The Collectors cc-2

by David Baldacci

  “Do you know if he found anything?”

  “No. As I said, I went to New York. He didn’t call me. But when I called him, he didn’t mention it, and I had forgotten about it by then.”

  “Did he sound disturbed when you talked to him?”

  “No more than usual.” She paused. “Oh, he did say he was going to check the pipes in our house. I thought he was joking.”

  “The pipes? What was he referring to?”

  “I don’t know. I assumed our gas line pipes. I guess they can leak, and there could be an explosion.”

  Stone initially thought, Like what happened to Speaker of the House Bob Bradley. But then something else occurred to him.

  “Mrs. Behan, do you have a sprinkler system in your house?”

  “Oh, no. We have a large collection of artwork, so water was out of the question. But CB was concerned about fire. I mean, look what happened across the street. He had another system put in, one that put out fire without using water. I’m not sure how it works.”

  “That’s all right, I think I know.”

  “So you believe whoever killed Jonathan also murdered CB?”

  Stone nodded. “I do. And if I were you, I’d go and stay at another of your homes, as far away from here as possible.”

  Her eyes widened. “You think I’m in danger?”

  “I think you might be.”

  “I’ll go back to New York, then. I’ll leave this afternoon.”

  “I think that would be wise.”

  “I suppose the police will let me. I had to give them my passport, though. I suppose I’m a suspect. I am the wife, after all. My alibi is ironclad, but I suppose I could have hired someone to kill him while I was away.”

  “It has been done before,” Stone conceded.

  They sat in silence for a minute or so. “You know, CB really did love me.”

  “I’m sure he did,” Stone said politely.

  “No, I know what you’re thinking. But he did love me. The other women, they were just playthings. They came and they went. I was the only one who got him to walk down the aisle. And he left everything to me.” She took another sip of her coffee. “You know it’s ironic, he made a fortune building tools of war, but CB actually hated guns, never even owned one. His background was in engineering. He was a brilliant man, and he worked harder than anyone else.” She paused. “He loved me. A woman can tell, you know. And I loved him. With all his faults. I still can’t believe he’s gone. A part of me died with him.” She wiped away a tear from her right eye.

  “Mrs. Behan, why lie to me?”

  “What?”

  “Why lie to me? You don’t even know me. So why bother?”

  “What the hell are you talking about? I’m not lying. I did love him.”

  “If you really loved him, you wouldn’t have hired a private detective to watch your house from across the street. Was he taking pictures of the comings and goings of the women your husband enjoyed?”

  “How dare you! I had nothing to do with that. They were probably the FBI spying on CB.”

  “No, the FBI would’ve been smart enough to have a team of agents there, at least one man and a woman to make it seem like a normal household. They would’ve also taken the trash out and performed other ordinary tasks, and they wouldn’t have let themselves be seen during the surveillance. And why would the FBI be watching your home? Would they think it even remotely likely that your husband would meet with some incriminating person there? Not even the FBI has an unlimited budget to cover every base, however implausible.” He shook his head. “I hope you didn’t pay the firm a lot of money, since they were hardly worth it.”

  She half rose from her chair. “You bastard!”

  “You could’ve just divorced him. Gotten half and walked away a free woman.”

  “After he humiliated me like that? Paraded those whores through my house? I wanted to make him suffer. You’re right: I hired a private detective and set him up in that house. So what? And the pictures he’d already taken of my husband and his paid bitches? Well, with those I was going to make old CB bleed and force him to turn over everything to me. Otherwise, it all comes out, and let me tell you, the federal government doesn’t like its contractors putting themselves in compromising positions. CB had top-secret clearances. Maybe he wouldn’t have if the government knew he was doing something he could be blackmailed for. And after he signed everything over to me, then I was going to dump him. He wasn’t the only one playing around. I’ve had my share of lovers, and I’ve picked the one I’m spending the rest of my life with. But now I get everything without even blackmailing him. It’s the perfect revenge.”

