by Tim Green
“How does that help me?” Kurt said, icy and irritated.
Dipper looked at him strangely. “The gun is in his mouth and his fingers are wrapped around it,” she said gently. “If he shot himself and lived long enough to convulse and spread that blood all over the bed, then the gun shouldn’t still have been in his mouth.”
Kurt looked at her incredulously. It was like the simple solution to a mind-bending riddle, impossible at first, obvious once revealed. Of course she was right.
“Didn’t you tell this to them?” he asked.
Carol Dipper looked around nervously. “I said something at the scene but . . . well, Detective Olander has been doing this a long time. I’m really new here; I’m sure you guessed that. He told me it was a grounder and that was that.” Then she added, “I think that’s what he really believes.”
“A grounder?”
“Something easy,” she explained. “A case that you don’t have to work very hard to solve. He thought it was clearly a suicide. It’s possible. I’ve seen lots of strange things with dead bodies. Almost anything is possible. It’s just that I don’t know if that’s what this was. And now the way you described him . . . Most people can’t accept suicide, but most times there’s also something there, some kind of depression, some sign to someone that this kind of thing might be going to happen. Please don’t say I said any of this to you . . .
“I don’t know . . .” she continued, shaking her head dubiously. “The blood all over the sheets . . . and that gun, they bother me. I have to go.”
The young woman turned abruptly and headed for the building.
“Thank you,” Kurt called after her, feeling a sudden and overwhelming sense of gratitude. What she said made perfect sense, and while he had insisted that Collin didn’t commit suicide, there had been a horrible sliver of doubt in his own mind. That was now gone.
The nausea came upon him unexpectedly like a rogue wave. His mind abruptly regurgitated the images he’d just seen and his body followed suit. Kurt bent over and vomited on the pavement, splattering his shoes with flecks of what remained from dinner. When there was nothing left, his stomach gave three final wrenching heaves before he began to cough and spit his mouth clean. He closed his eyes and leaned against the truck door to catch his breath. There was nothing more to do than drive himself to the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City.
There would be plenty to do in the morning.
Because they dealt with these kinds of investigations all the time, the best chance of finding a killer was with the local homicide detectives. Kurt knew that while different government agencies had their strong points, none of them could investigate a murder as effectively as a good homicide cop. The problem was that Olander and Todd weren’t really handling it like a murder.
Kurt knew from the look on Olander’s face that any effort he expended trying to find the woman Collin was last seen with would be perfunctory at best. He also knew that that woman was the key. Any investigation of this sort began with a time line, and there was a lot of time missing right now. The mysterious woman was the only one who could complete the picture. And if the cops weren’t going to find her, he’d do it himself. He wondered if the young detective, Dipper, could be any help. Probably not; she wasn’t going to do anything to buck her superiors.
At least he’d gotten them to dust the house. Anything they did would be a plus, and if he found something that supported his theory, he’d go back to the captain and get them to do more. But a murder trail went cold fast, and he knew that if something valuable didn’t turn up within a week, the likelihood of ever knowing the truth was remote.
When he checked into his hotel, the desk clerk told Kurt he had two messages. She slid a white envelope across the granite desktop before proceeding with his registration. He tore it open. One message was from Jill. She wanted him to know that she loved him and she was there if he needed her. Kurt allowed the warmth of her words to comfort him, but only for a moment before he folded the paper and slipped it into his pocket.
The next message astonished him. It was from David Claiborne. Claiborne was slightly younger than Kurt, but years ago the two of them had served together as rookie agents in Dallas.
While most people had considered Claiborne’s brazen style slightly obnoxious, Kurt always called him a friend. Occasionally the two of them had gone down to the Cayman Islands on dive trips. Then Kurt was selected from the field to serve on the Secret Service’s CAT team. CAT, the Counter Assassination Team, was the Secret Service’s covert strike force within the Uniformed Division. As a group, the team was almost unseen by the public except for the agents who rode in the vehicle that preceded the president in a motorcade. To be selected for such duty was a high honor for the agents who aspired to it. They were the physical elite of the service, and while Claiborne too had attempted to become a CAT team member, he had been passed over.
