Vegas. Somewhere where large cash deposits are fairly common.”
“This will be a lot easier with some inside help,” Harvey said. “Let’s call General Hawthorne in the Pentagon, see if he’ll help.”
General Robert “Thorny” Hawthorne was the Marine Corps Commandant, the top man in the Corps, one of four Joint Chiefs of Staff. Hawthorne had been their commanding officer during their operations in Nicaragua and their successful missions had helped boost Thorny’s career by a star.
“Good thought,” Nathan said. “I’ll call first thing in the morning.”
“Think he’ll help us?”
“Yeah, I do. He won’t have time to do it personally, but he’ll assign us a liaison officer to dig into the DOD computers.”
“We’re going to need some help up here for the legwork. There’s no way we can do everything. I’ll pull two of our guys up from San Diego. We’ll set up our base of operations here. We’ll need a secure fax line to send and receive transmissions. I’ll make sure Lewey sets our guys up with an encrypted cell phone connected to a fax. Thorny will want assurances we’re using secure lines for the data transfer back and forth.”
Nathan was already feeling better. It felt good to be doing something, to have a plan and work toward a goal. And it was a worthy goal. The Bridgestones were going to be hunted down like the rabid dogs they were. A reckoning was coming, coming like a freight train with its engine roaring and horn blaring. Those two turds had no idea of the wrath they’d brought upon themselves.
Harv ordered room service and asked for it to be delivered next door in Nathan’s room. A few minutes later, Harv answered a soft knock at the door. Carrying a first-aid kit, the maintenance man strode into the room, tools hanging from his belt. At the bathroom door, he looked at the broken glass covering the countertop and floor, looked at Nathan sitting on the bed, looked at the bloody hand and the damaged face it belonged to, and decided silence was the best course of action. He handed the first-aid kit to Harvey.
“How long do you need?” Harvey asked.
The maintenance man shrugged. “Maybe an hour.”
Harvey pulled a couple of butterfly bandages out of the kit and applied them to Nathan’s knuckles. He wrapped a couple layers of gauze around the wound and secured it with white tape on the palm side, opposite the cuts.
“Thanks,” Nathan said.
“Think nothing of it.”
With the maintenance man in the bathroom, Harv transferred their duffel bag containing their Sig Sauer pistol belts, night-vision visors, and other tools into Nathan’s room through the adjoining door.
After Harv returned, Nathan said, “We’d better make that call to Ortega. The longer we wait, the harder it’ll be.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“How do you do it, Harv? Keep your cool.”
“Like I said, you beat me to it. That mirror was doomed from the day it was installed.”
“I’ve never seen you break anything.”
“That’s just it, you’ve never seen it. I once beat the living daylights out of a lawn mower with an aluminum bat. It was brand new and gassed up. But the damned thing wouldn’t start. I must have pulled that cord a hundred times before I took the bat to it. Candace came out to the lawn and without saying a word, handed me the instruction manual. She reached down and turned the gas shutoff valve to the on position, winked at me, and then walked away.”
“Yeah, that sounds like Candace.”
“I have to admit, it felt great smashing that mower. Come on, let’s get this call over with.”
“Harv, I’ll make the call to Ortega.”
“No. I should do it. You’re in no shape to talk to Ortega right now. Honestly, it’s my responsibility. I got us into this, I’ll make the call.”
After Harv left the room, he tried to clear his mind of the red fog blanketing his thoughts. He needed to focus, to see the situation from a calm perspective. He concentrated on the FBI’s role in all of this. The farmhouse had been under surveillance before the raid. Okay, why? They obviously thought the Bridgestones might show up there. Still, no one had known about the tunnel at Freedom’s Echo, or else the FBI would’ve been waiting at the other end to grab them. Did Holly Simpson truly believe he and Harv represented the FBI’s best chance of collaring the Bridgestones? It seemed unlikely and overly risky. Maybe Frank Ortega had insisted they remain involved. That seemed more reasonable, but that scenario assumed Ortega had a level of influence with Director Lansing he’d denied during their initial meeting in San Diego. So what was the truth? Nathan wasn’t so sure anymore.
Setting that thought aside, he again envisioned the farmhouse. Immediately his thoughts returned to the garage. Something about it had been odd. He closed his eyes and pictured it in his head. Okay, it had a workbench on one side, tools on the other. The toolboxes were stacked against the far wall. There was a new Enduro motorcycle in the corner. Red, with a luggage rack. What does something like that cost? Four, maybe five grand? They didn’t seem like the type of guys able to afford something like that. It had looked fairly new and well maintained. Everything in that garage had looked new. He pictured the wall of tools above the workbench, everything organized by type and use and hung on neatly organized eye rings and hooks. And the power tools on the opposite side of the garage were also well maintained and arranged by use and type. He remembered the empty power-tool boxes. Who saves the empty boxes?
And why would a pair of losers need a trip wire on their front porch? How many people did that? He pictured the rigged stack of beer bottles. Were they just paranoid? Maybe they thought Leonard and Ernie were going to drop by. Could they have anticipated the authorities’ interest in them?
Nathan looked down at the bandage Harv had applied to his hand and thought about the gauze bandage on cousin Billy’s arm. There had been blood seeping through and the white tape was crossed at the corners. It looked a lot like a field dressing. He held up his hand. A lot like this one. He thought back to his field-medic training.
Shit!
He sprinted across the room and grabbed the phone message from Holly and punched the numbers into the nightstand phone and heard an annoying beeping. He hadn’t punched nine first. He stabbed the button and waited an eternity before hearing a dial tone, forcing himself to slow down and dialing Holly’s cell number carefully.
“Holly Simpson.”
“Holly, listen to me very carefully. We blew it, blew it badly.”
“Who is this? Nathan?”
“We blew it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The farmhouse. I think they were there last night, the Bridgestones, Leonard and Ernie.”
“What? How? That’s impossible.”
“Get back out there Holly, get SWAT out there as fast as you can.”
“Nathan-”
“Holly, please, just do it.”
“But we’ve had the farmhouse under constant surveillance, even before the raid. Nobody’s come or gone from there.”
“Last night I saw what looked like a large diameter pipe sticking up above the ground near the property corner under the windmill. I didn’t think twice about it until now.”
“Another tunnel,” she whispered.
“Holly, be careful, have your people check the garage again, the light switch.”
“I’ll call you later.”
Nathan began pacing the room. “They played us, Harv. They put on a dog-and-pony show and we bought it.”
“You could be wrong, they may not have been there.”
“They were there.”
“Nate, you can’t know that for sure.”
“I didn’t put it all together, I should’ve. Their cousins could’ve lasted a lot longer than they did. They gave up the cabin and the cash to satisfy us, to make us think we’d gotten something valuable. They threw us a bone to get
