by M. A. Lawson
Fang handed Otis the gym bag, and he unzipped it and looked inside, which Fang found somewhat insulting. Thankfully, Otis didn’t waste time counting the money.
“We have a problem,” Otis said.
“And what is that?” Fang asked. He noticed that Otis didn’t mention there being a problem until he had the bag in his hand. Fang wondered if he could take Otis if he had to. Otis was a powerful man and he was certainly armed, but Fang, although not armed, had been trained to kill in numerous ways.
“A woman came to see Ray Brown’s sister today,” Otis said. “She told her that she’d frozen all her assets and wouldn’t unfreeze ’em until Shirley gave her the names of the men Ray had been working with. She also said the bank was going to foreclose on her house. Shirley told her to go to hell and then came to see me.”
“I see,” Fang said. “So you’re saying that Ms. Brown knows you did the job with her brother.”
“Yeah. I always worked with Ray, and Ray told Shirley everything.”
This was not good. “Are you concerned that Ms. Brown will give this woman your name?”
“No. Shirley would never do that.”
“Are you sure? Maybe you should eliminate her. I mean, for your own safety.”
“I’m not going to do that. Shirley’s good people. Like I said, I know she’d never give me up. But I have to do something to help her out of the mess she’s in. I can’t let her lose her house.”
“Who was the woman who threatened Ms. Brown?”
“I don’t know,” Otis said, “but the way Shirley described her, I think she might be the same woman who shot my other guy, Quinn.”
“I see,” Fang said. Hamilton. Fang could kick himself for not taking the security guard—who he was now sure was not a mere security guard—more seriously.
“But that’s not the worst of it,” Otis said. “This woman, whoever she is, told Shirley that Callahan’s connected to national security. Is that true? Is Callahan connected in some way to the government?”
“No,” Fang said. “She’s lying.”
“Then how was she able to freeze Shirley’s accounts? Who but the government could do that?”
Fang smiled and shook his head as if Otis were being naïve. “It’s funny,” he said, “but people are always worried about the government spying on them and about the government’s power. It’s not the government that people should fear, Mr. Otis. It’s people like me and the people this woman works for.”
“What are you talking about?” Otis said.
“Like myself, Mr. Callahan works for a large, international company, and it would have been easy for his company to get into a bank’s computer systems. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the company that Mr. Callahan works for owns the bank where Shirley Brown keeps her money. At any rate, the government is not involved, and I’m very sorry that Ms. Brown has been caught in the middle of all this.”
“Yeah, but I have to do something to help her.”
“Her problem is easy to solve,” Fang said. “It just takes money. How much do you think her house is worth?”
“What? Shit, I don’t know. Three, four hundred thousand.”
“Fine. We’ll pay off Ms. Brown’s mortgage. I’ll also have a lawyer speak to her bank. The lawyer will tell the bank that he will tell the media that their computer systems are vulnerable, that Ms. Brown’s accounts have been hacked, and that she intends to sue for damages, distress, and whatever else the lawyer can think of. And when the bank looks into Ms. Brown’s accounts, they will find out that they have indeed been hacked and they will unfreeze her assets. That may take some time, but in the meantime, you will give Ms. Brown her brother’s share of the money.”
“You’ll do that? You’ll pay off Shirley’s mortgage?”
“The people I work for will,” Fang said. Otis had no idea that Fang was employed by the Chinese government. “The stakes are very high, which was why you were paid so much in the first place. Another four hundred thousand is of no consequence.” And for the Chinese government, it really wasn’t.
“But what do we do about this woman who’s looking for me?”
“I’m not sure,” Fang said, and he was being honest. “But right now I’m inclined to do nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Yes. All that this woman appears to know is that Ms. Brown is Mr. Brown’s sister. And if Ms. Brown refuses to tell her anything, then she’ll have no other leads to follow.”
“What if we kill her?” Otis said.
“That’s always an option, but I’m not sure it would do much good. Like Mr. Callahan, she’s an employee of an organization that has many employees, and if she’s killed, someone will replace her. I think the best strategy at this point, as I said, is to do nothing and avoid exposing ourselves.”
What he’d just told Otis wasn’t exactly true. Fang always had the option of calling his young friend, Jamal Howard, and having him eliminate both Shirley and Otis if that should become necessary.
• • •
KAY STILL COULDN’T CLEARLY SEE the guy Otis was talking to and now his back was to her. She couldn’t make out his license plate either, and she couldn’t hear what they were saying to each other.
She wondered what was in the gym bag that the guy had given Otis.
She had to get back to her car so she could follow him.
She started to scoot backward—away from the edge of the ball field where she lay—when the man talking to Otis got into his car and drove out of the lot. Goddamnit! She belly-crawled as fast as she could, and when she was far enough away from Otis, she got to her feet and sprinted to her car.
She jumped into the car and drove toward the parking lot exit. She hoped she’d be able to see the guy’s taillights—but she couldn’t. There was an intersection half a block from the parking lot, and she knew that the guy hadn’t headed straight because she would have seen him. He’d taken either a left or a right, but she couldn’t see taillights in either direction. Shit!
