The Collective (38 page)

“You’ve got me,” he said, voice so strong.

“I know. And I need you to get Jordan, too. He knows some of this already,” she said. “He’s probably freaking out right now. I tried calling but got his voice mail. Track him down, Ronnie. Tell him I need him.”

“I’ll grab him and meet you. What’s your ETA?”

She tried to read the signs flashing by outside. “Less than an hour. But that’s a guess.”

Ronnie rattled off directions to a Wendy’s just off 84 east of Hartford. Easy enough. The mere thought of seeing them—especially Jordan—lifted her spirits. If the people hunting her baby found them again before Cait could vanish with Leyla, she wanted to know she had backup she could rely on.

“If I get Jordan in the next few minutes, we can meet you there in two hours,” Ronnie said.

“Two hours. See you then,” Cait said. “And Ronnie? Come strapped.”

She hit
END
, but kept staring at the phone. More than anything, what she wanted was to know who she was up against, who wanted her baby. Lynch’s rant had indicted everyone but ninja assassins, though she figured he would get around to them eventually. She had to know what was true, how widespread this really was, and if there truly was no help to be found.

Sean had trusted Herc. The question wasn’t if she trusted Brian Herskowitz, but how much she trusted Sean. Making up her mind, Cait started to dial the Hot Line.

“I hope you’re right about this phone being harder to—”

Lynch shushed her, turning up the volume on the radio. When Cait heard her own name, she forgot to breathe.

“… instant debate over whether McCandless is a troubled
veteran who simply snapped or is actually working in conjunction with domestic terror groups. Police will say only that she is wanted for questioning related to two shooting deaths at her Medford apartment earlier tonight and that they would like to speak with her about her connections to domestic terror groups in Florida and the Midwest. A spokesman for Boston’s Channel 7, where Sergeant McCandless is employed, has said the station will release a statement shortly.

“Meanwhile, the one person who is speaking about Sergeant McCandless tonight is former Boston College football star Aaron Traynor, whom the media has dubbed ‘A-Train.’ McCandless reportedly stepped in on Saturday night when, police allege, Traynor became violent with his wife, Alina. Worse than the broken bones he suffered, A-Train has endured days of humiliation over the YouTube video of the fight and has threatened to sue McCandless.

“ ‘I hope they track her down and throw her in jail. I’ve got issues I gotta get under control, yeah. I’m in anger management classes, all right? Tryin’ to pick a rehab place right now, get the alcohol situation taken care of. But I ain’t no terrorist. I’m not out shootin’ folks.’ ”

Cait closed her eyes, sucking in a deep breath. People had tried to kill her and take her baby. Sean was dead, and they were calling her a terrorist. A-Train was whoring himself out to the media over beating the shit out of his wife and getting his ass kicked by a girl.

“Turn it down,” she said.

Lynch obliged, but the radio voice droned on.

“Photos of McCandless are available on our website, along with the number for the police tip line—”

“Turn it off!”

He did. She clutched the phone in her hand and turned to gaze out the window. In the green glow of the dashboard she could see her face reflected in the glass, expressionless, bereft of all emotion.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered.

She pressed her forehead against the glass, not bothering to try to wipe away the tear that slipped down her cheek, tasting
the salt on her lips. With the hum of the engine and the hiss of the A/C, she could not hear Leyla breathing. She wished the baby would wake up, would cry, wished the morning would come and she could get out of this damned car and hold her little girl in her arms and feel the summer sun on her skin.

But where could she do such a thing, now that the whole country would recognize her face and think they were seeing a monster?

“Caitlin?” Lynch ventured.

“Drive,” she rasped. “Just drive.”

A rap on the glass made Herc jerk upright behind the wheel of his Camry. He tried flinching away from the window but was held in place by his seat belt. A figure loomed outside the car and it took a moment before he realized it was Terry Stanovitch.

“Christ!” Herc wheezed.

Hunched over, Stanovitch raised his fist to bang on the glass again. Pulse thudding in his temples, Herc cracked the door open.

“Get in, for fuck’s sake. You scared the piss out of me.”

“What are you, paranoid?” Stanovitch said, nervous irony draining the blood from his face. He glanced about, then skittered around the front of the car and slid into the passenger seat.

“You’re a funny guy,” Herc said.

Stanovitch pulled the door shut and both of them stared at the light above the rearview mirror, waiting for it to go dim and bathe them in the privacy of darkness.

“Nothing about this is funny,” Stanovitch told him.

Terry had blue eyes and orange hair and freckles he inherited
from his Irish mother. Not very inconspicuous for a CIA operative, Herc had always thought. But it just showed how little he really knew about the business he worked in. He gathered intelligence via satellite photography, but in truth he knew almost nothing about real espionage. Despite his friendship with Sean, how it all really worked remained a mystery to him. The number one thing Sean McCandless had taught him was that he didn’t really want to know more than he already did. And if he had ever needed to be reminded of that, Sean’s death had done the trick.

“What’ve you got?” Herc asked.

Stanovitch glanced around as though tempted to search Herc and the car for a wire.

“Come on!”

“Relax,” Stanovitch said. “I’m here. Be grateful for that. I almost didn’t come.”

Anger surged up inside Herc. “What, you think you’re doing me a favor? He was your friend, Terry. Saved your life once, and your career more than once. You told me that yourself, because Sean had too much class to ever mention it.”

Stanovitch nodded. “Yeah, I know. And now Sean’s dead and nobody—and I mean nobody—knows who took him out—”

“Somebody knows, because somebody did it,” Herc snapped.

