The Escape (22 page)

Don’t trust Veronica Knox, Puller. She is not what she appears to be.

N
ILES ROBINSON HAD
left work early to catch his son’s soccer match. The boy had gone from death’s door to being a healthy athletic twelve-year-old in less than two years. It truly was a miracle, and one that Robinson never took for granted.

There were a handful of parents watching the match from the sidelines. The day was warm and the boys had already worked up a sweat. Robinson’s son was a center midfielder, which meant he had equal responsibilities for defense and attack. Because of this his kid probably ran more than any of his other teammates, but he seemed up to the task.

Robinson shook his head in wonder as his son flashed past him with the ball. A minute later the ball was in the net and his son’s team had taken the lead. It was a lead they would not relinquish. After the match was over, Robinson congratulated his son and then headed back to work. The boy would be driven home by a friend.

A tall man in a hoodie approached him in the parking lot. Robinson didn’t register on him until the man was nearly upon him.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

Before the hooded man could answer, four men appeared out of vehicles parked nearby and converged on the pair. The hooded man was grabbed and his hood yanked down as his hands were cuffed behind him.

Robinson stared at the man and shook his head. “It’s not him,” he said. “It’s not Robert Puller.”

The man in the hoodie was younger and his face was dirty.

“Get your hands off me,” he yelled. “I ain’t done nothing wrong. Get them cuffs off me.”

One of the other men slammed him up against Robinson’s van. “Why did you approach this man?”

“Is that a crime?”

“It might be.”

“Some dude paid me.”

“What dude? Where is he?”

“Just some dude. Paid me twenty bucks. Said to come over here after the match was over.”

“What did he look like?”

“I don’t know. He was tall as me. Never saw his face.”

“Why’d he pick you?”

“How the hell should I know?”

“You hang around this park a lot?”

“Yeah, going through the trash cans. The kids leave full bottles of Gatorades. And the moms throw half the snacks they bring away. Cornucopia, man.”

“You’re homeless?”

“No, man, I had my private jet drop me off here so I could go through shit in the garbage.”

“When did the ‘dude’ approach you?”

“About an hour ago.”

“Where?”

“Over by the basketball courts on the other side of the park.”

The man let him go and looked at Robinson. “He faked us out with this idiot.”

Robinson nodded. “I told you he was smart.”

The man spoke to one of his colleagues. “Take this smartass and see what else you can get from him.”

They pulled the man away and pushed him into a waiting SUV, which immediately drove off.

The first man looked at Robinson. “If he contacts you, you get in touch with us immediately. Understood?”

Robinson nodded, climbed into his car, and drove off. When he looked at himself in the rearview mirror he was sweating.

He arrived at his house, having decided against going back to work. He emailed an excuse to his boss, went out into his backyard, and sat on a chair on his patio, his thoughts a whirlwind of mostly cataclysmic scenarios.

His personal cell phone buzzed. He had almost been expecting this.

He looked at the screen.

Sorry for all the excitement at the park. Had to flush the Dobermans.

A few seconds later another text came in.

I’m glad Ian is okay. But now that he’s healthy you have to consider what you’ve done and the damage that it’s caused. Because you opened the door for them. You and Susan. We need to meet.

Robinson stared down at the little screen and then, after looking around to make sure no one was watching him, thumbed in a brief response.

How? They’re everywhere.

As Robinson read the reply his opinion of Robert Puller was once more validated. He was a very smart man.

Union Station was busy at this time of day. Robinson parked in the upper deck and rode the escalator down to the station. He walked inside and over to a bank of phones set against one wall. In a world of cell phones, there was no one using these antiquated tools of communication.

Across from him some scaffolding enclosed with a tall curtain had been set up around repair work being done on the ceiling.

Robinson parked himself at the phone farthest from the door he’d come in and waited. A few seconds later it rang.

He picked it up and said hello.

“You’re looking good, Niles. Trim as ever.”

Robinson didn’t bother to look around. He doubted he could have spotted the man.

“How did you get out of DB, Bobby?”

“Nothing planned. Just taking advantage of an opportunity.”

“Your brother came by to see me.”

