Edge of Black (7 page)

Chapter 11

Sam’s expression moved from confusion to incredulity in a matter of seconds.

“You’ve got to be kidding. Are you talking like...what, a militia?”

“No. Well, sure, some of them. It’s like any group of people, there’re bad seeds mixed in with the good and innocent. There are militias spread all across the country, homegrown groups who like to think they’re the law, parade around in uniforms, ragtag batches of locals who spew nonsense and are basically harmless. But there are groups who are dead serious, people you wouldn’t want to cross. The government keeps a damn close eye on them. And some of them are idiots, people who are just wrong in the head and can’t be fixed. Skinheads, those kinds of yahoos.”

“Ruby Ridge?”

“Right. But the people I’m talking about—no, they’re not militia. Just concerned private citizens who have shared their knowledge of survival to help like-minded individuals prepare in case there’s a catastrophic event. Anything from a nuclear bomb to economic collapse to a tornado.”

She noticed he didn’t say flood, though that would certainly qualify.

“They’re good people, just trying to figure out where we’re headed, and what to do in case something awful happens.”

Sam raised an eyebrow. Sometimes she forgot that they came from very, very different worlds. She was a debutante from Nashville, a good little Southern girl, raised on manners and money and all things genteel, and he was a soldier who’d been raised by hippies, seen too much and had a healthy mistrust of the government.

He must have caught her thought, because he continued. “Okay, this isn’t something that you and I have talked a lot about. It’s hard to understand, but there are people out there who think things are going to hell in a handbasket, and are trying to make preparations in case it does. They’re harmless, and smart. They’re like pioneers, able to grow food and build shelter and live off the land and, most importantly, defend themselves if it’s needed.”

“Like you.”

He smiled.

“Like me. Many of them are ex-military, of all generations. You know many of us don’t fit back into the world anymore, Sam. What we’ve seen, what we’ve done, civilians can’t necessarily comprehend. It’s only natural that some of us fall back on our training, and want to be prepared. Just in case, you know? When, or if, the shit hits the fan, you’re going to want us on your side, if you get my drift.”

“I follow.”

“Okay. So this one group that I check in on from time to time lit up last night. Like they knew something was about to go down. Chatter.”

“And the feds didn’t see it?”

“Trust me, there are no feds in this group. It is very private.”

“There’s no privacy online. You’ve told me that a million times.”

“And that’s true. But even if they do know about it, they can’t get in.”

“My God, Xander, if these friends of yours were talking about an imminent attack, why didn’t you do anything? Say anything?”

She’d said the wrong thing. He closed up tight as a drum. Slammed the laptop closed and stalked from the room. He went to the bedroom, started gathering his things.

She followed. “Xander, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. This isn’t your fault. None of it is your fault.”

He kept his back turned. “You don’t get it. I’m not mad at you, I’m mad at myself. I
should
have said something. Maybe if I had, it wouldn’t have happened. Instead, I couldn’t sleep, and finally ended up leaving Thor with Bryan at the Forest Ranger station and heading down to the city. I must have just missed you this morning, but by then it was too late. The attack had already occurred.”

She took the bag and his semi-folded shirt from his hands and set them gently on the bed.

“Hey. I’m sorry. I’m exhausted, and that came out wrong.”

He was silent for a moment, then shrugged. “Accepted. There was nothing specific anyway, just a couple of guys talking about this dude they knew who had recently joined up, and was flapping his gums. It just felt...wrong to me.”

“All right. So let’s call Fletcher and let him know.”

“It’s too late.”

“It’s not. He can get a subpoena, go after their records—”

“Seriously, it’s too late. The site’s dark.”

“Dark?”

“Gone. The owners took it down. It’s like it never existed.”

Sam wasn’t a computer expert, but she knew that it was virtually impossible to get rid of every footprint on the internet. Caches existed of material. It could be accessed. Someone talented enough could get in there and find it. She told Xander that. He shook his head.

“You don’t understand. The group doesn’t exist. The site
doesn’t exist
. It was a closed portal on another site’s network, accessible only to certain people who knew certain ways to get into it, and then had the proper passwords. They’ve erased everything.”

He sat on the edge of the bed, looking despondent.

“You know who they are, though, don’t you?”

He was quiet for a moment.

“I know their internet handles. I’ve been looking for them since you left. I’ve trolled every site I can think of, and a few that I had no idea existed. They’ve gone gray.”

