Armageddon Conspiracy

by John Thompson

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Brent demanded.

  “A little bit ago, her cousin from the deli rings my doorbell and hands me some bread with another note.” Fred got up from his chair, fished in his pocket, and held out a folded piece of paper inside a plastic baggie. “It says to keep you here, that she’s got help coming. She’ll be here soon.”

  Brent felt a surge of hope, mixed with suspicion. “What do you mean she’s got help coming? Why hasn’t she called to tell me that herself?”

  Fred shrugged. “I donno.” He pointed to the bag he’d put on the kitchen table when he first walked in. “But she gave me a shopping list.”

  FIFTY-TWO

  MORRISTOWN, NJ, JULY 1

  MAGGIE RACED WESTWARD OUT OF Newark, chafing at the traffic but wondering at the same time why she was in such a hurry. After all, wasn’t she about to risk her career, maybe even her freedom, on a wild speculation? She glanced in her rearview mirror and picked out Kosinsky’s truck, and her anxiety notched higher. She wasn’t the only one rolling the dice. She’d tried to talk him out of coming, but probably not hard enough.

  Everything had started to snowball around midday when Ann Jenkins came into her cubicle. She had the memo rolled in her fist and looked exhausted, like she’d had maybe two or three hours sleep in the past several days. “DeVito, if it was my call, I’d go after Biddle yesterday, but I can’t convince any of these other bastards to back us. I’m really sorry.”

  Maggie bit her cheeks. “They’re making a huge mistake,” she said. “I’ve done even more work on this and I can—“

  Jenkins waved a hand for silence. “I gave it my best shot. Bottom line—nothing’s happened since 9/11, and they all think I’m paranoid. I tried, but I lost. It’s finished, and I’m too goddam tired and pissed off to discuss it any further.” She tossed Maggie’s memo on her desk then turned and left.

  A moment later, Kosinsky came into her cubicle. “I overheard.”

  Maggie stared at the wall and shook her head. A single tear broke loose and trickled down her cheek.

  “You gave it your best shot,” he said in a gentle voice.

  She wiped the tear away with an angry swipe. “I’m right!” she said in a choked voice.

  “Let’s think about it. Maybe there’s some way to run this by other people.”

  Maggie turned and looked at him, her eyes narrow slits. “You don’t get it! Brent’s not going to wait!”

  Kosinsky’s face wrinkled in disbelief. “He’d go after the terrorists alone?”

  “He’ll go after Biddle, which may be the same thing.” She wiped her other eye.

  “You could always arrest him.”

  She nodded.

  “But if you do arrest him, it does nothing to stop the bad guys.”

  “Yeah.” Maggie put her elbows on the desk and covered her face with her hands. “Got any ideas?”

  There was a long silence, and she finally took her hands away. Kosinsky was looking at her with a wry expression. “We’ll have to blame it on the boyfriend. We’ll say we were in hot pursuit. There’s really no other way.”

  Now, as she finally exited the freeway at Morristown, Maggie’s thoughts switched to Fred Lucas. He was a poor choice for something like this—a loveable guy but a loose cannon. Still, when she’d talked it over with Kosinsky, they’d agreed they needed help, and the skills of a retired fireman were ideal.

  She held her breath as she turned onto her street, afraid Brent might have departed even before Fred arrived. She’d seen it in his eyes that morning, and later she’d heard it in his voice when she’d called, his anger and desperation as he told her he wouldn’t wait any longer. His tone had suggested other things as well, but she couldn’t dwell on them until they got through the next twenty-four hours.

  She let out a moan of relief when she reached her house and saw a rusted Chevrolet Cavalier with a dented bumper in the drive. Hopefully, that meant Fred had followed her orders and ditched his old Voyager minivan. She parked behind the Cavalier, took a long tube of rolled up paper from the seat beside her, and then waited for Kosinsky to pull in.

  “Did the old guy do what you told him?” he asked as he climbed out.

  “I think so,” she said. “But don’t call him old to his face. Fred’s prickly.”

