by Mg Gardiner
“You’re not going to steal the money—you’re going to throw it away and pin its disappearance on Grissom?” Lawless said.
“If you have a better idea, tell me. It’s my shot. And I have to take it now.”
Lawless looked like he was trying to work it out. “Where are you going to transfer the money?”
“The Marshals Service must have an account for seized assets.”
He cut a glance at her, as though glimpsing a dimension that could only be seen from the corner of his eye—a view into the sly. He brightened.
“We can’t use an obvious account. Figure the Worthes will try to trace the transfer. You don’t want it going straight into a government account.”
“Then a way-station account. A slush fund.” She gestured in Nolan’s direction. “With a fee sent on to whatever local bank he’ll be using in his next WITSec existence.”
Lawless stood thinking, loose limbed, watchful. “Shall we include the Bureau in this transaction?”
“Of course not.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Call the Worthes’ offshore bank. As soon as Nolan gets Grissom’s phone number, I’m going to call Antigua and move the money.”
Nolan said, “Assuming I do this, how come you need Grissom’s phone? You call the bank, they’re going to know it’s not him.”
“On the contrary.” She dug in her messenger bag. She came out with two cards. She held them up. “Calling card. To keep from showing my own number. And this”—she raised another credit-card size item—“is the ticket.”
Lawless said, “Spoof card.”
“Damn right.”
“How legal …”
“I don’t see you walking away.”
He let out a near-laugh. “You bought the whole shebang?”
“My employer considered it a worthwhile investment in skip tracing. Possession of the spoof card is fully legal. The company’s registered in Panama.”
He did smile then. She felt his encouragement as reassurance.
A spoof card allowed you to disguise your phone number when making a call. It replaced your actual number with another—a number you entered into the system before you connected the call.
“You got the voice alteration package?” Lawless said.
“It’ll lower my voice to a male register. I’ll sound just like Grissom Briggs. Man,” she said, adding a lazy drawl to her voice. “I’m going to trick the bank into thinking Briggs is making the transfer.”
His smile seemed admiring. “To the slush account. We’ll have to disguise that.”
“Can you put a name to the slush account?”
“Reavy Worthe?”
“Joint account. Reavy, Fell, and Grissom. For their trousseau.”
“I’ll work on that. But if you can’t convince the banker that you’re Grissom—”
“I don’t have to. The banker’s not going to know exactly how Grissom sounds. All he has to do is say, ‘Yes, I spoke to Mr. Briggs,’ when Isom Worthe or the family’s accountant calls the bank to ask who the hell emptied the account.”
Nolan said, “About the joint account.”
She tensed. “It can’t have your name on it.”
“Not what I meant. Fell and Reavy used to use aliases. They had fake IDs. The names were Jade and Opal Riggs.”
She smiled. He was in. Lawless was nodding.
She nodded at Nolan. “Make the call.”
She wanted him to do it while he was ragged and hoarse and tired, and before he chickened out. He got his phone. As she’d known, he scrolled straight through his contacts and hovered over a number. His eyes had a gleam of fear, but he called.
He put the phone to his ear and closed his eyes. Took a sharp breath. “Uncle Isom? It’s me. It’s Nolan.”
And he burst into tears.
In her pocket, Sarah’s phone vibrated.
Danisha kept the radio on, loud enough that Sarah should be able to hear.
“Road’s blockaded west,” she said. “I can’t get to the Air Force Base.”
She heard nothing in reply, just open silence.
“Sarah?”
Sarah stood chilled and hot. Road blockade. She snapped her fingers at Lawless. Mouthed, News. Phone.
She couldn’t have Danisha and Zoe come back here. She couldn’t have them anywhere within shooting distance of her and Nolan. She ran her knuckles across her forehead.
On the phone, Danisha repeated, “Sarah? Can you hear me?”
Nolan was talking in hesitant teary bursts to his uncle Isom, sounding abject and wheedling. She walked along the arroyo downstream, behind a cluster of boulders.