“What’s that mean?”

“They’re hiding in plain sight, where no one will be able to find them until this thing is over. They’ll lay low and wait until the time is right to resurface. They can’t take the chance that they’ll be strung up in this mess.”

Sam’s pulse increased. “Until this is over...you mean he’s not through? Whoever did the Metro attack?”

“Not by a long shot.”

“Xander. There’s no choice here. We have to tell Fletcher. Right now. He’s been added to the Joint Terrorism Task Force. He’ll know what to do.”

His answer was very pointed. “
I
know what to do.”

“You just said you’ve been searching for them all afternoon with no luck. Let Fletch and the JTTF take it from here. This is too much for just you. You’re brilliant and talented and, given the right amount of time, I have no doubt you could find them. But, Xander, people are dead. More may die. It’s bigger than you, or me, or a group of like-minded individuals on the internet. We need every available resource on this. If they know who this is, or what he might do next, they must be found.”

“Fletcher won’t find them. He has no idea what he’s up against.”

Sam knelt before him, took his face in her hands.

“We have to let him try. Okay?”

Xander hesitated a minute, then nodded. “Okay. But you better get a guarantee out of him first.”

“A guarantee of what?”

“That he doesn’t come roaring in here and arrest my lily-white ass.”

“He wouldn’t.”

“Fletcher might not. But the feds? They don’t exactly stop to ask questions. Shoot first, that’s what they’re taught.”

“You mean that metaphorically, don’t you?”

He gave her an exceptionally oblique look that again reminded her just how different they really were.

“If that lets you sleep at night, darlin’, have at it.”

Chapter 12

Washington, D.
C.
Detective Darren Fletcher

Fletcher needed sleep. He needed it in the worst way. He wasn’t young anymore, couldn’t pull these forty-hour-on shifts like he could when he was a rookie. At some point, his brain just plain shut down, and there was nothing that could be done for it until he closed his eyes and recharged.

But the JTTF was expecting him, and his city was under siege. Sleep wasn’t an option.

He fueled up at the 7-Eleven on the corner of 24th and New Hampshire Avenue, an extra-large black coffee, and headed to the address he’d been given.

He rolled up on the JTTF at just past one in the morning. Nineteen hours post-attack, and the investigation was in high gear.

The people inside the offices weren’t dragging, that was for sure. They were chipper and rushing about and calling out factoids over their impressively toned shoulders. He hoped that somewhere in here was someone his age. Someone who didn’t get their information from Twitter and could speak in complete sentences without using “like” or “really” every three words.

Now, Fletch. You’re being unkind. If the kids are part of the JTTF it’s because they’re damn good at their jobs, and nothing else should matter.

He was getting old. Old at forty-two. Old and broken down and lacking faith in humanity.

A young woman in bulky glasses, with blond hair clipped high in a ponytail and a trim black-skirted suit paired with fantastically high heels, met him at the front desk. She didn’t smile, but her face lit up when she saw him come in the door.

“You must be Detective Fletcher. I’m Inez Crow. I’ll be your assistant while you’re on the JTTF.” She started him walking toward a steel door. “As you can see, we’ve got a lot going on. There’s too much paper for you to handle by yourself, so I’ll be dealing with as much as I can for you. Anything you need, you call me.” She handed him a slim mobile phone. “All my numbers are already programmed. I hope you’ll take advantage, I’m pretty good at this.”

She’d managed the whole speech without a breath.

Fletcher followed her through the door, which she unlocked with a thumb on a fingerprint scanner, then a series of numbers and letters on the keypad. Decent security, but he would expect nothing less.

“So what’s your story, Inez? How’d you get to be an assistant to a scrub like me? Punishment?”

She gave him a look of sheer incredulity. “Hardly. B.A. in criminal justice from Princeton, graduate school in Bern, Switzerland, in International Affairs, two years at Interpol, went through the FBI Academy last year and I’m just finishing my Ph.D. in forensic psychology at Harvard. I asked to be assigned to you so I could make sure you could get up to speed quickly and make sure you don’t step on your own feet, which you’ve already managed to do and you haven’t been here for five minutes, which isn’t a record, but damn close to it, and that tells me I made the right call. In a few months you’d have to call me Dr. Crow. In the meantime, I’ll settle for Inez, and a bit of respect.”

