Red Cell Seven

by Stephen Frey

  The badge was fake, but it looked heavy and real, and the kid bought in to its authenticity immediately. “I want to know who in here helped this woman,” Troy said, stowing the badge before pulling out his cell phone and showing the kid the picture of Jennie he’d taken during his first visit to the hospital.

  “Wow,” the young guy murmured as he glanced at the picture, “she’s pretty.”

  “She was in a few days ago,” Troy continued, “a few minutes before the attack here went down. I have her credit card receipt. She bought a phone in this store. And according to those credit card records, your company is her service provider as well.”

  “Okay.”

  Troy skipped to a picture he had of the sales receipt for the phone. One of Travers’s contacts had found it and e-mailed it over. Troy pointed to a number on the screen after he expanded the receipt. “That’s the salesman’s number on the receipt. Who is it?”

  The kid’s expression brightened. “That’s Chad’s ID number. He’s right there.”

  Chad was on the other side of the store and looked over when he heard his name. “How can I help you, sir?”

  Troy moved quickly to where Chad was standing. “You helped this woman just before the attack here.” Troy showed him the picture of Jennie lying in the hospital bed. “Do you remember her?”

  Chad rolled his eyes. “How could I forget her? She’s beautiful. I asked her out while she was buying the phone. I thought I was golden, but then all of a sudden she had to go.” He shook his head as he glanced at her photo again. “Is she all right? My God, did she get shot in the attack?” he asked as his voice rose quickly.

  “She’ll be fine,” Troy answered, stowing the phone in his pocket and quickly pulling out and flashing the badge again. “According to the records I have in my possession, your company is also her service provider.”

  “Yeah, I remember. That’s right.”

  “I want to see the record of her calls for the last thirty days.”

  Chad spread his hands wide. “Hey, man, I can’t let you—”

  “You can, and you will,” Travers interrupted, leaning past Troy and over the counter so Chad had to lean back. “Otherwise you’ll be in direct conflict with the federal government’s ongoing investigation of the Holiday Mall Attacks. Is that what you want, son? I don’t think so,” he said firmly, answering his own question. “With what’s going on in the world right now, that could land you in Leavenworth doing hard time for ten-to-twenty. Now show us those phone records of hers.”

  “WE HAVE to leave,” Gadanz said into Sasha’s ear when he’d made it inside their Manassas townhouse and turned the stereo up loud.

  For all he knew Daniel had planted listening devices in the home. Hopefully, the stereo would give them cover if there were bugs in here.

  “I need time to get my affairs in order at the company, and then we have to leave.”

  Forty minutes ago, he’d hurried off the plane from Miami and raced home from Dulles in the Accord, terrified that something had happened to Sasha when he couldn’t reach her after calling her number three times on the way. He’d prepared himself to find them all dead, murdered by Kaashif or one of Daniel’s men as a clear message not to fuck up and to toe the line.

  “Do you understand?”

  Jacob had almost been overcome by relief when she met him just inside the door a moment ago. Maybe he’d let his paranoia go too far; maybe the cocaine was still playing tricks on him—he hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours now, and it had been so pure he was still feeling it. Whatever it was, he was completely convinced they had to get out fast even though everything appeared to be fine. This afternoon Jacob was going to arrange a move to new quarters for the death squad here in northern Virginia, to make it seem like he was cooperating and doing what he’d been told. But once that was checked off the list, he wasn’t doing anything else for Daniel or Kaashif. Once the squad had been moved, he was going to transfer two million dollars out of Gadanz & Company—the most he possibly could—to where it would never be found. He and the girls would have to live on that money for the rest of their lives, because he could never lift his head above ground again and expect to survive.

  “We’ll pack whatever we can, put it in the minivan tonight, and take off first thing tomorrow morning.” Tears were already spilling down Sasha’s cheeks. “We’ll be all right, sweetheart, I promise we will.”

  “Jacob,” she said as he gently wiped moisture from her face, “does this have anything to do with the Holiday Mall Attacks?”

