Capitol Punishment (An Art Jefferson Thriller Book 3) (27 page)

“...check for any impairment. Would you—” Fitzroy’s words froze in his throat as the movement came quick and unexpected from the backseat. He swiveled the flashlight to the rear of the car to illuminate whatever was going on as his right thumb released the topstrap on his holster. The beam of white went not to the faces—faces might frighten, but they are not dangerous—but to the hands, which were on the occupant’s lap. The far occupant was reaching across and toward the window with—
NO!

Darian didn’t know what effect the glass would have on his shots, so he swung the Ingram back and forth as he sprayed the rounds at the pig, destroying the window and sending his target falling from view.

“SHIT!” Roger screamed, ducking, then looking in the side view mirror. “He’s still out there! He’s on the ground! He’s moving!”

Darian ejected the empty magazine and noisily dug another out of the gym bag and inserted it. He crawled over Moises and peeked through the permanently open side window just in time to see the pig disappear behind the car, crawling on his belly. A wide trail of blood marked his path. “Stay down.”

The NALF leader popped the door handle and stepped out after cautioning his comrades. Down the interstate he could see only a speck of white approaching, some distance off. But this wouldn’t take long. He edged along the car toward the rear, the stubby Ingram held forward one-handed. A raspy scraping rose from the asphalt behind the Olds, which Darian could tell was the sound of hard soles pushing off the pavement. And there was breathing, or wheezing, which came and went in short bursts. As he reached the rear quarter panel the source of both sounds became visible to Darian.

“Hold it, pig.”

Trooper Fitzroy, his face abraded and bleeding from being pushed along the roadway as his legs attempted to drive his damaged body to safety, paused at the sound, then rolled onto his back near the right front of his cruiser. He winced in pain as his shattered arms flopped with the motion of his torso. Both limbs from shoulder to elbow were red, pulpy strands that seemed strangely long. They, along with Fitzroy’s Kevlar vest, had absorbed the brunt of the submachine gun’s punishment. The trooper’s gun and radio were still in their place on his Sam Browne, useless to him.

Darian stepped closer, trying unsuccessfully to skirt the swath of blood. His thumb moved the selector switch to single shot as he leveled the weapon at the pig. “How long did you think we’d just sit back and take it, pig?”

Fitzroy’s expression became one of mixed pain and puzzlement, but no fear. He knew what was coming, whether the guy shot him or not. Too much blood was pouring from his open wounds. Too much for anything to matter anymore. “They’ll get you,” Fitzroy said confidently, his voice breathy. “Don’t worry.”

The short barrel centered on the pig’s face. “We got you first.” Darian smiled, then pulled the trigger twice, both rounds hitting true and literally exploding the top of the pig’s head, which spilled toward the lowest point on the road’s shoulder.

“Shit!” Roger yelled from the car. “There’s cars coming!”

Darian looked south, squinting past the bright spotlight that shone almost in his face. The single dots had become multiple pairs of distant headlights, and they were coming fast. He gave the patrol car a quick look from where he stood. There was no one else in it. No other pig, and no one locked in the rear seat cage. It was a clean kill. As clean as it could get.

“Come on!”

Darian heeded that call and climbed back in the Olds through the open rear door, pushing Moises over as he did. Roger dropped the car into gear even before the door shut completely and pulled into the traffic lanes with a screech of rubber worthy of Hollywood.

Trooper Fitzroy lay in front of his idling UHP cruiser for another thirty minutes before a passing fellow officer made the grisly discovery. Within twenty minutes there were over fifty state and local law enforcement personnel on-scene. The first thing they did was call for the coroner. The second was to switch off the small video camera mounted in tandem with the cruiser’s rearview mirror and remove the tape from the recorder secured in the trunk. It arrived at the Utah Highway Patrol’s Salt Lake City headquarters by helicopter twenty-two minutes after that.

SEVENTEEN

Remembrance

A hundred and twenty hours after the first person fell in the attack on the First Interstate World Center, the core of the FBI investigative team was moving beyond the “who” to focus on the “how,” a question they believed was explained in the voluminous handwritten diaries of Canadia Conyers Royce.

