36: A Novel (38 page)

“Fine,” I said.  “That family just reminded me of something.”

I probably should have kept chattering as we rode up.  Thanked him again for his assistance.  Praised his sense of duty to America.  That’s what the con-man would have done.  But I was too unsettled after seeing Monica.

The elevator dinged to announce we had arrived at the twelfth floor, and I forced myself to focus on the moment.  Stepping out, I looked around and let Cummins lead the way to the room.  I stood close behind him, reaching into my jacket pocket, as he inserted the key card. 

The lock beeped and a small light changed from red to green.  He withdrew the card, turned the handle and pushed inside.  I was right behind him, withdrawing one of the syringes labeled M99 that I’d found in the back of the FBI Suburban.  Lifting it, I stuck the hard plastic needle cover in my mouth, bit down and pulled it free. 

Taking one quick step, I reached around Cummins and placed my hand on his forehead, pulling his head tight against my shoulder.  He tensed and reached for my hand, but the needle was already in the side of his exposed neck.  I pressed the plunger home, and withdrew it.

His arms went limp, hands falling to his side.  Two seconds later his entire body collapsed against me and I dropped the syringe and lifted him into my arms.  He wasn’t a big man, but he wasn’t light either.  Heading for the sofa, I glanced around and saw that we were in a two-bedroom suite.  Changing directions, I carried him into one of the bedrooms and gently placed him on the bed.

I spent a few minutes making sure his neck was straight and his airway wasn’t compressed.  I removed his shoes and placed them on the floor next to the bed and started to cover him with the sheet, but paused.  Could the M99 drug make him sick? 

To be safe, I rolled him onto his side so if he did throw up he wouldn’t inhale and drown in his own vomit.  Pulling the sheet to his shoulders, I closed the bedroom door behind me and headed downstairs to get Julie.

45

“What the hell was that all about?  Going back for your purse.”  I asked when we were in the room.

I hadn’t wanted to discuss anything in front of Cummins, and to her credit, Julie had picked up on this and stayed silent.  Now, we had a few things to go over before I took a walk.

“My purse.”

She looked at me like that explained everything.  I stared back at her and shrugged my shoulders.

“My wallet, ID, credit cards, cash, phone.  Everything was in there,” she said, shaking her head like I was a dullard.

“Your phone,” I said, realizing the mistake we had made.  “Give it to me!”

She reached in her purse and pulled it out, pressing a button and staring at the screen. 

“Sorry, it’s dead,” she said, holding it up for me to see.  “I don’t remember the last time I charged it, and looking things up on the internet while we were on the plane must have drained it.”

I took it from her hand and tapped the screen a couple of times with my finger.  It stayed dark.  Turning it over, I popped the cover off the back and removed the battery before pulling the SIM card.

“What are you doing?”

“This is the FBI.  They froze your account and tracked us to that airstrip in the middle of nowhere.  If they can do that, they can locate your phone.  It’s a good thing for us that the battery did die, or we might not have made it here.”

The look on her face told me she understood exactly the error we’d made.  Only sheer luck had kept us from driving around Virginia and DC with a phone constantly transmitting our location.  Well, as a friend of mine used to say, I’d rather be lucky than good.

I put the pieces of the phone next to a large, flat screen TV.  Opening the suitcase, I began unloading weapons and placing them on a small, round table near the windows that had a partial view of the distant Capitol building.  Once the bag was empty, I took off my jacket and removed all of the other items I’d taken from the FBI.

While I did this, Julie opened the door to the bedroom where I’d put Cummins.  The first question she’d asked when I went downstairs to get her was what I’d done with him.  Now, she was checking on him, disappearing into the room for a couple of minutes.  When she came back out, she met my eyes and nodded that he was OK.

“So, what do we do now?”  She asked, looking at the array of weapons on the table.

“I want to take a walk,” I said.  “Get a good feel for that street and try to figure out where the ground team is set up.”

“You should look at it on Google Earth, first,” she said.

