The Third Coincidence Page 6

  This case alone would define his career. Twenty years of successful overt and covert operations wouldn’t count. This time the battleground was America. Success would allow him to leave the government with the best wishes of his president and a grateful nation. Failure would be, well, failure.

  He went inside, back down to the kitchen and poured two more fingers, not quite covering the cubes in his glass. He was back in the death business. Seeing it. Trying to prevent it. Perhaps dispensing it. At the kitchen table his mind replayed that night in the sand in Iraq, his last night with his younger brother.

  “Oh, Jack. It hurts. Jack.”

  “Hang in there, bro. The chopper’s had it. We’ll have to get out on foot.”

  “I can’t, Jack. Oh, God it hurts. You go. Get out of here.”

  “Stuff that talk, soldier. We’ll make it. Together. Like we always have.”

  “No, Jack. No. You go. I love you, bro. Live for us both.”

  Jack had sat in the sand with Nick’s torn head on his lap. Nick’s eyes on Jack’s face, scared eyes trying to be brave. But neither of them had said another word.

  Jack had gotten out. And Jack had taken revenge. But Nick was still gone.

  Why had he taken Nick on his mission? To impress him? To train him? To show off for him? Always the same questions. Always no answers. The memory always ending with the same words, “No, Jack. No. You go. I love you, bro. Live for us both.”

  He walked into the living room and put the glass on the piano without bothering with a coaster. Then sat down to play, determined to shake off his funk. He started to play Fats Waller’s “Rumpsteak Serenade,” a song that made him think of his sexy neighbor, Janet Parker. Before he reached the end, the phone rang. He hit the talk button. “Jack McCall.”

  “Why haven’t you fucked Rachel Johnstone?” the voice said. “You must know she wants you to.”

  Jack clenched his teeth. “Who the hell is this?”

  The caller sucked in a breath. “Your new friend. And you have no idea just how friendly we’re going to be.”

  CHAPTER 14

  The president’s opponents scream: “Schroeder’s using McCall’s squad as a forerunner to forming a Presidential Secret Police.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 8

  He left the van in an empty lot in a high-crime area of Oakland, California, tossed the keys next to the plastic explosive, and set the timer for ten minutes.

  Four blocks away with his hand on the door of a taxi, the blast brought him up short. Fighting the desire to laugh, he parroted the cab driver’s expressions of concern.

  During his flight back to Baltimore, he went over what he had compiled about the next aristocrat who would die for his country: Charles (Chip) Taylor, the Federal Reserve Bank governor from the Cleveland District.

  Taylor lived in Pepper Pike, an affluent Cleveland residential neighborhood about twenty-five miles from the airport. The kind of neighborhood that had strategically placed garden club bag stations so the residents who walked their dogs on cold mornings could bag their steamers.

  He had periodically surveilled Chip Taylor for more than a year, and, for the past few weeks, bugged his home telephone. Taylor lived with his wife, Susan, a woman obsessed with trying to stay young, and his invalid mother who, suffering with advanced Alzheimer’s, spent afternoons twice a week in therapy. Killing all three, after the eliminations of Justice Breen and his bride would shock the nation’s financial markets and legal system.

  After deplaning in Baltimore, he took a taxi downtown where he purchased a pair of running shoes, an expensive jogging suit, a new red baseball cap, and a backpack.

  A different cab brought him back to the Baltimore-Washington International Airport where, as Robert Campbell, he purchased a ticket for the next flight to Cleveland.

  Outside Hopkins International Airport he hailed a cab into downtown Cleveland. After walking three blocks, he entered a public parking garage where he recovered a detonator he had hidden there on an earlier trip, after having picked the lock on Taylor’s kitchen door and rigged a bomb in their basement.