Besides the CAT team, the Uniformed Division provided the armed guards at the White House as well as the snipers who covered the tops of buildings wherever the president went. Protection agents wore plain clothes and formed the perimeters to provide security for the chief executive. In varying numbers, they were with him at all times, and when he traveled, their numbers were supplemented with investigation agents from the field.
After a few years on the CAT team, where he quickly rose in the ranks, Kurt was offered an ASAIC position—Assistant to the Special Agent in Charge in the Presidential Protection Division. After Dallas, the two friends had drifted apart. Even when Claiborne was rotated in on protection detail for the president, he and Kurt didn’t come into contact with each other. The CAT team, as part of the Uniformed Division, was in a different section of the Service from the Protection and Investigation Divisions, and while there was no animosity between the groups, they were very distinct entities with divergent duties.
When Kurt left the Service to form Safe Tech, he had received a call from Claiborne. His friend had heard rumor of his venture and offered up his services to assist in the formation of the new business. “The Service,” Claiborne had told Kurt, “isn’t the place where someone of my abilities can maximize his potential.”
Kurt politely declined his friend’s offer, not thinking Claiborne could offer anything to his nascent company that he didn’t already have. Not long after, he heard that Claiborne had finally made it out of the field and into protection, and that had assuaged his guilt at not having hired him.
When Collin joined the Service, Kurt learned that his old friend had advanced even further. He was occupying the job Kurt had held when he left: one of only three ASAICs who worked under the Special Agent in Charge of the Presidential Protection Division. It had taken Claiborne almost twenty years to reach the position Kurt held as a young man. That must have bothered Claiborne, who had always had grand aspirations. Nevertheless, even with Collin working underneath him, neither Claiborne nor Kurt had gotten around to contacting the other.
Kurt wondered how his former colleague knew that he was even in the capital. Possibly after he heard about Collin’s death, he’d called the house and spoken with Gracie. She’d remember him. That was certain. Kurt smiled to himself. Claiborne was a small man, but good-looking to the point of being almost pretty. Every woman Kurt ever knew remembered David Claiborne. It was too bad that so much time had gone by during which neither of them had bothered to call the other, and that it took a tragedy to precipitate a reunion.
The message was simple. Call David Claiborne on his cell phone. It was important.
Kurt looked at the round brass clock behind the desk. It was two-thirty, but important meant call anytime, day or night, and he knew it had something to do with Collin. He took the elevator up to his room. When he got there, the phone was ringing. Kurt hurried to pick it up. It was Claiborne.
“David,” Kurt said, feeling that old familiarity immediately, “I was just going to call you. I got your message.”
“Listen, Kurt,” Claiborne said in a hushed tone, “I’m
sorry about Collin. I’m incredibly sorry.”
Kurt said nothing.
“I need to talk to you, but I’m supervising a shift right now. Can you meet me tomorrow?”
“Of course,” Kurt said. “But why?”
“I can’t talk,” Claiborne said. “I have to see you. It’s about Collin. Meet me at the Thomas Cole rotunda at the National Gallery tomorrow at noon. Make sure no one follows you. Kurt, make sure!” Then he hung up.
CHAPTER 4
Kurt stood looking at the phone. His mind was sprinting in circles. After a while, he unpacked his things and went to the window. He drew back the heavy golden drapes and stared for a while out at the stars and the light-polluted horizon beyond the Pentagon. He reminded himself again that there was nothing he could do at this hour and if David Claiborne was on duty, he certainly couldn’t be expected to break away. Part of him wanted to head for the White House and pound on the gates.
