Run for Cover

by Michael Ledwidge

  In walked the new FBI director, Thomas F. Foldager, himself.

  “Harry,” the six-foot-seven friendly-faced man said as he walked in smiling. “I know you’re steamed, but I was just at the White House, and I’ll tell you what they told me. This is an internal security matter. Play ball. Whatever script they want, it’s their game. And Harry, no leaks. They’re cracking major stones over this.”

  “Over what?” Wheaton said.

  “Your guess is as good as mine, Harry. Ours is not to wonder why.”

  “No,” Harry said. “No way. This is bullshit. You want me to lie to the public? Tom, we’re friends. You know me. You know I can’t do that. Ain’t in my DNA.”

  “That your final say?” Director Foldager said. His Mr. Rogers-like face was still smiling but his eyes were not.

  “Honestly, be careful, Harry. I’m not joking,” Foldager said. “I’m giving you a direct order.”

  “I don’t care what you’re giving me. Actually, I know what you’re giving me. The answer’s no. I won’t do it.”

  “Then you’re relieved of duty immediately,” Foldager said coldly. “Get off my screen and send in your deputy.”

  “Send him in yourself, Tom,” the Denver SAC said, giving the director the finger.

  They stood watching as Harry Wheaton hovered the bird over the keyboard and then inverted it and pressed down.

  Director Foldager turned to Warner as the screen went dead.

  “Any suggestions, Dawn?” he said. “I’d like to help you guys out, but you really screwed the pooch on this one. Harry’s a straight shooter.”

  “We don’t have anything on him,” Dawn Warner complained. “No leverage at all.”

  “On Harry?” Foldager said with a frown. “No, you’re digging a dry hole there. Got a silver star in Afghanistan. Married his high school sweetheart. Got seven kids. Eucharistic minister at his church. The Little League team he coaches lost the national world series three years ago by a run. I’ve never seen him walk on water but you never know. You know he’s going straight to the press.”

  “Let him,” Dawn Warner said. “We have a line into every network. They already know the script.”

  The director shrugged his shoulders.

  “Okay. Well, as usual, I’ll leave it to you guys, then.”

  He gave her an air kiss.

  “Hit me on my personal phone if you need me. I have to head back home early today to help my daughter pack for college.”

  “Is that right? Emmy?”

  “No, Gwen.”

  “My goodness, the baby? Time flies. Where is she headed? Brown?” Dawn said.

  “Dartmouth.”

  “Perfect,” Dawn Warner said, smiling. “Give her my love.”

  PART FOUR

  THE RUBBER MEETS THE ROAD

  82

  When Kit woke up, Gannon was driving and they were on a two-lane country road.

  A sign for US 385 flew past the passenger window. The country beyond it was a flat, wide-open landscape. It looked like Wyoming except the mountains were gone.

  She felt woozy as she sat up. A pleasant woozy like a beer buzz.

  A trailer home went past. Kit saw a kid, a cute blond little boy, on a swing in the dirt yard beside it. In a pen behind the double-wide on the other side was a foal.

  “Oh, look, a little baby horse,” she said.

  “How are you feeling?” Gannon said.

  “Tired. Where are we?”

  “Oklahoma,” he said.

  “Oklahoma?”

  “Yep.”

  She looked up at the big sky above, gray and overcast, like it was about to rain. The land was shadowed off to their left. It looked to be near sunset.

  As she looked out the window, what had happened started to come back slowly. She remembered the FBI building. The horrible EMT man. After that there were just snapshots. Being strapped to a gurney. The sound of shooting. She remembered lying on her back next to a car in a parking lot.

  She couldn’t put the rest of the pieces together. She wasn’t sure she wanted to. She patted at her numb face.

  “Wait, is this the rental car?”

  “No,” Gannon said. “I acquired another one. Another two, actually.”

  She looked at the steering column then. It was cracked open and there was a screwdriver handle sticking out of it. The seats and the rest of the inside of the vehicle seemed really big.

  “What is this? A truck?” she said.