Danisha said, “Radio says it’s a nuclear spill. They’re cordoning off this area in a thirty-mile radius. Nobody gets in or out.”
Harker. He was penning them all inside, and planning to drive the trio straight at her. She was inside a noose. Firewalled.
She said, “Where are you? Could you get to a police station—or even one of those cops at the barricade?”
“I’m miles away from the barricade. And I don’t want to turn around. Bunch of other vehicles pulled out of line right after I did. Maybe they all just want to avoid traffic, but if one of them’s following me …”
“Yeah.” If that was the case, then doubling back would put her directly in their path. She pictured the landscape. “The airplane graveyard. Get there and get as deep inside as you can.”
“Then what?”
She glanced around the boulders. “Lawless will come to get you. I’ll call the FBI. Tell them where you are. Maybe they can airlift you to safety.”
“Sarah, I don’t like this. You don’t want to mess with the FBI.”
“We’re running out of choices.”
She didn’t think Harker had the resources on scene to protect Zoe. Danisha could take care of herself, but Zoe needed more. She needed an assault team, with air support and missile defenses. She needed the Death Star.
Sarah had one handgun and one U.S. marshal. “Call back when you’re in the boneyard.”
“I’m two miles away. I’ll get back to you.”
She hung up. Danisha sounded rock-solid but stressed. God help her, Sarah thought.
Queasy with apprehension, Sarah hurried back to Nolan and Lawless.
Nolan squatted on his haunches, head down, speaking into the phone. “They didn’t put me in witness protection for giving them anything, Isom. They put me in ’cause Beth was planning to tell the FBI everything she learned about the family. The Feds were coming to the cabin that day. They were going to take her into protective custody so she could talk into a recorder until she ran dry.”
It was a good lie. He listened, eyes shut. Isom, Sarah guessed, was not playing the cuddly uncle.
“Like you would have believed me?” he said. “Isom, just listen for a second. You want to know why I disappeared? Because Sarah Keller shot me.”
He held still, balanced precariously on the balls of his feet. Though listening to Isom, his lips moved. He seemed to be praying, or mumbling, Come on, come on.
Then he stilled. “Shot me and left me there for dead. And she took Zoe. I tried to keep her from taking my baby girl, but she shot me right in the gut. When I came to, the marshals had me handcuffed to a hospital bed in a federal jail facility. Told me I could cooperate and continue into WITSec, or I could go my merry way back to the family—and after I’d been disappeared for a week, maybe the family might not believe what I was telling them about my innocence. So what was I supposed to do?”
He listened again, his fears reeking from his posture. “And you want to know the ironic part? The FBI—they’re the ones convinced me to come out of hiding this week. They’re the ones showed me I was a fool to believe anybody in the government this whole time.” He laughed. “They’re the ones who got me my kid back.”
Two more seconds. Then he stood. He clenched a fist. “You heard me. I got her. Zoe’s with me.”
He looked at Sar
ah. His eyes were bright.
“But I need help to get to you. The Feds, they got agents everyplace around here. They see Zoe, they’ll go nuts. They’re searching every car, every truck, they’re gonna go house-to-house and tree-to-tree before long.” He paused. “I need Grissom.”
Sarah walked to Lawless’s side. They watched, barely daring to breathe.
“This number?” Nolan said. “Yeah, I’ll be on it. I got a signal. But hurry. No way I can keep under the radar much longer. I need Grissom here, now.”
He hung up. His hands were shaking.
“Grissom’ll call,” he said.
62
No guard at the gate, Danisha thought. No gate. She drove through a gap in the fence where a rusted chain-link barrier listed against the shining white sand.
She had a prickling sense of foreboding. The sky above was so blue it looked glazed, but she felt the darkness lowering.
From the back seat Zoe said, “These planes look all broken. Do they fly?”
“Nope. So we’re going to explore them.”
