Mariposa (13 page)

She slumped like a sack.

His groin muscles wanted to spasm. He didn't allow it.

He was now exposed to the street, but jumped back and to his right. A bullet
shnizz
ed just under his extended arm and blew a tan puff of splinters from a beam.

He kept going.

The white curtains drawn across the front windows covered his movement, but the sniper followed a probable trajectory and sent three more shots through the glass.

Close, very close. But seeing it all as if in film previews, Nathaniel had dropped to the floor—so fast he almost dislocated his hip.

He could feel his arm muscles start to rip.

No brakes
.

His internal narration—the amused, wise old professional voice said,
He lands in a crouch, drops, and slithers into the dining room, away from the backdoor, where others now enter.

The large bay window in the dining room reached over the walkway on the left side of the house. He lifted aside a chair, silent as a snake, and crawled under the heavy table.

One man's denim-clad legs appeared in the swinging door to the kitchen. The man pushed the door wide with one hand. The other hand no doubt held a gun—a pistol.

Nathaniel heard quiet movement down the middle hall—coming in on another route from the back porch. Heavier footsteps sent quivers along the wooden floor boards.

These two would form a pincer.

He squatted, braced, and shouldered the entire table like Atlas, tilting and shoving it into six rapid pistol shots from the man in the kitchen door—one of which penetrated the table's dense wood and grazed his shoulder.

The table pressed the shooter's arm against the door frame, bending it until it snapped it like a tree branch. Pinned, the man would not move—certainly not for the next few seconds.

Nathaniel was now exposed from the rear, but the man in the hall had not yet reached the living room—no doubt taking a couple of crucial seconds to assess the condition of his female colleague outside.

Nathaniel moved flat along the wall that paralleled the middle hall and retrieved an iron elephant bookend from the top of the built-in cupboard. With a bent grin, he watched the assailant's hand come into view, guessed the height of his head, and round-housed the bookend not into the man's face—
no fatalities
—but level with the jaw and the neck.

The man was fast but the elephant dropped him like a brick.

By now, the sniper and other team members would be up on the front porch.

Nathaniel returned to the dining room, lifted the oak table by its central pillar—ignoring another blaze of pain—rotated the three hundred pounds, easy-peasy, and heaved it through the bay window.

Broken arm released, the pinned man fell with a scream. The kitchen door swished back and hit his head.

He grunted and stopped screaming.

Nathaniel jumped after the table, through the shattered panes of glass. Table and body landed in the side oleanders in a painful tangle. He extricated himself and lurched to the right, around the back—behind other houses, through other yards.

One last bullet cracked, a wild shot inside the house.

Some blocks away, limping toward Long Beach Boulevard and a city bus or taxi, Nathaniel assessed the damage.

Not good.

He was thirty-seven years old, not in prime condition, and this was going to hurt like hell for days, maybe weeks. Nothing broken, however, and no bullet holes—just a few cuts in his forehead and arms and a graze that had already caked over.

He stopped by a curb and leaned on a signpost and started to laugh. The laugh sounded like a leopard's cough in a bad jungle night.

No ordinary humor—not even satisfaction at having survived an attempt on his life. A man who took no heed of pain or fear was in real danger.

He had to find a place to lie low and recuperate.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Los Angeles, California

"Rebecca!"

Rebecca swung into her hospital room on new crutches.

Three men and a woman stood by her empty bed. She knew Hiram Newsome, former director of the FBI and her onetime rabbi and mentor in the Bureau.

His friends had always called him News, even during his tenure as director.

She recognized Deputy Director Alicia Kunsler from their earlier days in the FBI, when they had worked together several times. Kunsler looked mannish and frumpy—short-cut dark hair, pale skin, small, discerning eyes, square in all her angles.

The short, long-armed and short-legged forty-something male was Ruben Scholes, Deputy Director of the Bureau in Transition West. His friends reportedly called him Monk, but a slippery grasp on power was losing him most of those friends.

