Damage Control (24 page)

“They have only themselves to blame for that. I’m still considering a posthumous court-martial for Private Prado.”

“He misunderstood his orders,” Nazario said. “If you’re going to court-martial anyone, court-martial me. I’m the one who didn’t make myself clear.”

Palma smiled. He admired non-commissioned officers who defended their troops. It spoke of integrity and inspired respect from subordinates. “Don’t think I’m not considering that, as well,” he said.

Nazario knew better, yet he shifted uneasily in his seat. “I have another question, sir, but it is certainly out of line.”

Palma waited for it.

“It’s about the ambush,” he said. “How did we know that the mercenaries would be there? How did we know where their vehicles would be?”

Palma stared straight ahead as he tried to form an answer. According to Felix, the CIA had been feeding them satellite tracking information, and as outlandish as it sounded, Palma believed it to be true. To invoke the CIA, however, would only make the troops more uncomfortable. He chose to say nothing.

After a moment of silence, Nazario got the message. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I’m sorry, sir.”

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-
ONE

D
om D’Angelo nearly ran as he crossed the lawn from the St. Katherine’s rectory to the sidewalk that would lead down the hill to the converted firehouse. Going to Scottsdale would wait. Everything would wait. If what Venice told him was true, the world had been knocked off its axis.

“Director Rivers’s office,” a voice answered. Even calls on Irene Rivers’s secure personal line were screened.

“This is Father D’Angelo,” Dom said. “I need to speak to Irene, please. It’s urgent.” He imagined that he was one of a very small handful of people who asked for the director by her first name. By doing so, he hoped that the gatekeeper would be less apt to ask questions.

Dom slowed his pace as he waited to be connected. He’d nearly made it to the firehouse when the line clicked.

“Hello, Father,” Irene answered. “Look, unless it’s really important, I am swamped with—”

“Venice says that Gail is dead.”

“Oh, my God.”

“She was shot in the Crystal Palace Cathedral about twenty minutes ago. We need to get police there, but we can’t call without revealing why she was there.”

“The Crystal Palace is in Scottsdale, isn’t it? Is Venice sure?”

“She sounded sure on the phone. I don’t know how she knows. I’m on my way to her now. But if it’s true—if Gail has been shot, irrespective of whether or not she’s dead—time is of the essence. I thought you could pull a few strings to get the police out there.”

He could almost hear the FBI director’s brain whirring. She had to have a thousand questions—he had at least that many—but she also had to know that they could wait. “I’ll do it,” she said. Then she hung up.

He assumed she would reestablish contact if she got anything.

Pulling open the street-level door to the office, Dom tore up the stairs two and three at a time, startling Rick Hare, the armed security officer who stood guard outside the door to Security Solutions.

“Father Dom,” he said. “Are you all right?”

Dom didn’t pause to acknowledge him. Instead, he swiped his key card and punched in the entry code with the forefingers of both hands.

Rick grabbed the priest’s biceps. “Father, I know you’re a friend of Mr. G’s, but I can’t let you in if you’re this agitated. What’s going on?”

Dom paused. Despite his early years in the Army, cloak and dagger was not his business. Secrecy, however,
was
his business, and Venice had been clear about not sharing the news. He steeled himself with a breath. “Mr. Hare, you’re going to have to make a decision. I’m going in there. If you feel the need to shoot me, then may your soul be spared.”

Clearly, it was not what the guard had been expecting, and the look in his face nearly made Dom laugh. He used the awkward silence as an invitation to enter the office suite.

A second armed security guard, this one named Charlie Keeling, stood at the entrance to The Cave, and judging from the way he touched his ear, Rick had just told him about the nutjob priest who was on his way in. Rather than trying to stop him, though, Charlie used his own card to buzz him in.

“Thank you, Mr. Keeling,” Dom said as he passed.

“Rick said it was important, Father.” That was it; no further inquiry. If ever there was a place of business where need-to-know was the mantra, Security Solutions was it.