“I’ll read to you,” Frankie said. Art, Hal, Omar, and Lou gave their attention as she found the first section she had marked. “Here:

December 1985,

The ‘Defender,’ last month’s issue, arrived today, and a very, very powerful piece was on page seventeen. By a man named John Barrish. I have never heard of him before, but he referred to Father’s good friend Dr. Trent in the piece. Powerful, I do say. So clearly does he describe the negro problem that I could almost overlook that annoying habit—the same one Dr. Trent had—of calling the negroes Africans. Words, words, words. This is about more than that. I must look into this John Barrish. I definitely must.
”

Frankie skipped to the next passage marked by a sticky note. “And this:

March 1986,

John is a charming man. He reminds me so much of father. Intelligent. No... wise. That is the word. And what power there is to his vision!
”

“She sounds infatuated with him,” Hal commented. “What’s that
Defender
reference?” Lou asked.

“It’s some quarterly white power rag put out by an old minister who acts as a sort of clearinghouse for all the groups’ writings,” Frankie explained. “And Burlingame found an interesting ad in one from three years back. Placed by some Afrikaner mercenary type who said there were, quote, ‘former East Bloc
specialists
eager to work for the right price,’ unquote. An interesting spin on Royce’s trip, wouldn’t you say?”

“I would say. You read all these?” Art asked, gesturing at the stacks of diaries.

“Every page.” Three solid days it had taken, holed up in a vacant office one floor up. Frankie, a diary writer herself, felt she knew Canadia Conyers Royce now, a state of familiarity that had pity and anger as tagalong emotions.

“So she read something by Barrish and...what?” Art wondered.

“This goes back further than Barrish’s piece in the
Defender
,” Frankie explained, recalling the passages laid upon the yellowed pages eighty-odd years earlier. “It goes all the way back to the Civil War. Mrs. Royce’s family was originally from Charleston. Big shipping people. Her grandfather squirreled away his money in gold, and when the war started he fought for the Confederacy. He lived through it all and moved north with his booty when it was all over. But he didn’t forget his
suthun
ways. He was one of the original organizers of the Klan in Massachusetts, and his son—Mrs. Royce’s father—followed in his footsteps. The business Gramps had set up did well and they never hesitated to support their fellow hood-heads.”

“So Mrs. Royce had a background that lent itself to John Barrish’s way of thinking,” Art proposed.

“Step one: like ideology. Step two: contact. After she read the
Defender
she started corresponding with Barrish. Eventually they met, and she liked him a lot.”

“A May-December thing,” Hal suggested facetiously.

“In a way it was,” Frankie responded. “For her, at least. Women think differently, fellas. Older women like Mrs. Royce in particular. There’s a romantic sort of thing about being ‘connected’ to a younger, powerful man. And she saw John Barrish as very powerful.

“So, step three: assistance. She started giving him money for the AVO, just like her father and grandfather had done for the Klan.”

“How much altogether?” Lou inquired.

“She never said in the diaries, but she was loaded.”

“The money was hers, not Monte’s,” Omar reported. “He had the business, but she had the family fortune tucked away. We ran down her accounts and found withdrawal after withdrawal, all cash. And remember those cash bundles in the desk drawer? Those match exactly in amount with several withdrawals.”

“And who—need I ask—did the actual withdrawing?” Lou wondered needlessly.

“Mrs. Royce’s signature on the papers, Monte Royce’s hands on the cash. She’d okay it, he’d go pick it up.” Omar shrugged. “From him it somehow got to Barrish and Kostin and whoever else she was supporting. But we do know it totaled over fifteen million from the time she met Barrish.”

“Fifteen million?” The A-SAC slid back in his seat at the head of the table. “That’s a lot of mad money.”

“Hate money,” Art corrected the emotion.

Lou Hidalgo nodded. “So Mrs. Royce bankrolled Barrish because she liked him.” His face screwed into a frown.

“That, and some of the nostalgic connections,” Frankie expanded. “Remember what she said about Trent? That’s Felix Trent.”

“The guy Barrish put on a pedestal?” Hidalgo said, leafing through the thick mental file devoted to the AVO leader.

“The same one,” Frankie confirmed. “Mrs. Royce’s father was a friend of Trent’s. In a way she thought of her connection with Barrish as a sort of divine signal.” She paused, feeling a connection herself to Mrs. Royce. But it was only gender, and that was grossly insufficient to allow understanding of her actions. “The stupid old woman.”

