Within a few blocks she’d passed Daisy Brook Elementary School, where her son had attended, and curved onto Ramshorn Drive, the town’s upper-middle-class enclave. After breakfast with Rick and Joseph, she e-mailed Mark Barrientos, the man she’d had on Meg Tolman and the professor, Nick Journey.
“Leave them for now,” she typed. “We need to meet. Drastic measures are required.”
Then Gray went to bed and slept for nearly twelve hours. She didn’t know when she’d be able to sleep again.
* * *
Rick could tell she was distracted that evening. “That must have been one hell of a conference,” he said at the dining room table.
“It was ridiculous,” Gray said. “Three countries, six companies, six overblown CEOs, and the laws of all these countries.… I’m going to have to leave again, but I’m not sure when.”
Rick looked at her.
“Don’t say it,” she said. “But you may have to take him to the chess tournament in Ann Arbor. This thing is about to blow up on me.”
Rick shrugged, but she knew he was disappointed. The truth was, her husband liked the lifestyle her income provided. They had the best house in town, and he could be the hands-on father he’d always dreamed of being, without having to worry too much about earning a living. He would happily take Joseph to the chess tournament, and they’d get a hotel room and have fun. Joseph would call her from time to time and give her updates, but he would miss her. He was thirteen and he would miss her.
Maybe I’ll make it to the first day of the tournament, she thought. I owe them both that much. A little getaway with my family, participating in my only son’s favorite activity in the world …
“I’ll arrange it so I can at least go down with you,” she said. “I can catch a flight out of Detroit if I have to go again. But I want to be with you two for at least a day.”
She went into the family room and played Xbox for a while with Joseph. He was a tall, gangly kid with her light brown hair, her husband’s green eyes, and her own sense of pragmatism and logic. They had an easygoing relationship. He understood that he benefited from her business travel as well, and he also understood that when she was home, she was able to do things other parents couldn’t, parents who were shackled to an eight-to-five Monday-through-Friday job. It was a trade-off, and they understood each other—as much as she could allow another person to understand her.
Joseph didn’t complain when she told him to put away the Xbox. He never did. He didn’t care all that much for video games anyway—he played them to keep up with what other kids his age were doing, but he would rather play chess. He’d placed in the top three in the state of Michigan the last two years, and this year he thought he would take the state title. Instead of a good-night hug or kiss—he was thirteen, after all—his mother high-fived him and he went upstairs.
Fifteen minutes later Gray’s phone rang. She talked quietly in her study for a few minutes, then told Rick she was going out to run some errands. A shadow crossed his face, but he said nothing. He knew better than to ask. Gray made the forty-five-minute drive to the larger town of Big Rapids, and parked in a half-full student lot on the campus of Ferris State University. She wasn’t likely to see any of her Fremont neighbors here.
She flashed her headlights once, and in less than a minute Mark Barrientos got into the car beside her. “Your husband won’t be worried?”
“Not at all,” Gray said.
“He knows nothing?”
“No,” Gray said. “We’ve been married fifteen years. He still believes I am an attorney specializing in international mergers.”
Barrientos was impressed. Most people in the business never married. Relationships were inconvenient and essentially impossible. Then again, Ann Gray was the best. She wasn’t the ordinary, in this business or any other.
“I bet it’s difficult,” Barrientos said. “I dated a woman for a couple of months last year, and had trouble remembering what name I was supposed to use with her. Finally gave it up. Too confusing.”
“It’s a challenge,” Gray said. “But it’s a matter of priorities. My husband and son keep me going. When dealing with idiots like Victor Zale and some of the others I have dealt with over the years, they center me. I can come home to my pleasant upper-middle-class home in my small town in Michigan and go to PTA meetings and bake sales and hockey games. It’s so uplifting to simply do some of the things normal people do.”
“We’re not normal people, Ann,” Barrientos said.
“No. But we can experience bits and pieces of normalcy, if we are very, very careful.”
Barrientos shrugged. “What do you want to do?”
“Zale sent a man to kill me,” Gray said. She sat back against the car seat and rubbed her temples. “He’s broken the rules now, the terms he agreed to when we entered into our relationship. That can’t be allowed to happen.”
“Agreed.”
“He has already taken rash, foolish chances, unnecessary risks. I know men like Zale. They tend to use a nuclear warhead when a small-caliber revolver would do. Some of the things he’s done … when I found out…” Her voice trailed off into the darkness.
“Ann?”
“He’s dangerous. I never really understood how dangerous before.”
“So you’re going to hit him back.”
Gray closed her eyes. Despite the sleep, she still felt fatigued. “It’s not a matter of hitting him back. With Zale becoming unstable, he’s going to be even more reckless. He’s going to hurt even more people who shouldn’t be hurt.”
“You want to do something about the project?”
“Zale says he’s closing it down, tying it off.”
“Without you?”
Gray nodded.
“Son of a bitch,” Barrientos said.
