But if there was an unknown traitor somewhere within the detail itself …
Ray Tolman ground his teeth, going back to the list, looking at the names of the people who’d been with Harwell since the first term. The list was still too long.
He sat back, thinking. If I were going to take out the president, Anacostia would be the place to do it. All those vacant houses … I would have to check out the place beforehand, find a place to shoot … define the access points. If I were a Service insider, I would have to decide what I needed to do to get around my fellow agents.…
So the assassin would want to be on the property before the event. He could volunteer for both today’s advance team and tomorrow’s detail, and no one would think anything of it.
Ray Tolman checked the duty lists and compared who was on today’s advance team with who was on protective duty for the Anacostia speech. There were five names: Anthony Alley, Jay Clare, Ron DeBacker, Timothy Delham, Miranda O’Daniel. He knew all five of them, though only one of them well. Alley was the veteran of the bunch—he and Ray Tolman had served together on the Clinton detail.
“It could be someone you know well, someone you’ve served with,” Meg had said.
O’Daniel was one of only four women on the entire presidential detail. She’d started out in the investigative side of the Service and had later moved into protection. He knew little about her, other than she seemed intelligent and quiet.
Clare, DeBacker, Delham. Names, just names, with faces he saw on occasion.
He couldn’t get his mind around it, sitting here at this desk. He needed to see the place. He needed to see the people.
One good thing about being a deputy assistant director—Ray Tolman could pretty much pop in on any operation unannounced. He put on his suit jacket, straightened his tie, and grabbed his keys.
* * *
When Ray Tolman came home to the District after his second stint in Philadelphia, he’d been told that you simply didn’t go into the Anacostia area. Things had changed, and the historic African-American community had gone from stately homes and abundant, if small, minority-owned businesses to drug dealers and random violence that occasionally spilled over and grabbed national headlines. One recent weekend had seen seven homicides in two days.
But President Harwell, as part of the Urban Initiative he pushed through Congress early in his first term, had been promoting partnerships between HUD and the private sector to bring real businesses back to such areas, to foster a sense of community, to reclaim the high ground. It had met with mixed success nationwide, as it had in Anacostia.
Tomorrow’s event was in the 1300 block of Valley Place, and the area was downright surreal. One side of the street boasted the new Anacostia Community Center, with its brick and glass, its community kitchen, computer lab, sports complex, meeting rooms, and playground. On the other side were houses, mostly three-story colonials. Many of the ones that were occupied had window-unit air conditioners and sagging porches, though the occasional house had new paint and windows, standing out like roses among weeds. Several were vacant, with plywood nailed over the windows and three-foot-tall grass choking the yards.
Ray Tolman showed his ID to the uniformed officer at the end of the block, parked his Crown Vic, and walked past the barrier. Service agents were talking with residents. Tech teams and dogs were scouring the abandoned houses. Service people and Metro Police were all over the new community center.
Ray Tolman saw John Canton, leader of the advance team, and walked over to him. Canton was a twenty-five-year veteran. Tolman had worked with him for a long time. They’d been to each other’s homes. His son and Meg were almost the same age. Canton and his wife, Renee, had come to Janet’s funeral.
“It could be someone you know well.”
“Hey, Ray,” Canton said. He was a big man and always looked out of place in a suit, even though he’d been wearing one for all these years.
“Hello, John.”
“What brings you down here?”
“Had to get out of the office, see how this is going.” He nodded at the community center. “Impressive.”
“So I hear,” Canton said.
“I’m just going to wander a bit and see what the guys are doing, if you don’t mind, John.”
“Not at all. Always glad to see a deputy assistant director.”
They smiled at each other. A field agent who’s been moved inside always seemed a bit out of place, and those still in the field were never sure how to take them. Ray Tolman moved off.
He walked past the makeshift stage that had been erected for the president’s speech tomorrow. The presidential seal was already affixed to it. A technician was running cables into the community center. Tolman walked the block, then started back on the other side, where the houses were.
He spotted O’Daniel—she was hard to miss—and then Alley, who waved to him from the porch of a house. He saw DeBacker a few doors down. Do any of you want to kill the president and suspend the Constitution?
He stopped at a vacant house, across the street and one door down from the stage. The brickwork of the colonial was crumbling, especially on the second floor. Metal grates covered the two downstairs windows. Of the three windows that marched across the second floor, the two outer ones were covered with plywood. The bottom half of the center one was covered, but it was open on the top. The only third-story window was open. A white sign nailed to the front porch read FOR SALE BY OWNER.
Good luck, Ray Tolman thought, and made his way past the sagging fence. He walked a couple more steps and looked up. He couldn’t stop looking at the partially uncovered second-story window. A rifle could rest on top of the plywood and have a clear shot across the street.
He heard scratching noises, and a man stepped out onto the porch. Timothy Delham was an agent in his late thirties, a sharp dresser, a bit of a smart-ass, but then, many of the younger guys were.
“Director Tolman,” Delham said. “Checking up on us?”
