Capitol Reflections (51 page)
It was the barn. Mark drove into a small clearing and straight into the barn, shutting off the engine as soon as he was beneath the arched wooden roof.
“Now what the hell do we do?” Jan asked.
“By morning, they’ll know of our little charade,” Peter said. “They’ll comb the woods with dozens of men, and it won’t be hard to find this place once they discover the path. Might even locate the barn from the air. This is little more than a staging area for whatever we do next. We have a few hours at most to make our next move.”
“A move to where?” asked Gwen.
No one answered.
71
Henry was doing his best to get drunk. Anne was nowhere to be found, and the servants were also absent. Henry didn’t trust either circumstance. He called all Anne’s shopping friends, but no one knew his wife’s whereabouts.
“Probably with that asshole Trainor,” Henry mumbled as he poured himself another double scotch.
He slumped onto the sofa. Things had taken a turn for the worse. Though what he told Anne about the relocation of the Pedregal operation was true, he hadn’t been privy to the location of the new Transpac offices—if they existed at all. And his recent call to the man with the raspy voice had yielded nothing but a ringing phone with no answer.
“It’s my goddamn coffee they’re using!” he said angrily.
But coffee wasn’t Henry’s only trouble. He returned from his midday meeting with three members of his Agriculture Committee to find that his new chief aide, Virginia Soo, resigned during the lunch break.
“Anne probably threatened her,” he muttered. “I don’t know what kind of power play she’s making, but she’s gonna lose—and she’s gonna regret it the rest of her life.”
Picking up the remote, he flipped on the television and went straight to CNN. According to the breaking story, Dr. Edward Karn had just died, the result of a tragic automobile accident.
72
The night was eerie, quiet. Mark sent the beam of his flashlight across the barn roof to check its integrity. It had a few holes where the wood was rotten, but for the most part, it looked solid and appeared to provide adequate cover. An owl hooted in the distance.
“Did we just land in a Stephen King novel?” asked Jan, huddling close to Peter.
“No,” said Mark, “but I’m reasonably sure that we’re in the middle of something that was supposed to remain a deep, dark secret.”
Gwen sat off to the side, by herself. She hadn’t seemed right since she returned to the cabin without Karn. Mark ached for her. What she was going through was exponentially tougher than what he was. He walked over to her and knelt on the hard ground littered with straw.
“You holding up?” he said softly.
Gwen’s eyes touched his briefly and then dropped. “I just wanted to get to the bottom of Marci’s death.” She sounded like a penitent in a confessional. “I end up pulling in people I care about and putting them in all kinds of danger. Jack, Jan … you.”
“It sounds like Jack is going to be fine. The word from the hospital is great, right?”
Gwen nodded softly.
“As for the rest of us, we’re grown-ups and we chose to help you. We’ve all been in trouble before and dealt with it.”
“Not this kind of trouble. You do realize we’re not just talking about losing our jobs or even going to jail here. If someone like Broome knows what we have on him, he could do anything to stop us. We know what he’s done in the past.”
Mark was of course aware of this. If you spend enough time exploring the dark side of humanity, your mind jumps to those conclusions fairly quickly. He’d been hoping that Gwen hadn’t been thinking that way, though.
“Eddie’s in danger,” Gwen said softly, “isn’t he?”
There was no reason to kid her. “He might be.”
“If something happens to him, it’s my fault.”
“Or maybe whatever happened to him would have happened to both of you.”
Gwen said nothing for a moment and then put her hands to her face. Instinctively, Mark reached for her hands and held them in his. Their heads were no more than a foot apart. Even in the dim light, Mark could make out every contour of her face—every bit of tribulation in her eyes.
“You’re doing something important here, Gwen. You may have started this because of Marci, but you’re doing it now for everyone.”
“I never wanted to be a crusader. That was your job.”
Mark smiled and held her hands to his face. “You’ve always been a crusader. It’s one of the things I’ll always love about you.”
“Mark, I—”
“Of course not. Some things just need to be said, though.”
A moment later, Peter came up to them, breaking whatever it was that just happened between Mark and Gwen.
“Look what I found,” he said, holding a long, coiled orange power cord.
“Great,” Mark said, “but there’s no place to plug it in.”
“Take a gander through the rear.”
The barn’s large rear door was missing entirely and, as Mark aimed his flashlight outside, he located a small home about twenty yards away. It was in complete darkness.
“What if the residents are asleep?” asked Gwen.
“Or what if it’s abandoned?” added Jan, who’d come over to join them. “There may be no electricity.”
“Only one way to find out,” asserted Peter. “I discovered the place, so I’ll volunteer to check it out. It would be great if I could finish accessing Jamie’s information before the sun comes up and we have to decide where to go.”