She made a U-turn and drove back to the parking lot. If she was fast enough, Otis would still be parked and she would make him tell her who the guy was. But she was too late. Otis was already pulling out onto the road.
She decided to follow Otis again. Maybe she’d get lucky and he’d stop someplace along the way, someplace where she could get him alone and question him.
• • •
OTIS LOOKED AT HIS WATCH. It was almost ten, but he called McCabe. “I’m on my way,” he said. “I’ve got the second installment.”
He called Simpson next but he didn’t answer. Irritated because he’d told Simpson to stay by his phone, Otis left a message: I’m headed to Billy’s right now. Get there as fast as you can. I’ve got the second installment.
He hesitated before he made the third call, but finally decided it was the right thing to do. He called Shirley Brown.
“Has that woman contacted you again?” Otis asked.
“No, that bitch. And my accounts are still frozen.”
She sounded like she was drunk, but Otis needed to get Shirley her brother’s share of the money. He could do that tomorrow, but he’d decided he wanted to get her out of her house and someplace where that woman couldn’t squeeze her anymore.
“Are you sober enough to drive?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “Why?”
“You know how to get to Billy’s place on the river?”
“Yeah, Ray and I went there a couple of times for barbecues.”
“Good. I’m headed there now and I want you to meet me.”
“Why?”
“Shirley, just meet me there. Okay? I’ve got some good news for you, but I’m not going to say any more on the phone.”
“Okay,” Shirley said, and Otis ended the call.
• • •
PRESCOTT DROVE B
ACK to Fort Meade after her meeting at the Pentagon, and the first thing she did was call Brookes to find out what Hamilton was doing.
“At about nine, she left Otis’s place in Fairfax and drove to a high school in Falls Church.”
“A high school?”
“Yeah. She was parked there for about twenty minutes, and now she’s on the move again. I don’t know where she’s headed.”
• • •
KAY WONDERED WHERE OTIS WAS GOING. She thought he would’ve headed back to his home, but he didn’t. He headed south. Forty-five minutes later, outside the town of Lorton, he turned onto a narrow, unpaved road. Kay didn’t follow him—he would spot her tailing him if she did—so she drove past the turnoff and parked. She pulled up Google maps and saw that the only thing at the end of the road was the Occoquan River. She was pretty sure that Otis was meeting someone; he certainly wasn’t going fishing at eleven at night.
Kay parked and started to take a flashlight from the glove box, but then she looked outside and saw the pale half-moon. It would provide enough light to see by, and a flashlight beam bouncing around in the woods wouldn’t be good. Holding the Beretta, she left the car and started down the road Otis had taken, moving cautiously, staying to one side of the road. There were trees and bushes on both sides, and if anyone else came down the road, she could hide in them.
Less than a hundred yards later, she could see lights ahead of her and a one-story, ranch-style house. It looked like one of those prefabricated, manufactured homes. Otis’s pickup was parked near it and another pickup was in the carport. Off to one side of the house was an ATV and a boat on a trailer. She remembered that Quinn had a pit bull and that it had almost gnawed the arm off one of the deputies that had searched Quinn’s house. She sure as hell hoped that whoever owned the house by the river didn’t have a damn dog.
• • •
BROOKES CALLED PRESCOTT, who was still in her office. He could imagine her sitting there in the dark, like an ancient spider at the center of its web, waiting for some helpless prey to blunder into the sticky mesh.
“After she left the high school in Falls Church,” Brookes said, “she drove to Lorton and stopped near the Occoquan River. Right now it looks like she’s walking toward the river. There’s a house close to where she parked, and it belongs to a guy named William McCabe. He’s like Dylan Otis, another guy with a record for bank robberies.”
Prescott hung up without saying anything, but Brookes, in his mind’s eye, could see the spider’s legs twitching.
Prescott scared the shit out of him. He knew that she had come to the agency in the late ’80s with a doctorate in math and started out working on technical stuff, but she soon proved that she had the Machiavellian political skills to rise in a large, complex, backstabbing bureaucracy. She was there during the Cold War and the War on Terrorism, and every other war that the United States had fought in the last thirty years, and she found a way to make herself indispensable. Within the NSA, there was hardly anyone more powerful.
Rumors about her abounded. Some said she was gay, but one of the old hands said she’d had a male lover, a CIA officer who died in Afghanistan when the Afghans were fighting the Russians. Brookes had also heard that her older brother had died in the Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon in ’83. If those stories were true, maybe they explained her fanaticism and why she did nothing but work. The only hobby she was known to have was photography, and the depressing photos in her office of leafless trees and collapsing barns and fallow fields had been taken by her. The one thing Brookes knew for sure was that crossing Olivia Prescott was tantamount to career suicide.
• • •
PRESCOTT FIGURED THAT MCCABE was one of the men who’d helped Otis steal Callahan’s safe and Hamilton was now sneaking down toward his house. But what was Hamilton going to do?
The only logical conclusion was that Hamilton planned to question Otis to find out who’d hired him. But then what? It would be acceptable if she killed Otis and his pal, but the last thing Prescott wanted was Otis and McCabe being arrested for stealing Callahan’s safe. She didn’t want them talking to the police about who’d hired them. She didn’t want anything to happen that might possibly interfere with Kincaid’s plan to use Winston as a double agent.