Ray Tolman smiled. “Don’t call me director. I’d be getting paid a lot more if I was director.”
“True. But you don’t really want me to call you Deputy Assistant Director Tolman, do you?”
“Good point. Just Ray will do.” He nodded upward. “What do you think?”
“This house makes me nervous,” Delham said.
“The uncovered windows upstairs.”
“Right. And there’s a fence in the back that’s in such bad shape that anyone could get over it pretty quickly. We’ll have uniforms in here tomorrow.”
“Good call. It’s at a solid angle for a shot.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Delham moved away to check in with Canton, and in another few seconds, the other one of the five agents, Jay Clare, stepped from the house. He was a big, burly guy with reddish hair, getting a little gray, who, like Canton, looked ill at ease in a suit. Clare was in his forties, and never said much.
“Hello, Jay.”
“Afternoon. Tim and I were just finishing up in here.”
“Don’t mind me, I’m just getting some fresh air.” Tolman walked into the house as Clare moved away. The wood floors, which he imagined had once been quite stately, were pitted and splintering apart. The walls were down to exposed Sheetrock in places. Tolman took the stairs up to the second landing, where the floors were in even worse condition, and he crouched by the half-covered window, his knees complaining.
He looked down onto the street and across it. From where he was, he could actually see all five of the agents he’d identified as possibles.
Who are you? Which one?
After nearly ten minutes, he slowly descended the stairs, holding the rail, which wobbled at every step. Outside he waved to Canton and to Tony Alley, and started toward his car. His stomach was in knots—he wondered if his ulcer was trying to come back.
He had to go back to the office. As the Crown Vic headed away from Valley Place, he wondered which of the people he’d just seen mi
ght betray the Service and try to kill the president of the United States.
And if he could stop them.
CHAPTER
50
Darrell Sharp liked living in Yell County because he felt safe. The ancient, rounded hills and the deep forest on all sides sheltered him. No one came looking for him, no one talked to him, and it was always quiet. No one wanted to hurt him here, and he didn’t want to hurt anyone else.
Until today.
Sharp also liked living at the end of his own private road because he could see if someone was coming, long before they reached him. This was especially true if that someone was driving a shiny new silver SUV and turning off the highway straight toward his house.
As soon as he saw the cloud of dust on the path, Sharp took his FN Special Police Rifle, the same one FBI snipers now used, and went out the back door. He climbed the ladder that leaned against the rear of the house, walked across his flat roof, and lay prone behind a little lip that curled upward from the top of the house.
He adjusted the telescopic sight, moved his arms around, angled his body. He kept the SUV in sight all the way. The windows were tinted, so he couldn’t see how many people were in it, but it didn’t really matter. They had penetrated his sheltering hills and trees, and now he would do what he had to do.
The SUV slowed as it pulled into the clearing. It stopped beside his Cherokee, pulling in behind the Toyota that Tolman had driven from Kentucky. The driver’s door opened. Sharp adjusted his position a fraction of an inch. A man’s head appeared. He had short dark blond hair.
Everything was quiet. Sharp felt nothing but his breathing, his heartbeat. His finger nudged onto the trigger.
The man’s head moved out from behind the car door. Sharp took two breaths, letting the second out halfway. He relaxed and slowly squeezed the trigger. The man’s head dissolved in a spray of red and gray. He toppled back against the car door and reeled to one side, dropping into the dirt.
Sharp heard voices from the SUV, the sound of the doors clicking, the passenger door opening, but no head appeared. The passenger would be keeping his head down, as he didn’t want what happened to his partner to happen to him.
A hand holding a pistol appeared behind the passenger door, in the space where the doorframe separated from the car itself. Sharp calculated distances from hand to head and swung the rifle a little to the left.
The pistol spit in his general direction, but the shot went at least ten feet wide of his position, which told Sharp they hadn’t actually seen him yet. The hand holding the pistol wavered. Sharp pulled the trigger. The glass of the passenger door exploded. Some of the shards turned red. The pistol fell, and the hand holding it disappeared.
Sharp listened. With both doors open, he could hear inside the SUV. Another person was in there. He could hear the movements, uncertain, trapped.
Sharp kept staring through the rifle sight, and the other person in the SUV stayed put. That was all right. He was patient.
They stared at each other for five minutes, then another door, the one behind the driver, opened. A pistol came flying out and landed on the ground. Sharp waited.
Two more minutes passed.
More movement from inside the SUV. Sharp steadied the rifle, making minute adjustments, calculating where the third person would emerge. Another gun, this time a rifle, flew out the open door.
“That’s it!” said a man’s voice from inside the car. “That’s all there is! Those are all the weapons we brought!”
Sharp waited.
“I’m coming out!” the man shouted after another minute. “You’ll see my hands first. Don’t shoot!”
He slid out of the SUV. He was a tall man and younger than Sharp, probably only mid-twenties. He was muscular and would probably be good in hand-to-hand fighting. He edged out, his hands away from his body. He stepped around the body of the driver and into the spot between the SUV and the Toyota.
