“I have no idea if the Secret Service killed your friend,” Jonathan said, finally. “I suspect that they’re involved in this somehow—that seems self-evident, given the events of the shoot-out at the Wild Times. But there’s a subtle difference between suspicion and paranoia. Both are reasonable under the circumstances, but for now, I don’t know how to tell one from the other.”
“Well, I don’t think there’s any doubt,” David said. He seemed to think people were arguing with him. “Deeshy sure as hell was convinced. And why is Becky being held separately?”
The suddenness of that question startled Jonathan. “About her,” he said. “How stable is she?”
“Scorpion!” Venice’s tone was that of a scolding mother.
Jonathan ignored her and waited for his answer.
“I don’t know what to say,” David said. “How stable ? What does that mean?”
Boxers simplified the question: “Is she going to be part of the solution or an extension of the problem?”
David still didn’t get it.
“Can you trust her?” Jonathan said.
“Of course I can trust her. She took me in.”
“She’s awfully angry,” Jonathan said. “Disproportionately angry, I would say.”
“How can you say that?” Venice said. “Think about everything that has happened to her in the past twenty-four hours. How could she not be furious?”
David smiled at her, a look of genuine relief.
“I mean really,” Venice went on. “She’s lost everything. And she lost it by helping a friend. Yet you ask if she is the one who is trustworthy. Imagine the questions that are streaming through her head right now.”
She looked to Boxers. “Did he give her the blood oath speech?”
The Big Guy nodded.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake.” She stood and held out her hand. “Key.”
Jonathan knew better than to argue. He handed over the entire ring. JoeDog curled herself into the vacated cushion the instant Venice left the room. A minute later, when the two women appeared in the doorway, the beast slunk back to the floor. She looked ashamed of herself. It was a look that made her invulnerable to scolding.
“Here you go, sweetie,” Venice said, pointing to the sofa. “Have a seat next to the boss.”
Becky hesitated.
Jonathan stood. “It seems I owe you an apology,” he said. “Soft talk has never been my strong suit. Your anger bothered me. Abundant caution has always served me well.”
“Fine.” Becky sat. “Whatever. What I want to know is what’s next. Clearly, neither of us can go home, and while staying here is a fine option in the short term, what happens tomorrow or the next day?”
This was the sticky part. Jonathan resumed his seat. “I think that in two or three days, this whole thing is going to be set in concrete. The evidence that needs to be covered up will be, and David, your future will be permanently bleak.”
David blanched. “What do you mean by bleak?”
“Just exactly what you think I do. You will stand trial and be convicted of murder. Or, at best, you’ll have an outstanding warrant that will keep you on the run for the rest of your life.”
“But I didn’t do anything. Somebody has to believe that because they hired you. In court—”
“Your day in court won’t matter,” Jonathan said.
“I’m innocent.”
“So what?” Boxers said. “Jails are full of innocent people.”
“That’s because all the guilty people say they’re innocent,” Becky said. “That’s cynical. David’s actually—”
“No, Becky,” Jonathan interrupted. “While everyone in prison was convicted of a crime, a good many of the people rotting in cells didn’t do what the jury believes they did. Courts aren’t about finding truth. They’re about lawyers winning and losing, based on their ability to sell a jury on their version of the facts.”
Becky made a huffing sound. “That’s paranoid bullshit.”
Boxers huffed back at her. “God, I love young people.”
“Look at what happened in your apartment today,” Jonathan said. “Men with Secret Service badges—men with the authority to step into your home—tried to kill you. If they turn out to be who I think they are, Big Guy and I are guilty of assaulting federal officers. We met all the elements of the law. If they had died, we would have committed murder upon a federal officer. Is that what you saw?”
“That’s such a specific case,” Becky said.
“All assaults are specific cases,” Jonathan pressed. “A white security guard kills a black teenager in a late-night struggle. The police decide that it was self-defense. But then the press gets ahold of it, and suddenly it’s a chargeable offense. The guy is convicted by the world before he ever stands trial. Jurors know that if they find the guy not guilty, the city will likely burn with riots. Is that a fair trial?”
“Is this really the time for a civics lesson?” Venice asked.
Jonathan paused to let some of the wind out of his sails. “Okay. My point ultimately is that whoever is behind whatever is going on is actively building whatever fiction is necessary to pull off his plan. Somehow, David, you’re a pawn, and Becky, you’re an accomplice.”
“What does that make you?” David asked.
Jonathan smiled. “I’m the problem solver.”
“Speaking of which,” Venice said. “I need to speak to you in the hallway. Big Guy too.”
They both stood. He addressed his new guests. “Okay, guys, I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll keep the doors unlocked if you promise me that you won’t leave the basement.”
“I don’t understand why we need to be treated like prisoners,” Becky said. “You tell us that we need to be here of our own free will, but then you restrict our every movement.”
Ever the optimist, Jonathan took one more shot at explaining. “It’s about keeping your location a secret,” he said. “This building is more than a home. It’s also an office, with people moving about on the floor above. Children wander in and out at times, making the presence of a stranger even more notable. Never forget that you, David, are wanted for a very serious crime. People are actively looking for you.”
