“I’m ready for you to drive,” Journey said. “My foot’s very sore, and I’m tired.”
“Thanks for driving.”
Journey nodded. “Now will you tell me where we’re going?”
“A little speck of a town in Arkansas called Gravelly. There’s someone there I trust. It’ll be safe, it’ll be secure, and the Glory Warriors would really have to be stretching to make the connection. The man who lives there is named Darrell Sharp. I knew him at the Academy. I got to know him because of the piano.”
“The piano?”
Tolman smiled. “We all lived on campus at the Academy. That was a requirement. But Darrell also rented an apartment in town. One day in class, I think it was Advanced Database Investigations, someone made a crack about him renting an apartment just for a piano.”
Journey looked at her.
“It was true.”
“So he was also a pianist,” Journey said.
“No. He can’t play a note. But his father was a concert pianist who taught at the University of South Carolina. His father had died of cancer the year before and left Darrell this piano. But not just any piano—a Steinway concert grand. He didn’t want to leave it in storage somewhere, and he didn’t want to sell it or give it away, so he kept it and hired professional piano movers to take it wherever he went.”
“Isn’t that expensive?”
“Very. But his father had done well as a concert pianist and left Darrell a decent trust fund. So anyway, after class I went up to him and asked him about the apartment and the piano. He offered to show me, so the next time we were both free, I went over and saw it. He let me play it. I’d just come off a year of trying to make a living as a musician, then coming to the realization that I wasn’t good enough to do that, so I went into the family business and applied to the Academy.”
“And you and he started seeing each other.”
“It’s not what you think. We didn’t really ‘date’ or anything like that. I just … went and played his piano. Sometimes he made dinner. A few times things went further.” Tolman stopped, turning the memories over in her mind. “But there was never anything beyond that. Then he graduated and joined the U.S. Marshals Service. His first job was in Miami. I was still at the Academy.”
Tolman had already downed a full cup of coffee, and she signaled the waitress for another. “Six months after Darrell got to Miami, he was sent on a prisoner escort. A major cocaine dealer who’d been a fugitive for more than five years had been recaptured in Key West. Darrell and one other deputy marshal were sent to bring him back. Some of the dealer’s ‘employees’ somehow broke through security and tried to blast him out during the transfer. Between the holding cell and the car, they broke him out. Darrell’s partner had his head practically blown off. They killed the DEA agent who’d found the dealer, and two local cops.”
“My God,” Journey said. He put down his coffee cup.
“Darrell ran around the opposite side of the truck, with them shooting at him the whole way. He got to one of the guys, knocked his gun away, but the guy turned around with a knife and slashed Darrell across his stomach. So there he was, bleeding from a belly wound. They scuffled, Darrell got to his shotgun and put a round through the guy’s neck. The two other guys turned on him, he rolled into a ditch, got around the other side of them, and shot them both. The dealer got into the middle of it and Darrell shot him, too.” Tolman looked down at the table.
“That’s eight people dead,” Journey said, counting on his fingers.
Tolman nodded but didn’t look up. Her eyes were far away. “Darrell was the only one of either the druggies or cops left alive. Bystanders corroborated everything, he received citations for bravery, newspaper and TV stories were done on him. But he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, couldn’t even move some days. He’d go for a week or more at a time without talking. He was put on administrative leave and sent to a counselor.”
“Posttraumatic stress disorder.”
“PTSD and severe depression. He woke up crying one morning, and he couldn’t stop. He simply couldn’t stop crying. He had the presence of mind to drive himself to a hospital, and he spent three weeks in the mental health unit. He resigned from the Marshals Service the day he walked out of the hospital. Eventually he was awarded a disability pension. So there he was, retired on disability at age twenty-six. He found this remote place out in the woods in Arkansas, and just walked away from everything.”
“And you talked to him while all this was going on?”
“He called me from the hospital. I’d finished the Academy and joined RIO in D.C. by then. I went to Florida over two weekends and saw him in the hospital.”