“I’m sure.”

“I don’t think he believed me.”

“It’s pretty much impossible to lie to him.”

“I know you went to see Susan. She said you tried to kill her. That she finally got away and got to her gun and that you ran.”

“I’m sure she did. Not exactly how it went down, but that’s Susan for you.”

“Meaning she’s a lying sack of shit.”

“That’s sort of what I meant, but I like the way you said it better.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t want to do it, Bobby. But they had me cornered. No way out. Ian was going to—” Here, Robinson faltered.

“I’m not here to judge you, Niles. Given the circumstances, I might’ve done the same thing. But now we have to make this right.”

“How?”

“For beginners, you need to tell me who paid you off to do what you did.”

“I never met anyone. It was all emails and they never deposited any money in my account. They just paid for the medical care in Germany directly. That way no one would be the wiser. We explained away the treatment in Germany as a charity case because the company running the clinical trials needed bodies to try it on.”

“Okay, but what exactly did they want you to do? Backdoor them into STRATCOM and from there everywhere else?”

“That might have been their plan. But that’s not what they told me to do. I just had to finger you meeting with the Iranian. They provided the doctored photos.”

“Okay, Niles, but there had to be some endgame on this.”

“You ever wonder why they specifically targeted you out of everybody at STRATCOM?”

“Of course I did.”

“And did you ever find an answer?”

“Not a good one, no.”

“Well, I asked myself that question many times.”

“And did an answer ever hit you?” asked Puller.

“About a year ago, when I was at work.”

“And what was it?”

“You were being groomed to go all the way to the top, Bobby. General Able was pretty clear on that.”

“So what?” asked Puller.

“There were some who might not have liked that.”

“Who exactly are you talking about?”

“I tried to make it right, Bobby. I really did. This has been eating me from the inside out for over two damn years.”

“Give me a name, Niles,” urged Puller.

The shot hit Niles Robinson right in the base of his neck and severed his medulla. With that core destroyed, so was he. He stood there for an instant, a look of intense surprise on his now bloody face where the round had exited and struck the wall. Then he fell face first into the phone bank and slid to the floor, the wall smeared with his blood, his hand still clutched around the receiver.

The shooter, dressed as a police officer, was behind the enclosed repair site. He had aimed and fired his suppressed pistol through a slit in the curtain. He holstered his weapon, exited out the other side of the work site, and started yelling at people not to panic but to move away from the site of the shooting. Most people obeyed since he was in uniform.

Still, hundreds of people were screaming and fleeing in all directions, abandoning their luggage and trying to get away from the murdered man. Police, guns out, rushed toward him. Union Station was instantly transformed into a nightmare scenario.

Only two people walked calmly out of the station that day.

One was Robert Puller.

The other was the person who had just killed Niles Robinson.

A
T SEVEN A.M.
the next morning Knox and Puller sat at breakfast in the hotel restaurant. Rays of cheery sunlight were coming through the window facing the street. People walked in and out of the restaurant, and cars motored on their way. It seemed improbable that someone had tried to murder them a few hours ago and only a short distance from here, but improbable or not, it had happened.

She said, “I have to tell you I had trouble going to sleep, at least for the three hours of sack time I had.”

“Why?”

“I shot a man, Puller. Maybe that’s routine for you. Not so much for me.”

“Shooting someone is never routine. At least I hope it never becomes routine.”

“We’re on the same page there. But we must be making some people nervous. That’s progress.”

Puller paused with his cup of tea halfway to his lips. “We’ve covered a lot of ground but we have no answers, Knox. That is not progress. Not in my book.”

“I disagree. We’ve discovered that two people were lying their asses off and got your brother sent to prison wrongly. We figured out—well, you did—that some Croatian snuck a bogey into Fort Leavenworth who was sent there to kill your brother. We’ve accomplished a lot. We really have.”

“But we really don’t have answers yet. Not for the important questions. Namely, who and why?”

She fiddled with her spoon. “Obviously your brother is out there right now trying to figure it all out.”

“You sound like you’ve been giving that some thought.”

“I’ve been giving it a lot of thought, actually.”

