Armageddon Conspiracy (27 page)

She jiggled her foot in a staccato beat. God, she wanted a cigarette, a strong one, preferably unfiltered, a Camel or Lucky Strike. She was so busy contemplating getting up and going outside to stand in the smokers’ area where she could at least sniff the second-hand smoke that she almost missed Maggie DeVito’s name.

She had been feeling bad all day about her inability to bring any follow-up to DeVito’s memo, which had been a sharp piece of deductive reasoning. Moreover, it demonstrated initiative and a creative
intellect sorely lacking in too many law-enforcement people. DeVito had been frustrated and disappointed at the turndown, but she hadn’t whined or carried on. Jenkins liked the way her prettiness hid a tough character.

But why the hell was DeVito requisitioning satellite photos? She had a staff position, not a line job, which meant she wasn’t supposed to be working her own investigations. Jenkins placed a call to the satellite imaging section of the NSA and asked a technician to look up the photographs DeVito had requested. “What’s it of?” Jenkins asked.

“Looks like a waterfront estate on Long Island,” the man replied.

Jenkins scratched her head, again conscious of the lack of fingernails. “I need to know more. Who owns it?”

“Call you back,” the man said.

Ten minutes later, the man got back to her. “Belongs to a guy named Prescott Biddle,” he said.

Jenkins’ pulse quickened. She quickly looked through the rest of the report and saw that DeVito had ordered a number of images. “What were the other images?”

“Same shot, but for different dates and times.”

“What did they show?”

The man promised to check and get back.

Jenkins stood and paced her office. What the hell was DeVito doing? She went back to her desk, typed in a search program and designated DeVito’s computer. She called up a list of the searches she had run starting today and going back a week. Nothing looked interesting.

She ran another check, this one general, designed to look at all the Project Seahawk computers, and she put in Prescott Biddle’s
name. Immediately, she got a hit. A New York State Police lieutenant named Kosinsky had run a check on Biddle. Kosinsky was big and good-looking, the type who look like he was bred to be a state cop. She hadn’t paid him much attention until now, but suddenly she wondered at the connection between Maggie and Kosinsky. An over-search of Kosinsky’s computer showed that he’d done concurrent searches on Fred Wofford, Owen Smythe, Betty Dowager, and a Reverend Howard Turner. Later, he’d done search on Brent Lucas.

She felt a prickle at the back of her neck. Lucas’s name had appeared in DeVito’s memo and been all over the law enforcement net. She remembered that Lucas worked for Biddle and was a suspect in several murders. She brought up Kosinsky’s searches and saw that Smythe was one of the murder victims and that along with Wofford and Dowager he had worked at Biddle’s firm.

A symbol blinked beside Turner’s name, meaning that more recent information was available. She updated the search, and then her breath caught in her throat. In the past forty-eight hours Turner and his wife had been found dead in what was termed a murder/suicide. Moreover, Wofford’s wife had reported her husband missing. What the hell was going on? Was Brent Lucas on a murder rampage, or did this information somehow help prove DeVito’s hypothesis? She resumed pacing, lost in thought, absently winding her red hair around her fingers until her phone finally rang.

It was the guy from the NSA. He said one group of satellite photos were close-focus shots of each building on Biddle’s estate, also his boat. Another group were images going back thirty days, all of Biddle’s yacht and the two small cottages located in one corner of his property. DeVito had also requested infrareds of the same location
but NSA needed prior notice for close-focus infrareds. They had, however, taken one shot that afternoon.

“Anything interesting?” Jenkins asked, trying to mask her anxiety.

The man told her that the earlier pictures seemed to show nothing at all, but several from the past week showed figures.

“What time were they taken?” Jenkins asked.

He said they were taken shortly after sunrise and just before sunset. The infrared shot showed what seemed to be three figures—possibly two inside the cottage and one outside in the trees.

She thanked the man for his quick response and ordered her own copies. She hung up then printed copies of Kosinsky’s searches and read each of them more closely. She saw that Fred Wofford was the president of Biddle’s company and along with Biddle was on the national board of the New Jerusalem Fellowship. Betty Dowager was an executive assistant at the same company, and Owen Smythe had been a portfolio manager there. Kosinsky’s search on the New Jerusalem Fellowship described a church dedicated to the most radical and fundamental form of Protestantism with a focus on the approaching End of Days.