“Becky, too, unfortunately,” Venice said. Then with a sheepish smile, she added, “Late breaking news. They’ve named you as an accomplice.”
Becky’s jaw dropped.
“Powerful people move with remarkable speed,” Jonathan said.
A lightbulb went on over Becky’s head. Her eyes grew wide. “There was a shooting here a few years ago,” she said. “And a kidnapping, too, right?”
Venice’s quick glance to Jonathan eliminated any chance of Jonathan bluffing his way out. “Let’s not go there,” he said. “The point is that there’s too much opportunity for you to be seen and recognized. If that happens, a lot of bad stuff follows.”
“So we just hang here?” David asked.
“Pretty much, yes,” Jonathan said. “And just to sweeten the pot, Doug Kramer, the local chief of police, is a good friend of mine, and it’s not out of the question that he might wander in upstairs, too.” He saw those words hit home.
Venice said, “My mother—you can call her Mama—will be sure that you get enough food to gain five pounds every day. Honestly, it won’t be that bad.”
Jonathan left before they could ask any more questions. He pulled the door to on his way out, but he didn’t latch it.
Back in the hallway, he asked, “What’ve you got?”
“I looked at the files you took from Albert Banks. I think I know what they’re up to.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Lover of drama that she was, Venice kept them in suspense until they wandered back to the third floor of the firehouse and gathered around the conference table.
“Good thing we’re not in a hurry,” Boxers grumped as he pulled a seat out for himself.
“I’ll do the easy stuff first,” Venice said, her fingers already pounding the keys. �
��Eyes on the screen, gents.”
At the far end of the room, the massive screen switched from dark to blue, and then two faces appeared. They looked vaguely familiar, but before Jonathan could process them, Venice said, “Those men in the apartment were not Secret Service agents. I found both of their fingerprints in the Interpol computers. Here are their names.”
The screen displayed Vasily Alistratov and Pyotr Zabolotny. “I’ll let you figure out how to pronounce the last names. Vasily served six years at hard labor about fifteen years ago for assaulting a police officer. He was elevated to Interpol’s list in 2002 when he disappeared from view. Nine-eleven paranoia was running at its fevered height back then, if you recall, and it was easy to move from petty criminal to public enemy without a lot of justification.
“Pyotr, on the other hand, didn’t serve any jail time that I can see, but does have some spotty history of petty crimes. Nothing serious and nothing violent.”
“So why is he listed on Interpol?” Jonathan asked.
“I have no idea. He is, however, listed as a potential terrorist.”
“Now that’s interesting,” Boxers said. “How did that happen?”
“Again, no idea. But both are listed as known to be in the company of the other, and both are on all the no-fly lists.”
“Yet here they are,” Jonathan said.
Venice chuckled. “You’ve got to love it. The TSA pokes every nook and crevice of Granny’s wheelchair, but suspected terrorists somehow get in.”
“Granny needs better handlers,” Jonathan said. “You know, people who can give her a fake identity to sneak her in and out.”
“I bet a First Lady could figure out how to pull those strings,” Boxers said. “I’m not the only one who caught the Iron Curtain connection, am I?”
“It was subtle,” Venice said, her voice dripping with irony, “but yes, I managed to catch it.”
“This is really helpful, Ven,” Jonathan said. “I’m sure Irene has our friends in custody by now. She’ll certainly have all of this. I wonder what else she’ll come up with.”
Venice shifted in her chair and gave a coy smile. “I have something else,” she said. “On the files from Banks’s computers.”
Jonathan’s jaw dropped. “You couldn’t possibly have read through all the files already. You only had them for a little over an hour.”
“It helps to be brilliant,” she said.
Her boastfulness was way out of character, prompting an exchange of glances between Jonathan and Boxers.
A subtle smile bloomed as she added, “It also helps to be really lucky. Look at the screen.”
At the far end of the room, the 106-inch screen filled with lists of files.
“After I transferred all the data from all the files on all the disks you brought in onto a single drive, I decided that the best bet to find what we’re looking for was to search the files that were accessed most recently, and then to work backwards.” She glanced over at Jonathan. “I’m extrapolating from ‘manual methods first.’ ”
Jonathan recognized the reference to one of his most inviolable philosophies: that the simplest, most elegant explanations were most often the correct ones.
Venice continued, moving the cursor on the screen to highlight her points as she spoke. “There are tons of correspondence and assorted other details that I haven’t had a chance to look at yet, but my attention was first drawn to these files here.” The arrow-point cursor stroked a list of ten or twelve files that all ended in a similar suffix.
“Note the dates,” she said. “These were all opened yesterday, and they all came from one of the thumb drives.”
She said this stuff as if people could read her mind and understand the implications. Jonathan feigned patience and waited, confident that a sensible explanation was on the way.
“But if you look here,” she continued, clicking to a different screen that to Jonathan’s eye showed more files that looked essentially the same as the others, “you’ll see that the same files were erased from the computer’s hard drive just today.”
Jonathan raised his hand, as if in a classroom. “If they’ve been erased, how can we be looking at them?”
