by Tim Green
Claiborne smiled and nodded in agreement, and the pair headed for the door. Claiborne stopped at the pay phone near the bathrooms and got his NSA contact out of bed. After speaking with him for a few moments, he rejoined Kurt outside the restaurant.
“He wasn’t happy,” he told Kurt as they left the restaurant, “but I got it.”
“David,” Kurt said after a quick glance around, “I need a gun.”
“Why do you need a gun?” Claiborne asked, surprised.
“I don’t know what’s going on, but if it’s what it looks like, I don’t want to get into a situation where I can’t fend for myself. Can you get me anything?”
Claiborne’s answer was as casual as if Kurt had asked to borrow a flashlight. He said, “I’ve got a three fifty-seven in my trunk you can have.”
“Clean?” Kurt asked. He preferred to have a reliable gun that wasn’t traceable to anyone or anything. He looked sideways at his friend as they walked past a large, raging fountain that dominated the center of the empty courtyard outside the restaurant. The steady hiss of water swallowed the sound of their footsteps.
“Yeah,” Claiborne said. “It’s clean.”
“You keep a gun like that in your trunk?”
“You never know, right?”
“True.”
They walked to the garage where Claiborne had left his Lexus coupe. Claiborne removed the gun and its shoulder holster from the hatch and handed it to Kurt, who strapped it under his arm before covering it with his blazer. The two agreed to take separate vehicles and meet at the Ritz-Carlton. It was just across the bridge.
The hotel’s business center was closed. The night concierge apologized, but he didn’t have a key. Only the manager would have that at this time of night and the concierge didn’t even know if she would have one. Kurt asked for the manager and brought out his thick clip of money. A thousand dollars later, they were ensconced in a dark, vacant room on the second floor, sitting in front of a desktop computer that had high-speed cable access to the Internet and all the capacity Kurt needed to conduct his search.
To be safe, Kurt hacked his way into the interactive Web site of one of his larger clients. From there, he could access the NSA system without leaving any trace back to himself. With Claiborne’s information and a working password, he was soon inside the NSA system. He fed his disk into the A drive and brought the sketch up on the screen.
Claiborne inhaled sharply through his teeth. “That’s the woman?” he said incredulously. “That’s who Collin’s friends saw him with on Friday night?”
“Yes,” Kurt said, turning from the picture of the exotic-looking woman to his old friend. “Why?”
“You don’t have to do a search,” Claiborne said grimly. “I know who she is.”
CHAPTER 7
She’s one of us,” Claiborne said. The empty expression on his face was illuminated only by the blue glow of the computer screen. The rest of the room was cast in a gloom that emanated from a single dull hooded lamp on a low end table by the window. One of the shaggy faded locks of Claiborne’s hair had fallen from its place and drooped across his forehead, giving him the appearance of a disheveled corpse.
“What do you mean?” Kurt asked.
“She’s an agent,” he said quietly. “Or she used to be. Leena Ventone. She was a sergeant in the Uniformed Division, a group leader on the CAT team. She got jammed up about six months ago when she got drunk and wrecked a police car on her way home. The cop in the police car was the nephew of some congressman and the kid lost his leg.”
“The CAT team?” Kurt exclaimed. “She’s a woman.”
“They have them now,” Claiborne said with a patronizing smile. “You know better than anyone the politics involved in government service. It’s politically correct to have women agents.”
“I know that,” Kurt said. “But the CAT team?”
The CAT team was more like a military special ops unit than a bureaucratic government agency. Even the ranking within the group took its lead from the military, as opposed to most of the Secret Service’s governmental grade levels. The team was essentially a combat unit, an elite strike force trained in weapons and tactical assault, but camouflaged under the more passive CAT acronym, which suggested a “counter” strike force, a defensive unit rather than an offensive one. But the acronym was only a political convenience, to avoid giving the general public the perception that the president of the United States traveled around the world with a deadly assault team at his fingertips.
“How well do you know her?” Kurt asked.
