He got to the top of the roof just as the chopper skidded in to accept them.
“You first!” Jonathan yelled to Boxers. “Give us cover fire.” Becky was doing as good a job as she knew how, but with Boxers’ finger on the trigger, bad guys would start falling down for good.
Striker never actually touched down on the roof. Instead, he hovered with the starboard skid just three inches off the surface.
Boxers hoisted himself in first, and charged directly to the far side to start pouring more firepower into the people on the ground. Within seconds, the incoming fire decreased by ninety percent. Jonathan heaved Alexei in first, and then lifted Nicholas into the doorway. The first glimpse of the blood smear on his back showed a critical injury. Joey was next, though he pretty much scaled the skid by himself, and then Yelena brought up the rear.
Jonathan checked one more time to make sure that he hadn’t left anyone, and that there were no immediate threats that could hang off the side of the chopper, and then he heaved himself onto the deck.
“Go, go, go!” he yelled to Striker, and then to the others, “Keep your heads down. Lie flat on the floor.” As the words left his mouth, he took up a position next to Boxers in the doorway and he opened up on to ground on full auto. The MP7 sounded positively anemic next to the pounding pulse of Boxers’ HK 417.
Striker pulled pitch, and they climbed like a rocket, pivoting out of harm’s way, and then dropping again like a stone to treetop level when they were out of range.
Jonathan felt someone pounding on his shoulder, and he turned to see David, extending a headset to him. “It’s Striker,” David yelled. “He wants to talk to you.”
With the doors off, there’d be no direct communication with this much power poured into the engines. Jonathan slipped the headset over his ears. “Scorpion here,” he said.
“I’m making a dash straight back to Vermont,” Striker said. “I’m abandoning everything we left at the staging area. You okay with that?”
This was exactly why it was important never to leave fingerprints or DNA behind. “Roger that,” Jonathan said. “Let’s go home.”
In Striker’s world, treetop flying meant the actual collection of treetop material in the skids of the helicopter. He flew at full throttle, and as Jonathan watched the world pass inches below him, he envied those who had no goggles and therefore could fly without stress.
The Mishin family had found itself in the darkness. They sat clustered together amidships at the aft end of the aircraft. Boxers, one of the best combat medics Jonathan had ever known, had done his best to treat Nicholas’s wound, but the fact was that the man needed a trauma surgeon right now, and they were not in the position to provide him with one.
“Thirty seconds to the US border,” Striker said over the radio.
Jonathan knew he should breathe a sigh of relief, but thirty seconds could be an eternity when things were running against you. Still, there was something about being back on American soil, where contacts had influence, that made life easier.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I welcome you back to the United States of America,” Striker said over the intercom.
Jonathan yelled to the PCs over the engine noise, “We’re almost home.”
If they cheered, he couldn’t hear it.
“Hey Scorpion, we have a problem,” Striker said over the intercom. “Take a look at eleven o’clock high.”
Jonathan moved to the door, with Boxers right behind. Looking up and above the left-hand side of the helicopter, he saw the well-defined outline of a Blackhawk helicopter, fully lit.
“He’s got a friend at six o’clock level, and he’s squawking on one twenty one point five megahertz for us to put down immediately.”
Jonathan’s heart sank.
“You know my rule on incarceration,” Boxers said. It was a simple one: he’d die first, but he wouldn’t die alone.
“He just threatened to shoot us down,” Striker said.
Jonathan’s mind screamed. With the NVGs in place, he looked over to Yelena and her family. The blood from Nicholas’s back showed white in the infrared glare. This guy needed help a half hour ago. In another hour, he might be beyond hope.
“Tell you what,” Jonathan said over the intercom. “Let’s make a deal with them.”
While Striker bargained to keep them from being shot out of the sky, Jonathan worked through Wolverine to make a few phone calls. There’d no doubt be a lot of guns when they touched down, but if everyone stuck to the script, none of them would be fired. The whole process took less than fifteen minutes.
Jonathan stood conspicuously unarmed in the starboard doorway as they flared to land on the heliport of the trauma center at Fletcher Allen Hospital in Burlington, and Boxers occupied the other door. Striker settled the chopper with such ease that there wasn’t even a bump.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Striker said over the radio.
“Me, too,” Boxers added.
Well
, Jonathan thought,
we’re all about to see together
.
Striker shut the engine down, but the rotors were still turning as a dozen cops approached in SWAT gear, their weapons drawn and at the ready. This was a twitchy group that needed to be handled carefully.
