Far Gone (32 page)

“Ma’am.” Jon crouched beside her, out of kicking range. “Can you confirm your husband’s whereabouts?”

“He’s with Shay! I told you! What is wrong with you people?”

Jon’s phone rang. Whitfield.

“We got a problem.”

A queasy feeling slithered into Jon’s stomach. “What?”

“No one’s here,” Whitfield said.

“What do you mean, no one?”

“None of ’em. Hardin, Leeland, Driscoll. Santucci went in and looked. Then I went. Then Maxwell.”

“How is that possible? You’re telling me—”

“I’m telling you none of them are in there. Everybody’s gone.”

chapter twenty-six

WHILE JON AND HIS
team hopped a helo ride to San Antonio, the FBI’s assistant director of counterterrorism was landing at Lackland Air Force Base, signaling a major shift in the case. By nine thirty
A.M.
, everyone was crowded around a table in one of the base’s conference rooms.

A real table this time, no plywood.

“Hey, we’re movin’ on up.” Torres slapped Jon on the back, crooning the
Jeffersons
theme song as he sank into a faux-leather chair.

Jon grabbed a seat and settled his gaze on his SAC, who was deep in conversation with Alan Reese at the end of the table. At some point in the last twenty-four hours—Jon wasn’t sure when—the investigation in Texas had gone from low priority to high. Not only was the counterterrorism chief in town, but he’d brought an entire team with him.

Jon had expected to be knee-deep in agents by this point, but he only saw a dozen. And he realized what this was: the briefing before the briefing. Reese was rounding up his intel before he addressed his troops—by which time, Jon and Torres and everybody else would be long gone, and there would be no mistaking whose show this was. Jon didn’t give a damn about the politics at this point. His sole objective was to see Hardin dead or in custody by the end of the day.

“First, some news.”

Everyone quieted at the CT chief’s voice.

“I’ve talked to the medical examiner in Philadelphia. The skull fragments recovered from the bomb site—Khalil Abbas’s skull fragments—showed evidence of lead wipe.” He glanced around the table to see if everyone understood the significance of this development.

“Someone shot him in the head?” Theilman asked.

“According to the ME, yes. We sent an evidence response team to the mosque to do some more searching, and they recovered a shell casing from a gutter in the alley behind the building. It’s from an SS195 hollow-point bullet.”

“Same type of bullet used in the killing of that homeless guy a block from the mosque,” Santucci said.

Reese nodded. “Our lab ran the analysis, and they believe there’s a ‘very high likelihood’ that the two rounds were fired by the same weapon. So now it looks like Khalil Abbas was murdered, which basically eliminates him as our prime suspect.” His gaze zeroed in on Jon. “Shay Hardin has been bumped to the top of the list.”

Silence settled over the table. Jon tried to get his head around the fact that the theory he’d been pushing for so many months had finally gained traction within the Bureau.

“Second piece of news—which most of you already know—we have reason to believe Shay Hardin and Ross Leeland are in San Antonio,” Reese said. “They may be driving a white Plymouth four-door.”

This information was based on conjecture, but Jon believed it was solid. He’d personally interviewed a gas-station clerk in Fort Stockton who’d sold Leeland a map of San Antonio while Hardin was buying gas.

“I hate to torpedo this supposed ‘lead,’ ” Theilman said, “but all we really know is that Leeland bought a map last night. So what? I mean, who uses actual maps anymore? People want to go somewhere, they look it up on their phone.”

“Hardin doesn’t use a phone,” Torres said, clearly irritated. He didn’t like the agent from Philly. “Neither does Leeland.”

“It’s part of our profile of the suspect,” Maxwell told Reese. “He’s extremely paranoid about government surveillance.”

“I don’t blame him,” Reese said.

“He goes to great lengths to avoid anything traceable,” Maxwell continued, “like cell phones, e-mails, even landlines. It’s not surprising to me that he’d use a paper map instead of downloading one.”

“So the question is, what’s in San Antonio?” Reese looked around the table.

“Not Kirby,” Jon said. “I checked with his scheduler a minute ago. She says the senator was supposed to address a group of business-school students at UT Austin this morning, but his security team convinced him to bag it. He’s canceled all public appearances through the weekend.”

“Okay, what are some other potential targets in San Antonio? Maxwell? This is your home turf.”

