Checkmate

by Steven James

  27

  Ralph and I landed at the Charlotte Douglas International Airport and entered the famous atrium decked out with a row of old-style rocking chairs lined up along the glass wall that overlooked the tarmac.

  Live grand-piano music resonated through the air. The hustle and hum of busy people living busy lives paused here, found a respite near the food court and the rocking chairs that offered a taste of Southern hospitality.

  Before exiting past security I went to grab a cup of coffee at Chierio’s, an indie coffee shop in the C terminal, something I always did when flying through Charlotte. But today, to my disappointment, I found that it was gone and a Starbucks occupied its place in the concourse.

  “So,” Ralph said, “I’m guessing you’re gonna pass on the java?”

  “You know me all too well.”

  “No mermaid coffee.”

  “No mermaid coffee.”

  “Tessa’s right. You really are a coffee snob. And to think I’m the one who got you started drinking the stuff. Can I ever forgive myself?”

  “‘Snob’ is such an unflattering word.”

  He nodded toward a store nearby. “Buy you a Snickers?”

  “That’ll do.”

  * * *

  As we waited in line at the Avis rental counter, Ralph, who was crunching his way through a duty-free almond chocolate bar nearly the size of a tablet computer, said, “Remember the last time we were in Charlotte?”

  “Tracking Sevren.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  Sevren Adkins was a killer who’d left clues at his crime scenes about who his next victim would be. Eventually that investigation had led us to uncover a conspiracy that had its roots in the Jonestown Massacre in Guyana, South America, back in the seventies.

  The mnemonic of the origin of the Latin text message formed the phrase I am back.

  But, no, that didn’t work. Sevren was dead.

  A copycat?

  Possibly.

  Something to keep in mind.

  Because now death had brought me back to this city.

  It’s strange how the past threads its way into our lives, affecting the trajectory of our moments, sometimes bringing unexplainable unity to the way the present unfolds.

  Even with the priority of this investigation, the Bureau wasn’t interested in “unnecessary case-related expenditures,” so we had only one rental car between us and we were staying at a midpriced hotel fifteen minutes from Uptown.

  Once we had our car, a compact that Ralph could barely squeeze behind the steering wheel of, we navigated through the early-evening traffic.

  As he drove, he shared what he thought the people who’d laid out the road system, with the right-hand lanes ending so frequently and abruptly in exit-only lanes, should do to themselves. His suggestions included a few unique and rather memorable anatomical suggestions that, though impossible, were, if nothing else, quite inventive.

  Traffic held us up and we didn’t arrive at our hotel until after seven, too late to swing by the FBI Field Office, so we grabbed supper next door at a small, locally owned fried-chicken place. “Tessa’s not here,” Ralph reminded me. “That means you can have chicken without any meat guilt.”

  “What about deep-fried Southern-grease guilt?”

  “I won’t tell Tessa if you don’t tell Brin.”

  “Deal.”

  When we’d finished, I had a mango smoothie to help assuage my grease guilt. Ralph chose a packet of gummy bears.

  Afterward, as I stowed my suitcase in the hotel closet, I said, “When I first met you in Milwaukee, back when I was a detective, you told me that you used pillow mist.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I didn’t believe you.”

  “I know.”

  He dug through his things and produced a small spray bottle. “You should have.” He held it out, offering it to me.

  “I think I’ll pass.”

  He chose the bed nearest the television and spritzed his pillow. “Your loss, my friend, your loss. There’s nothing like a nice-smelling pillow to welcome you to dreamland.”

  “Did you just say ‘welcome you to dreamland’?”

  “Just seeing if you were paying attention.”

  We spent some time reviewing the case and then laid out our plan for the morning: visit the Field Office and orient ourselves to what they were working on, drive past the locations in Charlotte that seemed pertinent to the case, and then connect with the curator of the Mint Museum at eleven thirty, a meeting Margaret had set up for us while we were flying down here.

  Earlier, on our way to the airport, I’d called Gonzalez and asked him to look into the minister from the funeral, and now he texted that the pastor was a friend of Jennings, the National Security Council rep, and that Jennings was the one who’d coordinated with the families to have him speak.

  I found that informative, but I couldn’t see how it had any immediate bearing on the case.

  At last, Ralph and I called it a night.

  I’ve stayed in hotel rooms with my friend on a couple of occasions, and I was thankful he didn’t snore.

  Or at least that’s what I thought, but I soon found out he’d developed a new habit since I last traveled with him.

  I tried adjusting the air conditioner/heater unit under the window to cover up the sound, but the thing apparently had two settings: tepid and arctic.

  In the end I went for arctic.

  With my unscented pillow folded around my head and an extra blanket over me so I wouldn’t shiver from the frigid air blasting at me from only a few feet away, I tried to get some sleep.

  + + +

  The bard was back in Charlotte. It’d been a long day, but it had been worth it to visit the graveyard. He’d gotten the photos he needed. He’d seen Lien-hua and Patrick Bowers, and also Agent Hawkins and his quite-pregnant wife.