  From there he went to the corner of Green and Mayfield Roads and entered a bicycle shop where he paid cash for an assembled red Jamis Ventura road bike and two cans of black aerosol bicycle paint. He pedaled five miles on Green Road and then Lander Road before turning into the heart of the Pepper Pike neighborhood. Street after street of pristine homes lived in by upper-class Americans who had stood aside while their elected leaders sold out their generation’s stewardship of the country. Two turns later, he stopped across from a dark brick home, reached down for the water bottle suspended on the bike’s frame and, while taking a drink, casually glancing at the light edging around the drape in Taylor’s second-floor rear-bedroom window.

  Constance Harding spent her days watching soap operas and her nights watching old movies, particularly musicals. Last summer she had tried to become friends with the older woman in the house behind her, the widow Lucille Taylor, who lived with her son and his wife, but it hadn’t worked. Lucille, addled to the point where she had trouble recalling her own daughter-in-law’s name, never remembered Constance from one visit to the next.

  Constance’s son, who lived in Pittsburgh, drove over with his family on the first Sunday of every other month to take her out to dinner. Other than those visits she had been alone since her husband died eighteen years ago. Except for the news hours between ten and eleven at night, the television was her best friend. She could not stand the steady recitation of gloom and doom that filled the news, never speaking to the good in people, the God quality that Constance believed could be found in every person. For a while she had watched I Love Lucy reruns during the late news hour, but eventually she started to simply turn off her television in silent protest.

  Tonight, as she did every night, weather permitting, she sat in a chair on the screened-in porch at the front of her house, feeling the pulse of the neighborhood she had lived in for forty years, the first twenty-two with her dear departed husband. At that hour, the neighborhood was quiet. She rarely saw anyone except for an old man who walked his dog between ten and ten thirty—perhaps his own silent protest against the news. She had often thought about walking out and introducing herself, but she never did.

  Right then, Constance saw a biker pull to the curb. She thought she knew everyone in the neighborhood, at least by sight, but not this man. Pepper Pike had become so transient. In her forty years she had lost all her neighbors several times until now no one remained who had known her Roland. The biker took a drink of something and moved on.

  A hard push on the right pedal got him going again. Two quick left turns and he would soon pass the home of Charles Chip Taylor. The biker sat back on the seat, reached into the pocket of his zippered lightweight jacket and pressed the remote on the three-minute timer for the blast that would launch a thousand Chips.

  Okay, that was corny, he thought, but even a revolutionary patriot should have a sense of humor.

  He stopped where Lander Road at Country Lane crossed over a creek. After wiping the remote clean he tossed it into the water under the bridge. A block later his watch pulsed, and he turned to see pieces of the Taylor house, maybe chips of Charles himself, twist and turn against the night sky. In less than a minute, he heard the sirens.

  The authorities always give fast service in the ritzy neighborhoods.

  Two minutes later he coasted his bike into a vacant lot near I-271. After putting the bike down on its side in the weeds, he cut the seat and splatter sprayed the bike with the black aerosol paint. Then he walked to a nearby hotel where he put the cans in their Dumpster. At the street entrance, he hailed a cab pulling out of the hotel after dropping a fare. Feigning a cough he held a handkerchief against his mouth and used it to shield his hand when he touched the taxi.

  He changed into jeans and a Cleveland Indians’ baseball cap in a downtown gas station bathroom. In the next block he walked behind a bar, stuffed his backpack
and the clothes he’d worn on the bike into the Dumpster and dropped in several lit matches.

  Eight blocks later he hailed a second cab to take him back to the Cleveland Airport where, as Robert Campbell, he cleared security and boarded his flight.

  On his way home from the Baltimore airport he stopped at his father’s grave to consecrate the identities he had used in Oregon and Ohio.

  We’re inside a dozen, now. You were so right, Father. They didn’t hear your warnings. Your noble attempt cost you your life. My way is costing them their lives. Tomorrow will be stimulating.

  CHAPTER 15

  Some say it’s foreign terrorists. Others say American extremists. To vote your opinion, visit the Internet site shown on the bottom of your screen.

