The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich

by Lars Emmerich

  The text was from Dan Gable. “Mike Charles has a daughter.” There was a video attached to the text. I’m glad the cell phone companies haven’t gone belly up just yet, Sam found herself thinking.

  She clicked on the video. A pretty young girl lay on a mattress in what looked like a shelter or youth hostel of some sort. A group of people stood in a semicircle around the girl, talking in concerned tones. She was trembling visibly, mumbling something about missing her shot. Drug addict?

  “Type 1 diabetic,” Dan’s next missive explained. She’s run out of her insulin, Sam realized.

  Leverage came in all sorts of forms, some of them alarming, but there was only one rule in Sam’s line of work: use it while you had it. She held the phone up against the plexiglass divider that locked Mike Charles into his mobile prison in the backseat. She played the video.

  She watched his face carefully in the mirror. It was more instinct than habit by now, after years of reading volumes in slightly arched eyebrows and almost imperceptibly oscillating pupils.

  No clairvoyance was required in this case, however, and Sam watched as any remaining façade melted instantly away from the smart and charismatic senior executive’s face at the sight of his sick daughter. His eyes misted over, and he seemed to deflate.

  She let a few seconds pass, to let the first reverberations gang up on him, then started gently to work. “Type one. My grandmother had that. That’s where the body attacks its own insulin-producing cells, right?”

  He nodded.

  Brock stirred, awakened by the conversation.

  “What’s her name?” Sam asked, a subtle twist of the knife, emphasizing the familial connection.

  “Jenny.” Charles struggled for composure, forcing himself to look away, squinting out the window through the harsh reflections of the morning sun.

  “My grandmother was a sufferer. It was tough as she got older. She kept forgetting whether she’d taken her meds. Lost feeling in her extremities, and ended up on dialysis. I’m no doctor, but it looks like Jenny’s gone too long between shots.”

  She saw Charles’ jaw clench. “I told her to stock up.” His voice was almost inaudible.

  “There were fires in certain neighborhoods, and some gang activity, from what I hear. Maybe she had trouble getting home to take her shot.”

  She watched him steel himself.

  Brock caught her eye, with that look he sometimes got, asking wordlessly whether working a man’s family angle like that was really necessary. She gave him a small, sad smile and a nod in answer.

  “It can get serious, though, if the blood sugar builds up too high, right?”

  Charles gave her a hard look, aware of what she was doing, annoyed by how well it was working on him. “Life-threatening. As you know. Who took the video?”

  Sam shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  She let a few more miles pass in silence. “I’ve been thinking about something you said, Mike. About how you told your daughter to stock up on her medications.” She turned to look at him, adding emphasis to her question: “Why?”

  “A diabetic must always have an emergency supply of insulin.” The reply was terse, and a little unfriendly.

  “But you said, ‘stock up.’ As if in preparation for something catastrophic.”

  He snorted. “Semantics?”

  “They only matter when they do. Which means a girl has to pay attention.” She eyed him, staring him down. “You knew this was coming. This meltdown. Didn’t you.” It didn’t feel to Sam like a question, more like an expression of the preverbal knowing that she’d formed over the past couple of days.

  She saw Charles’ jaw clench, but he steeled himself against his anger and helplessness, and it was as if a veil had descended over his face. His expression was implacable. That’s right, Mike. Get that feeling like you’re back in control. Perfect preamble to the coup de grace.

  “NIH and Homeland work closely together, Mike. It’s not common knowledge, because the medicaid crowd would come after them in droves demanding handouts, but there are drug stockpiles in every major city.”

  Charles tried to remain impassive, but his eyes gave him away. The gears were clearly turning.

  “I’m sure a word or two in the right ears could go a long way.” Dramatic pause. “Given that this is a national security situation, of course, and you’re a guy with a lot of relevant knowledge at the moment.”

  Anger flashed. Charles sat forward, losing his cool in what Sam surmised was an exceptionally rare apoplectic episode. “How dare you toy with my daughter’s life!”

