Seven Grams of Lead (37 page)

It was a high-end disposable, the sort he sometimes
picked up for use with dicey sources. Its call log showed four calls placed to the lone contact listed, Bob, number 5 on the speed dial. Possibly a phone dedicated to the bomb, the calls having been made to test the connection. This information ought to be enough for the FBI to locate the weapon.

Finally, it was time to call the authorities for help. Thornton weighed the pros and cons of dialing Musseridge—the devil he knew—when the phone rang. Best not to answer it, he thought, until the caller ID appeared:
MALLERY
,
BERYL
.

He punched
ANSWER
. “Hello?”

“Hey, Russ,” she said.

“Where are you?”

“Listen, I finally found the guy I’ve been looking for, and I want you to leave the two of us alone here—”

What sounded like a robust slap was followed by the upending of furniture. Thornton’s blood froze.

A man’s voice came on the line. “Ask her a proof-of-life question.” Soft and gentle, not the rasp Thornton had imagined for Canning. But this was Canning. Mallery had said as much.

Thornton scrambled to think of a question only she could answer. He came up with
What was your first home?
The answer, a Volkswagen Kombi. But he recalled that that conversation had been recorded by Littlebird. Canning might well have techs at the ready with a searchable Littlebird database. Thornton needed something he’d learned after the devices had been removed. One came to mind, not his favorite,
but it would do. “According to your site’s metrics, how do we score as a couple?” he asked.

“Initially, in Nantucket, I calculated fifty,” she said. “Now, one hundred and ten.”

Although at this juncture Thornton had no business deriving satisfaction from her answer, he did.

Canning returned to the line. “Acceptable?”

“Couldn’t have been better,” Thornton said.

“Then I want the phone you’re now speaking on. In exchange you get her, alive.”

“Good,” Thornton said. Understatement. “Meet someplace public?”

Canning scoffed. “Like the Hirshhorn Museum?”

It was what Thornton had been thinking. He took it as a mandate to think faster. “What do you have in mind?”

“Unfortunately, since Hoagland is busy stonewalling the police, he won’t be able to die in a traffic accident. The flip side is you have his car, so you can come to us. I’ll text you directions. As you’ve surmised, I’ll know where you are at all times because I’m tracking the phone, which is also hot-miked.” Thornton understood this to mean that the mic within the cell phone’s mouthpiece transmitted constantly, whether or not a call was in process. It was a means of electronic eavesdropping almost as old as telephones.

“That’s how—one way how—I will know if you apprise anyone of what we’ve discussed,” Canning added. “In fact, if I even suspect anything …”

Thornton heard more rustling followed by Mallery’s
piercing scream, nearly costing him his grip on the phone. The blare of a car horn brought him to his senses. He returned the receiver to his ear to catch Canning saying, “Any hijinks, she gets two and a half grams of lead in her lovely head. Now, get moving, beginning with a right onto Independence.”

As Thornton cranked the Volvo, he noticed a police car pulling up at the Willard’s main entrance. He considered transmitting some kind of SOS to the policemen but decided he didn’t dare. Probably they were looking to arrest him.

Unfortunately, he thought, the disposable cell phone constituted his only means of stopping Canning. Assuming Canning killed him. And Canning would try—that was a given. He almost certainly planned to kill Mallery too, as well as E-bombing thousands of others.

On a phone
call designed to appear as if it originated at a sporting goods store in Kansas City, a man whose voice sounded very different from Canning’s conversed with a middle-aged woman at a customer support call center in Mumbai. In fact, while pacing the backyard of the safe house overlooking Chesapeake Bay, Canning spoke on a satphone, attempting to convince Izzat Ibrahim al-Hawrani to continue with the E-bomb operation. Although both of the Iraqi’s operatives in Washington had gone down, Canning maintained, success was imminent.

The problem, Canning knew, was that he himself had made several critical mistakes. In his rush this morning to traffic the remote detonator and capture Mallery, he’d left Mickey Rapada’s body in the
South Atlantic Resources office. The corpse could be erased once the E-bomb detonated, but without Rapada to service the dead drop, Canning had leaned on Hoagland—who was a cutout in the E-bomb op.
Was
, until Thornton filled him in. The banker wouldn’t dare talk to the FBI, but the Bureau might elicit actionable intel without his realizing it. Or one of his colleagues would say too much. And God only knew what Langlind had blabbed after Bridgetown went down. Meanwhile the mess in the Caribbean would bring in DOC Internal Affairs officers, with CIA and ODNI breathing down their necks. All the loose ends added up to a net about to ensnare him, Canning thought.