“And what do you think?”

“That he’s maybe ahead of us on some things.”

“Why?”

“He’s super smart. He was set up. He was in the intelligence field. And he’s trying to prove his innocence. Lots of motivation there.”

“I’ve started to think that he was the one who saved my butt when those goons snatched me. It’s really the only thing that makes sense.”

Knox looked at him in surprise. “I hadn’t even considered that. But I guess that would make sense. So you might have been a few feet from him that night?”

“I might have been, yeah. As it turned out, it might as well have been a few miles. He’s gone, and I’m no closer to finding him.”

“You were really tight with your brother, weren’t you?”

“For a long time we were all each other had. Our mother was gone and our dad might as well have been.” He nudged a roasted potato on his plate. “That may be one reason I never took the plunge.”

“What? Marriage?”

“Yeah.”

“Why? Afraid you’d be a crappy father?”

“Crappy husband too.”

“I don’t see that, Puller, I really don’t. You’d make a great catch. And a great dad. Teaching your kids right and wrong, how to color in the lines, throw a ball, execute a room breach, fire a sniper rifle, take out four bad guys with a piece of rope and a stick of chewing gum. All good life lessons.”

“You ever think of getting hitched?”

“Actually, I did.”

Puller hiked his eyebrows. “You mean you
thought
about it?”

“No, Puller, I mean I walked down the aisle, exchanged rings, and got married in front of a licensed preacher.”

“When?”

“Long time ago. We were both eighteen. High school sweethearts. It lasted all of fourteen days. Big friggin’ shock there, right? I mean, we both knew exactly who we were and what we wanted in life at eighteen, right? Well, turns out we were clueless. So we did a bookend. And got it annulled. So there’s no record of it even happening.”

“Did a bookend? What does that mean?”

“That means we were married in Vegas and divorced there, all within the span of two weeks. We returned our rings and signed the necessary papers and went our separate ways. I never even told my parents. They thought I was at a college prep retreat.”

“Why do I not picture that at all? I mean, you marrying at eighteen in a wedding chapel in Sin City?”

“I told you I liked to live my life fast. But the fact is I was a straight-as-an-arrow, straight-A student, three varsity letters, did everything right back then. Never walked off the line my parents laid down for me. I won all the awards, got into all the best schools. Then something snapped and I went psycho right after high school graduation. Like I said, it lasted for two weeks. After that I got back on track. I got a top-notch education at Amherst while also servicing my athletic side, earned a master’s, decided to serve my country on the intelligence side, and the rest, as they say, is history.” She gazed over at him. “You ever do anything like that?”

“No.”

She looked disappointed. “Always by the book, then?”

“I was an Army brat with an officer for a father. The book was all we ever knew. The Army way or nothing.” He said this last part with particular sternness.

“Okay,” she said, taken aback by his tone. “I’ll just call you ‘by-the-book Puller’ from now on.”

“Okay, but what do people call
you
?” he said, his tone suddenly harsh.

They stared at each other for a long, uncomfortable moment. “What exactly do you mean by that?” she asked.

“It’s just a question.”

“They call me Veronica Knox. Okay, now let me ask you one. What changed from a few hours ago to now? Because three hours ago things seemed pretty good between us. I shot somebody who was trying to do us harm. But you’re being so cold and distant now I feel like I’m in Alaska instead of North Carolina.”

“You’re just being a little sensitive, I think.”

“No, I’m just someone who wants the truth, Puller. You up to providing it?”

“I’ve never lied to you, Knox. And I never will.”

“I know, you kept pointing out my deficiencies on that score and you were probably right to do so. But I thought by now I had proved to you that I’m on the up-and-up. So, again, what’s changed?”

“I like how you put things. You should think about writing a novel. Or a blog.”

“And you should think about stopping the bullshit and telling me what’s going on.”

Puller started to say something, maybe more than he should. An internal struggle ended with him standing up, checking his watch, and saying, “It’s time for our meeting with Todd Landry.”

She sat there as he walked out of the restaurant. Knox muttered, “Women are supposed to be complicated, not guys!” Then she grabbed her jacket and followed him.