The Wrong Man (22 page)

If things continued as they were, it would be the last home-cooked meal he’d ever eat.

The truck pulled up in the dirt at a red flag and stopped.
“Number One at Rovner Street. Stand by for the five-minute.”

Randall Manning watched through binoculars and listened through his earpiece.

“Green light at Rovner, that’s the five-minute,”
the voice crackled through the earpiece.

The truck started moving again. Manning followed along with his binoculars. Good so far. Wait for the green light.

“Number Two at Rovner Street.”

Good. Just about right. Manning’s pulse was steady. This wasn’t the first time they’d run through it. It was, in fact, the twentieth.

“Number One at Dodd Street, stand by for the two-minute.”

Manning moved his binoculars to the second red flag, four hundred yards to the south, coming toward him. It was an approximation in terms of timing. It wasn’t intended to be precise. It didn’t need to be precise. They weren’t in the city’s downtown, and they were nowhere near Rovner Street or Dodd Street. They were out in the country—the “boonies,” to most people. They were in unincorporated Fordham County, surrounded on all sides by farmland purchased by Summerset Farms following its acquisition by Global Harvest International.

“Green light at Dodd. That’s the two-minute.”

Manning had driven the real route dozens of times. Dodd Street was
actually far less than two minutes from the target, but Manning had built in an extra time cushion to account for unpredictable traffic.

The truck continued south, coming toward Manning. He was inside a dome he’d constructed more than a year ago for this purpose. A few hours ago, this dome had housed all sorts of farm equipment—tractors and plows and backhoes—all of which had been emptied out for this exercise.

He watched out the window from his position on the second-level balcony as the truck drove through the open double doors into the vast dome. He turned to face inside the dome and watched as the truck picked up speed and drove toward the makeshift building, consisting of only a front façade and door.

“Red light at Dayton, doesn’t fucking mat-ter!”

The truck stayed at a speed of twenty miles an hour and pulled up just short of the front door of the building.

The rear door of the truck burst open, and Patrick Cahill jumped out. The driver, Ernie Dwyer, also jumped out. Each of them was wearing state-of-the-art body armor and a helmet with a face shield. They raised their black AKM assault rifles and backed away from the faux building.

“Pop the targets,” said Manning.

Standard tactical training, about which Manning knew absolutely nothing eighteen months ago. But he’d learned a thing or two since then.

Targets popped up like characters in a children’s picture book, the shapes of humans, in various spots around the faux building. From the distance he’d created, Cahill and Dwyer unloaded their assault rifles on the targets, knocking them flat. To the extent they missed the targets—though Manning doubted that the two of them had missed even once—their bullets hit a bulletproof tarp that had been placed floor-to-ceiling behind the building façade.

Randall Manning looked at his stopwatch.

“Good,” he announced. “Well done. Now clean up. Then we eat, and then target practice.”

The ammo would be the first phase of the cleanup. Every shell casing would be collected. The bulletproof tarp would be lowered and scrapped. The roof would be opened to air out the place of the smell of gunfire. Then the tractors and other farming equipment would be brought back in.

Within an hour, tops, this dome would look like nothing more than a warehouse for farming equipment again.

Manning looked over at Bruce McCabe, who was standing next to him, looking a bit flushed.

“What’s bothering you, Bruce?” he asked.

I stopped by my office to pick up the dossier that Joel had built up on the legendary Gin Rummy, because I knew he was pissed that I’d taken him off that assignment—actually, he was pissed that he hadn’t succeeded in finding the guy—and I knew that he’d be in my office bright and early on Friday, and if he still saw the file in the same place on my desk, he’d think I wasn’t paying attention to it. I wasn’t, not at the moment, but Joel didn’t need to know that. He had pretty thick skin, but he had a sensitive streak when it came to his professional abilities.

Then I picked up Tori at her condo. A cool wind whipped inside my car, and she closed the door quickly to keep it out. The temperatures were falling. It wasn’t going to be a white Thanksgiving, but it was going to be a cold one.

She had her trademark long white coat and nice boots, always nice threads, but that was the only thing about her that looked normal. Her eyes were hooded and her face drawn. She looked like she hadn’t slept well at all.