He glanced at the tall mast bobbing in and out of sight. He’d acquired the sailboat—rather than a motor-powered yacht that the E-bomb pulse would cripple—as part of his escape plan. He could still sail away now, but as a defeated and penniless fugitive. The most grievous error, he reflected, had been his failure to anticipate the need for a backup remote detonator, a simple matter of adding another ten-buck cell phone to the Centrex loop.

He admitted none of his mistakes to al-Hawrani. After all, things going wrong was to be expected, and Canning had planned accordingly. In a matter of minutes, his biggest loose end was about to hand deliver the remote detonator. The blogger was about to become a Ba’athist martyr.

There was little
late-afternoon traffic, a rarity in D.C. Thornton wondered if Canning was monitoring the grid and guiding the Volvo clear of congestion. Canning’s texts directed him onto Capitol Street, past the Nationals’ stadium, and across the Frederick Douglass Bridge. As an increasingly suburban Maryland flashed past, Thornton thought it curious that Canning hadn’t simply pulled a van into a parking space on 9th Street to make the “swap.” Possibly he preferred to meet at a location where he would be in complete control or, at least, minimize his chances of exposure. Or maybe this was just more misdirection. Maybe the text messages would loop Thornton back to 9th Street. Canning seemed to like deception. To a fault, Thornton reflected. If
Canning had shot Sokolov with an ordinary nine-millimeter round, as opposed to one cast from seven grams of lead on the nose, Thornton would have had no insight whatsoever into the incident. Peretti, in turn, wouldn’t have thought twice about the satellite image of Canning on a yacht. And Thornton would be spending this evening Web crawling in his apartment.

Another text sent him
EAST ON 260.
He’d never been to this area and didn’t know much about it, except that Route 260 was also known as Chesapeake Bay Road. Chesapeake Bay, the Atlantic inlet extending through Virginia and Maryland for 200 miles, couldn’t be far away. Because of its proximity, a forty-minute drive from downtown, many of Thornton’s Washington sources had weekend places here. It was likely, he thought, that he was headed to a safe house, bolstering his suspicion that Canning was alone with Mallery—as she’d said,
I want you to leave the two of us alone here.
Good, because Thornton’s plan depended on that.

The phone rattled in the center console with a new text.
RIGHT ON BAYSIDE RD IN .2 MI.

On Bayside, Thornton could see the water. The road more or less clung to the shore.

RIGHT ON HILL IN .3
, came another text.

Hill lived up to its name, rising gradually to a broad view of the bay. The street appeared to be split between weekend places and full-time residences,
half of the houses lifeless, the other half with raked yards and cars in the driveways.

.8 MORE MILES
, according to Canning. As the houses ended, the yards reverted to woods, and the paved road to one of dirt. A bumpy half mile further and a solitary saltbox cottage came into sight.

YES
, texted Canning.

Thornton’s fears were overtaken by a sense of mission. First he pressed the
VOLUME DOWN
button on the phone until the ringtone was muted. Next he used a thumbnail to pry open the air vent on the station wagon’s center console. Then he slid the phone into the duct, a compartment spacious enough to hold several phones. Finally he replaced the register. He’d learned this means of concealment from heroin smugglers—in reporting on the DEA’s attempts to thwart them.

He turned the Volvo up the dirt driveway. At the top, he parked with the driver’s side facing away from the cottage. The front door swung open, revealing Canning in a sleek black jogging suit, holding a fourteen-inch-long pistol. Thornton recognized it as an integrally sound-suppressed AWC .22LR, the Navy SEALs’ weapon of choice. Not only could the semiautomatic pistol fire with water in its barrel; water enhanced its sound suppression. SEALs had dubbed the gun “the Amphibian.” Hardly the garden-variety .22 Thornton had planned on. He would have to adapt.

“Good to see you, amigo.” Canning ushered him into the cottage. “Come on in and grab yourself a brewski.”

Thornton stepped into the living room. The minimal furnishing was meant to withstand sand and wet swimsuits.

“Where’s Beryl?” he asked.

Canning tapped the front door shut, his tight tracksuit revealing the dramatic expanse and cut of his muscles. “First things first: turn around, hands against the wall.”

