Book of Souls by Glenn Cooper (31 page)

He lowered himself over the bed rail and held her so tightly she gasped. He loosened his python grip and kissed her forehead gratefully.

“We have to do something, Will,” she said.

“I know.”

“We need to get those bastards. I want to bring them to their knees.”

Will couldn’t use his cell phone without getting chewed out by the nurses, so he went down to the lobby. The address book of the prepaid phone had one number in its memory. He called it.

A breathy voice answered. “Hello?”

“It’s Will Piper.”

“I’m glad you called. How are you, Will?”

“The watchers tried to kill us last night. They got my wife’s parents.”

After a moment of silence, “I’m very sorry. Were you harmed?”

“My wife and son were, but they’re going to be fine.”

“I’m relieved to hear that. Is there anything I can do to help you?”

“Possibly. And I’ve made a decision. I’m going to get you the database.”

That night, Will slept in a chair in his son’s hospital room. All the arrangements for the following day had been made, and there was nothing to do but allow himself to get some restorative sleep. Not even the nurses coming and going every few hours for vital signs disturbed him.

When the morning came, he awoke to the sounds of Phillip in his crib, happily cooing and playing with his stuffed toy, and he used that optimistic beginning to psyche himself for the travails of the coming day.

He tensed at the sound of another nurse coming into the room, but instead it was Laura and Greg. They had driven up from Washington and had been a magnificent help in working through all the logistics. The Lipinskis were popular, and their funeral service would be crowded with mourners. Given the leaked reports of furnace tampering, there was media interest too, and a good contingent from the New York City press corps was expected. There were details to work out between their priest, the funeral home, and the cemetery regarding the final arrangements. Laura was slowed down by her pregnancy, but Greg took it upon himself to be the family point man with the outside world, and for that, Will was grateful.

“Did you get any sleep?” his daughter asked.

“Some. Look how good he looks.”

Greg looked down on Phillip like he was trying out the role of father. “Hey there, bud.”

Will got up, stood beside his son-in-law and put his hand on his shoulder, the first time he’d ever made physical contact with the young man beyond a handshake. “You’ve been a real help. Thank you.”

“No problem,” Greg said, mildly embarrassed.

“I’m going to find a way to repay you.”

Will took on the role security chief, and over breakfast in the cafeteria, he meticulously planned the choreography. They needed to keep themselves in public view, in the middle of crowds. Frazier could watch all he wanted, but he wouldn’t be able to do a snatch with people around. The details were important. Everything had to go perfectly, or they’d wind up at the bottom of a very deep hole.

When he went to Nancy’s room, she was already wearing her new black dress and standing in front of the mirror in the lavatory. She seemed determined to keep her face dry while she applied makeup. An old friend from the Bureau had stopped off at their apartment and picked up one of Will’s dark suits. The two of them hadn’t looked so smart since their wedding day. He put his hand on the small of her back.

“You look nice,” she said.

“You too.”

“I don’t know if I can do this,” she said, her voice quavering.

“I’ll be by your side every step,” he said.

A Ballard-Durand limo picked them up at the hospital entrance. By discharge protocol, Nancy was rolled on a wheel-chair right up to the curb. She held Phillip close and stepped inside the Cadillac. Will was surveying the drive and the street as if he were on the job, protecting a witness. A small cadre of agents from the New York office flanked the limo like a Secret Service detail assigned to dignitaries.

When the limo drove off, Frazier put down his binoculars and grumbled to DeCorso that Piper was in a cocoon. They followed at a distance and in a short while they were parking their car on Maple Avenue, the white-pillared funeral home in view.

The Lipinskis had been informal easygoing people, and their friends from the community made sure the service matched the couple’s sensibilities. After a heartfelt eulogy from their priest from Our Lady of Sorrows, an endless stream of coworkers, bridge partners, parishioners, even the mayor, stood and delivered touching and funny anecdotes about two caring, loving lives, cut short. From the front pew, Nancy wept a steady stream and when Phillip got too loud, Laura would walk him up the aisle to the lobby until he settled down. Will stayed tense and ready, craning his neck, searching the crowded hall. He doubted they’d be inside, among them, but you never knew.

