Before the Proof

by Gary Williams

“Jude verse 10 in the King James Bible states, ‘But these speak evil of those things which they know not: but what they know naturally, as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt themselves.’ You think it has something to do with the assassination?”

  “Not sure. Run queries against the term ‘Charge Mother Mary’ and the Jude 10 Bible verse. Equally curious is that the front of the paper contained a transcript of the conversation that I listened to between Lu and McReynolds. It’s word for word. Whoever attacked me also eavesdropped on the meeting. I found his earpiece. The sooner we find out who he is, the better. It’s also possible that he’s tied to the assassination target.”

  “The facial recognition search may take a while.”

  “Contact Tomlinson. He offered to help. Maybe his people can speed up the process by running facial recognition against their database.”

  “Only if the victim is U.S. born.”

  “Based on the English text on the paper I took off the body, my suspicion is that he’s either American or British. Also, let Tomlinson know I was attacked. Someone leaked information. I want to know if his people told anyone else I was coming to Sri Lanka.” Tolen glanced at his watch. “Bar, we’ve got just under an hour before the assassination goes down. Time is critical.”

  “I’m on it. By the way, sounds like you’re on the move. Where are you going now?”

  “Lu’s hotel room. Whoever the target, one way or another, I’ve got to stop it.”

  * * * *

  Tolen hung up as he stepped off the hotel elevator onto the first floor. He crossed the lobby and exited to the street. Evening traffic was heavy, and he carefully threaded through the four lanes of congestion to arrive at Lu’s hotel. Once again, he was greeted by the overly cheerful doorman with the weathered face, who ushered Tolen inside. There were more patrons inside the lobby than earlier, when Tolen had awaited McReynolds’ arrival. He casually checked the faces to ensure Lu and McReynolds were not among them and continued to the bank of elevators. When one arrived, he stepped onboard, into a thick smell of wood polish.

  Once the doors closed, Tolen turned his cell phone to vibrate. His thoughts returned to the paper he found on the man. Tolen mentally recited Jude verse 10 to himself: But these speak evil of those things which they know not: but what they know naturally, as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt themselves. Was it some sort of code? Why had the man transcribed the same conversation that Tolen had listened in on between Lu and McReynolds? Was he also an operative for some foreign government after Lu? It would not explain why he attacked Tolen, though. None of it made any sense.

  A ding signaled the arrival of the elevator on the fourth floor. Tolen left the elevator as another couple boarded. He made his way quietly down the carpeted hallway, checking the room numbers until he spotted 409 just ahead. He withdrew his pistol and lowered it to his side in order to shield it from view. Tolen considered knocking on the door and announcing his arrival, but since Jung Lu had allegedly graduated from illegal arms dealing to assassin, it did not seem prudent. Instead, Tolen withdraw a CIA-issued universal card key. He slowly swiped the card reader in the door, waited for the light to turn green, and pushed the door open with his gun leveled ahead. A chalky smell greeted him. The entire room was visible, including the bathroom with its door open. What he saw surprised him.

  The room looked as if it had just been cleaned by the maid: no Jung Lu, no luggage, no clothes or personal items. Everything was in place. The bed was made. The two lamps on either side of the bed were turned on. Otherwise, it appeared the room was ready for the next hotel guest to check in.

  Tolen closed the door behind him and checked the closet. Beyond the normal hotel items—iron, ironing board, coat hangers—it was vacant.

  The room was clearly unoccupied, yet this was the very room where Lu had checked in and had the conversation with Clarence McReynolds barely 20 minutes ago.

  Tolen holstered his weapon just as his cell phone vibrated. It was Bar. “What have you got for me?” he answered.

  “Tolen, can you talk?”

  “Yes, I’m standing in Lu’s room, but it’s empty.”

  “I’ve got FBI SAC Tomlinson on the other line. I’m going to bring him on this call.” There was a dull click. “Mr. Tomlinson, we’re on with Tolen.”

  “Tolen, this is highly embarrassing, but I know who your attacker is . . . er . . . was. He’s an FBI analyst under my command, Ronald Chin. He is supposed to be on a two-week vacation in California. You say he attacked you in your hotel room?”

