Sometimes, though, the fruit turned out to be more than he expected. Not just an apple, but something more exotic.
“I can tell you the IMEI of the phone connected to it,” Gant said. “Another Bhozarj. It connected ten seconds before the blast and went to voicemail.”
“Tell me you have that recording,” Sanders said, his words both wary and hopeful.
“Just tones,” Gant said.
“Tones?”
“Eight-three-six-six,” Gant shared. “The lights went out two milliseconds after the final number was received.”
Eight-three-six-six…
“That’s the trigger code,” Sanders said.
“V-E-N-N,” Gant said. “That ties everything together nicely.”
It did. But not completely.
“Now, Mr. Gant, I’m going to need you to place a call.”
“A call. Who am I calling?”
“The Attorney General of the United States,” Sanders said.
Gant almost laughed but managed just a chuckling cough. “Excuse me?”
“You’ll have to retrieve his personal cell phone number, but I assume that is within your abilities.”
“Yeah, fine, I can do that,” Gant said. “But what am I going to say to him?”
“You’re going to alert him that, in twelve hours, you will provide him with the location of Simon Lynch,” Sanders said. “This location.”
Kirby Gant stared at the man, waiting for some explanation. None came. Not yet.
“You will then log and record any calls the Attorney General makes immediately after your contact and will provide a copy to me,” Sanders said. “There is an SD card in the backpack. You can use that for the copy.”
“Excuse me for just a minute, but…what?”
Sanders crossed his arms and cocked his head slightly at the hacker. “Emily LaGrange has decided to trust me. I think you should, too, which means that further questions are only going to delay what must be done. And we don’t have unlimited time.”
Kirby considered the man’s words for a moment. A short moment. He’d come this far following the stranger’s directives and, if Emily was onboard, there was no reason for him to jump ship.
“The SD card will work fine,” Gant said.
Sanders nodded, pleased. “All right. Find the number and make the call.”
Forty One
Angelo Breem kept the phone to his ear even after the call had ended and considered one thing the caller had stated above all else.
‘Who else knows the players? Who else could get your number so easily? You know who this is, and you know I can deliver him to you.’
There was only one person who it could be. Connected to Jefferson. To Lynch. And possessing the skills to make any communications system his bitch.
Rothchild…
If what Damian Traeger had told him about the old hacker taking flight was true, then he could very easily have arranged with LaGrange all that had happened. That he had done so to fully free himself of the shackles his past crimes had fixed upon him was a clear motive. As clear as his conditions.
‘Full pardon. End of story. No more baggage. My freedom for Lynch.’
That was the deal Kirby Gant, aka Rothchild, was offering. No—demanding. He’d given Breem twelve hours to make arrangements. Then he would call and, if they had a deal, he’d give Lynch’s location. What he’d said next, though, when challenged as to how he would know where Lynch was, had sealed his own fate.
‘Because I’ll be with him.’
“So be it, Rothchild,” Breem said to himself as he sat at his desk in the Justice Department’s Pennsylvania Avenue headquarters. Across the street was the FBI. Either direction up and down the famed thoroughfare were the Capitol and the White House. He sat at the center of power in the most power-hungry city on the planet.
But one person, one man, held sway over him. For now.
Breem looked up the number for the Wilstone Place Hotel and placed the call he would have had to make at some point. Now, though, he had something to offer. Something which would end the threat that Damian Traeger posed to him.
“Yes, Mr. Holman’s room please,” Breem said when the hotel operator answered.
* * *
He’d arrived in the United States as Lawrence Oberlin, and checked into the Wilstone Place Hotel as Joseph Holman, but the call placed to the sixth-floor room was answered by Damian Traeger.
“You have what I want?” he asked, certain of the caller even before the man spoke. No one else had reason to ring him. No one knew he was even in the country. That gave the caller some bit of power, but he would never wield it. He was cowed. What would American’s call him? A boot licker? A toady? He was all those things, Traeger knew, but he cared more about what the man could give him than what he was.
“I will,” Angelo Breem said. “I’ll have the location in twelve hours.”
“Why not right now?”
* * *
The Attorney General came around his desk and stood at the center of his spacious office. He could offer Traeger what he wanted but needed assurances of his own in the exchange that was still to come. In doing so, he couldn’t share too much. Rothchild could be as valuable to the man as he was to Breem right then. He could offer Traeger things. Information. Enough, maybe, to allow a power imbalance to continue.
That could not happen.
“The location won’t be available until then,” Breem said.
“This does not sound like it comes from an investigative effort,” Traeger said.
Breem silently winced. The man was reading the situation far too accurately.
“This sounds more like something a source would provide,” Traeger added.
“Listen, I’ll have the location, but I need something from you,” Breem said.
“I wasn’t aware this had become a negotiation.”
“Please,” Breem calmly implored. “What you want will be there. But what about others at the location?”
The line quieted. Breem waited. Worried.
“Hello?”
“You wish a problem to go away,” Traeger said.
