Run for Cover

by Michael Ledwidge

  “But come on, he ripped her apart. Why?” John Barber said.

  “We don’t know. Why do husbands kill their wives? She was cheating on him? Going to leave him? Or she confronted him about an affair and he snapped? Whatever it was, we can assume Weber doesn’t want to suffer the consequences, so he snaps his globally connected billion-dollar fingers and voilà! His goons and Assistant Attorney General Warner go to work and the cover-up begins.”

  85

  “But if Weber wanted to cover up his wife’s murder,” John Barber said, “why the hell did he leave his wife out there in the open for my brother to find?”

  “There must have been a lag between when Weber killed her and when the cover-up started,” Kit said. “Maybe it was a spur-of-the-moment thing and after it happened, Weber got scared and left back for the hotel and didn’t go into cover-up mode until he calmed down and got his bearings.

  “And in that lag is when Owen finds the wife. Thinking quite rightly that he’s looking at some sick psycho ritual murder, Owen remembers our FBI bulletin about serial killing in the parks and calls it in. And thinking it’s our NATPARK killer, Dennis and I flew straight to Wyoming.”

  “And as you were on the way,” Gannon said, “word of your imminent arrival somehow got back to government-connected Team Weber, who had just started the cover-up.”

  “Exactly,” Kit said. “Once they realized we were on the way from DC to see a NATPARK victim body, they knew they needed to get one and quick.”

  “Which is why they snatched Tracy Sandhurst in Cheyenne,” Gannon said, snapping a finger.

  “Right,” Kit said. “They grabbed her and they killed her and then they flew her up to Grand Teton from the Warren Air Force Base.”

  “From a covert nuke missile base?” John Barber said. “Isn’t that a little too far of a stretch?”

  “Is it?” Kit said. “Not only does Weber obviously have Dawn Warner in his back pocket, Sonexum, like all the rest of these big tech companies, has multiple joint R & D projects with the military. I read that Sonexum is actually in the lead now in terms of the global artificial intelligence race, and they just bumped out Google to score a top secret contract for the NSA and NASA and the Pentagon.

  “You think getting IDs and clearance at that level is a problem? Or dropping bribes to make people look the other way? These losers have literally unlimited amounts of money. How much money would a base guard take to switch off a camera and go get a cup of coffee for fifteen minutes? A hundred grand? That’s too low. How about two? Don’t like that? How about seven? No stretch is too far.”

  “Good point,” Barber said.

  “So some hired mercenary killers go to Dynamite Dolls,” Gannon said, “and snatch the first stripper they can get their hands on. Then they race from the air force base up to Grand Teton, hoping to beat the FBI profilers. But they must have been a little too late.”

  “Then what?” Barber said.

  “As Kit headed in from DC,” Gannon said, “one of Weber’s security guys—the sniper—must have snuck past Owen somehow and waited for the rest of his team to arrive with the body. But Kit and her partner and the sheriff got there first. Knowing that Weber’s wife being identified is a no-go, the sniper goes to plan B. He shoots Kit and everybody else and then they do the switcheroo to blame all of it on this crazy NATPARK killer.”

  “And then they all flew the hell out of there with Weber’s wife?” Barber said, shaking his head.

  “Yes, but not before they meticulously prepared Tracy Sandhurst’s body,” Kit said. “They knew all the details about the NATPARK killer’s victims through Warner, is my guess. She has top-echelon data access. She must have snatched up our NATPARK file for the deets on the killer’s modus operandi and given it to Weber’s goons in order to snow us.”

  “I get it now,” John Barber said. “Talk about the cover-up being worse than the crime. But it fits. All of it fits. This computer geek, Weber, and his crew actually killed my brother.”

  “They might have even gotten away with it, too,” Gannon said, “except they missed something. They didn’t count on Owen already having filmed Weber’s dead wife on his personal phone.”

  “Or the fact that our NATPARK suspect—the real killer, Ketchum—was already in jail,” Kit said.

  “Okay, so now we probably know what happened,” Barber said. “What now?”

  “Now I start making some phone calls,” Kit said.

  “Are you sure about that?” Gannon said. “When you went into work there in Denver, it didn’t turn out so hot.”

  “Warner’s obviously insanely compromised, but not everybody in the government is on the take, Mike,” Kit said. “At Dennis’s funeral, I met some of his old partners and old students who begged me to tap them for help. Some of Dennis’s old friends are super connected people high up in the Bureau who are chomping at the bit to find out who gunned him down.

  “With Owen’s video and all the rest of it, we’ve got Weber by the short hairs. Not just him either. I hope Dawn Warner has her stylist on speed dial for the cameras that are going to be camping out in front of her house. Because it’s nailing corrupt murderous assholes to the floorboards time.”

  86

  Dawn Warner had meetings all day in town. It was so late when she got out, she had to hustle her driver along with a promise of an extra day off to run a few red lights so that she could catch the last Acela Express to New York City.

