by Marc Cameron
The President nibbled White House M&Ms as he spoke, snatching little handfuls from the bowl on his desk and dropping them into his mouth during the conversation. McKeon could not help but think that for someone who was so concerned about his physique, the man ate a great many M&Ms. President Chen Min of the People’s Republic of China was on the other end of the line and must have heard the crunching.
McKeon stood behind the President, arms folded, looking out the window. David Crosby, Drake’s chief of staff, stood by the main door, his body obscuring the view of the peephole the President’s secretary—and anyone else who happened to be standing beside her desk—used to check on the status of meetings in the Oval Office. Two admirals and five generals—with more stars among them than two colonial flags—crowded onto the small spot of carpet between the sofas and the President’s desk. Secretaries Watchel and Filson were on opposite sides of the situation and the room. Apart from the President, no one sat.
“. . . I’m sure you do, Mr. President,” Drake said around a mouthful of red, white, and blue M&Ms. “But it would be helpful to take a little more of a worldview on this. I . . . No, I completely understand.... It saddens me that you feel that way. . . . No, I have made my decision.”
Drake hung up the phone and grabbed another handful of candy.
“He’s pretty pissed,” Drake said. “Gave me a rant about our relationship with what he called the ‘illegal government of Taiwan’ and our treaties with Japan over the Senkaku Islands. A lot of saber rattling, but that’s it so far.”
A buzz ran between the military leaders. Filson gave a bellicose nod and Watchel bit his tongue to keep from saying “I told you so.” McKeon had hoped, but not expected this would push China over the edge. The more independent leaders who’d taken over after Mao might have fired a missile directly after hanging up the phone. They had been able to command, where the current leader had to consult. McKeon understood the realities and planned for them.
“Andrew,” the President said to Secretary of Defense Filson. “Have your guys monitor the situations in the South China Sea as well as Japan.... Hell, just keep an eye on China.” He turned to the Secretary of State. “Tom, get in touch with our embassy in Islamabad and let’s get these Uyghur sons a bitches back in a Pakistani prison where they belong.”
Crosby stepped up and whispered something in the president’s ear. He was a pasty man who looked as though the pressures of the job were eating him alive—but he’d been the keeper of Drake’s dirty laundry since his time in the House. There was really no one else who could do it.
Drake took a deep breath. “Seems I am needed in the Roosevelt Room.”
Wong’s eyes flashed momentarily toward the president, looking, no doubt, for some sign of appreciation for their earlier time in the gym. When he gave her none, she tucked the white dress cap under her arm and squared her shoulders. “Thank you, Mr. President.”
“Thank you . . .” Drake consulted the name tag on her uniform. “Ensign Wong.”
She addressed the rest of the heavy brass in the room, and then excused herself before she started crying. Drake had that effect on women—a fact that kept his chief of staff perpetually busy fending off civil suits and blackmail threats. At least Crosby thought he was fending them off. Ran, McKeon’s Japanese friend, had done the heavy lifting, sorting out many of Drake’s women before they even hit Crosby’s radar.
JFK and Bill Clinton were his heroes, but the Warren G. Harding White House made their liaisons seem like college indiscretions. Drake had outdone them all in his first six months in office. If things continued as planned, Drake would have a great deal in common with the twenty-ninth president.
The baby-faced Marine Corps sentry posted outside the West Wing did not acknowledge Ran when she walked by, but three uniformed Secret Service officers and two plainclothes agents nodded in turn as she walked down the colonnade toward the Rose Garden. Armed with pistols and expandable batons and radios on their belts, these agents stood by with a twitchy hyperawareness that made them jump at the click of a cicada. Counter-snipers patrolled the roof and some of the agents carried small submachine guns on hanging harnesses under their jackets. It had been nearly half a year since the assassinations, but security personnel, from the president’s bodyguards to the uniformed mounted DC Park Police who patrolled the Capitol on horseback, still operated as if they were under immediate attack. Staffing in and around the White House had tripled. Ran had to stifle a laugh at all the precautions since the greatest threat to their way of life was sitting inside the Oval Office. If these men and women knew what their precious POTUS was up to, they would kill him themselves. Ran had certainly thought about it.
Ran viewed everyone she met as a possible opponent whom she would eventually have to crush. She had vague recollections of a mother who was pretty, but essentially soft and flawed. From the time she was old enough to walk, her father had drilled into her an exactness of spirit, a focus that cut through weaker souls and saw them for what they were—nothing. She’d killed her first human being before she was six—a boy two years older than her. He had sneered when he saw he was fighting a girl—and then vomited up his own blood when her dagger had pierced his belly. One of her father’s counselors, a lusty wrestler with rippling muscles and an ego the size of the sea, made advances on her when she was thirteen. He fell to her sword like rice stalks before a fire. She’d counted at first, seen the faces in her dreams, but by the time she was twenty, there were too many.
The fact that she wore no ID badge hanging around her neck was a sign of her importance. Virtually everyone working or visiting the West Wing wore a color-coded badge identifying their work status and clearance level. Only four people were exempt: POTUS, VPOTUS, David Crosby, and the Vice President’s special advisor, Ran Kimura. The fact that she was included in that list caused no small amount of jealousy among staffers.