She eased the red rental tank past endless neat rows of 737s and DC-9s and into a military section, F-4 Phantoms and then a destruction yard, ranks of B-52 intercontinental nuclear bombers bigger than McMansions, eight-engined terror machines sitting dry and empty. Their wings had been guillotined from the fuselage and lay smashed in the sun, left there for orbiting Russian satellites to photograph and verify.
When she found a narrow rut in the sand between two columns of planes, she turned carefully, thinking, Sarah’s little girl, Sarah’s little girl, in my hands.
In the rearview mirror, sunlight flared behind her. She glanced up but saw nothing. She looked out the window. Everything was flaring in the sun—aluminum fuselages, cracked cockpit glass, curving canopies. She checked ahead: the rutted path ran straight for nearly a mile, directly through the center of the boneyard, and intersected another road that ran along the inside of the fence at the far end. If she had to, she could get out that way. She drove halfway down the path and pulled the SUV beneath the shade of a blue KLM jumbo. A ladder leaned against the wing but it looked as dusty and forgotten as everything else in the boneyard. Nobody was around.
She parked under the wing. “Out you go, pipsqueak. Let’s play fighter pilot.”
They climbed up the ladder. At the top Zoe balled her hands in front of her eyes to shade them from the silver glare off the wing surface. Danisha led her through the open emergency exit into the jet’s gaping, gutted interior.
Danisha paused. All the plane’s windows and doors had been removed. The view to the west looked out across a moonscape of white sand to black-ridged mountains. There wasn’t any wind, just an oppressive stillness. She listened, wondering if she heard an engine in the distance, or whether it was the pounding of her own heart.
The insistent ringing wasn’t what made Grissom pull over and stop in the middle of the aircraft graveyard. What made him pull over was the insistent ringtone that told him Isom Worthe was calling.
He seemed to feel a hot punch, like a match being lit in his gut. This job wasn’t done yet. Which meant this call couldn’t be congratulations.
“Isom.”
“Drop what you’re doing. We got a lost sheep says he wants to return to the fold. And says he’s bringing a little lamb with him.”
Grissom listened, and the lit match feeling eased and spread into a sense of warmth and well-being. “What’s Nolan’s number?” he said.
Nolan held his phone like it was a baby dragon, ready to breathe fire. He wiped the back of his hand across his forehead and leaned against his truck.
Sarah rubbed his shoulder. “You did great.”
“I need a drink.”
Lawless was on his own phone, talking to somebody in cool, muffled tones. She approached and he finished the call.
“They can put two names on the account. I told them Grissom, plus Jade Riggs. They’re working on it.”
“They. Your people. Does that mean they’re still willing for me and Zoe to enter protective custody?”
“They’re also working on that.”
She tried not to scratch at her arms, or his throat. He looked like a rock, maybe one that was about to splinter off a cliff and crash to a valley floor. He looked as if he wanted to comfort her, or kiss her. She still wanted to punch him.
He put out a hand, palm up. She gripped it, just for a second. When she let go she felt steadier.
Quietly she said, “If Grissom calls, Nolan doesn’t need to answer. Asking him to hold it together may be too much.”
Lawless eyed Nolan, who was rocking back and forth beside the truck. “Agreed. All he needs is the number. He can let it ring.”
And it did, a clear chime in the dry air. Nolan twitched and before Sarah could speak, said, “Grissom. Hello.”
Grissom heard the weasel’s voice on the other end of the line. Five years, he hadn’t heard it, certainly hadn’t missed it, didn’t care for it, and had no doubt who it was.
“Nolan. Where are you?”
On the passenger seat, his second cell phone buzzed. It was a text from Reavy, replying to the message he’d sent her a minute back, telling her he was at the airplane graveyard.
15 min out.
He panned the view up the white sand road, to the turnoff where the Helms woman had driven.
He spoke calmly. “Nolan? I’m going to bring you in. Tell me how to find you.”
Hesitantly, Nolan said, “How long’s it gonna take? I need you here ASAP, man. The cops are crawling all over the place.”