The true-blue grapevine—backed by an extensive series of articles in
NYT Online
—told of bad blood between the Scholes and Kunsler, not surprising, since they were jockeying for ultimate control of the Bureau.

The second woman, a thin-faced, aquiline blond in her early thirties, wore a green pantsuit and pale gray shoes. Behind her thin and impressive nose followed a sharply attractive face.

They had never met and Rebecca did not recognize her.

News stepped forward and hugged Rebecca gingerly. She pulled in her crutches, looking in puzzlement over his shoulder at Kunsler.

"You're on God's payroll now, Rebecca," News said. "I hear a truck flipped over on you."

"And part of a roof," the blond said.

"I'm okay," Rebecca said. "Just a few cracked ribs and a sprained ankle."

News pulled back. "I don't believe you've met Shawna Prouse, JTTF Los Angeles, SAC of the convention center bombing investigation." SAC—he pronounced it letter by letter—meant Special Agent in Charge. "Agent Prouse, Rebecca Rose. You know our east and west coast directors."

"Pleasure," Rebecca said. "I wasn't expecting a reception committee. They serve Jell-O in fifteen minutes."

"Not much in the way of visible damage," Scholes said, touching his own left cheek.

Rebecca started to lift a hand, then stopped herself. "They're removing the specks this afternoon," she said. "The burn marks should fade."

"Can't imagine," Scholes said. "I'd need counseling, at the very least."

Rebecca swallowed and looked plaintively at News. His hound-jowled expression told him he could not save her.

"News has been kind enough to fly in from Virginia for this meeting," Kunsler said.

"At Deputy Director Kunsler's request," Scholes added as if that was important.

"This is a meeting?" Rebecca asked, little-girl innocent. She crutched past them and sat on the bed, propping her braced and bandaged leg on a plastic stool. "It's great to see News again, but I've been debriefed half a dozen times—at least four times by your own people, Agent Prouse. I'm squeezed dry."

"This time, I'm here to give
you
information," Prouse said. "Let's start with the bombs." She laid her slate on the bed. "We've got an early report. What took the roof off the Los Angeles Convention Center was a device made of sugar, nitrogen, and a load of phosphate."

"Coke syrup?" Rebecca asked.

"With something new mixed in," Prouse said. "It's called a
synthobe
. A small, minimum genome synthetic microbe tailored to carry out specific chemical reactions. Used for industrial applications, mostly. Not really alive—can't reproduce. The synthobe kills itself, or deactivates, after getting the job done."

Rebecca felt an angry flush creep up her face. The burned patch on her jaw and cheek started to throb. "Some job," she said.

"Turns out twenty-eight of the canisters brought in for the convention by the catering company were inoculated with synthobes. The sealed canisters compounded the effect. Pressurized with nitrogen. The synthobes converted nitrogen, sugar, a trace of phosphate, and certain additives into a highly explosive gel. Security didn't detect any of this because this kind of bomb doesn't contain an explosive until all the ingredients are combined.

"The gel is heavier than water and it sinks to the bottom of the canister. It rises in temperature just before the explosion. Becomes as sensitive as old nitro. When it goes off, it instantly superheats the water to steam and compounds the force.

"We don't have a chain of possession established, but we're working on it," Prouse finished.

Rebecca looked out the window. "Any idea who's that clever?"

"Half a dozen going concerns, most of them in Belarus or North Korea," Prouse said. "A few more in Russia. One, very likely, in Haiti or the Dominican Republic."

Scholes looked concerned, as he would be expected to.

News and Kunsler were stone-faced.

Scholes said, "You mentioned before the blast, a self-proclaimed former agent met you outside the exhibition hall, and that he helped rescue you after."

"Ginger-haired fellow," Newsome said. He was obviously here as her advocate. That meant she was either in trouble or something strange was in the wind. "Dumpy, disheveled. You didn't think he looked FBI."