Breem hesitated now. He glanced to his office door. Nothing in the space was being recorded. His cell phone was a personal device, not his secured model. What he was about to do would be overheard by no one, but still he was unnerved.
“I do,” Angelo Breem said.
“I’m only interested in one thing,” Traeger told him. “Anything else will be dealt with.”
“Good,” Breem said. “Good.”
“I’ll expect your call in twelve hours,” Traeger said.
Breem heard the call end. He put his phone away and dropped to his knees, breathing fast. After a moment he calmed and looked to his hands, only slight tremors visible in each.
“It’s going to work,” the United States Attorney General told himself. “It’s going to be fine.”
* * *
Kirby Gant pulled the SD card from the slot in the laptop’s side and held it out to Sanders.
“Jesus…”
“It would appear that the Attorney General just suggested that an American citizen should be eliminated so that a criminal conspiracy could continue,” Sanders said. He pocketed the SD card. “A pity that can’t be used against him. Fruit of the poison tree.”
Gant had been through enough legal proceedings as an accused felon, an actual felon, and an ex-felon, that he understood the legal meaning of what Sanders had said. The recording had been obtained through an illegal wiretap. It could never be used in a court of law.
“But, in the right hands, it will certainly make people take an interest in the man,” Sanders said.
Quod est necessarium est licitum…
Maybe not entirely in this instance, but he could live with that. Taking Angelo Breem down had been a part the plan before Emily’s call. That remained an objective, but the man’s use as a conduit to ensnare himself would be all the more satisfying if the new pieces fell
into place.
“You want me to write down the hotel and the name he checked in under?” Gant asked.
Sanders nodded. “Please.”
Gant stood and fished a pen and slip of paper from a drawer in the kitchen, then returned to the dining table and jotted the information down. “You said you wanted something added to the message.”
“I do,” Sanders said. He relayed the changes to be made and watched as Kirby Gant fed the message through the KIWI software again, the hacker taking a new screenshot to replace the original he’d captured. “Same thing—send that as soon as she makes contact.”
Kirby Gant nodded and stared at the cyphertext. He couldn’t read it, but he knew what it would say in plain English. And that scared the hell out of him.
“It’ll work,” Sanders told him, keying in on the obvious concern, offering a fuller explanation of what was to come. And what would be required of him. “You can do this, Kirby.”
“I sure as hell hope so,” Gant said. “I kind of enjoy breathing and being alive and all that stuff.”
Sanders smiled at the old hacker. He’d both volunteered and been drafted into the affair now unfolding. How different things might have been with Art Jefferson involved and not Emily LaGrange, there was no way to know. The retired FBI agent had a reputation for being difficult. Hard headed. And right. His younger replacement had a way to go to match those traits, but she was off to a fast start.
“When Emily and Simon get here, make the call to Breem,” Sanders said. “After that, just follow the plan.”
Kirby Gant nodded and stood. “All right.”
“I’ll see you soon, Kirby.”
Sanders left the house and walked briskly down the gravel driveway to where he’d parked his car two hundred yards from the house. He didn’t get in. Instead he walked into the woods and up a gentle slope adjacent to the narrow path that led to the road, stopping just short of the crest.
“Maddy,” he said, his tone loud and urgent.
A dozen yards away, where the hill began to tip over to the reverse slope, an armed figure rose, dark green camouflage obscuring the person almost entirely. Almost.
“What is it?” Madeline Harrison asked as she moved down from the crest to meet the group’s leader. Behind her, and along the crest, a half-dozen warriors rose as well, a mix of weapons at the ready. Long rifles topped with scopes. Assault rifles. Even a bulky squad automatic weapon. Taken as a whole, the former Army officer appeared to have assembled a force ready to inflict maximum damage.
Now, though, another approach to ending the situation had presented itself.
“Stand down,” Sanders told her. “Pull your people. Disperse. You’ve done your part, Maddy.”
“They’re not coming?”
“They are, but the plan has changed,” Sanders said.
The security he’d had her put in place for Simon Lynch’s arrival was not going to be necessary. There would be no fusillade of fire to end any threat to him. At least not from her people.
“You don’t need me anymore,” she said, a hint of melancholy in the realization. “It’s all over.”
Sanders nodded and offered his hand. “Thank you, Maddy. Thank you. For everything.”
There was more to say, but no time to say it. Sanders turned from her and walked down the slope toward his car, taking one of his secure cell phones from a pocket and dialing, not bothering with a text.
“Hello.”
Lane sounded perplexed by the direct communication. Maybe even a little startled.
“I need something,” Sanders told the man from Justice. “It’s not up your alley, but I can’t get the right people there in time.”
One of Harrison’s people would be his choice. What needed to be done was the closest thing to direct action just shy of pulling a trigger. And there was a chance it could spiral into a confrontation where that very thing would happen. But he was out of options.
“Are you willing?” Sanders asked.
There wasn’t any hesitation. At all.
“For anything,” Michael Lane told the group’s leader.