“Then tell me where to find you.”
The pause in Nolan’s response sounded like, duh. “Oh. Motel at a town on Highway 82. The Atomic Inn. I’m afraid to open the door, man. I registered under another name but I don’t trust the front desk. Just get here.”
“I’ll be there within thirty minutes. Sit tight.”
“Good. Okay, cool,” Nolan weaseled. “Thanks.”
“I’m on my way,” he said. “Oh, and Nolan—let me talk to Zoe.”
The look in Nolan’s eyes turned to open panic. Sarah got halfway to his side and he said, “Why?”
The way he listened, she thought his hair was going to ignite and slough off. She mouthed, What?
He mouthed back, “Zoe.”
The panic became contagious. Her skin heated. She shook her head. Made slashing motions. Refuse. Tell him no.
Cringing, he said, “Not going to do that, Grissom. There’s no need. And, frankly, you’d scare her.”
He listened.
“She’s a wreck, that’s why. I don’t need her crying again. Walls here are thinner than Saran Wrap. I gotta keep her quiet.”
He closed his eyes again. Nodded and said, “I’ll be here.”
When he hung up he crouched by the truck, breathing hard. Sarah knelt beside him.
He held up the phone. “Here’s the number.”
“Thank you, Nolan.”
He nodded again, quick, jerking motions. “He believed me. We’re okay.”
Grissom put away his phone. He stared up the road, into the forest of planes where Danisha Helms had driven.
Why was Helms hiding? She wasn’t wanted by the law. She wasn’t afraid of some nuclear disaster.
She had something with her. Or somebody. And there was only one person that could be.
He started his engine.
63
Sarah’s heart beat like a drum in her chest. Grissom Briggs had provided a phone number. It set up everything she needed to set them free.
But he had asked to speak to Zoe.
Grissom Briggs called himself the Shattering Angel, but he was a snake in the grass.
“He knows,” she said.
Lawless said, “What do you mean?”
And she had let Zoe go with Danisha. She had let go of Zoe’s hand, let her out of her sight. She’d thought that made sense, that it put Zoe in a safer position.
But Briggs.
&
nbsp; “He wanted to talk to Zoe. He knows.”
“Knows she’s not with Nolan?” Lawless said. “He might suspect.”
“He knows it’s a trick.”
“Then get on the phone to the bank. Right now.”
Her heart drummed, rapid-paced, a rhythm of dread. She seemed to hear a dry sound, the rustle of scales, a rattler sidewinding toward them.
“Why else would he ask about Zoe?” she said.
Lawless put a hand on her back. The touch nearly made her jump. “Sarah?”
“What if he … Jesus.”
Vision thumping, she phoned Danisha.
Her friend answered on the second ring. Hushed, whispering. “Sarah, what’s going on?”
“You okay? Safe? Out of sight?”
“A mile deep in the aircraft boneyard, surrounded by the Cold War. But Sarah …”
“What?”
“Is there any chance somebody could have followed us?”
A moan rose in Sarah’s throat. “Stay put. Stay quiet. I’ll get the FBI there. And the cops.”
“You sound worried.”
“You have a weapon. Right?”
“You know it.”
“Safety off.”
The quiet on Danisha’s end lasted a long heavy beat. “Call me when the law’s on its way.”
Sarah ended the call, hands trembling. “I have to get to her.”
Lawless was shaking his head, already dialing a number. “I’m on it.” He looked up. “You call the bank.”
“I don’t …”
“Call them. Do it. This is your one chance. If we arrest Grissom before you get through to the bank and move the money, you’ve blown that chance.”
He was right. She crossed to the truck, leaned against the hood, and laid out all the information. She checked her watch. She looked west, toward the white sands and blazing sky where her little girl was shielded only by friendship and grit. Hang on, she thought.
She took out the calling card and dialed.
64
In the shade of the withering trees, deep in the arroyo, Sarah made the call. She accessed long distance through the calling card. Then she dialed the access number on the spoof card.