The Escape (30 page)

“Meaning she kept you and your sister from talking to anyone?”

“Pretty much, yeah. And the cops were convinced it was just a hit-and-run. They weren’t looking beyond that.”

“I’ve actually spoken to your mother. She intimated that she thought it might have been connected to one of your dad’s cases.”

“Did she tell you that she had called him that night?”

“No, she somehow left that out.”

“Well, then?”

“I take it you don’t get along with her?”

“No, I don’t. Even if this hadn’t happened with my father, my mother is not the warm fuzzy type. She had her kids but I don’t think she had any interest in actually being a mother. I was a lot closer to my dad. And after he died my grandmother pretty much raised us, not her. So now I have nothing to do with my mother. And she seems perfectly fine with that.”

“Does she know you suspect her?”

“I’ve never mentioned it to her. She scares the shit out of me if you want to know the truth.”

“I think that’s a good thing, actually. I meant the not mentioning part.”

“I truly wouldn’t put anything past her.”

“If she did have a role in his death, do you think it was for the money?”

Dan shrugged. “I would hear my dad sometimes in his little den after he’d been hitting the booze a bit.”

“What would he say?”

“He had really bad arguments with my mother about things. And when she wasn’t around, he would go to his den and talk to himself.”

“And say what exactly?”

“I just caught snatches here and there. And he didn’t seem to be making much sense. But it seemed he had a problem with my mother and what she was doing in her job.”

“And do you know what that was?”

“I know she spent a lot of time in Russia.”

“As part of a START verification team?”

“I think that’s right, yeah. At least I found out about that later. She never talked to me about her work.”

“Why would that bother him? She was helping to dismantle nukes.”

“It didn’t seem like he had a problem with that. I think it was more personal.”

“Meaning someone she worked with?”

“All I know is I heard my dad once say he’d kill the guy if he had the chance.”

“Kill the guy?”

“Yeah. And my dad was a pretty calm person. I don’t know what he found or heard, but he was definitely pissed off about it.”

“What does your sister think?”

“She was closer to our mom than I ever was. She wouldn’t agree with anything I’ve been saying. They see each other a lot. They’re tight. My mom has even helped my sister out financially.”

“Where does she live?”

“In Gaithersburg, Maryland. She has a clothing store up there.”

“She do well with it?”

“She does okay. Like I said, I know Mom helps her out financially.”

“Does that surprise you? I mean, given what you’ve told me about your mother?”

Dan shrugged. “My sister won’t bite the hand that feeds her. So she tells the woman what she wants to hear. But to give our mother her due, if she loves anyone, it would be my sister.”

Puller wrote some notes down and said, “She told me about making the Olympic team in the biathlon. She said she might have won the gold.”

“Did she tell you she didn’t compete?”

“Yeah, some sort of medical issue.”

Dan laughed.

“What’s the joke?” asked Puller.

“
I
was the medical issue.”

“Come again?”

“She was pregnant with me. They wouldn’t let her compete.”

“Was she upset about that?”

“She was so upset about it that she never mentioned it. I only found out from my dad.”

“Hey, it takes two to tango. She knew what she was doing.”

“My dad said she claimed he messed with her birth control pills.”

“Did he?”

“Who knows? If she wanted to win a medal in the Olympics she knew she couldn’t do it while heavily pregnant. Maybe my dad did do it. She was so controlling. Maybe he wanted to give her a taste of her own medicine. And it might be one reason she never really took to me. I guess I represented her missed opportunity at glory.”

“It may or may not have been someone’s fault, Dan, but it sure as hell wasn’t yours. You weren’t even born.”

“Sounds logical. But some people are not swayed by logic.”

They sat in silence drinking their coffees.

Puller finally said, “I’m surprised you’ve talked to me about all this.”

Dan gave a mirthless laugh. “I guess I surprised myself. But when you called out of the blue, I thought, well I just thought—”

“That the truth might come out and justice would be finally served for your father?”

The two men locked gazes. Dan said, “After all, it’s why I joined the FBI’s legal office. And I really loved my dad.”

“Well, I hope I can make that happen for you,” Puller said.

And for my brother
, he thought.

He thanked Dan Reynolds and headed back to his car. Before he got there his phone buzzed. It was Knox.

“I was wondering when I was going to hear from you,” he said. He listened for a bit and said, “Shirlington, huh? Okay, it was definitely worth a shot. Why don’t you stay with them and we can hook back up later.” He paused, listening, but she broke off in midsentence. His features grew tight. He said, “Knox? Knox?”

He heard her yelling something, not at him, at someone else.

When he heard her words he started to run.