“I didn’t,” she said, when I commented. “And thanks for noticing.”

“Big math test coming up?” I asked, even though I was aware that she had finished her last final exam a couple days ago. She was off until mid-January now.

She looked at me. “Is that you making fun of me? You got something against math?”

“No, hey—I love math. Math is the greatest thing since… science.”

“Because that sounded like condescension. And that’s about the only thing I can’t take from someone.”

I had obviously struck a nerve with her that I hadn’t seen coming. “Tori, I’m sorry. That’s not how I meant it.”

It was the first time I’d seen her get her back up about something. She was basically a cool customer, aloof, in control. Something had put her on edge.

Our relationship was odd. I really didn’t know that much about her, and she didn’t know much about me. We kept the topics safe. We kept each other at arm’s length. All I knew was that the more time I spent with her, the more time I wanted to spend with her. Maybe it was her aloofness itself. I’d considered that possibility. I’d never been in a relationship where I was the pursuer. When I was in school, I was a jock, and girls followed athletic success like day followed night. Not necessarily the kind of girls you’d settle down with, but who the hell wanted to settle down?

Then there was Shauna, but she’d started as a pal, so that just sort of happened for a brief spell before we decided that our friendship worked better than romance. And then there was Talia. Even Talia took the first step with me.

I’d never felt like I was more interested than the lady. Until now.

Tori said, “I was working on your case, if you want to know what I was doing. And I found something.”

“Okay, great. What?”

“Kathy Rubinkowski has a Facebook page.”

“Oh—okay. Facebook. Okay. Did you find anything interesting?”

“No, because we’re not ‘friends.’”

“Well, obviously you and Kathy weren’t friends.” I looked over at her as I drove.

“Do you know anything about Facebook?” she asked.

“Sure. I know some shithead stole the idea from two other shitheads, or something like that. And there was a movie about it where everybody spoke in incredibly intelligent, fluid sentences.”

“You are hopeless. She has to invite me to her page, and she obviously can’t now. So I can’t get on her page, is my point. But if someone could find a way in, I’ll bet you could find her e-mail address on her ‘information’ page.”

“Ah, e-mail. I know e-mail. Okay, I get it. If we can get her e-mail address, we can hack her e-mail and see if anything was on her mind.”

“That’s what I was thinking. You think Joel is able to do something like that?”

Interesting. He probably could. “There might be some ethical challenges there, yes?”

“Technically,” she conceded.

“Technically? Tori, I’m seeing another side of you.”

“You’re seeing a side that doesn’t want some poor, sick kid to take the fall for something he didn’t do. That’s what you’re seeing. This is hardball, not softball—isn’t that what you always say?”

It was. I hated it when people used my words against me.

“Shit, where are those Mapquest directions?” I patted the seat around me and looked down at the floor. “Look in the back,” I said.

She did. “I don’t see it. There’s some big file.”

“That’s the Gin Rummy dossier Joel put together.”

“You’re still spending time on that?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “You were right. It’s a waste of time. Even if I find Gin Rummy, he won’t admit to anything. But Joel went to all this trouble, and I’m not even paying him for this shit. So I’ll try to read it. I mean, he has biographies and background material. It’s like an encyclopedia. I’ll get to it at some point.”

“Whatever,” she said. “I’ll just pull the directions up on my iPhone.”

“You can do that?”

“You’re really a dinosaur, aren’t you?”

“I prefer ‘old school,’ Tori. You can pull up directions on that thing?”

“Sure. I’ll just type in the name, get an address, and then set the GPS.”

“Great,” I said. “So type in the name ‘Summerset Farms.’”

“Tell me, Bruce,” said Randall Manning.

“Nothing’s wrong.” McCabe shrugged. “Just general nerves, I guess.”

“Identify it, Bruce. Tell me specifically.”

Below them, inside the dome, the cleanup was already under way. Shell casings were being collected, dust was being swept, the bulletproof tarp was being pulled down.

McCabe looked at Manning. “It’s the lawyer, Kolarich. The whole thing.”

Manning nodded. “He won’t figure this out in time, Bruce.”

