The Short Drop

by Matthew Fitzsimmons

  It also meant no hotel reservations, but Hendricks knew the layout of the entire town of Somerset and rattled off the names of every motel in a three-mile radius.

  “Have you ever been here before?” Gibson asked.

  “Do I look like I’ve been here before?”

  “So do you go home at night and study atlases?”

  “If I’m going somewhere. Google’s no substitute for knowing things. Write that down.”

  When Jenn pulled up, they caravanned up and picked a dumpy single-story motel that was somewhat shielded from the highway noise. Still feeling restless, Gibson opted for a run before thinking about dinner. He left his room and nodded to Hendricks, who had brought a wooden chair out of his room and was smoking lazily.

  “I’ll be back in an hour.”

  Hendricks grunted, and Gibson began an easy run out toward the street. Summer had arrived; it was still a muggy ninety degrees after six p.m. He ran south back into town, taking the lay of the land, passing the Summit Diner, a classic stainless-steel prefab diner with a red-and-green neon sign by the curb. It had been renovated, but he’d be damned if it hadn’t originally been an honest-to-God Swingle Family Diner. Probably dated back to the sixties. Duke would have known for sure, but it was a collector’s item in any event. Gibson knew where he would be eating his meals for the duration of their stay.

  At the courthouse, he hung a right and headed west into the sun. He slowed when he saw the library and walked the rest of the way, wanting a firsthand look at it. The library had a single-page website that was little more than an electronic hours-of-operation sign. He’d found a few pictures but none that gave him a complete picture of the layout. Mostly, he was curious to get a look at what might be the base of operations of one of the FBI’s most wanted.

  As villainous lairs went, it was a bit of a letdown. The Carolyn Anthony Library was a pretty brick building with white-painted trim around the windows and main entrance. It was set back from the street by a neatly manicured lawn and a border of flower beds and small bushes. A bright-red fire hydrant stood on one side of the main entrance, a water fountain on the other. It was a little slice of Mayberry Americanus and, like the courthouse, felt out of place in its drab clapboard surroundings.

  The drinking fountain gave little more than a trickle. Gibson managed to coax a sip out of it then circled the library. To the side and rear, a public park sloped away with park benches, picnic tables, grassy lawns, and a stone fountain at the center that threw water up in a hazy, erratic spray.

  It reminded him of the photo with Suzanne and the frog. Which in turn brought to mind something that had bothered him before… The hat—something about that Philadelphia Phillies baseball cap. What’s the big deal? he asked himself. She’d needed a cap to hide her face and bought a Phillies one. Settle down, Sherlock.

  Still it nagged at him.

  Keep your mind on the task at hand, he told himself: the layout of the library. It appeared to have three ways in and out: the main entrance, a loading dock on one side, and a side door that opened onto the park. It stood apart from its neighboring buildings, offering little excuse to loiter. That plus the size of the town meant anyone who didn’t belong would quickly stand out. WR8TH would make them long before they made him.

  Gibson used his cell phone to check what he already knew—the library Wi-Fi was not password protected. He walked half a block away before he completely lost the signal. Tomorrow, he’d come back with a range-tester and map out the perimeter of the Wi-Fi’s signal. Already, though, it was painfully clear that WR8TH could log in to the library Wi-Fi without stepping foot in the building—practically without coming within eyeshot of it. Their job had just gotten trickier. Not impossible but much more complicated.

  Well, there wasn’t anything he could do about it now. He put his earbuds back in and began the run back to the motel to call Ellie before dinner.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  It was wall to wall at the Summit Diner, a claustrophobic little place with a blunt, utilitarian feel. Immovable black steel stools hooked out of the base of the square-topped counter. Booths crammed around the exterior wall, everyone on top of everyone else. Jenn didn’t see the appeal, but Vaughn treated the place with the reverential awe that most people reserve for museums. The diner belonged in one, that was for sure. What was it with him and diners?