  They walked around to the back, but as soon as Maggie opened door, she froze. A hulking African American kid stood behind Fred and Brent. “Who the hell are you?” she demanded.

  “Meet DeLeyon,” Fred said, as if it was no big deal. Maggie glared at him as she stepped into the kitchen then held the door for Kosinsky.

  Once all five of them were inside and Maggie had closed the door, the small kitchen seemed crowded to the bursting point. Brent looked toward the door. “Who else is coming?” he demanded.

  “I’m it,” Kosinsky said.

  “This is Steve Kosinsky,” Maggie explained. “He’s a lieutenant in the New York State Police.”

  Brent eyes flicked back and forth between them. “I assume his presence here isn’t official.”

  Kosinsky gave a wry smile. “No.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Your girlfriend is very persuasive.”

  After a brief hesitation Brent shook his head. “It’s too big a risk.”

  Kosinsky tipped his head toward Maggie. “I agree with her that it’s better than you doing it by yourself.”

  Maggie stepped in and turned to Fred. “So, who’s DeLeyon?” she asked.

  “He’s Brent’s Little Brother.”

  Maggie swung her gaze. “You’re DeLeyon Jones, the high school kid?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  She knew about him, that he was sixteen, smart as hell. He was slouching, but she guessed he was at least six-seven. She took in the long, bony face, intelligent eyes, lips that lifted at the corners with unexpected humor. “You get on the wrong train?” she demanded.

  “Damn,” DeLeyon said. “That sound like a cop question.”

  “Well, I’m a cop,” Maggie said, her voice taking on a measure of heat.

  “Easy now,” Fred interjected. “DeLeyon came looking for me cause he wants to help Brent. I figured it was better to bring him here than leave him.”

  “He needs to get a train back to New York,” Maggie said.

  “You best put me in cuffs,” DeLeyon said. “Cause I ain’t going less you do.”

  “I think he could help,” Fred said.

  “Great!” Maggie slapped the counter. “Let’s add endangering a minor to everything else they can throw at us.” Even as she said it, she knew Fred was right.

  “That mean I stay?” DeLeyon asked.

  “No!” Brent interjected. “Sorry.”

  Maggie glanced at him, noting the pallor of his cheeks. She grabbed handfuls of his tee shirt just under his chin. “Everybody here made choices,” she said, giving him a shake. “You can be grateful, but you’re not responsible.”

  He looked into her eyes and finally gave a nod. Then he looked around slowly at each of them in turn. “Thank you.”

  Maggie let go of his shirt, went over to the kitchen table, and started to pull the rubber bands off her paper tube. “Okay,” she announced, her voice crisp. “The official answer is that neither Project Seahawk nor the FBI are going to pursue Prescott Biddle. However, Steve and I did more homework, and we’re convinced that he’s the guy.” She stopped and looked at Brent. “More important, we’re convinced of the terrorism connection.”

  “Well, let’s go kick his ass!” Fred interjected.

  Maggie spun and gave him a hard look. “We’re not going to kick anyone’s ass. We’re going to do this very carefully. Biddle’s got his own security detail, and we’re pretty sure the terrorists are on his property as well.”

  She watched Fred’s face as the information sunk in, and then she unrolled the satellite photographs she’d requested from the NSA.

  FIFTY-THREE

  NEWARK, NJ, JULY 1
>
  ANN JENKINS WORKED THROUGH ANOTHER pack of M&M’s and sipped stale, lukewarm coffee as she reviewed the duty reports. Tonight’s batch was mercifully thin because with half her staff reassigned and the others stretched to the breaking point, they had no time to file paperwork. She knew she ought to be grateful for small blessings, but she scowled. From a port security point of view, the situation sucked.

  The politicos in Washington were sticking with their plan to bring POTUS to New York, and she was holding to her insistence that Project Seahawk needed to be at Condition Red. A leper would have been more popular than she was right now. Her own people were pissed off and overworked, the politicians were afraid rumors of her Condition Red would leak out and ruin the fantasy that the national security situation was under control, and the bean counters in Washington were grumbling about all the overtime her people were clocking.

