Gary came by and told him that Connie Wall was still not “consistently conscious.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Swamp asked.
“She drifts in and out. Doesn’t say anything, recognizes a couple of the nurses, and then submerges again. The ICU supervisor did say they’re purposefully keeping her down to facilitate the healing process.”
“Anything from the Crass County sheriff’s office?”
Gary looked at his notebook. “No signs of the woman who did the cutting. They did a forensics sweep of both bathrooms, but they’re public bathrooms and it was a busy hotel on Saturday night…. Possible indications of someone going out the men’s room window, but their forensics unit isn’t exactly equipped like the big city units.”
“So they got a ton of stuff that means nothing.”
Gary shrugged. “We get a female suspect in custody, I guess they could do a match comparison. But what with the snowstorm that night, other accidents to contend with, they never even got an effective roadblock set up. According to Sheriff McComb, the cutter had plenty of time to make her creep.”
Swamp shook his head in frustration. “We’ve got a German guy going to that garage, asking questions about Wall and her car, and being told she was going to Garrison Gap. We’ve got what sounds like the same German buying a black Suburban with tinted windows for cash, right across the street, and noticing the car. The next day, we’ve got a black Suburban with tinted windows two minutes behind her on the same road. That night, she is once again attacked and almost killed.”
“We don’t know for a fact that the guy who bought the Suburban was the same guy following her,” Gary said. “I’ve seen three black Suburbans go by my office window this morning.”
Swamp nodded. “True, we don’t. Hell, there was one on my tail coming out of—”
“What?” Gary said, seeing Swamp’s expression.
“When I left Garrison Gap Sunday morning, there was a black Suburban right behind me all the way to Route Eighty-one. With tinted windows.”
“Wow.”
“Except the state cop said he had a light bar and whip antennas. The one following Wall, I mean. This one was a plain Jane.”
“You can get a light bar at just about any auto-parts store. You know, all the volunteer firemen and EMTs get ’em there. This Suburban have a luggage rack?”
“I’m not sure. I wasn’t paying any attention to him, and he passed me on the first straightaway we came to, near the interstate.” Swamp shut his eyes and concentrated. “Yes, I think it did.”
“Well, it’d be no big deal to bolt and unbolt a light bar if there’s a luggage rack. And a Suburban’s plenty big enough to throw the damn thing in the back when you don’t want it up there.”
“Or it could have been just another damn black Suburban, up in ski country for the weekend.”
Gary nodded. Swamp’s phone rang. It was Mary, McNamara’s secretary. The boss wanted to see him—alone. In other words, Don’t bring your sidekick.
He asked Gary to assemble some data on the scope of the record screen—how much stuff someone would have to paw through, and some guesstimate of how long it would take for one person to do it by himself. Then he asked him to update that dossier on Heismann/Hodler with what they had now from Immigration. “And see if you can find someone who could build you a list of surgical procedures that would be involved in a total makeover of this guy’s face.”
Gary gave him a look. “And when I’m done with all that?”
Swamp waited.
“Right,” Gary said, “I can take the rest of the day off. I knew that.”
Heismann made the call to Mutaib from a phone booth down in the Air and Space Museum on Independence Avenue. Fifty feet from where he stood, there was a German V-2 rocket from World War II standing on its steel nozzle ring next to a scale model of the first successful American satellite-launching rocket, which was strikingly similar. In the afternoon light, he could just make out the swastika showing through the paint on the V-2’s now age-dimpled side. Apparently, someone in the museum had decided to paint over the symbol of Nazi Germany so as not to offend any visitors. Heismann was willing to bet he knew what group of visitors they’d had in mind. Lots more of them over here than there are in Germany these days, he reflected with satisfaction. Mutaib came on the line.
“I have a list of materials, and I do not want to take that large vehicle out on the streets just now,” Heismann announced.
“Very well, wait one moment, please.”