  Sam laughed derisively. “But kneeing the global economy in the stones wasn’t out of bounds?” Surely, he had to have thought of this. It didn’t take anything more than average human predictive power to conjecture that someone would eventually find some sort of uncomfortable situation in Mr. Charles’ personal life that was suitable for exploitation. After all, more than a few people were certain to go looking for a little enlightenment regarding the most outrageous conspiracy in memory, the little to-do from which no country on the planet appeared to be immune at present.

  “You’re a federal agent!” Charles said. “It’s criminal to knowingly withhold lifesaving medicine from someone who needs it.”

  Sam shook her head. “I’m not withholding anything, Mike. Jenny has just as much right to help as any of the millions of other diabetics in the same boat right about now. You and I were merely discussing what might make me feel compelled to spend a little effort trying to move her closer to the front of the line, particularly in light of the national security situation that you seem to be directly involved with.”

  He stewed in silence.

  “And let’s not forget,” she pressed, “who kicked this whole thing off. As far as the blame game goes, my money’s on the guy who stole the beam director and authorized its delivery to Langley.”

  It was a theory she’d paraded in front of Charles before. The effect had been muted, at best, and Charles had clearly prepared well to resist interrogation efforts.

  But it was different with a daughter in trouble, Sam figured, which was why she decided to take a gamble. “I’m going to figure this out one way or the other, Mike. It’s too big, and you weren’t careful enough, and even a lumbering government employee like me could eventually fit the pieces together.”

  She watched his eyes carefully. He blinked a few times, more rapidly than average, she thought, a sign that the idea of an inevitable revelation of his culpability was at least rattling around his brain, its sharp and spiky consequences pricking all sorts of precious things in his life.

  “Difference is,” Sam continued, “people might be inclined to cut you some slack if you help us stop what’s next.”

  Charles sat up and leaned forward. “What makes you think there’s anything else coming?”

  Was that a trap slamming shut? She smiled, with unabashed smugness. Charles’ outburst was delivered far too quickly. “It’s always the same with you alpha males,” she said. “You can never bear to lose a battle, even to win the war.”

  Sam saw him blush, and she laughed a bit harshly. “Too much foreskin and too little forehead, I think.”

  Brock chuckled in the passenger’s seat, despite his efforts to remain as unobtrusive an observer as possible, captive audience that he was.

  “Like I said,” Sam went on, “this will all end up out in the open. Too big and messy, which means there are too many loose ends to button down. I give it two days, max. A week, at worst. And honestly, even accounting for the reduced workforce due to all the mayhem, we’ll have more than half of you clowns in the bag by sundown.”

  She turned her head to look at him again, her face serious, her eyes hard. “So twelve hours, max. That’s what you’ll gain in exchange for your daughter’s life.”

  Sam let him mull, watching him through the mirror as he did so, wondering what was going on inside his head.

  Ideologue? It was possible. They came in all sorts of fla
vors, even the otherwise level-headed type.

  But she didn’t think that was what made Mike Charles tick. Disgruntled and disillusioned, maybe, but that was a very long way from conspiring against the free world. Plus, he just wasn’t that riled up about all the trouble that he’d caused. He wasn’t pleading a case or preaching, as an ideologue might. So the zealot angle wasn’t really working for her.

  He had even taken his misfortune largely in stride. Being rescued from the buck-toothed animals at the rest stop, by the very same federal agent who was sent to bring him to justice, was terrifically shitty luck. But he’d seemed to roll with the punches remarkably well.

  Until the video of his daughter. Maybe the family angle was something Charles had considered, and maybe he had even tried to prepare himself for it. But it certainly wasn’t anything he was on top of. He was clearly rattled, and he’d even lost his cool.

  That’s why she wasn’t surprised when Charles began to speak. “We’ll need to get gas in Denver,” he said. “I think you’ll be interested in something a bit further west.”