  “Can you believe this place?” Gibson asked.

  “No,” Jenn said. “What the hell is a pretzel melt?” It was listed on the specials board.

  Gibson grinned. “Kind of like a calzone but with a pretzel. You’ll love it.”

  Jenn stared at him. “This is for me not letting you in the car, isn’t it?”

  “You’ll thank me later.”

  “Don’t wait up.”

  To her relief, she found salads on the menu. Hendricks ordered the meat loaf. When it came, Hendricks cut it into a dozen bite-size squares and then dipped each bite in Tabasco sauce. Gibson ordered a milkshake and a monstrosity called the Cindy Sue—a burger dripping barbecue sauce and topped with a thick onion ring. Throw in a side of fries, and it was no wonder he spent so much time at the gym; it had to be 1,500 calories. Between mouthfuls, Gibson briefed them about the challenge that surveillance of the Carolyn Anthony Library would present.

  Hendricks agreed that blending in was going to be tough. “Hard truths time. This is an underused public library in a small town. New faces are going to need a damn good reason to be there.”

  “Well, obviously this guy hasn’t avoided detection for ten years by being careless,” she said, thinking out loud. “He’s picked his spot well. He’ll see us; we won’t see him.”

  “Yeah, but he’s also telling us something,” Hendricks said.

  “What’s that?” Gibson asked.

  “Strangers stick out. Means he isn’t one. He’s comfortable and confident.”

  “We have a bigger problem,” Gibson said and explained how the Carolyn Anthony Library’s public Wi-Fi required no log-in or password, ran 24-7, and was broadcasting a signal strong enough to reach the moon.

  “So where does that leave us?” Jenn asked.

  “Where it leaves us is our man can use the library Wi-Fi anytime, day or night, and doesn’t even need to physically enter the library to do it. He can sit in his car, half a block away at two in the morning, and do his business. And we can’t stop him.”

  “But he’s only given the virus instructions during business hours,” Jenn said.

  “True, and no reason to believe he’ll vary his tactics. I’m just saying that he can if he wants.”

  “If he wants,” Hendricks underlined. “But it’s also possible that he’s had his fun and this is a dead lead.”

  “What’s the lag time between an active intrusion to ACG’s network and your sentries recognizing it and notifying you?” Jenn asked Gibson.

  “Three to five seconds. Give or take. Any incoming instruction from the corrupt ad on the Post website’s IP will trigger an alarm here. I’ll get a text message, an e-mail, and a phone call.”

  “What about your concerns WR8TH might be monitoring ACG communications?”

  “Why do you think I bypassed your network entirely?”

  Jenn glanced at Hendricks. He didn’t like that answer any more than she did.

  “Can you route the alert to our phones as well?”

  “Sure. I’ll do it after dinner.”

  “So let me see if I understand the plan,” Hendricks said. “We wait for WR8TH to access his virus and then run around like fools looking for a middle-aged pedophile with a laptop and a hard-on. Missing anything?”

  “No, that’s pretty much the plan,” she said.

  “So long as I’m clear.”

  “But in case he does change up his schedule, we’ll sleep in shifts,” Jenn said. “We need to be ready to go at all hours, but som
ething tells me he’ll stick to his schedule.”

  Gibson nodded his agreement. He’d gone back and sifted through ACG’s network history looking for traces of WR8TH’s footprints in the ACG servers. Every instance that he’d identified was at the end of the week, on a Friday afternoon.

  “Which gives us all of four days to game-plan.”

  “I did a little research,” Gibson said. “A few years ago, there were a slew of pedophiles using the Wi-Fi at Virginia public libraries. They would literally park in front of the library in the middle of the night and download child porn. So it’s not a new or unique strategy.”

  “What are our options?” Jenn asked.

  “We could do what they did and add a log-in. They also shut down their Wi-Fi after business hours, but…”

  “Any change to the system would spook our boy.”

