by Wil Mara
Hammond could not have agreed more. The notion that this was actually Rydell flashed briefly through his mind. No, too young. This is Rydell’s lapdog. The asylum inmate who’s been after us all along.
“Then what are we going to do?” Hammond asked.
“We’re going to make a deal.”
“Can I assume it involves my friend? The one you kidnapped?”
“That’s right.”
“And what are the terms?”
“Well, I’m all finished with her. She has served her purpose.”
The implications made Hammond feel murderous. He forced himself to ease up on the accelerator. “If you have harmed her in any way, I will make you regret it.”
This came out in a calm, measured tone and without a trace of humanity. Even Clemente looked stunned.
Birk immediately tried to regain the upper hand. “Do not threaten me, Mr. Hammond.”
“Let me speak to her.”
“You are not calling the—”
“Let me speak to her.” Hammond enunciated each word as if teaching a primer class in the English language.
There was a long pause, during which he inwardly prayed he had not gone too far.
Then Sheila spoke, her voice wobbly. “Hello?”
“Sheila? It’s Jason.”
“Hi.”
“How are you holding up?”
“I’m okay, for the most part.”
She sounded weak, feeble. Broken, Hammond thought, then forced the word down until it was out of his mind.
“Has he hurt you in . . . in any particularly bad way?” He couldn’t bring himself to name specifics.
She sniffled. “No, no, he hasn’t.”
“Okay. I’m going to do everything in my power to get you back, all right?”
“Sure.”
Then Birk’s voice again—“Now you know your little damsel is fine.”
Hammond’s fist tightened on the steering wheel. “And what is it you want? What’s our ‘deal’?”
“As I said, I am finished with her now. I could so very easily kill her and put her body someplace where it would never be found. But upon further consideration, I believe she would be more valuable to me alive, to be used as a bargaining chip.”
“To bargain for . . . ?”
“Half a million dollars.”
Hammond said nothing.
“Are you still there, Hammond?”
“Yes.”
“And you heard the amount?”
“I heard it.”
“I want it all in cash, naturally. And in bills no smaller than fifties. Can you do that?”
“Yes.”
In the background, Sheila yelled, “Jason, no! Don’t give him the satis—”
“SHUT YOUR MOUTH!” Birk screamed, away from the phone. Hammond tensed, waiting for the follow-up sound of a physical strike. When it didn’t come, he let out a long breath.
“Half a million,” Birk continued, “in fifties and hundreds.”
“Where and when?”
“There is an abandoned shipyard in D.C. on the Anacostia River at the end of Third Street. Go to the main building tonight at eleven. Use the side entrance, white door. You will bring the money inside and leave it on the floor. And make sure your other friend comes along too.”
“Other friend?”
“The one you’re currently traveling with. I know who he is, and I know what he is.”
“Why does he have to be there at all?”
“So I can see both of you in plain sight. I don’t trust you—or him.”
Hammond looked at Clemente, who nodded.
“Okay, we will both be there.”
“Once you drop off the money, you can take the girl and go.”
“Just like that, huh?”
“That’s up to you. Again, I’m done with her. Now I’m looking for a payoff. So if you want this to be simple, then it will be simple. But let me be clear on one very important point.”
“What’s that?”
“If you deviate from this plan in any way—if you come armed, if you alert the authorities, if you make any attempt to trip me up, I will kill her. I have done this before, and I am very good at it. Don’t think of trying to be a hero, because I will make sure you don’t get that chance. Am I perfectly clear, Hammond?”
“You’re clear.”
“Do we have a deal?”
“Yeah.”
And Birk was gone.
The money was Birk’s idea. His handler had been unspecific in his instructions. “Just get all three of them together in the same place,” he had said. “I don’t care how. Get them together, and kill them all.”
Birk had every intention of carrying out his orders, but he wasn’t going to toss away a golden opportunity to indulge in a little extortion at the same time.
He had thought carefully about the amount. He decided that something outrageous—say, $5 million—could cause several problems. First, Hammond might not be able to come up with the money quickly enough. Second, for that kind of number, he might resist. But half a million, Birk figured, was nothing to a guy like him.
Five hundred thousand, plus the hundred grand he was getting for this job from his employer, would be more than enough to set Birk up for quite a while. Very soon, this whole business would be over.
44
BARRY WHYTNER, the veteran FBI agent who had been put in charge of examining every inch of Rydell’s home with a microscope, removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He stood in the kitchen, which was stage-brightened by a pair of droplights, and watched as two members of his team crawled around the linoleum floor wearing rubber gloves and dust masks.
It had been an unbearably long day; getting out of bed this morning seemed like a week ago. And what did Whytner have to show for his team’s hard work? Not much—zillions of useless fingerprints and DNA samples, bags of innocuous trash, a safe that had recently been opened, and an upturned cardboard box in the basement whose contents had obviously been important to Rydell but were now impossible to determine. A glimmer of hope was doused when it turned out Rydell’s personal computer was missing its hard drive. Whytner was further inflamed by the fact that he had been forced to post several of his men outside, where their time and talents were wasted fending off pesky reporters and curious neighbors. A few of the residents had already been interviewed, also without result. No one had seen the fugitive arrive or leave.
