Saving Faith

by David Baldacci

  "And you'll just let me walk away?"

  "Drop her off and drive away. We'll take care of the rest. You don't interest us."

  "Where?"

  Lee was given an address outside of Washington, D.C." on the Maryland side. He knew it well: very isolated.

  "I have to drive it. And the cops are everywhere. I need a few days."

  "Tomorrow night. Twelve sharp."

  "Dammit, that's not a lot of time."

  "Then I suggest you start right now."

  "Listen, if you lay a hand on my daughter, I'll find you, somehow I will. I swear it. First I'll break every bone in your body, and then I'll really hurt you."

  "Mr. Adams, consider yourself the luckiest human being on the face of the earth that we don't see you as a threat. And do yourself a favor:

  When you walk away don't ever, ever look back. You won't turn to salt, but it still won't be pretty." The line went dead.

  Lee put the phone down. For a few minutes he and Faith just sat there without speaking. "Now what do we do?" Lee finally managed to say.

  "Danny said he'd be here as soon as he could."

  "Great. I've got a deadline: tomorrow, midnight."

  "If Danny's not here in time we'll drive to the place they gave you.

  But first we'll call in some reinforcements."

  "Like who, the FBI?" Faith nodded. "Faith, I'm not sure we could explain all this to the Feds in one year, much less one day."

  "It's all we have, Lee. If Danny gets here in time and has a better plan, so be it. Otherwise I'll call Agent Reynolds. She'll help us.

  I'll make it work." She squeezed his arm. "Nothing is going to happen to your daughter. I promise.

  Lee gripped her hand, hoping with all his heart that the woman was right.

  CHAPTER 44

  BUCHANAN HAD A NUMBER OF MEETINGS on Capitol Hill scheduled for the early evening, pitching to an audience that didn't want to receive his message. It was like throwing a ball at a wave. It would either be kicked back in your face or lost at sea. Well, today was the end. No more.

  His car dropped him off near the Capitol. He went up the front steps and over to the Senate side of the building, where he climbed the broad staircase to the second floor, which was mostly restricted space, and continued to the third floor, where people could freely wander.

  Buchanan knew he was being followed by more people now. While there were lots of dark suits around, he had trekked these halls long enough to sense who should be here as opposed to those who looked out of place. He assumed they were the FBI and Thornhill's men. After the encounter in the car, the Frog would have deployed more resources.

  Good. Buchanan smiled. He would, from now on, refer to the CIA man as the Frog. Spies liked code names. And he couldn't think of a more appropriate one for Thornhill. Buchanan just hoped that his stinger was potent enough, and that the Frog's shiny, inviting back wouldn't prove too slippery.

  The door was the first one a person would come to upon reaching the third floor and turning left. A middle-aged man in a suit stood next to it. There was no brass plate to identify whose office this was.

  Right next door was the office of Franklin Graham, the Senate sergeant-at-arms. The sergeant-at-arms was the Senate's principal law enforcement, administrative support and protocol officer. Graham was a good friend of Buchanan's.

  "Good to see you, Danny," the man in the suit said.

  "Hello, Phil, how's that back of yours?"

  "Doc says I should have the surgery."

  "Listen to me, don't let them cut you. When you're feeling the pain, have a nice, pleasing shot of Scotch, sing a song at the top of your lungs and then make love to your wife."

  "Drinking, dancing and loving-sounds like good advice to me," Phil said.

  "What'd you expect from an Irishman?"

  Phil laughed. "You're a good man, Danny Buchanan."

  "You know why I'm here?"

  Phil nodded. "Mr. Graham told me. You can go right in.

  He unlocked the door and Buchanan passed through, and then Phil closed the door and stood guard. He didn't notice the two pairs of people who had idly watched this exchange.

  The agents reasonably figured they could wait for Buchanan to come out and then take up their surveillance once more. They were on the third floor, after all. It wasn't like the man could fly away.

  Inside the room, Buchanan grabbed a raincoat off the hook on the wall.

  Lucky for him it was drizzly outside. There was also a yellow hard hat on another wall hook. He slipped this on as well. Then he pulled Coke-bottle glasses and work gloves from his briefcase. At least from a distance, with his briefcase under the raincoat, he would change from lobbyist to laborer.

  Going to another door at the end of the room, Buchanan removed the chain locking this door and opened it. He went up the stairs and then opened a hatch like door, which revealed a ladder leading up. Buchanan put his feet on the rungs and started climbing. At the top, he popped another hatch and found himself on the roof of the Capitol.

  The attic room was how the pages accessed the roof to change the flags that flew over the Capitol. The inside joke was that the flags were constantly changed, some flying only for seconds, so that members could send generous constituents back home a continuous supply of Stars and Stripes that had "flown" over the Capitol. Buchanan rubbed his brow.

  God, what a town.

  Buchanan looked down at the front grounds of the Capitol. People were scurrying here and there, running for meetings with people they desperately needed help from. And with all the egos, factions, agendas, crisis upon crisis and stakes greater than anything that had come before in the world's history, everything somehow seemed to work out. A large anthill came to mind as Buchanan looked down upon the scene. This well-oiled machine of democracy. At least the ants did it for survival. But maybe in a way, we do too, he thought.

  He looked up at Lady Liberty on her century-and-a-half perch atop the Capitol's dome. She had recently been removed via helicopter and stout cable, and the grime of a hundred fifty years had been thoroughly cleaned away. Too bad the sins of people weren't as easy to scrape off.

