by Jake Needham
Chapter Thirty-Nine
When Rebecca returned to her car, Zac and his green BMW were gone. She got behind the wheel and started the engine, but then she shut it off again and just sat there staring at the woods. There had been a white van and a Mustang in the lot when she and Zac walked into the park, but now they were gone and the parking lot was completely empty. She was utterly alone, and she felt utterly alone.
What had Reed meant by that story about Vince Foster? Was it supposed to be a threat? Why else would he have told her? She didn’t even know if the story was true, but it was hard to look at it as anything other than a threat aimed at her.
People in Washington who knew too much about other people in Washington sometimes ended up dead. That’s what Reed was telling her.
She knew that Reed had directed her to set up August and his people from the Band to be killed, but now they were alive and somehow they had figured out she was the one who had put them in the room where the bomb went off. They knew about her and she knew about Zac Reed. It really was that simple, wasn’t it?
When Reed came to her, he had told her these people had become a threat to national security and the Agency had been given the task of shutting them down by whatever means necessary. He told her that they were part of an organization called the Band, but he didn’t tell her much else and at the time it hadn’t seemed to matter.
Reed was the DCI’s hit man. His job was to give the DCI separation from the really unpleasant tasks that ended up on his desk from time to time, and killing several Americans who might be a threat to national security certainly met the description of an unpleasant task. Worse, it was a task that could come back to bite somebody in the ass if it went wrong.
That was why Rebecca hadn’t argued with Reed or questioned him when he came to her and laid out her instructions. On the contrary, she was proud to be trusted with such a sensitive undertaking. She had never doubted then, of course, that her instructions were really coming straight from the DCI. Reed was his closest aide. He spoke for the DCI. Everyone at the Agency knew that. But now she found herself wondering if her instructions really had come from the DCI? They must have. Surely. Zac Reed wouldn’t have launched an operation like that entirely on his own, would he? That simply didn’t seem possible.
Rebecca had to admit she had no proof her instructions to see that August and his team were killed came from the DCI, but that was how it looked to her. And that was exactly the way it would look to anyone who found out that Reed had given her those instructions.
That was when a horrifying thought struck her. She had no proof Reed had given her those instructions either. There was nothing in writing. Of course, there wasn’t. Nobody exactly sent out memos asking you to murder people, did they? What if Reed claimed he hadn’t given her any instructions at all, that she had acted entirely on her own?
Just the thought of that made her shudder. If he did try to deny it, she would only be able to protect herself by spilling everything she knew. And she knew a great deal.
Not only did she know enough to bring Zac Reed down, destroy his career, and possibly even put him in prison for murder, she probably knew enough to do the same thing to the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and he was a man with nearly unlimited power at his fingertips. She knew Reed well enough to know he wouldn’t sit around and hope for the best if he was threatened. She didn’t know the DCI. She had never even met him. But you didn’t get to be DCI by ignoring threats and hoping for the best either. You acted. You did something to neutralize a threat before it got to you.
And now she was that threat.
She didn’t want to think about how vulnerable and alone she suddenly felt, but how could she not?
No matter how she looked at it, the bottom line here was stark.
She was alone. And she was pretty much fucked.
Rebecca searched through her purse until she found the white card that Tay had given her back at the IHOP when this nightmare had begun for her. Had that really only been a few hours ago? It hardly seemed possible.
When she located the card, she simply sat there in the car, holding it and not moving. She looked for a long time at the telephone number Tay had written on it.
That number was now her own personal Rubicon. She had never thought of comparing herself in any way to Caesar, but now they had at least this one thing in common. When Caesar crossed the Rubicon into Gaul, he was committed to war. After that, there was no going back for him. If she called that number and told Tay the truth, the whole truth, then there would be no going back for her either. She too would be committed to war. And a war against people who would, and could, crush her without a second thought.
She had to admit Zac Reed’s story about Vince Foster had shaken her just as she was certain Zac had intended for it to. Was he seriously suggesting to her that she commit suicide to protect the secret of where the operation to kill August had originated? If he was, he didn’t know her very well. She was about the worst candidate for suicide she knew. She was a fighter. Always had been, always would be. If Zac came after her, he would be in for the fight of his life. She had told him she wasn’t going down alone, and she wasn’t.
That still left the other part of the Vince Foster story, however. The part that had Foster being killed at the behest of the Clintons to protect them from Foster eventually breaking and telling what he knew about them and what they had done. Did she seriously believe that the Clintons had arranged for Foster to be killed and his body dumped to look like a suicide? Rebecca knew what people in government were capable of, she knew how far they would go to preserve their power and protect their reputations, but a President of the United States was so powerful and had so many ways to bend people to his will that the crudeness of a fake suicide didn’t ring true somehow.