Mt. Calvary Cemetery was in north White Plains, a few miles away from the Lipinski home, adjacent to the grounds of the Westchester Community College. Joseph always liked the peaceful area and in his methodical way he had purchased a family plot thirty years earlier. It was waiting for him now, the dark brown earth freshly backhoed into side-by-side graves. It was the kind of crisp, autumn morning where the sun was thin and flat, and leaves crackled under the feet of the mourners tramping across the lawn.

Frazier was watching the graveside communion through binoculars from a service road a quarter of a mile away. He had his plan. They’d follow the funeral procession back to the Lipinski house. They knew the wake would be held there because they had the Ops Center in Groom Lake hack the funeral home’s server to grab the Lipinski funeral itinerary and the limo drop-off address. They would wait until the evening, when Will and Nancy were alone with their son, then enter and extract Will, using as much or as little force as was required. They’d do a sweep of the house, looking for anything he might have found at Cantwell Hall. Once they had Will tucked away at forty thousand feet they’d seek further instructions from the Pentagon. His men agreed that two hits on the same house on two successive nights carried the best element of surprise.

While the priest said a graveside mass, Frazier and his crew munched sandwiches. While Nancy threw a handful of dirt on her parents’ coffins, the watchers were caffeinating themselves with cans of Mountain Dew.

When the service broke up, Frazier was still closely observing. There was a crush of mourners surrounding Will and Nancy, and Frazier lost them for a while in a sea of dark blue and black overcoats. He shifted his attention to their limo, which was parked at the front of the procession, and when he spied a man and woman with a baby in her arms climbing in, he had his driver move out.

The funeral procession snaked its way back to the Lipinski house. Anthony Road was a short, heavily wooded dead-end street. It was impossible for Frazier to park there without being made, so they took up position on North Street, the main artery, and waited patiently in the fading afternoon light for the visitors to depart.

The Ballard-Durand hearse, a black Landau coach, glided up to the private aviation terminal at the Westchester County Airport. The black-suited driver hopped out and had a look around before opening the passenger door. “We’re good,” he said.

Will got out first, helped Nancy with Philly, then hustled them into the terminal. He came back outside to lay some cash on the driver and extract their bags. “You weren’t here, you understand?”

The driver tipped his cap and drove off.

Inside the terminal, Will immediately spotted a medium-built, hard-bodied man with cropped gray hair, jeans, and a leather bomber jacket. The man unfolded his arms and reached inside a pocket flap. Will cautiously watched his hand as it emerged pinching a business card. He came forward and presented it.

DANE P. BENTLEY, 2027 CLUB.

“You must be Will. And you must be Nancy. And who’s this little man?”

Nancy took to Dane’s kind, gray-stubbled face. “His name is Phillip.”

“My condolences, folks. Your plane’s all gassed up and ready to go.”

Frazier waited all afternoon until the cars pretty much stopped coming and going from the Lipinskis’ block. In the late afternoon, he spotted Laura Piper and her husband leaving in a taxi. At dusk, he pulled down Anthony Road for a quick drive-by. The only car in the driveway was Joseph’s. There were lights blazing on both levels. He decided to give it another hour, to make sure there were no late arrivals.

At the appointed time, he and his men pulled into the driveway and split into two, two-man teams. He sent DeCorso through the bulkhead and personally shouldered his way through the patio door. His safety was off, and the silencer tube made his pistol look long and menacing. It felt good to be off his butt, on task. He was prepared, even anxious to engage in some level of violence. He was anticipating the pleasure he’d get pistol-whipping Piper across his temple, knocking the bastard onto the floor.

What he was unprepared for and what made him swear out loud was a completely empty house with a Phillip-sized doll lying on the living room sofa where Laura Piper had left it.

DANE BENTLEY PILOTED a twenty-year-old Beechcraft Baron 58, a sporty twin-engine with a top speed of two hundred knots and a range of almost fifteen hundred miles. There was hardly anywhere in the continental US where he hadn’t touched down, and there was nothing he liked better than having an excuse to do some serious flying.

