Wildfire (33 page)

"And six-month leases."

"And the Eskimo way of life."

"And a new ASAC."

"Amen t' that!"

Setting his mug aside, Bobby LaGrange turned back to the five federal wildlife agents.

"Okay," he said, "if you guys are ready to sack out for a few hours, we'll take her out on the first leg. And then, after you get up and get some decent grub in your stomachs, somebody can start this whole deal out by telling me everything you know about this character named Alfred Bloom."

At precisely five minutes after five on what would soon turn out to be a beautiful Saturday morning, Bobby LaGrange and his able assistant Mo-Jo stood at the bridge controls and skillfully piloted the eighty-two-foot
Lone Granger
out of the Windbreaker Marina harbor and into the main channel, her twin Detroit diesels rumbling smoothly. And as they did so, four men and a young boy settled into their bunks and beds, already soothed into a peaceful sleep by the gentle rocking motions of the deep-water craft.

As the
Lone Granger
cleared the first set of channel markers, a huge man pulled himself out of the water and up onto the dock. Then he sat there, salt water dripping off his huge, deeply tanned, and muscular body, as he watched the departure of the customized yacht with a look that was overwhelmingly cold, malicious, and foreboding.

But because of the surrounding darkness, the man who called himself Riser had no way of knowing that on the rear deck of the
Lone Granger,
in a place where the running lights left only dark shadows, Henry Lightstone sat cross-legged in quiet solitude, staring back in the direction of the marina with an expression of uneasy awareness and protective fury in his equally cold and unforgiving eyes.

Chapter Twenty

Alfred Bloom would have been absolutely panic-stricken had he known that at ten-fifteen that Saturday morning his fate was being contemplated by at least four dozen professionally trained and extremely dangerous individuals—one of whom happened to be sitting by himself in a far corner of the cafeteria of the J. Edgar Hoover Building in downtown Washington, D.C.

It had been a long night for FBI agent A1 Grynard.

After three hours out at the Dulles Access Road crime scene, the FBI special task force commander had spent another hour on the phone talking back and forth with two of the senior partners from Little, Warren, Nobles & Kole, in an effort to locate Jason Bascomb III and his two counter-terrorist clients. At one-thirty a.m., Grynard had taken his field notebook down to the communications center and begun contacting the senior members of his task force and the night-duty agents working out of the local FBI field offices, sharing with them what little the two senior law partners knew about Jason Bascomb Ill's security arrangements. Then, at four-thirty a.m., he had begun digging through the FBI's computerized central records files, searching for that elusive connection that no one else had managed to find yet.

And after all that, the fatigued supervisor of the thirty-two-agent special task force realized, he was no closer to making any sense out of the entire confused Operation Counter Wrench fiasco than he had been forty-eight hours earlier.

So
what do I do, Mr. Alfred Linneas Bloom?
A1 Grynard thought to himself.
Pull you in or let you run?

Grynard was tired, hungry, irritable, and absolutely frustrated. He had been on the go for the last twenty-eight hours, and he had long since given up any thoughts of dinner, rewarmed or otherwise. Instead, he'd finally settled for a quick breakfast of coffee and a couple of bran muffins in the FBI headquarters cafeteria before allowing himself to decide whether he should make an attempt to set an emergency meeting with Alfred Bloom—and in doing so, possibly either save the wealthy industrialist's life, or put him at much greater risk—or simply go home and go to bed.

It was turning out to be a far more difficult choice than Grynard would have ever imagined.

The veteran agent was sleepily contemplating the last cold dregs of his coffee, having just about convinced himself that Alfred Bloom would get along just fine for another twelve hours or so without the assistance of the FBI, when he happened to glance up and see a young man who looked a great deal like his teenage son enter the cafeteria.

Except that as far as Grynard knew, his sports-minded and government-hating son didn't even own a pair of gray slacks and a navy blazer— the standard uniform of the Washington, D.C., bureaucrat.