She stepped off again, back straight, walking briskly, and he took a deep breath and slurped back some coffee and followed. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Inez Crow had more qualifications than he did to be on the JTTF, yet she was working for him.

When he caught up to her, he said, “No offense meant, Inez. Just trying to get to know you.”

“I understand, sir. These things happen. This is your desk. And that is mine.”

There was a bit of privacy to the setup—they were in a corner, and not in the main flight path through the room. The desks were in a U, there was a window overlooking the lights of the Capitol, and the coatrack hid them from the main foot traffic area.

“You pick this spot?” he asked.

“I did.”

“Well done.”

“I know. We’ll want some privacy, and it’s quieter here.” She smiled, a thousand watts of bright white teeth, the front two slightly crooked, and he forced himself to check his libido. She was young enough to be his daughter, assuming she was as gifted as she sounded and had been conferred her degrees a bit earlier than was the norm, and that wasn’t right. But man, the girl was a looker. She had that sexy librarian thing going on.

“So what’s first?”

The smile disappeared, replaced by Inez’s usual rapid-fire demeanor.

“Agent Bianco would like to meet with you.”

“And who, pray tell, is he?”

“Bianco is a she, and she’s your boss for the foreseeable future. Special Agent in Charge Andrea Bianco, former head of the Futures Working Group, graduate of University of Virginia, summa cum laude, four years with the FBI in counterterrorism, two years at Interpol, a return to the FBI for three years in the BSU. Got her Ph.D. in behavioral psychology, steadily moved up the ladder since. In her latest role, she was tasked with figuring out what’s coming down the pike at us, and she was handpicked this morning to head up the Metro investigation. She’d like a briefing on your information in five.”

Inez was big on the qualifications and short on the personal. All he managed to glean from that recitation was the chick he’d be answering to was smart. Really smart.

“All right. I’m ready to go. Let’s do it.”

Inez hesitated for a moment. “Don’t you want to prepare? Bianco is a stickler for details.”

Fletched held back a laugh. “How old are you, Inez?”

“Twenty-four next Tuesday, sir. Assuming we have a next Tuesday.”

“How many briefings have you done?”

“Plenty, but remember, I’m just the assistant here.”

“I’ve been doing this awhile. Almost as long as you’ve been alive. I think I can handle it. Let’s go.”

* * *

More offices, more hallways, more glamorously intense young people rushing about. Children, really. The clatter of keyboards complemented the ringing of phones and the occasional shout. This section of the JTTF held twenty people total, but they were generating enough energy to power a small city grid.

The whole place felt...alive. Fletcher couldn’t help but catch a bit of the buzz.

He followed Inez into the big cheese’s domain. There was a conference room set up, and she led him there.

“Do you have any multimedia you’d like to use?”

Fletcher raised an eyebrow. “No, I guess not.”

She got him seated with a fresh pad of paper and a steaming hot cup of coffee, stood by his side for a moment, then whispered, “Don’t worry about notes, I’ll transcribe everything,” and slipped back against the wall.

He could get used to this.

Ten seconds later the door to the conference room opened, and in came Bianco’s team. Fletcher didn’t need to be introduced to see who was in charge.

Andrea Bianco was dressed in dark jeans and a black jacket, with a Glock on her hip in a tooled leather holster. She had green eyes and hair the color of a burnished sunset, and skin as white and flawless as a bowl of milk. God, was every chick at the JTTF pretty?

She shook his hand warmly, not at all what he expected from Inez’s prep. He figured Bianco would be hard and calculating. Instead, she seemed incredibly calm and approachable, like someone he would like to share some boiled shrimp and beer with on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Just a couple of cops, talking about the injustices of the world, the patter of drops on the roof making them slide inexorably toward a more comfortable position...

He rolled his eyes inwardly. Beautiful women always jarred his poetic side loose. He had a line out the door of them. Some even deigned to still speak to him.

“Detective Fletcher, I’m Andrea Bianco. I’m so glad to have you on board. Welcome to the JTTF.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“No ma’am necessary, you can call me Andi.” She went around the table to the other five people, four men, one woman, all serious and capable looking. “I don’t expect you to get everyone’s names immediately, but this is Nick Cusack, Ron Halder, Tom Hasty, Eduardo Mancha and Hyatt Sutton. I’ll let you get to know each other later.”

Fletcher shook hands with everyone, intentionally not lingering on Sutton, who was so severe looking and tightly contained he was afraid she might leap up and bite him on the neck.