  —All News Network, June 8

  Jack left home early enough to catch a glimpse through the trees of the sunrise glistening off the Potomac River, the sheet of moving water broken here and there by small whitecaps.

  Last night he had endured another attack of insomnia. When he was on assignment, sleeping was like being trapped in a fighter jet doing an endless roll. Last night he had watched one of his favorite movies from his collection of film noir: Humphrey Bogart’s great characterization of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Throughout the movie his mind had wrestled with the unanswerable: could the man who had called about Rachel be the man they were hunting? Nothing factual connected them. His instinct did. If the caller was the killer, it meant that assassinations weren’t enough. The killer wanted to play. This was a new piece of the profile, and Jack needed to tell his squad and warn Rachel.

  The sun was filtering through the surrounding trees when Jack pulled into the CIA lot. When he arrived this early, he rarely saw anyone other than Lana and Zaro Kindar. The Kindars provided coffee service in the CIA’s New Headquarters Building that comprised 1.1 million of the CIA’s total 2.5 million square feet secreted within the trees in the Langley neighborhood of McLean, Virginia.

  In the late 1980s, after Saddam Hussein’s forces killed their three sons, Lana and Zaro took jobs working as housekeepers to high officials in Iraq’s Republican Guard. In that job the Kindars secretly passed on information and documents they could copy to an American agent, Jack McCall. The afternoon before McCall and his squad were to be extracted from Iraq, the Kindars were arrested and taken to a small military camp near Tikrit, north of Baghdad. Jack had taken a few men, including Colin Stewart and with the support of the Kurdish Underground, fought their way in to free the Kindars. After their return, General Crook helped Jack walk Lana and Zaro through immigration. And Harriet Miller, the CIA director, had them employed as independent contractors to provide the coffee service in the nonhighly classified sectors.

  The CIA’s facilities staff met Jack at the door to his squad room. He explained the layout he wanted, the conference table at the far end, with a six-foot marking board on the wall next to the table’s long side, covering the rest of that wall with pin board. He would ask Rachel to set up half the pin board as a bulletin section with pictures and particulars on the sitting justices and Fed governors. With the other half developed as a graveyard section holding the pictures and information on each of the victims, and the details of the deaths.

  Desks were to be put at the end near the door, and in the space between a couch, some occasional chairs, and the food and beverage area that becomes essential once an investigation takes on a 24/7 life of its own.

  About the time the facilities people left, the Kindars arrived to set them up with fresh coffee, snacks, and fill the refrigerator with sodas and bottled water. They even put a bowl of red apples and green seedless grapes on the conference table.

  By early afternoon the furnishings were in place, and the installers had assured Jack that the computers and other high-tech goodies were ready for use.

  At four the members of Jack’s squad started coming in. Millet arrived, still grumbling about not being able to work at home. Jack had talked him into working at the CIA, in part, by going along with Millet’s request to name their squad room the Bullpen. Jack immediately took to the name, feeling the connotation of the word captured the independence and solidarity he wanted his team to feel.

  Millet headed right for his computer area, and spun on his heels when he saw an autographed picture of Tommy Lasorda, longtime manager of his favorite team, the L.A. Dodgers, hanging above his monitor. A card, wedged into the edge of the frame read: “From a fellow Dodgers fan, Nora Burke.” The already smitten Millet ran his hands through his undisciplined hair.

  After everyone got something to drink, they settled in around the conference table.

  “Tell us about the meetings you and Frank had with security at the Fed and the Court,” Jack said to Nora.

  “Security at the Fed had nothing out of the ordinary. Chief Wiggins at the Court gave us this.” She held up a CD and scooted it down the table toward Millet. “Crank calls and threatening letters during the past five years.”

  “Set that up so we can cross-reference names,” Jack told Millet, “also misspelled words, colloquialisms, whatever with anything we may get later.”

  “Wilco, Jackman, I’ll also rig these computers so we’ll know if anyone tries to hack in. And, while I’ve got the floor, I went through the financial records and newspaper morgues for all the folks working at the Court or the Federal Reserve here in D.C. I included the other property owners on Santee’s Winding Trail Road. In one word, nothing, zip, well, I guess that was two words.”