  “You might want to keep your voice down. As you said, the police no doubt still consider you a suspect. And it’s not smart to give them unnecessary ammo.”

  Marilyn Behan looked around at the people in the café staring at her. She paled and sat back down.

  Now Stone stood. “Thanks for your time. Your information was very useful.” He added with a completely straight face, “And I’m sorry for your loss.”

  She hissed, “Go to hell.”

  “Well, if I do, I surely won’t be alone, will I?”

  CHAPTER 47

  ANNABELLE WAS WAITING FOR her connecting flight out of Atlanta. As she looked over her new itinerary, she inwardly seethed at Leo’s stupid move. How could he have done that? If she had wanted Freddy to know who she was, she would have told him herself.

  Her flight was called, but she waited as the passengers lined up. Even though she was in first class and could have boarded early, out of old habit she liked to see who was getting on the plane. As the line thinned, she picked up her carry-on bag. She had dumped most of her clothes back in D.C. She never checked a bag when flying; it was an invitation for someone to snoop on her. She would buy more clothes when she got to her destination.

  As she was walking up to the line to get on the plane, she glanced over at an airport TV tuned to CNN and stopped moving. Reuben’s face peered back at her. She hurried over closer to the TV and read the subtitles. Vietnam vet Reuben Rhodes arrested. Defense contractor magnate Cornelius Behan and a woman murdered by shots fired from the home next door. Rhodes being held. . .

  “My God,” Annabelle said to herself.

  Over the PA came, “Last call for flight 3457 nonstop to Honolulu. Last call for passengers on flight 3457 nonstop to Honolulu.”

  Annabelle looked at the departure gate for her plane. They were about to close the door. She turned to look back at the screen. Shots from the house next door? Behan dead. Reuben arrested. What the hell was going on? She had to find out.

  Then her thoughts just as suddenly swung the other way. This is not your concern, Annabelle. You need to go. Jerry Bagger is coming for you. Let the old guys handle it. There was no way Reuben could have murdered Behan, but they’ll figure it out. And if they don’t, it’s not your problem. It’s not.

  Still, she stood there frozen. Never before had she been so indecisive.

  “Last call, door’s closing for flight 3457.”

  She whispered desperately, “Go, Annabelle, damn it, just go. You don’t need this. It’s not your fight. You don’t owe these people anything. You don’t owe Jonathan anything.”

  She watched as the door to her flight from Jerry Bagger slammed shut and the ticket-taker marched off to another gate. She watched ten minutes later as the Boeing 777 pulled away from the gate. As it soared into the sky right on schedule, Annabelle was booking another flight north taking her squarely within the vicinity of Jerry Bagger and his wood chipper. And she didn’t even know why. Yet somewhere in her soul maybe she did.

  Albert Trent was finishing up some things at his office at home. He’d gotten a late start after a long night of work and decided to catch up on some things before he drove in. The tasks were all related to his position as the senior staff member on the House Intelligence Committee. It was one he’d held for years now, and he was well grounded in nearly all aspect
s of the intelligence business, at least the part the agencies shared with their congressional overseers. He smoothed his few strands of hair down, finished his coffee and cheese Danish, packed his briefcase and a few minutes later pulled down the street in his Honda two-door. Five years from now he would be driving something much nicer in, say, Argentina, or he’d heard the South Pacific was truly paradise.

  His secret account now contained millions. He should be able to double that in the next half-decade. The secrets Roger Seagraves was selling were at the very top end of the payment scale. It wasn’t like the Cold War where you dropped a package off and picked up twenty thousand bucks in return. The people Seagraves was dealing with operated only in the seven-figure range, but they expected a lot for their money. Trent had never questioned Seagraves either about his sources or the people he was selling to. The man would never have revealed anything, and, in fact, Trent didn’t want to know. His sole but critical piece of the equation was getting the information Seagraves passed to him to the next leg of the journey. His method for doing so was unique and probably foolproof. Indeed, it was the main reason the American intelligence community was currently in shambles.

