Sam was worried about her. She didn’t know what she could say to change that, but she hadn’t been one of those portraits on the wall and didn’t see the need to assume the worst. Sergey’s reappearance was unsettling, but Sam and Gabriel were overreacting. Nevertheless, she found herself looking over her shoulder when she drove, feeling uneasy. She was tired of being suspicious of cars that turned out to be driven by old ladies.
She spotted a corner seat where she could see the walkway and settled in to wait for Sam. She found herself looking up at every sound and finally calmed her nerves by refusing to be distracted from the story. She was determined to read and to wait, showing patience even if she didn’t feel it. The story was good; the words eventually absorbed her for real.
“I seem to remember you reading that book when we first met.”
She glanced up, startled, to find Sam smiling down at her. She looked past him; the board showed that his flight still hadn’t arrived.
“I shaved twenty minutes off with a change of planes in St. Louis.”
She closed the book, feeling caught off-balance. “I’m actually trying to finish it this time. I never did figure out whodunit.” She rose to greet him.
“Come here.” Sam opened his arms and wrapped her in a hug.
She relaxed into it, comforted by the strength and breadth of him. The tension flowed out of her. Just by his presence, he made the situation better. “I’m okay, Samuel,” she whispered.
He stepped back and lifted his hands to brush back her hair and study her face. “We’ll talk about today in the car.”
Darcy nodded and tried to remember how to be an organized hostess. “I got you a room at a nearby hotel. Would you like to stop and get something to eat first? You must have flown out shortly after I called.”
He turned them to walk the concourse toward the parking lot. “Amy and I grabbed a sandwich at the airport, but I’d go for some drive-thru on the way to the hotel if we pass something open. I like your sister.”
“She said nice things about you too; although I’m intensely curious to know why you were up my way.”
He smiled and pulled a videotape from his carry-on bag. “Since you couldn’t get away to see home, I decided to bring home to you.”
She stopped walking. Sam caught her arm and pulled her out of the way as she was nearly overrun by a luggage cart.
“Your sister, your town, about fifty hellos from your friends we met up with on the street. Dar, we’ve got to talk about your house. That’s a fabulous house. Hey—”
Unexpected tears pooled and she tried to blink them away.
He wiped them away for her. “It was fun to do, and it wasn’t that big a deal.”
“Yes, it was,” she whispered.
He wrapped his arm around her and hugged her again. “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”
She wiped her eyes. “I guess I’m more tired than I thought.”
“We’ll watch the tapes when you have a couple hours.”
“Tapes?”
“Two, plus a bit of a third.”
She slid her hand behind his neck, tugged him down, and kissed him. She was falling in love with this man. He went to North Dakota and made tapes of her friends and family. She’d never had someone do something so wonderful. She didn’t care how emotional she got or how obvious it was that her heart was on her sleeve. She had a treasure in this man and she knew it.
He leaned his forehead against hers. “When you’re not so tired you’re swaying a bit on your feet, kiss me again okay? I think my heart stopped. I could go for a repeat during daylight.”
She had to laugh. Her hand settled on his shoulder where it had to rest because she couldn’t splay her hand wide enough across the muscle and bone to actually hold on. “I really missed you.”
“It’s mutual, big time, huge.” He ducked to quickly kiss her one more time. “And the sound of those boots coming this way is my partner with a lousy sense of timing.”
Sam let her move to look around. Wolf was coming toward them, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt that screamed tourist. “He came with you?”
“Actually, he’s been watching you for the last several hours.”
She looked back at Sam, startled.
He wrapped an arm around her shoulders and nodded to the sunglasses Wolf was twirling as he walked. “So he’s not subtle unless he wants to be. Call him my insurance. He’s been tailing you since you left work at seven.”
“You sent me a bodyguard?”
Sam shook his head, his expression grim. “No, I sent a hunter to see who was hunting you.”
Eighteen
* * *
MAY 25
Saturday, 10:40 a.m.
McLean, Virginia
Darcy stood by the doorway to the condo bedroom and watched Sam study the crime scene. It was kind of spooky watching the intensity of the man. The hard-to-ruffle, smiling man she was falling for was gone, and in his place was this focused soldier with distance in his eyes and assassination on his mind. Sam was in front of the wall where the maps and photos were taped up. He’d been standing there just looking and absorbing information for the last twenty minutes. Planning sniper hits was one of the things Sam did for a living.
She would have been just fine skipping this glimpse into his work. This room was giving her the creeps. The body had been removed, fingerprint dust covered most open surfaces, but the rest of the room contents remained undisturbed.
Sam moved over to study the documents on the table.
Darcy looked at where the man had died. How many did you kill over the years? Who were you sent to kill this time? And why did you spend your life murdering for money?
It was inevitable that he would be stopped eventually. What went around, came around. She’d been reading Psalm 75 that morning, and its words provided a glimpse into this—“At the set time which I appoint I will judge with equity. When the earth totters, and all its inhabitants, it is I who keep steady its pillars.” There was still justice in the world. But for all the evil that men do, there was still a good God keeping it checked, choosing to use evil for His own purposes to bring men to know Him. If the earth remained comfortable in sin, it would keep people blind to the death in their spirits.