“I understand you’ve been working the Peter Leighton angle for us today. I know you must be tired, we all are. But would you mind giving us your briefing now?”

“Of course. I don’t have much.”

He ran them through his day concisely, only presenting the facts, skipping over his suspicions, the rumors about the congressman’s private life, the weird feeling he got from Temple, the chief of staff who knew everything and nothing. He talked for about ten minutes, outlining the case. Bianco listened with her head cocked slightly to one side, nodding occasionally. When he finished, he glanced at Inez. She gave him a little wink, which he took to mean he’d done a decent enough job.

Been at this party a few times, kid.

Bianco twirled a pen around on her blank notepad for a moment. With a small smile that belied her words, she said, “That’s all great information, Detective. Now, would you mind filling in the blanks? You left a few things out.”

“Ma’am?”

“Andi. You left a few things out. We need to hear it all. We don’t operate like some of the folks you may have worked with. We must investigate all the angles, all the issues, all the rumors and innuendoes. We are life detectives, in a sense. Nothing is safe, absolutely nothing. Nothing is sacred if it means stopping these bastards from hurting another person. So give it to us, and give it straight this time.”

Fletcher ignored the small, humor-filled cough that emanated from behind and to the right of his shoulder. Perhaps Andrea Bianco was more of a force to be contended with than she first appeared. The friendly welcome was a guise, he saw. Inside, she was hard and unforgiving as a chalky cliff.

He took a breath and started again. At the top. He detailed what he’d left out, which was precious little. Bianco sat in her bird pose and watched him, listening, again, and when he stopped she gave him a curt smile, then stood. The room’s focus moved to her, and she began to speak. Her voice was infused with passion.

“Thank you. I appreciate that you were uncomfortable gossiping about the congressman. But everything matters right now. We have an interesting situation on our hands. The attack this morning caught everyone by surprise. That, in and of itself, is somewhat miraculous, considering how well plugged in we are to all the terrorist networks. There have been claims of responsibility from groups we’ve had under close scrutiny, which leads me to doubt the veracity of their claims.

“There is more than meets the eye in our attack this morning. The head of the Armed Services Subcommittee is dead, along with two others. Many people are sick, but none are dying. The tests that have been run have narrowed the toxin to something biologically similar to ricin. We have a thousand people working this case, and it’s going nowhere. There are two groups forming, one to investigate what happened, one to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Prevention is the biggest tool the JTTF has, and we failed this morning. I won’t let us fail again.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this attack is a stain on our character. I don’t believe that it’s a terrorist cell. I think it’s a lone renegade cell, independent, self-actualized, and far from finished. My bosses don’t agree with me, so it is our mandate to prove them wrong. With their approval, we are going to work separately from the rest of the JTTF, go at this from a different angle. Nick, Ron and Hyatt, you are on the Metro. Figure out how the toxin was delivered. I want a step-by-step, moment-by-moment breakdown. Eduardo, I want you to compile a list of possible threats that focuses on the United States. Tom, you’re our scientist. I want you to assess what the toxin is, where it came from, everything.” She turned to Fletcher. “Darren, you’re with me. Any questions?”

Silence.

“Good. Brief me at ten. Go to it.”

The others gathered their things and scooted out of the room. Bianco watched them go. When they were the only ones left in the room, she excused Inez, who shot Fletcher a meaningful look and shut the conference room door behind her.

“So.” Bianco sat at the table and pulled out a red file folder. She placed it carefully in front of her, squared the edges with the table. “What do you think of my theory?”

“It’s as sound as anything else I’ve heard today.”

“Why did you bring in an outside medical examiner to do the autopsy on the congressman?”

“Like I said, she’s the best at what she does. That’s not a knock on our medical examiners, she’s just gifted. She thought it was a ricin hybrid, something new, something developed specifically for the attack.”

“You didn’t mention that.”

“She asked me not to. She didn’t want to speculate. Ricin-like was all she’d commit to officially, that ricin mimics the findings from the autopsies, but doesn’t match exactly.”

“All right. First things first. This is eyes-only.” She slid the file to him. “Read it. I’ll wait. You want some more coffee?”

He glanced at his empty cup and then at the wall clock. 3:15 a.m. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Andi,” she said, then left him to read.

He waited until the door shut, opened the file. The first line of the report made him suck in his breath.

Holy shit.