Flight of the Fox

by Gray Basnight

  And the pages!

  The thirty-four pages, now splattered with blood, were still in his hand. Shackton had returned them to him just before he was felled by the first bullet. Despite his pain and awkward position, Teagarden managed to fold them into the hip pocket of Ernest Blair’s blue jeans while hoisting Cynthia higher into his arms so he could lean down and push the button.

  In the basement parking garage, she tried to talk as he carried her back to the Jeep Cherokee.

  “I can’t,” she mumbled. “I can’t. You go. Leave the car. Leave me. Just go. But remember the plan.”

  He laid her down beside a rear wheel of the Jeep where they were concealed. He removed his pullover shirt, ripped it lengthwise and tied a tourniquet above the wound in her calf. Then he tied a second one at mid-thigh.

  “Leave me,” she said between gasps. “Sam, he e-mailed the pages. He sent them. I saw it. The House committee has the whole thing now. That pushes the start button. You have to go. If they get you now, it’ll all be for nothing. Remember, what you said? You need to stay alive until somebody applies the brakes.”

  He pulled his backpack from the Jeep, withdrew the water bottle and gave her a sip. He splashed water on her leg, his arms and chest and used the remainder of the ripped shirt to wipe the blood. From the backpack, he withdrew the second pullover she’d given him from her ex-husband’s bureau and pulled it on.

  “I remember,” he said. “But I can’t leave you. If the sniper finds you alone he’ll kill you and say I did it. It’ll be the same as the others.”

  “You have to. It’s the only way. Sam, the medics will take me to GW Hospital. It’s only a couple of blocks from here. I’ll work my end from there until it’s safe for you to come back.”

  He dug in his backpack and withdrew the DVD Svetlana had delivered by messenger to The Argonaut Hotel. He slipped it into her hip pocket.

  “I should have given this to you earlier. It’s the video I told you about. It contains the image of McCanliss at Madison Park Euro Lodge in Manhattan.”

  It could only have been the continuing surge of adrenaline that allowed him to pick her up again. Instead of going back to the elevator, he walked with her cradled in his arms in a low crouch between parked cars, toward the vehicle exit ramp. Though writhing in pain during the short trek, she struggled to put one hand on the side of his face.

  “I hope you realize that I am madly in love with you,” she whispered into his ear as audibly as she could manage.

  At the toll gate, he gently laid her on the raised exit ramp near the garage attendant, who raced from his booth.

  “Call the police and an ambulance,” Teagarden said, still kneeling beside Cynthia. “She’s hurt bad. I tied a tourniquet on her leg, but she needs to get to the emergency room fast.”

  “Right,” the attendant said, running back to his booth to make the call.

  Teagarden kissed her goodbye.

  “For God’s sake, Sam, be careful,” she called out in a loud whisper. “I don’t want to lose another good man. And remember what I said about teaming with your next partner. She’ll help keep you safe now.”

  Teagarden turned away and walked up the ramp. He exited on the backside of the Watergate Building where the huge off-white façade of the nearby Kennedy Center loomed like an ancient Roman temple.

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  It looked like a giant dirty-white Kleenex box.

  For many, there was something Soviet-like in its unwieldy appearance. For better or worse, the Kennedy Center was a massive, look-at-me, national performing arts center.

  He had nowhere else to go, so why not walk toward that big, white monster of a building? Once inside, he might be able to disappear somewhere within its network of corridors and theatres.

  He set his bearings and strode as casually as he could manage while sirens wailed behind him. He bordered on another spell of amnesia. Unlike his blackout in the wilderness of Sullivan County where he first lost track of time, he knew he wouldn’t be allowed to wander the streets of Washington very long. He was only seconds away from being approached by law enforcement officers.

  Just keep moving as casually as possible.

  He fought against the tendency to sit on the curb and weep with exhaustion and fear. He wiped streams of sweat coursing down his face and neck, a giveaway if they saw it.

  Cynthia was right when she said “this town’s got more bacon than the Smithfield Ham Company.” Hoping it would help him concentrate and prevent another blackout, he ticked them off in his head like a word game:

  Let’s see, there’s DCPD, FBI, Secret Service, Capitol Hill Police, White House Guard, CIA, campus police at George Washington University. Even the U.S. Park Police carry guns in this town.

  That’s a lot of cops. And if they’re not all looking for him, they all will be very soon.

  It was still early in the morning, yet there were a dozen buses in front of the Kennedy Center, ready to begin the day picking up and dropping off school groups. Their drivers stood nearby, chatting in small gatherings on the sidewalk. Three buses owned by a company called “Easy Excursion” were already taking on passengers.

  Teagarden cruised them to check the roll signs above each windshield. The first read Atlantic City, Taj Mahal; the second was headed for Gettysburg Battlefield; the third said Virginia Beach. The first two were going in the wrong direction. The last one wouldn’t get him far, but he was in no position to argue and had no time to look for something better. It worked at the Walmart in Monticello. He could only hope the same lucky lightning would strike twice.

  “Room for one more?”

  “Yes, sir,” came the driver’s response. “Like the TV ad says, ‘sand and fun in the sun just two hours away.’”