Still, she supposed whether the Clintons actually had Foster killed or not had very little to do with her current predicament. What Zac was telling her was that people who became a threat could be eliminated by the people they threatened, and she knew that was true. You didn’t have to be a conspiracy theorist wearing a tin foil hat to believe that such things happened in Washington every now and then. She knew they did. After all, what had she been trying to do to August and his people, for Christ’s sake? She was arranging the elimination of a threat by seeing that the people who posed the threat were killed.
So, was she in danger now?
Yes, she supposed she was. As far as she knew, she was the only link between the bombing in Hong Kong and the Agency. She was the only person who could point to Zac Reed as the source of her instructions, and everyone knew that Zac Reed was the Executive Assistant to the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Even if Zac tried to take responsibility all alone, no one would believe him. The DCI would go down, too.
The perfect solution for both Zac and the DCI here was obvious.
And that was for Rebecca to be dead.
As long as she was alive, they couldn’t be certain of her. No matter how fervently she promised not to point a finger at either of them, she could always change her mind and, even if she didn’t, what she might demand from them in return was always an open question.
No, the only foolproof solution was for her to be dead. Then they could push the whole thing onto her, call her a rogue employee with a personal agenda, and who was there to say anything different?
If she told Tay the truth, her career would be over and all kinds of hell would be unleashed, of course, but at least she would no longer be worth killing. Once her story was out there, she was protected. Killing her no longer achieved anything for the people she threatened and, worse, it made the spotlight that had been turned on them even brighter.
So, okay, telling Tay the truth would probably save her life, but would it leave her a life worth saving? Interpol couldn’t arrest her or anyone else, of course, but they would report the results of their investigation to the FBI and that would unleash hell. She would spend the rest of her life testifying in Congressional
hearings and then, eventually, in court, or at least it would feel like it was the rest of her life, but the more she thought about it the more she realized that was actually the good news.
The bad news was that she had committed a crime. No matter who had instructed her to do it, she had participated in and facilitated a conspiracy to murder three American citizens, a conspiracy that ended up killing three innocent strangers instead. She couldn’t see that being brushed under the rug no matter who else she implicated in the conspiracy. In the end, she would go to prison. The little people always went to prison, didn’t they? And the smaller they were, the longer they went to prison for.
The more she thought about it, the less she felt like she was left with any real choice in the matter.
She picked up her telephone, glanced again at the number on the card, and punched it in.
But she didn’t hit the Talk button. Instead, she put the phone down on the passenger seat.
Maybe there was another way.
She wasn’t going to set herself up to be killed, but she wasn’t going to prison either. There had to be another way.
So, what was she going to do instead? Run?
How far would she have to run to get away from the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency? Forget that. Nobody could run that far.
How about going to the press with her story? Wasn’t that better than going to Interpol? Not really. The result would eventually be the same. Once the story was out there, she had admitted to a crime and they weren’t going to give her a pass for it, not even if her admission had appeared first in The Washington Post. Maybe especially not if it appeared first in The Washington Post.
So what else?
She couldn’t think of anything else, but she wasn’t willing to give up. Not yet, at least.
The problem was that she didn’t have much time. Zac was coming for her from one direction and Tay was coming from the other. Unless she intended simply to go limp and let the first one to arrive have whatever was left of her, she had to make a choice. It might be a lousy choice to make, but it was still her choice. At least it would be if she made it soon.
She would give herself a little while longer to find a way out, but she would set a deadline for herself, one she couldn’t weasel out of.
She picked the telephone up again, and this time she hit Talk.
“Hello?”
“Inspector Tay?”
“Yes.”
“This is—”
“I know who this is.”
“Oh, okay, yes.”
Rebecca paused and then firmly took the first step over the Rubicon.
“Look, Inspector, we need to meet. I want to talk to you.”
“Fine. Where are you?”
“No, not now. Tomorrow. Tomorrow morning.”
“Why tomorrow? Why not now?”
“Are you going to meet me tomorrow or not?”
“Yes, of course. I just thought—”
“I’ll call this number around nine tomorrow and tell you where.”
“I can come to your apartment if you like.” Tay paused. “I know where it is.”
“You don’t need to remind me how much you know about me. I believe you.”
“Then we’ll meet at your apartment?”
“No. I won’t be there tomorrow and, just in case you were wondering, I’m not there now either.”
“You sound scared. Are you scared?”
Rebecca hesitated. She was scared, of course, but she still didn’t much like the idea of sounding like she was.
All at once she didn’t want to talk to Tay anymore. At least not right then. She had given herself until morning to find another way out of this, and she was going to use every damn minute she had. If she couldn’t find another way, she would tell Tay everything. She might go to prison, but she wouldn’t die. At least she didn’t think she would.
“I’ll call you tomorrow morning, Inspector. Be ready. I may not be near.”
“What do you mean you may not—”
She hit the button to end the call. Then she turned her phone off, removed the battery, and dropped both the battery and the phone on the seat next to her.