The best thing for Kurt would be some sleep, but he knew his body wouldn’t rest. The alternative was simple. He dug into his shaving kit and found a small bottle of Halcyon, a powerful sleeping pill. He took two, removed his clothes, and lay down in the bed staring up at the ceiling. Naked, flat on his back in bed, a sudden and gruesome image sprang to life in his head: his son’s dead body in the police photos. Kurt’s mind tumbled recklessly from one possibility to another, tormented, until at last, mercifully, the drug overcame him.
The rotunda that contained Thomas Cole’s four-part allegorical depiction of the life of man was one of Kurt’s favorite museum exhibits in the world. He didn’t care that it wasn’t impressionist or done by one of the more famous European painters. He cared about its meaning. He cared about the room, the building, and the capital city that was its home. For all his worldliness, Kurt believed in America and he held a special place in his heart for her greatest artists, authors, statesmen, and scientists. It was, he told those who knew him best, the greatest society in the short history of mankind.
The museum was busy, and after a few minutes of searching for Claiborne in the milling crowd of visitors, he decided that he had been the first to arrive. For over an hour, he had conducted a series of evasive maneuvers in and around the Mall, including quick trips in three different cabs. He had taken his old friend’s warning quite seriously.
As his eyes wandered from one painting to the next, he tried to recall whether David Claiborne knew about his affinity for this place or if it was merely a coincidence that he’d asked to meet there. He couldn’t remember when he’d first discovered the rotunda. Events from the distant past seemed to run together, and although he was fairly certain he hadn’t spent much time with David since he left Dallas, he couldn’t be sure. On the other hand, Secret Service agents, even former ones, didn’t typically believe in coincidence. They were highly trained, as they joked among themselves, in the art of paranoia.
Kurt wondered how much of that paranoia he had retained, how much it had helped him to succeed in the business of computer encryption and security—and how much of it had returned in the sixteen hours since he learned of his son’s unusual death. His eyes came to rest on Cole’s painting of Youth, a young man not unlike Collin with his hand firmly fixed on the rudder of his baroque canoe. In the distance, an immense and incredible palace arose from the clouds—the hopes and dreams of youth. The eyes of the boy were fixed there in the sky, and only the viewer could see the impending bend in the stream of life that soon promised disaster.
Kurt moved clockwise in the decorative rotunda to the scene of adulthood. Three demons emerged from the tumultuous, inky sky above the boy who had become a man, who struggled amid the angry tempest in the now rudderless craft. Although murder lingered nearby, the most pernicious demon—and Kurt had always felt this way—was suicide. Again, he wondered if there was a reason for his old friend’s choice of this particular place.
“You’re sure no one followed you?”
Kurt glanced to his right. A grayer and somehow wilted version of the small, handsome man he had once known stood beside him, apparently contemplating the painting. He’d spoken softly, but his words still had that same imperious ring to them that had always made Kurt smile while others grew irritated.
“I’m sure,” he said, turning back to the painting himself, his attention focused on the periphery of his vision where Claiborne now stood. It was a strange reintroduction after so many years.
“Then follow me,” Claiborne said flatly. He turned and left the rotunda.
Kurt followed at a moderate distance through the crowded gallery that separated the American painters from the Europeans. When Claiborne reached the immense dome in the center of the building, he looked back to make sure Kurt hadn’t lost him. Then he turned to his right until he reached the stairs. He descended slowly, looking over his shoulder before turning off down a long empty hall and darting through an unmarked wooden door.
Kurt followed, glancing around before letting himself in and closing the door gently behind him. Claiborne had already physically separated himself from Kurt by sitting behind a small desk littered with knickknacks, among them a little statue of a golfer made from copper wire. It was the cramped office of a maintenance supervisor.
“Lock the door,” Claiborne said. “Have a seat.”
Kurt threw the bolt. In the instant before he turned around, he worried that David might harbor some bitterness at his refusal to hire him years ago. The men Kurt had hired on were now multimillionaires. But the thought was fleeting, and when he did turn around, Claiborne seemed to have relaxed somewhat.
