October's Ghost (34 page)

“Francine, what...?” Amelia Aguirre saw the gun on the bed and the small lamp lying on the floor near the door. Her daughter had always told Cassandra to open the door gently, as it easily hit the dresser when pushed too hard. But why was her gun on the bed?
Oh, no
. “Francine, what happened? You were yelling.”

“Oh, Mom. I’m sorry.” Frankie looked up to the woman she worshiped as she hugged Cassie as hard as she could without hurting her. “I didn’t mean to do it. I was dreaming about Johnny and Thom, and they were...” She couldn’t explain anymore.

Amelia Aguirre went to her knees and wrapped her arms around her two little girls. “It’s okay,
mija
. She is all right. She is fine.”

“But I could have...” Frankie collapsed into the arms of her mother and little girl, they now consoling
her
. There was something not right about it, but also something completely right about it. It was
familia
. It was safety.

“Mommy, are you okay?”

Frankie laughed through her tears at the question. “Yes, sweetie, I’m okay.” Her eyes apologized for what she had just done to her daughter, but the responding look told her that none was necessary. “I’m really okay.” She looked again at the face, wondering why the expression had changed. “Really, I am.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

ARRIVALS

The scene was reminiscent of a team meeting before the big game, but the players here were wearing suits and carrying guns. They also outnumbered their opponents by fifty to one. Yet they were at a distinct disadvantage, a fact well understood by the de facto coach and his players.

“Remember, these guys don’t have to play by the rules,” Art told the sea of agents arrayed around him. “We do.”

The senior agent seemed remarkably controlled in his approach to the situation, much different than some of his fellow agents had come to expect from past experience. The past was the past, they figured, happy to have Art Jefferson running this one with a cool head and measured determination.

“Is LAPD going to step up patrols?” Special Agent Shelley Murdock asked.

“Yeah, Shel. Metro is putting out four uniformed Adam cars to basically do runs around our perimeter-search area.” The LAPD’s Metropolitan Division was the elite of the department that provided specialized units for use throughout the city. In this instance it would back up the Bureau by increasing the department’s presence around the area to be checked. Within the area unmarked but obviously official FBI cars—government cars looked too plain to be anything other than official—would fill the twelve-square-block section around Olympic and Vermont. “If they see anything, they’ll call us in. We make the move.”

The agents took a last look at their assignments. There were sixty-seven motels or cheap hotels in the area to be covered, though no contact would be made with the individual businesses just yet. That part of the operation was yet to be planned.

“Okay, hit it.” Art hopped down from the chair he had used as a riser to address the gathering on the fourth floor. Omar Espinosa was the only one of the agents to remain, and coming through the stream of those heading for the basement garage was the partner Art had sent off to her room some hours before.

“How’s everything going?”

Art saw that the chance for sleep had not done much for Frankie. “Everything here is going fine. How about with you?”

She didn’t look up from the assignment list on her desk, prompting a worried look between Art and Omar. “Good. I slept a little.”

“How much?”

Frankie raised her eyes. “Enough. Now what’s the plan?”

So she was still pumped up, Art recognized. Maybe a little too much. He knew he’d still have to keep a close eye on her, for her own good. “Hal and Rob got the OP up and running about four hours ago. So far nothing from them. The teams are heading out to keep our friends’ heads down, if they’re where we hope.”

Frankie sat down. Art did so also, and Omar slid a chair over from an adjoining cubicle.

“Now we have to figure out how to find them,” Art said.

Frankie saw the report from the rental agency. It included two photocopied driver’s licenses. The pictures on each matched closely the composite sketches of the murderers.
Suspected
murderers, she corrected herself, falling back upon the proper method of classifying suspects. “The DLs check out?”

Art’s head shook. “No record of any Juan Quintana or Flavio Alicante with those numbers in Florida’s computers.”

“Some good counterfeiting,” Espinosa observed. The photocopies betrayed no telltale signs of illicit manufacture, something the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles was mighty disturbed to hear of. “Someone has some good resource people behind them.”