I looked at her blankly.  Had no idea what the hell she was talking about.

“Google Earth?  Satellite photos of the entire planet?”  She spoke as if by phrasing it as a question I’d suddenly know what she was talking about.

“I told you where I’ve been for more than a decade,” I said.  “I wasn’t making that up, and I really have no clue what the hell you’re talking about.”

“Sorry,” she said, walking over to the suitcase and picking up her laptop.

She messed with it for a bit, getting up and looking at the paper the front desk clerk had given to Cummins when he checked in.  Reading something off it and typing it in, she sat back with a smile a few minutes later and patted the sofa cushion next to her.  I sat down and looked at an amazingly crisp overhead image of a street lined with buildings.

“Is that real time?”  I asked, amazed.

“No.  I don’t know if there’s any way to tell when the pictures were taken, but Google runs cars all over the place with big camera setups on the roof.  Their goal is to photograph every street.  Don’t know how close they are to completing that, but I’ve yet to see a large city that didn’t have every single road already imaged.”

I leaned close and peered at the screen.  Thinking, I was able to remember the three rooftops where the Secret Service was stationed.  I pointed them out and Julie clicked her mouse and marked each one with what looked like an upside-down red teardrop.

“OK, I’ve already eliminated these two buildings.”

I tapped the screen to indicate the ones directly across from the restaurant.  A moment later, two more teardrops decorated the image.

“Has to be a location with direct line of sight to the restaurant.  Right?”  She asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“And the missile impacted the center of the front wall?”

I nodded.

“OK.  Let’s try something to speed this up.”

Julie clicked a bunch of times, opening menus and selecting options faster than I could keep up.  Soon she had a blue dot placed at the base of the center of the front wall of the target.  Still clicking, she drew a straight line directly across the street from the point she’d created. 

“So, we eliminate these two buildings,” she began.  “We can also eliminate anything on the same side of the street.  That leaves…”

She used the mouse cursor to begin dragging the end of the line farthest from the dot.  Moving it up and down the street she identified five buildings.  Everything else was at an impossible angle to the target. 

Of the five possibilities, two were structures that had already been tagged as having Secret Service on the roof.  Of the remaining three, one was a restaurant, one was a boutique coffee house and the final was an office building.

“It almost has to be the office building,” I said.  “The restaurant and coffee shop are too public.  Can you turn on that view that lets me see the front of the building?”

“Street view,” she reminded me, clicking and pulling the image around until we had a clear shot of the entire front of the structure.

A door at the midpoint of the building.  On either side, half a dozen windows.  Most of them had the name of the business occupying the suite stenciled on the glass that faced the street.  Twelve windows.  Nine of them were obviously occupied, but just because the other three weren’t labeled didn’t mean they weren’t in use.

Julie zoomed and began making notes on a pad of hotel stationery.  She wrote down the name of each business, then opened a new browser window.  In the search box, which I noticed was Google, she typed in the name of the business at the top of her list.  Within seconds, we had results and she scanned them quickly.

Realizing I was out of my depth, I sat back and let her work.  She spent almost twenty minutes researching the businesses, then did a final search based on the street address of the building.  She clicked on a couple of links, scribbled some more notes, then sat back with the pad in her hand.

“Alright,” she said, flipping back to the first page.  “An independent insurance agent.  Copyright attorney.  Two different personal injury lawyers.  Credit repair company.  Residential alarm systems sales office.  That’s what’s to the right of the entrance. 

“To the left is a small publishing company.  A public relations firm, but it looks like it’s a one-man show.  And a CPA.  That leaves three offices unaccounted for.”

“You’re thinking it’s one of the empty ones?”  I asked, glad to have another head working on this.

“Maybe,” she said, lifting her hand and waggling it back and forth.  “I looked up the building itself.  It’s owned by a corporation named New Look Ventures.  They’re incorporated in Delaware.  I tried to follow the ownership back to an individual or individuals, but it’s a maze of shell companies.  I’m sure there’s a way to unravel the maze, but that’s beyond my abilities.”