She thought again about DeVito’s memo, saw how the dots seemed to connect, and suddenly she absolutely needed that cigarette. She rushed out of her office, went through security, and took the elevator to the lobby. She spotted the glow of a cigarette outside the revolving doors, the smoker an African American woman who worked for the Border Patrol. “Can I bum one?” she asked as she came barreling out.

The woman threw her a resentful glance, but after a hesitation reached into her purse and brought out a pack of Marlboro Light 100’s. Jenkins snatched one then pulled out the gold-plated Zippo
she always carried whether she was smoking or not. She lit the cigarette, took a long, greedy drag then exhaled. “Thanks,” she said as the smoke streamed from her mouth.

“No problem,” the woman said, though her eyes suggested the opposite.

Jenkins turned and stared out at the dark Newark streets as she smoked. The nicotine hit her system and calmed her, while underneath she could feel her brain starting to crank. She winced at the thought of once again bringing Prescott Biddle’s name to her superiors, but then she quashed her fear.

The skeptics would ignore everything—the money, the satellite photos, the multitude of bodies, and the interrelationships of the people. Coincidence they’d say of the New Jerusalem Fellowship and Genesis Advisors connections. They’d insist the figures in the satellite photos were gardeners or houseguests. Jenkins no longer gave a damn. Her instincts were rock solid.

She recalled a
60 Minutes
segment she’d seen a year earlier, where the leader of a radical Christian group calmly explained that his goal was to create strife in the Mideast “in order to hasten the coming of Armageddon.”

A person would have to be insane to want that, Jenkins thought, but Biddle’s church embraced that craziness. She thought about the Turner murder/suicide. What if it hadn’t been a psychotic tragedy but a bizarre sacrifice intended to protect a secret? A secret involving eight hundred and fifty million dollars? Protect it from whom? Possibly DeVito? If this line of thinking was right, how did Brent Lucas and Owen Smythe figure in? Could they be dupes or scapegoats intended to divert attention from the real reason for the theft?

She shook her head, still wanting to poke holes in DeVito’s logic because politically, it was poison. Then suddenly everything clicked, and the whole thing hit her: POTUS! The President’s visit was tomorrow!

Jenkins had a good half-inch of unsmoked cigarette, but she flicked it away and started back into the building.

“If you gonna bum one, at least smoke the damn thing,” the woman snapped.

Jenkins ignored her. She had far bigger things on her mind. She was thinking that tonight, immediately, regardless of consequence, she had to pull together a group to find out if there were terrorists on Prescott Biddle’s estate.

And then in the next second she finally understood why DeVito and Kosinsky had said nothing about the satellite photos.

“Holy Shit!” she exclaimed, and she broke into a sprint and headed toward the elevator doors.

FRED LUCAS SAT IN THE
passenger seat of Kosinsky’s truck and scowled at the thousands of headlights on the Long Island Expressway. Nine thirty at night, yet traffic crawled in both directions.

“Long Island,” he groused as Kosinsky pulled off the expressway and stopped at the pumps of a self-serve gas station. “I’d rather live in Afghanistan.”

Kosinsky shrugged. “I’ve lived here all my life,” he said. “You get used to it.”

“You’re nuts.”

Kosinsky gave a wry smile. “I’ve had that thought a few times tonight.”

Fred grunted in agreement. He hated what was about to happen, but then he thought how some Arab shitbirds had killed Harry. Now, tonight, they were going up against the same kind of people. He didn’t
think he’d want to keep on living if something happened to Brent.

He opened his door and climbed out of the pickup. An empty five-gallon can sat in the truck bed. He took it out, unscrewed the top, and waited while Kosinsky ran his credit card through the pump.

“Regular or high test?” Kosinsky shouted over the freeway noise.

Fred looked up and smiled. “Like it matters,” he yelled. He had a fireman’s bias that most cops were full of crap, but this was a guy he could get along with, even one he could like.