Venice gave him a look of pure disappointment. “Come on, Dig. You’re not new at this. You know that no file is truly erased. Not if they don’t use a magnet or a shredder. If you know what to look for, you can search for recently erased files. You might not be able to pull up the files themselves without some extra work, but the file names will still be there.”
“Let me guess,” Boxers said. “You did the extra work.”
She beamed. “You said that you thought Banks was in the process of erasing files when you crashed his place. Building on that, I went to the erased files and entered today’s date, and I got this.”
She switched back to the first screen. “I searched on the file names. You see that they’re kind of weird? That ‘dot pic’ suffix? Well I copied and pasted, this is what I came up with. The backup file from the thumb drive.”
Jonathan felt a tingle in the small of his back. He sensed that something big was on the way. “Albert Banks hadn’t gotten to the backup yet to erase it.”
Venice nodded. “That, or he didn’t know that a backup had been made. You’re welcome, by the way, for forcing you to buy all that memory and storage space. It helps to be able to load all these files simultaneously.”
“Have I ever denied you anything?” Jonathan asked. One of the advantages of owning limitless funds was the ability to have it all. He never said no to a technology request from Venice. Most of the time, he didn’t even know what he was saying yes to.
“I’d be even more impressed if the files were open and we knew what they were,” Boxers said.
“I was thinking the same thing,” Venice said, oblivious to Big Guy’s sarcasm. “And let me tell you, I had to search for a while to figure out a way to open them. It turns out that the files were done in a partially encrypted program that I’d read about a couple of years ago. It’s used for the transmission of large documents, often architectural drawings.”
She clicked again, and the screen filled with a detailed drawing of what appeared to be a bridge. It was a skeletal view, revealing structural members in both plan and elevation views. Venice clicked again, and the screen revealed what looked to be a small part of the larger drawing shown in cross-section.
“Engineering sketches?” Jonathan wondered aloud.
“That would be my guess,” Venice said. “There are dozens of drawings like this within the file. Maybe hundreds.”
“What am I missing?” Boxers asked. “Banks was an engineer. Shouldn’t he have lots of this kind of stuff in his computer?”
“Ah, you weren’t paying attention,” Venice said. She clicked back to the first image. “What are we looking at?”
Jonathan held up his hand. “Ven, please. I know you groove on this, but is there a way to cut to the chase?”
“Look, Digger,” Venice insisted. “Look at the lower right-hand corner. Look at the name of the bridge.”
Then he saw it. “The Brooklyn Bridge? The original? Wow, I thought the drawing looked old. But why is that significant?”
“Because it was built over a hundred years ago. You said it yourself, it’s an old bridge. Engineers design new things, not old things.” Her eyes narrowed. “On the other hand, what group of people can you think of that would want to see detailed drawings of existing structures?”
Jonathan felt a chill. “Terrorists?”
She smiled.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Boxers said. “At what point did I become the voice of reason? You can’t conclude something like that from the presence of a drawing. Maybe he just likes old bridges.”
“You saw how feverishly he was trying to erase the files when we got to his house,” Jonathan said. He looked to Venice for confirmation. “That’s the timing, right?”
“I checked my record of your phone call after the shooting at Banks’s p
lace. Just about a perfect match.”
Jonathan could tell that Boxers was close to being convinced, but didn’t want to be.
“But there’s more,” Venice said. She had the most stunning smile when she thought she’d come up with something big. She started clicking more files, and more drawings popped up on the screen. “This is the file on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge,” she said. “And here is the Holland Tunnel. The Sumner Tunnel in Boston. New York’s Penn Station.” She stopped there. “There are more, but from what I can tell, they’re all major commuter routes. Can you think of a better terrorist target than a place that is guaranteed to have thousands of people at risk for the initial blast, and then millions more inconvenienced for years to come? Think of the economic consequences.”
Jonathan sat back in his seat, rubbing his face vigorously with his hands. He knew that she’d found the pulse of the plot they’d been looking for, but the ramifications made him feel a little dizzy. He held out his hands as if to stop the onslaught of ideas.
“Okay, let’s hang on a second. Let’s take a step back. We’re about three steps away from proclaiming that FLOTUS is a terrorist. Is that where we’re going here?”
Even Boxers looked shocked. “I believe that’s exactly where we’re going.”
Venice said, “It’s perfectly consistent with her past. Maybe this has been her plan all along.”
Jonathan scoffed, “Okay, that’s a step too far. Not even the president knew he wanted to be president until after they’d married.”
“She didn’t have to be First Lady to pull off an attack,” Venice said.
Jonathan liked that. “And maybe the reason why she didn’t pull the trigger before was because of her trajectory toward the White House. Whether she was biding her time for the perfect moment or delaying so that she wouldn’t screw things up for her husband, either way would explain the long leash on her plan.”
“Might explain why the Secret Service was shooting at each other,” Boxers offered. “Word got out that she was trying to pull the trigger and they decided to take her out.”
Therein lay the glitch in the theory that Jonathan just couldn’t embrace. “Come on, folks. Even my cynicism has limits. If that hit last night was truly executed by the Secret Service, that means killing each other. Box, could you have opened up on a unit operator?”
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