  “Yes. It’s a dumpster truck,” Gannon said as he cocked a thumb toward the back. “Beggars can’t be choosers. How are you feeling?”

  “Groggy.”

  Gannon laughed.

  “You look groggy. I got you a Gatorade. You need to hydrate. Try to flush your system.”

  She carefully lifted it out of the cup holder. The sports drink was the red fruit punch one. She laboriously opened it, then sighed after she took a long cool sip.

  She dropped the bottle back and wiped her mouth.

  “That tasted good. This is a great drink holder,” she said.

  Gannon laughed again.

  “I know!” he cried. “I thought the same thing. The tongues on it really grip, don’t they? This thing corners like a cinder block and guzzles gas like crazy but the drink holders are amazing.”

  “Are the cops after us?”

  “No,” Gannon said. “I saw the news in the gas station. No APBs. No video stills. We’re in the clear so far. I guess this Warner woman is covering this up somehow. Besides, those guys back in Denver weren’t cops.”

  “Mercenaries? Special Forces guys?”

  “Yep,” Gannon said.

  “Like you?” she said.

  “Yep,” Gannon said again. “Like me.”

  “No,” Kit said, shuddering as she remembered the troll-like man who’d slapped her. “No way, you’re not like them at all.”

  A minute of silence followed. Kit looked out at the empty land. Since the setting sun was on the left, they must have been heading somewhat north now. She felt an odd elation as they drove, a teenager on her first road trip. It made no sense but there you had it.

  “What do you think they gave me? Was it OxyContin or something?”

  “No, ketamine, probably.”

  “The club drug?”

  “Emergency rooms use it as a sedative. Intelligence services, too, because it induces memory loss. You’re feeling it, huh?”

  “Got a kick to it. What now?”

  “Take a nap. You’ll be okay.”

  “Okay,” she said curling up by the door.

  “You’re a gentleman, too, huh?” she said after another second.

  Gannon laughed.

  “You think so?”

  “Sure. Gentlemen save damsels in distress, right? Gentleman, ass-kicker, funny, smart, cute. You cover all the bases. A girl could fall for a guy like you, Mike. Even in a dumpster truck. You oughta be careful. Where are we going anyway?” she said, half-asleep.

  “Back to Barber’s ranch,” Gannon said.

  “That’s in Utah. Isn’t Oklahoma the other way?”

  “I called John. There’s an old airfield nearby. We’re going to meet him there. He’ll fly us back.”

  “Perfect,” Kit said, smiling with her eyes closed.

  “I have one more question,” she said sleepily after a moment.

  “What’s that?” Gannon said.

  “You really do have a navy SEAL frogman tattoo somewhere, don’t you?” she said.

  Gannon laughed and then laughed again a moment later when he heard her snoring.

  He leaned over as far as he could and bent as low as he could toward her ear.

  “Yes,” he whispered into it. “Yes, I do, Kit. I really do.”

  83

 
Westergaard was ordered to head northeast out of Denver to a town called Kersey.

  The designated motel was on a stretch of road up from a Family Dollar directly across from a car wrecking yard. He parked the Hyundai Sonata he’d stolen in the back of it and opened the door and painfully stood. In the cool of the evening, he walked slowly around the cheap structure of the motel to the sound of crickets. The key for room 17 was under its mat. He opened it and went inside and locked the door behind him.

  He looked out the window through the gap in the curtains as he shuffled stiffly toward the bed. It gave a view across the road into the center of the dump, where dozens of cars were strewn about in various states of destruction.

  “I wonder if someone is trying to tell me something,” Westergaard mumbled as he sat and gingerly worked his bloody ear bandage free.

  When the knock finally came at the door two hours later, it was pitch-black outside and Westergaard was half-asleep with fever. He left the gun under the bed as he stood with a bloody towel turbaned around his head.

  To say that the figure on the other side of the door did not look very encouraging would have been quite the understatement. He was tall and soft-bellied and homely with curly blond hair. Westergaard looked at the individual’s thick eyeglasses. He was maybe twenty-five.

  “You’re Bob, right?” the American said. “I’m Duane.”