Chapter Forty
Rebecca pulled out of the parking lot heading north on the George Washington Memorial Parkway. She hadn’t particularly intended to go north, but it was the only way you could turn when you came out of the Fort Marcy parking lot and, since she had no idea where she was going anyway, north was as good a direction as any.
She had always liked driving on the parkway. It traced the Potomac River from one side of the Washington Beltway to the other, and it was nothing like the rest of Washington. The parkway ran through a heavily wooded parkland for at least half its length and driving it you felt like you were wrapped in a peaceful cocoon far away from the mayhem and uproar of what people insisted on calling the most powerful city in the world.
She particularly loved using the parkway to drive into the District from the Agency’s main campus in Langley. For the first couple of miles you were wrapped in a pine forest as dense and quiet as you would find anywhere in the wilds of Tennessee. Then, all at once, you popped out on a bluff above the Potomac River and right there on the other side all of Washington was spread out before you. The granite cladding of the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Jefferson Memorial glinting impossibly white in the sunlight, and the White House and the Capitol Building radiating the strength and raw power always associated with them.
Each time Rebecca came upon Washington like that, it made her think of a child’s model built on a tabletop. The city didn’t look real. Its structures laid out in perfect geometrical patterns looked like toys carefully arranged by a kid with a serious obsessive-compulsive disorder. Looking at Washington that way, it seemed for a moment to be a pleasant and agreeable place to be, but that feeling never lasted for long.
The closer she drew, the more she sensed the malevolent lust for power that bubbled under the city like lava pooling under a volcano. This particular volcano had already erupted many times, and many times it had wiped out people, places, even whole civilizations. It would erupt again, and the people who lived on the volcano knew it. They understood the danger all too well, but they lived there anyway. The thing was, they thought the volcano’s power would always destroy someone else. They never, none of them, thought the volcano would ever get them.
Rebecca could feel the first rumblings of an eruption beginning to roll the ground under her and reflexively she pushed harder at her car’s accelerator. She had to get herself away before it exploded. She had to get away before the eruption got her.
The problem was that she had no idea if it was even possible to get away. So, she just kept driving, and she kept trying to think of someplace where she might be safe.
The Hampton Inn in Leesburg, Virginia, wasn’t one of the places Rebecca would have put on any list of attractive sanctuaries she might have compiled at a more leisurely moment in her life. In fact, she had never heard of it and didn’t know it existed, but after driving west from Washington for more than an hour without any real destination in mind, it looked pretty good when she saw it. She parked, went in, and got a room.
The moment she closed the door behind her, a sense of peacefulness settled over her. She felt safe. No one in the entire world knew where she was.
They could find her if they looked hard enough, of course. She understood that. You couldn’t check into a hotel anywhere in America without showing identification and a credit card, and both could be traced easily enough. But it wouldn’t happen today. For today, she was in the wind.
Two double beds sat side by side, each covered with a fluffy white duvet and stacked with enough pillows to hold a decent slumber party. On the opposite wall was a long cabinet made of pine that was so light colored and polished to such a sheen that it looked almost yellow. Above the cabinet was a huge Samsung flat panel television set and at its far end was a small knee-hole desk with an
office-style chair upholstered in orange fabric lined with a pattern of dark green squares.
It was an unexceptional although entirely pleasant room, but its very ordinariness made her feel better. She had been in hotel rooms just like it a hundred times and something about the sameness was reassuring. It was as close as she could get right now to being in a familiar place where she felt comfortable. The safety the room provided her was, of course, temporary. She knew that. But she welcomed the feeling, nevertheless, for however long it lasted.
Okay, what now?
She had driven away from Fort Marcy Park propelled by a desire to lose herself somewhere until she could decide what to do. She had had no destination in mind, had developed no plan of action. She just wanted to be… well, away. Now she was away, and something had to come after that.
She kicked off her shoes and pushed herself up into the middle of the bed. Bunching up some of the pillows behind her, she leaned back against them and stretched her legs straight out.
Did she really believe she was in danger from the Agency? Maybe, but she doubted it. The Agency didn’t kill its own people, at least not very often, but whether she might be in danger from Zac Reed was another matter altogether.
She was the only person who could link Reed to the operation that led to the bombing at the Cordis Hotel in Hong Kong, and linking Reed to the operation was as good as linking the DCI to the operation. Reed didn’t have the weight to do something like that on his own. Nowhere close to it. It was inconceivable to her, as it would be to anyone else who heard the story, that the true originator of the operation could have been anyone other than the DCI himself.
If the bombing had succeeded, if August and his people had been killed like they should have been, probably no one would have cared. Three foreigners dead in Hong Kong in an explosion of unknown origins? The Hong Kong cops wouldn’t have put much effort into that. But the real targets somehow escaped and three innocent local women were killed instead. That put the pressure on the cops to figure this thing out. And if Interpol had somehow linked the bombing to her and her to the Agency, the pressure would really be on the Hong Kong cops when they found that out.