As he continued to sit there, caught up in a sense of uneasy anticipation that he couldn't quite define, Grynard watched the neatly dressed young man stop just inside the entrance to the cafeteria and begin looking around at the scattered faces of the agents and technicians and clerical staff who were either coming on or going off duty. Then it hit him.

Oh, Christ, no,
he thought to himself.

Grynard froze in place, trying to convince himself that if he didn't move, didn't look up, and didn't meet the young man's searching gaze, then it just might not be . . .

But then, out of the corner of his eye, Grynard saw the navy-blazered young man suddenly stop his visual search and begin to move forward in the direction of his corner table. At that moment Special Agent A1 Grynard realized that pausing for breakfast at the J. Edgar Building had been a mistake.

Should have just gone home and gone to bed,
he told himself, knowing of course that it wouldn't have made much difference one way or the other, because they would have found him no matter where he went. That was what FBI agents were good at, finding people who didn't want to be found, he thought with a morose sense of irony.

For a brief moment Grynard tried to convince himself that the young man was looking for someone else—another agent who had futilely sought a few moments of peace and escape from the pressures of the job—and that he would get to go home to his incredibly patient and understanding wife after all. But the numbness in his stomach and the visible relief on the young agent's face had already warned him that it wasn't going to work out that way.

Not today.

And they had to send one of the young ones, too,
Grynard mused; realizing, of course, that the brass knew better than to send one of the old-timers for a notification like this. It was a common understanding in the bureau that the "dinosaurs" all watched out for each other. If they had dispatched one of his forty-eight-year-old peers with the news, Grynard knew, that agent would have taken one look at him and told him to go home—let someone else handle it—because there were always other agents available on standby, and they'd all been through the same thing hundreds of times in their careers.

No,
Grynard thought,
they wouldn't send an old-timer. They'd send one of the new ones who would hunt you down until they dropped, because they were young and dedicated and trained to never give up, no matter what.

"Uh, Agent Grynard?"

A1 Grynard looked up with tired and reddened eyes, and immediately decided that the young man in the navy blue blazer who was standing hesitantly in front of him couldn't possibly be an FBI agent, because he looked much too young and healthy and rested.

Where the hell are they recruiting these new ones, right out of high school?
he asked himself, and then decided that he really didn't want to think about that particular topic right now.

In fact, Grynard wasn't even sure if he wanted to identify himself. Not that it mattered, he immediately realized, because the rookie agent undoubtedly possessed 20/20 vision, and therefore would have no trouble whatever in reading the ID badge secured to the breast pocket of Grynard's suit coat from where he was standing. For Grynard to read the small print on the young agent's laminated ID badge, he would have to retrieve his glasses from his coat pocket. And for some reason that he couldn't quite define at that moment, he really didn't want to do that.

"Yes?"

"Sir, Supervisory Special Agent Whittman asked me to find you and advise you that they've located a Mr. Jason . . . uh . . ."

"Bascomb the Third?"

"Yes, sir, that's correct."

"Is he alive?"

"I don't know, sir. I was directed to find you and to transport you to the scene if you'd like a ride."

A1 Grynard sagged heavily in his chair. Whether he knew it or not, the young rookie agent had just answered his question. Or at least one of his questions.

"Yes." Grynard nodded tiredly. "I think I'd like that very much."

It was nearly quarter after ten in the morning by the time A1 Grynard and his rookie agent driver arrived at the Warrenton safe house.

"Uh, doesn't look too good, does it, sir?" the young agent said as he brought the brightly polished late-model sedan up alongside one of the Fauquier County patrol units.

"No, it doesn't," Grynard agreed.

He didn't bother to tell his youthful escort that he had been reading the scene from the moment they'd come around the corner and he had seen the number of marked units and uniformed officers surrounding the outside of the yellow scene tape. Four patrol cars and six uniforms outside, manning the perimeter. Four unmarked units, all locals, and three distinctive bureau cars inside, along with at least a half dozen plain- clothed figures, none of whom seemed to be in any particular hurry at all. And most telling, no ambulances or paramedic units parked outside with their rear doors open and ready.

