by Joseph Flynn
If all that was the case, and he was looking for the gang among the general population of the country, hiding out on a rez would be just the thing to do. Or not. Plenty of Native Americans lived off-rez. He’d bet Nahotabi Ambrose did.
John got out of the shower, dried off and got dressed.
He emailed Byron DeWitt.
Told him about the white trigger finger and his two lines of speculation.
He’d see what the FBI made of things.
Café du Monde, New Orleans
John got a table under the building’s green and white striped awning before seven-thirty. The café was open twenty-four/seven, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, almost. On Christmas Day and the six hours preceding and following the Nativity, the place was closed. There had been a momentary lull when John arrived. The table he’d chosen had a buffer of open space around it.
His order of three beignets and fresh orange juice sat before him.
Louis Mercer arrived a minute after he did, not bothered by what he said was normally an early hour for him. The moment Louis sat down, he made an announcement. “A local TV is going to air my video today.”
Realizing he’d made a mistake that made him want to kick himself, all John could say was, “What?”
“I gave you a list, remember?” Louis looked at his watch. “They recorded an interview with me right before I came here. It should be airing, along with the video, in a couple minutes. I was going home to watch it, but when you called, I set my DVR.”
John sighed. “I thought you might have waited. Synced the television broadcast with the other media exposure you mentioned. The newspapers and the magazines.”
“Nope, all at once doesn’t work as a modern media strategy. For the Internet, TV and even radio, a story’s value declines as it loses freshness. On the other hand, laying a foundation with ‘immediate’ media …” Louis made air-quotes around immediate. “That piques interest and lays the foundation for comprehensive media like magazines, books and films.”
Louis emphasized comprehensive by inflection.
He used a hand this time to point at a beignet.
“You mind if I have one of those?”
“Go ahead,” John said.
As Louis bit into the pastry with a smile, John thought he’d have to suggest to the faculty of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center that they should add a class on the impact of modern media on the investigative process to their curriculum.
He certainly hadn’t had a clue about it. He ate a beignet.
Louis told John, “I was up all night writing, but I’m still jazzed. Wired and The New York Times Magazine are bidding on my story. The Times has a prestige factor but Wired published the Iranian hostage rescue story that became the movie “Argo.” You know, the one that won this year’s best picture Oscar.”
John had seen the film. “Yeah, that was good.”
Louis swallowed the last of his beignet and was eyeing the one that remained on the plate.
John gave him a nod and he grabbed it. Scarfed it. Smiled and looked at John’s orange juice. John shook his head and picked up the glass.
Louis muffled a belch with a hand and asked, “Did you ask me here to talk about media?”
“I wanted to ask you how long I had before you went public with the pictures of the bank robbers,” he said. “Maybe ask you to hold off for a while. I never thought …”
John sighed. He’d even been prepared to threaten Louis with the power of the federal government to make his life miserable. Invoke the vice president by name, if necessary. He certainly wasn’t going to mention any of that now.
His words would only wind up in another news story.
Wouldn’t look good at all.
Yet another thing federal cops needed to know.
“Didn’t mean to mess you up, man,” Louis said. “Just striking while the old iron was hot.”
John couldn’t find it in himself to be angry. Having Louis’ images of the criminals was helpful. Might be more so, if his mother’s analysis of facial structure comparisons proved to be definitive.
“Not a problem,” John said.
Then he had an idea, maybe a bit of a reach, but Louis would be —
“What’re you thinking?” Louis asked. “You just cocked your head, and I bet if you weren’t wearing sunglasses I’d see a gleam in your eye.”
John said, “You’re telling the story of a bank robbery from your point of view, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What if one of the bad guys is planning to do the same thing?”
Louis sat back in his seat, crossed his arms over his chest.
Looking as if someone were trying to steal his winning lottery ticket.
He said, “They can’t do that. Crooks can’t profit from their crimes.”
John knew about that; Louis had it right. But maybe there was another way.
For bad guys to make good.
John said, “You’re correct about domestic law. But the Internet is global. Maybe there’s a foreign online magazine similar to Wired. Say one of the robbers submitted his story anonymously. Set up a way to get paid that couldn’t be traced.”
Louis wasn’t happy to hear John’s speculation.
“That would be the inside story of the crime, wouldn’t it?” John said.
“Shit,” Louis said.
Now, he appeared tired as well as disgruntled.
“Wasn’t there some guy who wrote a novel about a presidential campaign without giving his name?” John asked.
“Primary Colors,” Louis said. “Book cover listed the author as Anonymous. Turned out to be Joe Klein, a reporter and columnist. He was uncovered but only because he had a lot of other published writing to use as comparisons.”
John said, “Hmm. Probably unlikely a bank robber is broadly published. So you couldn’t catch him that way. But if he’s looking to make a splash on his first try …you think you could use your media contacts to see if anyone is peddling such a story, here or abroad?”