“Not well,” Claiborne answered. “But when she came to Washington, obviously people around the White House were talking. She’s a striking woman. The word was that she came from the military, the air force, I think. But that was a few years ago, and by the time she made the CAT team I think people were used to seeing her around, but she had a habit of going out and drinking too much and taking home strange men.”
“But why wouldn’t Collin have recognized her from the Service? His friends said he knew her from a coffee shop in Alexandria.”
Claiborne said, “She became part of the CAT team before Collin came to Washington. You know the Uniformed Division and protection people don’t mix, and it’s even more that way with the CAT team. They’re off to themselves, so no one sees her walking around like a million bucks like you did when she was in protection. And the times you did see her, you couldn’t really tell who she was with all the gear they wear and the sunglasses and the cap.”
Kurt nodded. Wearing the cargo pants, heavy boots, and bulletproof vest of a CAT team member, even a lovely woman would look inanimate.
“Is she capable of doing something like this?” he wondered aloud.
Claiborne shrugged. “You’d know better than I the capabilities of someone on the CAT team.”
“I didn’t mean could she,” Kurt said. “I meant would she.”
“I didn’t know her that well, Kurt,” Claiborne said. “But she was a capable agent, disgruntled at being bounced. If Mack Taylor and the president sat down with her in a back room, telling her she was somehow back in the loop, and if they targeted someone, telling her they were a threat to national security or something like that, who knows? Crazier things have happened.”
“But a woman,” Kurt mused in disbelief. “You just wouldn’t think that of a woman. Especially a woman in the Secret Service . . .”
“What’s the difference?” Claiborne asked, sounding slightly annoyed.
Kurt only looked at him.
“Well,” Claiborne grumbled, “now you’ve got your proof. It’s exactly what I thought. The old man was behind it.”
Kurt pondered the computer screen for a minute then said, “I want to talk to her.”
“Why would you do that? That’s only going to tip them off,” Claiborne argued. “If you talk to her, you’re going to be a target. Don’t you see that?”
Kurt’s mouth turned down in a mean-looking frown and he looked fiercely at Claiborne. “I don’t care. I want to hear it from her. I want to know exactly what happened and why. I want to know why, David!”
Claiborne coolly assessed him. His eyes shifted in quick little jerks that seemed to be outward signs of his internal calculations.
“What’s the access code?” Kurt asked. He was going to find out as much as he could about the enemy before an encounter.
Claiborne read it off the scrap of paper without resistance. But as Kurt hammered away at the keyboard, he said, “Now, you’re covering our tracks, right? No one’s going to know it was you and me going into these files?”
“No,” Kurt said. “I’m accessing them from someone else’s Web site. It’s kind of like using a stolen car to commit a robbery. I get in and out and the only traces I leave belong to someone else, in this case a huge corporate entity.”
Claiborne watched enviously as Kurt worked his way through the confounding labyrinth of programs and systems until they were staring at a comprehensive fi
le on Leena Ventone. After examining her history, Kurt felt he had some understanding of her.
She was driven by something. She had worked her way through college on an ROTC scholarship, then done military service, with abnormally brisk advancement, then entered the Service, two years in the field, a year in protection, then straight to the CAT team. She was obviously a smart, adaptable, physically superior human being with an internal drive most people could only dream of.
But now, everything she’d ever worked for was gone. And, if she believed somehow that she could regain it . . . Kurt imagined that a meeting such as Claiborne described with the president could have that effect. Still, he couldn’t think of anything that would cause an agent, even a disgruntled ex-agent, to become involved in the murder of another agent. It was inconceivable.
Kurt’s mind clicked and churned like the hard drive of the computer in front of him. Wasn’t it also possible that the girl was simply a pawn in a much larger game? She might have been the lure to get Collin isolated and off guard.
No, he thought, she was directly involved. She had plied Collin with vodka, drinking water herself to maintain her own sobriety. Then, most likely, she took him home and kept the drinking going until he was completely inebriated and too helpless to defend himself. Then she, or someone with her, killed his son. They stuck the barrel of his boy’s own gun into his mouth and pumped one of the vicious soft-tipped slugs into his brain.