  “Anything more from the Poconos on Santee?” Colin asked.

  “The case officer’s just waiting for his chief’s okay to officially book Santee as an accident,” Nora said. “To quote him, ‘It’d already be rung up thata way if Santee weren’t no big shot.’ “

  Jack told them about his mysterious caller and what he had said about Rachel, wondering as he did so, if he should have said something first to Rachel. If she was upset by what Jack had said, she did not show it, although he had seen the glint of something in her eyes.

  “If my caller’s the killer,” he continued, “it likely eliminates Islamic extremists. Fanatical Islamists would not make such references to a woman.”

  “Did we ever really suspect al-Qaeda or Hezbollah?” Millet asked.

  “Not really, but we can’t fully discount it. . . . Colin, anything on your remaining phone calls? Or yours, Rachel?” When they both shook their heads, he asked, “Frank, Nora, you have anything to add to what you’ve already reported?”

  “Nope,” Frank replied.

  “Rachel,” Jack said, “what’s the latest on alerting the possible targets to alter their habits?”

  “We’re beating our heads against the wall on that one. Oh, they’re frightened. No doubt of that, but they’re also vain and used to feeling private and secure.”

  Jack’s insides told him that would soon change.

  CHAPTER 16

  Almost a week has passed without another government official being assassinated: is it luck or is the beefed up security working?

  —Portland Oregonian, June 8

  Mabel, the senior maid, stuck her head inside the housekeeping office at the Resort at Depoe Bay. “It’s after two, girl, and them honeymooners still ain’t gone.”

  Joyce Griffith, the director of housekeeping, knew guests often left without stopping at the front desk, leaving the hotel to charge the credit card imprinted at check-in. After calling the cottage and receiving no answer, she followed Mabel to the cottage, moving slowly because Mabel’s bunions had been giving her a fit this week.

  “It smells ugly.” Mabel said, after she opened the door.

  “Ugly’s not a smell, Mabel,” Joyce said, covering her nose with one hand. “Makes me think of week-old ribs and molasses sauce.”

  When they pushed through the door and saw what was inside, Mabel was the first to scream. A moment later Joyce made it a duet. They held each other and, too frightened to stand still, began to bounce.


  In the parking lot, Jack suggested they all go for some dinner. Nora recommended Bisby’s, a local eatery where patrons barbequed their own steaks over an indoor mesquite fire pit and helped themselves to beans, salad, fries, and corn on the cob.

  By eight all the others had left except for Rachel and Nora, who sat toying with the remains of their dinners.

  “What’s the story on the old couple who bring the coffee?” Nora asked. “They treat Jack like he’s their son.”

  Rachel told Nora what she had scrounged up through a friend in classified records. “Their names are Lana and Zaro Kindar. You probably noticed Lana has no pinkie finger on her right hand. The Iraqi Republican Guard had been torturing her while interrogating her husband. The Kindars had been spying for our side. Jack had been their control. He and Ringo and some of the Kurdish freedom fighters fought their way in and saved their bacon. Jack got them brought here and helped get them the coffee work.”

  “Wow. That’s movie material.”

  “You got that right, but it’s one of the stories that’ll never see light.” Rachel refilled Nora’s beer mug. “Now, tell me, what do you think of our team?”

  “I can’t say I’m up to speed on what constitutes a federal task force,” Nora told her, “but if Jack had followed the book, a couple of local cops like Frank and me wouldn’t be on it.”

  “Jack says Millet’s our secret weapon.”

  Nora laughed and pushed back a runaway strand of hair. “That man reminds me of the mad scientist in the movie Back to the Future.”

  Rachel grinned. “It’s obvious Madman Millet is attracted to you.” She remembered challenging Jack about the unorthodox members of his squad, and in particular Millet. Maybe she had been a little too rigid.