  He’d also made sure his captive was secure in that basement on Pine Street.

  Yes, at an address that the Bureau would, eventually, find to be quite informative.

  A productive trip.

  Now he retired to his bedroom. Tomorrow he had to go to work in the morning; then in the afternoon he could check on Corrine and confirm the Semtex placement.

  He contacted his person in DC and offered a reminder of what would happen if things did not go as planned.

  “You have a job to do,” he said. “And you understand what will happen if it’s not carried out?”

  “I . . . understand,” came the soft reply.

  + + +

  Though Tessa had searched all afternoon and evening, she hadn’t found anything online about the Latin phrase, and now, with her dad and Ralph gone to Charlotte, she doubted she was going to get any more chances to help them out.

  Which pretty much sucked.

  She hadn’t admitted to them how important it was to her that she help them, that it was her way of trying to deal with what was happening this week. It was something positive she could do in the face of something so devastating.

  Ever since her mom had been diagnosed with cancer, the idea of death, of real people dying in real life, had been hard for her to deal with.

  Blood.

  Corpses.

  Funerals.

  All deeply distressing.

  Not that anyone likes those things—of course not—but for her it was different. She’d already seen too much suffering and death. Her mom. Her dad. Media photos from the cases Patrick worked.

  Obviously, he never let her see his case files, but the pictures that made the rounds on the cable-news shows and the Internet were grisly enough.

  She almost felt guilty being thankful at a time like this, but she was thankful—thankful that he and Lien-hua hadn’t been killed when the bomb we
nt off. That would have been too much for her. That would have sent her plummeting off a cliff she never would have recovered from.

  Given everything that had happened, despite herself, she found her thoughts revolving around death and loss: her mom dying of cancer, her biological dad being shot last year.

  She needed to process all this, needed to sort out the jagged images that were caught in her mind.

  Making sure she didn’t wake up Lien-hua, she snuck out for a smoke, but that didn’t seem to help.

  Back inside her room, she pulled out her journal and picked up a pen.

  She could type faster than she could write, much faster, but there’s something about having a pen in your hand that forces you to think carefully about every word.

  Typing gives birth to bloviated writing, fat and wobbly and sloppy.

  You see it all the time on the Web. Thoughtless, mindless prose, unwieldy and unfocused.

  Blog. Blog. Blog.

  Even the word sounded fat and imprecise.

  But with a pen, you actually experienced each word as you shaped it, stroke by stroke, curve by curve. One letter flowing to the next, each word a nonpareil experience.

  But when you type, every letter is shaped the same beneath your fingers, a flat or maybe concave square little world.

  Tap. Tap. Tap. Type. Type. Type.

  Only writing longhand allowed you to enter the breadth and unique form of every letter, every word.

  She flipped to a blank page in her journal.

  Write. Clear your head. Get death off your mind.

  She thought of her mom, and of growing up in Minnesota—springtime in a budding, unfolding world, the smell of moist soil underfoot, a warm rain erasing the remnants of winter.

  But even her memories of spring led her back to thoughts of death when a very specific afternoon came to mind, a day when she and her mom were taking the laundry outside to hang up on the line that stretched between two poles in their backyard.

  And she wrote:

  One day they found a dead bunny in the yard. It wasn’t fun to pet and they couldn’t leave it there or it would attract the wrong kind of flies.

  So they buried it beneath a spreading tree and said a prayer, and the little girl watched her first dead body get lowered into the ground on a sunny day when all she’d wanted to do was hang up the laundry with her mother and play tag in the tall, leaning grass.

  As she stared at the words, a cord seemed to stretch across the canyon of pain inside of her, connecting the sting of those memories with the present-day vague sense of grief that had draped over her life in the years since her mom had died.

  The Latin phrase that’d been texted to Patrick came back to mind, as well as the translation she’d come up with: Why, mortal man, do you raise up your head when, behold, you will die and end up as bald as this skull?

  Yeah, that was actually a pretty good question. Why, indeed?

  She hadn’t been able to find the quote anywhere.

  Sure, the Web was a great repository of knowledge, but it wasn’t the only one.

  Last summer she’d gotten a Library of Congress card. They’re only given to researchers—and sometimes students who can prove they’re doing research “of a significant and enduring nature.” She’d convinced them to give her one and was thankful because it allowed her to get into the main reading room, which was off-limits to the general public. They were good for a year, so she was golden.

  Yeah, tomorrow she would visit the Library of Congress while Patrick was gone and Lien-hua was at work.

  Who knows? Maybe Beck would need to come along with her, to protect her.

  Or maybe it’ll be that woman, his partner.

  Well, if it was Beck, Tessa told herself that she would just have to find a way to put up with it.

  As if that was going to be a problem.

  28

  Friday, August 2

  6:47 a.m.

