Liberty (35 page)

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Authors: Stephen Coonts

BOOK: Liberty
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In the silence he walked back to Anna. She was lying on the seat. She looked up at him with fear in her eyes.
He opened the passenger door of the Mercedes.
“It's okay,” he said. “We're okay. Let's wait for the police.”
His hands were shaking and his heart racing. He remembered the cell phone, felt for it in his pocket.
He had left it on the table in the restaurant, along with his credit card and her purse.
It was close to midnight when the first-class petty officer pulled the throttles of the cabin cruiser back to idle. The boat was about a hundred yards off Hains Point with its bow pointed upstream. Jake Grafton used his binoculars to scan the seawall. No one visible—which was what he expected. He could hear the faint sound of two army helicopters overhead, just under the clouds. They had been patrolling the golf course with infrared sensors since dark, and they had detected nothing.
Behind him he could hear Gil Pascal talking to the pilots on a handheld radio, and their tinny reply: “Nothing, Dog Leader. It's clean.”
Jake touched the petty officer at the helm on the shoulder and pointed. The helmsman nodded and stroked the throttle. Despite the raw breeze, he brought the boat in
expertly against the seawall. One of the sailors leaped from the fantail to the top of the wall, and another sailor threw him a line. While they were mooring the boat, two marines wearing night-vision goggles went ashore to act as perimeter guards.
With the help of the sailors, four army engineering officers off-loaded several boxes of equipment. They set up their gear in a location that Jake pointed out. Yes, right here. He could see the tracks from the van.
He, too, had night-vision goggles, but he carried them in his hand. Streetlights on tall aluminum poles were sited every hundred or so feet along the top of the seawall, so there was too much light for the goggles. Even without the streetlights, the glow of the city lights reflecting off the clouds raised the light level to perpetual twilight.
The rain late in the afternoon had soaked the turf. Jake watched the engineers work. Their equipment consisted of an ultrawide band radar normally used to look for cracks in concrete bridge structures. It had a fantastic ability to see through solids.
Soon the engineers had a picture on the scope. Jake bent down, examined the image with his reading glasses. Gil Pascal bent over, too.
“What do you make of it?” Jake asked the senior officer, a major with a Southern accent.
“Something down there all right, sir, but don't know what. Can't see too well from this angle.”
“Looks like rocks to me,” Jake said.
“Bound to be a lot of rocks in this fill, sir. Big ones, small ones, and everything in between. We're gonna have to look for something that doesn't look like a rock.”
They moved the transceiver several times, trying to find the best angle. All that could be seen on the screen were bright spots of high relativity and dark places of low. The major hooked the video feed to a computer and began playing with the image, seeing if he could improve it.
A shadowy line appeared across the screen, came and went as he increased some values and lowered others.
“What's that line?” Jake asked.
“A wire of some kind,” the major suggested.
He and Jake walked away from the unit, inspected the earth. The major pointed out where the wire would be.
“Seems to run toward that streetlight pole,” Gil Pascal suggested.
“Seems to be, yes.”
“Follow the wire. I want to know precisely where it goes.”
“Yes, sir.”
Using the UWB radar, the engineers confirmed that the streetlights were wired together by underground cable. In addition, there was this other wire that ran in under one of the poles.
“There ought to be one more wire of some kind, an antenna,” Jake muttered to the major. “See if you can find it.”
It was Gil Pascal who called his attention to it. “Some of these trees seem to have wires running through the branches.” Jake walked to where Gil was standing. “See this wire running up beside the tree? When I saw it I assumed it was a lightning rod.”
“Isn't it?” Jake donned his night-vision goggles and inspected the wire running up one of the trunks.
“It could be an antenna. See how the wire loops through the trees. Looks to me like it's been there for years.”
Jake Grafton turned to Gil and slapped his shoulder. “The Corrigan unit works. We're getting someplace now.”
Pascal was incredulous. “That's a nuclear weapon buried under there?”
“You can bet your last dollar on it,” Jake said, and walked away to tell the army engineers to pack up.
His cell phone rang and he answered it.
“Grafton.”
“Tommy Carmellini, Admiral. I'm in Baltimore police headquarters with Anna Modin. A couple of guys tried to kill her tonight.”
“Baltimore? What the hell are you doing with her in Baltimore?”
“I asked her to go to dinner, and she said yes. Why didn't you tell me the ragheads are after her?”
“I didn't know you were taking her out.” He hadn't been home since he left this morning for the L'Enfant Plaza bakery shop and his appointment with Sal Molina, and he had been too busy to call his wife. “She okay?”
“Yeah, but I killed two guys in the parking lot outside the restaurant. This went down about four hours ago. Police been trying to pump me. Every cop in Baltimore is milling around in here tonight. From what I gather, they think it's a drug gang thing. They finally let me make a telephone call, and you're it.”
“Don't say anything.”
“I'm getting real good at that.”
“I'll be there as soon as I can.”
Jake broke the connection and walked over to Gil Pascal. “Have one of the helos land and pick me up. Two men tried to kill Anna Modin tonight in Baltimore.”
“She okay?”
“Carmellini says she is. He took her to dinner, then killed these guys in the restaurant parking lot. You get this stuff cleaned up and out of here.” He used the cell phone to call Harry Estep.
