“What happened, sir? Is there an active shooter?”
“No. I’ll explain when I get there.”
Wells hung up, slowed slightly as he passed downtown Colfax, seeing the Hyde Out Tavern on his right. He hadn’t noticed it before. Funny. Hilarious. At the south end of town, the road forked, and Wells swung left and put Colfax in his rearview mirror. He wished he’d never have to see it again, though he knew he’d be back to check out the trailer. He gunned the Ford’s engine until it roared. The tach needle touched the red line, and the speedometer hit triple digits. The truck shook on its frame, and Wells laid off. An accident would kill Coyle for sure.
Coyle was muttering, one word: . . . ink . . . ink . . .
Wells didn’t understand. Then he did.
Not ink. Not link either.
Linc . . . Linc . . .
Lincoln, Coyle’s dead younger brother. Wells grabbed Coyle’s left hand with his right, squeezed it as hard as he could, dug his fingers into Coyle’s palm.
“You don’t get to see him yet, Sergeant. You stay with me.”
Despite the overheated air pouring from the vents, Wells found himself shivering, remembering a song he hadn’t thought of in a while: This train . . . / Carries saints and sinners / This train . . . / Carries losers and winners . . .
“Land of Hope and Dreams,” it was called. Springsteen.
If Coyle died, Wells would have to quit. The truth.
Emergency lights ahead, pulsing their red-and-blue SOS into the night. Northbound. Probably one of the neighbors had called in the shotgun. Maybe one had even found Darby’s body already. Wells slowed to seventy-five until the cruiser passed, then jammed down the pedal.
He called Tarnes, wishing he had done so before they went to Miller’s house. Past midnight in Washington, but he knew she’d answer. She did, the second ring. “John.”
“We found him. His name’s Tom Miller, he’s on the list.”
“How do you know?”
“We know. But it’s a mess here, and you need to get in front of it now—like, right now. The local sheriff is dead and Coyle’s wounded, I’m taking him to the hospital.”
“What happened—”
The door opening, the fishing line tightening—
“Trap in Miller’s trailer, shotgun.” Why didn’t we see it? Why didn’t I see it? But Wells knew. And he hated the reason. Being in the field alone was exhausting, and he made plenty of mistakes. But he never let down his guard. Tonight, he and Coyle had relaxed. Not just because they’d handled all the other meetings that day easily, even Harlan Gould. Not even because they felt they could depend on each other. Because they liked working together. For a minute, they’d forgotten the stakes of the game. A minute was all the other side needed. No time-outs, no takebacks.
Beside him, Coyle coughed, low, throaty grunts, like he had blood in his throat. Pullman was only a couple miles off.
“You there, John?”
“Just get the FBI on this guy Miller. He had a pickup and it’s gone. I don’t know the make or the model, but I’ll bet that’s their hide.”
“Tom Miller?”
“Yeah, and get ready to airlift Coyle to the closest hospital with a trauma center. And pick up when the cops call you about me, I need to get back to that trailer tonight.”
Wells hung up, wrapped an arm around Coyle’s shoulders, pulled him away from the window. Coyle groaned. Good. He could still feel pain. “You can’t die on me, Marine—”
Coyle coughed. He was trying to talk again. Fine . . . fine . . . No. Find.
“That’s right, Sergeant. I’m going to find this motherfucker.” The word burned Wells’s mouth like bleach. “And you’re going to be there when I do.”
25
Wells came back to Miller’s trailer just past midnight Friday morning. Its false wooded serenity was gone. It was a crime scene now, the property of the State of Washington, to be prodded until it gave up its secrets. All its lights were on, but it looked emptier than ever.
Paramedics and sheriff’s deputies had moved Darby’s corpse to the morgue at Pullman Regional, leaving only a patch of bloody and trampled snow where he’d lain. In their place, two state troopers sat in a Yukon next to Darby’s Explorer. The troopers told Wells they’d peeked inside the trailer to make sure there were no other bodies. They were waiting for daylight and a forensics team for a full search. Wells understood the caution, but he couldn’t wait. He doubted the Russians had left more traps. They would want investigators to be able to search the trailer and find the clues they’d left.