The next sound he heard made Puller redouble his efforts. As he ran full out to his car he screamed into his phone. “Knox? Veronica!”

She never answered.

And then the line went dead.

K
NOX HAD BEEN
sitting in a car she had requisitioned from INSCOM at Fort Belvoir. While she had told Puller that she needed to report in and start filling out voluminous paperwork, her real purpose was to stay behind and then follow Donovan Carter when he left the facility.

He had a black Town Car and a driver. And Knox could see the man accompanying him.

It was Blair Sullivan, the internal security man who had gotten so heated about their investigation of Susan Reynolds.

As they exited out of the DTRA complex, Knox fell in behind them. They got on Interstate 95 and Knox kept a few car lengths back. They exited onto Interstate 395 and headed north toward D.C.

Knox had no idea if this would lead to anything, but there was a chance and she felt she had to take it. She had nothing to lose. They exited at Shirlington and she followed. A few minutes later the car pulled to a stop in front of a small outdoor mall of upscale eateries and shops. The driver parked the Town Car, and Carter and Sullivan went into one of the restaurants.

“Great,” said Knox out loud to herself. “An early dinner. Just my luck. And I can’t go in because unless they suddenly go blind, they’re going to see me.”

She backed into an open space across the street and waited. She listened to the radio and answered emails but continually kept her gaze roaming over the street. She was drumming her fingers on the steering wheel when a white van pulled in next to where the Town Car was parked. A burly guy opened the passenger door and in doing so clipped the side of the Town Car.

The window of the Town Car came down and Carter’s driver stuck his head out. Knox could hear him yelling at the guy. The guy yelled back.

The driver got out and the two men stood toe to toe, still yelling and jabbing fingers in each other’s chests.

Knox was hoping this was not going to escalate into something bad, because she was pretty sure the driver was armed. Her gaze drifted to a teenager rolling down the sidewalk on a skateboard. He had long curly hair, a ball cap turned backward, and was wearing a bulky hoodie, jeans torn at the knee and thigh and sneakers the size of small dogs with no shoelaces. He was riding low, and then he attempted a complicated jump and fell on his ass right next to the Town Car, disappearing from her line of sight.

Knox’s gaze drifted back to the two men. They were still arguing, only now Carter’s man was showing his creds to the burly guy. She hoped that would put an end to the confrontation.

Knox shifted back to the kid, who was rising up next to the Town Car. He dusted off his pants and looked sheepishly around as he gripped his board.

Not such a hotshot on the board
, thought Knox.

As he dropped his board, stepped on it, and pushed off he passed by the two men. Then he gathered speed, turned the corner in a tight curve, and was gone from her view.

The burly guy climbed back into the van, still scowling and yelling, and the van reversed out of the space just as the restaurant’s door opened and Carter and Sullivan emerged. His driver yelled one more thing at the van as it pulled away, honking its horn. The driver turned and saw Carter and Sullivan and hurried to open the car door for the DTRA head.

Knox pulled out her phone and called Puller. He answered on the second ring.

She told him what she was doing, and also where she was. He replied to her information in a few succinct sentences.

“Roger that,” she said. “But I think that—”

As if someone had pushed a secret button in her brain, Knox started to piece together what she had just seen.

No, not what she had just seen.

What had really just
happened
.

She heard Puller say, “Knox? Knox?”

She didn’t even hear him. What she had just seen was a diversion.

The guy in the van bumping the Town Car on purpose.

A kid who wasn’t a kid sailing by on a skateboard while the driver was distracted by the van guy.

Then a planned fall that allowed the kid access underneath the Town Car out of sight of anyone.

Then the kid had disappeared.

As if on cue the burly guy had given up on the confrontation and the van had raced off.

She snapped back from these thoughts and saw that Sullivan and Carter were in the car.

The driver started it up.

Still holding the phone, Knox kicked open her car door, leapt out, and started to sprint across the street.

“Get out of the car!” she screamed. “Get out of the car! There’s a—”

The ground moved violently under her feet, the pavement seemed to whipsaw like a snake on crack. Everything took on the elements of a world reduced to slow motion. She staggered, braced herself for what she knew was coming and could do absolutely nothing about. Visions of Mosul came roaring vividly back to her. Sitting in an armored Humvee one second. Lying far away in the dirt another second later and having no idea how she had gotten there, not knowing whether people were alive or dead, whether she would die here too. Whether her legs would ever function again.

All of this took a millionth of a second to pass through her mind. And that was good, because even with that, she was out of time.

She had looked away at the last moment, and it was a good thing she did. Looking directly at an explosion of sufficient magnitude could blind a person. But it didn’t really matter. People close enough to be blinded by such a flash didn’t usually live anyway.

