Cold Glory

by B. Kent Anderson

  “What’s your research area?”

  “The American Civil War. Specifically, the lives of generals from both sides, after the war was over.”

  “Good enough,” Webster said. “I’m a Renaissance man. That’s a joke, by the way. I study Tudor and Stuart England, particularly concerning how the different monarchs supported the arts during their reign.”

  “You’re a historian?”

  “Ph.D., Yale. Where did you study?”

  “University of Virginia.”

  “UVA. Good for a state school. What does an American Civil War historian need with a Tudor and Stuart scholar?”

  “Well, sir,” Journey said, “I’m actually not calling about either one of those, directly. I wanted to ask you about your family background.”

  Webster sighed. “Yes, Sam Clemens was my uncle, many generations back. That’s why you called?”

  “Yes and no. I’m more interested in Charles Webster, who was in the publishing business with Clemens.”

  “A great failure,” Webster said. “They never duplicated the success they had in publishing the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.”

  “That’s why I’m calling. About the Grant papers, I mean. Do you have any of Charles Webster’s old papers? Did he leave anything relating to the Grant memoir? I’m working on a major project that is somewhat time-sensitive.”

  “Young man, every project is time-sensitive.” Webster laughed. “I have a few scattered scraps of paper, some things detailing how many books the company sold in a certain quarter, a few notes Charles apparently wrote to himself, that sort of thing. A couple of them are just nonsense. They don’t mean anything other than the fact that they belonged to Mark Twain’s nephew.”

  Journey waited a moment. “Dr. Webster, I’m going to ask a huge favor of you. Are those materials scanned? Are they in a computer?”

  Webster laughed. “Scanned? Who’d want to scan these things? There’s nothing of value here.”

  Journey drummed his fingers. His eyes fell on Sharp’s fax machine next to the computer. “Could you fax copies of them to me? There may be something in them that would help my project.”

  “I’m telling you, one historian to another, that there’s nothing relevant there, just bits and pieces.”

  “I know, but it might help me to make an important connection.” Journey was struggling to keep his voice even, not to sound desperate. Tolman’s cell phone rang.

  “Bad cell service out here,” Sharp said. “Better go outside.”

  Tolman held up a finger to Journey, then walked out the front door.

  “I suppose,” Webster was saying. “There are maybe ten pages in all. Give me the fax number.”

  Journey read the number from the fax machine. I’m not sure how long I’ll be at this number, but this should get them to me.”

  “It’ll take me a little while to get them together. I’m retired, but I do have more to do than just play with the Webster family papers.”

  Journey thanked the man, hung up, and walked outside. A slight rise rolled ahead of the house as the clearing narrowed into the rutted path that led back toward the highway. “It doesn’t sound promising, but he’s sending what he has.”

  He stopped short, seeing Tolman’s face. She was riveted in place next to Sharp’s Jeep, the phone pressed to her ear.

  * * *

  Tolman had seen the caller ID, the phone number preceded by a 703 area code—Virginia, her own home area code. Walking outside, she answered it and heard Kerry Voss’s voice. “Meg, I had to call you. I wasn’t sure what to do. I left the office sick. But I got your cell number and—”

  “Kerry? Kerry, slow down. What’s wrong?”

  “You asked me to see if those two names you gave me had been receiving military benefits. One of them, Standridge, was a dead end. Basic benefits, nothing out of the ordinary. The other one, Kevin Lane…”

  Tolman listened without interrupting as Voss told her about the large sums of money paid to Kevin Lane’s widow, and the series of pass-through bank accounts. Tolman’s stomach started a quiet burn when Voss said GW One.

  “Meg,” Voss said, “I just had to get out of there and think about this, about what to do, who I could trust.”

  “What, Kerry?”

  “The bank account for this GW One. I checked every way I could think of to be sure what I was seeing. There are two names on the account, Meg. The first one is Jackson McMartin. The second one is Russell H. Hudson.”