Keeping his hands visible, Jonathan pivoted to the side and said, “Okay, Mrs. Darmond, you’re on.”
The First Lady of the United States made her appearance in the doorway just as the floodlights erupted to illuminate the scene. The crowd of police and medical personnel had been told to prepare themselves for her, but from what Jonathan could see through the glare, they were nonetheless shocked by her presence. She even waved, and in that moment, Jonathan realized that he’d seen that very wave from the steps of Air Force One.
“I need you to help my son!” she called to the crowd. “He’s been stabbed.”
They’d been prepared for that, too, and as her words rolled into the night, a trauma team moved forward, pushing a cot that was loaded with all kinds of high-tech gear.
“You!” one of the cops yelled to Jonathan. “You in the doorway! Step out and keep your hands where I can see them.” Behind him, on the other side of the aircraft, he could hear similar orders being delivered to Boxers. Because of his size, Big Guy would have to be particularly careful not to spook these guys.
As the doctors piled into the helicopter, Jonathan climbed out, first to the skid, and then down to the pad. “I’m unarmed,” he said to the first man who approached him.
“But only recently, as I understand it,” the cop said. He was approaching fifty, and he wore parallel bars on his collar that would have indicated a captain in the army, but could have many meanings in the civilian world. By any meaning, though, the bars meant rank, and rank meant seniority.
As he got even closer to Jonathan, the cop—Jonathan could see now that his name tag read Amen—said, “I’m Deputy Chief Eric Amen. My boss says I’m supposed to treat you like a prisoner, but like a VIP one. I’m not sure what that means, but I know it includes handcuffs, at least until we can figure out all of the details.”
“I’m fine with that,” Jonathan said, moving his hands behind his back, “but if my friend objects, try to reason with him, okay?”
As it turned out, Boxers readily got with the program. As Nicholas Mishin was ushered down to surgery, Scorpion and Big Guy were escorted to a parking garage. True to the stated spirit of things, Amen removed the handcuffs before he ushered his prisoners into the backseat of a cruiser. Boxers had to sit mostly sideways to accommodate his legs.
Once they were settled in, and the cruiser was moving, Amen asked, “So who do you have to be to get the director of the FBI to put in a courtesy call for you?”
The Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington covered a footprint that Jonathan estimated to be about thirty thousand square feet. Deputy Chief Amen escorted Boxers and him into the reception area of the jail, and then sat with them while they chatted about nothing. They accepted coffee when it was offered, and no one got overly stressed when first Boxers and then Jonathan asked to use the restroom, which itself was built like a prison cell, with concrete walls, a heavy door, and no windows.
All things considered, Jonathan was getting tired of concrete walls. When this was over, he thought he owed himself a trip to an island. He was equally tired of being cold.
Overall, the atmosphere of the meeting—if that’s what you could call it—was cordial yet weird. Amen had clearly been instructed not to ask questions about what he’d just witnessed at the hospital, but it was equally clear that he ached to disobey his orders. For Jonathan’s part, he’d have been happy to have been left alone for a nap.
After nearly two hours, a couple of high-and-tight guys in suits arrived and identified themselves as FBI agents. “Thanks for taking care of things, Chief,” one of the agents said. “We’ll pick it up from here.”
They all said some cursory good-byes, and then the Fibbies escorted Scorpion and Big Guy out to a waiting Suburban in the parking lot. As they approached the vehicle, the agent who did the talking inside said, “Mr. Scorpion, and Mr. Big Guy, I am Agent Able and this is Agent Baker. I have been instructed by Wolverine to ask you to come with us. You are not under arrest and you may refuse if you wish.”
Able made no effort to camouflage that as anything but the memorized speech that it was. The code names lent convincing credibility to the words. “What do you say, Big Guy?” Jonathan asked.
“It’s been so much fun so far,” Boxers said. “I wouldn’t miss another minute.”
The Suburban drove them to the airport, where an unmarked Gulfstream jet awaited them, all gassed up and ready to go. Able drove them right up to the aircraft’s ramp, and as he approached, he said something into his radio that Jonathan couldn’t decipher.
A few second later, Jonathan’s cell phone buzzed. Caller ID read J. Edgar.
“Scorpion here,” he said.
“Nice job tonight,” Irene said. “The Bureau is supplying you with a nice ride home. I believe you’ll find some surprises in the plane.”
“How is PC One?” Jonathan asked.
“Still in surgery, but the last report I got was that he’ll pull through. Might lose the kidney, might not, but my people tell me that it’s not a huge deal.”
