Weapons Station? And what the hell was a large jet flying without lights doing landing across the river in the middle of the night?
Nearly two hours later he’d awoken again and taken a seat by the window. He saw two guards standing on the pebble path, talking and sipping coffee. Even from up here he could hear the squawks coming from their portable radios.
At five o’clock, Sean gave up on sleep, showered, dressed and headed down the stairs with a knapsack slung over his shoulder. In the broad, barrel-vaulted entrance hall, there was the smell of coffee and eggs and bacon coming from the dining room.
He ate breakfast and carried a Styrofoam cup of coffee with him as he stopped by the security desk set up near the mansion’s front door and showed the guard stationed there his badge. The stocky man nodded but said nothing as he took Sean’s card and swiped it through a slot on top of his computer screen.
“You hear that plane come in earlier?” he asked the guard.
The man didn’t answer. He simply handed Sean his card and turned back to his computer monitor.
“Love you too,” Sean muttered as he headed out.
It was still dark and Sean stood there for a bit wondering what to do. Alicia
Monk had left the country eight or nine months ago. Where had he gone? His passport would show where if he had used the normal channels of international travel. But if he had traveled under a fake name or via another country’s planes? Was he a spy? Had he gone out of the country to pass Babbage Town secrets to another country willing to pay well for them?
He breathed in fresh air devoid of the toxic fumes of the Washington Beltway and listened for a moment to scurrying feet from the nearby woods. Squirrels and deer probably; people made far different noises when they were moving. Sean had been trained to deduce the motive behind a person’s movements. It wasn’t actually all that hard to do. Most people couldn’t hide their motives to save their lives. If they could, far more than four American presidents would have been assassinated.
Sean had some FBI Hostage Rescue buddies who’d trained at Camp Peary with the CIA’s paramilitary units. These units traveled the world doing things no one at the CIA or anyone else in the government would ever talk about. Sean definitely did not want to cross swords with them. But had Turing?
Sean walked on, finally arriving at Len Rivest’s place. It was pretty early as yet and Rivest had really hung one on last night. He decided he’d let the guy sleep. He tossed his coffee in a trash can, passed the security office and a one-story squat building that appeared to be a garage and turned left where a sign that read “Boathouse” pointed down a gravel path. As he walked along Sean was quickly engulfed by forest.
It took twenty minutes to clear the trees and he came to the York River and the boathouse belonging to Babbage Town, which was situated along a pier that jutted out into the wide, calm, deepwater river. It was a long, plain cedar board structure painted yellow with multiple slips and garage-style doors enclosing each slip. He tried the door to the boathouse but it was locked. He peered through a window and could make out the shapes of several boats. He walked out onto a floating dock attached to the boathouse and noted several kayaks stacked on a holder there as well as two paddleboats tethered to cleats. One covered boat slip was open. On a power lift there were three Sea-Doos with their covers on. If Monk had used one of these crafts to get to Camp Peary, who had returned it here? Dead men didn’t make good sailors.
The sun was coming up now, throwing streams of light across the flat surface of the water. Sean pulled out a pair of binoculars from his knapsack. The sunlight was glinting off the razor wire fence on the other side of the York. Sean walked down to the edge of the river, his feet near the sandy edge, and took a sweep of the land opposite, not seeing much of interest. A couple of discarded crab pots floated in the water. Channel markers rose out of the depths of the York and a low-flying heron swooped effortlessly across his line of sight looking for breakfast in the murky water.
He wondered where the runway was that would allow a large jet to land. As he looked to his left he saw it: a clearing in the tree line revealing a wide swath of grass. The runway must start just after the grass, he thought.
Farther down to his left, long crane arms reached to the sky. The Cheatham Annex, he concluded. Navy boys. On the drive to Babbage Town he’d seen a gunmetal gray destroyer alongside a pier in front of the Naval Weapons Station. This area was alive with the presence of the military. For some reason that didn’t give him comfort.
The small branch fell from the tree and hit him on the head. Sean dropped to the ground not because the branch had hurt him, but because something else almost had. It had to have been a long-range rifle round. The bullet had clipped the branch right over his head. He hunkered down in the tall river grass. Who the hell had taken a shot at him? After about a minute he chanced a peek, his gaze scanning across the river. The shot had to have come from there. Now the question was obvious. Did the shooter intend to miss just to scare him, or was the branch supposed to be Sean’s brain?
When the next bullet whipped over his head, missing it by inches, his question was answered. The person was trying to kill him.
He burrowed deeper into the dirt and sand, pressing his body as flat to the ground as he could.
He waited for two minutes. When no other shot sailed past he began clutching at the short grass and propelling himself backward, resembling a snake whipping through the grass, albeit in reverse. He reached a patch of tall grass, and then the tree line. Once behind a thick oak, he stood and began zigzagging through the trees back toward Babbage Town.
He hit the path and ran flat-out to Len Rivest’s bungalow. Rivest didn’t answer his knock, so Sean pushed the door open and went in.
“Len. Len! Somebody just took a shot at me.”
No one was on the main floor. He raced up the stairs, two steps at a time, and flung open the first door he came to and stopped, his chest heaving.
Len Rivest was lying naked at the bottom of his claw-footed bathtub, his eyes staring unseeingly at the pale blue ceiling.
CHAPTER 21
HORATIO BARNES WAS SITTING at his desk looking at a map showing the small town in Tennessee where Michelle had lived when she was six.
Horatio had learned from Bill Maxwell that Michelle was many years younger than her next oldest sibling. Michelle might have been a mistake, Horatio mused. That could affect a child, he knew.
Horatio had pulled a few strings and gotten some information from her work file at the Secret Service. It had listed all the traits he knew that she had: control freak, hard on her underlings, but hardest on herself, incorruptible, fair, all earmarks of a good federal agent. Somewhere along the line she had lost or at least managed to control her fears, her inability to trust others, though the two agents he’d talked to about her had had strikingly similar comments. Both men had said that they would have trusted her with their lives, but they had never managed to get to know the enigmatic person behind the Kevlar and Glock pistol.
He’d had patients like Michelle before, and he’d wanted to help them all, but with Michelle he felt an extra urge to get her straight. It might be because she’d risked her life for her country or was the closest friend of Sean King, a man he respected like few others of his acquaintance. Or perhaps it was because he felt in her a hurt so deep that he just wanted to help her erase it, if she could.
And there was another reason, one he had not shared with Sean King or Michelle. People who attempted to end their lives, no matter how amateurishly they might do so at first, often got better at it, with the result that on the third, fourth or sixth try, they ended up on a slab with a coroner poking around their remains. He could not allow that to happen to Michelle Maxwell. He had a week’s vacation coming up. He’d planned on flying to California to go abalone diving with some friends. Instead, he went online and bought a plane ticket to Nashville.