Venice sat on the far side of her desk, tears streaming down her face as her fingers flew across the keyboard. Dom had been telling himself that maybe he’d heard her wrong, but now that he saw her face, he knew that the worst fears were true.

Venice made no notice of him until he appeared in her doorway, and when she made eye contact, she melted entirely. She rose from her chair and hurried around the desk, her arms out and her wrists drooping, ready for a hug. As soon as Dom folded her in his arms, she started to sob.

“It’s my fault,” she cried. “She asked me for help and I couldn’t give it to her.” Her words were barely audible through the choking sobs.

Dom held her tightly as she pressed her face into his black shirt and let the emotion pour out. He felt the wetness in the fabric, and he just let her go. He stroked her hair and patted it. As he did, he tried to wrap his mind around the enormity of it.

Gail has been killed.

Articulating the words, even in his head, made it sound impossible. Gail was too
alive
to be dead. His head reeled with questions, but until Venice regained control, they would remain unasked.

It took her five full minutes to calm herself to the point where she could speak, and even then, her voice quavered. Her eyes burned red.

“Oh, Dom, what’s Digger going to do? After he lost Ellen, Gail was all he—” Her voice caught and she abandoned the thought.

She pushed away from Dom and stomped her foot once against the floor. “No,” she commanded, though Dom wasn’t sure if she was speaking to herself or to him. “We are not doing this. We are not getting emotional. Not now. There’s plenty of time for that later.” She turned her back and headed to her computer.

Dom followed. “You’re absolutely sure that she’s dead?”

“I heard it happen,” she said. “On the phone.” She made a show of pounding the computer keys.

“You heard her
die
? How do you know she’s dead?”

“I heard the shots, and I talked to the killer.” Her tone could not have changed more dramatically. Now it was as if this were a simple business matter. She swiped angrily at the remaining tears in her eyes, and typed some more.

Dom reached over her shoulder and thumbed the power button on her monitor.

“Dammit, Father!”

“Dammit, Venice!”

The exchange hung in the air.

“Please talk to me,” Dom said. “I’ve already got Wolverine involved. She’s finding a reason to send police to the cathedral to look around.”

Venice looked stunned that she hadn’t thought of that herself. “That’s good,” she said.

“Wolverine is going to want to know details,” Dom went on. “You’re going to have to share them.”

Venice had always been intimidated by Irene Rivers. Dom knew how little she liked to speak to her.

Venice steadied herself with a breath, then spun in her chair to face Dom. “She called me from an office inside the cathedral. I think she said it was on the twelfth floor. She was there to meet with Jackie Mitchell, and somehow or other, she ended up coming under fire. She called me to see if I could pull up drawings to get them out of there.” Her lip startled trembling again. “I just didn’t have time. They found her when I was still looking. That’s when I heard them kill her.”

“I still don’t know what that means,” Dom said. “I don’t know what you mean when you say you heard them kill her. You mean you heard them shoot at her?”

Venice nodded. “There was a
lot
of shooting. Shooting and yelling. And then it just stopped. A man picked up her phone and said that he’d just killed her.”

“So, you don’t
know
that she’s dead. There’s no certainty.”

Venice looked confused. Maybe a little angry at being questioned.

Dom explained, “Suppose she just dropped her phone in the fight? Suppose she was on the run and it just dropped out of her pocket? Just because some guy—a bad guy, no less—
says
that she’s dead, that doesn’t necessarily mean that she is.”

Venice thought about it and seemed to allow herself a tiny glimmer of hope. She turned back to her screen and powered it up again

Dom’s cell phone rang. Wolverine. He snapped it open. “Please tell me you have good news.” He pressed the speaker button. “Venice’s on the line, too.”

“The news is neither good nor bad,” Irene said. “The chief of police down there is an acquaintance of mine. He sent a unit to the Crystal Palace. They spoke with the security team on the main floor, and they said they knew nothing of a shooting.”

“Did they check the place out?” Dom asked.

“They didn’t feel it was necessary,” Irene said. “Under the circumstances, with the extremely limited information we have to offer, I can’t say as I blame them.”

“Are they at least going to keep the police cars on the property for a while?” Venice asked.