  CHAPTER

  48

  “It’s a mistake,” Tolman said.

  “It’s not a mistake,” Voss said.

  “It’s a common enough name—”

  “Don’t you think I thought of that? We traced the computer that originated the first of the money transfers. It was part of the Wi-Fi network at the coffee shop on the corner, Around the Ground. You know the one I’m talking about?”

  Tolman squeezed her eyes closed. Hudson bought coffee there almost every morning, and she and other people in the office had lunch with him there from time to time. “I know it,” she said.

  “And the bank branch is in Silver Spring,” Voss said. “I checked the employee directory. Hudson’s home address is four blocks from the bank.”

  Tolman looked up. Journey had come out of the house, Sharp towering in the doorway behind him, a silent sentinel.

  “What is this all about?” Voss said. “Meg, tell me what this is about. What’s Hudson doing?”

  Tolman’s mind was trying to shut down. One of the few friends she had … Hudson, always allowing her time off to do piano gigs and then asking how they went … Hudson, following his losing baseball team … Hudson, her confidant …

  Hudson. Glory Warrior.

  She made writing motions with her free hand and gestured at Journey. He disappeared into the house and came out with a pen and paper.

  “Kerry,” Tolman said. “I can’t—”

  I can’t believe it. I won’t believe it.

  “What’s he doing?” Voss said. “Where are you, Meg?”

  Tolman shook her head. Journey was staring at her with a questioning look on his face.

  “I can’t—” she said, and the sentence died again.

  She thought of the last time she’d talked to Hudson.

  “Talk to no one but me, Meg.… Don’t trust anyone you don’t know well.”

  But I know you well, Rusty, she thought. I’ve known you for five years. You hired me. You brought me into RIO. You listen to me when I need to talk.

  “You are very, very good at your job, Meg.”

  The Glory Warriors would need a person like Rusty Hudson. He was an accountant. He had a law degree. He was low profile, but understood the workings of government like no one Tolman had ever seen. He knew money and budgets and infrastructure. He knew personnel and logistics and details. He was the consummate bureaucrat. He knew everyone, and how to do everything, yet no one knew his name. Through RIO, he had access to incredible amounts of information from several different tentacles of the federal government. He was perfect for the Glory Warriors.

  “Meg?” Voss said.

  “I’m here.” Tolman’s voice was very quiet.

  “Why?”

  “I can’t explain it. Not yet. Don’t go to the office. Don’t go back to work. Call in sick until you hear from me again.”

  Hudson refused to call in backup until she presented him with written evidence. It hadn’t seemed right at the time, though she’d cursed him for being such a bureaucrat, back in Louisville. But now it made sense. The “evidence” he’d wanted was the rest of the Fort Washita document.

  Tolman kicked gravel. Dust rose around her like a shroud.

  She’d just left him a message. A message with Sharp’s number to call back. A number that could be traced to a name and an address.

  “Sweet Jesus,” she said. “Kerry, what’s that other name? The other one on the account.”

  “Jackson McMartin.”

  “I kno
w that name,” she said. “Why do I know that name?” She repeated it aloud and pointed at Journey—write that down. She watched as he wrote the name. “Kerry, I have to go. Stay away from the office.”

  She hung up, still dazed. Sharp had come into the clearing and stood between the two cars. “Darrell, I’m sorry,” she said.

  Sharp looked down at her.

  “We have to get out of here. This place isn’t safe. The Glory Warriors know we’re here.”

  “What?” Journey said. “How—?”

  “My boss,” Tolman said, and the bitterness crept into her voice. “My fucking boss who lets me take time off work to play piano whenever I want. He’s one of them. He’s a fucking Glory Warrior.”

  “How did you—?”

  “I was tracking the guys who attacked you at the college. Turns out they were Army Rangers who were supposedly killed in action in Iraq in 2006.” She leaned against the Jeep, closing her eyes. “And that explains why Rusty was so hesitant for me to dig around DOD looking for them. Son of a bitch! Who knows how long he’s been one of them, managing their money, quietly taking care of all the little details so they could do this. God damn him!”