Sergey had stopped this act of great evil, but it raised an interesting question: How had he learned it was coming?
Darcy stepped aside as Gabe and Sam’s partner Tom came up the stairs, accompanied by Agent Sands. The way Tom and Gabriel had been huddling together earlier, she had a feeling she would have someone tailing her until they found Sergey. The guys were closing ranks and making decisions without asking her opinion.
Last night she’d ended up getting a hotel room for the night at the place Sam was staying just so she wouldn’t have to hear that Tom spent the night in his car watching her place.
Darcy let it go. She wouldn’t be talking any of them out of it. About the only course of action was to figure out what had happened here. She looked at the partially decrypted note in her hand. What was the open key? The note had to be deciphered. If it contained names and hers wasn’t on the list, she’d have something to point to that would lessen the stress around here.
This man wouldn’t have hidden the key. He wouldn’t have felt the need to do so. The note had been on the table, with only a few words decoded. If he went to all the trouble to start, why not finish? Had he been interrupted, set it aside, and it got buried under other items?
She walked back to the table where the note had been discovered and looked at exactly what was visible. On top of the encoded piece of paper had been a bus schedule. On the wall was a calendar turned to the correct month. A soda can on a coaster. A mug being used to keep pens. A ruler. She closed her eyes. She was making this too hard.
She went over to her locked briefcase and retrieved the pictures recovered from the house in Ireland. She flipped through the pictures comparing what she saw in common between the two places.
Books. Both men were snip
ers, both had been stopped during the planning portion of their assignments, and both were reading popular fiction. It didn’t make sense that they were reading for pleasure when time was that tight. “Sam, do you read a lot?”
He looked over at her. “In general, yes.”
“Do most snipers?”
“Being well-read on current events is an occupational necessity.”
That suggested newspapers, not fiction. She went looking for all the books she could find. She found two popular thrillers in the bedroom on the side table beside the clock. The price sticker on the back of the mystery was priced in euros, not dollars. Was it bought at an airport when he had extra time?
Were the numbers in the notes page numbers? She looked through the books trying to match up the numbers on the partially decoded message with some page numbers and letters. There wasn’t an obvious match.
“Darcy?”
She walked back to join Sam.
“Who’s this?” He pointed to a photograph on the table.
She hesitated. “Dr. Ellen Sandford. She’s one of our in-house experts on trade, particularly with Canada. She handles grain, fish, livestock, timber, that kind of thing.”
“She was the primary target.”
Sam motioned to the documents on the table and the maps. “Think of this as a layered plan. You need to peel back layers. His primary mission is where he started his planning, and then he added layers to see how many other targets of opportunity he could pull in.”
“What did he have planned?” Gabe asked, joining them.
“He would hit at her home probably the night before and then move during the cover of night to his next target. I need to get out and see several places he has marked, confirm this sequence is possible. My guess is three phases, maybe four, with shooting perches at each. This one looks like an ambush over the highway going to the CIA headquarters. This looks like a fallback perch near the high school, this one at a subdivision entrance. He intended to get as many of those targets as he could. He would use the chaos his first actions created to predict where people would then go, and that’s where he set up fallback locations. Be very glad he was stopped. This planning is good.”
“Are these all outdoor perches?” Agent Sands asked.
“They appear to be. But I’m beginning to wonder if he doesn’t have another weapon stashed at one of these sites. A couple of these look like they’re within walking distance, and he’s not going to be taking a weapon with him. He would want to be up high. I found gravel on the soles of his shoes in the closet, maybe the fine gravel from a roof. Look around for keys. He won’t want to slow down to break into a building. He’ll have rented other apartments, offices. But why Dr. Sandford?”
Darcy shook her head. “I don’t know. I never would have predicted it based on Luther’s past activities.”
“Go back and look at the data. A trade expert. You said Luther liked to profit from terrorist acts,” Sam said. “What would happen if U.S. and Canadian trade is seriously disrupted?”
“It would make the economic hit of September 11 look like the ripple of a pebble in a pond next to a boulder crashing into a lake.”
“Exactly. Profitable if you knew the disruption was coming. Darcy, go back to basics. You don’t have to figure this out; Luther is going to tell you in advance what will be hit. Follow his money. It could be anything from a bomb in a shipping container to a significant number of arson forest fires across the West getting planned. Ellen knows something that would either help minimize the damage or would cause the plan to fail.”
Follow the money. A simple suggestion that would be difficult to do. She’d add to the risk list telecommunications, power transmission, trains, banking, gas pipelines, for the two countries were interconnected in some very fundamental ways.
Gabe pulled out his phone. “The first thing is getting someone babysitting Ellen. Sam, can you and Tom take Agent Sands through those sites? Let’s find out what’s out there and get it wrapped up. Darcy and I will camp out at Ellen’s until we know everything she knows.”