  “With lethal force, Royce. It appears he documented McReynolds’ and Lu’s meeting as if he was on an assignment and performing surveillance. Yet he had no identification on him, not to mention he’s way out of his jurisdiction.”

  Royce Tomlinson audibly exhaled. “Samuel, we haven’t had a chance to check everything, but it appears he may have fed me bad information. Chin was the one who alerted me to the meeting between McReynolds and Lu. He’s also the one who uncovered the stock accounts that Arnold Bowman shorted for $350 million. We’re still trying to substantiate the information he gave me.”

  “You may have had a double agent on your hands, Royce.”

  Royce Tomlinson dropped off the call after promising to pull more resources into the investigation of Ronald Chin’s activities. Tolen knew it was an embarrassment to the FBI agent as well as the entire agency, and he felt for his friend.

  When it was just the two of them left on the line, Bar continued. “Tolen, I just located McReynolds’ hotel room in Colombo. He’s checked in at the same hotel as Lu. One floor up from where you are: Room 515.”

  Tolen checked his watch. “We’re running out of time. Less than an hour to go before whatever assassination attempt is going to go down. I’m going to McReynolds’ room. I’ve got to find either Lu or McReynolds.”

  Tolen closed his phone and left Lu’s room, but not before searching once more for any signs of occupancy. He checked the wastebaskets in the room and in the bathroom and found them empty.

  In the hallway, he was about to take the stairwell up when he spied the metal trash receptacle by the elevator doors. Tolen walked over to it and removed the domed lid. It was half full. He reached down, shifted some of the paper debris on top and lifted a small electronic device that had been damaged. It was an audio recorder/player. The facing had been crushed, and it was inoperable. Otherwise, it appeared to be new. Tolen stashed it in his coat pocket, turned, pushed the stairwell door open, and took the stairs up.

  Samuel Tolen now realized things were not as they appeared.

  * * * *

  A “Do Not Disturb” sign hung outside room 515. Tolen reached it just as a woman emerged from a doorway down the hall. He pretended to be searching for his card key as she approached. A native Sinhalese with dark hair and exquisite brown eyes, Tolen nodded cordially as the woman passed by. She returned a beguiling smile before boarding the elevator and disappearing from sight.

  Tolen put his ear to the door. There was no sound coming from inside the room. Time was critical. McReynolds had no history of violence, and it was a safe bet that the man would not be armed. It was time to throw caution to the wind. Whatever was going on with the assassination attempt, he was going to force the answer out of Clarence McReynolds.

  Tolen once again removed the universal card key, inserted it into the slot, and waited for the red light to turn green.

  It never did.

  Instead, he heard a faint low hum that quickly scaled up an octave.

  Tolen dove to his right just as the door exploded outward, smashing into the wall across the hall. He was spun counterclockwise and landed hard on the carpeted floor, his ears ringing, his thoughts discombobulated. The reverb from the blast bounced off the walls like a demonic force. A thick cloud of dust clogged the air. Tolen coughed, slowly pushing himself to his hands and knees even as specks of deb
ris rained down on him. It took several long seconds for him to gain his wits.

  Tolen looked up and found he was facing the hallway wall. He slowly turned his head to see a handful of people standing in the doorways of their rooms. Several people came to his aid and helped him up. They were asking questions, but he could barely hear them. Tolen absently looked at the damage. The door had pummeled into the hallway wall with such force that it had nearly disintegrated. A white mist now hung in the exposed doorway across from the debris.

  Tolen’s thoughts suddenly coalesced. He broke away from the people trying to help him and staggered into the room. The force of the explosion had struck him at the calves as he dove out of the way. His legs ached, but he fought to ignore the pain. He had to check the room to see if McReynolds had been inside.

  The room lights were on. He quickly spotted McReynolds lying on his back near the bed a dozen feet away. Tolen bent down and checked for a pulse. The man was dead.

  The position of the body was unusual; arms by his side and legs straight. His face was ashen, but unburned by the explosion.

