“Moms don’t screw around when it comes to information exchange. She knows a lot about my kids, too. We do it very efficiently. And in great detail.”
Pine had been writing notes down as Blum was speaking. “Okay, you’ve given me a lot to use as possible passwords.”
She worked away for several hours after using a program on her computer to put together a graph of possible password combos based on what Blum had told her and also using the names from the file list she’d taken from Priest’s office.
When she had tried the last possible combination, and nothing had worked, she sat back in frustration.
Blum, who had dozed off on her bed, awoke a minute later. Rain was drumming down on the roof of the one-story motel.
“No luck, I take it?” Blum said groggily.
“Apparently, his brother’s family wasn’t important enough to warrant being the basis for his all-important password, nor did his list of files have any clues that worked.”
“Well, I’m starving. I saw a diner down the street when we were coming here.”
They drove over, parked behind the building, and went inside.
They ordered their food and sipped their coffees as the rain continued to pour.
Blum looked out at the gloom. “My God, is it always like this here? I’d get suicidal. I need sun.”
“They get rain and then they get sun. And then they get fall and then they get snow.”
Blum shivered. “No thank you. Is that why you moved to the Southwest? For the weather?”
“I almost moved to Montana or Wyoming.”
“My God, do you know how much snow they get?”
“The weather wasn’t the deciding factor.”
“What was then?”
“I already told you. The people or lack thereof.” She glanced over at Blum, who had her coffee cup halfway to her lips. Pine explained further, “I don’t like crowds.”
“How would you define a crowd?”
“Pretty much anyone other than myself.”
“Well, I’m sorry if I’m crowding you then,” said Blum, sounding a bit hurt.
“Actually, Carol, I sort of consider us one unit, so when I say me, I include you, and vice versa.”
“You know, when I had six kids at home, and several of them still in diapers, I longed to be by myself, for just a few minutes, even. It seemed like every second of my life, someone was calling my name, demanding that I do something for them.”
“And now?” asked Pine curiously.
“Now, I live by myself. I wake up alone. I eat alone. I go to bed alone.” She glanced at Pine over her coffee cup. “I wouldn’t recommend it, I really wouldn’t. Crowd or no crowd. Sometimes it’s as simple as another human being keeping your feet warm in bed, or fetching you some aspirin because your head is splitting. I mean, really.”
Their food arrived and they ate in silence, each lost in her own thoughts.
As they finished up Blum said, “What are you thinking about?”
“The case. My career. Whether either or both are over.”
“You ever think about a career outside the Bureau?”
“No.”
“I’m a Leo. The lion. We’re stubborn control freaks with a streak of kindness. But we adapt. I think you can, too. Are you a Leo? Or are you another sign?”
Pine stared at her without answering.
“I said are you—” began Blum. She froze when Pine jumped up and threw some cash down on the table for their meals.
“Let’s go.”
“What’s up?” said Blum as she and Pine raced back to the motel.
“In answer to your question, I’m a Capricorn.”
CHAPTER
45
Pieces of paper containing scribbled words were all over Pine’s bed. Blum was actively helping her in her task by feeding her words that Pine then inputted to her computer program.
“When did you download this software?” asked Blum.
“As soon as I failed at getting the password manually,” Pine replied, her fingers flying over the laptop keys. “I’ve been crunching passwords all this time, with no result. But it helps a lot if we can narrow the parameters of what the password might be. And maybe we can finally do that.”
Blum set down the last piece of paper. “Okay, I think that’s everything.”
“Let’s see if we’re going to get lucky.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I haven’t been lucky in like twenty years.”
Pine hit a key on the laptop. “Here goes.”
The program started sorting through possible password combinations.
“What made you think of Capricorn?” asked Blum.
“I was wondering why Priest would have chosen that name for a nonexistent company. I don’t know if he’s a Capricorn too or not, but it was the only lead I could think of. But until you started talking about being a Leo, I never even considered it. So, if it works, you get the credit.” She paused and looked at the screen. “Damn.”
A password had just been typed in and the screen started to change.
“We nailed it,” said Pine.
“What was the password?” asked Blum.
Pine looked at the password box. “Something unbelievably complex, but everything except the letters w and m are connected to the sign of Capricorn.”
“And what do the letters w and m refer to?”
“Probably to Billy and Michael. William would be Billy’s real name. Which goes to show that Priest did value his nephews, at least to the extent that he would include them in a password.”
“What the hell is that?” said Blum.
A picture had appeared on the screen. Pine scrolled down page after page. They were all very technical drawings. She stopped at one ominous diagram and hit some keys to enlarge it. She read the language on the screen next to the device.
“That’s . . . those are Korean characters.”
“Can you understand what it says?”
“No, but I can find a translation really fast.” She wrote some of the characters down on a piece of paper and then went online to a translation site and input the Korean characters. The translation was almost instantaneous.
“Fissile material,” said Pine slowly. “Fissile? That has to do with nuclear material.”
Blum sat back on the bed. “Dear God. Is North Korea going to . . . nuke us?”