Her last conscious thought was a surprising one to her.

Sorry, Puller. It’s up to you now.

The concussive force of the explosion lifted her right out of her shoes, throwing her twenty feet through the air like a pellet from a slingshot, until she smashed against the plate glass window of a linen shop. She managed to cover her head with her hands right before impact as her phone flew from her, landed in the street, and broke apart. Knox ended up on the floor of the shop in a heap of limbs.

The Town Car had been obliterated. What was left of the three men inside was no longer recognizable. The explosion had shattered windows up and down the street. People were lying on the sidewalks, bloodied, battered, unconscious, and some of them would never be waking up.

Others were moaning, groaning, and staggering around. Some were in shock, others badly injured, and others, though unhurt, could only stare in horror at what had happened.

It was like a street in Baghdad or Kabul, not an affluent area a few miles from Washington, D.C.

Car alarms triggered by the blast were going off up and down the street. People were running now, some toward the blast site, others away from it, no doubt terrified that more explosions were going to take place. A police officer who had been pulling security guard duty in a jewelry shop did his best to help the injured and direct people to a safer area.

Inside the linen shop Knox was lying facedown on the floor in a pile of glass shards, covered with sheets and pillows that she had crashed into after cracking through the window. Her eyes were closed, her breathing was tight and shallow, and the blood was flowing down her face.

In another minute the sirens started to wail, people started to scream louder, survivors tried to help the injured and the dying. Then there were the dead. They had come here for a meal, or to do some shopping or run an errand, unaware that it would be the last time they would ever do any of those things.

Inside the shop, Veronica Knox didn’t move. The blood just continued to flow down her face.

W
HEN VERONICA KNOX
opened her eyes the first thing she saw was a blindingly white light.

That convinced her that she was truly dead. And that somehow, despite having committed a mortal and venal sin or two, she had ended up up rather than down, ecclesiastically speaking.

It’s a bloody miracle
, she thought. And she was being literal about that.

The second thing she saw were transparent tubes running into her right arm.

That drove the ecclesiastical element and the thought of miracles forcefully from her head.

The third thing she saw was John Puller hovering over her.

That brought her fully back to earth. And life.

She saw him breathe a sigh of relief, and then he flicked his finger against his eye as though to rub something away.

A tear
, her groggy mind thought. But no, men like John Puller did not shed tears. If they did shed anything, it would be blood, not water.

She tried to sit up, but he put a big hand on her shoulder and held her right where she was.

“Just chill, Knox. You took a big hit. Doc says it’s a miracle you’re still here.”

She suddenly looked wildly down at her body. “Am I here? Am I
all
here?”

He gripped her shoulder tighter to calm her. “Two arms with hands attached, though two fingers on your left hand are broken, hence the splints. You have two legs with feet attached. One head with brain intact, though concussed. And a lot of superficial cuts to your scalp, arms, and legs, hence the bandages. And enough blood loss that they had to give you a replacement bag.”

“But can I move everything?”

“See for yourself.”

She tentatively moved first her right and then her left arm, and then wiggled her fingers, even the ones with splints on them. Drawing a deep breath, she looked down at her legs.

Puller saw tears cluster in her eyes and knew she was thinking back to the Middle East when her legs had not worked. He slipped the sheet up a bit, revealing her feet. He squeezed one of her toes. “Feel that?”

She nodded.

“Now wiggle your toes.”

She swallowed, prepared herself, and did so. She felt them, saw them, and sank back on her pillow with a grateful, “Thank you, God.”

He put the sheet back over her feet. “Legs are just fine, Knox. With that said, you were lucky as hell.”

“I remember flying through…glass,” she said slowly and groggily.

“You picked the right store to fly into. A linen shop. You hit the glass, which was hard. But you fell into a display of comforters and very soft pillows. Sort of cushioned everything.”

“And Carter?” she mumbled.

He shook his head and said grimly, “Didn’t make it. Neither did Sullivan or the driver. Nothing much left of any of them.”

“How long have I been here?”

“They brought you in last evening. It’s now late afternoon.”

“I suppose people want to question me?”

“They do. But I got permission to come in here and sit with you until you came around. The cops and the Feds are all over the crime scene. Lots of people saw things. They’ve got lots of statements.”

“But I bet they don’t know what
I
saw.”

Puller sat down in a chair next to her bed. “So why don’t you tell me what that was?”

Knox glanced at the glass door to her room and saw a police officer, a man in a suit, and a burly MP standing guard there.

