Hell Bent (31 page)

Agent Neal steered to the right of Captain Parker and pulled into a parking area overlooking the green. During the entire drive from my house on Mt. Vernon to here, after reminding me about my seat belt, neither he nor Agent Greeley had spoken a word, either to each other or to me. Greeley had been working his cell phone the whole time.

Now he snapped his phone shut, stuffed it into his jacket pocket, and turned in his seat. “Glad you could make it,” he said.

“Glad to help if I can,” I said. “Anyway, Horowitz didn’t give me much choice. He also didn’t tell me what you wanted me to do.”

“Watch television,” he said. He pointed out the front windshield at a big Channel Seven trailer that was parked at the edge of the lot. “That’s ours. We’ll be in there.”

“Channel Seven?” I said.

“They don’t mind if we use them for cover now and then.” He opened his door. “Come on. I’ll show you the setup.”

We walked over to the Channel Seven trailer, climbed two portable aluminum steps, and went inside, where it looked like an air traffic control center. No windows. Men and women hunched over big keyboards. A chaos of red, orange, green, and flickering blue artificial light. The air seemed alive with subaudible electronic buzz and the soft murmur of voices. Along one wall there were ten stations with big computer monitors and
what looked like sound-studio consoles, each attended by a squinty-eyed tech wearing a headset. One of the techs was Eric, the buttoned-up guy I’d worked with on the John Kinkaid image. The wall above the stations was lined with television screens.

“Pretty impressive,” I said to Agent Greeley.

“We’re monitoring the crowd,” he said. “Not just this crowd, but also four others, remotely. We expect that if Kinkaid makes a move, it’ll be here. But there are Veterans Day events in four other Massachusetts communities this morning, too. We’ve got those covered. Agents with cameras mingling with the crowds.”

“And you want me to try to pick out Phil Trapelo? John Kinkaid, I mean.”

Greeley nodded. “All the agents have memorized that computer image you helped us work up the other day, of course. But you’re the only one we have who’s actually seen him, seen how he moves, seen him smile and frown and shrug and talk, seen his gestures. You can give us a heads-up, save us half a minute, maybe save a lot of lives. Okay?”

“Of course,” I said. “Just tell me what to do.”

“Our agents out there with cameras,” he said, “and our techs in here will be scanning the crowds looking for John Kinkaid in whatever form of disguise he may choose to wear. They’ll be looking for men of a certain height who might be wearing some bulk under their jackets. They’ll be looking for men with a limp. Anything at all close, we’ll ask you to check him out. If you think it’s even possible, you’ve got to say so. This isn’t a police lineup. We’re not waiting for a positive ID. Okay?”

I nodded. “Okay.”

He waved his hand at a table in the corner. “Coffee, juice, doughnuts, muffins, crullers, Danish. Help yourself. There’s a porta-potty right outside. Be sure to let someone know if you have to go.” He shook my hand. “Good luck.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said.

Greeley went outside.

I ate a doughnut and sipped some coffee and idly watched the television screens.

After a while, Agent Neal came in, nodded at me, whispered into the ear of one of the techs, and left.

Fifteen or twenty minutes later, Greeley came back.

I kept scanning the television screens on the wall, which I realized showed the same things that the computer monitors under them showed. The six screens on the left all displayed various areas of the Lexington village green right outside our trailer. The other four screens showed other—by the looks of them, much smaller—New England village greens where, judging by the abundance of red-white-and-blue bunting, the preparations for Veterans Day celebrations were under way.

One of the Lexington screens showed some workers setting up scaffolding. Another showed electricians stringing wires. Three screens showed groups of people wandering around the green. Another screen moved down a line of vendors on the sidewalk selling coffee and pretzels and souvenirs.

Once in a while, one of the screens would zoom in on a man’s face, and Greeley would snap his fingers at me and peer over a tech’s shoulder, and they’d mutter in low voices for a minute before the image changed. Then Greeley would look at me and shrug. None of the faces they put up on the screen looked anything like the man I was forcing myself to think of as John Kinkaid.

The Lexington green—and the other village greens, too—gradually became more crowded, and more faces flashed on the screens, and I found myself moving up and down the line of monitors looking from one face to the next.