He squeezed the handle and heard gas stream into the can. Thirty years putting fires out made it impossible to do this with an easy conscience. Still, he’d been over it in his mind and knew this was probably the only way. Besides, it was for Brent—and Harry. Suck it up you old bastard, he told himself.

AGENT JENKINS SLAMMED DOWN HER
phone, grabbed a tissue, and wiped her oily forehead at the hairline. She needed a shower, and her stomach was a seething mess. For the past thirty minutes she’d been intermittently calling DeVito’s house phone and cell phones, ditto for Kosinsky’s. There were many possible explanations for why neither of them answered. They might be bowling, out to dinner, or at a movie. They might not be together, only she knew they were.

“Shit,” she whispered, as she finally made her decision. She dialed a Washington number then put her right hand under her nose, sniffing the residual nicotine on her fingers. God, what she’d give to light up right now.

After two rings, the night duty officer answered. She identified herself and said she needed to be patched through to whichever Executive Assistant Director was on duty. As he was no doubt instructed
to do—because EADs did not like being disturbed in the evening—the duty officer asked several times whether a lower level person couldn’t suffice. After his fifth attempt to sidetrack the call, he put her through.

Jenkins heard the tremor in her voice, but at least she knew this particular EAD to be forceful and decisive. She told him without preamble about the missiles, the stolen money, the lengthening chain of murders that appeared loosely associated with Prescott Biddle, the satellite photos, and her conclusion that a raid on Biddle’s estate was required to prevent an assassination attempt on POTUS the following day.

To his credit the EAD did not mention chain-of-command issues or ask her why she wasn’t calling her titular boss in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. “Agent Jenkins, do you have any idea of the shit storm this will create?”

“Yessir,” she said.

There was a long silence before the EAD spoke again. “I’m sure you’ve considered the impact on your career if this proves unsubstantiated?”

Her pause lasted only a second. She was rolling all the dice on her intuition, but in the past thirty minutes, she’d also learned that Maggie DeVito and Brent Lucas had gone to the same high school, graduated the same year, both at the top of their class. DeVito was in a liaison job, yet her investigation was so precisely targeted that she had to have some outside direction. She intuited that DeVito had enlisted Kosinsky to help cover her tracks. All of which implied that DeVito was in contact with Brent Lucas.

“Yessir,” she told the EAD.

“I had to ask.” There was another silence. Finally, the EAD said, “Permission granted to conduct a raid with all due haste.”

“Thank you, sir.” In FBI parlance, ‘all due haste’ meant the raid would be preceded by an exhaustive planning session, only tonight there was no time. “Um, there’s another piece of information. I believe two Project Seahawk agents may already be attempting an interdiction.”

“On their own?” the EAD squawked.

“Yessir. I’ll provide details later. Right now, I don’t think they’re important.”

“Jesus H. Christ!” the EAD groaned. “I’ll mobilize the New York office and have all available agents at your disposal. I’ll also have Nassau County S.W.A.T. standing by for instructions. Get moving, Jenkins.”

“Yessir.”

Jenkins hung up and grabbed her copies of the NSA photos. She pulled her bulletproof vest from the hanger behind her office door then ran down two flights to the Border Patrol area. She found the woman she’d bummed the cigarette from earlier and tossed a five-dollar bill on her desk. “I need a few more. It’s an emergency.”

The woman looked up from her computer. She glanced at the money, shrugged, and then pulled the pack out of her desk drawer and held it out. Jenkins snatched six cigarettes, stuffed one behind each ear and four in the breast pocket of her jacket. “Thanks,” she mumbled, then rushed toward the elevator.

Moments later with her blue light flashing and a lit cigarette clamped in her teeth, she roared through the deserted Newark streets. She phoned the Manhattan FBI office and the night Duty Officer
told her five agents would be waiting for her in a navy blue van outside Federal Plaza. She told the DO to requisition night vision goggles and an M16 with a laser aiming device and extra magazines for each agent and for her as well. She also asked for communications gear, flash-bangs, and smoke grenades.

Next, she phoned the Nassau County Police and identified herself to the night sergeant. He in turn patched her straight through to the Chief, whose angry tone told her he’d been awaiting the call. “First off, I want to go on record as telling you this may be the craziest goddam idea for a raid I’ve ever heard. You got that?”