  Earlier that day, the Under Secretary for Border and Transportation Security had called to remind her that she was only an Acting Director while her boss recovered from his open-heart surgery. The implication was clear—if she wanted to be a real Director someday, she better damn well stand her people down. Well, screw that! She ate the last M&M, crumpled the pack, and tossed it in the waste can.

  She drummed her fingers against the desk, the only sound a dull thump. She glanced at her ravaged nails, but there was nothing left to chew. What she really wanted was a damn cigarette. No, she reminded herself, she was quitting.

  She shook her head, fruitlessly trying to shake off the desire, as she turned again to the duty reports. She finished her review, stuffed them back in their file, and then signed and time stamped the cover page. Next, she started in on the requisition summary that showed the information requests that went to the FBI, NSA, Armed Forces Intelligence, or CIA from any Project Seahawk personnel. She reviewed them to make sure everyone was playing ball and sharing information properly, also to make sure people weren’t accessing unneeded or inappropriate material.

  She jiggled her foot in a staccato beat. God, she wanted a cigarette, a strong one, preferably unfiltered, a Camel or Lucky Strike. She was so busy contemplating getting up and going outside to stand in the smokers’ area where she could at least sniff the second-hand smoke that she almost missed Maggie DeVito’s name.

  She had been feeling bad all day about her inability to bring any follow-up to DeVito’s memo, which had been a sharp piece of deductive reasoning. Moreover, it demonstrated initiative and a creative intellect sorely lacking in too many law-enforcement people. DeVito had been frustrated and disappointed at the turndown, but she hadn’t whined or carried on. Jenkins liked the way her prettiness hid a tough character.

  But why the hell was DeVito requisitioning satellite photos? She had a staff position, not a line job, which meant she wasn’t supposed to be working her own investigations. Jenkins placed a call to the satellite imaging section of the NSA and asked a technician to look up the photographs DeVito had requested. “What’s it of?” Jenkins asked.

  “Looks like a waterfront estate on Long Island,” the man replied.

  Jenkins scratched her head, again conscious of the lack of fingernails. “I need to know more. Who owns it?”

  “Call you back,” the man said.

  Ten minutes later, the man got back to her. “Belongs to a guy named Prescott Biddle,” he said.

  Jenkins’ pulse quickened. She quickly looked through the rest of the report and saw that DeVito had ordered a number of images. “What were the other images?”

  “Same shot, but for different dates and times.”

  “What did they show?”

  The man promised to check and get back.

  Jenkins stood and paced her office. What the hell was DeVito doing? She went back to her desk, typed in a search program and designated DeVito’s computer. She called up a list of the searches she had run starting today and going back a week. Nothing looked interesting.

  She ran another check, this one general, designed to look at all the Project Seahawk computers, and she put in Prescott Biddle’s name. Immediately, she got a hit. A New York State Police lieutenant named Kosinsky had run a check on Biddle. Kosinsky was big and good-looking, the type who look like he was bred to be a state cop. She hadn’t paid him much attention until now, but suddenly she wondered at the connection between Maggie and Kosinsky. An over-search of Kosinsky’s computer showed that he’d done concurrent searches on Fred Wofford, Owen Smythe, Betty Dowager, and a Reverend Howard Turner. Later, he’d done search on Brent Lucas.

  She felt a prickle at the back of her neck. Lucas’s name had appeared in DeVito’s memo and been all over the law enforcement net. She remembered that Lucas worked for Biddle and was a suspect in several murders. She brought up Kosinsky’s searches and saw that Smythe was one of the murder victims and that along with Wofford and Dowager he had worked at Biddle’s firm.

  A symbol blinked beside Turner’s name, meaning that more recent information was available. She updated the search, and then her breath caught in her throat. In the past forty-eight hours Turner and his wife had been found dead in what was termed a murder/suicide. Moreover, Wofford’s wife had reported her husband missing. What the hell was going on? Was Brent Lucas on a murder rampage, or did this information somehow help prove DeVito’s hypothesis? She resumed pacing, lost in thought, absently winding her red hair around her fingers until her phone finally rang.