  Tolen looked around the room, but it was barren. Near the door were pieces of mangled metal and charred plastic. It appeared to be the remains of the detonator that triggered the blast when he tried to open the door.

  People began to cluster in the doorway, murmuring in Sinhala. One woman screamed when she saw McReynolds’ body. No doubt, the local authorities would be here soon.

  Tolen left the room, his lower legs still throbbing. He awkwardly pushed through the congestion of people standing outside McReynolds’ hotel room. The throng appeared to thicken by the second, and the volume of the chatter escalated as more people saw the pale, still body.

  Tolen reached the elevator. Two minutes later, he stood in the lobby of his own hotel watching the procession of emergency vehicles arrive across the street; the flashing lights shocking the dim evening.

  Tolen slipped into a quiet corner and called Tiffany Bar.

  “Tolen, Deputy Director Vakind is here with me. Tomlinson has confirmed that everything Chin reported—the meeting between Lu and McReynolds, Bowman shorting the market for millions of dollars—was all a lie. They found documentation in Chin’s office where he falsified a report showing wire transfers from Bowman’s bank accounts to a broker. They went through Chin’s emails. McReynolds thought he was being blackmailed. He wasn’t there to hire an assassin; he was there because he thought he was paying off an extortionist.”

  “That explains why McReynolds seemed so nervous when he arrived at the hotel lobby,” Tolen said. “He’s dead, by the way. I found his body in his hotel room. The room was rigged with explosives that detonated when I tried to enter. From the position of the body and lack of burns, he was dead before the explosion.”

  “Oh my god, are you alright?” Bar asked.

  “Yes. Now I know what the transmitter was used for that I found on Chin. It activated and deactivated the charge attached to McReynolds’s hotel room door.”

  “I also found a brokerage account in Ronald Chin’s name,” Bar went on. “Actually, it was remarkably easy to find. In it, he had shorted the market just as he had lied about Bowman doing. Except that the value of Chin’s account is only for $50,000.

  “But there’s more, the voice you heard during the meeting between McReynolds and Lu was not Lu’s.”

  Tolen cut in. “It was Ronald Chin imitating Lu, wasn’t it?”

  “Well, that’s what we believe. I spoke to Tomlinson, and he told me that Chin had a talent for impersonations. How did you know?”

  “I found a small handheld audio recorder just outside Lu’s room. It was new, yet it had been smashed and was inoperable. That’s when I realized the paper that I found on Ronald Chin’s body wasn’t a transcript of the meeting between McReynolds and Lu. It was the script for the meeting. I believe Chin played the part of Lu. He used the audio recorder/player with pre-recorded sentences by someone impersonating McReynolds, probably also Chin.”

  “Why use a recorder? If he’s that good at impersonating, Chin could have done both voices.”

  “It’s nearly impossible for one impersonator to switch characters back and forth in a conversation and be effective. When McReynolds arrived and took the elevator to the fourth floor, Chin must have met him in the hallway, and persuaded him—probably at gunpoint—into the fifth floor room that Chin had booked in McReynolds’ name. That’s where Chin killed him.” Tolen paused. “That explains how I was able to witness McReynolds arriving in the hotel lobby and still get back to my room before McReynolds supposedly knocked on Lu’s door. It took several minutes for Chin to get McReynolds to the fifth floor room, kill him, and then return to his room on the fourth floor. The knock I heard was Chin returning to the room, then pretending as if the meeting was taking place by impersonating Lu and using the audio player for McReynolds. The script made sure he followed the planned conversation.”

  Bar sounded contemplative. “So it was all an elaborate plan to make Arnold Bowman look guilty in an assassination attempt?”

  “And I was the pawn. My role was to verify McReynolds’ arrival, which automatically implicated Bowman, especially given the information Chin had supplied about his recent stock activity, then listen in on the conversation regarding the planned assassination.”

  “All the evidence suggests that Chin was working alone,” Vakind said.

  “Then . . . all is well?” Bar said hesitantly. “With Chin . . . dead, there can be no assassination attempt. Whoever he was planning to assassinate.”