Either they've already been here and left, or nobody bothered to call them
, Grynard thought, not allowing himself to develop any hope be
cause he was pretty sure he knew which way it had gone. The people who had hit the U.S. Marshal transport team back at the Reston off-ramp had been much too professional to leave any living witnesses behind.

"Grynard?"

A trim and hard-looking man sporting a graying crew cut, pressed new blue jeans, rubber-soled field boots, a maroon polo shirt, and a 10mm Model 1076 Smith & Wesson semiautomatic pistol worn high in a snug-fitting hip holster, walked up to the passenger side of Grynard's car and bent down to look in the passenger side window. Grynard noted the distinctive creases and sweat marks that a Kevlar vest had recently made in the tight-fitting polo shirt. A vest that had undoubtedly been tossed in the trunk of one of the bureau units out of pure frustration, not to mention outright defiance of standing bureau regulations.

"That's right."

The man stuck a muscular hand in the window.

"Jim Whittman," he said. "Thanks for coming."

Whittman, Grynard knew, was the supervisory agent of one of the FBI's highly regarded hostage recovery teams. He had never met Whittman before, but he had certainly heard a number of rumors about the ex-Marine combat veteran. One of the more interesting ones was that Whittman had somehow managed to subvert personnel rules and recruit all twelve of his young agents from Army Ranger and Marine Recon teams. Another had it that his operational tactics were based on the simple principles of conditioning, intelligence, and planning—and then split-second controlled aggression when they got the "go" signal to extract a hostage.

True or not, Grynard reminded himself, there was one thing that was definitely not a rumor: the fact that in a little over three years Whittman's team had never lost a hostage or sustained a single agent casualty.

For a brief moment Grynard wondered how the Whittman aggressive fire-team tactics might fare against an unknown adversary armed with a four-bore rifle and the element of surprise, and then decided that he didn't want to think about that right now. Not after the Waco incident, or after what had just happened to one of the U.S. marshal's elite prisoner transport teams.

"I take it the scene's secure?" Grynard said evenly as he stepped out of the car, making it clear to Whittman that he had noted the vest transgression, but was not pushing the issue. It was Whittman's scene, Grynard reasoned. The hostage recovery team commander could argue rules and regs with his own supervisor.

"Oh, it's secure all right," the lanky FBI agent said disgustedly. "If it was any more secure, we could invite the whole goddamned White House press corps in for a barbecue."

Grynard allowed the casually dressed team commander to escort him into the house, thinking to himself that the FBI had certainly changed since he'd been a rookie agent.

"The two outside were part of the security team," Whittman said mechanically as he led Grynard through the scene. "Each of them took a knife in the kidney, and then got their throats cut. Military recon style," the ex-Marine added with a distant and professional casualness.

"Were they private?" Grynard asked as he stood inside the doorway and observed the neat bullet holes in the forehead and chest of the third body.

"Yeah, but they all had federal law enforcement backgrounds. Two DEA, one Secret Service, and one from the bureau."

Grynard's eyebrows came up in surprise.

"Stanley Woodson," Whittman went on. "Good man. Too damn good to have let himself get caught up in a situation like this. Put in his twenty and decided to see if he could spend more time with his kids before they got too old," the hostage recovery team commander said in a voice that was filled with tightly controlled anger.

"Which one is he?"

"You're looking at him." Whittman gestured with his crew-cut head at the sprawled body.

"What about the others?"

Whittman began to use the index finger of his extended right hand like a lecture pointer. "Roy Parker, one of the defendants . . . and an ex-Marine." He half-smiled. "Apparently made a try for one of the security guard's pistols when everything broke loose. Looks like he damn near made it too," he added approvingly.

The right hand shifted over to the next two bodies. "Calvin Green and Williston Fordham, attorneys at law for the firm of Little, Warren, Nobles & Kole. Far as we can tell, neither of them made any attempt to defend themselves. All they did was shit and piss their pants, probably before they got nailed. Whoever did it didn't even bother to double-tap them," Whittman said with a disdain that clearly bespoke his opinion of anyone who would chose to give up his life without a fight.