The Sixth Man kam-5

by David Baldacci

  “I think you and Michelle need to go there and look around.”

  “You’re officially retaining us?”

  “I thought I already had.”

  “With Bergin dead, it gets complicated. His associate, Megan Riley, is on the papers. She’s willing but really green. I’m not sure the court will allow her to continue in a solo capacity.”

  “You’re a lawyer,” said Paul bluntly.

  “You checked me out?”

  “Of course I did. I’d be a fool if I hadn’t. You can cocounsel with Riley.”

  “I’m not in practice anymore.”

  “I think you might want to reconsider that. You can wear two hats. Detective and lawyer.”

  “I’ll think about it,” said Sean. “Right now the FBI have Megan Riley holed up somewhere in Maine emptying out her brain cells.”

  Paul appraised him with a shrewd look. “You think your green lawyer can hold up against the Bureau?”

  “I don’t know,” said Sean, giving her a curious glance.

  “Brandon Murdock?” said Paul.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Teddy told me he was trying to break through the wall of legal confidentiality to find out who the client was. Teddy said it would eventually have to come out, but he’d managed to hold the fellow off so far.”

  “The FBI usually gets its way.”

  “Not disputing it. But let’s make them work a little harder. I’m no lawyer but I’d say finding out who killed all those people and Teddy and now Hilary takes precedence over trying to discover who’s paying for Eddie’s defense.”

  “So you’re assuming that all the deaths are connected?” said Michelle. “The six bodies and Bergin and his secretary. Killed by the same person?”

  “Teddy Bergin didn’t have an enemy to his name. And why kill Hilary except for something she knew? And that right there proves Eddie is innocent. There was no way he got out of Cutter’s Rock to kill either one of them.”

  Sean considered this. “That’s true. If they are connected.”

  “The proof is out there. All you have to do is find it.”

  “I’ll draw up a retainer agreement and have you sign it.”

  “More than happy to.”

  “Anything else we need to know?”

  “I believe you’ve got plenty to think about.”

  As they rose to go she added, “I doubt it would be smart to leave poor Megan with the FBI too long. You might want to make some noises about unlawful detainment or something like that, just to get the Bureau’s blood going. Mention something about calling up a TV station or newspaper reporter. They just love that stuff down at the Hoover building. Makes their butts get all tight and squirmy.”

  Sean looked at her strangely. “You have a lot of experience with the FBI?”

  “Oh, more than you’ll probably ever know, Mr. King.”

  CHAPTER

  27

  PETER BUNTING SAT in his office in Manhattan. He enjoyed living in New York. He had an office in downtown D.C. and his company had a facility in northern Virginia, but New York was unique. The energy here was visceral. As he walked to work each day from his Fifth Avenue brownstone he knew he was where he belonged.

  He stretched out a kink in his neck and studied the file on his desk. It appeared on an electronic tablet. No paper was kept here. Everything of importance was locked in impenetrable server farms far away from here. Cloud computing was king in Peter Bunting’s world.

  He had studied the career paths of Sean King and Michelle Maxwell and came away reasonably impressed. They both appeared to be hardworking, clever, and practical-minded. But he concluded that some of their success had also been due to luck coming along at just the right moment. And luck was not something one could count on happening all the time. How that might benefit or hurt him he wasn’t sure.

  He thumbed a button and the screen changed along with the subject area.

  Edgar Roy.

  His main problem.

  What to do about his E-Six was consuming an inordinate amount of his time. And yet the matter was of paramount importance to him. Even though he had set up some stopgap measures he was unacceptably behind schedule. And Secretary Foster was right: the quality of the analysis had diminished. The status quo could not be sustained. He could lose everything he’d worked for.

  Ellen Foster and her ilk were unforgiving. They would cut him off without a second thought. They might be plotting against him right now. No, there was no “might” about it; they were plotting against him. And Mason Quantrell was probably helping to orchestrate the entire scheme. The worlds of public and private sector had meshed into a single organism in the national security field. Players from both sides hopped back and forth with increasing frequency. It was now nearly impossible to tell where the government side ended and the for-profit machines began.

  When he had first decided to make the intelligence field the place where he would make his mark, the arena was a disaster. Too many agencies with too many people writing too many reports, often about the same thing, that no one had time to read anyway. Too many eyeballs watching the wrong things. And, most critical, no one wanted to share information for fear of losing budget dollars or hard-won turf. DHS didn’t talk to CIA. DIA didn’t interface with the FBI. NSA was its own country. The other alphabet agencies did their own thing. No one, not one person, knew it all, didn’t come close to knowing it all. And when one didn’t know it all, one made mistakes, enormous ones; the sort where lots of people died.

  That was how Bunting had commenced building his grand plan. Combining the basic tenet of the entrepreneur and the motivation of a patriot wanting to protect his country, he had seen a national security need and filled it. Once the concept had been tested and approved, the E-Program had been expanded and upgraded every year. It was no academic exercise. In that Mt. Everest of information collected every day by America and its allies, there could be one or two pieces of data located far apart in the gathering baskets of the intelligence community that might very well prevent another 9/11.