Ran stopped at the east door off the Rose Garden. Through the rippled glass, she watched several generals from the Joint Chiefs spill out of the Oval Office into the main corridor. The Vice President stood at the threshold with the President’s chief of staff, having a heated discussion about something. She watched as Crosby’s posture softened. He nodded, as if caught in some hypnotic spell. The man didn’t like McKeon—no, Ran thought, that wasn’t strong enough. Crosby despised McKeon, seeing him as usurping the power of the presidency. But those feelings melted when the two men were together. That’s the way it worked with Lee McKeon. He had a way. An inexplicable force that twined its way into your good sense, into your strategy and will, and made you think you were the most important thing in the world.
At first glance, it was impossible to see how a tall, gawky skeleton of a man with dark skin and deep-set eyes ever got elected to public office. His Pakistani blood gave him the features many Americans saw as a personification of the enemy—and yet, each speech saw hundreds more followers jumping on board his political machine, writing checks and donating time, because Lee McKeon, the Chindian underdog with the Scottish name, looked like a very tan Abraham Lincoln and entranced others as surely as the mad monk Rasputin.
Ran had seen the power of his presence firsthand, two years before, when he’d talked her out of killing him.
Chapter 49
Flight 105
Quinn turned to check on Mattie one last time before venturing closer to the body.
She peered over the top of her new book, craning her head in order to sneak a look up the stairs. She had inherited his curiosity for anything that smelled of adventure and danger—even if she was only seven.
“Stay put, you,” Quinn said. “There are some things you just can’t un-see. Got it?”
“I know, Daddy,” Mattie said, sounding decades beyond her years. “I’ve seen them.”
Her directness took Quinn’s breath away. She was definitely his daughter—and he was pretty sure that was not something she’d put on the plus side of her ré-sumé in the future.
Quinn was nearl
y fourteen when he’d stumbled upon his first body—a hunter who’d frozen to death in the Talkeetna Mountains north of Anchorage. The bears were in hibernation and he’d found him before the wolves did. But pine martens and weasels had begun to nibble away at the man’s hands, leaving nothing but finger bones hanging from the frozen cuffs of a wool shirt that was oddly clean. They radioed the troopers and watched when a ski plane landed in a snowy clearing among the gnarled black spruce. The plane looked barely large enough for the pilot, a tall man with a blue uniform and thin mustache. The Quinn brothers and their father helped the trooper stuff and cram the body into the airplane, frozen in a seated position, where it sat, staring blankly at the back of the trooper pilot’s head as he took off for Anchorage. There was no blood, no guts, nothing but emptiness—and bones where fingers should have been. Quinn’s conscious mind found the experience more reverent than traumatic, but the skeletal hands of that first dead man had shaken him awake from his dreams many times over the decades since.
Violent brushes with evil men already gave Mattie plenty of cause for nightmares. Quinn knew from hard experience that these things had a way of adding up. “Stack-tolerance,” they called it. At some point, the mind couldn’t handle any more. The last thing he wanted to do was put her near another grisly murder scene while she was still young enough to be reading Lemony Snicket.
“That’s how we found him.” Carly’s voice pulled him back to the present.
Quinn moved slowly, searching step by step for any clue before he put his foot down. Apart from a cascading pool of blood and the lifeless body draped across the stairs, the polished teak was remarkably clean.
Early in his OSI career, before he found a natural home in counterintelligence, Quinn put in some time in Criminal Investigations—known as “Crim.” He helped local authorities and the FBI with several homicides where Air Force personnel were involved, both on and off base. Two cases had been robberies gone bad, but most were crimes of passion. In all cases, clutter and chaos ruled the day. The scenes were in shambles.
Even at first glance, Quinn could tell this was no crime of passion. The killing had been quick and precise, by someone who knew exactly what they were doing. It all had to have happened in seconds, while the victim was alone on the stairs, without alerting the other passengers above or below. When done by an expert, assassinations—something with which Quinn had a certain amount of experience—very often appeared as sterile as an operating room.
Still four steps below the body, Quinn squatted to get a better look. The dead man lay facedown, legs trailing, arms above his head, as if he’d been trying to climb the stairs on all fours before he died. He was white and looked to be in his early forties, with a receding hairline and a sizeable spare tire around his waist. A well-worn leather penny loafer hung from the toe of one foot. A gray polo shirt, the back of which was oddly clean for the amount of blood on the stairs, bunched up around his armpits, exposing his back and belly—as if the killer had attempted to lift him off his feet during a struggle.
Quinn looked over his shoulder, checking in on Carly. “You okay?”
She nodded quickly, mouth clenched tightly as if she was trying not to throw up. “I’ve just never seen anything this gruesome before.”
Quinn took a deep breath, wishing he could say the same.
There was a bizarre obscenity in looking at someone who’d died a violent death—especially when that death had come at the hands of another. The dead could not turn away or cover their own nakedness. Investigators, for a time at least, were forced to leave the bodies exposed and twisted, frozen in their final moment of terror. Worse than that, the sight of such a scene drew in the unprepared, making them ponder too long and too hard on the short distance between life and death.
