The doors whispered open to a commanding voice barking orders. I was four strides toward Kyle’s office before it registered that he was behind me, running down a plan.
“I’ve just gotten word our best informant is in surgery at St. Vincent’s with a GSW, so we’re going on information that’s more than twelve hours old, but it’s all we’ve got. We’re looking for this man, Stacy Adams, and he may be in any form of disguise. He’s armed and highly dangerous, and . . .”
I rounded the corner into the room without really realizing I had moved that way.
Gasps and murmurs rippled through a dozen agents, front to back, and Kyle whirled, his head drawing back and his eyes flying wide when he saw me.
“Nichelle, my God, what—”
I shook my head. “It’s not Adams. It’s Hamilton Baine. And I think Jerry Stickley is carrying the bomb into the breakfast this morning for them.”
“Jerry Stickley? That guy couldn’t find his ass with two hands and a flashlight,” Kyle said. “He’s nothing but a small-time thief. No way he’s into anything this complicated.”
I leaned back against the wall, my knees finally giving. “He knew Hamilton, Stacy Adams told me. Those guys, the trailer explosion, the trial. The weight loss and hair loss and tomato-red skin. They weren’t cooking meth. They were building experimental nuclear bombs. But meth is a way lighter rap than terrorism. That’s why the case was such a slam dunk, why they copped to the charges Friday. Why Jerry turned on them and he’s still breathing. Because it was planned that way from before you guys ever made it to the scene. Kyle, I swear.”
An agent in full tactical gear crossed the room and dragged a chair over next to me before he extended a hand to help me into it.
“Can we get a glass of water here?” Kyle barked over his shoulder as I sank into the chair, shaking and fighting for air.
“I know all that,” he said. “Why do you think I tried so hard to get you as far away from this as I could after Craig Terry called me on Saturday when you started asking him questions? We couldn’t charge those guys with terrorism without tipping our hand before we got to whoever was really running the show. But Jerry Stickley is no assassin. What do you mean, he knew Hamilton?” He pressed a cold glass into my hand. “And what the hell happened to you?”
I closed both hands around the glass. “I shot them. Both of them,” I said, raising my eyes to his. “What you said before . . . your ‘best informant.’” I choked on the last word. Raised the glass to my cracked lips as Kyle’s disappeared into his goatee. “Kyle. Who?”
He put a hand on my shoulder, not seeming to care that I was covered in blood still. “He’ll be okay, honey. He’s strong.”
Oh my God.
What Joey couldn’t tell anyone, not even me.
I closed my eyes, pushing the panic back down, down, down until I could breathe.
He wanted me to move in with him.
I said our lives were too different.
And now he was bleeding on an operating table.
There wasn’t time to think about this now.
He would be okay, because he just goddamn had to.
And I would sort this out later.
I opened my eyes. “We only have an hour. We have to go. It’s Jerry, I swear. His stringy, thinning hair, the constant runny nose. I don’t know why he flipped on them, but he was closer to this than you think, and he’s stayed in it while his friends have been sitting in cells. He walked up to Hamilton Baine in a public place Friday night like they were old friends. Does that sound like the timid, backward Sticks from the courthouse? He’s your guy.”
Kyle pulled me to my feet. “Drink that,” he said, tapping the glass. I complied. He set it on a table and ushered me out the door, pressing on a little wired plastic piece behind his ear. “Nichelle is going to have to go in with you if we’ve got the perimeter. She says she knows who you’re looking for.” He paused. “I’m sure.” He glanced at me. I nodded. “Yeah. We’re sure. Meet me out front, I’m leaving now.”
He pushed the button to call the elevator.
“I’m sending you in with Chaudry because I don’t have a choice,” he said. “My team is holding the perimeter in case something goes wrong and the perpetrator makes it out of the venue. We need someone who can ID the subject, and I never even questioned that guy. I’ve seen exactly one grainy newspaper photo. Point him out and get the hell out of the room.”