“And Sidesaddle?”
“Not my problem anymore. The Secret Service took jurisdiction over her safety as soon as we crossed the threshold into the hospital.”
“But what about—” Jonathan stopped himself, aware of the additional ears.
“Some things we might never know,” Irene said. “I’m fairly sure that there’s much that ultimately won’t be shared with you at all. Nothing personal, you understand. Just need to know.”
Jonathan’s ears turned hot. He deserved better than this. “You’re a tease, Wolfie.”
“You won the big one tonight, Scorpion. There are a lot of powerful people indebted to you. Put a check in the win column and go to bed.”
“And what about Alexei?” Jonathan pressed. They hadn’t given the Russian a code name, so he had to default to the real one.
“Good night, Scorpion.” She clicked off.
Sometimes Jonathan forgot that Irene Rivers was the ultimate professional. He in fact did not have a need to know the details. All that was important from where she sat was that Jonathan did his job and that the mission was accomplished. As in the past, his was not to reason why.
Still, it sucked.
Climbing into the plane, he had to laugh when he saw the surprise Irene had spoken of. All of their gear had been delivered to the plane and stacked neatly along the last row of seats. In the forward part of the passenger cabin, someone had placed a bottle of Lagavulin scotch for Jonathan and a six-pack of Sam Adams beer for Boxers.
As they squared themselves away, a female voice said over the intercom, “Welcome aboard. Please make yourselves comfortable, sit back, and enjoy the flight.”
C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-SIX
J
onathan understood that there could be no White House reception or formal declaration of a job well done, but after two weeks, would a thank-you note have been out of the question? Even the Army had issued him citations for jobs exceptionally well done, though most of them were highly classified and could never be spoken of.
Reading the paper every day—he’d taken a special interest in the stories reported by the
Washington Enquirer
—it pleased him to read that the Canadian government had thwarted a terrorist plot against the United States. It seems that units of their military had received a tip from a confidential informant that the renovation of Saint Stephen’s Reformatory in Ottawa had in fact been a cover for a Russian dissident group that had been plotting for years to create havoc in America. Unfortunately, during the raid, the explosives were detonated and all of the terrorists were killed.
That last part intrigued Jonathan most, because he knew for a fact that a number of bad guys were still alive when Striker flew away. He wondered if the others were actually killed, or if they were just spirited away for some quality time with CIA interrogators.
Most important from Jonathan’s perspective, there were no reports of a helicopter being forced down that night, nor of VIPs being admitted to any hospitals in Vermont. Apparently when the administration actually cared about controlling leaks, secrets could be kept.
Jonathan was hunkered down in his office with a fire roaring against the blistering chill of the air outside, wading through the accumulated administrative crap that made business ownership such a pain in the ass. JoeDog was as close to the fire as she could be without actually igniting, and all but the most ambitious workers had gone home for the night. Jonathan had to kick Venice out of the place, telling her that she was not allowed to return until tomorrow at 10:00
A.M.
Yes, she had a lot of responsibility, and yes, she had a lot of work to do, but sooner or later, she’d burn out if she didn’t step away for a while.
Besides, with her gone, the Cave was exceptionally silent, which meant that he could concentrate without interruption.
A gust of wind rattled the building at the same instant that his cell phone buzzed. J. Edgar.
Shit.
He considered ignoring it, but Wolverine wasn’t the type to bother him for chitchat. He answered after the second ring. “Evening, ma’am,” he said.
“I see your light is on. Can you leave your desk long enough to let us in? It’s cold outside.”
Jonathan resisted the urge to look out the window. It would have been too . . . predictable. “Us?” he said. “Who’s ‘us’?”
“You’ll have to look to see,” she said. “But I’d rather talk in your residence than in your office.”
He sighed. The reality was that he welcomed any opportunity to so something other than the stuff he was doing. “Two minutes.”
Jonathan stood from his chair, triggering JoeDog to scramble to her feet, tail wagging, ready and anxious to find another place to lie down and sleep.
“Come on, Beast,” he said. “Come attack a government official.” They walked together to the office door, but upon opening it, he let JoeDog go first. It was better than being run over from behind.
He said good night to the guards and walked down to the residence. He pressed the code, and then he was home. He turned lights on as walked down one more flight to the main level, then across the living area to the foyer. He slid the latches and pulled open the door.
Irene Rivers stood wrapped in mink, the collar pulled tight under her chin, with a fuzzy fur hat down low over her ears. David Kirk stood next to her in a ski jacket, smiling from ear to ear. “Bet you didn’t think you’d see us again,” David said. On the other side of him stood Becky Beckeman in a poufy down coat that hadn’t been in style in Becky’s lifetime.