“What does he do now?”
“He paints,” Tolman said. “The guy actually paints landscapes on cups and bowls and plates, and he sells them online. I haven’t talked to him in a couple of years now. He rarely leaves the house. He’s worried that people are coming to get him. He’s on meds, and he’s better than he was, but he’s not quite whole yet. He always feels that he’s on the edge of either killing someone or being killed himself. But I know his communications are secure, and I know he has weapons. We’ll be there in the morning.”
Journey looked at her. “And he’s going to just welcome us, with all our baggage, into his remote little life out there in the country?”
“He’s ready for us,” Tolman said. “Ready as he can be.”
CHAPTER
44
Voss came to the office at her regular time, though it had been well after 1 A.M. when she finally went to bed. She said a quick good morning to Tina, the receptionist, then headed for the lounge to get a Diet Coke. Hudson was there, pouring himself a cup of coffee.
“Morning,” Voss said.
“Good morning, Kerry,” Hudson said. His voice was tired.
“Any news?”
“No.” Hudson poured sugar into his coffee and stirred it. “I don’t think I’m going to have to be at the Hoover Building today, though. Special Agent Díaz is running the investigation, with the attorney general personally overseeing. I understand the president himself even called Díaz. For all of our sakes, I hope this is a quick investigation.”
He stirred his coffee some more.
“Have you heard from Meg?” Voss asked.
Hudson looked down at her. “No,” he said, and left the room.
Strange, Voss thought. Everyone in the office knew that Tolman and Hudson got along famously, though it was an odd pairing. One of the law enforcement guys swore they were sleeping together, which of course was nonsense. A woman could tell, and Voss knew that what Tolman and Hudson had was more a big brother–little sister relationship. Voss went to her office and settled in to work. She followed up on a few e-mails, killed some time online, and her hacker called her cell at just after ten o’clock.
“Hey, Kerry.”
“Morning, Duke. What do you have?” Voss turned off her computer’s media player in the middle of Guns N’ Roses’ “Mr. Brownstone” and pulled at a strand of her hair. She’d meant to do more with it, but wound up pulling it back into a ponytail. She’d been too tired to face her hair this morning.
“Oh, yeah,” Duke said. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I rule the world, Kerry.”
“I know you do. Where does the money originate?”
Duke made a clucking sound with his tongue. “You want to go out sometime, Kerry?”
“No. I’ve told you this every time you’ve asked, Duke. We’ll keep it on a professional level. And you seem to forget that I have three kids.”
“Damn, that’s right. I hate kids. All right, never mind. Got your money, though.”
“Tell me.”
“Of course, there’s no name on the account in Aruba. Can’t get names on offshore accounts. This was a good challenge. It took me a couple of hours to get into the bank, but once I was in…”
“Duke.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so from Aruba it comes back to the States. I got the
computer that initiated the transfer of funds to Aruba, who transferred it to New York, who sent it to Dallas, who sent it to its final destination in Louisiana. And you know what? The original account is right here in the D.C. area.”
Voss sat forward. “Really?”
“Ha, now you love me, don’t you? Yeah, it’s a branch of one of the big banks. The branch is in Silver Spring.”
“And?”
“And…” Duke drew out the silence.
“I don’t have much patience with drama this morning, in case you’re wondering,” Voss said.
“Yeah, I’m getting that from you. And there is one big shitload of money going out of that account. We’re talking millions every week, and it’s sent to other accounts all over the place. Jamaica, the Caymans, Luxembourg, South America.”
Voss whistled. “And I bet all those are pass-throughs.”
“I bet you’re right. That money goes everywhere, but it all eventually winds up back in the States. There is a lot of it.”
“Okay, so who owns the account in Silver Spring?”
“It’s something called GW One. You want me to spell it? No, okay, I won’t spell it. GW One.”
Voss wrote GW1 on her pad.