“How can they just let people walk in here? Why is she even going to be there?” I asked. “Can’t they lock her in the hotel or something?”
“She wants to go,” he said. “They told her. She doesn’t believe it’s going to actually happen, and the event is important to her.”
I didn’t get that. She wasn’t just endangering herself anymore.
But it didn’t matter.
Nothing mattered except getting there in time, and being right for once in this whole lousy mess.
35
Chaudry paced a small square of concrete between the Coliseum doors and the corner. Kyle hadn’t stopped the car before I clicked my seat belt catch and kicked the door open, landing on the curb when I jumped out.
“Nicey!” The urgency in Kyle’s voice caught me off guard and I spun back, eyebrows up.
“Make sure you get back out of there, okay?” Pained lines rimmed his blue eyes. He didn’t want to let me do this.
I nodded. “Welcome to my world, Special Agent Miller,” I said, reaching to grab his hand. “I’m proud of you, you know that?” I wasn’t sure why I said it, really. I wasn’t as scared as I probably should’ve been. But I wanted him to know. Just in case.
“Back at you, friend.”
I nodded, letting his fingers go. “Do your thing. Keep your head down.”
He smiled. “You too.”
Chaudry stepped forward. “Getting tight, guys.”
I shut Kyle’s door and backed toward the squatty concrete building, watching his Explorer disappear into traffic. Chaudry touched my elbow with two fingers. “This way. Miller said you know who we’re looking for. How?”
“I spent the night under three tons of concrete next to a nuclear reactor courtesy of the governor’s son, who seems to have a different view of women and politics than most people,” I said. “Hamilton thinks killing the president returns the country to its rightful owners. That’s what he said. I haven’t stopped to work out the political beneficiaries web, but I’d bet you’re in a better place to do that than I am, anyway. They’ve been making test bombs for at least a year, in a trailer park on the edge of nowhere. They have something security won’t pick up, they think, but I’m betting they’re angling for the breakfast and not the speech tonight, because there are more ways in.”
He pulled the door open and waved me inside, nodding.
“Here.” He pushed open the door to the stairwell. I followed. We made it up two long flights, my legs protesting every step, before he ushered me into a long, dim empty hallway.
I turned. “Is the kitchen—” The words died on my lips when I saw the gun.
“Oh, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” The words slipped out before I could stop them.
He was an excellent liar. None of us had guessed.
The president was still on her way here because she didn’t know a damned thing.
Kyle was setting his team up blocks away. Joey was on an operating table. Aaron was AWOL for reasons I still didn’t understand. Landers was on his way to Nukes ’R’ Us, hours from here.
I was on my own.
Staring down a gun in the hands of an expert marksman at point-blank range.
Objectively, I didn’t like my odds. But damned if I was going out without a fight.
“So you were their inside man,” I said. “Did you and Hamilton meet on some sort of homegrown terrorism web forum, or is there a local chapter?”
He shook his head. “I’ve known Hamilton since he was a kid. Former state police.”
Of course. He’d
even told me that, in my kitchen. And I was so busy freaking out about Joey killing someone I didn’t manage to hold on to it. That was it. Someone who knew how the governor’s detail worked, how the ATF worked, and how the White House worked. Chaudry was my patient zero, the center of this whole messy web of secrets and death, and I’d followed him right into a neat little indoor blind alley.
Nice one, Nichelle.
I stepped forward, the blade in my pocket hard and cold against my leg. ‘Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight’ was a cliché for a reason, but I had zero options. I had to get close enough to touch him, and I needed surprise on my side.
Keep him talking.
“Why did you come get me? Yesterday afternoon? Why not just let me sit in jail?” I raised an eyebrow. “I have a bit of a reputation for being a pain in the ass for guys like you.”