“Truer words,” Jonathan said. He stepped aside and ushered them in. “Have a seat. Get warm.” They entered and Jonathan scanned the area outside. “Where’s your detail?”
Irene peeled off her coat. “In the car,” she said. “And don’t feel too sorry for them. It’s a nice car.” JoeDog examined the visitors long enough to determine that they had no treats for her, and then she retreated to watch from under the coffee table.
Irene blew into her hands and rubbed them together. “I heard a rumor that you have an excellent collection of single malts.”
“Excellent is such a relative term,” Jonathan said. “But I think we could all agree on ‘fairly comprehensive. ’ What do you like?”
“Glenmorangie,” she said.
“Can I get in on this?” David asked.
“You’re not going to ask me to put ginger ale or Coke in it, are you?”
“No, I like mine neat and peaty. Got any Talisker?”
Jonathan smiled. “I might learn to like you after all, kid. Becky?”
“I’ll take the ginger ale.”
As his guests took their seats, Jonathan walked to the bookcase that housed the bar and poured three drinks of two fingers each, and a tall glass of ginger ale. His own glass, of course, contained Lagavulin. He served them with an apology. “I don’t have a freezer in the bar. Would you like me to get ice from the kitchen?”
Becky smiled. “No, this is fine.”
“I confess you’ve piqued my interest,” Jonathan said, lowering himself into a lush green leather reading chair. Irene sat to his right in another lounge chair, and David and Becky had taken spots on the sofa to Jonathan’s left.
Irene started. Sort of. “Mr. Kirk and Ms. Beckeman have something to tell you.”
The hairs on Jonathan’s neck moved. “Oh, yeah?”
David took a sip as he nodded. “Yeah. I wanted to tell you about the story we’re never going to write. It turns out that Nicholas and Josef Mishin have the wrong last names.”
Jonathan crossed his legs and took a sip of his own. This was going to be interesting.
“By DNA testing, their real last name should be Winters.”
Jonathan nearly choked. “You mean as in Douglas Winters? As in the president’s chief of staff?”
“Yep.”
Jonathan scowled and glanced at Irene for confirmation. She answered with her eyebrows.
“How can you know this?”
“During our research, we found out that Winters has been joined at the hip with Tony Darmond since the Mesozoic era—since before Darmond was even in Congress. And you know how everybody says that Nicholas is the image of his mother, with the light hair and the blue eyes? That given the president’s coloration, Nicholas got every recessive gene?”
Jonathan rocketed back to his first meeting with Winters in Arc Flash’s barn. The hair was going gray, but he had blue eyes and the complexion that suggested that he might have been a blond in his youth. “And because Winters has similar coloring, you’re suggesting—”
“We’re not suggesting anything,” Becky said, hijacking the narrative. “We’ve got proof. When the rest of us were left behind at the hospital, we got to talking with Joey Mishin—a nice kid, but man is he gonna need some counseling. Actually, he was afraid of David, but he talked to me. He told stories that he’d heard from his dad that Tony Darmond was never nice to him when he was growing up. He said he felt like—and this was the phrase he quoted—a redheaded stepchild. That’s when the lightbulb went on over my head.”
Jonathan scoffed, “But that’s hardly—”
“Jesus, are you going to let us finish or not?” David snapped. “We have a confidential source inside the White House who was able to bring me a soda can that Winters had drunk out of. We sent it, along with a sample of Nicholas’s blood that I got off my pants that night.” He paused for effect.
“It’s a match?”
“Perfect.”
Jonathan gaped, and then he chuckled and took a longer sip of scotch. “Holy shit. So why are you both here?” He looked to Irene for the answer to that one.
“Because you’ve got enough skin in this game to get really pissed off, and I wanted you to know that restraint is the key to everything.”
“I don’t follow.”
She explained. “David showed the courtesy of running this past me. Frankly, it’s not a suspicion that had ever occurred to the Bureau or anywhere else that I know of. We took it to Alexei—he actually prefers to be called Len—and he seemed shocked as hell that we knew. That had been the Movement’s trump card.”
“The Movement?” Jonathan asked.
“Sounds like the shits, doesn’t it?” David said with a laugh.
“That’s what the Russian expats called themselves. They found out about the truth of Nicholas’s paternity through Pavel Mishin, the man who was supposed to have been the kid’s father. Apparently, they’ve been sitting on it for a while, waiting for the best moment to hurt the president.”