Eyes narrowed, Stanovitch glared at him. “No shit. Don’t be a prick, Brian. You know what I’m saying.”

Herc wanted to hit him, scream at him, but he knew it was just helplessness gnawing at him. He slapped the steering wheel and swore.

“I can’t believe he’s fucking dead.”

That sobered Stanovitch. “He was one of a kind.”

Herc stared at him, chewing his lower lip, contemplating. “Maybe not.”

“You’re talking about the sister?”

“Her name’s Caitlin. Her baby daughter’s name is Leyla. Sean talked about them constantly. You should remember.”

“I do—”

“Their names, Terry. You should remember their names. Look, maybe Cait McCandless isn’t the person her brother was, maybe she doesn’t have his courage or his smarts or his
loyalty—but maybe she does. We don’t know. All we know is that Sean loved her and that baby more than anything else in the world, and he made me promise I would look out for them if anything ever happened to him. And now it has. So you need to tell me, man, what the fuck is going on up in Boston? Who posted a watch on Sean’s aunt and uncle? Who tried to take the baby? Whatever you know, you’ve gotta tell me. You don’t want to go all in, take care of this for Sean, that’s up to you. You’ve got to sleep at night. But at the very least, you’ve gotta give me this.”

Stanovitch stared at him, sort of twitchy, mouth working as he turned his palms up, like he hoped the right words would fall into them.

“What … I mean, did you think we were going to be like Butch and Sundance, going out in a blaze of glory? Because those are the odds,” Stanovitch said.

Herc felt queasy. “No. Not at all. I’m not some action hero. I don’t want to expose anything or even get in anybody’s way. I just want to do what I promised and take care of Sean’s sister and her baby.”

“What if doing that leads to the other?” Stanovitch asked.

The question made Herc flinch. He hesitated, then shook his head to clear it of any doubt.

“Just tell me what you know. The rest isn’t your problem.”

Stanovitch took a deep breath. “Fine,” he said, letting it out. “You wanted to know who’s got the juice to blank those plates, right? I got your answer. But there’s another question you should be asking.” He glanced out the window again, as though afraid they were being watched.

“Which is?”

“Who owns the car?”

Monteforte drove without mercy, hitting the siren anytime some idiot on a cell phone didn’t notice the dome light flashing in the rearview mirror. Rachael Voss liked her for that. The white box van had more under the hood than Voss would have believed without seeing it, but they could easily have caught up. Instead, they all agreed to keep a short distance behind. They didn’t just want one truck and the armed soldiers it carried, they wanted both trucks and the person to whom the bodies were being delivered.

They had passed a state police patrol car, necessitating a quick radio exchange between Monteforte and her dispatcher, so now the state trooper roared along behind them on the way to the airport.

“We just came from the damn airport,” Voss said, though mostly to herself.

Turcotte sat in the backseat, churning through cell phone minutes. He’d been on with Chang at first, snapping orders, making sure the local P.D. would be guarding the crime scene now that all the techs, investigators, and FBI were leaving. Once the police cordons were removed, the press would be swarming the place. It would remain an FBI investigation with Coogan in charge of the scene, but the Medford cops would keep the press behind the yellow tape, at least for tonight.

Now, as Monteforte concentrated on the road and Voss and Josh listened, Turcotte had moved on to his second call—to his boss. Voss noted the number of times Turcotte said “sir,” and she wondered if he had always been that deferential or if this was a special case. The call lasted three or four minutes, and only ended because they went into the tunnel and Turcotte lost his cell signal.

“So?” Voss asked, turning to look into the backseat.

Turcotte’s jaw was set, like he wanted to throw a punch. Then he uttered a short laugh of disbelief. “So he knew. He’d signed off on it.”

“Without telling you?” Josh asked.

Voss heard the surprise and dismay in his voice and she shared those feelings. In the years that she had spent with the FBI, she had dealt with a lot of politics, a lot of shell games, but none of her superiors had ever pulled the rug out from under her the way Turcotte’s boss had just done.

“It gets better,” Turcotte said. “He’s the one who issued that BOLO identifying McCandless as a terror suspect.”

“For Christ’s sake!” Josh said.

“Sounds like someone’s got an agenda here that isn’t about solving this case,” Monteforte said.

The temperature in the car dropped twenty degrees. They all fell silent, staring at her. The engine roared and blue lights from the state police car behind them filled the interior of the Camry. Nobody wanted to respond.

“What was his excuse?” Josh asked at last.

“Wait,” Voss said, before Turcotte could reply. “First up, who are we talking about here? This is Julius Andelman?”

Turcotte’s face looked carved from granite. “Not for a while. Dwight Hollenbach. He’s SSAC of CTD Ops II.”

“All right,” Voss went on. “So what did he say? Why is SOCOM operating on U.S. soil? Why did he let Arsenault take the vics from the scene? Where the hell are they going?”

For the first time she saw the tic at the corner of Turcotte’s left eye. He reached up and ran a hand across his stubbled head.

“He told me that was not my concern—”

“It’s your case!” Josh said.

“—and that I should focus on finding McCandless and her accomplice.”

Voss scowled. “He used that word?
Accomplice?
”

“He did.” Turcotte continued, “As for why the bodies were removed, SSAC Hollenbach informed me, ‘Nobody wants the public seeing all of those body bags, or getting any ideas
about who might be in them.’ His superiors apparently decided this was the best way to keep the media in the dark.”