"Bureau," Scholes corrected.

"I only remember a little," Rebecca said, massaging her upper calf. "What about him?"

"You said he called himself Trace. Nathaniel Trace. There's never been an agent with that name," Scholes said. "And he wasn't registered at the convention. He must have been using someone else's badge."

News was getting irritated. "This is all well away from our mission."

"You were at COPES about to give a presentation, when the bombs went off," Prouse said. "You had clearance from the Bureau."

"Yes."

"From Deputy Director Kunsler?"

"From the former director, actually—before he resigned," Rebecca said.

"What's your current status, Ms. Rose?" Scholes asked.

"She's on indefinite furlough," Kunsler said. "Rebecca checked into the Los Angeles office before attending COPES and cleared her speech with your people. You have that on record, I'm sure."

"You've been out of action for eleven months," Scholes said. "What was your speech about, Ms. Rose?"

"Surveillance technologies."

Scholes took Prouse's notes and looked them over with pursed lips, then passed the slate to Kunsler. Rebecca saw she was being tag-teamed, almost—but not quite—as if she were a suspect.

"You met up with Captain Peter Periglas the night before. Drinks and dinner?" Scholes asked.

"We met up," Rebecca said.

"And he accompanied you to your room."

Rebecca did not blink. "He did," she said.

"You were involved in the clandestine Mecca operation. Both of you."

"I can only—"

Scholes's dark eyes flashed. "I am here to background an executive request. Did you and Periglas publicly discuss your work in Mecca?"

"Just by allusion," Rebecca said.

"What's that mean?" Scholes asked.

"We alluded to it indirectly. Peter—Captain Periglas—said that maybe we shouldn't be seen together." Rebecca bit the inside of her cheek. The "executive request" remark puzzled her. They were saving something for last.

Kunsler might be sympathetic, but Rebecca had never felt comfortable with FBI management—except News. "Did Captain Periglas say he had been approached by anyone regarding Mecca?" Kunsler asked.

"No."

"Why was he at COPES?"

"Representing a security consulting firm with navy contracts."

"Building better brigs?" Scholes said.

"Goddammit," News said. "Agent Rose has been through hell."

Scholes glared. "Everybody wants to protect everybody else. I'm here to protect the bureau."

"I appreciate that," Kunsler said. "But the executive request went through Bureau East. We're not here to grill Agent Rose about her personal contacts. In light of—"

Scholes held up his hand. "Agent Rose, you're on high-level furlough, but nobody told Bureau West until last week, and I've yet to figure out what all that means."

"Extended leave without pay, with the option to return to active duty," Newsome said.

Kunsler held up her own hand and waggled her fingers until Scholes looked her way. "Agent Rose is looking at early retirement. She has interviewed with other government agencies as well as private security firms."

"That seems unusual," Scholes said.

"Half the FBI has been furloughed or let go," News said. "Something of a stampede."

"Agent Rose, what about your contacts in the private sector? Tell us about the last six months."

"I've talked with half a dozen companies that offer executive protection, forensic accounting—art investigation for rich collectors," Rebecca said. "I also interviewed for permanent positions with Diplomatic Security, EPA, Border Security, IRS. They turned me down."

"And who's most likely to utilize your expertise, do you think?"

"Blue Eyes Executive Services."

"Sounds like a call girl ring," Scholes said.

Newsome's cheeks pinked, but Rebecca ignored that. "Private investigations," she said. "Courtroom rehearsal and prep for law enforcement. Art forgery investigations as a sideline."

Stan had survived—barely. He was down the hall, fresh out of intensive care and looking like a Borg nightmare—but all in white, not black.

"They have any advantages over other outfits?" Kunsler asked.

"Keeps me local."

"You suffered from PTSD—Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Was that behind your rejection by the other agencies?"

The change of atmosphere was electric—and so sudden that Rebecca felt another barb of apprehension.