Jonathan scowled again. “Nobody cares about bastard children anymore.”
“President Darmond didn’t know,” Irene said. “The president had always assumed that Mishin was the father, which was why he and the First Lady never got along, and why Nicholas the Younger was never treated well. Only Winters and Yelena knew the real truth—and Mishin—and Winters understood that if word leaked, he’d be toast in the administration.”
“Is he also involved with this terrorist stuff?” Jonathan asked.
“Yes,” Irene said. Her scotch was gone now, and she motioned for another. This time, Jonathan set the bottle next to her. “Apparently, Winters really loved the kid, and by extension, I guess he really loved Yelena, too.”
“Did he know about the witness protection stuff?”
“He does now, but he didn’t when they had their affair. He says he didn’t know until a guy named Dmitri Boykin approached him with that, and the knowledge of the true paternity. He was devastated and the bad guys knew it. That’s when they started applying the screws. They promised to hurt Nicholas if Winters didn’t pull strings to grant the Movement access to weapons.”
Jonathan recoiled. “Can a chief of staff do that?”
“A chief of staff can do anything he wants to. As a practical matter, he is surrogate president, so long as nothing has to be signed into law. That’s what chiefs of staff do. In Winters’s case, it meant alerting Alexei or Dmitri to the movement of materiel. Apparently, that’s a pretty simple matter.”
“So that explains all the US military munitions at Saint Stephen’s,” Jonathan said, connecting the dots.
Irene poured another two fingers.
“So, when are you arresting Winters?” Jonathan asked.
Irene’s answer came without hesitation. “We’re not.” It clearly was the money shot that she’d been preparing for.
“You can’t be serious,” Jonathan said.
Irene said, “What would be the point? All that stuff we told you on the first meeting—the fragility of the world economy, and the devastation that a crisis of confidence could do—that’s all real, Dig. The threat of further damage went away when the cache of weapons was destroyed. In the opinion of the attorney general, more harm than good would be done by prosecuting Winters.”
“What about the victims at O’Hare? Their blood is on his hands.”
“Only if you look ridiculously closely,” Becky said.
“Come again?” Jonathan had sort of forgotten that she was even there.
“He was acting to protect his only child,” she said.
Hot blood rose in Jonathan’s face. “He murdered over a hundred people.”
“No, he didn’t,” David said. “The Movement did that. I guarantee you that’s the editorial slant the
Enquirer
would give it. Sure, there’d be a clamoring for Winters’s head, and he’d get fired, but at the end of the day, the editorial board of the
Enquirer
and every network would see this as a human interest story, and Winters as a benevolent scapegoat.”
“Even as the financial markets tumbled,” Irene added. “This isn’t without consequence,” she continued. “Tomorrow, Doug Winters will announce his retirement from the Darmond administration.”
“No doubt to ‘spend more time with his family’,” Jonathan mocked.
“Or something like that,” Irene confirmed.
“And then he’ll pull in a million-five a year on K Street,” Jonathan said, referring to the home of the major lobbyists.
“Or something like that.” Irene paused for the words to sink in. “You know, Digger, justice isn’t always about the individual. Sometimes, it really is about the commonweal. If a threat is eliminated, it’s not necessary to find someone to blame it on. It’s not as if he were personally ordering the murder of individual people.”
Jonathan thought through everything that had been told to him, and he marveled at how limited his options were. They’d constructed a box around him. “Why are you telling me this?” he asked.
“Because you’ll find out, one way or the other,” Irene explained. “You’re that inquisitive, and you’re that good. I drove all the way down here with David and Becky to make sure all of you understand the consequence of individual retaliation. It is not to happen.”
Jonathan regarded his longtime friend with a cocked head. “Have you been drinking the Darmond Kool-Aid, Wolverine?”
“Don’t you dare go there with me,” she said. “My oath is to the Constitution, not to petty politics. I swore to protect this country from all enemies, foreign and domestic. I’m not happy with the twist that phrase has taken over the past few years, but I’m not going to oversee a global collapse based on a high-horse ‘gotcha.’ Not on my watch.”
“So he walks on a murder charge,” Jonathan said. The words tasted like acid.
“Is that
really
the line that you of all people are going to walk?” Irene fired back.
Under a strict interpretation of the laws of the land, Jonathan had committed multiple murders on his own. “I do what I do in service to the innocent,” he said. Even as the words left his mouth, he realized that they sounded like they came from a Superman movie poster.