Against his will, Kurt’s mind turned to Collin, flailing in his bed, spurting blood from his mouth, tossing from side to side like a dying fish, alone, horrified, and helpless. A sickness twisted his insides and the hot flames of anger burned his face. He punched the keys that got him back to the beginning of Leena’s file. For a moment, he stared into her yellow catlike eyes, their perfect almond form, and the majestic bone structure of her cheeks, forehead, and nose. She was exquisite, but Kurt saw the devil, a cloying demon that had shattered his own carefully constructed world with one fell deed.
Talk to her? Yes, he wanted to talk to her. He wanted to learn as much of the truth as was possible. But sitting there staring at her visage, he knew with a vicious certainty that unless there was some very unusual answer for what had happened, he was going to execute her as well. He took the address from her record, copied it, exited the NSA network, and went quickly across the Net to Maps.com. In seconds, directions from the nearby Pentagon to the girl’s home in Maryland were being expelled from the chattering mouth of the printer.
“What are you doing?” Claiborne asked.
Kurt ripped the page off the printer and said, “I’m going there.”
CHAPTER 8
To where she lives?” Claiborne exclaimed. He looked at his watch. It was two-thirty. “Now?”
Kurt snatched up the directions and stood. In the last thirty hours, he’d lost all sense of time, but even if he hadn’t, he couldn’t think of a better opportunity to find Leena Ventone at home, unawares, and hopefully alone.
“Yes,” he said. “Thank you. You saved me a lot of time, David. I won’t forget what you’ve done, and don’t worry, no one will ever know about your help.”
“I can’t go with you,” Claiborne replied defensively. “What you do from here on in, you’ll have to do on your own. You understand that?”
“Of course,” Kurt said. He held out his hand and took his old friend’s grasp with equal force. “Good-bye, David. Thank you. Thank you so much.” He left Claiborne standing there, staring thoughtfully at him. He pushed the button for an elevator up to his room, but thought better of it and decided to go straight down. There was nothing he needed in the room.
Kurt went south on the George Washington Memorial Parkway, and as he drove, he began to feel the weight of Collin’s death pressing down on him. He wondered how he could ever have worried about anything else in life but the well-being of his son.
It wasn’t that he hadn’t been concerned with Collin. It was just that over the past twenty-some-odd years there had been so many other things he’d worried about as well—the everyday worries that came with running a business. But what did his business matter? It was true that one of his largest divisions linked doctors all across the globe to share medical knowledge, in the hopes of saving lives. It was also true that he had used millions of dollars of his profits to fund an anonymous foundation for sick children and their families. But the people whose lives Kurt had affected were nameless and faceless to him.
Compared to Collin, everything else paled. Maybe it was selfish, but he knew with certainty that there wasn’t a thing, including his own life, that he wouldn’t give up without hesitation if it would bring his boy back to life. He tried to think about that objectively and after a time concluded that it was a universal human curse. People worried about things that, when put to a true measure, were insignificant.
He soon crossed the Potomac at the Woodrow Wilson Bridge and lost himself in a thinly populated area not too far south of Andrews Air Force Base. He wondered if the girl’s past connection with the air force was the reason why she lived in such an out-of-the-way place. With the directions pinned to the wheel with his right hand, Kurt navigated his way through a labyrinth of back roads until he came to a silver mailbox that gleamed in his headlights. The number belonged to Leena Ventone, and the box marked a gravel drive that dipped down into a wood bordering Tinkers Creek.
Kurt went past the drive and up the twisting road a short way until he found a shoulder big enough where he could tuck his Suburban under the eaves of the trees. He climbed out into the warm night air that was alive with crickets. Overhead, the bright moon drowned out all but the brightest of stars and cast deep purple shadows from the trees onto the winding road. When he reached the gravel drive, he was painfully aware of the loud crunch of stones under his feet. Small white clouds of dust marked every step he took, and he could clearly see the vehicle tracks leading in and out of the drive. He stepped off the crushed stone and into the ferns that grew in the damp loam lining the way. Down the slope he moved more quietly, but the dew soon began soaking into his socks.
