a heady change. He refocused on the motel, and moments later his decision to come here paid off in a way Robert Puller could never have imagined.

  A white Chevy sedan pulled up to the curb in front of the motel. Puller locked on this ride because the make, model, and color screamed military. A man and a woman got out.

  When Robert Puller saw his brother emerge from the car, he froze, yet only for a second. Then he inched more deeply into the alley, but kept his gaze squarely on his younger brother’s tall, imposing physical presence.

  What the hell was he doing here?

  This wasn’t a CID case. And even if it were, the Army would never have allowed John Puller to work on it, if only because it might have a connection to his brother’s case. The military not only disliked appearances of impropriety, i
t loathed them.

  But there he was, in the flesh, and he was heading past the guards after flashing his creds. The woman with him was tall, slender, and auburn-haired, but Puller did not get a good look at her face.

  So my brother is investigating this case. And I wonder what else he’s investigating?

  Would the military really let one brother go after another?

  Robert Puller had thought a lot about his brother and what he would make of his older sibling doing a bunk from the DB and leaving behind a dead body. But never once, with all his brilliance and built-in paranoia from working so long in the intelligence field, had he imagined his brother working an investigation whose one goal would be to bring Robert Puller in, dead or alive, as melodramatic as that sounded.

  And certain people might very well prefer me dead.

  He waited for his brother to disappear from his line of sight and then left the alley and quickly made his way back to his truck. He was confident of his new face and altered appearance. But he had learned that his younger brother’s powers of observation were far beyond the norm. Sometimes they were even scary. So he was taking no chances.

  He reached his truck, climbed in, and then just sat there.

  His thoughts were now totally focused on one thing, and they had nothing to do with a dead man in a prison cell.

  His brother was here.

  And Robert Puller did not even want to think about where things might end up.

  Things were already complicated enough.

  Now? What he was trying to do seemed impossible.

  Because his little brother might be standing right in the way.

  CHAPTER

  21

  JOHN PULLER SAT in his motel room staring at a wall. He and Knox had slept in after their late night. Then they had driven back to the motel where Daughtrey had been found. Puller didn’t know what he expected to find there the second time around. And ultimately he had discovered nothing new or helpful. Then he and Knox had spent the entire day running down more leads, but absolutely nothing had popped on any of them. Now it was night again and their investigation hadn’t progressed one iota.

  And something Knox had said was sticking in his head like a Ka-Bar knife driven into his skull.

  Or do you not want to know if your brother is really guilty or not?

  Do I want to know? Or not?

  He slipped his phone out of his pocket. It felt like a brick.

  He thumbed through his contacts list until he settled on the one he wanted. He checked his watch. It was late and even later on the East Coast, but the person was a night owl. Puller knew many such night owls; he tended to be one himself.

  He listened to the phone ringing. On the third ring he heard the gruff voice.

  “Yeah?”

  “Shireen?”

  “Who the hell is this?” The gruff had moved on to annoyance.

  “John Puller.”

  Puller heard a thump, like a book had been dropped, and a clink, like a glass with ice in it had just been set down. And knowing Shireen as he did, the glass was not filled with water. More likely gin with a splash of tonic, and ice cubes, because as she had once told him, it was important to keep cool and hydrated.

  A few moments of silence were followed by, “John Puller? What are you doing with yourself these days?”

  Shireen Kirk—her full name, Puller knew, was Cambrai Shireen Kirk—was a Judge Advocate General, or JAG, attorney. She’d had her professional shingle out for nearly twenty years and had been involved in several of the cases that Puller had investigated. Each of those cases had resulted in a conviction. She was now forty-four years old, petite and thin, with reddish-blonde hair cut in a bob and bangs that still showed plenty of her freckles—Irish sprinkles, she had called them once. She was based in D.C. and had a reputation for being brilliant, scrupulously honest, diligent, fair-minded, and a woman who would kick your ass if you lied to her, regardless of military rank. And she could drink anyone of Puller’s acquaintance—and that included many large male beer lifters of prodigious capacity—under the table.

  “This and that, Shireen,” replied Puller.

  “We haven’t worked a case in a while.”

  “Maybe we’re about due.”

  “Wait a minute, didn’t you just shoot somebody in Nebraska?”

  “Oklahoma.”

  “Right, one of those flyover states. Saw something come across my desk about it. You okay?”

  “I’m fine. The other guy isn’t. I didn’t kill him, but he’ll be walking funny for a while. Not how I wanted it to go down, but he didn’t give me a choice.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Kansas.”

  There was a long moment of silence. Puller could almost hear her mind sorting through things and compiling data, with a conclusion soon forthcoming.

  “DB,” she said.

  “DB’s here, all right.”

  “A little surprised you are,” she said warily, as though she were being wiretapped and suspected a legal trap.

  “I was too. But it’s all official and authorized.”

  She said in an incredulous tone, “You’re not saying you’re investigating the escape?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  “Get off it! You’re shitting me.”

  “No.”

  “Has the Army lost its damn mind?”

  “I can’t really answer that.”

  “Then have you lost your mind?”

  “I hope not.”

  “Well, I hope your authorizations go about as high as they can go, otherwise I might be prosecuting you for about a dozen violations of military law, Puller.”

  “I wouldn’t be here if they didn’t, Shireen.”

  “In writing. Sometimes a CO’s memory sucks when the shit hits the fan.”

  “Got ’em in writing. Army three-star and the NSC with trickle down the chain of command to my CO good enough for you?”

  “Well sonofabitch, will wonders never cease? Why are you calling? If you’re in Kansas it’s too far to catch a beer together.”

  “I’m calling about my brother.”

  “What would I know about your brother? Other than he’s apparently escaped from DB? And you’re there, apparently investigating a crime you shouldn’t be within a continent of?”

  “That word ‘apparently’ again.”

  “What about it?”

  “You’re not the first to use it when talking about what happened.”

  “Well of course, Puller. Think about it. People don’t escape from DB. And do you believe for one second the Army wants to admit to something like that? The bigwigs are probably still praying he got stuck in a ventilation hole and it was all a big misunderstanding.”

  “So my brother?”

  She said nothing, but Puller could hear papers rustling and thought he detected the sound of a pen clicking. She seemed prepared to take notes. Whether this was a good thing or not, he wasn’t sure.

  “I need to find out about his case.”

  “His case?” she said.

  “His court-martial.”

  “Find out what?”

  “Basically everything.”

  “You don’t already know about it?”