At least Wells would be able to work in secret. The initial service calls had gone out over police radio, but no cub reporter with a notepad and an iPhone set to record was going to show up. Wells figured Seattle, two hundred seventy miles west, was the closest city where reporters were on duty all night. And no one except the cops and Darby’s family knew he had died. The FBI had asked the Sheriff’s Office and Washington State Patrol to sit on the shooting until morning. The deputies had told Darby’s wife but asked her to stay quiet, too. The announcement they planned for the morning would say only that Darby had died overnight and that they were investigating.
Leaving out the details would buy them extra time, though by early afternoon the state papers and Associated Press would insist on knowing more. Once the word ambush appeared, the story would become national news. But those hours would give Wells and the FBI a chance to find Tom Miller and the woman who called herself Allie.
The details had been worked out while Wells was locked in an office at Pullman Regional. The local cops had waited for him at the emergency room entrance. No surprise, after his call. They frisked and cuffed him while the hospital techs moved Coyle to a gurney and sped him away. An officer half Wells’s age asked him if he’d shot Coyle, or anyone else, then frog-marched him to an office and shackled him to a desk.
Wells stared at the ceiling as he tried to unpack what had happened. On some subconscious level, he must have recognized the trap. Otherwise, why had he circled the trailer instead of going to the door? But he hadn’t taken the time to understand what his intuition was telling him.
He closed his eyes as the Muslim prayer for the sick came to him: As’alu Allah al’azim rabbil ’arshil azim an yashifika—I ask Allah, the Mighty, the Lord of the Mighty Throne, to cure you. Coyle would laugh at the blessing, Wells knew. Coyle couldn’t stand religion. Since his brother died, he was as sure an atheist as the late, great Christopher Hitchens. Wells repeated the prayer, anyway. Arabic was better than English for these desperate pleas, faster, more guttural and primal. It dug deeper into the muck where the truth lay buried—
A long night ahead, and Wells was already exhausted, the adrenaline from the ambush gone. He put his head on the table, floated through the walls into the operating room with Coyle. His dad, Herbert, was the surgeon, which made perfect sense. Herbert reached into Coyle’s chest with neon green tweezers, and a buzzer on Coyle’s nose went off. Thought you said he was the best, Coyle said. Just like you.
Before Wells could answer, the operating room door swung open. Sheriff Darby rode a BMX bicycle through. He pulled a wheelie and gave Wells a thumbs-up. Trusting a boy from Montana, he said. Lookit me now.
Lookit? Coyle said. Did he say lookit? Am I already in Hell?
You don’t believe in Hell, Wells said.
Got to be better than nothing.
Come on, Dad, get to work.
What’s the rush, John? We’ve got forever and a day, forever and a day—
Herbert began to sing, a low baritone rumble, then reached down to pull Coyle off the table, swing him around the room, a Fred-and-Ginger routine—
Better than jazz, Marine, I tell you—
The office door mercifully swung open, pulling Wells awake. He wiped sleep from his mouth as the cop walked in. The wall clock said a
n hour had passed, but the nap had played the neat trick of making Wells even more tired. He’d been so sure Coyle was dead. A bad sign.
The cop unlocked his cuffs. “Supposed to take you wherever you want.” He sounded neither annoyed nor impressed with the fact that he’d been told to chauffeur a man who’d been a murder suspect an hour before. He was young enough not to question his orders. Wells wasn’t sure he himself had ever been that young.
“I’ve got my own car. Anyplace around here still selling coffee at this hour?”
“Jack in the Box up 27.”
“Thanks.”
On his way out, Wells asked the nurses if anyone had news on Coyle. “Gonna be a while,” the head nurse said. “But he’s lucky Dr. Kenley was on call tonight. She’s amazing.”
Wells wanted to stay until the surgery was done, but the trailer awaited. He scribbled his number. “When she comes out, will you ask her to call me? Any hour, doesn’t matter.”