Whytner checked his watch—9:42 p.m.—and sent a silent thank-you to the heavens. Eighteen more minutes. When his relief man arrived, he would go home, take a shower, and fall into bed. Now three years into his fifties, he found he slept fewer hours each night, but the need for those hours was greater than ever. Covering a yawn with his wrist, he thought he certainly needed it on this particular night.
His personal cell phone issued the two soft tones that indicated a text message had arrived. He removed the phone from inside his jacket and opened the text.
Mr. Whytner—This is Jason Hammond. I am texting you because I am desperate for the FBI’s help. I am supposed to meet the man who kidnapped Sheila Baker tonight, at the old Walton shipyard at 11:00. I am under the impression that Frederick Rydell will be there as well. I was told Sheila would be killed if I contacted the authorities, but I now believe we will both be killed regardless. Please send agents to the scene. Whatever happens to us happens, but you may not have the chance to catch either of these men again.
Whytner had to read the message twice to make sure he wasn’t imagining it. He checked the incoming log and saw that there was no ID or point of origin. The agency had already established that Hammond’s phone had that capability.
“Oh, man . . . ,” he breathed.
As soon as Rydell was certain the message to Whytner—whom he had recognized in one of the Suburbans—was sent, he closed his eyes and took a deep breath. That should take care of them, he thought. He knew how Birk worked, how the agents worked, and, he believed, how Jason Hammond worke
d. With a little luck, I’ll kill all the birds with the same stone.
He chuckled at his choice of platitude. Then he checked his rearview mirror for oncoming traffic, pulled off the shoulder, and continued onward.
The driver of the white Lexus, still keeping a discreet distance, did likewise.
At exactly 10:44 p.m., the rental car that had been carrying Hammond and Clemente for most of the day turned off Tingey Street and took Third until it terminated at a small parking lot formerly used by the employees of Walton Boat Works. The plant had been idle since February of 1996, when the owner and family patriarch, Ellis Walton IV, died of a massive stroke at the age of eighty-one while sitting behind his desk eating a Big Mac. His relatives fought one another for control of the business until they reached a stalemate, due more to concern over exorbitant lawyers’ fees than anything else. Since then, the property had sat like a ruin, trapped in a legal stasis while the Waltons played a protracted game of chicken and waited for someone to blink.
Hammond pulled up to the side entrance as instructed, and he and Clemente got out. Although they were not aware of the fact, they were being observed by FBI teams in four different positions. None had seen anyone else arrive to this point, making them highly skeptical that the text Whytner received was genuine. Now they scrambled to report that Hammond was, in fact, on the scene, accompanied by an older man of Latino descent and unknown identity. There were a total of sixteen agents in the area, all under the same orders—keep a safe distance for the time being. They watched Hammond open the back door of the car and remove a brown leather bag containing what they correctly assumed was ransom money. They had traced recent bank activity in the area and found just one large withdrawal—half a million in cash from Virginia Commerce Bancorp shortly after eight thirty. The account was held by a retired investment pro who, as it turned out, had been a close friend of Hammond’s late father.
A chill breeze rolled off the waterfront, but Hammond ignored it and slid the bag containing the ransom money over his shoulder.
Clemente was on Hammond’s side of the car now, watching him. “Are you ready?”
Hammond nodded. “I guess so. Listen, this guy’s obviously out of his mind, so . . . in case anything unfortunate happens, I just want to thank you now for what you did during the drive.”
Clemente smiled. “It was no problem.”
At Clemente’s urging, Hammond had showed the older man how to use the iPad to video-record what amounted to a detailed deposition concerning the Cuban’s role in the assassination. Hammond, driving, had been spellbound, marveling that he was the only person in the world aside from Clemente himself to have all the details of this information and to watch as the missing pieces to the most tantalizing puzzle of the modern age were set into place at last. Later, Hammond had uploaded the video to the same FTP site he’d used for the digitized copy of Margaret Baker’s film. Then he’d instructed Noah to download it at home. Noah was to release it publicly if the meeting with Sheila’s captor went afoul.
Through the door, they found themselves in what appeared to be a small receiving office. Some basic furniture was still there: a desk with a blotter, a cheap couch framed by mismatched end tables, and several straight-back chairs, as well as a large artificial plant in a cheap plastic pot. Everything was finely powdered with dust.
There was another doorway on the opposite side, the door itself removed long ago. This led into an employees’ anteroom. Although details were scarce in the dark, Hammond could make out a bank of cubbyholes and a long bench bolted to a tile floor. The scratching of their shoes echoed expansively, suggesting much greater space than was visible. Hammond’s heart jumped when he spotted a face in the dimness, then realized it was his reflection in a cracked mirror.