Sanders spent the next few minutes explaining what was needed to the man as he climbed in his car and drove away. That call complete, he made another.
“She called,” Sanders told Porter.
“She had to,” the man from the CIA said. “What is she going to do with him on her own? She has no allies other than us.”
“We’re not her allies,” Sanders said. “Not yet. Not until we deliver.”
They were not discussing the operation in the lavatory of a bar this time. It was taking place bouncing between telecommunications hubs which, both knew, were monitored by sophisticated systems belonging to the very entity that wanted Simon Lynch back.
But theirs was one of a billion conversations happening. It would have to be tagged first by a computer somewhere, then logged, queued, and analyzed. That would take time. For a while, that hadn’t been on their side. Now it was. To a degree.
“I need one more thing from you,” Sanders said.
“Anything,” Porter said.
“I need you to go to Albany for me,” Sanders told him. “With a message.”
“For who?”
Sanders explained. It was a straightforward assignment, but they were down to principals now, everyone doing their part without a layer of operatives between them and the actions. Sato had stepped up. As had Harrison. Lane. And now Melvin Porter would add his name to those who were giving their all, risking everything, for this very last operation.
“You’re clear on it?” Sanders asked.
“She’ll cooperate?” Porter asked.
“You’ll be the first to know,” Sanders replied.
“And you?”
“I have one more person to see,” Sanders said. He paused after answering the man. “We’re never going to speak again, you know.”
“It’s that final?”
“It is,” Sanders told him as he steered onto the highway, though the finality he knew to be coming was not what his friend was imagining. “Take care, my friend.”
Sanders hung up and rolled the passenger window down as he drove south over the bridge that crossed the Allegheny. He tossed the phone across the seat and watched it sail over the concrete barrier that hemmed in the lane. He heard no splash, but he didn’t need to. The deed was done.
He had a five-and-a-half-hour drive to D.C. ahead of him. About the same that Emily LaGrange had to reach that very city. It hadn’t been part of the plan that Jefferson and Gant had imagined, nor that Emily had signed onto, but it was now. And that plan, changed as it was, had acquired more moving pieces than Sanders was fully comfortable with. But he had to take the chance that it would work. There could be no doubt this time.
Simon Lynch had to be removed from the equation. For good.
* * *
“I lost some people,” the team leader told his employer. “We almost had them in Kansas.”
Damian Traeger held the phone to his ear as he listened to the man’s report. He stood at the hotel window and watched the fading light of day twinkle upon the Potomac. The people he’d contracted had been spread thin, attempting to locate the savant and his protector while also making a move on Kirby Gant. Both had been unsuccessful endeavors, but he could not hold such failures against the man he’d reached out to. There was too much he needed him for in the upcoming hours.
“We’ll have their location soon,” Traeger said. “Do you have sufficient people in the northeast to make a move tomorrow?”
“I’ll move what I need,” the team leader said. “You’re certain of the geography?”
Traeger was making an educated assumption. Breem had given him no hint as to even a general location. But if Kirby Gant was involved, which he believed to be true, then the map where any hideout was located was constricted. He’d abandoned his home to flee, and that spoke to guilt. He was involved now, as he had been with Jefferson, trading one dead former FBI agent
for a soon-to-be dead one. Emily LaGrange would be joined at the hip to the savant, and she would die in that very spot. As would the man once known as Rothchild.
He’s your source, Mr. Attorney General…
It hadn’t taken Traeger long to come to that conclusion after ending his call with Angelo Breem. Gant, at some point, was likely to know where the savant would be, and there was much incentive for him to cut a deal to allow him some kind of future. There was inherent value in Simon Lynch, but in an aging hacker? Even less than one might think—now, at least. He would be eliminated along with Emily LaGrange, both almost certainly a proverbial stone’s throw from Pittsburgh.
“They’ll be near,” Traeger assured the man. “You’ll have your target by morning.”
He ended the call and set his personal cell phone on the night stand next to the device. It looked so harmless, he thought. So ordinary. Just as Simon Lynch must have to those doctors who’d recognized his difference when he was but a child. They would have had no idea, just as no one would imagine what made the off-brand cell phone special. And dangerous.
In short order, once he had the savant, he could, at will, replicate the singular device he possessed at the moment. Or threaten to. Power, and the will to administer it, was the pinnacle of evolution, Traeger knew. From the first quasi-primate that picked up a stick as a weapon, to him, the lineage was long, and it was illustrious.
If a man was to have a legacy, let it not be wasted offspring. Let it be a mark he made. A reminder to the world of who he was, and what he’d done.
A man also needed to eat. And drink. There was a well-reviewed restaurant across the street from his hotel. The mood in the city was grim. Despite their roles, the hotel staff had been hard pressed to not let show how devastated they were with the terrible events that transpired in Baltimore. Damian Traeger saw that as validation. And as reason to celebrate.
Simon Sees (An Art Jefferson Thriller Book 5) Page 39