It was nearly two-tenths of a mile down the drive, and a bevy of frogs had joined in to accompany the chorus of crickets before the narrow way opened onto a grassy swatch bordering the creek. The fresh gravel dipped down again and made a bright gray loop in front of a sand-colored double-wide trailer. Near one corner of the dwelling was a telephone pole mounted with a brilliant halogen streetlamp. Amid a blizzard of insects, the harsh white light illuminated the trailer, the weedy bank of the pitch-black creek, and the entire lawn as brightly as the parking lot of a shopping mall. On the far side of the trailer, a narrow chain-link kennel surrounded a large doghouse. The homestead was a sterile abode, bereft of flowers or painted shutters or ornaments of any kind. It might have been a small industrial shop instead of a place someone called home.
The only sign of a human presence was a shiny black Jeep Cherokee that stood guarding the front entrance. Kurt remained motionless well within the shadows of the woods on the edge of the light, studying the setup and wondering what other kind of security measures were in place, if any.
He knew the first and often best deterrent to intrusion was bright lights. Well, she had that covered. He circled the perimeter carefully, away from the doghouse, crouching down from time to time to look for posts or any hardware attached to the trees that might house a detection device. Halfway to the creek he found an infrared eye on a small black metal post. His eyes went instantly to the trailer, wondering if he hadn’t already broken a beam during his search.
There was no sign of life, but that didn’t mean anything. A perimeter of infrared beams wasn’t something a person did to discourage burglars. It was a much more sophisticated method of protection and one that would probably trigger a silent alarm, enough to wake the girl inside but not enough to startle an intruder. If that was the case, then she could be searching the woods right now with the nightscope of a high-powered rifle from the darkened window of her bedr
oom.
Quickly, Kurt found the next eye in the circuit and established in his mind just where the beam was: two and a half feet from the ground. He jumped it and went straight for the house, zigzagging wildly as he crossed the grass with Claiborne’s .357 clasped tightly in both hands. His face was pulled tight with the expectant grimace of a man who suspects he might be shot. When he got to the corner of the trailer, he flattened himself against the siding and gasped for air amid the ringing in his ears and the tumultuous pounding of his heart.
Finally, his body quieted and he dabbed the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. He was in, inside the perimeter, anyway. The next step was not to find a way inside the trailer, but to get the girl to come out. The Jeep was his first thought, then the dog. If the car had an alarm, that would get her up and out. If not, the dog would be the next best bet.
He started slowly around toward the front of the house, ducking under a window and stopping to listen as he went. The chorus of frogs and bugs was a sweet steady hum; otherwise all was quiet. He was at the front of the trailer, under the shaded picture window and halfway to the Jeep when a dark figure slipped out the back door and moved silently around the trailer behind him. Kurt never suspected that he was being outmaneuvered until his body jumped involuntarily at the sound of the harsh voice behind him shattering the night.
“Drop the gun or I’ll put a fucking bullet in your head!”
Immediately, a dog shot out from its house to throw itself repeatedly against the fence, while barking maniacally.
Kurt stood up slowly from his crouch with the gun held high up over his head.
“I said drop it!” she screamed. Kurt could hear her rage and something told him that she would kill him if he even hesitated. He dropped the gun.
“Now turn around, slow!” she ordered. Then she screamed at the dog, “Kay! Quiet!”
To Kurt’s surprise, the big dog instantly went silent. By this time, the frogs and insects were quiet too, scared into stillness by the German shepherd’s frenzy. He turned to face her. It was Leena Ventone, and even in the harsh halogen light in the middle of the night, wearing no makeup, a ponytail, and a loose-fitting black T-shirt and shorts, she was stunning. Kurt knew everything Collin’s friends said was true, and he could see how the girl had enticed his son.