Carmellini was right about the Baltimore police brass—they were all at headquarters when Jake Grafton arrived. They kept popping into the waiting room where a uniformed officer had parked him, introducing themselves, feeding him tidbits of information while they looked him over, then leaving him to cool his heels. He used the dead time to call Callie on his cell phone.
He broke the news of the attempted assassination as gently as he could.
“Tommy said they are both all right. I'm in Baltimore at police headquarters waiting to talk to them.”
“My God!”
“They're okay,” he said. “According to one of the cops, someone fired a rifle into the restaurant, killed a waiter standing beside Anna.”
She took the news pretty well, he thought. After telling her all he knew, he promised to come home when he could.
At three in the morning he was led into a conference room full of brass. Harry Estep was there and introduced him to a senior FBI officer from Washington.
The police chief was a black man named Carroll. “You'll be delighted to hear that Carmellini and Modin were uncooperative. They identified themselves and refused to talk without a lawyer.”
Silence followed that remark.
The chief sighed. “We're releasing them. It looks like self-defense. We'll investigate, talk to all the witnesses we can find, give the file to the prosecutors. If self-defense holds up, I assume they'll let it go at that.”
“Okay.”
“We'll hold on to Carmellini's rifle until our investigation is complete. He killed the living shit out of these two guys. We don't know who they are. They fired a bolt-action Winchester into the restaurant, trying for Modin or Carmellini apparently, killing the waiter instead. New rifle, no visible wear, got both their fingerprints on it. We found it lying outside by a tree.”
“Sounds like these guys were real craftsmen.”
“Couple of rank amateurs. Fingerprints on the rifle, blew the shot, then drove up to Carmellini and he splattered them all to hell. You oughta see the car.”
“No thanks. Who were they?”
“Middle Eastern males in their twenties, looks like. They had wallets and ID, maybe fake. We're working on that. We'll get fingerprints and talk to the INS and FBI, and maybe we'll know more tomorrow.”
“I'd like to keep Carmellini's and Modin's names out of the newspapers.”
“That we can do,” Chief Carroll said. “The reporters will get the rest of it, though. The television crews are outside now. I suggest you get your people out of here through the basement. We'll give them something to put over their heads.”
“Okay.”
Carroll toyed with his pen. Looking at the senior FBI officer, he said, “I'm going to be frank with you people. The dead waiter was a kid working his way through Johns Hopkins. Name of Newhouse. John Wilson Newhouse. Had a wife and kid. We're lucky only one innocent person was killed.”
“And your point is?”
“Keep your goddamn problems in Washington. Don't want'em in Baltimore.”
“There's a war on,” Jake Grafton retorted sharply, “or haven't you noticed?”
“I'm just telling you, we've got enough problems with druggies and gang-bangers and all the usual crooks and creeps. We don't need assassins—competent or incompetent—running around killing innocent people.”
“Tell it to the terrorists,” Jake Grafton snapped, and started for the door.
Carroll wasn't finished. “Your man Carmellini is a real piece of work. The Maryland State Police tell me he killed a man with his bare hands Sunday night. This guy is a walking bomb. Seventy-two hours later he blew these two away before they had time to fire a shot. Oh, they both had pistols in their hands when he did it, but what if they'd been cops responding to a call from the restaurant?”
“What do you want me to say? He should have let them shoot first?”
“He could have stayed inside the restaurant until the police arrived. Any
normal
person would have done that.”
No one said anything.
The chief continued: “You people are going to ride off to Washington clucking over this mess, and I'm going to go see Newhouse's wife and tell her she's a widow.” Carroll
put his face inches from Jake's. “We don't want your goddamn war. That ain't fair, I know. Life rarely is. Oh, I know, everyone waves the fucking flag and wants the terrorists smacked—but they want them smacked somewhere else. And from now on it better happen somewhere else. Keep Carmellini and your other goddamn holy warrior killers the fuck out of
my
city! Got it?” He spun and pointed his finger at the FBI agents. “That goes for you assholes, too.”
Jake walked out of the room.
On the way to the basement Harry Estep said, “Boy, the chief was really pissed.”
“I know just how he feels,” Jake muttered. And he did. The greed and stupidity of everyday criminals he understood—those qualities were inherent in the human condition. The irrational, illogical hatred that drove the terrorists was a ray of evil leaking from a crack in hell. It was frightening—and horrifying.
Anna Modin rode silently in the center of the backseat of the crowded car. Traffic on the wide superhighway was light in this hour before dawn. Tommy Carmellini told Grafton and the two FBI officers about the evening in detail, answered their questions. Harry Estep chattered away on his cell phone, call after call after call.
Carmellini was seated beside her, against the door. She could feel the warmth of his body, the solidity of his upper arm against her shoulder.
The car was dark, so she found his hand and squeezed it. They sat with their hands together, holding them between their thighs so no one would notice.
“Are you certain they weren't after you, Tommy?” Jake Grafton asked, half-turning in the front seat so he could look at Carmellini.
“Not certain, no. Pretty sure though.”
Estep stuck his oar in. His superiors wanted Carmellini and Modin to spend the next few days at the FBI barracks
in Quantico. Grafton said it was okay and Carmellini agreed, after a glance and nod from Anna Modin.
“I want a pistol,” Carmellini announced.
“Harry?” That was Jake Grafton.
“We can do that, I guess.”
“Something like an old Browning Hi-Power, nine millimeter. Not one of those plastic jobs. And a shoulder holster.”
“We'll do our best.”

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