by Tim Green
But his instincts took over and he raced dead-on for a prodigious stand of hardwoods. He neared the trees and saw clearly the black hole where the forest opened its maw to engulf the road. Instead of taking it, he held out his right foot and leaned hard, spinning even more dust into the air and racing now along the edge of the trees on a small sandy path bordering the cornfield. For a quarter mile he sped along the edge of the field, his path clearly lighted by the intense beam of the searchlight, until he came suddenly to another farm road. Like the first, it bisected two fields and also led straight into the woods.
Kurt jammed on his brakes and spun the bike in a swirling cloud of brightly illuminated dust. But instead of taking the road into the trees, he doubled back straight into the dense cloud that he had kicked up along the path. The plume was a brilliant creamy brown, the color of coffee with milk, until suddenly they were in total darkness. The Apache spotted the road leading into the woods and erroneously presumed that that was where Kurt had gone. The gunship shot up above the trees, stabbing futilely in through the forest’s late summer canopy for some sign of the motorcycle.
Kurt slowed somewhat, until his eyes, teary from the dust, adjusted to the gloom of the starlight. Soon the dust cleared, and by keeping tight to the corn where the stalks smashed past his elbow, he could feel as well as see his way back to the first dirt road. By the time he reached it, the dust had settled enough for him to make out the opening in the trees. This was the thickest wood he had to travel through, and when he’d plotted his escape he had driven through it one afternoon more than a dozen times, familiarizing himself with every dip and turn. Even so, it was slow going, and Kurt’s grip on the handlebars was desperate from the tension of trying to go as fast as he could without a wipeout.
Twice the beam of the Apache cut across their path through the trees like a vast column of light from a UFO. Both times, Kurt slowed to a stop and ground his teeth until it passed. Finally, they could see up ahead the dim opening where the dirt path opened onto a gravel country road. Kurt stopped at the edge of the wood and dismounted from the bike.
“Are you all right?” he asked Jill in a whisper.
She nodded that she was, but when Kurt lifted the visor of the helmet to kiss her, he could see that her eyes were wide and her mouth was pulled tightly back in a mask of fear.
He jogged awkwardly up the path and peered cautiously out onto the road. One way, at the bottom of a long descending grade, were the flashing lights of a police car and the hazard lights of a pickup truck. Probably some farmer on his way home who’d been pulled over for questioning. Kurt imagined that everything that moved on these roads would be subject to questioning if not an all-out search. The other way, however, appeared to be clear.
But instead of going that way, Kurt pulled slowly out of the woods and headed for the flashing lights. That was where the next farm road in his escape route lay. The sight of the police car goaded him in the opposite direction. A more rational voice, however, said it was better to stick to his plan and that it was better to drive toward trouble he could see rather than risk the unknown. The police up ahead would be concentrating on whoever they’d pulled over and would not be as apt to see his darkened motorcycle cruising toward them.
With the engine running at nothing more than a purr, Kurt drove halfway to the police car and then turned right onto another road leading up into more cornfields. The road went steadily uphill until he and Jill were high enough so they could look back and see the Apache, which had now been joined by another helicopter, crisscrossing the large thick wood they’d just left. A second police car, lights flashing, raced down the road they’d just taken from the opposite direction on its way to the cruiser that had pulled over the pickup truck. Kurt felt a grateful sense of relief that he’d followed his plan rather than his instinct to just run.
After another hour of careful travel, they turned north onto 38A, the main road that ran up along the eastern shore of Owasco Lake, Skaneateles’s sister that lay to the west. Several miles after that they reached Auburn. Kurt took side streets to the Wal-Mart. He wasn’t worried about being pulled over arbitrarily this far from where they’d been chased, but he was concerned that his lack of a helmet could draw the attention of a local cop. When they reached the large illuminated parking lot, he eased in among the rest of the traffic and pulled right up next to his Suburban, looking around him as if he hadn’t a care in the world.
An overweight woman wearing a ratty pair of furry slippers and a tent-sized house shirt shuffled past under the blue-white light. She gave Kurt’s wet suit a funny look. Kurt stared right back at her and she averted her eyes, moving quickly on.
“Will you drive?” he asked Jill.
“Of course,” she said, noticing for the first time that he was in pain. “What happened? Are you hurt?”
“I was shot,” Kurt said grimly.
“Where?” she gasped. “Let me see. Kurt, we need to get you to a doctor!”
Kurt shook his head, unlocked the Suburban’s doors, and handed her the keys.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” he said, rounding the vehicle and getting in. “We’ll worry about that later. The bullet went through and I think the bleeding has slowed down.”
“Slowed down?” she said incredulously as she started the ignition. “Let me get some bandages at least.”
“All right,” he said, “but not here. Let’s get away from the bike. Let’s get out of town and we can stop at a drugstore along the road. We’ve got to get as far from here as we can. Even though I didn’t do anything to the president, they’ll put me in jail, Jill. You understand that, don’t you?”
Jill bit her lower lip and nodded her head. “Yes,” she said. “And I know I’ll be in trouble too, if they catch us.”