Heismann waited, then heard one of the assistants pick up an extension. He read the list aloud, trying to keep his voice low. The list, which included heavy timbers, some sheets of plywood, fasteners, curtain material, power tools, extension cords, and gasoline cans, might have sounded a bit strange to any tourists standing nearby. When he was finished, Mutaib had news.
“We had callers today,” he said. He described the visit from the Secret Service and the local police. He said the Secret Service agent in charge looked like a bloody Neanderthal.”
“And this was about the purchase of the vehicle?”
“Yes. It was about the money. I explained it as a money-changing transaction, nothing more. Euros to dollars.”
“Did they believe it?”
“I’m not sure. From some of the things they said, I think Interpol has been queried,” he said. “We will check that, but I think the Americans have connected the Heismann name and the Hodler name.”
Heismann blinked. Hodler? Interpol had Hodler? This was a surprise. He really had believed that Interpol did not have that name; he had paid some good money to get it out of their database.
“And of course you used Hodler to purchase that automobile.”
“Yes, I did,” Heismann snapped, looking around the crowded lobby of the museum to see if anyone was watching him. “What of it?”
“Well, I’m not sure about the local police, but the federal police might put a flag on that name here in the city. The vehicle registration will be in that name.”
“But no address—I had all the paperwork sent to the bank, as you directed. Besides, they told me that will take weeks—the salesman warned me about this. How slowly such things are done in this city.”
“Even so. They were curious about that, too.”
“Well then, this is about the bait,” Heismann said. “Which was your idea.”
Mutaib didn’t say anything.
“What is the matter?” Heismann asked.
“Nothing. I was just surprised that Interpol had the Hodler name. You told us they did not.”
Not as surprised as I am, he thought, but you are right to be concerned, princess. Because now that vehicle ties the name Hodler to you and your Saudi money. “As long as you did not use that name or the Heismann name in the apartment lease,” Heismann said, “we will be fine. I will be in Hong Kong by the time those automobile papers come through.”
“It’s not in the lease, but there was some discussion about the famous artist,” Mutaib said. “Let’s hope no one remembers. I will have the materials sent around this afternoon. The neighbor is no problem?”
“No problem at all,” Heismann said. “In fact, she is going to be part of the final solution. We’ve been getting acquainted. Or I have anyway.”
“Do I want to know anything about that ‘final solution’?”
“You do not,” Heismann said.
“That’s a rather precarious choice of words you’re using,” Mutaib said.
“It is just an expression, no matter what some people think,” Heismann said. “It speaks to efficiency, nothing more.”
“Come in, Swamp, and shut the door,” McNamara said. “I have about ten minutes, and then I’ve got to go back and murder-board the revised NIC briefing. God, I hate these eternal committees!”
Swamp entered the office, shutting the door behind him, and sat down. He’d brought a legal pad filled with his notes, but McNamara waved him off. “Look,” he said. “Mar
y said you wanted to brief me on this PRU firefly. But given PRU’s position, why do we still want to pursue it?”
Hell, Swamp thought, he’s forgotten already. “Uh, you’ll remember that I subsequently talked to Lucy VanMetre and—”
“Yes, yes, I remember, but this memo apparently came in this morning.”
Swamp drew a blank. Based on his conversation with Lucy last night, they were still collaborating, albeit on a loose leash. Was this a new memo? McNamara caught his surprise. “Your interlocutor over there in PRU lead you astray?”
Swamp shook his head. “I don’t know what’s going on here. We spoke as recently as last night. But now that you mention it, I tried to call her earlier, got stonewalled big-time. Is this a second memo?”
McNamara nodded and then read it aloud. “He references the previous memo. Then this is what he says: ‘With regard to the matter of the transcript recovered from the fire at the cosmetic surgery clinic, the Secret Service/PRU wishes to reiterate that a determination has been made that no threat to presidential security exists and that no further official action is contemplated in regard to this matter. It is further and strongly recommended that no further action should be taken on this matter by any other office within the national security system.’ Love and kisses, C. Hallory, Director, et cetera.”