  “Right, which also means I can’t interfere with the Wi-Fi’s range or the bandwidth. He’s shown himself to be cautious and smart. If we mess with it, he’ll be in the wind.”

  “We could call in the cavalry. More bodies, more eyes,” Hendricks said.

  “Running a gargantuan surveillance operation that would almost certainly be spotted is not the answer,” Jenn said. “We need a solution that doesn’t depend on deploying the 101st Airborne.”

  “Let me work on it tonight. I may have an idea,” said Gibson.

  She thought about pressing him on the details but elected to heed her boss’s advice and give Gibson the benefit of the doubt. When he’d finished his meat loaf, Hendricks excused himself to go scout the library. Gibson ordered a slice of blackberry pie and a scoop of vanilla ice cream. He offered her a spoon, but she declined, studying him over her coffee.

  “CIA,” she said.

  He looked at her, not understanding.

  “You asked where I served.”

  “Really? The way you moved on me. At the Nighthawk. Would have pegged you for military.”

  She felt his eyes search her face as if he were studying an equation that had produced the wrong answer.

  “Parents were,” she said. “Dad was a marine. Mom was Navy.”

  “Who was your dad with?”

  “The One Eight.”

  “Where?”

  “Lebanon.”

  Gibson put down his spoon. “Was he there?”

  “Yeah, he was there.”

  She’d been two the day the truck drove onto the Marine barracks in Beirut and crashed into the lobby. The truck’s only obstacles: concertina wire and sentries with unloaded rifles. Condition Four: no magazines, no chambered rounds. Not that it would have made a difference. The force of the detonation lifted the building off its foundations, and gravity slammed it back to Earth, crushing those inside. The fireball killed the rest. A good rule of thumb, Jenn had found: the brutality of a thing was directly proportional to how often the word “instantaneous” was used. Her father hadn’t suffered—the most comfort that could be offered. The same could not be said of her mother.

  What little Jenn remembered of her mom was hard. Beth Charles had been a small, practical woman. After her husband’s funeral, she drove straight to the liquor store. Never a drinker, she settled on vodka because mouthwash masked the smell when she was on duty. She hadn’t hit Jenn often. And never too hard. Only the one scar, behind her ear, but that had been an accident. Jenn remembered being really afraid only a few times. Mostly when the gun came out at night. Her mom would strip and clean it on the coffee table with the television up so loud that Jenn slept with a pillow over her head.

  After the wreck, Jenn went to live with her grandmother. She ran her tongue over her teeth.

  “I’m very sorry,” Gibson said.

  “Why did you call her Bear?”

  Gibson laughed and took a bite of pie. “She was a full-body hugger. Wrap her arms around you and squeeze for all she was worth. Whenever she saw my father, she’d take a running start at him, and he’d yell, ‘Bear hug, incoming!’ Became kind of a thing. Suited her. Also, she was always hibernating somewhere with a book. I think I was the only one who actually called her Bear, though.”

  “What was she like?”

  “Bear? She was my sister, you know? I mean, not my sister sister, but we grew up together. We didn’t have a whole lot in common, but she was just good. Really good. She was one of those kids that made other parents jealous. Like why couldn’t their kids be more like her? She was easy, polite. Kind to everyone. Totally unspoiled. But really stubborn too.” Gibson laughed at a private memory. “When she decided something was going to be a certain way, it was a lost cause to resist. Trust me.”

  “When did she start to change?”

  “I don’t know. I was getting older. I stayed home in Charlottesville more. School and stuff. I’m not sure I even noticed at first, because she was always a quiet kid. I didn’t even know she had a boyfriend. Then my father, you know… I didn’t see the Lombards after that. I got arrested about three months after.” Gibson threw down his fork and sat staring at the pie. “I’ve got a question. What do you know about the Phillies cap? From the Breezewood tape.”