  There were many energetic and skilled counterintelligence agents out in the field trying to ferret out how the secrets were being stolen and then communicated to the enemy. In his official capacity Trent had been privy to some of these investigative efforts. The agents talking to him had no reason to suspect that a mere staffer with a bad hairdo who drove an eight-year-old Honda and lived in a crummy house and labored under the same bills and limited income every other civil servant had was part of a sophisticated espionage crew that was decimating American intelligence efforts.

  The authorities had to know by now that the source was deeply buried inside, but with fifteen major intelligence agencies eating up 50 billion in budget dollars a year spread over 120,000 employees, the haystacks were enormous and the needles beyond microscopic. And Roger Seagraves, Trent had found, was chillingly efficient and never missed any of the details, however small and seemingly trivial.

  Trent had tried to find out some background on him when they first started talking, yet could discover exactly zero on the man. To an experienced intelligence staffer like Trent, he knew this meant Seagraves had had an entirely covert past professional life. That made him a man you would never want to cross. And Trent never intended to. He would much rather die old and rich far away from this place.

  As he puttered along in his dented Honda, he imagined how that new life would look. It would be very different, that was for certain. However, he never dwelled on how many lives had been lost because of his greed. Traitors seldom had such pangs of conscience.

  Stone had just returned from his visit with Marilyn Behan when someone knocked on his cottage door.

  “Hello, Oliver,” Annabelle said as he peered out.

  He exhibited no surprise at her reappearance, but simply motioned her inside. They sat in front of the fireplace in two rickety chairs.

  “How was your trip?” he asked pleasantly.

  “Come off it, I didn’t go.”

  “Really?”

  “Have you told the others I left?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I knew you’d be back.”

  She said angrily, “Okay, that really pisses me off. You don’t know me.”

  “Obviously, I do, because here you are.”

  She stared at him, shaking her head. “You have got to be the most unusual cemetery worker I’ve ever met.”

  “You’ve met many, have you?”

  “I heard what happened to Reuben.”

  “The police are wrong, of course, but they just don’t know it yet.”

  “We have to get him out of jail.”

  “We’re working on that and Reuben’s doing fine. I don’t think many people will give him trouble in there. I’ve seen him take out five men in a bar fight. In addition to his great physical strength, he is one of the most ruthless and dirtiest fighters I’ve ever seen. I greatly admire that in a person.”

  “But somebody got the drop on him at Jonathan’s?”

  “Yes, someone did.”

  “Why do it? Why kill Behan?”

  “Because he found out how Jonathan died. That was enough reason.” Stone explained his conversation with Marilyn Behan.

  “So they take out Behan and blame it on Reuben because he was ever so conveniently there?”

  “They probably saw him coming and going from the house, figured the attic would be a good shot line, and they executed upon that plan. They may have ascertained that Behan brought women by and that they always spent time in that room.”

  “Pretty tough competition we’re up against. So what do we do now?”

  “For starters we need to see the tapes of the reading room vault.”

  “On the way back I actually thought of how to do that.”

  “I had no doubt you would.” He paused. “I don’t think we could have finished this without you. In fact, I’m sure of it.”

  “Don’t flatter me too much. We’re still not there yet.”

  The pair sat in silence for a few moments.

  Annabelle gazed out the window. “You know it is peaceful here.”

  “With dead people? I’m starting to find it very depressing.”

  She smiled and rose. “I’ll call Caleb about my idea.”

  Stone stood too, stretching out his lean, six-foot-two frame. “I’m afraid I’ve reached the age where simply cutting the grass does awful things to my joints.”

  “Take some Advil. I’ll give you a call later, once I’m settled back in.”

  As she passed Stone on the way out, he said quietly, “I’m glad you’re back.”