  The successes of the E-Program had been early and often. Some could argue quite persuasively that the world was basically in a shitty state. But Bunting was one of the few who knew that things could be far worse. How close the United States and its allies had drawn to the precipice. How narrowly they had avoided events that would have resulted in greater devastation than when those jumbo jets had slammed into those buildings. In six months alone Edgar Roy’s analysis had prevented at least five major attacks on both private and military targets around the world. And a host of lesser but still potentially deadly incidents had been broken up because the man could stare at the Wall and get it to reveal its secrets like no other analyst in history. And the results of his strategic conclusions could be felt around the world in a thousand different ways.

  But it all came down to finding that one right person. That was always the challenge. The average career of the Analyst was only three years. After that even the mightiest of minds had had enough. And then they were given golden retirement packages and put out to pasture, like stud horses—only, unfortunately, without the possibility of siring their replacements.

  The phone rang. He licked his lips and tried to remain calm. It was a scheduled call. It was the primary reason he was in the office today. He lifted the receiver.

  “Yes? Yes, I’ll hold.”

  A moment later the man’s voice came on. Bunting drew a shallow breath and answered. “Mr. President, thank you for making time for me, sir.”

  The conversation was swift. It had been pretimed for five minutes. And it was only because Peter Bunting was such an important player in the intelligence community that the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue had bothered to call at all.

  “It’s been my pleasure and honor to serve my country, sir,” said Bunting. “And I give you my word that all of our goals will be met, on time. Yes, sir, thank you, sir.”

  The men then got down to the
details.

  As the phone timer clicked to five minutes, he said good-bye, set the receiver down, and looked up at his assistant.

  She said, “I guess you really know you’ve made it when the president calls you.”

  “You’d think that would be the case, wouldn’t you?”

  “It’s not?”

  “Actually it only means you have a longer way to fall.”

  After she left he put his feet up on his desk and interlaced his fingers behind his neck. Bunting personally knew hundreds of intelligence analysts, smart people from the best schools who operated in specialties. People in this field could devote their entire careers to a certain quadrant of airspace over the Middle East, dutifully studying the relatively same satellite imagery until their hair changed from brown to white and their skin sagged toward retirement. Specialists, good, sound people for their little sliver of the plot. But that was all they knew, their incremental slice of the intelligence rainbow. And that was hardly good enough.

  But Edgar Roy’s specialty was omniscience.

  He was tasked to know everything. And the man had!

  Bunting never expected to find another Edgar Roy, a genetic freak to end all genetic freaks. A perfect memory and an astonishing ability to see how all pieces came together. He wished that the man could live forever.

  His phone buzzed. He looked annoyed but answered. “What?” He hesitated. “All right, send him in.”

  It was Avery. The young man had finally gotten his hair cut, but he had never learned how to dress properly. He looked like he had just woken up at his frat house after a keg party. But he was smart. Not an E-class mind but certainly useful.

  “I see you’re back from Maine.”

  “Just this morning. I wanted to tell you that I followed Carla Dukes home two nights ago. I wanted to speak with her about some issues.”

  “Okay. Did you?”

  “No, because I noticed someone following me.”

  Bunting sat up straighter. “What? Who?”

  “I didn’t get a good look at him because it was dark. I nearly ran over him while I was trying to get away.” He paused. “But I think it was that investigator, Sean King.”

  “Sean King? What was he doing there?”

  “Apparently following Dukes and/or me.”

  “Did he see you?”

  “Not clearly, I’m sure of that.”

  “Did he get your license plate number?”

  “Probably, but I switched the plates out with a pair of fake ones. They’ll lead nowhere.”

  “I’m impressed, Avery.”

  “Thank you, sir. I just thought you should know.”

  “Is that all?”

  Avery looked nervous. “Actually, no. The Wall backup is bordering on cataclysmic.”

  “That I already know. I’m recalling a pair of E-Fives to duty. And after I got blindsided by Foster I arranged a phone call with the president to reassure him. I just finished it. That will give us some time. If Foster tries to go over me now she’ll look pretty stupid.”

  “But that won’t last.”

  “Of course it won’t last.”

  “But if Edgar Roy is proven innocent and we get him back on the job, all of our problems go away.”

  Bunting rose, went over to the window, and looked out, his hands stuffed into his trouser pockets. “That’s not necessarily true.”

  “Why?”

  He whirled around. “Do you really think the US government will let Edgar actually go to trial?”

  Avery said slowly, “But what’s the alternative?”

  Bunting turned back around and watched a flock of birds heading south for the winter.

  I wish I could fly, he thought. I wish I could get the hell out of here.

  “What do you think, Avery?” he said over his shoulder.

  “They’ll kill him?”

  Bunting sat back down and switched topics. “So King was in Maine two nights ago following you. What about Maxwell?”

  “She wasn’t with him.”

  “And what have their movements been since?”

  Avery took a small step back. “Surveillance was lost for a bit but it has now been regained.”

  Bunting rose out of his seat once more. “Lost for how long?”