“That’s clear as a bell,” Swamp said. “But hear me out—let me tell you what’s happened since we last spoke, because I think there is a very definite threat to presidential security.”
“Can you do it in five minutes?” McNamara asked.
When Swamp was finished, it was McNamara’s turn to be baffled. “Something’s sure as hell going on,” he said. “There has to be a reason why some guy is so determined to kill the last surviving member of that clinic team. But maybe—”
“What?” Swamp said, but McNamara was already shaking his head.
“No, that doesn’t work. I was about to say maybe he’s trying to kill her because she can ID him from the cop killing. But you say it’s the other way around, that the lieutenant got whacked just because he was there.”
Swamp nodded. “And the killer came back, remember? Tasered those patrol cops and shot at the house to spook her. Which worked. Now she’s hanging on a morphine drip out in West Virginia.”
“And the Royal Kingdom Bank provided the money for this guy to buy a Suburban?”
“Sort of, yes, sir. He brought in the Euros. But don’t forget that they owned a piece of that clinic business.”
“Yeah. Shit. What a can of worms.”
“Now we’re definitely making some assumptions here,” Swamp said. “I’m hardly ready for court. But bottom line? I’m hearing ‘bomb, bomb, bomb,’ an identity-change shop, a German’s version of ‘State of the Union,’ Saudi money, a determined effort to kill a potential witness, one face with at least two names from the German terrorist underground. I mean, shit, think of that laundry list appearing after the fact in the Washington Post.”
“Be a shit storm. ‘You mean you guys had all this and you did nothing?’”
“Exactly. Can you give Hallory a WTF call?”
“I guess I’m going to have to,” McNamara said, looking at his watch.
“Or—” Swamp said, then stopped and looked at his boss.
“Or?”
“Or we haven’t had this discussion. I just keep trucking. The Secret Service doesn’t drive OSI. Committee of equals and all that. This outfit can still make its own decisions, can’t it?”
“Yes and no,” McNamara said with a sigh. “It’s partly a budget issue: Our director might challenge any additional resources in light of this love note from PRU.”
“How’s about this: I work for you, not Hallory. I’ll keep going here until you tell me unequivocally to shut it off. Make no decisions now. That way, I’m the runaway train if they call you out on it.”
McNamara smiled. “Old habits die hard, huh?”
Swamp shrugged. “I’ve got my teeth in this one, boss.”
“And we all know what that means,” McNamara said. “Okay—I’m going to exercise some executive oversight. Meaning, because of some oversight, this executive never saw this memo.” He waved Hallory’s new memo. “But pretty soon, we’ll have to sort this out. Hallory may be getting some guidance we don’t know about.” He looked at his watch again and stood up.
Swamp got up, too. “Thanks, boss. With your permission, I’ll work my old web, see if I can get some help for that forensic screen I need on all those clinic records. If we can get a new face on this guy, even a composite, it will help a lot in finding him.”
McNamara was already headed out the door. “What guy?” he said over his shoulder.
Heismann had the delivery people put all the building materials right in the front rooms of the town house. He wore a minimal facial disguise, because the deliverymen could have cared less what he looked like. He set to work as soon as they left.
The first order of business was to reinforce the floor under the “studio.” He got up on a ladder in the dining room and began tapping finishing nails into the ceiling plaster to locate the floor joists in the center of the ceiling. When he’d found three adjacent joists, he chiseled out the plaster to reveal the actual wood. Then, leaving the rug in place, he cut out eight one-foot squares of three-quarter-inch plywood. He measured the distance between the first floor and the bottom of the exposed joists, then cut four of the four-by-four timbers to that length. He tacked the plywood plates on each end and then erected the timbers to form four closely spaced columns. The rug provided the necessary clearance to squeeze the timbers into vertical position. Then he screwed the upper and lower plywood plates into the ceiling joists and the floor itself to keep the four-by-fours from moving. Right now, they just sat there. Once the weapon was brought in, they would support almost all of its dead weight.