  If she heard him, Annabelle didn’t react. He watched the lady climb into her car and drive off.

  CHAPTER 48

  AFTER HIS REVELATION JERRY Bagger had summoned the manager of the hotel across the street to his office and demanded details of every guest who’d taken a room on the twenty-third floor on the side facing his building on a certain day. And in Atlantic City, when Jerry Bagger said to come, you went. As usual, some of Bagger’s men hovered in the background.

  The hotel manager, a young, good-looking man who was obviously ambitious and intent on performing his duties to the best of his abilities, was not inclined to let the casino chief see anything.

  “Just so you understand the situation, if you don’t give me what I want, you will die,” Bagger said.

  The manager had flinched. “Are you threatening me?”

  “No. A threat is when there’s a chance it won’t happen. This is what in the trade we call a sure thing.”

  The manager paled but bravely said, “The information you’re requesting is confidential. I can’t possibly hand it over to you. Our guests expect their affairs to be kept private, and we have the highest standards at the—”

  Bagger cut him off. “Yeah, yeah. Look, I’ll go the easy route first. How much you want for it?”

  “You’re trying to bribe me?”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  “You can’t possibly be serious—”

  “Hundred thou.”

  “A hundred thousand dollars!”

  Bagger looked at his men. “Boy, this guy’s quick, ain’t he? Maybe I should hire him to run my place. Yeah, a hundred thousand dollars slipped right into your personal account if you let me look at the records.” The man seemed to be considering the offer, but Bagger was quickly growing impatient. “And if you don’t, I tell you what, I’m not gonna kill you. Instead, I’ll break every bone in your body, mess with your brain so you can’t tell anybody what happened to you, and you can spend the rest of your life in a nursing home pissing all over yourself while some freak-offs drill you every night. Now to me there’s no real choice there, but I’m a reasonable man, so I’ll let you make the decision. You got five seconds.”

  An hour later Bagg
er had all the information he’d requested and quickly culled down his list of potential suspects. Next he questioned hotel personnel about some of the guests in question. It didn’t take him long to hit the jackpot because of some extra services one of the guests had taken advantage of during his stay.

  “Yeah, I gave him a massage,” the young woman named Cindy said. She was petite and dark-haired with a cute face, alluring curves and a streetwise manner. She popped gum and played with her hair while talking to Bagger in a private room in the hotel’s sumptuous spa area.

  He eyed her closely. “You know who I am?”

  Cindy nodded. “You’re Jerry Bagger. My mom, Dolores, works a craps table for you at the Pompeii.”

  “Right, good old Dolores. You like this spa shit?”

  “Pay sucks, but tips are great. The old guys like to feel a young lady’s hands on ’em. A few get a hard-on while I’m doing it. Pretty disgusting on an eighty-year-old, but like I said, they tip good.”

  “This guy you worked on.” Bagger glanced at the name he’d written down. “This Robby Thomas, tell me about him, starting with what he looks like.”

  Cindy gave him a physical description. “Good-looking guy but way too cocky. He really thought a lot of himself. I don’t like that in a man. And he was too thin and pretty, if you know what I mean. I could’ve probably taken him in arm wrestling. I like my guys big and rugged.”

  “I bet. So this pretty boy, you only give him a massage? Or something extra?”

  Cindy crossed her arms and stopped popping her gum. “I’m a licensed professional, Mr. Bagger.”

  In response he pulled ten hundred-dollar bills from his wallet. “This enough to buy your license?”

  Cindy eyed the money. “I guess what I do on my own time is my business.”

  “Can’t argue with that.” He held out the money. “So tell me about it.”

  But she hesitated in taking the cash. “I could maybe lose my job if—”

  “Cindy, I don’t give a shit if you’re screwing dead people at this two-bit joint, okay?” He pushed the money down the inside of her shirt. “Now talk to me. And don’t lie. Lying to me is a very bad thing.”