“I’m unarmed, I swear,” the man said. He shuffled a few more feet into the open until he was between the cars and the front door.
“Stop,” Sharp said, not raising his voice. The man was almost directly below him.
The young man stopped moving and looked up.
“Turn right,” Sharp said. “Around the house. Slow.”
He walked around the side of the house. Sharp wasn’t worried about him running away. There was nowhere for him to go except deeper into the hills, and Sharp knew he could find anyone in these hills. The FN rifle would drop him in a few steps, no matter which direction he went.
Sharp stood up, walked across the roof, and climbed down the ladder. The man was standing ten feet away from him. He wore fatigue pants and a black shirt with a gold pin clipped to it.
“Inside,” Sharp said.
The man walked ahead of him through the open back door, down the hallway, and into the front room. Sharp looked toward his desk. The fax machine was humming, paper sliding out of it.
“Down.”
The man lay on the floor. Sharp took the steel cable he kept in his gun cabinet and bound the man hand and foot.
“What are you going to do?” the man asked, out of breath.
Sharp said nothing. He leaned the rifle against the desk and went to the fax machine to see if it was an order for china. He thumbed through the pages until he found what looked like a cover page. Ornate printing read J. T. Webster, Ph.D., with an address in Burlington, Vermont. The fax was addressed to Nick Journey, Ph.D. Sharp sighed.
The rest of the pages didn’t make much sense. There was one that looked like a receipt for books sold, but it was all in old-fashioned handwriting. One page looked like a note about a dinner party, with a reminder that it started at eight o’clock.
A few more pages rolled out of the fax, and Sharp looked at the man on the floor. “What are you going to do?” the man asked again.
“Call the sheriff, I guess, and report trespassers.”
The man looked at him as if he couldn’t believe what he’d heard.
“You ought to leave people alone,” Sharp said.
He gathered up the rest of the fax pages. More gibberish, but if Journey had asked for them, maybe they were important. Sometimes the most important connections in an investigation were the most obscure.
He glanced at the man on the floor. The sheriff could wait a few more minutes. What Sharp had told Journey this morning was true—it was hard to know how you felt after killing someone. Right now Sharp didn’t feel anything.
He put his hand on the phone.
* * *
“We have to get back to Oklahoma,” Journey said.
“Explain it to me,” Tolman said.
“It was too easy,” Journey said. “How could the Glory Warriors have all these people in place, just waiting around, if they didn’t already know about the document?”
“Okay, so they knew about it, but they didn’t have it.”
Journey nodded. “It’s a real stretch to think this secret society devoted to an overthrow of the federal government could go on and on, recruiting new people, moving money around, building its organization, if it didn’t have something to go on. There’s something to be said for oral tradition, and I’m sure there’s some level of father-to-son heritage, but I still think they would need to have something tangible to continue to exist, something they could show to new recruits as part of their sales pitch.”
Tolman glanced at him and she saw it in his eyes. “They have the missing pages from Grant’s book. They’ve had them all along.”
“I think so. You were right when you said they could have gotten into someone’s hands. I don’t know how they got them, but think about the letter Mark Twain wrote in 1910 to this Leon. The letter wasn’t sent. We know it came to Berkeley in 1962. But that’s not to say that someone didn’t read it at some point.”
“And someone who read it may have talked to someone else, and somewhere along that chain, the message resonated with a person who read it. How hard would it h
ave been to get the pages from the Webster family? Charles Webster himself died just a few years after the book came out. It was public knowledge that Twain had published the book, and now twenty-five years after the book came out, here’s Twain saying that there were these ‘lost’ pages.”
“People would have jumped on that then, the same way they would today,” Journey said. “Human nature doesn’t change that much over the centuries, does it?”
Tolman nodded into the windshield. “So the pages become their bible, and the treaty between Grant and Lee their holy grail. They dedicate themselves to finding it and being prepared to put their special clause into effect. They tell themselves that when they find the treaty, that makes their power grab legal and that it’s just what Lee and Grant intended when Lee surrendered.”
Journey spread his hands apart. “So we don’t have to find the pages. I think we already know where they are.”
Soft pain crossed Tolman’s face, but only for a moment. “The other name on the bank account with Rusty. Jackson McMartin.”
“He’s the leader of the Glory Warriors. He has to be. We have to find him, and we have to get him to come to Oklahoma, to Fort Washita.”
“What?”
“That’s where we can end this. That’s where it ended in 1865, and that’s where we can end it now.”
“You are out of your mind. What makes you think the leader of the Glory Warriors will meet you at Fort Washita?” Tolman said.
“Because he thinks—they all think—that I have the signature page. Just like before, I have what they want.”
Tolman reached over and flicked on the air conditioner, angling the vent so it hit her in the face. “And you know where the page is.”
“I do now.”
Tolman drove in silence for another five miles, the hills opening as they approached Little Rock. “Jackson McMartin,” she finally said.
Cold Glory Page 29