  The exercise room at the hotel consisted of a single, dated treadmill and a stained, yellow yoga mat discarded haphazardly beneath the window.

  I opted for a jog outside.

  With my wounded side, I had to be careful not to swing my right arm too much, which made running a little awkward, but I managed.

  A wooded park nearby, enshrouded in early-morning mist, gave me a quiet place to run.

  After half an hour I turned around, and on the way back to the hotel I explored a side street where I found a park with a children’s playground. One bar looked about the right height and I would have loved to pump out a few sets of pull-ups, something I try to do as often as possible to stay in shape for rock climbing, but there was no way the stitches were going to stay intact if I tried something like that.

  A discarded toy helicopter lay beside a rusted metal swing. The chopper was splattered with mud from a recent rain and was half-covered with dirt. I’m not sure why, but I picked it up and found that its blades were broken.

  It would never fly again.

  And it took me back.

  Memories.

  A boy.

  Taken.

  I was working as a detective in Milwaukee. One day a woman lost track of her five-year-old son on the Summerfest Grounds. She was nearly hysterical by the time I arrived. “He’s okay,” she was saying over and over. “He has to be okay.”

  But the boy wasn’t okay. I was the one who found him two days later. He was still alive. The man who took him, a high school English teacher, had kept him locked in his guest bedroom and videotaped the things he’d done to him.

  That boy would never be okay again.

  And I was the one who had to tell his mother.

  I wish I didn’t know so much about crimes.

  For some reason it didn’t feel right to leave the helicopter there, so I took it with me.

  Back in the hotel room I found Ralph doing push-ups. I had no idea how long he’d been at it. I’ve seen him lay out a set of seventy-five in a row before, so when I realized he was finishing a set of twenty and was sounding winded, I imagined he’d been working out for a while.

  “What’s with the helicopter?” He took a break, lifted his right arm, stretched his triceps.

  A reminder of a time I was too late.

  “A souvenir from my run.” I set it on the bedside stand.

  After we’d both cleaned up and changed clothes, we left for the Field Office.

  + + +

  The bard drove to work.

  A month ago he’d taken a position that allowed him access to the local museums as well as other businesses throughout the city that he’d used while he was looking into the location of the mines. It’d made it easier to get the artifacts that he’d needed for his night with Jerome Cole.

  Really, the job was perfect—only a couple of days a week, flexible hours, and it got him into places he never would have been able to enter otherwise.

  He kept a low profile.

  Didn’t cause any trouble.

  He was a good, quiet, faithful employee.

  No one at work had any idea about his extracurricular activities.

  + + +

  We took Exit 3 to get to 7915 Microsoft Way, where the Charlotte Field Office was located.

  “By the way,” Ralph said, “did you think it was a little cold last night in the hotel room? I was freezing.”

  “Hmm . . . We’ll have to take a look at that tonight.”

  “Yeah. I don’t want to miss out on any of my beauty sleep.”

  “Now, see, you just lobbed one over the net for me and I’m not even going to spike it back at you. No snide comment coming your way.”

  “You’re a smart man.”

  “I’m a beacon of self-control in a factious world.”

  “It sounds like you’ve been spending too much time with Tessa.”r />
  “That just may be true.”

  As we drove toward the five-story building, the sunlight glared off its dark windows situated in the reinforced concrete sides. An imposing, spear-tipped steel fence ran around the property.

  The FBI has its own police force and now, even though the officers here were expecting us, the two men in the guardhouse took their time verifying our creds and, in light of the bombing at the NCAVC on Monday, even checked under the car for explosives.

  After parking, we met up with Special Agent in Charge David Voss in a conference room. He was a tall, spindly man who made me think of a human spider. Glassy eyes behind retro glasses, late thirties. I figured he must either have been an incredibly bright guy or someone who was shrewd at politics to snag his position at his age. Maybe he was both.

  After introductions, he said to Ralph, “I got word from Director Wellington that you were coming.” It seemed like a needless thing to say.

  “Yes,” Ralph replied.

  “I’m here to do whatever I can to help you.”

  “Glad to hear that.”

  Voss gathered up the leaders of three of his units—Cyber, Evidence Response, and Counterterrorism.

  Fortunately, the agents had prepared for our arrival and were already relatively familiar with the case. Together Ralph and I filled in the blanks for them.

  When we’d finished, Ralph said, “So, where are you guys at? What do we know?”

  “Well,” Voss replied, “we have a team looking into historical markers and locations that deal with the Mecklenburg Declaration. So far, nothing. We’re consulting with the Charlotte Historical Society to see if we can find out about a connection between the Catawba tribe and the Mecklenburg Declaration.”

  Ralph nodded. “Good. And the museum footage?”

  “Still reviewing it.”

  I flipped open my laptop and connected to the room’s projection-screen system for a video conference with Joint Terrorism Task Force Director René Gonzalez, the man Margaret had put in charge of the investigation.