“No,” Kurt said, “you won’t. If we’re caught, we’ll say I forced you to drive me. I’m not letting you take any of the blame. The thing I’m more worried about though is Claiborne and his people. If they find out I’m alive, they’ll try to kill me . . . I just don’t know how many of them there are. I don’t know how deep this thing goes.”
“Where are we going now?” she asked. “Do you want me to go to the Thruway?”
“Yes,” he said. “Do you know how to get there?”
“I take a right here and then a right on Thirty-four,” she said as she drove out of the Wal-Mart parking lot.
“Right.”
As she made the turn, she asked, “Are we taking the Thruway to the Northway, and then to Montreal?”
“No,” Kurt said. “We’ll take the Thruway to Eighty-one. Then go south.”
Jill started to speak, but the words got caught in her throat.
“Eighty-one south?” she asked hesitantly. “You mean north?”
“No, south.”
“Kurt, why?”
“Because,” he said, “we’re going to Washington.”
CHAPTER 42
Claiborne took a commercial flight back to the capital, leaving the state police and the FBI to their fruitless search for Ford. His fellow passengers and the flight attendants on the airplane saw only a man distraught beyond reason, unresponsive and lost in a fog of great consternation. When he arrived at the airport in D.C., Claiborne got into a cab and sat for nearly a minute before he realized the driver was asking him where he wanted to go.
Once home, he went directly to the second floor of his brownstone and ensconced himself in the spacious leather chair of his small, musty, wood-paneled den. After a moment of consideration, he proceeded to knock down most of a quart of Canadian Club whiskey. Both his cell phones as well as the house phone rang at repeated intervals, but Claiborne ignored them. He was thinking, his mind sprinting desperately along on an endless treadmill, until he was too drunk to care, got off, and climbed the stairs to bed.
In the morning, he staggered to the bathroom and gulped down four aspirins with a mouthful of water straight from the tap. He got back in bed, hoping to pass the next thirty minutes s
leeping until the medicine took effect, but his mind was already back up and running. Head pounding, he got up again, shaved, and dressed himself in a pair of tan slacks, a white button-down shirt, and a herringbone jacket.
On the front porch was the paper; Claiborne slapped it down on the kitchen table before pouring himself a glass of juice and preparing a pot of coffee. As the scent of brewing coffee filled the kitchen, his headache began to fade. The paper was full of exactly what he would have suspected, a massive headline about the attempted assassination with pages and pages of little else. Apparently, the police had given chase to two people on a motorcycle late in the night at the south end of the lake, but lost them. Authorities presumed that it was nothing more than drunken teenagers. Claiborne snorted derisively.
With a hot cup of strong coffee in hand, he played back his answering machine. There were several calls of conciliatory concern from some of his peers within the Service. As the lead advance agent, he would endure the brunt of the fallout after the assassination attempt. Someone had to pay for it. Claiborne was unaffected, but when he heard the somber voice of Mack Taylor, he blanched. His boss was requesting that he report to the Secret Service offices first thing in the morning.
“We need to talk,” were Taylor’s final words before a harsh click.
Something in the SAIC’s voice told Claiborne that the meeting was more than just a debriefing after a catastrophic breach in the president’s security. Although any connection between Claiborne and Ford would be nothing more than conjecture at this point, it unsettled him nonetheless. Instead of delaying, he called Taylor’s office and said that he would be over directly. Before going, he dialed the vice president on his safe cell phone.
“I’ve been waiting for your call. What happened?” Pimber demanded irately.
“A temporary setback,” Claiborne replied. “But I have a solution.”
“A solution?”
“I need two million dollars in a suitcase by five o’clock this afternoon and I need to meet you and Mr. Yale somewhere safe. I’ll explain my plan. If you like it, you give me the money. If not, then it’s over. I go my way, you go yours.”
“If this is your way of trying to wheedle money out of Yale, you can forget it,” Pimber hissed.
“Two million dollars is nothing to me,” Claiborne countered. “I want all twenty and I know I’m not going to get it unless I get the job done. I will get the job done. It won’t be as clean for me, but I will get it done. The cash will make an impression on the men I need. That’s why I want it. At this point, it’s our only chance. You can tell that to Yale.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. Finally, Pimber said, “I’ll call him. He’s in town and if he wants to hear what you have to say then I’ll call you back and tell you where.”
With that, the vice president hung up.
Claiborne put on a pair of Ray-Bans, walked outside his brownstone into the sunlight, and pulled away from the curb in his late-model Lexus coupe. It was a short drive to the Service’s offices, and Taylor was waiting for him in a conference room with the director of the Secret Service himself as well as two of his deputy directors. Claiborne peered at them from the end of the table through bloodshot eyes. He was properly dejected for an agent intimately involved in a monumental failure.
“I don’t know what to say,” he began, sighing heavily. “I did everything by the book. You’ll see that from my reports, but I know that’s no excuse and I would prefer that this not reflect badly on any of the other agents involved in the advance, especially Agent Morris . . .”
Claiborne sat looking at them, one by one. They were annoyingly devoid of emotion and he wondered if it was simply because they had seen right through his subtle attempt to deflect the blame to Morris. It had been Morris’s job, after all, to do the interview and background check on Kurt Ford.