“And I got the IP address of the computer that initiated the funds transfer. It came from a wireless network that’s part of the Hubopag server. You know them, right?”
“Local ISP for the D.C. area. Yeah, I know what Hubopag is.”
“Right, right. One step further back, the Wi-Fi signal was from a place called Around the Ground. Its physical address is in downtown D.C. You know what that is? I don’t go downtown. I don’t want to deal with tourists all over the place. You know what Around the Ground is, Kerry?”
Voss looked out her window at Connecticut Avenue, squeezed her eyes closed, then opened them again.
“Kerry? Hello?”
“I’m here, Duke. Sorry, I zoned out for a minute there. I’m tired. Up past my bedtime last night.”
“Hoo, you’re a wimp. I haven’t been to bed yet. I spent all night doing this for you, just because—”
“I appreciate it, Duke. The GW One account—did you get names? Are there real people’s names on the account?”
“I pulled up the signature card itself. Two names on it.”
Voss listened as Duke gave her the names. She didn’t recognize the first one, but the second name she knew well.
So would Meg Tolman.
Voss hung up without saying another word to Duke. She sat for a minute, then another, in the quiet stillness of her office; then she opened a desk drawer and pulled out a thin booklet, a stapled-together directory assembled by the Government Printing Office. She flipped pages, then ran her index finger down a page. She read the name, then the phone number and address beside it. The address was in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Her cell phone still in her other hand, Voss stood and walked out of her office, turned at the reception desk without speaking to Tina, then took the elevator to the first floor and walked into the lobby of the office building. She passed through the revolving door and felt a gust of wind. She heard traffic sounds, a few voices. The morning was cloudy and it felt like rain.
Voss turned right and walked to the end of the block, to another office building almost identical to the one that held RIO’s offices. She pushed through its revolving door, walked twenty or so steps, and rounded a bank of elevators. She smelled coffee.
To her left, at the rear of the building, was a little glassed-in coffee shop. A stylized painting of a cup of coffee was etched on the glass. The sign on the window, in bold blue letters, read AROUND THE GROUND.
CHAPTER
45
Tolman drove through the night, crossing the Mississippi River at Memphis. They listened to various radio stations, catching snippets of an evangelist thundering on about the impending rapture, a few minutes of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, Tim McGraw singing about how choices and mistakes all knew his name, but mostly news. The newscasts were all from Washington: Speaker Vandermeer’s memorial service had been held at the National Cathedral. President Harwell delivered one of the eulogies for his longtime colleague and frequent sparring partner.
More news: The Speaker’s killing had been officially classified as a random act of violence, a possible robbery, though nothing was reportedly taken from the body. The Darlington investigation, on the other hand, was rife with intrigue and speculation about a terrorist cell that had an inside contact close to the chief justice. Journey and Tolman exchanged grim looks.
The sun rose behind them as they passed through Little Rock. Tolman looped onto I-430, crossed the Arkansas River, and exited on Cantrell Road. It wound west out of the city and became two-lane State Highway 10 heading west, then sharply north, then west again. In Ola, on the edge of the Ouachita National Forest, Tolman stopped in the parking lot of a Baptist church and said, “I really hate driving.”
Journey had been awake since Little Rock. “Want me to take over?”
“No. We’re almost there. I just need to check my directions. Don’t want to get lost way out here in the middle of fucking nowhere.”
“You were right about one thing,” Journey said. “I don’t think the Glory Warriors will be looking for us here.”
At Ola’s only crossroads, they bent back to the southwest on Arkansas 28, winding deeper into the trees between the Dutch Creek and Fourche Mountains. Forty-five minutes later, with the sun high over the brilliant green hills, the Camry rounded a bend into Gravelly: a handful of scattered frame houses, mobile homes, and a tired post office with a gravel parking lot. A dusty black Jeep Cherokee sat beside the post office. Tolman pulled the Toyota next to it and said, “Stay right here.”