“Language, Mark,” Gray said. “Take care in your language, please. But the terms state that I am in complete operational control of the project, including any shutdown. I’ve already taken some steps.”
“You aren’t going to go after Zale personally, are you?”
Gray waved her hand in a dismissive gesture. “The Associates cannot be allowed to continue. When Victor Zale falls, he will fall quite far.”
“So, what…?”
Gray turned and looked at her young associate. “Sometimes sacrifices have to be made.”
“Ann, what the hell are you talking about?”
“We’re going to reactivate April 19. They have much work to do.”
* * *
She gave Barrientos detailed instructions. She knew he was surprised at her decision, but he was a professional—his face betrayed nothing.
Then Gray drove home, being careful to stop and purchase a few items at the grocery store. At home, Rick was already in bed. She sat down in her study to think. She needed time with her family, time to recharge. But Zale was shutting down the Silver Cross without her, and she didn’t know if Meg Tolman and Nick Journey would be able to capitalize on what she had already given them in time to make a difference.
Then I will raise the stakes again, she thought.
She crossed to the wall safe she kept behind a print of Renoir’s At the Concert. She punched numbers on the keypad, opened the safe, and withdrew a slim envelope. It contained one item: a very old paper encased in plastic bubble wrap. She had insisted on having the papers—both this one and the letter from Napoleon III to Jefferson Davis—in her possession when she agreed to take on the project. The Associates cared nothing for history. They cared only for how they could use history. They had been happy to hand over the papers. The papers themselves meant nothing to Victor Zale and Terrence Landon.
But Gray understood their value. She understood their meaning outside of what they accomplished, outside of Zale and Landon and those whom they both served and manipulated.
And now, the value had become even more substantial.
Gray found a box and carefully packed the bubble-wrap-encased papers in it. She handwrote a short n
ote and slipped it in the package, then sealed it, opened her laptop, and pulled up the information she’d obtained since she left Meg Tolman in Cassville, Missouri.
Gray addressed the envelope to Nick Journey, Ph.D., 411 E. 7th St., Carpenter Center, Oklahoma.
She looked at the box. Am I the hunter or the hunted now? she wondered.
Both, she decided, thinking of Meg Tolman and Nick Journey, and of The Associates.
She would send the package by overnight mail in the morning, then Gray would spend some quality time with her husband and her son.
CHAPTER
14
Tolman ordered pizza at nine o’clock and met the delivery man at the office building’s street entrance. Most of the other suites were dark. She nibbled the pizza and drank stale coffee, then settled in at her computer again. She considered what she already knew about Barry Cable: he’d left Cassville and attended the University of Missouri, where he received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in accounting. He worked for a large accounting firm’s St. Louis office, then transferred to Chicago, and had moved to Washington to work for the Government Accountability Office eight years ago. The GAO was divided into thirteen “teams,” and Cable was part of the Financial Management and Assurance team. He was single. He dated occasionally, had a few relationships of a few months, but was dedicated to the job. He swam at the Y every morning and was into classic muscle cars. He had a ‘68 GTO that he tinkered with on weekends.
He had started with the GAO’s main headquarters on G Street, but the agency was growing, and a few “contract offices” were spread throughout the D.C. area. Two years ago he’d been transferred to such an office in Rockville. It was a small contingent, seven employees, all part of the same team.
Tolman scrolled through the notes she’d already made. The details were well known. On April 19, four men with automatic weapons burst into the contract office and opened fire. They destroyed government computers, shot out every piece of glass in the place, and worked their way toward the rear of the building. Barry was the only employee scheduled to be in the office during the day, with the other six at a training workshop in D.C. One of them, a forty-eight-year-old CPA named Corinne Barrett, was running late and stopped by the office to pick up some papers for the workshop. She was wounded in the arm, but she hid under her desk and escaped further injury as the killers quickly made their way through the office. The gunmen claimed to be part of an antigovernment group called April 19, naming itself after the day Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
“We will finish Brother McVeigh’s work,” one of the shooters was quoted as saying. “If the GAO won’t hold the government accountable … we will.”
The four men were arrested as they left the building. They didn’t resist.
“We are martyrs for the cause,” said Jeremy Rayburn, an unemployed sheet metal worker from Spokane, Washington, who acted as leader. “You haven’t heard the last of April 19.”
Inside, Corinne Barrett had crawled from beneath her desk and called 9-1-1. Barry Cable was slumped over his desk, a cup of coffee and a cinnamon bagel at his side. One of the crime scene investigators had made a point of including in the report that the bagel was covered in the victim’s blood. Cable had been shot five times. His office was at the rear of the building, but all the shooting took place in less than two minutes. It was a small building.
The members of April 19 pleaded guilty in federal court to one count of murder of a federal employee, one count of assault, and one count of conspiracy to commit an act of terror. All four men were sentenced to life in prison without parole. By the time Jim Cable was found hanging on his back porch in late June, the men who killed his brother were in the U.S. penitentiary in Hazelton, West Virginia, awaiting transfer to another facility to serve their sentence.