Deep in a funk now, thinking his thunder might be stolen, Louis asked, “What good would that do me?”
John leaned forward, slid his glass of orange juice over to Louis.
“Well, if you can help me find these guys, and I can lock them up before they do any deals, you’re covered. There aren’t any TV or publishing opportunities inside a federal prison.”
Louis brightened. His fatigue fell away. He guzzled the juice.
“Now, you’re talking.” He got to his feet. “Man, I’m all over this.”
Louis left without saying goodbye.
John didn’t seriously think the bank robbers would do a story on their own. But who knew? He’d never have thought Louis would reap a fortune from trying to refinance a motorcycle either.
He’d made the best retrieval from his mistake that he could.
In that spirit, he ordered more beignets and orange juice.
The White House, Washington DC
Vice President Jean Morrissey’s video conference with the mayors of the five largest cities in the United States — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Philadelphia — went live at nine a.m. She could have done the conference from her office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, but she chose to use her White House office.
Nothing commanded attention like a message straight from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Jean Morrissey paid careful attention to how Patricia Darden Grant went about her job. You not only had to outthink the other guy, you had to look good doing it. Stagecraft was a large, indispensable part of a successful presidency.
She was coming to think that a happy, solid marriage was part of it, too. The president earned her own standing with the voters, but her position was buttressed by James J. McGill. He was a roaring success as the first presidential husband. He’d shown he could crack a joke or bust a nose with equal panache.
Finding a good man, eliminating the need to look for a date at state
dinners, would be smart politics. It would be good for her, too. Her most recent boyfriend, the headmaster of a prestigious Washington school, had succumbed to the rigors of dating the vice president after the corpse of a street person, made to look like his beloved sister, had been left in the trunk of his car.
She could hardly blame him for that.
Still, it left her without a man in her life.
Finding a more stalwart replacement wouldn’t be easy. For one thing, any man she chose would inevitably be compared to Jim McGill. That was just the way the popular press worked these days. She’d need to find someone who was smart, charming, handsome and tough as nails. Every girl’s dream. Unfortunately, that kind of guy —
Just knocked on her door and asked, “Madam Vice President, may I come in?”
Deputy Director Byron DeWitt. He’d come to apprise her of Special Agent Tall Wolf’s latest report from New Orleans. She heard and remembered every word. And never stopped thinking: What about him?
Would they make too cute a couple?
If that was the only drawback, she could live with it.
She could already see he was interested in at least a physical way.
The vice president decided to explore if there were other levels of compatibility.
She’d start after she got on with the video conference. She told the five mayors, “Good morning and thank you for setting aside this time for me. I’m speaking to you on the president’s behalf. She wants me to inform you that our country’s foreign intelligence community is working overtime to determine whether the recent bank robbery in New Orleans was a cover to test a cyberattack on America’s critical infrastructure.
“Our initial reading is that a foreign power was involved in taking down New Orleans’ power grid and causing all the traffic signals to show green at the same time. We also think there will be another attack. Every resource we have will be deployed to prevent such an attack from happening, but we can’t be sure that we’ll succeed.
“If there is another attack, our intelligence community thinks it will be directed at a larger population center. Most likely, it would come against one of your cities. So that’s where we’ll be deploying the most personnel and resources.”
— Chapter 14 —
Easy Money Motel, Las Vegas, Nevada
For all its glitz and illusions of glamour, the gambling capital of the United States was only the country’s thirty-first largest city. The president had former careers in modeling and acting, but on the advice of her agents, she’d avoided the neon gaming Mecca in the desert. The vice president had a far more personal reason to give the place a miss. Her late father had been a gambling addict.
After Mom finally gave up trying to rehabilitate him and filed for divorce, as Jean Morrissey was entering high school, Dad left Minnesota and moved to Las Vegas.
He somehow got a job as a card dealer. Sent his kids postcards two or three times a year. When Jean was a senior in high school, he didn’t show up for his shift at work one night, and nobody ever heard from him again. His girlfriend called Mom to say he’d been murdered.
She never said why she suspected foul play, and then she disappeared, too.
The best guess was they both got title to six feet of desert outside of town.
Experts who studied foreign terrorist organizations often mentioned Las Vegas as a high probability target. If nothing else, its gaudy infidel decadence called out for a strike. But the town wasn’t on the radar for either of the two women at the top of the federal government.
Corey Price was once again awakened by an urgent knock on his motel room door.
Having had a reason to celebrate the night before, he woke up with a hangover. He held his head in both hands and said, “Jesus Christ, what now?”
In response, a voice said, “It’s me.”
No further identification was needed. Tut Warren was the most imperturbable guy in the gang. He rarely spoke, but when he did his Alabama drawl was unmistakable. Price got out of bed and let him into the room.