“If so, that might explain David Roth’s involvement. And Sung Nam Chung’s. Is this the North Koreans’ backup plan in the event the peace talks cratered? Hit us with a nuclear weapon?”
“But if the North Koreans are planning something like that, how do you explain the military chopper taking the Priest brothers away?”
Pine shrugged. “Maybe they know about the plot and are trying to trace it back to its source.”
“So, do we show this to, I don’t know, the FBI director?”
“We have no proof that any of this is true. If we go in with this, we might disappear.”
“But people don’t just disappear in this country.”
“Tell that to the Priest brothers.” Pine fell silent for a moment. “And even if we get proof, I’m not sure who we should take it to.”
“What do you mean?”
“The DD did his best to have me called off this case. And he never would have done that without the approval of his boss and his boss’s boss. In fact, this might go all the way to the top, Carol.” She stared pointedly at the woman. “And I mean all the way to the very top.”
Neither woman said anything for a few seconds, as they both seemed to let the enormity of this possibility sink in.
“But we have to do something,” Blum finally said.
Pine nodded in agreement. “We have to find David Roth, for starters.”
“How?”
Pine said, “He was last seen in the Grand Canyon. Wait a minute. There’s more to the file.” She scrolled down some more pages until she came
to something different.
“That looks like a map,” she said. “It has latitude and longitude markers.”
“Agent Pine, that looks like the Grand Canyon.”
She paled. “Shit, it is.” Pine turned a shade whiter as she stared at the map. “Do you . . . do you think the North Koreans somehow planted a nuke in the Grand Canyon?”
“And Priest and Roth found out about it?” said Blum.
Pine nodded. “That must be why Roth wanted to get into the Canyon. To find the bomb.” Her phone buzzed. It was a text. “It’s from Oscar Fabrikant. He’s in Russia.”
“What does it say?”
Pine read the text. “Check out the death of Fred Wormsley. He was very close to both Roth and Roth’s father.”
Pine went online and found an article on point.
Blum read over her shoulder.
“Okay, it says here that Fred Wormsley’s body was found in the Potomac near Three Sisters Island a while back. The police speculated that he fell in somewhere along the GW Parkway, was sucked under by the current, and drowned.”
“But obviously Fabrikant thinks there’s more to it,” said Blum.
“And maybe so does David Roth.” Pine pointed to another part of the story. “Wormsley worked at the NSA. He was very high-up there. That’s why the police investigation was a little bit more involved than would be normal. They still concluded it was an accident, and now I wonder if they were pressured to say that.”
Blum sat back and seemed to process all this. “Okay, Roth is a WMD expert. He found out about this plot by the North Koreans, maybe from Wormsley. Wormsley might have learned about it through his work at the NSA. Then he got killed, maybe by this Sung Nam Chung. After that, Roth hooked up with Priest. They somehow discovered there’s a nuke planted in the Canyon. And he impersonated Priest and went down there to find it so no one would know he was involved. So, is he trying to disarm it?”
“I don’t know. But why would Roth turn to Ben Priest?” asked Pine.
“Maybe they knew each other before. And Priest was helping him out.”
“But if Roth knew there was a nuke in the Canyon, why not just call in the government?”
Blum thought about this for a few moments. “Maybe he’s afraid if the North Koreans know that we’re on to them, they’ll detonate it. Maybe he’s trying to disarm it by stealth. I’m just speculating here. I have no idea how nuclear weapons even work.”
Pine said, “Neither do I. I just know what they can do when they go boom.”
“Okay, now what do we do?”
“I think it’s time to head back west.”
“Thank goodness. I can already feel my tan fading.” She smiled embarrassedly. “Sorry, bad joke. I do that when my nerves are about to run away with me.”
Pine was punching in numbers on the computer. “What if the longitude and latitude lines indicate the spot where the nuke is located? And maybe Roth was trying to give whoever found that dead mule a clue. J and k? That could point to a hidden cave for those who know about the legend.”
“A lot of questions to answer,” noted Blum.
“And the answers apparently lie in one of the biggest holes on earth.”
CHAPTER
46
The credit card purchase was made online at eleven a.m. Two one-way tickets from Reagan Washington National Airport to Flagstaff, Arizona. The fastest flight was on American, which only had one stop in Phoenix before heading on for the short leg to Flagstaff. The flight was scheduled to leave in three days.
Carol Blum’s personal credit card number had been flagged and sent along to those parties who had requested the marker. Strike teams were assembled, and a recon unit was dispatched to Reagan to bang out the necessary details for Blum’s and Pine’s apprehension before they boarded.
The people in charge were wary of the purchase, however, since Blum could be the only one to show up. Or else neither of them might appear for the flight. Thus, the other two airports and the train and bus depots in the DC area were immediately put under watch.
And a secondary team was deployed to the Flagstaff area just in case. Pine and Blum’s homes and the office in Shattered Rock were already under surveillance.
Now, all they could do was wait.
* * *
“You want to go where?”