  “A few hours.”

  Bunting snapped his fingers. “More precise than that, Avery.”

  “Eight hours and four minutes. But now they’re headed, at least it seems, to Edgar Roy’s farm.”

  “Did it occur to you that when we lost sight of them they might have been going somewhere that could have been highly enlightening?”

  “Yes, sir, but I wasn’t in charge of that task.”

  “Fine. I am now making it your task to ensure that surveillance is not lost again.” He refocused. “The six bodies at the farm?”

  “Yes?”

  “Not one ID made? Strange, isn’t it?” Bunting’s expression signaled that it was far more than strange; it was impossible.

  “Yes, you would think they would be on some database somewhere.”

  “And there’s something else.”

  “Sir?”

  “The number.”

  “Number?”

  “Of bodies. Now go do your job.”

  Avery looked very confused as he closed the door behind him.

  Bunting sat back in his chair, swiveled around, and stared out the window.

  Six bodies. Not four, not five, but six.

  Ordinarily, Bunting was a man who embraced numbers. He loved statistics, analysis, conclusions based on solid building blocks of data. But the number six was starting to haunt him. He didn’t like it at all.

  Six bodies. The E-Six Program.

  That hit very close to home.

  Someone was really playing with him.

  CHAPTER

  28

  THE TRIP to Edgar Roy’s home took a number of hours. Michelle drove, as usual, while Sean stared moodily out the window.

  “Are you curious about what Kelly Paul did while she was out of the country?” he asked.

  “Of course I am. But she has a point about focusing on the investigation into her brother. He’s the one facing the death sentence. Not her.”

  He didn’t seem to hear this. “And she never said how her stepfather died.”

  “Easy enough to check, but that seems a little far afield, Sean.”

  He turned to look at her. “Unless it’s all connected.”

  “You’re talking a long time period, then.”

  He looked back out the window. “Why would a woman like that move to a ramshackle house in the middle of nowhere? She’s not farming. And her country accent was a bit too well done.”

  “Well, she did grow up in Virginia. And they do have accents down here,” drawled Michelle.

  “Lot of questions,” said Sean absently.

  “What do you think about her advice with the Bureau?”

  “It was good actually. Riley is a lawyer for the defense. You just can’t detain her indefinitely. In fact…”

  He took out his cell phone and punched in a number. “Still no answer. Okay, let’s do this the hard way.”

  He keyed in another number. “Agent Murdock? Sean King here. What? Yeah, we took your advice and went home. But we’re coming back. But that’s not why I’m calling. You’re holding the defense counsel in a case you’re investigating. That breaks about a dozen ethical and other laws I can think of off the top of my head. I either hear from her in five minutes that she’s free and on her way to Martha’s Inn, or the next time you see me it’ll be on CNN talking about Bureau overreach.” Sean paused as the other man said something. “Yeah, well, try me. And you now have four minutes.”

  He clicked off.

  Michelle glanced at him. “And what did he say?”

  “Basic blustery bullshit.” He looked at his watch. Ten seconds past the deadline Sean’s phone buzzed.

  “Hello, Megan, how are you doing?” He paused. “Excellent. I thou
ght Agent Murdock would see it my way. We’re down in Virginia but we’ll be heading back up very soon. Go to Martha’s Inn and stay there. No visitors. Do nothing. And if Murdock comes near you again, call me.”

  He clicked off and put the phone in his pocket.

  “What have they been asking her?”

  “She didn’t say. From the background noise I think she was in a Bucar getting a ride back to the inn.”

  “Do you think they told her about Hilary?”

  “No, at least she didn’t mention it.”

  “Wait till she finds out I was the one who probably shot her.”

  “Michelle, you don’t know if it was you, so stop driving yourself crazy about it.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  He started to make a retort but then stopped and patted her arm. “Actually, it is easy for me to say. I’m sorry.”

  “So when are we heading back up to Maine?”

  “As soon as we check out Roy’s farm and talk to the local authorities.”

  “Doubt they’ll be much help.”

  “No, I think they will.”

  “Why?”

  “Up to this point it seems everyone believed that Roy was guilty. Now, with Bergin and Hilary dead, something Roy could not have been involved in, it might make people take a second look. And cops are no different.”

  “Who do we deal with on the federal side in Virginia? Not Murdock?”

  “I know the RA in Charlottesville,” Sean said, referring to the Resident FBI Agent. “He’s a good guy. Owes me a favor, in fact.”

  “Lots of people seem to owe you. What’s his debt?”

  “I wrote a recommendation letter for his daughter to get into UVA Law.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Well, I got him tickets to the Skins-Cowboys game in D.C. He’s originally from Dallas.”

  “Now that is valuable.”

  The FBI agent was suitably cooperative. And he told them something that was particularly intriguing.

  “I know Brandon Murdock. He’s a good guy. But I don’t know why he would be involved in something like this.”

  “Why’s that?” asked Sean.

  “He doesn’t work VICAP,” the man said, referring to the Bureau’s Violent Crime Apprehension Program, which also dealt with serial killers.