The nurse took the number but shook her head. “She probably won’t. HIPAA.”
The Ford stank of blood. Red smears covered its passenger-side window. Wells wondered how many units Coyle had lost. He knew he should call Coyle’s parents, but he couldn’t bring himself to wake them, especially when he didn’t know whether Coyle would survive the night.
Instead, he called Tarnes, who filled him in on what had happened while he was locked up. She’d reached the duty officers at FBI headquarters, who’d passed a message to the Seattle agent in charge, who had leaned on the Washington State Patrol. The Feds would have their own agents at the trailer by morning. Meanwhile, the troopers guarding the trailer were expecting Wells and would let him pass.
“Thanks, Julie.”
“Any word on Winston?”
Strange to hear Coyle’s first name. Wells usually called him Coyle or Sergeant. “Still in surgery.”
“You call his people?”
The question jabbed Wells. “Not yet. I wanted to know where he stands.”
“I can do it. You have enough to worry about.”
Wells almost said yes. But he was Coyle’s senior officer. The job was his. “Get some sleep, Julie. I’ll call them.”
“Let me know if you find anything. And John . . . ?”
His name hung heavy. “What’s that?”
“Not everything’s your fault.”
Then she was gone.
He badly wanted to call Anne. But waking a pregnant woman at 4 a.m. to make her carry his sins seemed cheap. Instead, Wells swung into Jack in the Box and ordered a combination meal, cheeseburger and large fries. Eating emotionally in his old age, soothing his soul with salt and fat. Then two more combos, though those weren’t for him. No quicker way to a cop’s heart.
Sure enough, the troopers watching the trailer perked up at the burgers.
“Twelve-gauge,” the one in the passenger seat said. “Rigged to angle down the stairs. Nasty. You’ll see.”
“Find anything else?”
“Not much. It’s empty, for sure. The door to the bedroom’s open, so we looked, but we didn’t check any closets. Basically, sniffed the place for bodies.”
In other words, the troopers hadn’t gone out of their way to find more traps. “Understood.”
The trooper handed Wells latex gloves and booties. “Just don’t mess it up for tomorrow, the techs are gonna shake it out.”
At the door, Wells pulled on the protective gear, stepped inside. The trap that had killed Darby waited. Nasty was right. The shotgun had been hidden in a closet in a wall left of the front door. The killer had nailed a two-by-six to the closet floor, duct-taped a metal C-clamp to the wood, tightened the clamp around the barrel of a shotgun. The fishing line ran from the doorknob, through a pulley screwed into the back of the closet, to the trigger.
Civilians called these setups booby traps. Police called them spring guns. By any name, they were simple and deadly. This one had been positioned high and angled down, to take out not just the person who opened the door but anyone behind him. And the person who set it had left the door unlocked to make entering easy.
Seeing it set Wells’s blood on fire. He knew the killer hadn’t meant to target Coyle or Darby. But the randomness only made him angrier. He wondered if Miller had set the trap. Probably the Russians. They could have come to the trailer anytime after Miller and Allie left and before the snow on Tuesday night. Miller had probably given Allie the key months before. If not, she could have stolen and copied it. The police might never find the answer. The filament, C-clamp, and wood were all available at any Home Depot. The shotgun was a Remington, a popular brand, untraceable if it had been bought used for cash at a gun show or garage sale.
Wells forced himself to leave the closet behind, turn to the rest of the trailer. The living room was spare and clean, guides to local hiking trails stacked on the coffee table, weights in the corner alongside a sit-up mat. The furniture was carefully set at right angles. Miller hadn’t lost his military habits. He’d cleaned before he left, too. The toilet was spotless. The glasses and coffee cups were washed. The refrigerator was empty, aside from a jug of water, a loaf of white bread, and a package of string cheese.
Wells found no trace of Allie, no women’s clothes or cosmetics or personal items. A box of condoms was tucked in the bathroom cabinet, but it was unopened. Wells suspected that if the FBI matched the serial number, the Bureau would find it predated Allie’s arrival. No surprise. She wouldn’t have wanted to leave any evidence of her existence.
