Run for Cover

by Michael Ledwidge

  “Yes,” he finally said with a sigh. “We can do that. Let me call the tower.”

  Westergaard yawned himself and spread out his lanky arms as he walked back to his seat. Tall and slim as an Olympic swimmer, the thirty-five-year-old South African had to duck to keep the top of his six-foot-two head from brushing the jet’s low bulkhead.

  “What now, Chief? What’s up?” said Maniscalco as he sat back down on the couch.

  Westergaard resumed his repose and took a deep, even breath as he closed his eyes.

  “Boss? Yoo-hoo? Boss?” Maniscalco said.

  Even with one leg, Maniscalco was brutally efficient in action. Especially with nip-and-tuck dirty work, which he actually seemed to enjoy.

  But the New Yorker’s nervous energy before an operation was a constant irritant in the extreme, Westergaard thought. Why couldn’t he just sleep like the rest of them?

  “Chief?” Maniscalco said, chewing away at some gum now. It was Nicorette, of course. When the jittery fast-talking mercenary wasn’t smoking or chewing something, he was jiggling his leg or aggravatingly tapping at things.

  Westergaard listened to the incessant chewing for as long as he could and then finally opened his eyes and looked over at the man with disdain.

  Blond and pale and clean-shaven with slightly bulging brown eyes, Westergaard’s stern yet refined countenance looked on virtually everything with a kind of arrogant disdain.

  “What’s the word, Skip?” Maniscalco said, blowing a bubble.

  Instead of answering him, Westergaard lifted the tablet with the text on it and handed it across the aisle.

  “Where now? Denver?” he said, chewing away.

  Westergaard didn’t reply.

  He was already back asleep.

  60

  On I-25 driving south with the traffic north of Denver, Gannon rolled his neck as he slipped his coffee out of the drink holder.

  There was early-morning rush hour traffic around him on the wide three-lane highway, and it was getting fuller and fuller by the moment.

  A glossy black glass generic corporate office building went past on his right, then some indifferent high-rises. Except for the immense line of Rocky Mountains in the close right-hand distance, they could have been on the New Jersey Turnpike, he thought.

  He looked over at Kit busily texting on her phone.

  Overall the plan seemed to be coming along pretty good so far.

  Kit had made contact with Braddock’s NSA buddy the night before at their motel. The man’s name was Ian Parker and despite Kit’s worrying, the senior intelligence analyst had been surprisingly receptive about helping them. Especially when Kit had told him truthfully that the facial recognition ID on the first victim they were looking for had to do with getting to the murky bottom of Braddock’s death.

  After that Gannon had gone out and done a little shopping at a Walmart to get a knapsack and a few hardware items to put inside of it. Kit wasn’t the only one who liked to be prepared. His just-in-case emergency pack was sitting on the floor of the back seat.

  There had also been another spot of good luck. After doing some research, it turned out Kit actually knew someone in the Denver office, another female agent named Amy Cargill who Kit had worked fairly closely with in LA.

  The current plan was for Kit to call Cargill when they got closer. It would be far easier and less suspicious for Kit to get inside the facility if she had a friendly established face to smooth things over at the front desk.

  Gannon clicked the blower fan on a little higher as he listened to Kit text. Then he clicked it back. He thought about switching on the XM radio but then decided not to. He drove in the center lane, listening to the steady hum of the tires all around until he couldn’t take it anymore.

  “So how we looking?” he finally said.

  Kit thumbed at the screen with a loud release of breath and put down the phone. She rubbed at her eye with the heel of her hand.

  “All I need is to get into the SCIF and type in the code Ian just sent me and the info will show up on the SCIF screen,” she said. “Since I already downloaded the encrypted format protocol for the thumb drive he sent me last night, we’re looking good to go.”

  “Okay, it’s all set, then. Good,” Gannon said. “We’ll get to the city and you call your friend Amy and get in there and we’re ready to rock.”

  “Sure we are,” Kit said without much enthusiasm. “If I get into the SCIF, that is.”

  “You’ll get into it, Kit,” Gannon said. “Just play it the way we’ve set it up. Just follow the plan. Keep it short and keep it simple.”

  She stared out at the mountains for a moment. Gannon looked with her. The sun out from behind a cloud was on the snowcapped peaks now and the vista was stunning, majestic, celestial.

  It didn’t look like the Jersey Turnpike anymore, Gannon thought, blinking.

  “Easy for you to say,” Kit finally said as she lifted her Starbucks.

  She took a sip of coffee and set it back down.

  “You’re not going inside,” she said.

  61

  Dawn Warner’s corner office in DC was on the fifth floor of the neoclassical Department of Justice building just under the base of its southwest pediment.

  At thirty-three minutes after ten Eastern Standard Time she stood at its window and looked out between the fluted columns over Constitution Avenue at the Smithsonian Museum’s scalloped dome.

  Then she shut the big heavy drapes.

  On the way back to her desk, she popped the two Excedrin gel tabs in her hand, dry swallowing them. She didn’t know if maybe she wasn’t drinking enough water or something before takeoffs, but she’d acquired a nice sharp altitude headache on the plane coming in this morning from the Cape.