  “Aren’t you too young to be a doctor?” Westergaard said as he stepped aside before shutting and locking the door behind him.

  “I’m actually an RN and an EMT, but I’m about to get my certificate as a physician’s assistant,” he said as he unslung his backpack.

  “My lucky day,” Westergaard said as he staggered back toward the bed.

  “I get it. You’re hurting, fella, aren’t you? Tell you the truth, you don’t look so hot. Let’s take a chair into the bathroom and get a look at you.”

  “Ahhhh!” Westergaard yelled a few minutes later as Duane dug with his tweezers into the meat between his right ear and eye again. He stomped at the tile with his big foot as the medic finally pulled something loose.

  The bathroom tile was blotted with his blood. There were blood canals in the grout. There was blood everywhere.

  “You need more meds, I got em,” the medic said in his annoyingly soft Midwestern singsong as he lay the shard of glass from his face into a medical pan.

  Westergaard cried out again as his stainless-steel facial began anew.

  “Seriously, bro, more meds. What’s the issue? If it hurts, it hurts.”

  Westergaard looked around the depressing room. The mint-green bathroom tile. The shower curtain that was the color of piss. He looked at his blood all over everything. Then he looked back at the American butcher.

  “Okay, okay,” Westergaard said. “You’re right. I need more.”

  Westergaard shook his head as he swallowed the pills he was handed. He’d been wounded several times and was usually quite stoic but not this time. This time was new. Even he was surprised at how unglued he’d become over this.

  It was Maniscalco, he thought as he bent over, catching his breath. The fact that Maniscalco had been killed had spooked him to the core. Maniscalco had survived the bloodiest violent conflicts the world had to offer, had been a military advising mercenary in the Congo for two years.

  How could Maniscalco be dead?

  Westergaard sat back up and glanced over at the Vincent van Gogh portrait staring back at him from the bathroom mirror.

  “I won’t lie. This part’s going to hurt a little now,” Duane said as he laid down the tweezers.

  “Now?” Westergaard said as the EMT suddenly pulled his head wound agape with his big rubber-gloved thumbs. The saline wound wash he sprayed in a moment later felt like he was being murdered with a Black and Decker drill bit dipped in lemon juice.

  “Stings a bit, I know,” the medic said as Westergaard shuddered in agony. “Let me bandage you up now.”

  “Why am I sweating so much?” he said, snuffling. “And why the hell won’t my nose stop running? I’m drooling like a bloodhound!”

  The medic began wrapping gauze around his head.

  “There’s a nerve between your ear and your eye. It’s called the auriculotemporal nerve. It regulates the saliva and sweat glands. It looks like it took some damage from some of those splinters I took out. It’s not critical, but you get a chance, you should see a specialist about it.”

  “You’re saying I’m just gonna be leaking spit, snot, and sweat until further notice?” Westergaard said.

  “Some over-the-counter cold medication might help for the mucus, but in sum, yes.”

  Westergaard turned and dropped his forehead down until it was resting against the cold porcelain top of the toilet tank. A warm drip of snot hung from the end of his pointy nose, then plopped onto the thigh of his bloody jeans.

  “I know, fella,” Duane said, patting him on the shoulder. “I know.”

  84

  On his Hotel Juliet Bravo ranch, John Barber had a heavy-duty professional outdoor shooting range fronted by a small field house with a lean-to roof. Inside of the barnlike building were gun lockers and regular lockers and benches and an armor-plated clearing trap beside a card table by a window overlooking the range.

  At nine o’clock in the morning on the day after the Denver shoot-out, Gannon was in the gun barn standing by the card table with John Barber, looking out where his son, Declan, was lying prone on the macadam with a Savage Arms .30-06 deer rifle.

  Down the desert range were markers and hanging steel targets at various distances of up to 1,200 yards. Through his binoculars, Gannon could see that Declan was consistently hitting the target at the 700 mark. As he calmly let off rounds, John Barber’s daughter, Stephanie, sat cross-legged beside him, wearing earmuffs, also looking downrange with binoculars.

  “He’s been up here ever since you left,” John Barber said as Declan cracked off another round. “He’s actually getting pretty good, Mike.”