  He gazed down at her for several moments, and then nodded once.

  She turned and raced for the stairs to pack.

  “JESUS CHRIST,” Travers muttered as they pulled to a stop in a parking spot at the Fairfax County Hospital.

  “What is it, Major?”

  Travers glanced up from his phone and over at Troy with a shell-shocked expression. “Don’t get too fond of Jennie.”

  “What do you mean? Why not?”

  “Remember I told you and your father about following Kaashif from Philadelphia down here to northern Virginia?”

  “Sure.”

  “How Kaashif went to see a woman in Manassas named Imelda Smith?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  Travers held his phone up. “I just got a report back from one of my guys. You’re not going to believe this.”

  “Try me.”

  “One of the numbers on Jennie’s list of calls for the last thirty days is for Imelda Smith.”

  Troy’s heart skipped a beat, and the world suddenly seemed to be closing in around him. And then his phone went off with a text. “Holy shit,” he whispered as the words on the tiny screen blurred in front of him. He’d run a detailed background check on Jennie Perez, and the results were in.

  Jennie was Lisa Martinez’s first cousin. No damn wonder they reminded him so much of each other.

  SOPHIE AND Elaina shrieked with joy as they jumped from the school bus and ran for their father.

  Jacob scooped up Sophie in one big arm and hugged Elaina with the other. He kissed Sophie several times, then put her down and hugged and kissed Elaina.

  He didn’t care about money anymore, he realized as he gazed at Sasha over Elaina’s slender shoulder. She was doing her best to hold back her emotions, but he knew what she was going through. She wanted to get out of here right away, but he had to move the squad and the money.

  He’d been a bastard last night in Florida, he’d given in to terrible temptation and all that Daniel held dear. Well, that would never happen again, he promised himself as he hugged his girls. Tomorrow morning they would drive somewhere, anywhere that was far, far from here, and settle down quickly into an anonymous life. From this day forward he would cherish and do anything he could for the three people he cared most about in the world—his three girls.

  And he would kill anyone who tried to harm them.

  CHAPTER 29

  TROY KISSED Little Jack’s forehead and then handed him carefully back to Cheryl. He loved the way the boy smelled; he couldn’t get enough of that new-baby aroma. It was so fresh and beautiful—except when the little guy had an accident, like now.

  “I’ll take care of everything,” Cheryl said, laughing and rolling her eyes as she took the bundle from Troy.

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem.”

  Bill and Troy were sitting at the card table in the Jensen basement. His father hadn’t seemed himself tonight at all, Troy realized. It wasn’t that he seemed preoccupied; he seemed depressed, which worried Troy. Bill was always the rock. He wasn’t always pleasant, but he was always calm and collected at crunch time when people around him were panicking.

  Right now was one of those times the country needed Bill to be calm and focused. Ten more attacks today, and once again, none of the guilty had been apprehended. Local law enforcement h
ad arrested two men in Boise, Idaho, where an attack believed to have been perpetrated by one of the death squads had been carried out at a shopping center in the suburbs, killing five and wounding seven. But the arrests had turned out to be false. Just a couple of guys in a pickup truck heading into the mountains to hunt elk and loaded down with weapons and ammunition, pulled over on their way out of town by ten cop cars and a SWAT team.

  “You all right?” Cheryl asked as she leaned down to kiss Bill’s cheek on the way out of the room.

  “Fine. Why?”

  “You’re not yourself tonight,” she said as she headed for the door.

  “That’s ridiculous. And do not bring that baby back in here.”

  “See?”

  “Stop it, Cheryl.”

  “I know you too well,” she said as she reached back for the handle to close the door behind her. “Something’s not right.”

  When she was gone, Bill muttered a few unintelligible words and then pointed at Troy without looking. It was another sure sign that something was wrong. He always made direct eye contact when he was giving an order. It was a holdover habit from his Marine days.

  “Come on out, Major,” Troy called toward the closet.

