Veil of Civility: A Black Shuck Thriller (Declan McIver Series) (13 page)

"Did you make a new friend?" Okan Osman said, as he and Altair Nazari walked the rest of the way into the room after following Castellano out with a cold stare.

"Yeah, I think so," Declan answered.

"He's a real charmer, isn't he?" Nazari said, as he took the seat where Castellano had been sitting. "We had the pleasure of his company earlier this morning."

"Seems to think the world of me," Declan quipped dryly.

"What's going on?" Constance asked, her face still masked in concern. "What are you talking about? They don't think that you had something do with this whole thing, do they?"

She looked from her husband to Osman and Nazari and then back to Declan.

"It would seem that Agent Castellano certainly wants to believe that," Declan finally answered. While he and the two bodyguards were used to handling bureaucrats like Castellano and tended to do so with a bit of adolescent satisfaction he knew that his wife was a different matter. Raised in a conservative home by an authoritative father, she took people at their word and became visibly upset whenever someone became confrontational with her. She stood solemnly next to the hospital bed with her hands on the railing.

"Hey, it's grand," Declan said, smiling up at her from his reclined position in the bed and placing a hand over hers. "I'm being released this afternoon and we'll straighten this entire thing out. Would you do me a favor?"

"What?" she asked, without the concern leaving her face.

"I could really use a cup of coffee."

Osman and Nazari both agreed audibly and Constance said, "Fine."

It was obvious that she knew the three of them wanted to talk about what was going on and didn't want her to hear. Withdrawing her hands from under Declan's, she walked towards the door. He grimaced as he watched her leave.

As soon as she'd closed the door Declan said, "You have to stop anyone from delivering anything to—"

Osman raised his hands to signal Declan to stop. "We've already intercepted it, Declan. The FBI is supposedly questioning the guy who tried to deliver it but it doesn't look like he knows anything, just a paid delivery boy with no clue what he was carrying."

For the first time since they'd arrived Declan took a moment to take stock of the two men. Neither looked like they'd slept and Declan knew that looks, in this case, probably weren't deceiving. If it hadn't been for the heavy medication he'd received, he likely wouldn't have slept either. He'd witnessed violence before; at times in the past it seemed as though it would be a staple in his life. Having buried many friends over the years, he was no stranger to death. Growing up in Northern Ireland during the thirty year conflict known as the Troubles he'd seen many people die, some at the hands of the British Army, others killed by loyalist paramilitaries and still more in operations run by the Irish Republicans he'd once called friends. Each time the effect was the same, a realization in the pit of his stomach that a person he'd walked and talked with was gone and he would never see them again.

He could remember vividly the last times he'd spent with all of them, and the last minutes he'd spent with Abaddon Kafni haunted him. Had the leader of the group he'd seen at the Briton-Adams mansion really been Ruslan Baktayev? If so, then Kafni had been correct in assuming there was someone else besides Baktayev involved. While it was certainly possible for terrorists to enter the United States, the idea that someone with Baktayev's history could enter a mere two weeks after escaping from a Russian prison and still have time to plan an assault as audacious as the one that had just occurred, certainly supported the theory that a larger network of some sort was involved. And as Kafni had pointed out, whoever they were, they had to be well connected and very powerful, both politically and financially. That fact, coupled with Castellano's confrontational interview, weighed heavily.

"Where were you guys?" he asked. "What happened to you in the Barton Center?"

"Locked in a basement storage room," Osman said. "Led there by one of the security guards who said he'd found something suspicious. Once we were inside, he slammed the door and locked us in. It took the emergency crews hours to find us."

"It was one of the security cars parked outside that exploded," Declan said.

Osman and Nazari both nodded. "It was an inside job," Osman said.

"Aye, who was the security company?"

"We don't know. Their uniforms and vehicles didn't have a name or logo and the investigators are keeping everything very close to their chests. The local police have been completely shut out. The FBI is handling everything and our friend Castellano is in charge."

"It was the same company that was guarding the mansion. You guys didn't vet them?"

"Levi handled all of that. They must've checked out or else they wouldn't have been there."

Declan shook his head. "The FBI has to know it was the security company. They have to be following up on that."

"We assume they are, in addition to giving us a hard time," said Nazari.

"We brought you something," Osman said, handing Declan a manila folder before leaning against the room's waist high armoire.

Osman was tall for an Israeli, mostly owing to the fact that his family was of Arabian descent. With a shaved head, a tightly cropped goatee, a broad chest and an intensity in his eyes that radiated a preparedness found only in a professional soldier, he was an intimidating sight.

Declan took hold of the file and laid it in his lap.

Inside the file a photograph was paper-clipped to a dossier that was written in Hebrew. Although he couldn't read what was written, the picture said enough. A thin man with pale, coarse skin stretched over a bald head stared back with a look only a Russian could muster, coal black eyes staring directly into the camera as if intensely willing the lens to break. Beneath his nose, an untrimmed black beard masked the rest of his face, reaching down out of the photograph.

"That's him," Declan said, closing the file. "That's the guy at the mansion."

"You're sure?" Nazari asked.

Nazari was Osman's polar opposite. Always well-dressed and without so much as a strand of his curly black hair out of place, he looked more like he belonged in front of a television camera reading the nightly news than standing guard. The only evidence of the ordeal he'd been through were the dark circles underneath his eyes, betraying a lack of sleep. Declan knew his employment as Kafni's security wasn't because of his operational prowess, but his intuition and mechanical genius. If it floated, flew or could be driven, Nazari could operate it, fix it or destroy it in a matter of minutes.

"Yes. I'm sure. He didn't have the beard, but it's him."