“We’ve got several colleges, plus the Alamo, the River Walk. In terms of government targets, there’s the FBI building, the IRS office . . . this base, obviously.”

Jon shook his head, frustrated. None of this was “obvious” at all.

“You don’t agree?” Reese looked at him. Clearly, someone had told him that Jon was the resident expert on Shay Hardin.

“No, I don’t. Hardin’s pattern is to target people, not places,” Jon said. “The judge, the senator’s daughter, the senator’s mistress and child. I don’t believe his objective is a place, no matter how high-profile.”

“Do you think he’s planning a suicide attack?” Reese asked. “Does he want to be a martyr for his cause?”

Jon was no profiler, but he gave his best answer based on investigating the man for months. “I don’t think he’s a martyr. And I don’t think the ‘cause’ is really the cause of this. Hardin’s a sociopath. He kills without remorse. His antigovernment ideology just gives him a rationale. So do I think he’s suicidal? No. I think he’s got a plan, and it includes getting away after his next attack, with or without his co-conspirators. Everyone in Hardin’s world is expendable.”

“What, you can read his mind now?” Theilman quipped.

“Okay, let’s table that for a moment,” Reese said. “What about those co-conspirators? What do we know about Mark Driscoll? And how did we lose track of him in the first place?”

All eyes swung to Whitfield.

“It’s my fault,” he said, not dodging the blame. “I was tailing the pickup. I didn’t see Driscoll in it, and I didn’t see him slip out. Which tells me Hardin knew he had a tail.”

“We know he didn’t get out at the bar,” Santucci said. “I saw two men go in, and two men only: Shay Hardin and Ross Leeland.”

“In hindsight,” Whitfield said, “looks like Driscoll probably slipped out when they went through the McDonald’s drive-thru before heading over to the Broken Spoke. That’s the bar where they disappeared from view.”

“It’s as if they knew a raid was imminent,” Maxwell said insightfully.

Whitfield nodded. “Probably tipped off when Gavin and Vicky left the ranch with some cooked-up story. I’d say they saw us coming.”

“I’d say they’ve seen us coming for months,” Jon said. “The SNAP system proves it. He’s been paranoid about government surveillance since he first set up operations at Lost Creek.”

“So he could be anywhere by now, assuming he has transportation,” Reese said. “And I think that’s a safe assumption. Based on the bank robberies, it looks like he has the ability to swap vehicles whenever he wants.”

Jon glanced out the window as a Humvee zoomed across the tarmac. The base was jumping this morning, everyone going about his business, no idea that just a few feet away, an FBI team was scrambling to track down the most wanted man in America.

“So, it’s back to our original question. What—or who—is in San Antonio?” Reese nodded at the agent to his right. The man gave a few taps on his keyboard, and a slide flashed up on the projection screen across the room. Jon turned in his chair and saw a giant image of what appeared to be a floor plan.

“We accessed the digital storage device provided to us by”—Reese glanced at his notes—“Gavin Finch. This is what was on it.”

“That’s all?” Torres asked.

“That’s all,” Reese confirmed. “Only this file. It looks to me like a floor plan. Anyone know where this is?”

Jon could tell by the tone that it wasn’t a rhetorical question. The assistant director of counterterrorism, with all the resources at his disposal, didn’t have a clue what this image was. The sole file on Hardin’s flash drive—a drive protected with biometric security—remained an enigma.

“Looks like a house, probably a big one.” Torres leaned forward and squinted at the screen. “Maybe it’s Kirby’s?”

“It’s not,” Reese said. “And it’s a pretty rudimentary floor plan—just showing a basic layout—but it appears to be on a fairly large lot, assuming this is drawn to scale.”

Jon looked at the image. He wouldn’t assume anything. The picture consisted of some computer-generated lines and rectangles, something any ten-year-old could have slapped together on a computer. The map appeared to show streets surrounding the lot, but they weren’t labeled.

“What’s that cross up in the corner?” Torres asked. “Is that a church? Or maybe a compass rose?”

“We don’t know,” Reese said. “We don’t really know anything about this image, except that it was on Hardin’s storage device and it might be a building in San Antonio.”

“Are we sure it’s Hardin’s device?” Jon asked.

“His prints were on it.”