"Not your concern, Ruben," Kunsler said.

"It seems particularly relevant to the executive request," Scholes said.

"We're aware of it," Kunsler said. "It isn't relevant to Bureau East."

"Upon diagnosis, I volunteered for treatment," Rebecca said. "A clinic came recommended by folks at the marine base in Quantico."

Scholes gave News the kind of look you might expect from a prosecuting attorney about to nail a conviction. "Hiram, did you arrange for that recommendation? Upon your own evaluation of Ms. Rose?"

"I haven't heard about this until now," Newsome said.

Rebecca had told no one other than her FBI-appointed psychiatrist and personal physician. It didn't seem to be anybody's business but hers. At the time, she had already been furloughed.

For her, Mecca had screwed up everything royally, within the agency and personally.

"I feel fine, if that's your question," Rebecca said.

Scholes shrugged. "No judgment, no onus. But I suspect that might have played a role in your being refused by so many agencies."

"It was supposed to be confidential."

Newsome shook his head with a look that Rebecca new well—dismay at the ways of this silly, wicked world.

Now Kunsler sprang the reason for all of them being here. "President Larsen has asked for you to lead a White House investigation."

"The Bureau needs to be sure that won't backfire on all of us," Scholes added.

Rebecca was taken aback. She glanced at Prouse. "To work with you?"

Prouse shook her head. "I'd be proud to have you on our team—but, no."

"The Quinn homicide," Kunsler said. "The president seems to trust you. She enjoyed working with you—the last time."

Rebecca was suddenly tired and irritated and nervous, all at once. Her ribs ached abominably, as they always did around this time of day.

"The president has requested a personal meeting," Kunsler said. "She isn't asking for anyone's approval. You're being vetted by people outside the Bureau. You extend us a courtesy by answering our questions."

"Terrific." Rebecca looked aside at News, crinkling one eye.

Scholes sighed, petulant. "It should be said, despite my concerns, that I do believe you were one of our finest assets, Ms. Rose. I'm sincerely sorry about Captain Periglas."

News cringed. Kunsler looked hard at Scholes.

"I haven't had a chance to talk to Peter," Rebecca said. "If you debriefed him—"

"You haven't heard?" Scholes asked.

Prouse looked away and said, "Everyone wanted to make sure she was physically strong."

Rebecca sucked in her breath, like a half sob or hiccup, before she could catch herself.

"He was in an elevator in the parking garage," Prouse said. "He never made it down to the convention floor. The whole structure collapsed."

"It goes a lot deeper than that," Scholes said, trying to recover lost ground. "Informants in Arabia Deserta tell us there's a connection with your operation in Mecca. We think you and Captain Periglas may have been targeted."

"Someone blew up the entire building—to kill two people?"

"Under those circumstances," Scholes said, despite a warning glance from Prouse and News, and a wide roll of Kunsler's eyes, "I would assume your time with the president is going to be brief, tightly controlled—and secret."

"They're drawing a connection with the assassination attempt?" Rebecca asked. She turned to Kunsler. "Is this legit?"

"So far, it's pure speculation," Kunsler said, but Scholes would not be deterred.

"Solid intel," he insisted. "Probably financed by the same group. If they are who we think they are, they've been kicked out of Arabia Deserta, but they have plenty of money and international connections—and they still think it's their mission to protect Mecca from infidels. President Larsen gave the orders authorizing your incursion. She would be an obvious target."

Rebecca looked out the window. There it went—not that she had ever had much hope. No normal life, ever again; no child, no man, no escape.

No waking up from the nightmare.

"When does the president want to see me?" she asked, voice barely a whisper.

"Tomorrow," Kunsler said. "You're under the executive branch from this point on. White House chief of staff is making the arrangements. One more thing . . . we need to download your dattoo. We think we might be able to recover the data."

Rebecca lifted her sleeve and looked down at the cracked and smeared dragon that had been the conference symbol.