“More Florida connections,” Frankie said. “Still, this doesn’t give us much. The names are obviously aliases, maybe onetime identities if this is really something international. Maybe even if they’re just hired guns.” She looked at the faces closely for a moment. “At least we know our ‘puters can put out good sketches.”

That was an understatement, Art thought. They were actually photo-representations, mimicking the look of actual pictures. But those would do little good now unless they could come up with a way to use what they had to locate the men pictured.

“We can’t just do the rounds with these,” Art said, pointing to the color composites. “If we show these to a desk clerk who’s been paid to give a warning, then we may cause a mess. I want that avoided at all costs.”

“What about calling?” Omar wondered. “What if they used the same names to check in at one of the places? It’s possible.”

“Yeah, I guess it is, but we’d be taking the same risk of tipping them off.” The morning was young, and already the frustration was mounting. “Any ideas, partner?”

None that are legal,
Frankie answered for herself. “Unless we get lucky and spot them without them knowing it, then we’re going to have to do some kind of approach. That means the desk clerk at every place, or a cleaning person. And it has to be in some way that won’t spook them, something that won’t set off alarm bells.”

“There’s the ten-thousand-dollar outline,” Art commented. “Now all we need is the ten-cent answer to make it fly.” He snatched up the photocopy of the licenses. “Almost as good as our boys could put out.” It was a little-known and infrequently used skill that the Bureau’s TS Section had mastered: producing counterfeit documents. Sometimes it was necessary to provide an undercover agent with documentation to prove his cover story. With the cooperation of agencies in all fifty states and several foreign jurisdictions, the Bureau had compiled a collection of authentic materials from which the required papers and IDs could be put together. Art studied the fine detail work. “Jacobs would appreciate work like this.”

“He’d say he could do better,” Omar joked.

“I bet he could,” Art concurred, the spark flashing in his brain without warning. His eyes drifted away from the photocopy, the thoughts piling one atop another as they fought for dominance in the plan that was forming in the senior agent’s mind.

Omar caught the intensity in Art’s demeanor before Frankie. “You got something, Art?”

“I think we might.”

Frankie’s attention level shot up at the positive tone in her partner’s words. “What? How?”

“We’re waiting,” Omar implored.

“I think with a little help from Jacobs we can pull this off,” Art said, without explaining what “this” was.

“Pull what off?” Frankie asked.

Art picked up the phone and dialed down to TS. “We’re going to play a little ‘lost and found.’ “

“What kind of game is that?” Espinosa asked, playing along with Art’s crypticism.

“The most satisfying. We’re the finders, and our perps are the losers.”

*  *  *

“You’ll want to buckle up now,” the Air Force lieutenant informed his five passengers. The Gulfstream would be landing on Andrews’ east-west runway in a few minutes.

“Give me something, Dick,” the
Post
reporter begged. “I go all the way down there with you, hang back in the shadows like a good little reporter, and don’t look where I shouldn’t. What do I have from that? Nothing.”

Congressman Richard Vorhees, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, laughed at the childlike begging and guilt projection Chick Hill was shooting his way. As the
Post’s
military-affairs correspondent, an assignment with fewer potential stories in the “days of downsizing,” he had been invited to accompany the congressman on a short inspection of several special operations facilities. His access had been understandably limited to nonsecure areas of the three bases, which had frustrated him to no end. The congressman had enjoyed every minute of it. The media hated to be told, with no chance for argument, that they couldn’t go somewhere or see something. “Childlike” might have been an improper characterization, Vorhees realized; “infantile” was more descriptive.

“Hey, that sergeant offered you a chance to run the confidence course.” Vorhees heard the snickers from his staff in the seats behind as the Gulfstream began to descend. “You didn’t take him up on
that
.”

Pig
. Hill was treading water here, trying to make something of his new beat. The State Department had been a hell of a lot easier to cover than the Pentagon. At least there you could see the comings and goings of ambassadors and the like, things that gave an inkling if something was up. The wrong person in the right place at the wrong time could set the old noggin to thinking. That was the reporters’ sense. Somewhere after the sixth on the hierarchy of human senses, he figured. That ability, however, could not easily penetrate a stone wall, the likes of which Vorhees had erected around everything interesting on their short jaunt down South.