And then from outside the trailer I heard the muted first
notes of the national anthem. On one of the TV screens, an army band was playing.

I glanced at my watch: 11:00
A.M.
, on the dot.

That’s exactly when the cell phone in my shirt pocket vibrated.

I
looked at the little window on my phone.
UNKNOWN CALLER,
it said. I glanced around the crowded trailer. All of the techs were focused on their computer monitors and muttering into their headsets.

Greeley was down at the other end, bending over a tech’s shoulder. I waved my hand at him. He looked up. I pointed at my phone. He shrugged and nodded, then returned his attention to the monitor in front of him.

I turned to face the back wall, opened my phone, and said, “Yes?”

The deep voice was unmistakable. “Happy Veterans Day, Mr. Coyne. Are you celebrating?”

It was John Kinkaid. It occurred to me that, calling my cell, he had no idea where I was. “Where are you?” I said.

“I wanted you to know some things, Mr. Coyne,” he said. As he spoke, I could hear the band playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” through the phone. It came to my ear a fraction of a second behind the music from outside the trailer.

Kinkaid was here, in Lexington, somewhere outside.

I turned and waved my hand frantically at Martin Greeley.

“First off,” Kinkaid said, “I hope you know that I could have killed you and Herb Croyden the other night. I chose not to. I had no reason to kill you.”

“I figured that,” I said. “I’m grateful. I guess you had your reasons.”

Greeley came over to where I was standing. He was frowning.

I pointed at the phone, then drew a big
K
in the air.

Greeley mouthed the word “Kinkaid” with his eyebrows arched.

I nodded, made a circle in the air with my finger, then pointed at the floor, indicating that Kinkaid was in this area.

Greeley nodded, held up his hand, and flapped his fingers against his thumb. He wanted me to keep Kinkaid talking. Then he moved to one of the techs at his monitor and spoke into his ear.

“So why did you have to kill Gus Shaw and Pedro Accardo?” I said to Kinkaid. “I wouldn’t have thought you were a coldblooded killer.”

“I’m not,” he said. “We had a plan. They intended to betray it. They left me no choice.” He paused, and it sounded like the band music coming from his phone was getting louder. “Soldiers die for lesser causes all the time. Shaw and Accardo made their sacrifices.”

Greeley came over, tugged on my sleeve, and pulled me to one of the TV monitors. The agent with the camera was somewhere on the battle green panning back across the street toward our trailer. The monitor showed several scraggly groups of people, including many men in various military uniforms, heading in the direction of the green, latecomers to the festivities.

“Aren’t you tired of running and hiding?” I said to Kinkaid.

Greeley pointed at a cluster of old veterans moving up the sidewalk toward our trailer. The tech zoomed in on their faces.

“I’m not done yet,” said Kinkaid. “I have a message for Martin Greeley. Will you deliver it for me?”

“Of course,” I said.

The camera closed in on one soldier’s face.

I shook my head.

Three or four more close-ups. None was Kinkaid.

Then I noticed a man lagging behind the others a bit farther down the sidewalk. He wore army khaki and was operating an electric wheelchair. You couldn’t tell how tall he was, or if he walked with a limp. He had flowing white hair under his creased cap, and thick glasses, and he didn’t look much like the Phil Trapelo I’d met—but he had a cell phone pressed against his ear.

I jabbed Greeley’s shoulder and pointed at the wheelchair on the monitor. The camera zoomed in on it.

“Tell Agent Greeley,” Kinkaid was saying, “that I have never thought of this as a game. It’s never been about him, or about me. Nothing personal. I have been absolutely sincere about my convictions all of these years. Will you tell him that?”

“Sure,” I said.

The man was steering his wheelchair up the sidewalk toward our trailer while he was talking on his cell phone. I could read his lips on the TV monitor as his words came to me through my phone. The white hair and the glasses and the wheelchair weren’t a bad disguise, but as I studied him, watched the way his mouth moved and his eyebrows arched as he talked, I saw past it. It was John Kinkaid.

I pointed at the image of the vet in the wheelchair and gave a thumbs-up sign to Greeley. He snatched the headset from one of the techs and began speaking into it.

“So what are you up to today?” I said to Kinkaid as I watched him on the monitor. “How are you celebrating this Veterans Day?”