  36

  Pitkin County Airport, Aspen, Colorado

  Brock opened the car door and hobbled inside the terminal building to inquire after Dan Gable’s arrival time. The high-priority case had apparently shaken loose some federal resources that were otherwise reserved for the upper crust, even in the nation’s ‘hour of need,’ and Dan had finagled private jet service to Aspen from DC, nonstop, with no ear-piercing badgering or livestock treatment at the hands of the bargain-basement airlines.

  Sam stayed with Mike Charles, who was still imprisoned in the backseat of the Oklahoma police cruiser. The mood in the car had become strangely affable since Charles had begun opening up about the conspiracy.

  He had done much more than merely cooperate with Sam’s investigation, it turned out. He’d even arranged for a few of his co-conspirators to meet them at the airport. Sam thought his gratitude at her arranging insulin treatments for Jenny might have worked against his own best legal interests, but she certainly didn’t stop the effusion of juicy tidbits. He’d revealed enough to keep a grand jury busy for years, Sam thought.

  If there’s still such a thing as a grand jury these days.

  The radio reports had been a bit grim, though admittedly, not nearly as grim as she would have anticipated. People seemed to be figuring things out. That annoying Monopoly Man, with his smug pith, was more insightful than Sam cared to admit. They’d listened in silence to yet another intrusive message during a lull in the conversation, the bygone-era cartoon voice speaking again about currency as nothing more than a symbol of a social agreement.

  She resisted the thought as a consequence of its source, but a quieter, slightly niggling voice in her head, to which she was not yet prepared to grant prominence, seemed to have a different sense of things. She’d have to revisit the idea, she decided, when she had a little more mental bandwidth.

  Something else was on her mind at the moment. She was replaying the conversation she’d had two nights earlier with the asshole-esque old coot who ran the show at Langley Air Force Base, General Mark Hajek. He was too smart to be as dumb as he sounded. “Mike, something’s been bothering me,” she said to Charles. “Was Hajek really in the dark? He said he knew nothing about what was going on at Langley. Which makes me think he knew everything that was going on at Langley.”

  Charles’ eyes twinkled just a bit. “I don’t know what COMACC knew.”

  “Why’d you sign the authorization for the cargo plane to land at his airstrip?”

  The sparkle turned into a sardonic smile. “I’m the designated lightning rod.”

  Sam laughed. “How’s that working out?”

  “Would have been better not to have made the bathroom stop in Oklahoma, I think.” Charles shook his head. “I suppose that’s life in a random universe.”

  “Some might call it comeuppance.”

  Charles laughed. “The thought certainly crossed my mind. But I still think this is the least painful way to make the transition. Better we deal with the debt problem now, than to have to deal with it as part of a larger political or military conflict later on.”

  Sam pondered. “There’s some wisdom there, I’m sure.” She looked at him in the mirror, with a motherly expression aimed at a man who could be an uncle. “But a lot of folks are going to have a lot of things to say about it, and the old ‘ends justify the means’ thing probably won’t float.”

  “In court?” Charles asked. “You’ve heard the radio reports, right?”

  “Same radio you’ve been listening to. But it’s hard to know what’s credible. It’s the news media, after all.”

  Charles shook his head. “Hard to fake burning courthouses and government buildings.”

  “It is definitely starting to feel like an uprising, I’ll give you that.”

  “When you meet them, you’ll recognize many of the players who were involved in engineering this event. It’s not a collection of dunces and dullards, and there are some exceedingly accomplished individuals involved. I think we all hope that the public comes to see past the momentary inconvenience to grasp the big picture.”

  “Tall order,” Sam said. “The public generally doesn’t seem to see past much.”

  “Don’t conflate the public with the news media’s portrayal of us. They’re vastly different things. The media serves the purpose of its owners.”

  Sam laughed. “You sound like me. But you’re more of an idealistic curmudgeon than I’ve managed to become.”

  “Just a frog who happened to wake up to the uncomfortable temperature in the pot. Thankfully, it wasn’t boiling quite yet.”