  “You really think so?” Gannon said proudly as he heard the faint clink of a target in the distance.

  “Okay, I’m all set up,” Kit Hagen said from where she sat at the card table beside them.

  Gannon lowered the binoculars as they both turned.

  Kit was wearing a plaid shirt and shorts and some flip-flops she’d borrowed from John Barber’s wife, Lynn. She looked a hell of a lot better after some sleep and a shower and their big pancake breakfast.

  The Denver SCIF thumb drive was sticking out the side of the laptop she was typing on. She suddenly stopped typing and turned the screen toward them.

  “Okay, first thing I wanted to show you is this, Mike. It’s a surveillance camera still that my friend Amy just sent me from the Denver parking garage.”

  The guy he’d had the gunfight with in Denver was lanky and pale and younger than Gannon would have guessed, maybe in his early thirties. Gannon looked at the intensity in his eyes. He had a kind of nose-in-the-air polished viciousness to his expression.

  “He even looks look like a Euro weenie, doesn’t he?” he said. “We got a name?”

  “No, not yet. He’s not in the system. But it doesn’t matter. That’s only the appetizer. Now for the main course,” Kit said, clicking a button.

  It took a moment for Gannon to realize the multiple photographs on the screen were of the first unknown female victim from Grand Teton.

  Fully clothed and alive without bite marks, the young Asian woman Owen Barber had videotaped was quite cute. In two of the photos she was wearing khakis in what looked like maybe Africa. In one of them she held hands with a little smiling child on a crowded market street and in another she was hugging and kissing a baby in a dirty hospital. There was something almost elfin about her features, something sweet, a palpable sort of innocence, a childlike caring.

  He had pegged her as som
e kind of charity doctor or something until he saw one shot along the bottom where she was dressed to the nines wearing a metallic Tiffany-blue gown with a glittering diamond choker, standing on a red carpet somewhere.

  Gannon suddenly recognized the face of the thin bland man of about thirty-five with salt-and-pepper hair who was wearing a tuxedo beside her. At least vaguely. Was he from a business cable TV channel or something? he thought.

  “The man there,” John Barber said sitting up. “Isn’t that...that’s that internet company guy, right? That billionaire. What’s his name?”

  “Weber,” Kit said. “Yes, that’s Ethan Weber. He worked at Apple before he started the smartphone behemoth Sonexum. Remember, they did a movie about him on Netflix last year? He’s the eleventh richest man in the world.”

  “Holy shit!” Gannon said, grabbing his head as he stood. “One of those internet billionaires from that damn conference in Jackson, right? Only someone with unlimited sway and cash could even dream of attempting all this bloody insanity.”

  “So you’re saying our missing victim one is some billionaire Silicon Valley dude’s girlfriend or something?” John Barber said.

  “No,” Kit said, looking at him steadily. “Victim one isn’t Weber’s girlfriend. This is Lisa Weber. It’s his wife.”

  “No!” Gannon cried. “His wife?”

  “Yes. They met in college at MIT. The reason we didn’t recognize her straight off the bat from Owen’s video is because she’s reclusive and notoriously camera-shy. Especially in the States. The only time she does any PR at all is for their philanthropic foundation, which is run out of Italy and based mostly in Africa and Southeast Asia. Her parents are actually from China.”

  “And Weber killed her,” Gannon said. “Or hired someone to do it. Had to be. And all this, the shooting, switching out the victims, all of it was part of a cover-up.”

  “You’ve got to be shitting me,” Barber said.

  Kit nodded.

  “That’s what it’s looking like,” she said.

  “Walk me through it,” Barber said.

  “Here’s how I think it probably went down,” Kit said, standing. “Like Mike just said, there was a bunch of Silicon Valley computer execs staying in Jackson for a mogul conference. Ethan Weber was the keynote speaker. His speech is actually on his Facebook page. I’m thinking at some point he and his wife are bored at the hotel, so they decide to head up to Grand Teton for some reason. Do a little glamping under the stars or something. Who knows? And he kills her.”