What Lies Behind (16 page)

He gave her a smile. He had a nice smile. It made him look even younger than he was.

“How old are you, Agent Daniels?”

“Twenty-eight yesterday, ma’am. Today’s my first day working for NCAVC.”

Chapter 30

Georgetown

XANDER SLAMMED THE
phone down and unplugged it from the wall. How the media had found him so quickly was astonishing. No one was parked outside yet, and he hoped that wouldn’t happen, but he wasn’t at all convinced he could avoid it. Sam would be upset with their life being played out on the news again. And so would he.

He joined Chalk at the kitchen table, where they’d been sipping water and booting up their respective computers. Xander had eschewed the idea of them having an office, much preferring to work out of the town house in Georgetown, but now, he was rethinking that decision.

“I don’t know if we’re secure here. That was CNN. This isn’t good.”

“I’ll fight them off for you, cupcake. Just point me at the nearest news van with my grenades and they won’t bother you anymore.”

Xander clutched his hands to his chest and batted his eyelashes. “Chalk, you’re my hero.”

Chalk flipped him the bird and started typing.

The smile left Xander’s face. He wasn’t kidding; he didn’t feel secure here. Not with a professional contract hitter down by his hand, a client/target taking a nap on his living room couch and three possible suspects having Diet Cokes in the backyard under Thor’s watchful eye.

Xander had come across a professional assassin once, been assigned to cover his ingress into a hot zone outside of Kandahar to take out a brutal Taliban leader, an executive order kept so quiet the press had no idea it was happening, back when the greater good was actually a point of sale in the war. The ride had been a long one—at night, overland in dangerous territory, scooting around known IED hotbeds, making sure they weren’t seen. They talked. It was the natural thing to do to pass the time.

The assassin had his own code. He wasn’t a believer, wasn’t attached to any sort of dogma. If the job paid, he went, simple as that. But he’d felt it was his duty. There were too many lives being lost fighting unjust wars unnecessarily. He felt the best way to end a conflict was to take out the leadership, do it quickly and brutally, and watch the rebellion fall apart.

Xander had seen enough rebellions pop up after a leader’s death to think this wasn’t exactly accurate. He told the man—his code name had been Atlas—that he felt like they were fighting a hydra. The insurgents were true believers, and cutting off the head in this neck of the woods simply created five hundred more heads, all desperate for power, and the desire to crush the West.

Atlas had laughed and told him it didn’t matter. There would always be another leader to eliminate. That was what made the world go around. One rebellion quashed, another rising from its ashes. More money for him. He was just the trigger. And in keeping with his pragmatic philosophy, he pointed out there were plenty more where he came from, too.

Xander supposed he was the same as the assassin, albeit with a slightly different code. He only killed under orders, too. He dragged himself back to the present, to his current crisis.

Beloved by many, Denon was still despised by a few, and they were clearly the ones behind the assassination attempt. The old axiom was true: powerful men and women drew powerful enemies. Xander had no illusions on that point. It was the thesis that would keep him and Chalk in business, long into their careers in close protection.

More importantly, if Xander could find who was funding the hit on Denon, they’d be able to stop the contract.

And he had no illusions on what that meant, either.

He was about to go hunting.

He knew he’d done the right thing protecting his principal. But now he’d brought down a world of hurt on himself and everyone around him. He couldn’t stand the idea of putting Sam in danger. She managed to get herself in enough trouble without him adding to the mix.

Xander pulled up a file on his laptop. Maybe someone from Denon’s past had a beef they’d missed, and was using his private staff to get close.

In the manner of all great—and rich—men, Denon had his fingers in a number of lucrative pies. The biggest entity by far was his interests in Britain’s oil and gas. Twenty years earlier, as a young driller on an ocean platform, he’d seen a way to make their jobs more efficient, and his work resulted in a new method for getting the oil from the ocean’s floor, one that had been adopted by every oil company in the world. Which made him a multibillionaire.

It was complicated stuff, and since he couldn’t find any links from the past to support the current issues, it had no bearing to Xander’s thoughts. He closed the backgrounder and moved into more recent information.

The specialized software Chalk had developed for their use was taking forever to run. Xander’s internet connection was overloaded by the five laptops connected to the router. It was taking quite a bit of effort not to rip the house apart in frustration.

“Anything yet?”

Chalk shook his head. “Patience, grasshopper.”