  She took off her jacket and hung it on the back of a tufted leather chair. She buzzed her secretary, Roberta, to let in Fitzgerald and Harris.

  “We’re in here,” Warner said, pointing over at her suite’s conference room.

  Littering the long varnished mahogany table were computers and secure phones and cords. Behind them on the back wall of the dim windowless room was a whiteboard bookended by the two huge and bright American flags Dawn Warner used as background for her TV appearances.

  She kicked shut the door as they all slipped on their hands-free mics. Her FBI men took off their own jackets before they all sat before the glowing terminals.

  “Do it,” she said to Patrick.

  The tall FBI man nodded as he leaned forward and pressed on the speaker of the secure link phone.

  “Red team, bring me up to speed,” she said.

  “We are inbound from Denver International ten minutes,” Westergaard said.

  “Las Vegas, are you there?” Warner said.

  They had a UAV over the city now. Eighteen thousand feet above Denver, a high-altitude surveillance MQ-9 Reaper was traveling slow and steady in a wide east-west ellipsis. She could see the slowly moving feed of it on Fitzgerald’s computer screen.

  “Yes, ma’am. Right here,” said a deep Southern voice.

  “Good. How’s the weather report around the city looking?”

  “Crystal clear all day, ma’am. Perfect conditions.”

  “What’s your name, Las Vegas?”

  “Jhett.”

  “Jhett,” Warner mouthed, rolling her eyes at Fitzgerald and Harris, making her FBI men chuckle silently.

  “You’re all linked up with the red team there, um, Jhett? Everybody has a good connection?”

  “Audio and visual is clicked tight here,” Jhett said.

  “Red team, confirm,” Warner said.

  “Affirmative. Looking good on this end,” Westergaard said.

  “Okay, good,” Warner said, looking from screen to screen. “Give me a look in, Jhett. Zoom in and show all of us the car.”
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  The reaper feed went down and down and then there was a white Armada flowing on a highway.

  “That’s Interstate 25, yes?” said Westergaard.

  “Affirmative,” Jhett said. “Southbound.”

  “Where do we think their destination is? Any clue? The city?” Westergaard said.

  “We have no idea,” Dawn Warner said. “Hagen is running wild so get on them as quickly as humanly possible.”

  62

  It was half past nine when Gannon brought them off the interstate at the Park Avenue exit into downtown Denver.

  The sloping ramp of the exit passed up over the opposite lanes of the highway and some freight train tracks and then came down alongside Coors Field, the Colorado Rockies baseball stadium.

  There was already some more commuter traffic where it dumped them out onto 22nd Street, and they had to slow to enter it and then slow again as they came to a red light.

  At the next block to the left of where they waited was a cluster of people and tents lined along the sidewalk in front of a brick building. Gannon thought it was some kind of line of customers waiting for something—a new phone or concert tickets—until he noticed the shelter sign above the brick building’s front door.

  As he watched, a ragged bearded man sitting out on the sidewalk stood and began hopping on one foot as he pushed a junk-piled shopping cart. He seemed to be yelling at the sky.

  When the light turned, they went through the intersection and at the next block, they made a right onto Arapahoe Street. They passed a new five-story residential building with terraces, a gym, an outdoor parking lot.

  They had to slow on the next block into a single lane as they passed a cordoned-off line of idling cement trucks about to pour a foundation for yet another new building. Gannon stopped to let a couple of hardhats cross before they made the left onto 19th Street.

  They’d only come one block south when Kit turned and pointed out the windshield.

  “There it is,” she said.

  When Gannon put on the clicker, a horn honked behind him. He pulled over behind an already parked UPS truck.

  She didn’t have to point, Gannon thought, looking up at the behemoth of the white stone federal building a block to the east.

  It was twenty stories tall and a block wide. The ugly Excel grid of windows in its pale facade gave it a look of a storm drain carved from a block of marble.

  What was the name of the architectural style? Brutalist? Gannon thought. It was brutal all right. The looming white stone structure looked like a mash-up of a giant Rubik’s Cube and a mausoleum.

  “I don’t know if this is going to work, Mike,” Kit said as they sat there listening to the clicker tick. “I really don’t.”

  Gannon opened his mouth to say something. Then he closed it.

  Just pregame jitters, he thought.

  He looked out at the passing traffic. When he looked back up at the building, the bright white clouds in the cyan-blue sky above it looked unrealistically perfect, like they’d been drawn by a Pixar cartoonist.

  He put the transmission into Park and then folded his hands and put them in his lap.

  “Can I ask you a question, Kit?” he said.

  She looked at him.

  “Remember that stuff you told me about human nature when we were driving to Casper?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “That wasn’t just your partner who came up with all that. A bunch of that was you, right?”

  Kit looked down at the footwell.

  Gannon nodded.

  “It’s because you care, Kit. Care about doing your job right. Someone kills someone else, you ain’t sitting still until something’s done about it no matter what. You care about what’s right. And you care about what’s wrong.”

  Gannon reached over and held her hand.