“But he’ll figure it out eventually. He’ll connect us to this. And if we take him out now, isn’t that a red flag? He clearly has his sights trained on us, and suddenly he winds up dead? We thought we had complete anonymity, Randy. There was no way any of this was going to connect to us.”

That was never a certainty in Manning’s mind, or anywhere close to it. He had planned this well and chosen the operatives well, but he had no illusions. He knew that the odds were quite decent that he, personally, would be caught. He’d always told his men that they had to be willing to die for this mission. He preached it to them. McCabe was part of the Circle, of course, but he wasn’t one of the operatives. He did the necessary legal work to get everything set up to put the mission in place. But that was all.

And now things were coming to a head. It wasn’t just an idea now. It was happening.

“I think we’ll get away with it,” said Manning. “And then we’ll lie low and wait for another opportunity. But yes, Bruce, there are risks. Surely this isn’t the first time you’re realizing this?”

McCabe wasn’t dumb. Of course, he had to have been aware of the risks. But he’d placed trust in Manning, perhaps more than Manning had realized. And he hadn’t had to get his hands dirty. He wouldn’t be putting his life on the line on December 7. Maybe it was only now dawning on him what, exactly, they were going to do.

Perhaps it had been a mistake to bring Bruce here today, to see up close a dry run of the operation.

Or maybe it had been a good thing, in the end. If McCabe was going to go south on them, better that Manning knew that now, not afterward.

“I think we should abort,” said McCabe.

Manning put a hand on McCabe’s shoulder. “Let’s go eat, Bruce. Everyone’s tired and stressed and hungry. Let’s have some turkey and think this over. Go on ahead. I’ll be there in a minute.”

Manning watched his lawyer walk out the door. Then he dialed his cell phone.

“Patrick,” he said, “wait five minutes and then come up to see me.”

Traffic was nonexistent on Thanksgiving afternoon. We got off the interstate and followed the local roads. The housing was sparse and modest, and there wasn’t much for commerce besides gas stations, bait shops, and an occasional diner. Nothing was open today.

We found the street we were looking for, aided by a small sign that said S
UMMERSET
F
ARMS
with an arrow pointing to the right. I turned right and drove down a paved road.

We pulled up to a long metal gate blocking the road. On the gate was a sign reading S
UMMERSET
F
ARMS IS CLOSED
.

We got out of the SUV, if for no other reason than to stretch our legs after more than two hours in the car, and walked up to the gate. Down the road, there was a long ranch-style house and a gigantic barn, all painted red. And behind that housing was farmland as far as the eye could see. Shauna had mentioned that when Global Harvest purchased the farm, it bought up neighboring farmland.

“You didn’t expect it to be open, did you?” Tori asked me. She looked like a fish out of water, a well-dressed, cosmopolitan woman in farm country. I suppose I didn’t look much like the town, either.

And no, I didn’t expect Summerset Farms to be open on Thanksgiving.

“Why the gate?” I asked.

“Who knows? Maybe vandals or robbers.”

“Yeah, maybe.” The gate was fastened to a post. It didn’t appear to be
hydraulic. I pushed on it, and it moved. So I kept pushing, and it kept moving, until I had cleared a path for my vehicle.

“I’m not the lawyer,” said Tori, “but I do believe this would be trespassing.”

“Hardball, not softball,” I reminded her. “You don’t have to be a part of it. You want to go for a drive and come back in an hour?”

She thought that was amusing. “I’ll stick. It wouldn’t be the worst thing I’ve ever done.”

With the gate out of the way, we returned to the SUV and drove up to the small parking lot. We got out and walked up to the ranch house. The front door was locked, as expected. There was a window, and I peered into the place. Not much to see for my purposes. It was a reception area with what appeared to be standard office space behind it. I guess they didn’t sell their products to walk-up customers, or if they did, it didn’t happen here.

We walked over to the barn. The main door, which was taller than me, had a gigantic padlock securing it. There were no other windows.

“Okay, that’s what I figured,” I said.

Tori peered up at me, squinting into the sunlight. “We came all this way just for this? You discover that the place is closed for Thanksgiving, try the door, peer into a window, and that’s—”