Thornton submitted to a thorough pat down, which netted Canning the keys to Langlind’s Ford—Hoagland’s keys were still in the Volvo’s ignition, improving the slight chances of getting Mallery away from here.

“You’re supposed to have a good memory, Russ. What about the one thing you were supposed to bring?”

“Show me Beryl,” Thornton said.

With an eye roll, Canning produced his own phone, pressed
REDIAL
, and cocked an ear to the driveway. No ring was heard. Which was why Thornton had muted the disposable phone. Using a simple app on his own phone, Canning could still triangulate the disposable’s signal to bring him to within twenty-five feet of it. But unless he had a radio-frequency detector too, that meant a search area of 2,000 square feet. The car alone had myriad hiding places, which
was why customs officials relied on dogs. And Canning couldn’t be sure that the phone was in the car.

“I want to see her,” Thornton said.

“No problem.” Canning jerked Thornton around. “This way.”

Canning crossed the living room and opened the narrow broom closet door, revealing Mallery. She’d had to contort herself to fit in there—or Canning had contorted her. Probably the latter, as she was hog-tied, still in the orange jumpsuit, which emphasized a pallor unrelated to her terror. Blood soaked her right side and shimmered on the closet floor. A quart of it at least, maybe two.

“What happened?” Thornton asked, acting merely concerned, as though the sight weren’t horrific. A 120-pound woman had just four quarts of blood.

She said, “Nothing worse than I’ve had at the hair salon.”

“Let her go now,” Thornton told Canning. “I’ll go get the phone. That was my plan.”

“Don’t take this personally, Russ, but what if I let her go now, then you don’t get me the phone?”

Thornton had no immediate reply. He’d bet everything that Canning wouldn’t risk having to search for the detonator.

“I propose the following,” Canning said. “You get the phone. Then I untie and release Beryl. And then we do the basic Checkpoint Charlie exchange.”

Thornton almost believed him. “Let’s do it,” he
said, stepping toward the door. “Pick you up in a minute,” he added to Mallery.

Her reaction was lost as Canning tapped the closet door shut before following Thornton out of the house.

Outside, there wasn’t another soul in sight. Thornton hurried around the hood of the Volvo, opened the driver’s door, and slid into the seat so that his trench coat billowed out, concealing his actions from Canning.

Canning watched him from the tail of the seventeen-foot-long station wagon. Twenty-one feet away, Thornton estimated, as he flicked off the air vent register, withdrew the disposable cell phone with his left hand and, with his right, the Beretta Storm he’d acquired in the Willard Hotel parking garage. He backed out, using his body to keep the gun hidden from Canning. Then he whirled away from the car and, in the same motion, slung the phone as hard as he could at Canning’s head.

Thornton knew that if you throw an object at a man’s head, he has to sense the motion and process the information before he can move. His reaction will be either to catch the object, to duck, or to blink while turning his head away. Any of these reactions would create enough time for Thornton to aim and fire the Beretta, but not enough time for Canning to get safely out of harm’s way. Canning might reflexively return fire, but Thornton would already be in motion. In combat training, police fire at moving targets twenty-one
feet away, with only one in five shots hitting. Thornton took it for granted that Canning would be a better shot than the average cop. Also factoring into Thornton’s calculations, 90 percent of handgun wounds aren’t lethal if the blood loss is controlled; even 70 percent of head wounds from handguns are survivable. The Amphibian rated among the world’s most sophisticated and versatile firearms, but it fired relatively minuscule twenty-two-caliber rounds. In this case, its bullets were made of just thirty-eight grains of soft lead. Or, as Canning had revealed over the phone,
two and a half grams of lead.

Completely defying Thornton’s calculations, Canning allowed the cell phone to hit his jaw. His eyes remained locked on Thornton, even as the phone fell to the driveway. Then Canning fired the Amphibian, its integrally suppressed report no louder than a finger snap.

The simultaneous motions of Thornton pivoting, aiming the Beretta, and pulling its trigger shifted his torso to his right by six inches. So the twenty-two-caliber bullet that would have nailed his sternum instead struck him in the left clavicle—the break of bone was audible even over the roar of his Beretta. The “minuscule” soft lead round felt like a railroad spike pounded into him by Jack Armstrong. It knocked him off his feet, the motion causing his own blood to stripe the station wagon’s hood. Gravity exacerbated the flaring pain as he hit the driveway, his spine and
then his skull. The fender smacked the Beretta out of his hand.