  She hadn’t even realized she was crying until the tears were coursing down her face. She balled both fists and struck the side of the Jeep, her hands hitting hot metal over and over again. Sharp looked alarmed, but didn’t move.

  Tolman hit the car again. “Goddamn son of a bitch bastard,” she muttered through the tears. She struck the car, this time with an open palm. The tears gradually slowed, then stopped, and she said, “I never fucking cry. Never.”

  “No, you curse,” Journey said.

  Tolman laughed and wiped her face with the back of her arm. “No shit.” The smile faded. “I’m sorry, Darrell. We need to get our things and get out of here. They’ll be coming. You can go with us and we can take you—”

  “No,” Sharp said.

  “Darrell, I know you don’t like leaving your place, but these are dangerous people.”

  “So am I,” Sharp said.

  * * *

  They tried for the better part of an hour to persuade Sharp to leave, but he insisted he would be ready for whatever came over the horizon. He gave them the keys to his second vehicle, a ten-year-old Dodge Dakota truck—the same kind Rusty Hudson drove, Tolman thought. He also gave each of them a clean, prepaid cell phone and a SIG Sauer 9-millimeter pistol.

  “I try to stay ready for anything,” he said with a shrug, then looked at Journey. “You know how to shoot?”

  “No,” Journey said.

  “Better learn fast,” Sharp said, then looked at Tolman. “I remember how you like the SIG. You were always a pretty good shot.”

  “I can still hold my own,” Tolman said.

  “Just get the truck back to me when you can,” he said.

  “I will,” Tolman said. “I bought that car in Kentucky. I guess you can drive it free.”

  Sharp almost smiled, his mustache moving around a bit. “Where will you go?”

  Tolman and Journey looked at each other. “I don’t know yet,” Tolman said.

  Sharp nodded. “I wish you’d played the piano some more.”

  “So do I.”

  They parted without touching. Journey thought about a handshake, but settled for a small wave. Sharp nodded in his direction. Tolman got behind the wheel of the Dakota and pulled it from its parking spot behind the house, pointing it toward the road. As they topped the little rise, Journey looked back once. Darrell Sharp was standing in front of his house, still watching them.

  * * *

  Tolman stopped the car at Highway 28, idling as a pickup truck drove past. “Where do we go?” Journey asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Tolman said. “Maybe back toward Little Rock for now. We can regroup in a city. I tell you, I’d rather walk through the worst parts of D.C. at night, unarmed, than spend too much time out here in the woods.” She turned left.

  They rode in silence for an hour. Radio reception and cell phone signals were spotty in the hills. Journey, in the passenger seat, stared out at the green that surrounded them, his mind playing over all that had happened: a backhoe breaking ground for a new museum at Fort Washita, and the swiftness of all that had come since. The Glory Warriors were well organized, and they had people within the government already working for their cause. Journey glanced at Tolman—the heavy betrayal sat on her face as if painted on, even as she drove the winding road.

  Journey turned the thoughts over and over. As soon as the guns and the document had been found at Fort Washita, and plastered all over the media, the Glory Warriors had swung into action, as if …

  As if they’d been waiting.

  But if the pages had really been lost since 1865, why did the Glory Warriors even exist in the modern era?

  “You were right,” he said aloud.

  Tolman jumped, as if she’d forgotten he was there. The truck veered a little into the left-hand lane. It didn’t matter—only one car had passed them since they left Gravelly. “What?” she said.

  History was about the small details that add up to major events, Journey thought. He preached that to his students constantly: Look beyond “shots heard ’round the world” and find the shots that were barely heard at all. That’s where history really begins, with small things like a casual comment, or one throwaway sentence in the midst of thousands of pages, or the way a person’s face looks when something unexpected is suddenly placed in front of them.…

  “You were right,” he said again. “Those pages—the pages Grant wrote about the Glory Warriors and then asked Mark Twain to leave out of his book. They did wind up in someone’s hands.”