  “Me, too, Kit,” he said. “That’s why I’m here with you. All I know is that you’re in the right here. You’re doing your job. It’s your bosses that are pulling some kind of shenanigans. You and me are just here to un-pull them.”

  Kit finally squeezed his hand back and let it go.

  “Short and simple,” she said and then pulled open her door.

  63

  “And target one is on foot,” Agent Harris said.

  “Yes, I see, Harris, since I’m standing here beside you,” Dawn Warner said. “But thanks for the running commentary anyway. Your eye for detail is unerring.”

  On the screen Warner watched Kit crossing 19th Street.

  “What the hell is she doing?” Warner said as she began pacing between the two flags. “Where is she headed? What’s that building there?”

  “That’s a Greyhound bus station,” Fitzgerald said.

  “What in the hell? She’s going to ride the dog now?”

  “No, look. She’s heading south,” Harris said.

  “Las Vegas, zoom back a tad,” Warner said.

  The slowly panning camera of the reaper backed up.

  “What else is around there?” Warner said to Fitzgerald. “Are those courthouses?”

  “Yes, there are several courthouses,” he said, clicking at his computer. “And let’s see. It says there’s an army recruiting center nearby.”

  “Wait, look. She’s on... What’s that? Champa Street? Now she’s crossing west. She seems to be heading to that white building there.”

  “Holy shit,” Fitzgerald said. “That’s the federal building. That’s the FBI Denver office building.”

  Dawn Warner felt her headache spike up through the top of her skull as she watched Kit walk the length of the block and go inside.

  The three of them, still staring at the FBI building, suddenly jumped as there was a soft knock on the conference room door.

  Warner sped across the room.

  “What is it?” she said, cracking it to see her secretary standing there.

  “It’s Francis Sinclair,” she said, handing in a phone. “He wants to talk to you.”

  She snatched the phone and banged the door closed.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “Hagen is texting me,” Sinclair said. “She’s saying she’s in Denver at the FBI office.”

  No shit, Sherlock, Warner thought, closing her eyes.

  “And?” she said.

  “She wants to know if we can set up a Skype so she can still attend our ‘meeting.’”

  Dawn Warner squinted.

  What the hell was this? Was Hagen on the level? Was she really coming in? Or playing more games?

  Well, she was definitely playing some kind of game or why the hell was she in Wyoming poking around?

  But maybe she’d hit a wall in Cheyenne, Warner thought.

  They’d covered their tracks there. They could have gotten lucky.

  But then again, she’d seen Hagen’s records. Her law school grades. She seemed pretty clever. Especially for a field agent. Was it just some kind of a bluff?

  Warner stared at the slowly panning reaper footage over the FBI building with her steady brown eyes.

  Shit, she thought. There was no way to know.

  “Hello, you still there?” Sinclair said.

  “Set up the meeting. Set up the Skype,” Warner said. “Keep me posted moment to moment. Do you understand? Moment to moment. Use two phones. I want to know exactly what’s going on.”

  “Las Vegas, do we have eyes on the Armada?” Warner said after she hung up.

  “Yes. I have the other camera on it. It’s just sitting there. I’ll mark it on my GIS map so you can track it.”

  As she watched the screen, a blue box appeared around the SUV.

  “Excellent,” Warner said. “Red team, where the hell are you?”

  “Inserting into downtown. We see the marked Armada on screen. We will have eyes on it in a mome
nt.”

  “Jhett, can you mark the red team on the GIS map, as well?”

  Warner looked on screen where red boxes appeared around vehicles heading off the interstate. There were three of them. A Mercedes Sprinter van, a Chevy Suburban, and an ambulance.

  She smiled at the sight of the white-and-orange ambulance. Nothing on earth beat an ambulance for discreetly taking a subject off the street.

  “Okay, good. I see you. I want two cars on the Armada like static cling. You get me full court press. And Westergaard, you set up an over watch perimeter around the FBI building.”

  “An over watch around the FBI building?” Westergaard said.

  “Is there an echo in here?” Dawn Warner said.

  “Understood,” Westergaard said.

  64

  The conference room off the white-collar squad bullpen on the FBI building’s eighth floor was decorated with generic office inspirational prints about teamwork and perseverance.

  “Amy, I can’t thank you enough for all this,” Kit said as she laid her bag down on the table.

  Her old friend, Amy Cargill, flicked on the overhead light, then took a silly bow.

  “Your wish is my command,” she said.

  Kit smiled. She had always liked Amy. Unlike most agents, she hated the field and actually loved accounting and took every back-office gig she could grab.

  She’d gained some weight in the three years since they’d last seen each other, but it seemed to suit her. She definitely seemed happier.

  “Your boss really wants you at this meeting, huh?” Amy said.

  “Apparently,” Kit said, slipping out her Mac Pro.

  “On your break from a shooting? I mean, really? He sounds like a real jerk.”

  “Well, now that you mention it,” Kit stage-whispered back and they shared a laugh.

  “Coffee?” Amy said.

  Kit lifted the navy blue YETI travel cup in her hand.

  “No, I have my yucky kale smoothie right here, thank you very much.”