  It was the guy from the NSA. He said one group of satellite photos were close-focus shots of each building on Biddle’s estate, also his boat. Another group were images going back thirty days, all of Biddle’s yacht and the two small cottages located in one corner of his property. DeVito had also requested infrareds of the same location but NSA needed prior notice for close-focus infrareds. They had, however, taken one shot that afternoon.

  “Anything interesting?” Jenkins asked, trying to mask her anxiety.

  The man told her that the earlier pictures seemed to show nothing at all, but several from the past week showed figures.

  “What time were they taken?” Jenkins asked.

  He said they were taken shortly after sunrise and just before sunset. The infrared shot showed what seemed to be three figures—possibly two inside the cottage and one outside in the trees.

  She thanked the man for his quick response and ordered her own copies. She hung up then printed copies of Kosinsky’s searches and read each of them more closely. She saw that Fred Wofford was the president of Biddle’s company and along with Biddle was on the national board of the New Jerusalem Fellowship. Betty Dowager was an executive assistant at the same company, and Owen Smythe had been a portfolio manager there. Kosinsky’s search on the New Jerusalem Fellowship described a church dedicated to the most radical and fundamental form of Protestantism with a focus on the approaching End of Days.

  She thought again about DeVito’s memo, saw how the dots seemed to connect, and suddenly she absolutely needed that cigarette. She rushed out of her office, went through security, and took the elevator to the lobby. She spotted the glow of a cigarette outside the revolving doors, the smoker an African American woman who worked for the Border Patrol. “Can I bum one?” she asked as she came barreling out.

  The woman threw her a resentful glance, but after a hesitation reached into her purse and brought out a pack of Marlboro Light 100’s. Jenkins snatched one then pulled out the gold-plated Zippo she always carried whether she was smoking or not. She lit the cigarette, took a long, greedy drag then exhaled. “Thanks,” she said as the smoke streamed from her mouth.

  “No problem,” the woman said, though her eyes suggested the opposite.

  Jenkins turned and stared out at the dark Newark streets as she smoked. The nicotine hit her system and calmed her, while underneath she could feel her brain starting to crank. She winced at the thought of once again bringing Prescott Biddle’s name to her superiors, but then she quashed her fear.

  The skeptics would ignore everything—the money, the satellite pho
tos, the multitude of bodies, and the interrelationships of the people. Coincidence they’d say of the New Jerusalem Fellowship and Genesis Advisors connections. They’d insist the figures in the satellite photos were gardeners or houseguests. Jenkins no longer gave a damn. Her instincts were rock solid.

  She recalled a 60 Minutes segment she’d seen a year earlier, where the leader of a radical Christian group calmly explained that his goal was to create strife in the Mideast “in order to hasten the coming of Armageddon.”

  A person would have to be insane to want that, Jenkins thought, but Biddle’s church embraced that craziness. She thought about the Turner murder/suicide. What if it hadn’t been a psychotic tragedy but a bizarre sacrifice intended to protect a secret? A secret involving eight hundred and fifty million dollars? Protect it from whom? Possibly DeVito? If this line of thinking was right, how did Brent Lucas and Owen Smythe figure in? Could they be dupes or scapegoats intended to divert attention from the real reason for the theft?

  She shook her head, still wanting to poke holes in DeVito’s logic because politically, it was poison. Then suddenly everything clicked, and the whole thing hit her: POTUS! The President’s visit was tomorrow!

  Jenkins had a good half-inch of unsmoked cigarette, but she flicked it away and started back into the building.

  “If you gonna bum one, at least smoke the damn thing,” the woman snapped.

  Jenkins ignored her. She had far bigger things on her mind. She was thinking that tonight, immediately, regardless of consequence, she had to pull together a group to find out if there were terrorists on Prescott Biddle’s estate.

  And then in the next second she finally understood why DeVito and Kosinsky had said nothing about the satellite photos.

  “Holy Shit!” she exclaimed, and she broke into a sprint and headed toward the elevator doors.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  LONG ISLAND, JULY 1