“Be careful, Peter,” Jan urged. She gave him a quick hard hug. It was obvious to Mark that she had a major crush on Peter. Going by the way Peter looked at her, he knew the feeling was mutual.
Peter stepped lightly to the ramshackle house, the orange power cord looped over his left shoulder. He was keenly aware that people who lived out in the woods usually owned a twelve-gauge, so caution was paramount in his mind as he approached the side of the home. A heavy layer of dust coated the windows. Moving closer, Peter shone his light on the window for a split-second before sweeping the beam away and turning it off. There were no curtains. He clicked the light on again and directed its illumination into the room beyond the dusty pane of glass. Empty. Moving around the house, he peered through each window and found that the other rooms were empty, too. Now came the real challenge. Having circled the house, he stood on the narrow, ground-level front porch and tried the doorknob.
Locked.
Kneeling, he produced a keychain with a small cylinder on it no bigger than a stubby pencil. Pressing a miniscule button on its side, he accessed what looked like a thin shaft of graphite and inserted it into the lock. In reality, it was a piece of slender steel designed for picking locks, a rod with extremely small serrations on its tip. With no deadbolt with which to contend, Peter had the door open within seconds.
He searched for the smallest room so he could try a light switch. Luckily, a bathroom with no windows adjoined the home’s only bedroom. Peter flipped the switch on the wall panel, causing a single light bulb over the sink to flare.
“Excellent!” he said in a whisper.
He retraced his steps and plugged the orange power cord into an outlet above the baseboard, one approximately three feet from the front door. He uncoiled the cord as he stepped outside and made his way back to the barn. Midway, he glanced up. A few clouds obscured the stars, but otherwise the skies were quiet. No choppers.
“Okay, mates,” he said when he was safely inside the barn again. “I’m going to see if I can finish deciphering Jamie’s password. Mark, I want you to cover the cord outside with grass, dirt, leaves, sticks—whatever you can find. If any choppers return with searchlights, they could easily spot the orange line. Jan and Gwen, I want you to sit around the Apple so that its glow will be contained.”
Everyone went off to their assignments. By the time Mark returned, Peter had the decryption program up and running again.
“Any luck?” Mark asked.
“It’s taking much longer than I expected. The unscrambler I’m using was certainly not designed with an Apple II in mind, but it’s slowly but surely discovering each password character. It’s tedious, though.”
They were so absorbed in unlocking the Apple’s secrets that no one noticed the shotgun barrel aimed at Gwen’s head until it was too late.
“Everybody just stay nice and still.”
“Whom do we have the pleasure of meeting?” asked Peter, polite to the end.
The old man was gruff, but without the gun, he wouldn’t be too much of a threat. “I live across that there crik and saw the light, thought I’d check it out. You’re no part of the Brooder family. So the big question here is, who the hell are ’ya?”
“Federal law enforcement agents,” said Peter. “I’ll show you my badge, but I have to stand up and reach in my pocket.”
“My granddaddy taught me to shoot Feds and bury ’em in the holler back in Kentucky. Well, go ahead, but don’t try no funny stuff.”
From a cross-legged position, Peter got to his feet, bending over and dusting off his pants legs. As he raised the trunk of his body, he threw a stiff, flattened right hand into the man’s neck. The man, a skinny farmer with thin white hair and weathered skin, toppled backward, unconscious, but his shotgun discharged as he fell, sending buckshot into the roof with a deafening roar, and leaving dozens of new holes in the old wood.
“That’s not good,” said Mark.
“No, not good at all,” Peter reiterated. “If I’d had one of the rings I used in Panama, it would have been simpler.”
“I wonder if there are other neighbors nearby,” wondered Gwen.
“We’ll find out soon enough, won’t we,” said Mark.
Peter knelt down and continued to work on Jamie’s computer.
73
Mark found some rope and a not-too-dirty piece of cloth in one of the stalls and set about the task of binding and gagging the old farmer. He wasn’t happy about it, but he had to do it. They couldn’t have the old man blabbing about them until they were long gone—whenever that might be. No other intruders showed up and no nosy neighbors came to investigate the shotgun blast.
An hour passed, and a feeble gray light outside the barn told Mark and his companions that dawn was about to paint the sky crimson and orange
“Let me use your magic cell phone, Mark old boy,” requested Peter.
“I need to call my company. You’re all going to become consultants for my security firm.”
“Why?” asked Gwen.
“Because we have a meeting with one of my former clients this morning.”
“Who?” asked Jan.
“A fellow by the name of David St. Germaine. He’s Security Chief at the National Institute of Health.”
“And just how are we going to get there?” asked Mark. “What rabbit do you have inside your hat this time?”
“A very large one, my friend. In fact, it’s a rabbit that flies.”
Gwen, Mark, and Jan exchanged confused glances.
Peter punched in a number and requested a pickup, giving his employee precise geographical coordinates.
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