Every face at the table looked disappointed. They’d been hoping the drive would provide a treasure trove of information.

“Again, it’s back to figuring out where he is and what he’s targeting,” Reese said. “What’s his connection to San Antonio? Does he have any friends here? Relatives? Army buddies? Maybe a former commanding officer he hates for some reason?”

“I’ll find out,” Jon said, thinking of Gavin. He was with Andrea right now. Maybe he knew something, although Jon had no idea whether Andrea would let him anywhere near her brother—at least, not without a lawyer present. He checked his watch. He didn’t have time to fight about it—he’d just have to convince her.

“Another disturbing piece of news,” Reese said. “We have new information about the driver of the white Tahoe that was spotted trying to meet with Hardin in the middle of the night last week.”

Jon looked at Torres.

“Brian Floyd. I checked him out,” Torres said. “He works at a quarry about twenty miles west of Stockton. They don’t have any explosives missing, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“It is,” Reese said. “We checked out his background, and it turns out he previously worked at a quarry near Las Cruces, New Mexico. They recently had a theft at one of their facilities. Manager there thinks it was an inside job, someone who knew the layout of their storage lockers. Whoever did it drilled out a few padlocks and made off with more than two hundred blasting caps and fifty spools of ignition cord.”

Jon leaned forward on his elbows. “When?”

“March twenty-second.”

“That’s the week before Philadelphia.” Jon looked at Torres. “Maybe that’s why we never found him on a flight out of El Paso. Maybe he didn’t fly out of that airport—he drove.”

“In a rented vehicle,” Torres suggested. “He could have picked up the goods in New Mexico and then motored cross-country to carry out the attack.”

“Would he have had time?” Maxwell asked.

“Yeah, especially if he had someone to help him with the driving.” Jon looked at Reese. “Two hundred blasting caps?”

“ATF says that’s more than he needed for Philly, same for the ignition cord. So now we have reason to believe he’s got another bomb in the works. Which again brings us back to what he’s targeting in San Antonio. What’s his connection to the city?”

“What about the bank robberies?” Torres asked. “Probably not a coincidence that three of four of them happened here in town.”

Reese looked at Maxwell. “What’s the status on that?”

“I’ve got an agent working on it—”

“
One
agent? Where is he?”

“She’s . . . in the office, I assume.” Maxwell’s face reddened. “I can call her for an update.”

“I’ll call her,” Torres said. “We touched base on this yesterday. She was running down the getaway vehicles. Maybe she’s got something new.”

“Find out,” Reese said.

“I’ll check with Gavin Finch,” Jon said. “See what he knows.”

“And we need to talk to Leeland’s wife again,” Maxwell said. “She’s at her parents’ in Midland.”

“Don’t waste time on details,” Reese ordered. “Our object is to find these suspects and bring them in. And in the meantime, we need to figure out what or who their next target is.” His gaze moved around the table and stopped at Jon. “If your theory holds and he’s planning something for the OKBOMB anniversary, then the clock is ticking.”

He pushed back from the table and stood up. “Let’s go, people. We have less than twenty-four hours.”

♦

Elizabeth pulled into a parking space and took out her file. Ten to the fourth. Ten thousand possible phone numbers. The computer database had eliminated more than half right away because they were not in use. But she’d been left with 4,400 numbers to check out, and she’d run down every single one of them. She’d whittled the list to a few dozen entries that merited further investigation, including her current prospect, an Adam R. Jones of A.C.C. Enterprises, listed at this address. Jones’s record was clean, but the business name sounded suspiciously vague, so she’d decided to check it out.

Elizabeth got out of her car and read the sign atop the building:
ALAMO CITY CHOPPERS.

A.C.C. Enterprises.

Well, goody for her. Maybe if the agent gig didn’t work out, she could get a job with the Bureau’s cryptanalysis unit.

Elizabeth sighed and glanced around. The entire front row of parking was reserved for motorcycles. She glanced beyond them at the glass windows of the showroom, which faced the street.

Elizabeth stepped into the building and peeled off her sunglasses. Her gaze landed on a low-slung bike with gleaming fenders and a fat back tire. She glanced at a few customers and felt immediately self-conscious in her tailored gray suit. But everyone seemed too busy to notice her. It looked as though half of San Antonio had decided to spend this sunny morning checking out custom bikes.