“You said maybe,” I prompted.

“Right.  Sorry.  So here’s what’s interesting.  New Look Ventures purchased the building one month ago.  And they paid a premium for it, even though none of these tenants are the type that write a big rent check each month.”

“How much?”

“Fourteen million,” she said.

“Sorry,” I shook my head.  “I haven’t exactly been following the commercial real estate market.  Is that a lot these days?”

“In this economy?  With low rent tenants?  That alone is a red flag.  But check this out.  The restaurant, two doors down, which is a much larger building, was bought two and half years ago for less than three million!”

That got my attention.  I may have never been more than an Army grunt, a roofer and an inmate, but I was still smart enough to recognize the smell of the US Government.  Basically unlimited funds when they really wanted to buy something.  No one else was dumb enough to overpay for a piece of property by a factor of seven.  It was damning, but not quite a smoking gun.

“How long did the previous owner have the building?”  I asked.

Julie leaned over the keyboard and typed and clicked some more. 

“Thirteen years,” she said.  “A private individual was the sole owner.  Josiah Holmgren.”

“Out of the blue, he gets a fourteen million dollar check for a property that’s probably worth two million at best,” I said.  “Anyway to tell if he was trying to sell, or if the buyer came to him with an unsolicited offer?”

Julie shook her head and leaned back, lifting the notepad again.

“I’m sure there is, but I’m not the one to try and figure that out.  I’m an office manager for a large real estate company in LA.  That’s the only reason I know how to look for this stuff.  Probably the agents in the office could find out, but I don’t have a clue where to start.

“But, here’s the final thing I found.  You’d think, if you just paid a shitload of money for a building that’s one quarter unoccupied, you’d be trying like hell to lease out the empty offices.  Right?  Well, not here.  If the owner has them listed, they would have come up when I searched the street address.  But nothing other than the property records and a listing of the businesses that are operating at that location.”

I sat there and turned over what she was telling me.  On the surface, it sure looked suspicious.  And what was a fourteen-million-dollar expenditure if it resulted in the death of the President and the Speaker of the House?  To the people that operated at that level of government, it was nothing.  A pittance in exchange for gaining control of the White House.

“Is there a phone number listed for the owner?”  I asked when an idea popped into my head.

Julie clicked a few times before shaking her head.

“No, not the owner.  Just the law firm that handled the transaction.  I pulled up their website and they look like a really big deal here in Washington.  Their home page has a photo of the senior partner standing next to the President on a golf course.”

“Give me their number,” I said, stepping over to the hotel phone.

I dialed as Julie read it off the screen.  It rang once before being answered by a woman with a melt you in your tracks sultry voice with a slight British undertone.  When I could put my brain back in gear, I identified myself as the first fictitious name that popped into my head and explained I was interested in leasing space in one of their client’s buildings.  I provided the address and was asked to please hold.

While I listened to sappy music, I tried to dispel the image of a naked goddess that the receptionist’s voice had conjured up in my head.  I had little doubt that was exactly why she had been hired. 

It was almost five minutes later before she came back on the line and told me that she had checked with the attorney for that particular client and there were not any offices available at this time.  Before I could say a word, she thanked me for calling and disconnected.

“Well?”  Julie asked with raised eyebrows when I hung up the phone.

“Nothing definitive,” I said.  “But there’s supposedly no space available.”

“Could be true,” she said.  “One of the other tenants could have rented out the empty offices as their business grew.  Probably cheaper than relocating to a larger space.”

“OK,” I said, thinking.  “Or she didn’t do anything other than put me on hold long enough to make it seem like she asked someone.  Or, our theory is right.  Time to take a walk.”

“Give me a minute,” Julie said.  “I haven’t been to the bathroom since we left LA.”

“I should go alone…”  I stopped when she glared at me.

“Are we really going to have this conversation?  You’re the one that talked me into coming with you.  Now that I’m here, I’m not going to sit in a hotel room.  It’s just a walk.