Carly stood behind him, hands at her sides. Her twitchiness disappeared now that she was certain Quinn was going to help.
Still squatting, Quinn studied the curvature of the wall above the body, where the victim would have been standing when he was killed. A swath of blood spatter, four feet wide, flecked the white plastic in tiny specks of red. There was a notable vacancy in the pattern, where someone or something else had blocked the path of the spray.
Quinn glanced back at Carly. “Don’t you carry some nitrile gloves for cleanup in case someone gets airsick?”
“I’ll get you some.” She ducked back down the stairs, apparently happy for the chance to step away from the gore.
“And a camera,” Quinn added. “Something better than a phone if you can find it, with a good flash.”
Quinn stepped up next to the void in the blood spatter and found, as he suspected he would, that it was roughly the shape of his shoulder. He bent at the knees to make the comparison, which put the person who’d been standing there when the victim’s throat was cut at around five-seven or five-eight.
Carly returned a few moments later with a pair of blue gloves. Quinn hung the camera around his neck, and then slipped the gloves on with a snap. He took photos from every angle, noting the way the man was positioned, the spatter and the blood that pooled on the polished wood beneath the body, before overflowing and dripping down the riser to the next step.
Moving up beside the victim, Quinn stooped to take close-ups of the wound in the man’s neck before he moved him. Whatever it had been, the weapon was sharp, maybe a piece of glass. A deep gash began under the dead man’s left ear, severing both the carotid and jugular before continuing around to open his windpipe.
“So,” Quinn muttered to himself. “You’re right-handed.”
“Pardon?” Carly took a tentative step forward, watching where she put her foot to avoid stepping in blood.
“Our killer is probably right-handed.” Quinn pantomimed grabbing someone from behind and drawing a blade from left to right, as much to get the movement in his own mind as to demonstrate to the flight attendant.
The wound was deep enough to expose the grotesque white of vertebrae and glistening cartilage. Quinn knew from experience that it took someone with a substantial amount of upper-body strength to hold even a small victim still while inflicting this much damage.
After he’d taken far more pictures than he’d ever need, Quinn passed the camera back to Carly. He fished the wallet out of the dead man’s back pocket and flipped it open.
“Aaron Foulger,” he said, reading the man’s driver’s license. “From south Anchorage . . . There’s about five hundred bucks cash US and roughly . . .” He thumbed through the bills and did some quick math in his head. “About two grand worth of 5,000-ruble notes.”
Quinn found a faculty ID for the University of Alaska and passed it back to Carly, along with the wallet. “Have Natalie get somebody to check and see if he’s traveling with anyone. Don’t make contact if he is. Just let me know one way or the other.”
Carly ducked away long enough to use the interphone and find out Foulger was traveling alone. She studied the ID and looked up at the body from her vantage point on the gentle arc of the staircase below Quinn. “Why would anyone want to kill a UAA professor?”
“We’re looking for opportunity, means, and motive,” Quinn said. “Our killer had opportunity when he caught Foulger alone on the stairwell.” Quinn nodded toward the gash in the dead man’s neck. “He had access to some sort of sharp blade, which should theoretically be difficult to come by on a commercial aircraft. I’m guessing it was a piece of glass—maybe a broken wine bottle or something. Anyway, the blade, along with the strength to employ it, gave him means.”
Quinn scanned the body again to see what he’d missed. “What I’m not seeing is motive.” He bent to study the dead man’s hands. “There’s a good chance the professor was a target of opportunity. If this was preplanned, I can think of a dozen better places to kill somebody than in the stairwell of a crowded airplane.”
Carly gave him a weak smile. “You know it doesn’t calm a girl to know you can think of a dozen better places to commit a murder.”
Quinn ign
ored her, instead working through the odds that someone would risk committing a murder at this exact spot with five hundred potential witnesses.
“Too big a chance that you’d get caught here,” he mused. “Why not wait for him in his house, wire his car to explode, slip something in his coffee? If it just had to be up close and personal, you could even cut him like this when he’s walking past a blind alley in downtown Anchorage.” Quinn paced back and forth on the stairs. “He lives up on the Hillside, not five hundred feet from Chugach State Park. It would be nothing to set up a sniper nest and pop him while he was out walking his dog. . . .”
“Again with the creepy stuff,” Carly said. “You just rattled five ways to kill a man right off the top of your head.”
“Yeah.” Quinn shrugged. “I guess that is a little scary.” He resisted the urge to explain himself further.
Carly cocked her head to one side, pondering. Her long hair hung down, away from her shoulder. She wrestled with her thoughts for a moment before looking up at Quinn.
“What kind of sick person murders a random passenger on board an airplane?” she said.
Quinn took a deep breath, thinking through the ramifications of his theory.
“Somebody who wants a diversion,” he said.
Carly’s eyes narrowed. “A diversion from what?”
“I’m not sure yet,” he said. “It’s still only a theory.”
Quinn stepped down to the base of the stairs so he could talk to both Carly and Natalie and do a quick check on Mattie.
“How many people in the crew?” Quinn asked.