He snorted. “No lie. But Miller told me to go after you while he talked alone with your little snitch friend. I couldn’t say no without possibly blowing my cover. So . . . here you are. I told Hamilton to take care of you last night when I saw on Miller’s phone that you were on your way to the silo.”
I blinked.
“Your message came up while he was in the can. I deleted it, I texted Hamilton. But.” His hand tightened around the butt of the gun. “If you want something done right, you do it yourself.”
“How did you get Hamilton into this?” I blurted, stepping to the side and forward.
He rolled his eyes. “This, the bomb part, was Hamilton’s idea. All I came in knowing was that I wanted Katherine Denham under the turf at Arlington National with my baby brother. Women have no business sending soldiers into harm’s way. Wyatt Bledsoe knows a couple of my old buddies from the state police who knew how I felt about our commander in chief. So Wyatt accompanied the governor to the White House last year and found me, told me about Grayson’s plan: take down Denham and pin it on Baine by way of Hamilton. Saved me from having to do it myself, and Grayson and I get a fat retirement payday from Standard Coal, too. All I had to do was get Denham here and keep Miller off Hamilton until today. He’s not quite all there, that kid. I think the thing with his parents kind of fucked him up from an early age, really, but he’s handy. Nothing like a zealot to make sure a plan goes off well.” He gave me a once-over, his eyes lingering on the bloodstains still on my shirt. “Though it seems he underestimated you. I won’t make that mistake.”
We’d see about that.
“Anything you want me to tell anyone?” he asked. “I am sorry it had to come to this, believe it or not. I will of course have chased you up the stairs when you took off after a hunch, only to have arrived a split second too late.” He cast his eyes down, his voice going soft. “She died in my arms, man. I’m so sorry. She said to tell you . . .” He looked up at me with a cocked brow. “What?”
He blinked at my proximity. I’d slipped right up next to him during his little dramatic performance, palming the blade of Joey’s knife.
Flipping it forward, I closed my hand around it tight, biting down on a scream when the teeth sank into the meat of my palm. “Tell him people like you always underestimate me,” I said, wrapping my other hand around the first and jabbing as hard as I could, the blade sliding into his side so effortlessly it took the blood pouring out over my hand to make me sure I’d gotten it deep enough.
Chaudry sucked in a sharp breath, raising his big right fist and swinging hard at my face. I leapt back, managing to just catch the back edge of his massive class ring on the tip of my temple instead of the full force of the blow.
But I stumbled, landing on my ass.
And the knife clattered across the linoleum, disappearing behind me.
Shit.
Chaudry was bleeding pretty good, but it wasn’t slowing him down much. He stepped forward.
“How about I just tell him you loved him?”
He raised the gun.
I pinched my eyes closed, pulling in a deep, calming breath.
36
Shoving with everything I had in both arms, I vaulted myself back to my feet and sprang at Chaudry, a scream ripping up my throat from some primal place I didn’t know I had.
I hit him square in the center of his sternum with the top of my head, pain exploding down my neck as we tumbled to the floor.
The air rushed out of his chest when we hit the ground. I knew that gave me a split-second biological advantage. His body would focus first on getting oxygen back.
Scrambling to an upright position, I straddled his thighs and spotted the open gash in his side, balking for a half tick.
Could I do this?
His chest started to expand again.
If I wanted to live, I had to.
Sinking both thumbs into the wound, I twisted and scratched, swallowing the bile that rose up my throat at the warm, squishy feel of something I didn’t want identified under my bare fingers. His whole torso wracked, a low, growling scream twisting his face into a mask of fury and pain. “You bitch!” he howled, banging his fists on the floor before he swung them blindly at me.
The metal end of the gun swooped so close to my face I felt the air move around it, but didn’t hit me.
Before I could process the near miss, Chaudry’s meaty left hook collided with my shoulder, pain skating out from the blow in every direction. I tightened my abs and stayed upright, my eyes still on the hand clenching his sidearm in a grip I had no hope of breaking.