The gun safe in the bedroom was locked tight. Wells left it. If the Russians had set a second trap anywhere, the safe would be the place. Besides, he already knew Miller had taken his rifle.
The more Wells looked, the more strongly he felt that Miller had intended to leave not just this place but his life behind when he walked out. In a kitchen drawer he found Miller’s most important documents neatly stacked: discharge papers; medical records, showing the extent of his injuries in Kandahar; the title and registration to his pickup, which turned out to be a black Dodge Ram; the Veterans Administration letter explaining he’d been given a sixty percent disability rating. A dozen photographs from Afghanistan lay at the bottom. Mostly standard stuff for an infantryman, pics of Miller and his fellow soldiers at the base and on patrol. One showed Miller grinning as he sat astride a donkey that had a big red ribbon stuck to its side. A sergeant stood beside the donkey, angling a bottle of Jim Beam as if he planned to pour a shot in the animal’s mouth. As Urquhart had told Wells and Coyle, Miller wasn’t very good-looking: short, with pitted skin and a strange slope to his forehead. He looked happy enough in the picture, though.
At the back of the drawer, Wells found the red ribbon from the picture. Miller could have had other copies of the photos, maybe even his medical records. He didn’t have another ribbon. He’d cared enough about it to bring it home from Kandahar. He hadn’t forgotten it here. He’d left it.
Wells took it, left everything else for the cops.
The Russians had seeded the place relatively subtly. Wells found no ISIS flags or Qurans left open to verses that called for death to the unbelievers. But the top drawer of Miller’s bedside table held a dozen pamphlets about Islam, the basic brochures that mosques and Islamic community centers left on their front tables for curious American visitors. What does Islam say about terrorism? Who was the Prophet Muhammad? What do Muslims believe about Christians and Jews? Ramadan: The Month of Fasting . . . The pamphlets were creased, paragraphs circled and underlined. Wells took them. Islam had enough problems in the United States without the Kremlin helping.
The second drawer contained two photographs. They both showed the bloodied corpse of an Afghan child lying on a muddy village path, his neck torn apart by a high-caliber round. The photos were taken from different angles, both close up. Wells suspected that even a forensic expert would have no way to determine where or when t
hey had been taken, much less who had taken them. They didn’t have any indication of when they’d been printed on the back.
Wells wondered if Miller had really taken the pictures, if they’d really depicted an incident from his tour. If not, the Russians were taking a chance by leaving them. On the other hand, would the FBI want to ask the soldiers who’d served with Miller about them? And if his buddies denied that they depicted a real incident, would investigators believe them? Plenty of kids had died during the war, usually by accident, occasionally in atrocities that received little attention in the United States but lots in Afghanistan.
The Russians were offering a story the investigators would understand: an angry veteran, getting by on disability, lonely, Hispanic in a rural and overwhelmingly white community, racked with guilt over a child’s death. He’d grown interested in Islam, self-radicalized, decided to put his skills as a sniper to use. I’ve met the enemy and he is us. As an explanation for terrorism, the narrative was a little paint-by-numbers, but it would stick. Best of all, from the Russian point of view, it didn’t require Twitter rants from Miller, or even letters or a diary. The photos and records spoke for themselves.
Of course, none of this evidence explained how the woman who called herself Allie had actually convinced Miller to shoot a pastor and a cardinal. Wells couldn’t imagine her playing a true believer, considering she’d picked Miller up in a bar. He supposed only Miller and Allie knew the answer. He took one of the photos, left the second. He suspected having the picture might come in handy if and when he confronted Miller.
In the bottom drawer, more articles, these about the futility of the Afghan war, the problems at Walter Reed. Followed by stories about Luke Hurley, Cardinal McDonnell, and—
Paul Birman. Senator from Tennessee. Chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence. Presumptive presidential candidate. And the leading voice for more American invasions of Islamic countries. Birman had been in the news plenty since the Hurley shooting. In fact—
The Deceivers Page 34