  The floodlights on the Metropolitan Museum of Art grand classical facade came on as she arrived in her Uber from Penn Station. Growing up on the Upper East Side, she’d been coming here since she was a child. On a summer Friday this late, the great temple-like Fifth Avenue steps were mostly gray and empty. Clopping up the steps in her Louboutins, she passed only a few tired Asian tourists and a pathetic old mumbling homeless woman surrounded by a half dozen can-filled bags.

  It was dim inside as she passed beneath the oculus skylight domes. As she waited on line to get her pin at the reception desk, she yawned, looking around at the ancient Greek statuary. Back through the deserted corridors, her eyes kept getting drawn to one piece in particular. It was the great marble of Perseus proudly holding the head of Medusa aloft.

  From the desk, she quickly made her way into the north gallery. It took her two minutes of walking through the Ancient Egypt wing to get to its main attraction, the Temple of Dendur.

  It was actually closed off with a velvet rope, but she stepped over it as she had been instructed. Beyond the doorway in the stunning cavernous installation space, a figure was facing the temple, sitting on one of the stone blocks by the pool.

  Ethan Weber smiled as he turned around.

  With his salt-and-pepper buzz cut, the famous billionaire had an almost George Clooney thing going on.

  But he seemed thinner than the last time she’d met him six months before, Warner thought as she got closer. She’d read in a Fast Company article that like some other Silicon Valley moguls, he’d recently been on a stoic philosophy fasting kick.

  She really didn’t think it was doing a lot for him, she noted as she arrived in front of him. Always thin, he now looked sort of skeletal. In the dim museum lighting, his shadow-filled eyes were like skull sockets, and when he yawned, she couldn’t help but think of Munch’s The Scream.

  “Do you actually know why this structure is here, Dawn?” the billionaire said to her, casually crossing his legs as she sat beside him.

  “You mean the temple itself? No, not really,” Warner said.

  “It was a gift to the United States from Egypt after the assassination of J.F.K.,” Weber explained. “With the gift, they especially cited their condolences to Jacqueline. She actually lived across the street here on Fifth Avenue and could stare down at it from her apartment window with John Jr. and Caroline.”

  “Noble gesture,” Warner said.

  “Yes,
quite,” Weber said, gazing up at the magnificent sandstone behemoth. “Most widows are lucky to get a casserole. But that’s not the reason I come here. I come here because of him.”

  He pointed to an Egyptian figure carved into the stone.

  “He looks like a pharaoh, doesn’t he? But he’s not. It’s a trick. He’s actually Augustus, the Roman emperor.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Dawn Warner said.

  “Augustus Caesar was perhaps the greatest Roman emperor of all. Rome ruled Egypt during his long, happy reign, and this temple was originally a gift from him to the people of Egypt.”

  Ethan Weber crossed his thin arms.

  “Some think Augustus was great because of how clever he was. He was as much and perhaps even more of a military dictator than Julius Caesar, who had preceded him, but unlike the glory hound Caesar, he was smart enough to hide it. To cloak his ruthless will to power behind the grand facade of service to the Republic.

  “And he did serve it,” he said, cocking his head up at the figure. “Despite all his devious machinations, and I would claim because of them, the Roman Empire lasted several, maybe even as much as five centuries, longer than it would have.”

  Ethan Weber sat and silently stared at the temple.

  Warner was deft enough a bureaucrat to say nothing when the powers that be were in guru mode.

  Then after a minute or two, he sighed.

  “How’s our friend?” he finally said.

  “He’s fine,” Dawn said. “Much, much better. He has the senator’s estate all to himself like I told you. There’s a small golf course. A lake. He goes out in the morning and feeds the ducks. Gandalf is doing much better.”

  “Gandalf?” Ethan Weber said, puzzled.

  “That’s his code name. Security needed a code name for him. He chose it himself.”

  “Oh, he must love that,” Ethan Weber said with another sorrow-tinged sigh. “I’m glad he’s doing okay. I really am.”

  Dawn Warner resumed silent mode. She didn’t touch that one. Not with a hundred-thousand-foot pole, she thought.

  “I assume you’re doing everything you can to staunch the shitstorm in Denver, so you needn’t mention it,” Weber said. “I asked you to come because I wanted to invite you to the meeting. Considering our situation, I managed to reschedule. We’re on for Monday evening.”

  “Back in Wyoming?” Warner said.

  “No, in San Francisco. They’ll be leaving from the airport right after.”

  “Do you really think that makes sense for all of us to be there? It’s a bit, um, overt, isn’t it?”

  “I know, Dawn. It is a bit. I wouldn’t even ask but here’s the thing. They’re not stupid. They have people in the same places we do. We have to assume they know everything that’s going on. The bit of a bind we’re in. You know as well as I do how much it’s all about saving face for them. If you are there, it will comfort them that there is no law enforcement risk on their end. No risk of embarrassment. That the matter is being handled smoothly by all their partners.”

  “I see,” Dawn Warner said. “Okay. Of course. That actually makes a lot of sense. If you need me there, Ethan, then I’ll be there. I’ll make it happen.”

  “Thanks, partner,” Ethan said, standing and offering his hand. “We’ll keep it between you and me, then.”

  “And Augustus,” Warner said, tossing a chin at the temple as they shook.

  87

  Westergaard was home at his town house in Ventura when his eyes opened in the dark.