“They’re not taking any chances with you,” he said, following her gaze. “Cops, FBI, and the military.”

She turned back to Puller and slowly but clearly told him what she had seen. The van, the kid, everything.

“So it was a deliberate setup the whole way,” Puller concluded.

“It appeared to be. But why target Carter?”

“Well, he heads up an important part of our nation’s defenses. He’s a target just by virtue of that.”

“No, I get that. I’m just looking at the timing. Why now?”

“You mean is it connected to what we’re doing?”

“It could be.”

He looked her over. “You up for some information sharing?”

She smiled and slid her hand around his forearm. “With you here I’m up for anything.”

Puller placed his hand on top of hers. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you when this happened, Knox. I should’ve been.”

“You had no way to know I was going off half-cocked on my little sleuthing trip.”

“You tried to save them. Over the phone I heard you screaming for them to get out of the car.”

She shook her head, looked miserable, and put a hand to her face. She let out a sob, her eyes filled with tears, and she moaned, “I didn’t see it fast enough, Puller. I should’ve seen it faster, but I didn’t.”

“You did everything you possibly could. You had seconds, maybe not even seconds. No matter what you did or didn’t do, Knox, they weren’t going to make it. They were already dead. They just didn’t know it. So while you may want to take the blame for it, please don’t. It won’t help you or them.”

She let out another sob, composed herself, rubbed her eyes dry with her sheet, and focused on him. “I guess that was the weirdest phone call you’ve ever gotten, huh?”

Puller looked down. “When I heard the bomb detonate over your open line—”

She reached out and cupped his chin, drawing his gaze back to her. “I’m here, Puller. A little banged up and bloodied. But I’m not dead. Let’s count that as a victory.”

He smiled. “I count it as a lot more than that.”

Their gazes held on one another for a few more moments and then Puller reverted to business mode.

“I spoke to an FBI agent who remembered Adam Reynolds, Susan’s husband.”

“The hit-and-run?” she said.

“Maybe, maybe not.”

He went on to tell her about the rest of his conversation with the agent and then his subsequent meeting with Susan Reynolds’s son, Dan.

That part made Knox try to sit up again, and again, Puller held her back down.

“I know,” he said. “I know. She really is a piece of work.”

“That witch gets her husband killed for some reason. Another man? That’s what Adam Reynolds thought?”

“Apparently so. And she was working in the former Soviet Union.”

“Do we know exactly where?”

“Working on it. But it had to do with the START verification program. She told us that herself.”

“Nuke dismantling.”

“Right. And she works at the WMD Center now,” Puller reminded her.

Again, Knox tried to sit up, and this time he helped her, adjusting the bed control to support her.

“So is that what this is all about? WMDs?”

“Maybe it is
now
. If she’s a spy then she’s probably covered a lot of territory over the years. WMDs may be the latest on her checklist. But the positions she’s held have given her access to lots of valuable information that our enemies would pay a pretty penny for.”

“And she just stares at you like you’re an idiot for even hinting that she might be involved in something shady.”

“If she’s been doing this as long as I think she has, her poker face has to be exemplary. And by the way her financial history was conceived and hardened, I’m thinking she was seen as a high-level, long-term asset.” He added, “I have to believe the two-million-dollar insurance policy was her idea, not her husband’s.”

“I need to get out of here, Puller. We need to get back to work.”

“Whoa. You need rest. And you need time to heal.”

“I don’t have time to do either. That can wait.”

“No, it can’t wait.”

She tried to get up and he pushed her back down. On the third time she said, “Damn it, John Puller, if I had a gun I’d shoot your ass.”

“Well, good thing you don’t have a gun, then.”

She stopped struggling, lay back, and let out a long, resigned sigh. “Okay, so when can I get the hell out of here?”

“I’ll check with the docs, but probably within twenty-four hours. And after that, bed rest.”

“Shit!”

“It is what it is, Knox.”

“And what are you going to do in the meantime?”

“Follow up on all this.”

“Without me?” she said, stunned by this prospect.

“I will keep you informed of everything, I promise.”

“And you won’t get killed?” She said this in a joking manner, but there was no humor in her look. “I almost bought it, Puller. One more step, one more second, no soft pillows at the end of the runway, I’m not here.”

“I know that.”

“No, maybe you don’t know that.” She reached up and gathered a fistful of his shirt. “Don’t die. Just…don’t.”

“Okay. I won’t.”

She slowly let his shirt go and sank back, breathless.

“I’ll check in later.”

“Yep,” she said, not looking at him.

Puller walked out. He had told Knox everything he knew. Now he had to tell someone else.

His brother.

No code.

Face-to-face.