“We aren’t here to talk about that, David,” Taylor said finally. “We want to know about your relationship with Kurt Ford.”
Claiborne feigned astonishment as well as indignation. “We were friends a long time ago, Mack,” he said defensively. “You know that—everyone who’s been around does.”
“We want to know about your relationship lately,” the director said. He was a wisp of a man with frizzy reddish hair that circled his bald bespectacled head like a clown. Even so, there was nothing comical about him. His beetle-black eyes bore into Claiborne with characteristic intelligence and intensity.
Claiborne returned the stare, looking hard into his small dark eyes, then at Mack Taylor. They were bluffing. They didn’t have a thing. He could see it. They were fishing around.
“I haven’t spoken a word to him in years,” he said defiantly.
The director’s eyes went to Taylor. The SAIC cleared his throat and said, “The president believes otherwise, David. Kurt Ford told him about an off-the-record move that you had arranged between him and Vice President Pimber.”
A smile curled the corner of Claiborne’s lips and he calmly replied, “Kurt Ford is a madman. You must know that. He tried to kill the president. You must be joking to take anything he said seriously. Honestly, you can’t be serious.”
“How did he know about the meeting?” Taylor demanded.
“His son!” Claiborne said, slapping the words down like a trump card.
“His son is dead,” Taylor pointed out.
“And so, Ford’s madness,” Claiborne said.
“Mack, this is serious,” the director said with a scowl. “Don’t you think we should just leave things as they are? We’ve got enough problems as it is.”
“The president thinks—” Taylor began.
“Mack,” the director said, cutting him off, “with no disrespect to the president in any way, this is a Secret Service issue. David is a highly respected member of the Service, a part of the team, and we have to conduct ourselves accordingly.”
“I don’t know if Kurt Ford is all that mad,” Taylor said grudgingly.
“Anyone who would try to kill—” the director began.
“He didn’t try to kill the president,” Taylor broke in. The room was silent. All eyes were on Mack Taylor.
“The president said Ford never fired a shot,” he continued quietly. His face broke out into a subtly evil grin. “They talked about the meeting with the vice president and Brian Yale. Then Ford just stood up and jumped over the side.”
Claiborne’s throat grew suddenly tight and he searched Taylor’s face for a hint of deceit.
“He’s escaped, you know,” Taylor continued, with a cunning look at Claiborne. “The papers are reporting that there were two people on a motorcycle that eluded the police last night. The troopers are speculating that it was teenagers, but they know and we know that Ford owns a bike that fits the description of the one they chased. I don’t know how he did it, but he’s out there somewhere, David. If you have something to tell us, maybe you should do it now . . .”
Claiborne returned Taylor’s gaze with equal malevolence and then said to the director, “I resent this, this witch-hunt, and I’m going to file a formal complaint. I have nothing left to say to Agent Taylor, sir. So, unless you have more questions for me yourself, I’m going home.” He stood, and so did the director and his two men. Taylor continued to sit and stare.
“I’m sure we can resolve this,” the director said. His stern nasal voice was tinged with anxiety. The last thing he needed now, in light of a nearly successful attempt on the president’s life, was an internal scandal. “I don’t think any formal complaint will be necessary, David. Think about it. I know both of you have been through a lot. Let’s all just take some time to cool off and think about it.”
The director turned pointedly to Mack Taylor, who by the look on his face was going to refuse to acquiesce in any way. And really, they all knew that he didn’t have to. He was in an unusual position. The director was his superior, but he was the SAIC of the Presidential Protection Division because that’s what the president wanted.
In reality, if not on paper, Taylor had more influence than any of them.
“Of course,” Claiborne said, calmly leaving the room. He didn’t mean it, but what he needed now was time. The end of his career was at hand and that might be the least of it. Things were much worse than he had feared.
What had been an emergency plan was now the only hope he had left. It was risky, and with Taylor looking for something already, it would almost certainly connect Claiborne with the president’s death. That was why he hadn’t tried to do it this way from the start. He knew that even if he succeeded, he would be hunted for the rest of his life. But the look on Taylor’s face told him that the life he had now was over.
Taylor might not ever be able to prove anything. But Claiborne’s career—that was finished. Taylor’s suspicion alone would see to that. But twenty million dollars in offshore bank accounts would enable him to hide in style. That’s what he wanted. He wanted to enjoy the wealth he should already have had. The wealth he would have had if Kurt Ford hadn’t snubbed him years ago.
But this plan, if it worked, would be even better than sharing in Kurt Ford’s wealth. This plan was his doing, and if it worked, he could revel for the rest of his life in his own cleverness. This would be his last chance. He had to act quickly and presume that Yale would come up with the cash. He knew a suitcase with that much money in it would put the deal to bed.
He dialed his phone and when a gruff voice on the other end answered, he said, “Reeves, it’s me. Get Vanecroft and meet me at the Tabard Inn on N Street tonight at seven. Ask for Mr. Valance and come to my room. We all have to presume we’re being followed, so take every precaution to shake a tail. I’ve got a critical job for you.”
Then he added, “It’s the job of a lifetime . . .”