“I can’t imagine that they would,” Irene replied. “Venice, I need you to catch me up with the details.”

It only took a couple of minutes.

When the explanation was finished, Irene said, “I don’t suppose you recorded this conversation, did you?”

Venice’s face turned into a giant O. “Oh, my God,” she said. She pushed her chair across the mat to her credenza, where the push of a button produced a postage stamp–size memory card. “I did record it.” She placed the card in her computer and clicked a few buttons. The whole horrible scene played out all over again, from the initial contact through the shooting and finally the ominous voice at the end.

Halfway through, Dom felt himself turning pale and he leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees. When it was over, he understood Venice’s feeling of helplessness.

Silence hung in the air until Irene broke it with, “I’m sorry, guys, but that really doesn’t sound good for Gail.”

“There’s always hope,” Dom said. He looked to Venice, but didn’t get the support he was hoping for.

“If you say so, Father,” Irene said. “Matters of faith are much more your bailiwick than mine. I want to know whose voice that is at the end. Venice, can you send me a digital copy of that? I’ll try to get it voice printed and see what we can find.”

Dom shared a smile with Venice as she clicked send on the file she had already been copying. She was already a step ahead. “On its way,” she said.

“I want to pull out that shouting on the recording, too,” Irene said. “Maybe we can isolate something in the noise that will be helpful to us.”

“I really appreciate this, Wolverine,” Dom said. “I know you’ve got a lot going on. It means a lot—”

“You people mean a lot to me too, Father,” she interrupted. “I’ll be back to you if I get anything useful out of any of this.”

With that, the line went dead.

“I can’t put my finger on why,” Venice said as she turned her attention back to her computer. “But I really don’t like that woman.”

“She’s pulled Dig’s backside out of a lot of fires,” Dom said.

“She’s set a few of them first,” Venice replied.

Jonathan and Irene had a history that even Dom didn’t fully understand, but he knew that there was at least as much angst between them as there was trust.

Dom scowled as he watched Venice become lost in whatever she was typing into her machine. “What are you doing?” he asked. “You look like you’ve discovered something important.”

Venice shook her head, but she didn’t move her eyes from the screen. “I should’ve thought about the shouting,” she said. “Pisses me off that Irene got to that one first. I even have the same software they do.”

Dom smiled. “I’m guessing that if you were Catholic, I’d have heard a confession after you got your hands on it?”

“That’s why it’s good to be Baptist, Father. Everything we do is a sin. We don’t draw hard lines on things like borrowing without permission.”

Dom laughed at the euphemism. He imagined that Saint Peter would have his hands full when the Security Solutions team finally passed on and had to be sorted out. Was stealing still a sin when the stolen materials were put to good use—even if it meant breaking the law? He imagined that God was growing weary of them all.

His attention was drawn to a series of horizontal lines that had appeared on Venice’s computer screen. The lines fattened and thinned on the screen, not unlike the lines painted by oscilloscopes and electrocardiograms.

“Noise is the accumulation of many sounds,” Venice explained. “Even in the noisiest party, you can pick out the words of the person you want to hear, right? You might have to concentrate and watch their mouth for visual cues, but you’ll still be able to get the gist of what they’re saying. To do that, though, you make yourself oblivious to the rest of the noise in the room.”

She paused in her explanation, clearly seeking an indication of understanding. “I’m with you,” Dom said.

“Good. If you were to listen to a recording of that same party, it would be difficult if not impossible to consistently pick out any one voice because the recorder is a piece of electronic equipment that gives equal value to every sound—from the individual voices to the hum of the air-conditioning. That all becomes noise.”

Venice liked to show off a little when she was about to slam-dunk a computer. Dom settled in for the rest.

“For years, governments and individuals have been trying to figure out a way to eavesdrop that would allow the listener to weight the importance of different sources of sound. The FBI took the lead for domestic listening, and the National Security Agency got the nod for international eavesdropping. Obviously, the NSA program is more sophisticated, if only because they’ve got more PhDs per square inch than anywhere else on the planet.”