  When Travers had emerged from his usual hiding spot and was seated at the table again, Bill took a deep breath. “Where are we?” he asked, rubbing his eyes.

  “We wanted to give you an update.” He and Travers had been at the house for an hour, but Bill had been on the phone until ten minutes ago, supposedly dealing with an issue at First Manhattan. Troy could tell Travers was starting to get impatient. Taking another roundabout way through the woods to get to the mansion tonight hadn’t helped the major’s demeanor, either. “It’s important.”

  “Okay, go.”

  “I know you weren’t happy about me seeing this Jennie Perez woman in the first place, but—”

  “It wasn’t that,” Bill interrupted. “I just thought it was a distraction.”

  “Well, it turns out it wasn’t.”

  “Oh?”

  His father’s tone just then had seemed odd. It was almost as if he’d been expecting this development, Troy thought. “She knew a woman named Imelda Smith,” he explained. “Or was at least having consistent contact with her.”

  “Imelda Smith is the person Kaashif went to see in Manassas, Virginia,” Travers reminded Bill. “It was the day I followed him all the way down there from Philly. Kaashif is the young man who I interrogated last—”

  “I remember, Major. How do you know they were in contact?”

  “Phone records. Apparently, Ms. Perez and Imelda spoke nine times in the two weeks prior to the attacks. Some of the calls lasted for over ten minutes.”

  “After we left the hospital the second time,” Troy spoke up when Travers was done, “we drove out to Imelda’s place in Manassas, but nobody was there. A neighbor told us he’d seen a van out in front of her place a few days ago. He’d never seen the van before, and since then Imelda hasn’t been around. He admitted that maybe it was just a coincidence, but he was genuinely concerned, no doubt. He told us Imelda has a five-year-old son. The guy hasn’t seen the boy lately, either, and he was worried about it. We went inside after we finished talking to the guy, and it looked like there’d definitely been a struggle in the kitchen. Dishes and pans were scattered everywhere, and there were several chairs overturned. The door to the outside wasn’t locked, either.”

  “That’s terrible,” Bill said quietly, chin almost on his chest.

  “You okay, Dad?”

  “I’m fine,” Bill retorted angrily, forcing emotion into his voice. “I’m dealing with something at the firm, that’s all. You all need to stop this crap.”

  His father dealt with difficult issues all day long at First Manhattan, and he never acted like this. Oftentimes, in fact, he seemed to revel in problem-solving through confrontation. The explanation about First Manhattan causing his sour mood seemed pretty lame.

  “You said you went to the hospital a second time today,” Bill spoke up. “Why?”

  “I wanted to see Ms. Perez’s physical charts.”

  “Why?”

  “I just did.”

  “And?”

  “And we got into a records room, and it turns out she hadn’t been shot in the back like Dr. Harrison told me she had. That was all a lie.”

  Bill’s expression remained impassive.

  “She’s Lisa Martinez’s cousin,” Troy continued. “I ran a background check on her, and that connection came up right away. Ms. Perez was born in Brooklyn and moved to Virginia when she was ten. But I’m betting she and Lisa stayed close after she moved.”

  “What are you saying?” Bill asked.

  Troy glanced at Travers, then back at Bill. “I think what’s going on is pretty obvious.” He and Travers had run this logic through their collective gray matter several times today on the way up to Connecticut. “Jennie Perez is working with whoever’s behind the Mall Attacks.” Troy waited for a response from Bill, but got nothing. “These people must know something about Red Cell Seven, Dad. They must have contacted her to try to get to us, maybe to you specifically. I think they figured out somehow that Lisa and I were involved and that I was in RCS.” He paused. This was the key to the connection. “Maybe Maddux had something to do with them finding out—maybe everything, in fact. Maybe Maddux put together the whole thing, like he did with the LNG tankers heading for Boston and Virginia. Maybe the terrorists told Ms. Perez that I murdered Lisa after Maddux told them to tell her that.”

  “Why would you murder Lisa?” Bill asked, obviously unconvinced.