Chalk was more tolerant than Xander, always had been, which was what made them a good team. He was quiet, tapping industriously into the program he’d designed, waiting for it to work. The software could search the netherworlds of contract hits, looking for any moves by the known hitters. Assassination was primarily a word-of-mouth business, but there were still people who used their computers and email to ask for “help,” and Chalk was a genius when it came to programming. He’d written a software program that looked for the lingo special to the field. When it found a match to the usual buzzwords, it made a note, downloaded a piece of ingenious tracking software.

Some would call that hacking, but he didn’t use the information he collected for his own personal gain, he simply fed it into his program to identify the threat. So white-hat hacking, definitely. The program followed everything from the computer of the person who’d initiated the contact, especially funds transfers. It was a handy tool to gauge where in the process certain plans were. Talk was one thing. When money started changing hands, it was clear matters had gotten more serious.

It was only one tool, and helpful or not, now they knew it was fallible. The program had picked up nothing of interest relating to James Denon before their detail began.

Chalk cracked his knuckles, drawing Xander’s attention. “We’re going to have to invest in a better wireless connection for you, my friend. I think I’ve got it finally.” He clicked his mouse a few times. “Yeah, we’re up.” He read for a few seconds, shaking his head. “I see nothing here—no warnings, no threats. No contracts on Denon. No mutterings at all, in fact. I’ve been scoping conversations from the past two weeks—I did this before, too, and saw nothing, figured we must have missed something—but I’m coming up blank.”

“So the program doesn’t work perfectly. You can keep working on it, refine it.”

“No, it works. Unlike some,
I
believe in my abilities.” He grinned at Xander. “Seriously, maybe we’re looking at this all wrong. Maybe Denon wasn’t the target.”

Xander came around to the back of Chalk’s chair. “Let me have a go.”

Chalk got up, fetched himself a Coke from the refrigerator. Xander took his spot, running through the program, searching for anything that might stand out. After ten minutes, he had to admit Chalk was right. There was nothing out of place, nothing that looked even remotely suspicious.

Xander leaned back in the chair and stretched. He needed fuel—caffeine, food, sleep. He grabbed himself a Coke and started making sandwiches for the crew. Chalk watched quietly, letting him think. After years together as Rangers, living in all corners of the world, there was no unnecessary chatter.

Finally, Xander turned, set a plate of sandwiches on the table, motioning for Chalk to dig in. He delivered a plate to the pool, left another on the table by Denon. Then he grabbed one for himself and in between bites ran through things with Chalk. “So if Denon wasn’t the target of the hit, who was? Or did we just stop a madman from going all bell tower on that tarmac?”

“We need to run Denon’s people through the system. None of them pulled a contract. Ergo, maybe one of them was the real target.”

“Let’s do that.”

Chalk smiled. “Already am. Program’s been running since you sat down. Should be about ready now. Of course, now that our target pool has expanded exponentially, we may find this has nothing to do with Denon at all.”

Xander thought of the bloodstain spreading down the concrete wall. “Don’t say that.”

Chalk had green eyes with yellow centers that made him look like a raptor. He trained those hawklike eyes on Xander now. “Xander, man, you did right. Don’t worry. You saved a life today, no matter what. Even if it wasn’t our principal, you saved a life.”

“We’ll see about that. Where’s this Senza guy from? Is there anything on him?”

Chalk sat back at the computer, pulled up a fresh screen. “He is Spanish, actually. Was. Worked under several names, so I don’t know which one is real, but his history says he was a product of their spec ops. GOE—Grupos de Operaciones Especiales. Mean motherfuckers. Remember that guy, Pablo somebody, who came through Herat with those LAG 40 grenade launchers? He was GOE.”

“I remember. He was posing as a translator. He was nuts. I didn’t know if he was transporting those weapons or was setting up to shoot them at us.” Another chunk of the sandwich disappeared. “So Senza had all the same training as we do.”

“Yeah. His mandatory was up, they cut him loose in early 2000 and he went private.”

“That’s a nice long career for a private hitter. Any paper on who he’d been working for? Did he discriminate?”

“Not really. He’d taken ten jobs in four countries in the past two years. That’s steady work, at a decent clip, too. You know how some of these guys are—they’ll disappear for years, only come out if the target is huge, meaningful. And some of them will take the smaller jobs to keep in practice. Senza fell into that category.”

“Someone like Denon is pretty meaningful.”

“He is. But let’s see who else might be of interest to the forces of evil.”

He tapped on the keyboard, and a list popped up—the names of Denon’s small group that traveled with him to the US on his secret trip. “I’ve put in all the names of everyone in Denon’s top echelons, from the staffers who traveled with him to the company’s C-suite, and I’ve got nothing. Bebbington, Everson and Heedles are clean.”

“Show me the files.”

Xander ran through them. “Well, there’s a ton more people in his company who could be a target.”