  He paid the cash fare to the driver, took a seat in the rear, and within minutes was riding to Virginia Beach on a bus three-quarters filled with sleepy teenagers. They’d turn rowdy soon enough, but for now, the hour was too early for them to animate.

  The bus looped into traffic ahead of an invasion of police cars fanning out from the Watergate. At the Lincoln Memorial, a score of cops on foot waded into the early morning crowd and across the Memorial Bridge looking for him. They eyeballed tourists, joggers, and morning dog walkers, stopping anyone that fit the description of white male, six feet tall, late forties.

  Once again he counted his blessings. It seemed the whole world was looking for him, yet he had again avoided the net. He dodged them in Bethel, New York City, Sparta Township, and now Washington, D.C.

  Either I’m really good at this, or they really are bad at it. Imagine if I were actually armed and dangerous. That would be unpleasant for everyone.

  The bus maneuvered through Arlington to the Shirley Highway where it took a steep ramp up to the triple level for HOV vehicles. At the top, there was a gaping hole in the guard wall temporarily covered by mobile concrete barricades. It was obviously the site of some horrible accident. Teagarden leaned into the window for a better look at the asphalt three levels below where it appeared stained with the darkness of crashed metal, fire, and blood.

  Chapter Sixty

  Old Town Alexandria, Virginia

  It was breakfast time.

  Speaker of the House Henry Wayne Alderman, a Louisiana Democrat, had a mouthful of buttered whole wheat toast when he opened the e-mail from Danford Shackton on his Nook.

  It was his obsessive breakfast routine to eat two slices of toast each morning, one whole wheat and one rye. The first always received only butter; the second slice got a thin, perfectly spread layer of jam, artfully spooned to the precise edges of the square. It was usually peach but sometimes strawberry, occasionally grape, and much less often, cherry.

  After breakfast, he habitually stood at the kitchen sink to gargle a mixture of milk, honey, whiskey, and three drops of tincture of iodine for one full minute before expectorating the daily ablution. He had never been sick a day in his life and swor
e that it was due to his homemade morning gargle concoction. In his home district of Lawson Parish the mixture was famously known as the A.G.D., the Alderman Gullet Douche. In the late 1980s, a local pharmacist marketed the idea as a health tonic, but it never caught on, not even in Lawson Parish.

  Outside of his rented townhouse on Old Town Alexandria’s Rupert Alley, the driver of the black Ford Town Car waited for him to finish breakfast so he could be chauffeured to his office inside the Capitol Building. Another ten minutes and he’d have finished with breakfast, gargled, phoned his wife back home in Louisiana and head off to work on Capitol Hill.

  But none of it happened because on this particular morning, he did not finish the toast, get to the gargle, or phone his wife.

  The e-mail read:

  Mr. Speaker,

  I am forwarding the attached file to every member of Home Sub-CIST. Please open and read IMMEDIATELY. I believe it to be a matter of extreme (and delicate) urgency pertaining to national security. More backstory to follow when I get into the office.

  See you in a couple of hours,

  Dan Shackton

  Home Sub-CIST was an acronym for The Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure and Security Technologies. Since 9/11, two foreign wars, the NSA leaks of 2013, and Russian hacking that helped elect a president in 2016, it had become the most important and most watched committee on Capitol Hill. The President was known to keep up with the committee’s docket, regularly phoning to learn legislative views so as to balance the CIA’s hand-wringing on the south side of the Potomac.

  The House speaker trusted Danford Shackton. He knew him to be a freakishly smart lawyer who understood more about navigating the halls of Congress and the wider federal government than most members of Congress. That Shackton was openly gay never deterred Alderman from appreciating the man’s talents. Why would it? He had been a longtime supporter of LGBT issues. He voted in favor of every gay rights bill he encountered as a state and now federal legislator. Privately, especially back home in his bayou district, which sometimes seemed to have more alligators than people, he let everyone know his way of thinking on the subject. After the Supreme Court upheld the right to same-sex marriage, they stuck to the old school way of thinking. And when they gave voice to those opinions, Alderman sometimes weighed in with his favorite, albeit peculiar and somewhat vulgar rant on the subject: “What do I care what a man does with his pecker, after all, it’s his pecker. Why hell, if a man can’t do what he wants with his own pecker then what kind of country is this, anyway?!”

  His constituents didn’t like it, but they voted for him anyway, mostly because of his position on other issues, including his championing the right of every victim of Hurricane Katrina to sue the federal government and win unprecedented sums in out-of-court settlements. They were still doing it fourteen years later, and that was all it took for them to overlook his liberal views on homosexuality.

  Toast in hand, he did as Shackton instructed and opened the attached file. It was the Dear John File, fully decoded by nationally wanted fugitive Sam Teagarden in obsessively neat handwriting. What he read very nearly caused him to choke on his buttered whole wheat. He focused particularly on passages dated to the winter of 1963 and the spring of 1968.

  “I will be goddamned,” he whispered to himself. “This fucker is the holy wrath of God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth.” He read further. “Holy Mother of Christ, this thing is the electronic burning bush.”