He looked up and down the hallway, didn’t see anyone else up and about yet.
He closed and locked the door behind Tut.
“What’s going on?” Price asked.
Never a man to waste words, Tut just turned on the room’s television. An older model, it took a moment to bring up a fuzzy picture. Tut tuned it to a channel with a news program and —
Holy shit, Price thought. There they were. Robbing the damn bank in New Orleans. It was a video clip lasting maybe twenty seconds. Showed all six of them inside the place. Then it replayed in a loop.
Price said, “How the hell —”
Tut held up a hand. “Watch.”
With the loop running in a little box in the top right corner of the screen, another shot was stacked under it. The face of some guy with a beard Price had never —
“Oh, hell,” he said. “I remember that guy. He was one of the people in the bank when we charged into it.”
Tut nodded. On the left side of the screen were two TV news people, a man and a woman.
A name appeared under the bearded guy’s chin: Louis Mercer.
“Bastard,” Price said.
Under Louis’ name were the words: Recorded earlier today.
Louis said, “I just happened to be in the bank. Like everyone else in the world, I always have my phone with me. So I decided to use it. I thought it might be helpful.”
The loop of the robbery filled the whole screen again.
Price and Tut shook their heads.
Tut turned off the television.
Price said, “I never saw that asshole taking pictures. How could we have missed him?”
“First time robbin’ a bank for all of us.”
“There’s always goddamn something.”
“I wasn’t watchin’ TV this mornin’, we wouldn’t know about this.”
“We thought we were cool when we knocked out the bank’s cameras,” Price said.
“Always something to fuck you up.”
That pretty well summed up the life stories for the whole gang.
“So now what?” Tut asked. “We quit?”
Another thing about the gang: They were all diehards.
Price said, “I had fun in New Orleans. How about you?”
“It was better’n most a the sex I had the past five years.”
“If we keep going,” Price said, “it’ll have to be all of us. One guy’s out, we all gotta quit.”
A guy left the gang, he’d be the first one the cops would flip.
Give all the rest of them up for a light sentence.
“True,” Tut said.
“Talk to the others and let me know. One more thing: We do another job, we take everyone’s cell phone.”
Tut nodded and left.
No sooner was Price alone again than his phone rang.
Half-expecting a cop to be on the line, he said, “Yeah?”
“Didn’t wake you, did I?” It was his literary agent.
“No.”
“Good. Listen, I could hear it in your voice yesterday. You were disappointed by the advance you were offered for your book. So I want to give you something more hopeful to think about.”
“What’s that?”
“I talked to a movie producer last night. We went to dinner and I told him about your book deal. He said he liked your story. Wants to read the book. So I told the publisher about that at breakfast this morning. He said if the producer options your book, he’ll double your advance.”
“That’s good,” Price said.
“Yeah, and if a movie goes into production, we’re looking at big league money.”
“Christ.”
“You’re happy, right?” the agent asked.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m happy.”
“Good. Here’s the only other thing for you to think about. The producer says you have to finish your year big to help him find financing for the movie. You still have that in you?”
Price told him what he’d done last night.
The agent said, “Just what we want. That’s beautiful.”
“Yeah,” Price said.
Now if he could only do it again. Under pressure.
— Chapter 15 —
Woldenberg Park, French Quarter, New Orleans
John sat on a park bench looking out at the Mississippi River. He had his laptop resting on his thighs. He expected Marcellus Darcy to join him shortly. Before the postal inspector arrived, his phone rang.
“Special Agent Tall Wolf?”
“Yes.”
“This is Aggie Bing.”
It took him a moment to remember the name. She was the animal control officer he’d met while looking for a garage that might have hidden eight Indian motorcycles. He asked, “You have any news for me, Officer Bing?”
“Only the second best kind, and you can call me Aggie.”
“Okay, Aggie, what’s second best mean?”
“Means the police cadets and me have eliminated any garage space in the French Quarter big enough to hide eight motorcycles. So at least you know where the bikes you’re lookin’ for aren’t.”
That was something, John thought. “Thank you, Aggie, that helps a little.”
“Worked out better for me. We found the creeps that dumped that poor little wallaby. They had all sorts of illegal snakes, lizards and other critters. One of the snakes bit the wallaby. That’s what killed it.”
“You got your bad guys cold?”
Aggie laughed. “Colder than my former mother-in-law’s frown. You done me a solid, Special Agent. Don’t suppose you’d let a girl buy you a drink?”
“I’m still working my case.”
After a moment’s silence, Aggie said, “Bet you have someone special, too.”
“I do.”
“You got a brother?”
The question stopped John cold. He knew his biological mother had died, but it had never occurred to him to ask if she’d given birth again before she passed away. If she had —