"How could Baktayev have possibly gotten into the U.S. without Mossad picking up on it?" Osman said. "They've had agents investigating every known connection he has for two weeks and they've turned up nothing. We were beginning to think maybe the Russians weren't lying, maybe he really was dead and we needed to reevaluate our agreement with our man inside the prison."

"They can't be everywhere at once," Declan said. "If the CIA and NSA believed what Moscow said and they weren't keeping an eye out for him, then he could have easily slipped past Mossad."

"He's right," Nazari offered. "Even with the intelligence sharing between our two countries it would have taken a combined effort. Mossad could never track him over U.S. soil without help from the American intelligence community."

"Abe said he had to have had a pretty serious player in the terror world helping him in order to get out of that prison," Declan said. "If that's the case then it's possible that that same person helped him get into the U.S. But why? Has Mossad found any connections powerful enough to accomplish this?"

Osman shrugged. "The only person of any real wealth that we're aware of was Sa'adi Nouri, but he's dead and so is his network. But who knows? Al Qaeda or someone else could easily be involved."

Declan shook his head. "None of this makes any sense."

"There's more," Osman said. "We've been ordered to leave the country. Our visas were pulled before Abe's blood was even cold. As soon as the coroner's office releases his body, we're to be on the plane back to Tel Aviv."

"Why? By who?" Declan asked.

Osman shrugged.

"So what do we do?" Declan asked, somewhat rhetorically.

Osman leaned forward, clearly agitated by what he was about to say. "We keep our heads down. We've told them what we know and now it's up to them."

"What other choice do we have?" Nazari said. "In America we are not operators. We're security guards. Kafni gave everything he had on Baktayev to the Americans two weeks ago. It's up to them to act on it."

Declan grimaced and ceded the point. Nazari was right. There was nothing they could do.

"Look," Nazari said, standing. "The coroner is releasing Abe's body to us this afternoon. There's an Israeli C-130 already waiting at Lynchburg Airport to take him home and Mrs. Kafni and the children are being transported here. We're taking both him and Levi back to Jerusalem for burial. You should come with us. We will bury them properly in the land they fought so hard for and loved so much."

Declan paused at the thought of burying his friend. Kafni's death was still sinking in.

"No," he said shaking his head. "I've got to stay here. I'm going to try to get the police on the right track. I saw what I saw, whether Agent Castellano wants to believe it or not."

Both men nodded.

"We'll see what we can do on our end once we're home," Osman said, as he followed Nazari towards the door. "Watch your back, Declan. We're already burying two friends."

Declan watched as they left and as the door clicked closed, their words echoed through his head. He didn't like the picture that was forming in his mind. The law enforcement agencies investigating the matter were looking in entirely the wrong direction and they didn't seem to be interested in being pointed in the right one.

2:35 p.m. Eastern Time – Saturday

Lynchburg Federal Building

Lynchburg, Virginia

Senator David Kemiss buttoned his suit coat as he stepped out of the rear door of the black Lincoln Town Car driven by his government appointed chauffeur. Pushing his thick-rimmed glasses up on his nose like an aging Clark Kent, he prepared for a media onslaught as he walked towards the front door of the non-descript four story building that housed most of the federal offices in Lynchburg. In the twenty hours since the bombing outside of a Liberty University building and the subsequent murder of Abaddon Kafni, the mostly vacant building on the corner of 12
th
and Court Streets had become a hub of activity. Federal law enforcement officers from every agency under the banner of the Department of Justice and a legion of national news media had descended upon the quiet downtown block like a squadron of flying monkeys.

Kemiss sucked in a deep breath as several reporters took notice of him and ushered their camera men in his direction.

"Senator Kemiss! Senator Kemiss!" a top-heavy blonde said, as she ambled towards him in high heeled shoes and a red pants suit, dragging an obese camera man behind her. "Stacey Courtney, ABC News. Sir, as one of the ranking members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, what can you tell us about the attack last night? Are the bombing and the murder of Dr. Kafni connected in any way?"

"Dr. Kafni was the keynote speaker at the grand opening of the building that was bombed. Of course there's a connection," he answered as he brushed past her. "Excuse me. I really can't discuss this now."

"Senator, why are you here? Has the FBI called you?"

"No," he answered severely. "Why would the FBI call me? I'm a policymaker, not an investigator. I'm here for the same reason as everyone else. I've lived in this region for more than thirty years and I'm a concerned citizen here to make sure our federal government is doing everything within its power to apprehend the men responsible for these events. Now, excuse me."

He pushed past the throng of reporters crowding behind the journalist and entered the building through a glass door that was held open for him by two black-suited federal agents. The two men quickly closed the door behind Kemiss and began blocking off the reporters.

Inside the well-traveled entrance, the building smelled of wet carpet. Aging wallpaper lined the narrow hallway leading to the building's rear entrance; the walls studded with glass doors bearing the logos of several federal agencies.

"FBI?" he asked a man in a white button-down shirt who was walking towards the front entrance.

"They've taken over the fourth floor," the man said, grudgingly. "The elevator's on the left at the end of the hall."

The elevator pinged as it arrived on the fourth floor, and the doors hissed open. Kemiss stepped out and looked around; behind a set of glass doors directly in front of him men in suits buzzed around a hastily prepared office suite. What had probably been a sleepy field office housing only half a dozen agents yesterday had been transformed overnight into a veritable command center. Pulling one of the doors open, he walked inside. Several of the agents looked up from their desks and two men standing in front of an oversized map stretched over a large white board near the back of the room turned around. Kemiss flashed Seth Castellano a knowing look and the agent immediately excused himself from the man he'd been talking to and began making his way towards a corner office.