  Was that pride she saw, that impish wrinkle at the corner of Charles’ eyes? “Thousands hacking at the branches of evil, all of that?” she asked.

  He nodded, maybe with a trace of self-satisfaction. “I went after the root.” Always the ego that gets them, Sam thought again.

  “Winning hearts and minds will be an uphill battle, I think,” Sam said.

  Charles shook his head. “Honestly? I don’t think so. I bet fewer than one person in ten honestly thought the old system was sustainable.”

  “That won’t stop them from tarring and feathering you in the meantime.”

  “Thanks. I wasn’t worried enough already.”

  Sam decided she liked Mike Charles, as far as one could like a perpetrator of such a megalomaniacal plot, anyway. No shortage of chutzpah. Something admirable about having the gonads to change the tilt of the world, she thought.

  She watched a plane land. Dan Gable’s, undoubtedly. The other rich people who could afford to retreat to their Aspen or Vail abodes had already done so, judging by the lack of empty space on the airport tarmac.

  Her mind returned to gnawing on the pieces of the conspiracy. “So, Mike, back to Hajek. Involved?”

  “No comment.”

  “So, yes?”

  “Draw your own conclusions.”

  Sam smiled. “Hazardous, in my line of work, at least without a trail of truth stones to hop across. He had dumb answers but intelligent eyes, and I thought I might have detected a hint of annoyance at having to play the fool.”

  “I don’t know him well,” Charles said.

  “But you chat at sewing circle?”

  “His organization is a customer of the program I ran.”

  “I did happen to notice the past tense there,” Sam said. “Optimism or fatalism?”

  “Not much difference in my case.” Charles’ smile was wistful and a little inscrutable.

  Sam turned to look at him again. “You lack the career bureaucrat’s bovine eyes and non-statements. My guess is you weren’t long for the job anyway. Either on your way up or on your way out.”

  “Out is up,” Charles said. “Pay was way below scale for the aggravation.”

  “It’ll read nicely in the Newspaper of Record,” Sam said. “‘Disgruntled government worker screw over the planet.’ Should sell a few million
copies, don’t you think?”

  Charles laughed. “But who’s buying? Besides, you give us too much credit. The dam was going to break. I just did my part to help nudge it along before the water behind it became any deeper.”

  “Swell guy,” Sam said. “You helped us keep from bludgeoning each other back to the stone age, is that it?”

  “Actually, yes.”

  Sam smiled sardonically. “Forgive me if I’m a little less than thankful. I had a few days off coming to me that I was looking forward to enjoying.”

  “The best laid plans… I hadn’t counted on the little Deliverance scene back in Oklahoma, either.”

  Sam chuckled, conjuring the Ned Beatty scene, “squeal like a pig” echoing in her head. Yes, she decided, there was some substance, some gravitas, humor, and intellect to Mike Charles. She’d have to remember to invite him over for dinner. Brock could undercook a few steaks, they could tell old flying stories using their hands, waving their big watches around.

  If they don’t hang him at dawn as a traitor, that is.

  And, she found herself admitting reluctantly, the guy might even have a few valid points. If her politics were a bumper sticker, it might read Everyone is an Asshole, and she certainly harbored a good portion of learned distrust of authority. It had nothing to do with her decade spent working for one of the world’s most powerful authorities, of course. And, upon reflection, she’d sort of had a sense of the fragility of the whole Big Brother edifice, probably borne of its utter disregard, in practice, for the people it was supposed to represent and protect. They were bound to get wise to it and sick of it eventually.

  Sure, the slogans on the letterhead said something different, but Sam had seen some pretty draconian shit. That got her thinking, as she idly watched the government jet carrying Dan Gable taxi to a stop on the ramp in front of a private terminal building, about the reports of burning courthouses and government buildings. It wasn’t hard to project motives into those events, to imagine that the populace had maybe, finally, wised up a bit to the perpetrations.