Well, so be it. Hill knew that if he couldn’t get information he could at least get denials to the right questions. “What about Delta?”

“Delta?” Vorhees asked with feigned ignorance. “What’s that?”

A smile. “Weren’t you observing a demonstration of their techniques?”

“Whose?” The game was fun to the congressman, a man who had developed a healthy disdain for the press during his tour in uniform. Plus, his professed lack of knowledge was the “literal” truth. The Army had no so-called Delta force. If that name stuck among its members, JSOC, and some uninformed members of the media, oh well. In the Pentagon’s nomenclature the unit once referred to as Special Operations Detachment Delta was now known as Special Operations Detachment Trumpet, and that designation would change again in three months. Delta hadn’t
officially
been “Delta” for quite some time, giving the politicos like himself a convenient answer when challenged on the existence of the unit. “Don’t know where you get your information, Chick.”

“Then there is no unit called Delta?”

A careful pause. “To my knowledge we have no unit that carries that designation.”

“To your knowledge?”

The congressman nodded.

Well, let’s try this.
“I heard someone mention that ‘some unit’ you were observing took off pretty quick from Bragg. Anything to that?”

Vorhees had heard one of his aides let that slip and had chastised the staffer for it. “People on bases move at their own speed. Some slow, some fast. Everyone has someplace to go.”

Okay, there’s an opening
. “Would they be going anywhere in particular? Maybe where the action is?”

Another laugh erupted from the jovial bureaucrat, giving him time to craft a response. “You give me more credit than I’m due, Chick. I’m a pencil pusher, remember?”

“Maybe Cuba?” It was a stretch, but he had to cast his line somewhere.

“Chick, come on. From what I can see that’s a
coup d’état
going on down there.” Vorhees had no knowledge of any American involvement, but the quick departure of Delta had made the same thought cross his mind. But speculation was not his job at the moment—deflection was. “You’re reaching on that one.”

Hill could accept that. It would do.
Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Richard Vorhees, after a tour of facilities housing U.S. Special Operations Forces, denies that any of those forces are involved in the apparent coup under way in Cuba.
Leads often generated as much information as digging for the story. He was certain he and his editors would be getting calls from the Hill concerning their “shoddy, speculative reporting.” At least the trip wouldn’t be a total waste.

The Gulfstream touched down with the rising sun behind it and turned off the runway toward the secure area of Andrews before backtracking along the taxiway toward the military VIP terminal.

“Jeez, she’s a big one, isn’t she?” one of the aides commented, looking out one of the aircraft’s left-side windows.

Chick turned his attention that way. The observation just heard was adequate, he thought. The white 747 with its long blue stripe running from tail to nose was being pulled from its hangar by a dark green tug. Within seconds of stopping, a truck with stairs mounted on its back pulled to the left—Hill reminded himself of the military jargon: port—side door. As the Gulfstream taxied by, a black limousine pulled up to the stairs and let out...
Granger?
He instinctively leaned closer to the window and squinted. It
was
Granger. That smooth head and blue uniform were unmistakable, his peaked cap in hand as he ran—
ran?
—up the steps into the...
That’s not Air Force One
. Hill cocked his head and looked as far to the Gulfstream’s front as he could through the small glass portal.
It’s there
. The President’s plane, a modified 747 designated VC-25A, was similar in appearance to the jet they were passing, but its long stripe flared upward near the nose to paint the entire upper front a bright blue. That plane was out on the tarmac in its usual place. The Post reporter looked back to the other aircraft, wondering...

The Doomsday Plane?
It was a flowery, overly dramatic nickname that no Air Force officer would ever utter. The correct name was Kneecap, Hill knew. The National Emergency...
Emergency?
...Airborne Command Post. Why was it rolling out, and why was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
running
up the stairs to it? Granger had been around long enough that everyone in D.C. knew he moved about as fast as he talked. That’s why he had chosen the Air Force for his military career path, the joke went, so he could let his fighters do the walking.