“But it doesn’t make sense, Mutant. We have to limit the target list to the people who knew about the trip. He kept it off the radar entirely. We should look at all the people he met with here in the States, too.”

Xander agreed. “Get the itinerary, let’s start marking off names, and see where we stand. I’m going to start at the beginning of the job and run through every contact made, from the pilots to the hotels, service and limos, everything external where there were strangers. You start running backgrounds on the people he was slated to see while he was here. Let’s run them down, and see who Denon’s doing business with who might be doing naughty things.”

“Roger that. On it.”

* * *

Twenty minutes later, Xander found what he was looking for. Or rather, an anomaly, which was enough to set his instincts on fire.

He was running the surveillance tapes from Teterboro, the first hour of the job, looking for anyone who might have been paying special attention to their principal’s landing. Denon had specifically requested to meet them as he exited the terminal, not a moment before.

They’d been running the perimeter. He distinctly remembered casing the warehouse, looking for unseen threats, just as he’d done when Denon was leaving. Xander hadn’t been looking at the plane. He’d had his back to it. Chalk had been inside the terminal scanning for problems there.

They’d missed it. Son of a bitch, they’d missed it.

On the tape, two females came down the steps of the private Gulfstream at Teterboro Friday night. Maureen Heedles, and a blonde he didn’t recognize. She looked neither right, nor left, but marched directly into the terminal, and out of sight of the camera Xander had on his shoulder.

She wasn’t listed on the manifest for the flight to London today. And she hadn’t been on the flight that left this morning. That he was one hundred percent sure about.

Denon had brought a woman into the country, and left her behind.

Chapter 31

FLETCHER CALLED HART
back and got the name of the renters of Souleyret’s house on Capitol Hill—Michael Oread and Jared Lanter.

“They’re both Congressional staffers,” Hart said. “I called to talk to them, but neither man was at work today. I haven’t had a chance to follow up. Also, Robertson is under sail to find and isolate the vaccines.”

“Good. Good work, man. Where are we with the cameras around Cattafi’s house?”

“Nothing yet. We still haven’t been able to touch base with the neighbors. They must be out of town.”

“The cameras will have a brand name on them. Get someone up on a ladder, find out who makes them, call the company and give them the address. They’ll have an emergency contact for the owners.”

“That’s next on my extremely long list. Let me know if you find anything at Souleyret’s house.”

Fletch hung up with a bad feeling. Just something in his gut that told him things were all wrong, all off. How a simple case of domestic dispute had turned into an international intrigue and a possible bioterror attack in less than twelve hours was mind-boggling. There was no keeping this quiet; there were too many moving parts. He didn’t feel the need to inform Girabaldi, though. He was going to handle this his way.

They got in his car and headed toward Souleyret’s place. Sam was silent on the ride over, making notes in her round handwriting.

“Anything good coming?”

She shook her head “No. Nothing good. I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the data we just saw. I keep hoping I’m wrong.”

“Funny, I was just thinking the exact same thing. Moving that info, smuggling it in, is one thing—bringing live diseases and tissue samples? It’s so risky. If Souleyret was working for us, for State, couldn’t she just send an email or pick up the phone and blow it wide-open? For that matter, leak it to the press? Why run the risk of allowing an epidemic on our shores, too?”

“There must have been a very compelling reason. And you can’t trust the press to work the information. Too much partisanship nowadays. It falls into the wrong hands, it gets swept under the rug, or blown into a different story, or starts an irretrievable panic. But yes, there are all sorts of ways to pass information, secure ways—interagency emails, diplomatic pouches, all that. She must have felt it was too important to chance, and I can understand why. There’s a group out there killing people, and I imagine they’ll do anything and everything in their power to keep it quiet.”

She messed with her bangs for a moment, smoothing them down. “The problem is, we have no idea who Amanda was hiding the information from, Fletch. If she wasn’t willing to risk coming in through her own service, or letting the people she was working with know where she was, that tells a lot about her situation. She clearly knew what was on the SD card. Why didn’t she go to Girabaldi? Why did she sneak into the country, and how? And she went to a med student in Georgetown instead of her handlers? That’s all kinds of messed up. We need to trace her last steps, find out when she came in and from where, in addition to figuring out why she was avoiding her own people. I don’t see how we can do that without talking to someone who genuinely has her best interest at heart. Who might know what she was thinking.”

“Like a sister.”

“Exactly. I don’t have one, but if I did, and I was in trouble, family is the first place I’d go. Who knows what sort of situation she had? They could be close, they could hate each other. But if they are close, the sister might be the key. She may have heard or seen something that she doesn’t even realize is important. We have to find her. That data—if it’s even remotely accurate—could be worth killing for. If Amanda shared, Robin is in danger, too.”