She needed to stop Hamilton. She needed to tell her to back off until she had decided how she wanted to deal with Otis and his crew.
She picked up her phone and called Hamilton. The phone rang four times and went to voice mail, but Prescott didn’t leave a message. She didn’t want there to be a recording of her speaking to Hamilton.
Goddamnit! Now all she could do was sit back and see what Hamilton did next—and pray to God that she didn’t turn Otis and McCabe over to anyone in law enforcement.
She also decided she didn’t want Brookes monitoring Hamilton any longer. He didn’t need to know more than he already did. She called Brookes and said, “Come to my office and set up your equipment so I can monitor Hamilton myself.” Minutes later, Prescott was sitting at her desk, watching the red dot that was Hamilton’s iPhone moving on a monitor toward the Occoquan River.
She told Brookes, “Go find a place to sleep, but stick around in case I need you.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
20
DAY 3—11:15 P.M.
Kay was still in the woods but now within fifty feet of the house by the river. She could hear the river but couldn’t see it, and figured the front of the house faced it. Otis had parked his pickup by the back door, and she could see concrete blocks that served as steps leading up to a small porch and a window in the back door.
With her gun in her hand, she started forward—and the phone in her back pocket vibrated, startling her. Thank God she’d turned off the ringer. She looked at the caller ID screen but the number was blocked. She could think of only one person who could be calling her on the NSA iPhone: Olivia Prescott. But why was Prescott calling and why was she calling now? Most likely she wanted an update on what Kay was doing. Whatever the case, this was no time to have a conversation with Prescott or anyone else. She’d talk to Prescott after she’d dealt with Otis.
She continued forward until she reached the back of the house, then ascended the concrete block steps, staying low, keeping her head below the level of the back-door window, and crept forward until she could press her ear against the door. She didn’t hear anything.
She turned the knob; it wasn’t locked. After the homeowner had let Otis in, he apparently hadn’t seen any reason to lock the door. She decided to take a chance and raised her head for a quick look through the window. She could see the kitchen—a small table, appliances, a single unwashed plate on the kitchen counter—but she couldn’t see Otis or whoever he was meeting.
Now what? Should she go in and try to take down Otis? If it was just Otis and one other guy, she was confident she could do it. They wouldn’t be expecting her, and if she moved quickly, she’d be the only one holding a gun. But she wasn’t sure how many people were in the house. If there were more than two, the situation could get unmanageable in a hurry.
Screw it. She was going in. Once she was inside and had the drop on Otis, she’d make him tell her who had hired him. She’d make him give her the name of the man he met in Falls Church. She wasn’t sure how she’d make him talk, but one way or the other, Otis was going to give her what she wanted.
She turned the doorknob and entered the house. She could hear a man talking, but didn’t know if it was Otis or someone else. She crept through the kitchen until she could see Otis and a younger man who was about thirty. They were sitting in the living room, the man on an old brown leather couch, Otis in a rocking chair near a potbellied, wood-burning stove. On a coffee table in front of the couch were stacks of bills and small gold bars. It was a shitload of money.
Kay stepped into the living room. Both men were startled and began to stand up, but she shouted
, “Don’t move! I’ll shoot both of you. I swear to God I will. Just stay where you are.”
Otis was wearing jeans and a plain blue T-shirt. The other man wore a sleeveless wifebeater and cargo shorts. Neither of them appeared to have a weapon.
“Put your hands on your knees,” she said. Both men did. They were surprisingly calm—they’d probably had guns pointed at them before.
“If you take your hands off your knees,” Kay said, “I’m going to shoot you. Who else is here?”
“Nobody,” the younger guy said. Then he added, “You’re the one who killed Quinn, aren’t you.” Again she noticed how relaxed he seemed, and then smelled the odor of marijuana. He was high, but not so high that he wasn’t able to function.
“That’s right,” Kay said. “I killed Quinn and I’ll kill you two if you force me to. What’s your name?”
“Billy,” the man said.
Speaking to Otis, she said, “I want to know who hired you to take the safe from Callahan’s office. And I want to know who you met with tonight in Falls Church.”
“You followed me to the school?” Otis said.
“Yeah. I followed Shirley to your place, then followed you to Falls Church. So who hired you?”
Kay could tell that Otis felt like a fool for having allowed her to tail him, but he didn’t answer her question.
“Otis, I’m not screwing around here,” Kay said. “I don’t care about you—you’re just hired help—and I don’t care about all that gold and cash on the coffee table. Give me a name or I’m going to shoot Billy. Then I might as well shoot you, too.”
• • •
THANKS TO THE PHONE Hamilton was carrying, Prescott could hear everything. The sound quality was excellent. But who was the man in Falls Church whom Otis had met? Was he another Chinese operative? It sounded like she’d find out pretty soon, because she had no doubt that Hamilton would get the information she was after. But the next thing Prescott heard was a woman’s voice saying, “Hey, Billy, where the fuck are you guys?”
• • •