“Done. And, Darcy, don’t head home until Wolf or I are with you.”
She nodded rather than have the debate here. She’d be tied up for several hours with Ellen anyway.
MAY 25
Saturday, 6:18 p.m.
Central Intelligence Agency
Where was Luther putting his money? Darcy sat in her office and pondered the great question Sam had asked and couldn’t figure out how to answer it. The Department of Treasury had three guys chasing Luther’s money. He was going to arrange to profit from whatever was coming. And if the timing of the sniper attacks was as eminent as Sam believed based on the sniper’s preparations, then the money should already be in play. But it was like looking into a black hole and trying to see light.
Darcy picked up another of the reports Ellen had written in the last year. Gabriel had taken half and she’d taken half. Timber shipments. She scanned the table of contents. The U.S. and Canada were close to a trade-sanction war over pine. This report focused on the projected market effect of opening the Tremont Forest Preserve to limited tree harvesting. Darcy read, but frankly it didn’t make much sense. She’d stayed as far away from economic espionage and intelligence assessments as she could. Why would Luther care what Ellen thought about timber, fishing, or the like?
She went back to the treasury report. Luther had profited from shorting airline stocks, insurance stocks, and he had made a chunk of money just betting the market was going to sharply correct downward. He’d had the advantage of surprise on September 11. He had been able to make a lot of large bets in the market and yet not get noticed ahead of time by the regulators. This time Luther would have to be subtle. He’d buy the stocks and sell short; he’d buy some futures.
She switched to the secure SEC Web site where software monitored for trends. Luther could quietly put a few hundred million into bets like that, and there would be no way to see it in a trillion-dollar global market. Oil and gas stocks, paper stocks, shipping, nearly every sector Ellen watched was under selling pressure. Would he stay away from the stock market and play the commodity market directly? Darcy rubbed her eyes, then closed the screens. She could be looking at Luther manipulating items and she wouldn’t understand what she was seeing. The guys at the SEC would have to give her those answers.
Maybe Ellen wasn’t targeted because of her current work. Darcy went back to Ellen’s work biography. Did she know someone who would raise a red flag today? Had she traveled somewhere and maybe seen someone or something that would lead to trouble? Had she crossed paths with someone they were interested in? Was she targeted simply because she would hear about the crime and instinctively think about a culprit’s name?
Ellen had degrees in agriculture; she’d traveled extensively to Europe last year when the foot-and-mouth disease crippled the beef export industry; she’d done her thesis work on mad cow disease; she had four recently published studies on the interactions of the Endangered Species Act and the North American Free Trade Act.
“You need to go home, dahlin’.”
Her knee slammed up against the corner of her desk. “Gabriel, scare me out of a few years of my life, why don’t you.” She rubbed her aching knee as she turned around.
“Ellen is a forty-four-year-old economist whose only logical enemy is probably her neighbor who dislikes all the animals she keeps as pets. We’re chasing the wrong thing.”
Darcy leaned back in her chair. “What?”
Gabe leaned against the doorjamb and bounced a tennis ball against the floor in a steady rhythm. “Try thinking domestic—a disgruntled former CIA employee who wanted to kill as many others as he could from his former employer. Had September 11 not happened that would’ve been our first guess as soon as we saw that set of photos. Besides agents in the field, the photos contained everyone from analysts like Ellen to assistants in the personnel department.”
“So why would Luther be involved then?”
“A sniper hit is a sniper hit, and Luther will take money from anyone. All it takes is one disgruntled former CIA employee who worked in Europe at some point, and we can explain how he knew to look up Luther when he wanted something nasty to happen.”
She leaned her head back and looked at the ceiling. “How many people have been fired since September 11 happened?”
“Several, even if it was quietly done. This sniper was hired to kill a lot of people. Ellen could have been chosen to lead the list for a twenty-year-old grievance.”
Darcy thought about it and shook her head. “A disgruntled employee wouldn’t have the kind of cash needed to hire this hit.” She frowned. “At least an honest employee wouldn’t.”
She looked at Gabe and hesitated to run that idea to its conclusion but reluctantly did so. “But a spy in our midst might. A spy working in this building is one of those fired, and he’s not sure if his espionage will be discovered now that he is not present to cover the evidence of what he’s done? That could explain the breadth of those photos and how the cash was obtained to have Luther hire a sniper of this caliber.”
The fact that Gabriel didn’t reject the idea told her a lot. He was senior enough in the CIA hierarchy that if there were suspicions of a spy being quietly checked, Gabe would know it.
He nodded. “We put the word out we’re looking for a disgruntled ex-employee, and we may just get the small observations from coworkers needed to discover a spy. The key would be not to let the apparent lack of resources eliminate a candidate.”
Darcy swiveled her chair back and forth, thinking through the pieces they had. “What about Sergey’s involvement?”
“What you originally speculated. Mikail was the sniper who killed his family. Sergey hunted him down and paid him back.”
“You know, it does fit, which is almost scary.”