“I agree. We’re here.” Fletcher made a right and pulled to the curb in front of Souleyret’s place.

The tall shotgun house was quiet, undisturbed, situated on a street that was also quiet, undisturbed. Real estate agents would call it charming. The whole neighborhood was a small oasis, one of those tiny pockets of homeyness in the middle of the urban sprawl. D.C. was changing all around him. Places that used to be dangerous at all hours were suddenly filled with sidewalks and driveways and grass and flowers and baby strollers. It was disconcerting. He liked it, but didn’t quite know what to make of it. He didn’t trust anything that looked so good on the outside it made people yearn for it.

He imagined them all sick, dead and dying, the strollers rusting in the driveways, the flowers decaying in their pots. He couldn’t let that happen.

He unbuckled his safety belt and climbed from the car. Sam followed him onto the small front porch, stood by his side as he slammed his fist into the door three times.

Nothing.

He rang the bell, and the dog next door, who apparently didn’t mind knocking but hated the chimes of the tinny bell, went mad.

Still, nothing from the house.

He tried the knob, found it unlocked, and his heart gave a little thump. This might be a nice area of town, but no one in their right mind left their doors unlocked. It was still D.C., after all.

“Exigent circumstances,” he said to Sam. “Back me up?” She nodded, eyes roving the neighborhood as if the answers were printed in the landscaping.

He called it in, told Hart they were entering the premises. Hart promised to have three patrols there momentarily. But Fletcher didn’t want to wait. Something was pulling him into the house. His years of experience told him something wicked waited inside.

He stepped into the cool foyer, called out, “Hello? Mr. Oread? Mr. Lanter? Metro Police.”

Nothing except the cool hiss of the air conditioner, which had been left on high. The whole place felt like the inside of a refrigerator. The floors were polished oak, the foyer empty of furniture aside from a small wooden bench, the walls painted a generic, builder-grade tan. A pair of muddy Wellies and dirt-covered work gloves stood in the corner—one of the renters had been gardening.

Fletcher cleared the rooms of the bottom floor out of habit; there was no one here, no one hiding, about to jump out. There was a table in the corner of the living room that had been disturbed. Searched, he thought, pointing toward it with his gun for Sam to see.

It was too quiet. Bad things awaited them above. He couldn’t smell them, but he knew there was death here.

He saw Sam staring up the stairs. She’d sensed it, too.

He raised his weapon again and started up. Sam followed in his steps, careful and competent, hands in her pockets so she didn’t accidentally touch anything. He appreciated not having to warn her to watch where she was going.

“Fletch,” Sam said, low. He turned and saw where she was pointing. A long blond hair, tag attached, drifted from the banister. “We’ll need to collect it. Amanda might have been here.”

“Or we could have a suspect. You feel it, too, huh? It’s all wrong in here.”

“Definitely,” she said. “Come on, let’s see what’s up there.”

When they found the renters, facing each other, one tied up, the other reaching out, such a strange, dislocated scene, Fletcher started to curse. Sam could already hear the sirens approaching; their backup’s arrival was imminent.

“How long have they been dead?” he demanded.

Sam touched the boy closest to the door on the arm. “You know I can’t tell you that without a liver temp. And with the air-conditioning set this high, it might retard the decomposition process. A day, maybe. It wasn’t recent, they’re out of rigor, but they haven’t begun to leak. The air-conditioning has helped preserve them a bit. I’d say within the past twenty-four hours.”

“Goddamn it all. We’ve been fucking around with the damn SD card while these kids rotted.”

She gently moved the boy’s arm. “Fletcher, I can’t tell you exactly, but they’ve been dead longer than you’ve been on the case. It wouldn’t have made a difference. You couldn’t have saved them.”

But she understood his frustration.

She saw a small piece of paper under the unbound boy. Carefully eased it out. “Fletch. We have another note. Listen to this. ‘
I’m sorry, I had no choice. It’s better this way
.’ Do you think it’s a coincidence? Could we have another murder-suicide?”

“I guaran-goddamn-tee you this isn’t a coincidence.”

There were voices outside. The police were here. Neighbors started to gather; Sam heard questions being shouted.

She ignored them, looked closer at the bodies, the positioning, the dried white strings of saliva around their mouths. Carefully eased a mouth open. Saw a brilliant red; the mucosa lining was irritated. “They ingested something. Something that worked fast. There are no signs of regurgitation, just froth. Whatever it was killed them very quickly.”