  Was it the alarm? he thought. No. By the faint glow on the barrel ceiling above, he knew that he’d just received a text on his work phone.

  To his right on the bedside table beside his phone was an old-fashioned mechanical clock and he listened to it tick. He turned and looked out the big picture window beyond the table. There wasn’t any light in the sky over the water yet.

  He turned left to his perfect blond wife. Elena always slept in the buff, and he reached out and softly laid a hand to her stunning bare back. He listened to her soft, measured breathing. Then he passed a finger down her spine and over to the valley upslope of her men’s magazine model hip and smiled.

  He’d met her in Las Vegas a year before at a crazy casino bar where all the bottles were stacked two stories high up a kind of climbing wall. For hours he sat and drank glass after glass of wine, mesmerized by Elena and two other beautiful bartender girls in bikinis as they were hoisted up on climbing harnesses to get the bottles.

  He’d only gone for the weekend to gamble with Maniscalco but two whirlwind weeks later, Elena had moved into his hotel room. It was two weeks after that that she’d told him she was pregnant.

  After the announcement, that very night he found himself drunkenly standing at an altar. He’d been unable to contain his laughter as the Elvis preacher thanked him very much before he asked him if he had brought the ring.

  He’d brought the ring all right, Westergaard thought, looking at the bulge of her belly. Bought the ring and bought the farm. Their kid was due in only a month and a half now.

  A father, Westergaard thought, shaking his head.

  He thought about his own father back on the farm outside Mutare in Zimbabwe that he’d bought them after being a lawyer in Sun City. He’d always thought him a simple fool, the serious way he’d pore over his planting schedules. Like an accountant over a spreadsheet.

  But maybe not, Westergaard thought with a glance at his phone.

  Why not cash it in like his father had done? he thought as he lay there. Get out of the city. Live simply. Maybe get a farm. Hell, with the money he had squirrelled away, they could do anything. Or nothing at all. They could get a trailer out in the country, have one of those cheap pools in the back. Watch the sunset from it. Watch his kid learn to swim.

  His new American daughter, he thought, smiling.

  He pretended he wanted a son, but he secretly wanted a daughter. He’d had three older sisters back in South Africa who’d always been so nice and kind and loving toward him.

  Well, at least before the rebel soldiers came that New Year’s night when he was seventeen and raped and hacked them to death, then hung them up in the barn with barbed wire beside his mother and father.

  If he hadn’t been away at Danie Theron Combat School at the time, he would have been up there with them himself.

  Westergaard listened to his phone buzz again.

  He put a hand to his bandaged ear.

  The man they’d been up against in Denver was, like himself, quite obviously a professional. A dedicated professional.

  He pictured the American. Pale and broad-shouldered and square-edged. A block of marble, he thought. A stumbling block. A life-sized Lego man who one messed with at the peril of their life.

  What had the American said the next round was going to be? A Sunday church barbecue? He didn’t even want to know what that meant. And the authoritative way he had said it. Like he was really looking forward to it.

  Did he really need that? Westergaard thought with another sigh.

  He turned and stared at his wife’s belly, her perfect ass.

  Wasn’t it time to hop off the gravy train with all his cash and prizes?

  Westergaard lay between his pretty pregnant wife and his phone, thinking.

  He touched his ear again.

  One last time, he thought, and he leaned over and finally lifted up the phone.

  88

  It was coming on two in the afternoon when Gannon came out of a 7-Eleven on the concourse of the Salt Lake City Airport, walking along with the crowd.

  The airport had been empty the week before when he had left with Kit to Wyoming, but it was packed now for some reason. Coming around a corner, he glanced up at a CNN news screen across the corridor and smiled when he saw it wasn’t showing his face.

  Perfect, he
thought. So far so good.

  Passing one of the other gates, he saw a service member with a shaved head, sleeping in a seat in the waiting area. He was a young marine, the brim of his camo cap over his eyes, his shaved head against his olive green canvas rucksack.

  Gannon thought about his own deployments over the years and how he never thought to wonder on whose behalf he was being sent to wreak incredible amounts of violence. It had never occurred to him that the unseen hands signing his top secret orders were just a pack of incredibly connected corrupt criminals pulling global strings to pour more and more money into their multinational pockets.

  “Keep your head down, brother,” Gannon mumbled as he continued down the concourse.

  Kit was talking on her phone when he arrived back, so he stood by the window. Right outside was a big white Delta airliner. He watched the orange jumpsuited mechanic on a scissor lift beneath its wing, refueling it.

  The guy still wasn’t done when Kit finally hung up.

  “So?” Gannon said.

  “It’s on, Mike,” she said. “Just heard back from everyone. It’s on like Donkey Kong.”

  For the last twenty-four hours, Kit had been calling people. Her friend Amy Cargill had told her about how the Denver SAC was relieved of duty and how there was a huge dustup throughout the Bureau.

  That coupled with some other calls she had made to the heavy hitters she knew in the FBI’s New York office had prompted her to drop the entire mother lode of their investigation.

  She had sent out Owen’s video and the NSA match on Lisa Weber, and now an FBI task force was quickly being put together do something about it.