  “Maybe because Troy had told her to get an abortion,” Travers spoke up, “and she wouldn’t.”

  “She’d already had the baby at that point.”

  “Maybe we argued about it,” Troy said. “Maybe it was just passion boiling over. Ms. Perez would have been bitter and ready to believe anything if she and Lisa were close. They figured she’d want to get revenge, and they were right. They would have had an easy time signing her up to be their agent if they fed her all that. Look, it could be the same terrorist group Maddux was involved with on the tankers. In fact, it probably is.”

  Bill shook his head. “I don’t think—”

  “So what was Jennie Perez doing talking to Imelda Smith? And what was she doing in the mall right before the attacks went down? It’s too coincidental.” Troy was getting revved up, pissed at Bill’s stonewalling. “The sales guy at the cell phone store said Ms. Perez was real calm one second, but when she suddenly realized what time it was, she took off. Why would she do that?”

  “It’s a stretch, Troy. And you know it is.”

  “Where there’s smoke there’s usually fire.”

  “Usually but not always.”

  Why was his father doing this? “We couldn’t find her new phone anywhere. It wasn’t with her possessions at the hospital, and no one turned it in. I think she had information on it that was important to them. The guy at the store who helped her said he transferred a lot of data over from her old phone. It’s a natural to think that’s what was going on.”

  “Someone at the mall must have gotten the phone,” Bill said. “If she was working with them, why would they shoot her?”

  Bill kept putting up roadblocks everywhere on this. Unfortunately, that was the one question Troy and Travers couldn’t find an answer to, either.

  “What about Kaashif, Major?” Bill asked, glancing at Travers. “Did you get any data on him from your phone, from the TQ app?”

  “Yes, sir. We believe Kaashif met very recently with a man named Jacob Gadanz who lives in Manassas. The data from my phone shows us that Kaashif went to the offices of a company Gadanz owns, and then later went to a location very near Gadanz’s home. So we assume it was Gadanz who Kaashif was meeting with.”

  “
What kind of company is it?”

  For the first time tonight Troy saw fire in his father’s eyes. “Gadanz and Company operates a chain of convenience stores.”

  “So it deals with lots of cash,” Bill said quietly. “So it has money-laundering capability and would be able to spread lots of cash around easily.”

  “That’s right,” Travers agreed, gesturing at Troy. “That’s what we thought, too.”

  “Did you run any lines on Gadanz?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Do it,” Bill ordered. “Immediately. Sounds like you’re on to something there.”

  “PLEASE TELL ME,” the man whispered compassionately. “I don’t want to hurt you. Just tell me where it is.”

  Nancy Carlson gazed forlornly at the ski-masked man, her mouth dry from the nasty-tasting gag he’d stuffed in there hours ago. In the end, Roger had told her where only one of the two documents was hidden. He’d told her there were two, but he hadn’t told her the hiding place of the other one. She was terrified this man would be furious when he realized that she only knew of the whereabouts of the one document and he’d go into an insane rage. She’d been worried about this day coming for forty years, but her worry had grown to terror the moment she’d found Roger slumped over the steering wheel of his car outside the townhouse in Georgetown. She’d cried for him when she’d realized he was dead—and then for herself. She’d considered leaving immediately, but she’d put it off. Now she was regretting that decision.

  Her eyes flickered around the dimly lit room. She didn’t know where she was now, but she knew it wasn’t Georgetown. He’d stashed her in the trunk of his car, and the frigid drive had to have been at least thirty minutes long.

  She finally nodded to him, and he removed the gag. “I only know where one of them is,” she whispered, “and that’s all I know. I don’t even know what the document is. I swear I don’t.”

  “It’s okay,” he whispered back, smiling through the hole in the ski mask as he patted her shoulder comfortingly. “That’s all I need. I’m keeping you here until I get it. When I get back I’ll let you go. I promise I will. I just have to make sure you’re telling me the truth.” It seemed silly to say that. She was obviously so scared out of her mind she wasn’t going to lie. But he had no choice. “Okay?”