“Any ideas?”

“Not until I get them on the table—or Amado does, I mean. OCME has the in-house tox screen. I’d advise you have a death investigator take a blood sample and hightail it through the system, so we can see what we might be dealing with. And we should check glasses, cups, anything that’s been left out.”

“We’ll do that. I’m going to go let them in and get a crime scene unit here.” He stopped in the door, looked back at her. “Who the hell are we dealing with?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know, Fletch. But we’re going to figure this out.”

Hopefully, before too many more people die.

* * *

There was a big problem with being a professor, and not a medical examiner. Sam had to leave the room and let the D.C. people come in and do their work, without guidance or instruction from her. She could have pulled rank, thrown her FBI badge around, taken control, but honestly, she needed to keep herself separate and allow the investigation to continue.

She’d asked the death investigators to look carefully for injection sites, just in case her first instinct, that they drank some sort of poison, was incorrect. She had to assume whatever killed them had been administered against their wills, whether injected or ingested. She texted Nocek and asked him to rush the tox screen. But then she’d stepped away to let them do their jobs. There was nothing else she could do here.

Her fingers itched for a scalpel, to peel back the skin and see what sort of havoc the poison had wreaked. She checked her watch instead, counting silently.
One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three.

She looked at her watch again. Baldwin should be calling soon; he’d promised her an explanation. She walked down the stairs and went through the kitchen into the tiny backyard. Sent Daniels a text:
Anything yet?

He responded immediately:
Yes, I’ll have a full report shortly. Call you at this number?

Hurry. We have two more down.

She stowed the phone in her front pocket. She was good at waiting, but her agitation wouldn’t allow her to sit still. She wondered about the long blond hair on the banister—both of the men had short, dark hair, and there was only one bedroom that seemed to be in use. There were three bedrooms upstairs, and the other two were set up as offices, with couches that looked like they could pull out into guest beds. She didn’t like to make assumptions, but the setup screamed couple, not roommates. So probably no girlfriends staying the night. Which made exactly zero difference to the investigation. The hair could belong to anyone, friend or foe. But her first instinct when she saw it was to think it belonged to whomever had been here last. An automatic turn to the nefarious.

She started prowling the backyard, walked out into the alley and bumped into a small, portly woman with tightly marcelled white hair, wearing fluorescent yellow gardening clogs and holding a pair of dirty gloves. Her face was red, with both exertion and shock, Sam thought.

When Sam disentangled herself from the woman’s grasp, she patted her down slightly under the guise of making sure she hadn’t hurt her, but also looking for any surprises that might be coming. But the woman was clean, the gloves the only thing in her possession. She began asking questions immediately, voice high and breathless.

“I’m fine, I’m fine. Oh my. Whatever is happening? I saw all the police cars. I was coming over to make sure everything is okay. Do you know what’s going on?”

“You’re a neighbor?”

“I am. I live next door. Please tell me nothing’s happened to Mike or Jared.”

She seemed a kindly old soul, but Sam was well-marshaled in the ways of crime scene investigation. “What’s your name?”

“Eloise Poe. I’m over there.” She waved a hand absently toward her fence. The dog they’d heard earlier uttered a short, sharp bark. “Hush, Tervis.” She turned to Sam, eyes full of concern. “Are the boys okay?”

Sam shook her head. “I’m sorry, ma’am.”

“Oh my. Oh my.” She had a hand on her chest, the red face going a duskier pink. Sam eyed her, making sure she didn’t fall or faint, but the woman kept her feet, uttering small exclamations of distress until Sam touched her arm, which seemed to bring her back to the present moment.

“When I didn’t see Jared on his run this morning I wondered if he was ill. I never imagined, oh my!”

“So they have a routine, a regular schedule?”

“They do...they did. Jared ran every morning at six. They both left for work at eight, together.” She gave Sam an assessing look. “They were together, you should know that. It didn’t matter to me. They were beautiful young men, very much in love. Jared said they might get married one day. And I thought that would be just grand. Well-suited to each other, did a nice job with the house, splitting the chores. And who am I to tell someone who they can love? I’m eighty-one and I’ve loved quite a few in my day who upset the people around me.”

Sam smiled. God bless nosy neighbors.

“When was the last time you saw them, ma’am?”

“Eloise, please. Jared ran yesterday morning, but I don’t remember seeing them last night. They usually sit out on the porch at night, have a beer, talk about their day. Oh, how could this have happened? How did they die?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, I can’t discuss any details with you. I need you to come with me, though. You’re going to have to talk to the detectives.”

Eloise Poe stopped short. “You aren’t a detective? Who are you?”