“It’s a day for mourning, not celebrating,” he said. “People forget. Heroes, yes. But for every surviving hero there are thousands—millions, probably—of forgotten martyrs. Men who’ve died for stupid, senseless causes at the whim of ignorant, self-serving politicians. It’s been the work of my life—”

Kinkaid’s voice abruptly stopped, and simultaneously, on the TV screen, I saw his chin slump to his chest, his arms fall onto his lap, and his wheelchair begin to veer slowly off the sidewalk.

The band was playing the final strains of the national anthem, “…
and the home of the brave.”
Then came the sound of applause, both from outside the trailer and through my cell phone.

Almost instantly a dark-haired woman was at the handles of Kinkaid’s wheelchair. She steered it behind our trailer and off the edge of the TV screen that I’d been watching.

I looked at Greeley. “What just happened?”

He headed for the door. “Come on.”

I followed him out of the trailer. The woman—I assumed she was an FBI agent—was wheeling Kinkaid toward us.

As they got closer, I saw the red blotch under Kinkaid’s chin.

“You shot him?” I said to Greeley.

“Let’s hope you didn’t misidentify him,” he said.

“Jesus,” I said. “Just like that? Murder him?”

“We’ve got sixteen snipers with silenced scoped rifles here today,” Greeley said. “What did you think was going to happen?”

The woman who’d been pushing the wheelchair was joined by another agent, a man. They bent over Kinkaid and blocked him from my sight.

After a few minutes, the two agents beckoned Greeley over. He joined them.

A minute later Greeley turned to me. “Come here, Mr. Coyne. Have a look.”

I went over and looked. John Kinkaid—the man I’d known as
Phil Trapelo—was wearing a fishing vest under his khaki army jacket. The round stain at the base of his throat was crimson. The vest’s many pockets were stuffed and lumpy. Plastique and gunpowder and buckshot, I guessed. Strapped around the bottom of the vest at his waist was a belt of batteries linked with a patriotic snarl of red, white, and blue plastic-coated wires. Two strips of one-inch nails crisscrossed his chest like bandoliers.

“They disabled this rig, I hope,” I said.

Greeley nodded.

“So he was going to do it,” I said.

“He aimed to blow us up with him,” said Greeley. “He was coming right for the trailer.” He showed me what he was holding. It was a television remote similar to the ones I’d seen in the steel cabinet in Herb Croyden’s carriage house. “This was in his pocket. The way it works, you press the power button and hold it down to activate it. When you release the button …”

“Boom,” I said. “If he was holding the button down, even if you killed him, it would detonate. A dead-man’s switch.”

He nodded. “If we’d waited till he had this in his hand, it would’ve been too late.” He patted my shoulder. “Identifying him when you did and keeping him talking made all the difference.”

“I had no idea you’d just shoot him.”

Greeley turned to me and smiled quickly. “Did you have a better idea?”

“No,” I said. “I think that was quite a good idea.”

We went back into the trailer. I realized that “neutralizing” John Kinkaid—that was Martin Greeley’s word for shooting him in the throat—had not relaxed anybody. They all continued to proceed on the assumption that there were others out there wearing suicide bombs.

But they didn’t expect me to help identify them. I’d done what they hoped I’d do, and now my job was just to stay out of the way. So I leaned against the back wall and sipped coffee and watched the TV monitors as the techs and the agents worked the crowds with their hidden cameras.

The spectators saluted the flag, and Senator Kerry, himself a vet, gave a short speech, and the military band played a couple of patriotic marches, and the chairman of the Lexington Board of Selectmen read a proclamation from the governor, and the band played “America the Beautiful,” and then, not much more than an hour after it had started, the Lexington Veterans Day celebration was over. Clusters of spectators headed for their cars, and groups of vets in uniform shook hands with each other, and band members wandered away carrying their instruments.

Agent Greeley and his cameramen and techs kept scanning the people until the only ones left on the green were the town workers disassembling the scaffolding, and the electricians rolling up their wires and stowing their gear, and the vendors packing up their wares, and a few uniformed Lexington town cops.

Then Greeley touched my arm and we went outside. Agent Neal was waiting behind the trailer at his black van. He held the back door for me, and I climbed in. Greeley slid in beside me, Neal got behind the wheel, and we headed back to Boston.