It was all very clinical. Police reports, official documents, trial transcripts. Statistics.
But somewhere in all that data was an answer that would set into motion the chain of events that led to Dana’s death a few days ago.
Tolman reread Jim Cable’s e-mail to his sister, five days before his death.
… I believe there was more to Barry’s death than just some random terrorist nutcases. He sent me something.
There’s something happening here, and I don’t know what. Going to check into it.…
Did that sound like a depressed man on the verge of taking his own life?
“He sent me something.”
Tolman sat very still.
“You haven’t heard the last of April 19,” Jeremy Rayburn had said.
But the silence since the shooting had been deafening. No one else stepped forward from the group. There were no threats of further violence. No pro-April 19 rallies at the trial. No messages from the group on Internet bulletin boards or websites. April 19 had faded away with the arrest, guilty pleas, and sentencing of the four members who carried out the GAO shooting.
Tolman closed her eyes. Everything was silent.
With almost every extremist group, noise was made when some of its members were arrested. The remaining members rattled their sabers and made pronouncements about what was coming next. None of that happened with this group. To be sure, they were loosely organized, but there should have been something.
She logged in to the Justice Department database and navigated to the files on domestic extremist groups. Each entry had a tag as to when the department became aware of the group, what their agenda was, what steps—if any—had been taken, and so on.
She found the entry for April 19 and said, “What the fuck is this?”
The date the Justice Department became aware of the group was April 19.
Extreme political groups did not exist in a vacuum. Even the groups on the furthest reaches of society, with only a few adherents, had some form of infrastructure: websites, bank accounts, real estate records. It had to be in place before the group took action. Weapons, personnel, transportation …
But the FBI had no record of April 19 prior to its appearance in Rockville.
She read the further notation in the file:
This group appears to have no organization that can be tracked.
There had been all kinds of news coverage about the group in the wake of Rockville, profiling their objectives … all information from the defendants themselves. There were no interviews with other members. Rayburn had told an interviewer from CNN, “You won’t find us, so you may as well stop looking.” The clip had been repeated over and over, with news analysts talking about its “ominous tone” and “dangerous portents,” and wondering if the U.S. was on the cusp of entering into a new wave of domestic terrorism.
Journalists hadn’t talked much about Barry Cable and Corinne Barrett, other than the obligatory feature story profiles in the days after the shooting. There was a footnote in a couple of stories that Barrett’s medical bills had been paid by a mysterious “concerned individual” who remained anonymous. The focus of the media was the agenda of the killers. Barry Cable and Corinne Barrett became footnotes to April 19, and then April 19 itself became a footnote.
Like it never really existed at all, Tolman thought.
Or it only existed to carry out this particular shooting.
Jim Cable had written: “I believe there was more to Barry’s death than just some random terrorist nutcases.”
“I’ll be goddamned,” Tolman said. “You were right, Jim.”
CHAPTER
15
In a quiet carrel on the fourth floor of SCC’s Epperson Library, Journey sat with his laptop open and half a dozen books spread around him, wondering if there was a way to translate wispy legends and whispered comments into something verifiable about Napoleon III’s Silver Cross—something for which he had apparently been willing to throw his government’s support to the Confederate States of America.
And what could this Silver Cross possibly mean to Meg Tolman’s friend and her brothers?
There were holes in the story big enough to drive a truck through, and Journey wasn’t convinced of the connection. But as a historian, he was fascinated by the possibilities. It was almost like imagining an alternate history. What if the letter had reached Jefferson Davis? What if Davis had indeed turned over the Silver Cross—assuming he actually had it in the first place? What if French warships appeared on the American coast, landing troops in Virginia and Georgia and North Carolina?
Journey tapped his finger three times on the legal pad he’d filled with notes. But Rose Greenhow drowned, he thought.
And how did the letter get to the woman who gave it to Tolman? For that matter, who was the woman?
That part was Tolman’s job. If the woman could be found, Tolman would find her. His task was to find the Silver Cross.
He threw down his pen in disgust, because he just wasn’t finding it.
He’d been through a volume of Napoleon III’s personal letters, the best primary source he could find. While there were many references to the French occupation of Mexico and the silver mines of Sonora, there was nothing about a valuable artifact, or any expedition into Confederate territory.
It wasn’t until he started getting into secondary and tertiary sources that he even found any whispers—unsubstantiated rumors, things someone said to someone else. Lots of speculation, not much fact.
One of the books, written in 1954, mentioned that one of Napoleon’s courtiers told his mistress twenty years after the fact that Napoleon had spoken of “a giant crucifix, almost as large as that upon which Our Lord suffered and died,” and that “the emperor was determined to possess.”
A 1971 article in an obscure British history journal included a one-paragraph notation of a conversation between a pair of British and French diplomats in 1864, with the Frenchman saying, “His Majesty is drunk on the idea of New World silver. He speaks of a single piece of treasure, for which he would gladly pay any bounty.”
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