When his old friend Henry Spence called invoking the 2027 Club and told him he’d foot the gas bill, Dane was quickly behind the wheel of his ’65 Mustang motoring to the hangar at Beverly Muni Airport on the rugged Massachusetts coast. On the way, he left a voice mail for his live-in lady friend informing her he was going to be away for a few days and a second voice mail to the younger woman he was seeing on the side. Dane was a young sixty.

In the distance, about fifteen nautical miles to the north, the late-afternoon sun was glinting over long, skinny Lake Winnipesaukee, a large deepwater body dotted with two hundred pine-bristling islands. Dane suppressed his tour-guide instinct to point it out. His three passengers were behind him, sound asleep in facing red-leather seats. Instead, he started chatting with the tower at Laconia Airport, and several minutes later, he was swooping over the lake and approaching the runway.

Jim Zeckendorf had left one of his cars for Will at the airport, its keys in an envelope at the general aviation desk. Will bundled his family into the SUV and took off for the house, leaving Dane behind to check the weather, file a flight plan, and catch a quick nap in the pilots’ lounge.

It was a straight ten-mile shot east on Route 11 to Alton Bay, one of the small towns that ringed Winnipesaukee. Will had visited once a few years earlier for a weekend of fishing and drinking. He recalled he had a girlfriend in tow but for the life of him he couldn’t remember which one. It had been a time when women were flying in and out of his life at speed, a bimbo blur. All Will could remember for sure was that Zeckendorf, who was wifeless that weekend, was more interested in his girlfriend than he was.

Zeckendorf’s second house was befitting a big-time Boston law partner. It was a six-thousand–square-foot Adirondack, perched on a rocky ridge high over the choppy waters of Alton Bay. Nancy was too tired and numb to appreciate the rustic, airy, vaulted living room which flowed into an open-plan granite-topped kitchen. On a happier day, she would have been flitting from room to room like a honeybee in a field of clover, but she was impervious to the magnificence of the place.

It was dusk, and through a wall of lake-facing windows, stands of birch and pines were swaying in the wind and the gray-black waters were doing an imitation of the sea, methodically crashing against the stone breakwater. Nancy went straight for the master bedroom to change Philly and get out of her mourning dress.

Will zoomed around the house, checking things out. Zeck’s wife had made a trip up from Boston and stocked the fridge and the pantry with provisions and baby food and boxes of diapers. There were fresh towels everywhere. The thermostats were adjusted. There was a car in the garage with keys. There was even a brand-new travel crib in the bedroom and a high chair, with a price tag still affixed, in the kitchen. The Zeckendorfs were unbelievable.

He unpacked Nancy’s service weapon from its case, checked its clip and safety, then left it conspicuously on her bedside table next to a prepaid phone.

The baby was fresh and powdered, and Nancy was in comfortable jeans and a sweatshirt. Will tightly held Phillip to his chest and peered out the window while she rummaged in the kitchen. They exchanged banal domestic talk, a pretense the last two days hadn’t happened, but it seemed all right to give each other a break. He waited until she was ready to start the baby’s feeding, then placed Phillip, wiggling, into his chair.

Then he hugged her for a long time and only broke the clench to wipe away two streaks of tears on her red face, one with each thumb.

“I will call you every step of the way,” he said.

“You’d better. I’m your partner, remember?”

“I remember. Just like the old days, back on a case.”

“We’ve got a good plan. It should work,” she said emphatically.

“Are you going to be okay?” he asked.

“Yes, and no.” Then her confidence broke. “I’m scared.”

“They won’t find you here.”

“Not for me, for you.”

“I can take care of myself.”

She gave him a squeeze. “You used to. You’re an old retired guy now.”

He shrugged. “Experience versus youth. You choose.”

She kissed him full on the lips, then gently pushed him away. “I choose you.”

It was semidark when Dane took off. He banked over the lake, then made a graceful turn westward. When his course was set and the plane was leveled off at a cruising altitude of eighteen thousand feet, he turned to Will, who was shoehorned into the copilot seat, and he began to talk. It had taxed him to keep quiet for so long. They didn’t come more talkative or gregarious than Dane Bentley, and for the next eighteen hours, he had a captive audience.