No time for pain. No room for squeamish disgust. I set my jaw and pulled outward in opposite directions with both thumbs.
His flesh tore, blood flowing faster over my hands. His arm fell to his side on the floor, his back arching off the floor and forcing me to clamp my knees around his legs to hold my position.
Oh God.
I couldn’t. I was going to puke.
But I had to, nausea be damned. It was either him or me and everyone in five city blocks.
I pulled harder. He screamed again, this one high and long, his fingers relaxing on the butt of the gun.
That was all I needed.
Yanking my hands out of his middle, I dived, Kyle in my ear lecturing me on how to disarm an attacker. One hand tight around the barrel, one pushing up from the bottom of the butt. Pull, push, twist, all in one motion.
I threw my whole body backward when I felt the gun coming loose, landing on my back across Chaudry’s feet, his weapon in my hands.
Gripping it tight, I rolled left, because Kyle said people usually move right, coming up on my knees over him and checking the safety on the gun. Off.
Resting a finger on the trigger, I aimed it at him.
“Stay there, Agent.”
He writhed on the floor, both hands covering the wound in his side. “Shoot me,” he said, turning his head toward me, a thin trickle of blood running from one corner of his mouth.
I rose slowly, keeping the gun on him. “I’ve shot enough people for today.”
“I won’t go to prison. You do it or I will,” he said. The blood trickle thickened. Damn.
“No dice,” I said, looking around for something to cuff him to.
The door to the stairs had an old-style crash bar. That was probably sturdy enough.
“Give me your cuffs,” I said.
He shook his head. “Shoot me, dammit!” he roared. His face melted into something else altogether, a desperate, livid, terrified mass of skin that didn’t even look half-human.
I swallowed hard.
If he was strong enough to get up and come at me, he would have. The black-red pool under him oozed outward over the dirty floor at an alarming rate, and the trickle from the corner of his mouth was getting thicker. He wasn’t going anywhere. But I had a job to finish.
I backed toward the door.
“You win,” Chaudry called. A thick-sounding cough sent blood droplets spraying into the air. “If you can find him.”
Whirling and hitting the crash bar with my free hand, I didn’t look back. I sprinted down the stairs, shouting
for help. The lobby was filling with people dressed in their designer runway best. A security guard raced through the crowd when I screamed, reaching his hands out and then drawing them back when he got an eyeful of all the blood.
“There’s a federal agent in the hallway two flights up those stairs, I think he’s bleeding to death. Call the PD, ask for Aaron White, and tell him this man is trying to kill the president.” I spit the words out fast, trying to sound authoritative and realizing I both sounded and looked batshit crazy.
“What?” He fumbled for his radio. “Who are you? What do you mean someone is trying to kill the president? I think you’d better come with me.”
I backed out of arm’s reach. “Just call Detective White, and don’t go up there alone,” I said. If he didn’t call Aaron, that was his problem.
Spinning toward the first-floor hallway, I ran.
The breakfast was in the Madison room.
The service staff would have to be in the next one over.
I read the signs on the doors as I pushed through the growing crowd headed for the huge ballroom, indignant shouts peppering my wake.
There.
I turned, running smack into a woman holding a Burberry-outfitted toddler on one hip. “Sorry,” I said, ducking past her. I yanked the door open and stopped short, nose to nose with Wyatt Bledsoe.
His wide eyes narrowed, his mouth screwing into a scowl.
I didn’t have time to think. One step back, base foot planted. I jumped, sending my best ap’chagi flying at his stomach. He hit the ground and I sped past, ignoring the recoil cramp in my quadricep as I scanned the room.
People spun. Whispers turned to murmurs. Trays crashed to the tile.
My eyes kept moving.
Until they lit on the one person who didn’t look shocked by my appearance.
I started for him at a dead run, the room erupting behind me as the security guard zipped in with a half-dozen Secret Service agents who actually wanted to do their jobs.
Deadly Politics Page 29