The cab driver looked askance at Pine and Blum. He was a black man in his sixties wearing a felt cap and glasses that dangled on a chain against his broad chest. His checkered shirt was open enough to reveal curling gray chest hair.
“Harpers Ferry, West Virginia,” replied Pine.
“Lady, you know this is Virginia, right, not West Virginia?” said the man.
“I can read a map,” said Pine.
“You know how far that is from here?”
“About a hundred miles. You should be able to do it in under two hours.”
“The hell you say. Look, ma’am, first thing is, I don’t drive to West Virginia.”
Pine held up five fifty-dollar bills. She had used her friend’s debit card to get the cash.
“Two hours for two hundred and fifty bucks. Do you still not drive to West Virginia?”
The man considered this offer. “Well, I got to drive back.”
“Still, over fifty bucks an hour, guaranteed. I doubt that’s a hardship for you.”
Blum pulled out a hundred dollars from her wallet.
“And this extra amount to cover your gas,” she said. “And because you’re a nice person.”
The man said, “You two must really want to get to Harpers Ferry. Why?”
“I hear it’s very historical,” said Pine.
“And you got no car?”
Before she’d used her credit card to buy the plane tickets, Blum had driven the Mustang to Reagan National and left it in long-term parking to give credence to their taking a flight from there to Flagstaff.
“We’re visiting from out of the area,” said Pine.
The man nodded. “Okay, thing is, I got nothing against taking your money, but it’d be a lot cheaper to take a bus, or even the train.”
“I don’t like crowds. You want the gig or not? Unless you can make more money today somewhere else.”
The man eyed their luggage. “Is that all the bags you got?”
“That’s it.”
He shrugged and slipped on his glasses. “Okay, ladies, let’s go.”
They made it to the Harpers Ferry train station in a little more than two hours. It was right on the border between the two Virginias. The building was wood sided, stained a dull red, and was Victorian in style. It rested on the buried foundations of old armory buildings.
They paid the promised money, and the cabbie handed out their bags from the trunk.
“Hope you gals enjoy the history,” he said, patting the cash in his pocket.
“Maybe we’ll make some of our own while we’re here,” said Blum.
The man cracked a grin and knuckle-smacked her. “Now, there you go!”
He drove off, and thirty minutes later Amtrak’s Capitol Limited train roared into town.
They had previously purchased their tickets at another train station, paying in cash. When the woman at the ticket window had asked for ID, Pine had pulled her badge and said in a low voice, “FBI, undercover, escorting a valuable witness for the government. Hoping to nail some really bad guys. Do not say anything to anyone about this.”
The woman, a matronly type in her sixties, glanced at Blum and smiled. “Good for you, honey. I won’t breathe a word to anyone.”
Blum smiled. “We all have to do our part.”
The train pulled away only a couple of minutes late.
They had reserved a Superliner bedroom compartment with its own bath, which also doubled as a shower. They stowed their bags and sat on the blue couch staring out the window as the West Virginia scenery passed by. Soon they would be looking at Maryland scenery followed by Pennsylvania and Ohio landscapes, with the final destinatio
n in Chicago, where they had a layover before boarding the Southwest Chief. They would arrive in Arizona before the flight they’d booked for Flagstaff ever left the ground.
Pine looked around the compartment. “I’ve never taken the train before. How about you?”
“Once. Along the California coast. I was sixteen. First time I’d been away from home. I went to visit an aunt. I really enjoyed it. Felt free as a bird. Three years later, I was a mom learning to live on a couple hours of sleep a night.”
They ate dinner in the dining car. Blum had a glass of wine, while Pine stuck to beer. Both women went to sleep in their clothes, Pine in the top berth and Blum in the bottom. The swaying of the train allowed Pine to fall asleep fast and not wake up until around six.
They reached Pittsburgh at midnight and Chicago at around nine the next morning. They left the train and went to have breakfast at a place in the train station, a cavernous building on the west side of the Chicago River.
Pine and Blum had six hours to kill before they would board the Southwest Chief.
While they were eating, Blum was watching a TV monitor that was bolted to the wall. “Oh my God.”
Pine looked at the TV. Oscar Fabrikant’s photo filled the screen. The chyron at the bottom read: AMERICAN SCHOLAR FOUND DEAD IN MOSCOW. APPARENT SUICIDE.
Pine and Blum looked at each other.
Pine said softly, “He didn’t kill himself.”
“How do you think they found him?”
“They must have learned we had met with him. Maybe from the two fake cops.” Pine smacked the table. “I should never have let him go. He was a dead man at that point.”
“You couldn’t have really stopped him,” pointed out Blum.
“He could have come with us.”
“But we can’t collect everyone we run into and try to protect them. We’d all end up dead. But it’s so awful.” She shivered.
Pine eyed Blum. “I think it would be better if you stayed here, Carol. Get a hotel room and lie low for a few days.”
“I use my credit card to get the room and they’ll be knocking on my door in an hour.” She pointed to the screen. “And I don’t want to end up on there with the scroll saying I killed myself.”
“But you could find a place that would take cash.”
Long Road to Mercy Page 25