  “It would appear so,” Tolen responded.

  * * * *

  It was 8:17 p.m. by the time Tolen returned to his hotel room. His forearm was sore where the bullet had grazed him, and his legs continued to ache. For the first time, he noticed the discoloration where his pant legs had been burned. It was almost inconceivable to think it had been less than an hour since he first began listening in on Chin’s fabricated meeting in the fourth-floor hotel room across the street. Since then, he had been shot at, killed a man in self-defense, almost been blown up, and he had discovered a corpse. Along the way, he had also helped to solve a twisted scheme by a rogue FBI agent intent on directing the blame of an assassination at someone else.

  It may have been his imagination, but the room already smelled of death. Tolen unfolded a blanket from the closet and draped it across the body of Ronald Chin. He called the airport and booked a redeye flight for that evening. Once he was out of the country, he would have Bar notify the Sri Lankan authorities of the man’s body in the hotel room and the circumstances surrounding the encounter; specifically that Tolen was an agent with the United States and had killed the man in self-defense. Since the victim was a U.S. citizen, the CIA would arrange for the body to be transported back to the states. No intervention would be required from the Sri Lankan government.

  Even though his mission was effectively over, as Tolen began to pack, something gnawed at him.

  His father had a quote. He had not heard it in a while, but it suddenly came to mind: A mystery lives on until every riddle within it is solved.

  Every riddle. Tolen still did not know who had been the intended assassination target or where it was supposed to occur. He also did not know Chin’s motivation for setting everything up in the first place.

  Tolen pulled the sheet of paper that he had taken off Chin’s body from his pocket, and unfolded it. He read the words on the paper again: Charge Mother Mary. Live Jude 10.

  Once again, he recalled Jude 10. But these speak evil of those things which they know not: but what they know naturally, as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt themselves.

  The verse seemed contradictory, and Tolen was not sure what it had to do with Chin’s plan.

  Tolen sat on the side of the bed still holding the paper in his hands. He closed his eyes and cleared his mind. The first image that
came to mind was his father, Jaspar Tolen, lying in a hospital bed. Unfortunately, this was not a time to dwell on his father’s condition. He discarded it, and refreshed his mind to a blank slate.

  The words of the Bible verse appeared in his mind as if written across a white board. They spoke of evil; of corruption. The words seemed to encapsulate Ronald Chin’s plan, yet they told Tolen nothing of significance. Then he considered the first phrase: Charge Mother Mary.

  Without resolution or revelation, he considered the second phrase, which named the Bible verse: Jude 10. Or did it?

  Suddenly, it made sense. It was so obvious now. He knew where the assassination was to take place.

  Then something else occurred to him. It was something that Chin, impersonating Lu, had said. “I anticipate the time will be 8:43 p.m., but know that the exact moment is out of my hands.” The reason the exact moment was out of Chin’s hands meant that the assassination was not contingent on Chin being there in person.

  He looked at his watch. 8:33 p.m.; approximately ten minutes. He ripped open his suitcase, snatched a small ear piece from a lining pocket, and inserted it in his right ear. He dashed out of his hotel room without even bothering to lock the door.

  * * * *

  Bar’s phone rang. She knew it was Tolen from the number. He must be leaving the country, she thought, and he wants me to follow up with the local authorities regarding Ronald Chin. It was not the first time Tolen had left a body behind for her to clean up. She hoped the locals got there before the maid decided to service the room.

  “On your way back home?” she answered.

  “Bar . . . Tiffany. Listen closely.” His words were labored and fluttering. She could hear resounding footsteps.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m in a stairwell. I know where the assassination is going to occur. It’s going to happen at the Paul McCartney concert here in Colombo. I also believe the threat is still valid.”

  “You think McCartney is the target?”

  “I don’t know. I need you to look into the attendees again. If it’s not McCartney, there must be someone of high value there. Where is the National Performing Arts Theatre?” His voice faded in and out, and Bar no longer heard the heavy footsteps. Tolen had left the stairwell. Horns and traffic sounds in the background signaled he was running down the street.