  For one insane moment, Buchanan contemplated jumping. He might have too, except the desire to beat Thornhill was simply too strong. And that would be the coward's way out anyway. Buchanan was many things, but a coward was not one of them.

  There was a catwalk that ran across the roof of the Capitol, and it would take Buchanan to the second part of his journey. Or, more accurately, his escape. The House wing of the Capitol building had a similar attic room, which its pages used to raise and lower its flags.

  Buchanan quickly went across the catwalk and through the hatch on the House side. He climbed down the ladder and into the attic room, where he removed the hard hat and gloves, but kept on the glasses. He pulled a snap-brim hat from his briefcase and put it on. Pulling up the collar on the raincoat, he took a deep breath, opened the door to the attic room and passed through. People milled here and there, but no one really gave him a second glance.

  In another minute he had left the Capitol through a rear doorway known only to a few veterans of the place. A car was waiting for him there.

  A half hour later he was at National Airport, where a private plane, its twin engines revving, awaited its sole passenger. Here was where the friend in high places earned his money. The plane received clearance for takeoff a few minutes later. Soon thereafter Buchanan looked out the window of the plane as the capital city slowly disappeared from view. How many times had he seen that sight from the air?

  "Good riddance," he said under his breath.

  CHAPTER 45

  THORN HILL WAS HEADING HOME after a very productive day. With Adams now in the fold, they would soon have Faith Lockhart. The man might try to dupe them, but Thornhill didn't think so. He had heard the very real fear in Adams's voice. Thank God for families. Yes, all in all, a productive day. The ringing phone would soon change all that.

  "Yes?" Th
ornhill's confident look vanished as the man reported to him that somehow, some way, Danny Buchanan had utterly vanished, from the very top floor of the Capitol, no less.

  "Find him!" Thornhill roared into the phone before slamming it down.

  What could the man's game be? Had he decided to begin his escape a little early? Or was it for another reason? Had he contacted Lockhart somehow? That was intensely troubling. Shared information between the two was not good for Thornhill. He thought back to their meeting in the car. Buchanan had displayed his usual temper, his little word games--mere bluster, really--but had otherwise been fairly subdued.

  What could have precipitated this latest development?

  In his agitation, Thornhill drummed his fingers on the briefcase he had in his lap. As he looked down at the hard leather, his mouth dropped open. The briefcase! The damn briefcase! He had provided one for Buchanan. It had a backup recorder in it. The conversation in the car. Thornhill admitting he had had the FBI agent killed. Buchanan had tricked him into betraying himself and then taped him. Taped him with CIA-issued equipment. That two-faced sonofabitch!

  Thornhill grabbed the phone; his fingers were shaking so badly he misdialed twice. "His briefcase, the tape in it. Find it. And him.

  You must get it. You have to get it."

  He dropped the phone and slumped back in the seat. The master strategist of over a thousand clandestine operations was absolutely stunned by this development. Buchanan could take him down with this.

  He was running loose with the evidence to crush him. But Buchanan would go down too, had to, there was no way around it.

  Wait. The scorpion! The frog! Now it all made sense. Buchanan was going to go down and take Thornhill with him. The CIA man loosened his tie, wedged himself into the seat and fought the panic he felt flooding his body.

  This is not how it will end, Robert, he told himself. After thirty-five years this is not damn well how it's going to end. Calm down. Now is when you need to think Now is where you earn your place in history. This man will not beat you. Slowly, steadily, Thornhill's breathing returned to normal.

  It could be that Buchanan would simply use the tape as insurance. Why spend the rest of his life in prison when he could quietly disappear?

  No, it made no sense that he would take the tape to the authorities. He had as much to lose as Thornhill, and he couldn't possibly be that vindictive. Thornhill had a sudden thought: Perhaps it was the painting, the idiotic painting. Maybe that was what had started this whole thing. Thornhill should never have taken the damned thing. He would leave a message on Buchanan's machine at once, telling him his precious object had been returned. Thornhill left the message and arranged for the painting to be brought back to Buchanan's home.

  As Thornhill sat back and looked out the window, his confidence was restored. He had one ace in the hole. A good commander always held something in reserve. Thornhill made another phone call and received some positive news, a piece of intelligence that had just come in. His face brightened, the visions of doom receding. It would be all right after all. His mouth eased into a smile. The snatch of victory from the jaws of defeat; it could either age a man several decades overnight or give him bronze balls. Or sometimes both.

  In another few minutes Thornhill was getting out of his car and going up the sidewalk to his lovely house. His impeccably dressed wife met him at the door and gave him a perfunctory peck on the cheek. She had just come back from a country club function. In fact, she was always coming back from a country club function, he thought, muttering to himself. While he agonized over terrorists sneaking into the country with nuclear-bomb-making materials, she lounged at fashion shows where young, vacuous women with legs stretching to their inflated bosoms pranced about in outfits that didn't even bother to cover their derrieres. He was out every day saving the world, and his spouse ate finger sandwiches and drank champagne in the afternoon with other ladies of considerable means. The idle rich were as stupid as the uneducated poor-more brainless than cows, in fact, was Thornhill's opinion. At least cows had a reasonable understanding that they were the slaves. I'm an underpaid civil servant, Thornhill mused, and if I ever let my defenses down, the only thing left of the wealthy and powerful in this country would be the echoes of their screams. It was a