Then he had to reinforce the upstairs floor so it could support a dynamic load. For this, he used four more four-by-fours, braced at a sixty-degree angle and meeting at the top of the column arrangement he’d built earlier. After tacking on some more plywood plates along the baseboards, he jammed the bottom of these four-by-fours up against the first-floor walls. He stepped back to examine his handiwork. From the front entrance, it looked like he had the beginnings of an oil-drilling rig erected. The air was full of plaster dust and the floor was covered in it. Then he began hauling materials upstairs.
The location for the weapon would be determined by the trajectory angle between the floor and that skylight in the master bedroom. He had acquired a handheld GPS navigation device at a marina down on the Washington waterfront. The GPS device gave him the grid coordinates of this room in the house. Now what he needed was the grid coordinates of the target. For that, he was going to have to take a walk, probably in broad daylight. He’d go tomorrow, during the lunch hour, when there would be more people wandering the Mall and the Capitol grounds. He didn’t think he’d be able to get up to the West Portico itself, not this close to the inauguration. But he could extrapolate from a map showing the grid coordinates and thereby refine the azimuth of fire. Mutaib had promised him precise coordinates in time for the attack.
The master bedroom was empty, and the rugs had been taken up, as well. The old tongue-and-groove pine floors were in good condition, considering their age. Once he had his materials upstairs, he went downstairs and measured the center of the column structure from the side and back walls of the house. Translating those measurements to the floor of the master bedroom, he located the center of the column support and marked it. He cut three more sheets of three-quarter-inch plywood in half and then began screwing these four-by-four-foot sections down onto the floor, centered on his mark, one on top of the other. When he had six sections stacked and screwed down, he located the center of the stack and marked that. Getting on a ladder, he climbed up into the ceiling dormer, which contained the skylight structure. The skylight was rectangular, with the long axis running parallel to the slope of the roof. T
he window aperture was six feet long by four feet wide. He had thought the grillwork in the glass contained individual panes of glass, but he found that the grillwork had been glued on to one solid piece of glass. He snorted in contempt. In Germany, of course, they would have been individual panes. The day’s dreary rain ran down the outside of the glass in cold-looking rivulets. He checked the edges of the glass to make sure there were no hinges, but it was all set down into heavy putty of some kind.
He could do no more until he had the coordinates and could work out the fire-control problem. He needed to remind Mutaib to get him the precise target coordinates. Tomorrow, he would take his walk, once again a Washington office worker out for a noonday stroll. He would get as close as he could, feigning interest in the preparations up at the Capitol, record the readings, and then compute a preliminary solution. With that, he could make absolutely sure the skylight was going to provide the necessary firing aperture, because if it didn’t, he might have to do some surgery on the roof itself. The marble would arrive tomorrow, so he had to be back in time for that. Which reminded him: He had to construct the ramp over the stairs so that the heavy blocks and ultimately the weapon itself could be moved upstairs. He looked at his watch. Much to do in the three days remaining.
Swamp spent the rest of the afternoon making phone calls to his old contacts in the Forensics divisions of the FBI and BATF, as well as the one out at NIH. In every case, the people he’d known had either been reassigned or had retired. Just for the hell of it, he put a call into Cullen’s office a little after five o’clock, but a lonely-sounding desk officer told him everyone was still out. That funeral has to be over by now, he thought, but then he remembered that there would be a racket going on somewhere. He left a message for Cullen to call him in the morning, as there’d be no point in talking to anyone in Homicide tonight. He called Gary over and took a look at the preliminary dossier on Heismann/Hodler.
“The Interpol report says he was a tank gunner in the East German army,” Gary said. “And then served as the sergeant of a mortar crew. Went from army conscript directly into the Stasi.”
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