  Then he had it, the thoughts that had fled when he woke up on Darrell Sharp’s sofa a few hours ago. He remembered words on a page, a page that didn’t seem near as important as others he’d seen recently. And he saw it, unfolding in front of him, just as the Fourche Mountains rose outside the window of the truck.

  Tolman alternated her glance between Journey and the road. She raised her hands from the wheel for a moment, asking him the question without words.

  “I know where the missing pages from Grant’s book are,” Journey said. “And here’s another thing—Samuel Williams was brilliant, absolutely brilliant. I know where to find the signature page, too.”

  CHAPTER

  49

  Ray Tolman took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He still couldn’t get used to the glow of the computer monitor, and he’d been driving a desk for quite a while now. His eyes felt strained, he had headaches, he had neckaches … Hell, his whole body hurt sometimes.

  Can’t blame that on a computer, he mused. I’m just getting old, dammit.

  Still, he knew that most investigations were conducted like this now, sitting in front of a computer, using mouse and keyboard. His daughter had made a career of finding people and constructing scenarios based on these things.

  Ray Tolman smiled, but it faded quickly.

  His daughter had told him a group called the Glory Warriors was going to try to assassinate the president, that they were behind the deaths of Jefferson Vandermeer and Nan Darlington and were trying to decapitate the federal government. They were extremists with a military bent.

  But it wasn’t that simple. They weren’t all military. They had people submerged in civilian positions as well. They compromised Justice Darlington’s security detail, and had most likely infiltrated the president’s as well.

  Ray Tolman didn’t want to believe it. He had devoted his life to the Secret Service, had served on protective details for three presidents. He’d never seen a traitor in the Service.

  But Meg wasn’t prone to fantasy. He looked at the screen again, then minimized it and plucked a piece of paper from his desk: the president’s itinerary for tomorrow.

  He tried to think like an assassin. These Glory Warriors were extreme. Their goal was destabilization. Chaos. Panic. Fear.

  Ray Tolman was quie
t, listening to the hum of his computer. They would make a public statement. That was what terrorists did, and make no mistake, these were terrorists, American or not. He picked up the itinerary again: Harwell had no public events the rest of today.

  There was a National Security Council briefing in the West Wing first thing tomorrow morning, then a Rose Garden ceremony honoring a group of high school kids from Idaho who had collected pennies for five years and raised over a hundred thousand dollars for cancer research, in memory of a classmate who had died of leukemia.

  No. Not public enough, and the attempt wouldn’t take place on the White House grounds. Too difficult, even for someone inside. The logistics would be staggering.

  At noon was a thousand-dollar-a-plate fund-raiser for the party’s Congressional campaign committee at a downtown D.C. hotel.

  Possible. He circled the event.

  Early afternoon, no scheduled events. Presumably Harwell would be back in the White House.

  At three o’clock was a short speech at a new community center in the Anacostia neighborhood of southeast Washington, a project funded partially through a public–private partnership with HUD that the Harwell Administration had enacted in the president’s first term.

  Definite possibility. Even with the area slowly improving, there were still vacant buildings around, lots of areas the advance team would already be working on.

  He circled the event twice. No other public events were on the schedule. The president and First Lady were leaving tomorrow evening for a weekend at their home in the Berkshires. If time was critical to this group, and if they wanted chaos and panic, they would go after the president before he left Washington.

  That meant tomorrow.

  Tolman went back to the members of the security detail. If these Glory Warriors had buried an agent deep in the Service, it would need to be someone who’d been on the detail for a while, building a cover, gaining the trust of both the Service and the president himself.

  Scratch anyone who joined the detail after the president’s second term began.

  Normal procedure would be to convene a threat assessment to evaluate the credibility of the information. He had no trouble believing the information, but he wasn’t accustomed to operating alone. In the Service, as in most of government, everything was done in teams. People used partners for ideas, to formulate theories, to keep each other in check.