  “The cap? Not a lot. Nothing special about it as far as I know. Neither of her parents identified it as something she owned. She hated baseball with a passion, so the assumption is she bought it on the road.”

  “Who said she hated baseball?”

  “Her parents. It’s in the FBI interview transcripts.”

  “Really? That’s weird.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Just something bothers me about that cap. Probably nothing.”

  “Probably,” she agreed. “But you have to respect a hunch. Talk me through it.”

  “Well, you’re right about Bear not being into sports. At least that’s how I remember it. But Duke and Lombard talked a lot of baseball. They were both huge Orioles fans. I think I’d remember if it got under her skin. She was kind of a heart-on-her-sleeve kind of kid, you know?”

  “Well, like you said, you hadn’t seen her in a while.”

  “Yeah,” Gibson agreed without sounding terribly convinced.

  At the counter, Fred Tinsley stirred cream into his coffee and looked over the menu. He wasn’t hungry, but when in Rome. He couldn’t hear what the two men and the woman were saying, but it made no difference. He wasn’t here to eavesdrop. He just wanted a little look-see.

  The little man was an ex-cop in Los Angeles, but he didn’t look like much. Still, Dan Hendricks had probably been underestimated all his life. Tinsley wouldn’t make that error. The other man, Vaughn, looked physically capable and had a military background, but as a computer tech of some sort. Since when did marines use keyboards? It was sad what the world was becoming.

  Charles was the only one of the three with quality. She had taken lives in combat. Tinsley would appreciate killing her the most. He sipped his coffee and wondered how he would do it if actually called upon to kill them. It all depended on whether they were successful. Their lives depended on their being incompetent. It struck Tinsley as rather funny.

  It really was a most unusual assignment. He would be paid in either event, so he could watch the drama unfold without a stake in the outcome. The novelty of it appealed to him, and he was curious to see how it played out. In the meantime, all he had to do was wait and watch. He was good at both those things.

  And of course, he still had to pay a visit to the doctor. He had not seen her since that night ten years ago. He admired her work, so unlike his own, yet also requiring calm and professionalism under extraordinary circumstances. He respected that and looked forward to seeing her again.

  The waitress came back, and he ordered a Reuben just to be done with her. He was still waiting for his food when the little man got up and left the diner. Tinsley wasn’t worried about where he was going. It made no difference.

  It was after
two a.m. when the Cherokee pulled up in front of the motel. Hendricks had already been gone when they got back from the diner and had just returned. Gibson was sitting on his bed, trying to diagram a rudimentary solution to their library Wi-Fi problem. He listened as Hendricks went into his room and slammed the door. A few moments later it reopened, shutting more quietly this time.

  Gibson put his work aside and went outside. Hendricks was sitting on the hood of the Cherokee smoking. He wore dark pants and a Windbreaker even though it was still in the mideighties. The back of the Cherokee was empty; Hendricks would be cramped with all those extra duffels stacked in his room.

  “You weren’t lying about the library,” said Hendricks. “It’s going to be a bitch trying to cover all the exits and the nearby streets with just the three of us. Never mind not being seen. And that doesn’t account for shifts and sleep.”

  “Can Abe send more troops?”

  “He could, but we run into that other problem. We stake out that library with an army and we’ll stand out like Girl Scouts in Las Vegas. And local PD might not be good for a lot, but I guarantee if we set up camp at a public library that kids frequent, we are going to wind up with a Maglite shoved way, way up our ass.”

  “So we’re screwed?”

  “Not entirely. I set up perimeter cameras. They’re motion-activated, but I’ve got coverage on all three doors. It’s not ideal, but we’ll get faces going in and out. If he even goes in or out. Nothing to rely on.” He flicked ash into the gutter. “We sure could use some of that cyber-ninja voodoo of yours.”

  “Cyber-ninja voodoo?”

  “Isn’t that why you’re here?”

  “Hendricks, can I ask you a question? Did you work this kind of thing in the LAPD?”