Journey watched as she got out and walked around the front of the car. The Cherokee’s door opened and a man got out. He was tall and muscular, with a shaven head and a thick mustache. He and Tolman didn’t embrace, didn’t shake hands. Tolman said a few indistinct words; then the man said, “Follow me.”
Tolman returned to the wheel. The Jeep pulled out of the parking lot and back onto the road. “How far—?” Journey said.
“He lives a little bit out of town,” Tolman said.
They drove another mile. At a barely perceptible opening off the highway, the Jeep turned right and Tolman followed. The rutted trail wound another half mile into the backcountry before ending in a wide clearing before a small flat-roofed house. A miniature satellite dish sat at one end. There were few windows. Journey and Tolman each took their bags and followed the man inside.
“Put your stuff in the corner there,” the man said; his voice was a Deep South drawl.
Tolman stood between the two men. “Nick Journey, Darrell Sharp,” she said. Journey extended his hand. Sharp looked at it as if he didn’t know what to do, then slowly shook Journey’s hand. Neither man spoke.
Sharp was even taller than Journey had thought, at least six-five. His body was muscular, though it looked more like manual-labor muscle than air-conditioned-gym muscle. His skin was tanned, his eyes dark and always in motion. Sharp’s mustache was brown, and although he had to be at least ten years younger than Journey, it was speckled with gray.
The floor was concrete, the furniture all wooden and cheap, but very clean. A modest TV sat on a stand in one corner. A desk holding a computer, two telephones, and a fax machine sat in the other. Small shelves lined the walls, filled with china—cups, bowls, plates—all painted with bright, vibrant colors of gold, red, green, and blue. A short hallway led away from the front room, and to one side, Journey caught sight of a doorway to another room. It was filled with a black concert grand piano, a bench, and nothing else.
“You can rest up a little on the couch out here if you want,” Sharp said, and it took Journey a moment to realize he was talking to him.
“Thanks,” Journey said.
“Meg, I got a spot for you in the back,” Sharp said. “You want something to eat?”
They hadn’t eaten since Elizabethtown, nearly twelve hours ago. Sharp made scrambled eggs and thick sausage, and they ate at the butcher-block table while he watched them. He breathed loudly, moved in his chair, sniffed the air. He was the noisiest silent man Journey had ever met.
When they had eaten, he stood, still saying nothing, and walked out of the room. “We should rest a bit,” Tolman said to Journey. “An hour, maybe two at the most. How’s your foot?”
Journey seesawed his hand back and forth. “Sore. Not too bad, though. How’s your head?”
“Sore. Stretch out, close your eyes for a while, then we’ll get busy.”
Journey nodded, then watched as Tolman followed in the direction Sharp had gone.
* * *
Journey fell asleep the instant his head touched Darrell Sharp’s couch, but an hour later he woke up gasping as if he were drowning, clawing at the cloth edges of the old couch, just as he’d clawed the rocks at Falls of the Ohio. His fingers ached where the nails had split.
He’d awakened with a thought at the edge of his mind. Not quite a dream, but a little corner of realization, like a slightly smudged fingerprint in his memory. It was Samuel Williams and Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant and Mark Twain and Charles Webster. It was Andrew and Amelia and Sandra Kelly, and the woman shooting at him on the bank of the Ohio River. It was the man he’d killed in the parking lot at SCCO. It was gold pins with G.W. gleaming on them. And it was Meg Tolman with her probing insights. It was even his parents and his brothers, reaching out to him from the place where he’d mentally locked them away long ago.
“We all hide from something,” Tolman had said.
“I don’t hide,” he told her.
Yes, I do.
I hide behind Andrew, and I hide behind my students, and I hide behind the Civil War.
But he still couldn’t reach it. The waking thought stayed hidden. He sat up on the couch as a form appeared in the doorway.
“Meg?” he said.
Sharp stepped into the room. As his eyes adjusted, Journey saw the pistol in the man’s hand.
Cold Glory Page 26