The two of them grasped hands across the desk like old friends. Claiborne said, “I’m sorry, Kurt. I don’t know what to say.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t bring you on with Safe Tech, David,” Kurt blurted out. “I had no idea it would become what it did. If I’d known the way things were going to work out, I would have taken you with me.”
Claiborne’s face suddenly broke out in a congenial smile and he swatted the air above his head, saying, “Don’t think anything about that, Kurt. That was a long time ago and I forgot all about it . . . I do pretty good for myself. I’ve got a nice brownstone in Georgetown. I drive a Lexus. Things are good . . .
“No,” he continued, his face darkening in consternation, “no, this is so far beyond anything like that . . . I just don’t know what to say or how to start . . .”
Kurt eyed him closely. Time and care had worn the edges off his old friend. Claiborne looked to be in good enough shape, but there was something subtly shabby about him. Maybe it was the incongruity of his clothes, or the pungent and expensive cologne he wore. Claiborne was dressed like a much younger man. It was as though his attempt to hide his age only accentuated it. The tight black silk shirt under his stylish olive four-buttoned Country Road jacket contrasted sharply with his faded blond hair and the liver spots that were beginning to populate the backs of his hands. Or maybe it was the once-pretty face that now sagged slightly at the jowls and drooped at the corners of his yellowing eyes. Kurt was reminded of a brilliant bouquet of flowers forgotten in their vase, not yet dried and dusty, but wilted and marred at the edges by the hint of decay.
“I think someone killed your boy,” Claiborne said abruptly.
Kurt felt his mouth sag open.
“I think it’s possible they might try to do the same to me,” the agent added curtly.
“Who are they?” Kurt asked incredulously. “Why? What the hell is going on, David?”
Claiborne drew a deep breath and held it. He let his gaze drift past the metal blinds and through the small window that looked out over the sculpture garden across the street. “Four weeks ago,” he began, exhaling, “the old man made an off-the-record move at three A.M. I was running the shift.”
Kurt gave him a puzzled look. An off-the-record move meant the president just suddenly announced that he was going somewhere. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, it created a special sort of anxiety for the agents on duty.
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“Mack Taylor was with him,” Claiborne said.
“The SAIC?” Kurt said. It was strange that the Special Agent in Charge would be on duty at such an hour.
Claiborne nodded. “Yes. The two of them got into the limo with a driver, and I got into the chase car with three other agents . . .
“One of them was your son,” he added somberly.
After a deliberate pause, he continued. “There were two others. One was killed two weeks ago in a carjacking, and the other disappeared five days after the . . . the incident. No one’s heard from her, including her parents.”
“What the hell happened?” Kurt asked for the second time. “How come no one knows about this?”
“Oh, people know,” Claiborne said flatly. “But no one is saying anything inside the Service. You know how that is. Of course the public doesn’t know. The families know about their own kids, but they don’t know that other agents have . . . have been killed.”
Kurt was flabbergasted. A conspiracy within the Secret Service itself was unthinkable. “What the hell happened out there?” he demanded.
Claiborne pursed his lips, nodded, and said, “We drove out to Maryland to some old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. To be honest with you, at the time I was thinking some CIA safe house. I still don’t know for sure.” Again, his gaze drifted out the window, and he continued as if in a trance. “Anyway, we got off the main road and went up a long drive through some trees and the old man hops out with Mack Taylor and heads for the front door. Taylor tells me he’ll take care of everything on the inside and for me to take the perimeter. These kids were all nervous about it. I don’t think any of them had been on an off-the-record move before, but I sent two out back to watch the door, your son and the girl. I stayed in front with the other kid.
“Nothing happened. We stood around for an hour or so and then Mack Taylor calls me and says to go check out the cars, that they’re coming out. I leave the kid in front, tell your son and the girl to come back around, and I walk over to the cars to look them over. They were still in the drive, hidden from the house by a row of trees. Then all of a sudden, I hear someone yelling.”