  His cellphone rang before he could speed-read half the file. The voice at the other end was his press spokesman, a former reporter from New Orleans named Willy Baaktau.

  “I’m glad I got you first, Mr. Speaker,” said the bass baritone voice with the French-Southern accent.

  “Go ahead, Baaktau. Wattchu got for me this Friday morning?”

  “Brace yourself, Mr. Speaker. This news is bad. Danford Shackton is dead. He’s been shot in his apartment at the Watergate. This Teagarden fugitive who’s wanted in New York for child murder may be involved, but initial press reports say the FBI is citing a spurned gay lover as a probable motive.”

  “I will be goddamned,” Alderman said, looking at his Nook where the Dear John File was still open.

  Chapter Sixty-One

  From: danjones@orangecircle.com

  To: naskeywestpublicrelations@usnavy.mil

  Subject: Dogfight Sequel

  Attn: Captain Eva Ghent

  Thank you again for your willingness to provide technical advice for the planned sequel to the movie Dogfight Girl.

  We are now filming B-Roll and would like to make an appointment to meet at your convenience.

  Best Regards

  Dan Jones,

  Sr. Assistant Producer

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  To: danjones@orangecircle.com

  From: naskeywestpublicrelations@usnavy.mil

  Subject: Dogfight Girl Sequel

  Will be happy to meet at Navy Air Station on Boca Chica Key regarding movie sequel.

  Please phone the P.R. Ofc. at N.A.S. Key West at your convenience.

  Ask for Raymond Bakerfield.

  Best Regards

  Public Relations Office

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Washington, D.C.

  “What in the name of heaven…”

  Congressman Toddman Lee Gaynor, a Kentucky Republican, sat at his desk consuming the printed pages of the Dear John File, which his staff had named as the day’s “top priority.”

  At ninety-two, he was the oldest serving member of Congress, as well as the longest serving U.S. representative in American history. Thanks to good hard-working Kentuckians, he’d been on the job for fifty-nine years, and still did the job the old-fashioned way—with voluminous use of paper. His office was the least ecology minded in all the federal government. He’d never used a computer in his life, at least not through direct, intentional contact, which was widely known as key to his politics and faith. During campaigns, he was known to hold up a ballpoint pen and call it “the best thing God ever allowed mankind to invent for conveying information.” He publicly pronounced himself an “anti-computer crusader,” and a “robot fighter for Jesus.”

  It paid off nicely.

  In the last twenty-five years, he’d been advised by campaign staffers and statistical researchers that his old-fashioned face-to-face habits combined effectively with his Christian principles to help him win elections. They labeled his views on the computerization of everything as “a lovable image” that thoroughly endeared him to the people of his 7th District in the Bluegrass State.

  “The Lord hath spake,” he told voters. “It just goes to show I have a direct line with the good Lord. If He wanted me to interact with computers, He wouldn’t have made me—a man—if ya know what I mean.”

  Such language was his conservative-minded idea of a wink-eyed joke brimming with socially acceptable sexual innuendo. Every time he referred to himself as “a man,” the staff demurred, laughing politely while making perfunctory “tch-tch” noises with pursed lips to indicate requisite disapproval at what, for him, was bawdy.

  At that moment, no one was laughing.

  His staff knew what was in the attachment forwarded by Danford Shackton. They downloaded it on the office’s one computer concealed in the back room. They printed a hardcopy and read it in its entirety before the Congressman arrived at his office in the penthouse of the Rayburn House Building. Shortly afterward, they heard news of Danford Shackton’s murder, which apparently happened just moments after he sent the file to every member of Congressman Gaynor’s House Sub-CIST Committee. For nearly twenty years he’d been chairman of a congressional panel whose sole purpose for existence was, ironically, about electronic communications via computers. It was something the pundits only occasionally objected to and which his fellow Republicans never mentioned as a contradiction of good sense.

  The staff advised their boss of the Sh
ackton killing after he arrived and sat him down with the document.

  “Oh my Lord,” he said softly while reading. “Oh good Lord in Heaven, what…in… the…world.” He gulped. “What…in…the…name…of…heaven…is…this?”

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Encrypted Field Communication

  NSA Apache Code Ofc Baltimore, MD/Washington, DC/CoinTelSatOrbit53/Washington, DC

 

  TO: copper miner

  FROM: deep field cmdr

  SUBJECT: opdearjohn

 

  deep field cmdr to copper miner: i drop gift in your lap after telsat tap learns of shackton d.c. meeting and u can’t deliver?…explain…

  copper miner to deep field cmdr: u said watergate hotel…

  deep field cmdr to copper miner: correct…watergate hotel…still waiting f/ explanation…

  copper miner to deep field cmdr: there are two watergates…one is hotel…one is residence apt bldg…we were airtight on hotel because u said hotel…

  deep field cmdr to copper miner: so how did clusterfuck happen if u were surveilling wrong bldg?…

  copper miner to deep field cmdr: street team spotted target on balcony in adjacent apt bldg…. i confirmed w/visual i.d….gave shooter green light…shots missed…they were gone before we could shift from hotel to apt. bldg…