“What else do we know?” Hidalgo asked.

“The minivan the Barrishes used was found at a shopping center in Palmdale,” Art reported. “Their house was deserted.”

“What about the Mankowitz and Royce hits?” That was something Hidalgo was puzzled about.

“Royce and his mother were hit sometime between five and eight,” Art answered.

“That was the coroner’s finding,” Frankie added. “But some things at the house point to a more concrete time. Royce was up, dressed, and in the kitchen. The nurse said he usually got up at six. Give him half an hour to dress and make his tea, and that puts it back to six-thirty. And the alarm was manually turned off at seven-fifteen. The security company that monitors their system records the times the systems are active for liability purposes.”

“So whether Royce or someone else turned off the alarm, we have them getting hit at the earliest at seven-fifteen,” Art said. “Mankowitz we know was hit at one minute after eight from the nine-one-one calls reporting glass breaking and strange sounds. They used silencers, we’re certain, otherwise it would have been a ‘shots fired’ call. All the callers were hearing was the sound of the rounds hitting Mankowitz’s Mercedes.”

“Forty-five minutes apart and different calibers,” Hidalgo observed.

“Three-eighty on the Royces, and forty-fives on Mankowitz,” Lightman said. “And two forty-fives on World Center’s plant manager. All the spent casings were clean. Wiped before they were loaded. Smooth prints. Pro-like.”

“The only people we know of that Barrish had to work with him are his family,” Art said. “A wife and two sons. No record on any of them.”

“This is a lot of work for four people,” Hidalgo commented. “The Royces, Mankowitz, the World Center. All within an hour and fifteen minutes.”

Art had no answer for that obvious and very correct observation. But there had to be one, and he would find it.

A single tap on the conference room door preceded Special Agent Dan Burlingame. His expression told those gathered to drop what they were doing. “KMOC just got a call from some group claiming the World Center as their work.”

“We have a hundred claims, Dan,” Art reminded him.

“Did any of those others know that the cylinder of nerve gas was in the A/C ducts on Seventy-four?”

The silence after Dan’s revelation of the message’s most important part was brief, just long enough for looks to be exchanged.

“I have a team going over for a copy of it,” Burlingame said.

“Who made the claim?” Art asked.

“Some group called the New Africa Liberation Front.”

Art’s eyes narrowed.
New Africa?
What in the hell was going on?

“I made a quick check on this group,” Burlingame reported. “We have them listed only as a matter of record, but LAPD has a file on them.”

“They’re an actual group?” Art asked skeptically.

Burlingame nodded. “I’ve got the address LAPD has on them.”

“Liberation Front?” Espinosa said. “Sounds like a revolutionary bunch.”

“That’s what LAPD said,” Burlingame confirmed.

“Are you saying this is a
black
group?”

Burlingame nodded to Art. He knew it wasn’t the answer desired. But it was a fact. “Black revolutionaries. That’s what LAPD called them.”

Damn
. Art looked to the A-SAC and stood. “We’ll check it out.”

Hidalgo stood, too. “Fast.”

Art gave a crisp nod and turned to Burlingame. “The address?”

“On my desk.”

“Let’s do it.”

*  *  *

Cars were like fingerprints, but infinitely more simple to dispose of. Activities and people could be traced to, or through, a car, and the Oldsmobile Cutlass involved in the shooting of Utah Highway Patrol Trooper Fitzroy made it only as far as Orem, Utah. There it was left burning in an empty parking space of a large apartment complex in favor of a Volkswagen van with a rickety box trailer attached whose owner would be needing it no more. That lasted the rest of their journey to Baltimore, then it, too, had to be done away with in favor of “clean” transportation. And more transportation.

Darian eased the just-purchased ‘84 Volvo sedan into the space to the right of the later-model Ford van. Its door slid open as he stopped.

“Brother Darian,” Roger said, sitting in the van’s first bench seat and running a hand over his newly shaved head. “Like my new doo?”

Mustafa leaned forward and looked from the front window. “We all need to look different.”

Darian nodded agreement, though they’d have to retain some individuality. “As long as we’re not four bald black guys running around together. And lose the hat, Brother.”