Moving forward again, he and Clemente came to yet another door. This one had a large rectangular window, through which Hammond could see the vast, cathedral-like hall where the Walton company had built its wares. A light, too high to be seen through the window, sent a cone of radiance to the concrete floor. Hammond pulled the door open and was immediately struck by the sour pungency of the Anacostia River. Then he could hear it, and he quickly located the source—a framed opening in the floor where the finished vessels had been lowered. To the right of this was a pair of bay doors that slid apart to mark the launch of each boat’s maiden voyage. Each door was at least thirty feet tall and looked strangely magnificent in the distance.
But the sight of the doors was not what caught and held Hammond’s attention with electromagnetic force—it was Sheila, hanging by a rope from the ceiling.
“No!”
He rushed in, ignoring Clemente’s shouted warnings and caring not a whit if Sheila’s killer took him down right then and there. As he drew closer, he made a sobering realization—she wasn’t dead. The psycho who put her there had gagged her and tied her to one of the straight-back chairs from the receiving office, then suspended the chair over the rectangular maw that led to the river beneath. The rope ran up to a large pulley wheel, then angled down to a battleship-sized eye screw in the concrete floor. The fact that the wheel was rusted completely brown was heart-stopping enough, but what Hammond found more alarming was that a cement block dangled from the bottom of the chair on a few more feet of rope. Both Sheila and the block were rotating in an unhurried manner that was somehow grotesque, like huge Christmas decorations on display in the overhead light.
Hammond slowed to a walk and continued closer. Sheila was facing away from him for the moment, but he could hear her crying softly. Then came a metallic click, which he immediately recognized as the hammer of a pistol being thumbed into place.
The man called Birk stepped from the shadows, smiling confidently. He was lean and handsome, slightly unshaven, clad in jeans and a white dress shirt unbuttoned toward the top and untucked at the bottom. He appeared to be the kind of man who would not be out of place in a trendy nightclub, would maybe make some extra money doing magazine ads for cologne or liquor. But Hammond could also sense the disturbance behind those eyes, the peripatetic psychosis that would always keep him a few steps behind the march of normalcy.
“So you really did show up to save the girl.” Birk put a curled hand to his mouth and performed a melodramatically triumphal horn signature, then laughed like a drunken hyena. When he noticed that neither of his guests were amused, he said, “Let me guess. Now you’re going to exercise your solemn Christian duty and try to talk me out of my sinner’s ways, right?”
“No,” Hammond said without a trace of inflection, “I don’t waste my time on hopeless cases.”
Birk’s smiled faded, and he brought the gun up until the barrel was aligned with Hammond’s face. “Don’t press me. You can make this quick and easy or slow and painful.”
Hammond didn’t flinch; neither, for that matter, did Clemente. Birk looked like he found this irritating.
“Is that the money?” Birk asked, nodding toward the bag.
“Yeah.”
“Open it. ‘Show me the money,’ as they say.”
Hammond took it off his shoulder and began unzipping.
“Dump it on the floor,” Birk amended.
“On the floor?”
“Yeah, all of it. I want to see that there’s no dye pack or wireless transmitter inside.”
Hammond shrugged and followed his instructions. He actually had considered using an exploding dye pack, then decided not to take the chance. As he turned the bag over and began shaking out the neatly banded stacks, he cursed himself for not considering the transmitter idea. It could’ve been sewn into the bag itself. . . .
After the last stack fell, Birk motioned for Hammond and Clemente to move away from the pile, then came over and kicked it around.
“Okay, now put it all back in again. Get down on your knees, big shot.”
Hammond obeyed without comment.
When he was finished, Birk said, “Now slide it over to me.”
Hammond did so while still on his kn
ees. He got back up while Birk relocated the bag just outside the circle of light. Birk never once took his eyes off either of them.
“Okay,” Hammond said, “you got what you want. Now please leave so I can get her down.”
Birk wagged his finger. “No.”
“Excuse me?”
“You won’t be getting anything you want tonight. No girl, no riding in on your white horse to save the day. You get nothing.”
“We had a deal.”
“And I have another deal with another party. And that deal is contingent upon my wasting the three of you. It’s one of the great laws of the universe—when someone gains, someone else loses. Today, you three are the losers.”
“Rydell must be very proud,” Hammond said.
“What?”
“Rydell.”
“Who’s that?”
Hammond traded a look with Clemente, the unspoken sentiment being, His confusion really is most convincing. This guy is some actor.
“Your boss, Frederick Rydell. I know all about him.” When Birk’s puzzled expression deepened, Hammond continued with, “You can’t honestly expect me to believe you don’t kn—”
Then he saw it all, the amazing truth of the matter coming to him in a wide, grand vision. Of course he wouldn’t know. Rydell would have to remain anonymous. Not only because it’s his standard MO, but also because he could never run the risk of revealing his identity to crazies like this who work for him. The blackmail potential alone . . . “The man who’s pulling your strings is named Jasper Frederick Rydell, and he’s the assistant deputy director of the CIA. He’s been part of that agency since 1961. He also played a small but operational role in the assassination of President Kennedy.”
Birk’s eyebrows rose in surprised admiration. “Really?”
“—and it is likely he arranged the three murders from last night, each victim also having taken part in the conspiracy. As of this morning, however, he has been exposed and is on the run. Your assignment here is him getting you to do his last bit of dirty work.”