Wildcard. Rachel Lee
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Tom had remembered John’s death and nodded obediently to his SAC. Tom had told Carlos he had to attend his brother’s funeral back in Ohio on the day that Carlos was supposed to meet a new contact. Carlos hadn’t objected. After all, this was only a first meeting with a new contact. It was in a public place. Carlos said it would be a fine day to take his daughter to the beach.
Tom couldn’t say, No, don’t take your daughter! He’d set up the meeting, and even suggested the time and place. Any objection would be suspicious. And in this business, suspicion alone was enough to get you killed.
Instead, he’d sat in the surveillance van and watched as things began to go horribly wrong. Carlos might not have had any formal training, but he had a lifetime worth of street smarts. He’d spotted the first tail—a young agent who had too little tan and too much curiosity to be the surfer he was portraying—within five minutes. So he’d given his bodyguard a subtle signal and taken his daughter for a walk down the beach, toward the rocky cove where lovers snuck away in the moonlight and behind which his bodyguard had parked a second car.
Tom had stiffened as he stared at the monitor. “He knows. Let him go. Pick him up another time,” he’d said. But his warnings fell on deaf ears. Instead, the contacts had decided to move in then, approaching Carlos, following him over the sea-weathered rocks and into the cove. Out of sight of the cameras.
Tom had heard the rest. The agent’s too-casual greeting. The wariness in Carlos’s voice. The girl asking if she could go down to the water. Her father saying the riptides were too strong. The overeager scene commander giving the order. The shouts. The gunshots. The girl’s scream.
Always, always, the girl’s scream.
In the next three minutes, Tom’s life had gone to hell. He’d tried to get out of the van, but the SAC had planted himself squarely in front of his seat and ordered him to stay put. “Fuck that,” Tom had said, grabbing the man by his shirt front and pulling him down as he rose himself and lowered his head just enough to drive his forehead squarely into the SAC’s face. He’d heard the satisfying crunch of cartilage and bone in the instant before he’d shoved the man aside and bolted from the van.
Tom had sprinted across the sand, arriving in time to see Carlos’s eyes glaze over, an agent pulling the girl away as she beat on his chest, screaming for her father to wake up. Then she’d seen Tom, and the yellow FBI logo on his navy-blue windbreaker.
There had been no question of trying to approach her, hug her, explain who he was and what he’d done. Her dark eyes stripped bare two years of trips to the zoo, walks in the park, shared entries in her diary, and exposed them for the lies they’d been. He’d simply turned and climbed back over the rocks, walking numbly down the beach under a flat, haze-dimmed sun….
A knock at the door shook him out of his reverie. The anger that never quite died surged again, burning away the guilt and grief. At least for now.
“C’mon in,” he heard himself say.
“Good movie?” Miriam asked, glancing at the screen.
“It probably would be if I were watching it,” Tom said, holding up the file in his hands. “Was that Terry?”
She nodded. “Grant is stable, at least. And there’s brain activity, although he’s still not conscious.”
“Sometimes the body just needs time.”
“That’s what the doctors told Karen,” she said. “They can’t say how long, of course.”
Tom nodded. “Any word on what’s happening with the case down there?”
She smiled. “Now why would you think I’d know anything about that?”
“Because I know you,” he said. “Detective Sweeney still has contacts in Tampa. So you told Terry to keep an ear to the ground down there.”
“Are you suggesting I don’t trust official channels?” she asked. “That I think Kevin might let us spin our wheels on the sidelines and not tell us what’s going on? Perish the thought.”
“So what did Terry say?” Tom asked, knowing she suspected exactly that.
Miriam put a hand above her eyebrows. “They have this much of the top of a head in the news footage. Male. Blond. Short hair but not remarkable. Same head, from the back, on the hotel street video as he’s leaving the scene. His body is obscured by a woman leaving behind him, an underling on Grant’s campaign staff. She was across the lobby when Grant was shot and doesn’t remember who was in front of her as she left the hotel.”
“In short, useless,” he said.
“That’s my guess, and Terry agrees. Of course, the SAC in Tampa is trying to run this guy down through everyone who was there. But I’d be stunned if they found enough to ID the shooter.” She sighed. “So how about you? Anything in those files?”
“Yeah,” he said. “They need to reprogram their damn computer. We might as well be sifting the Sahara looking for a particular grain of sand.”
“That bad?” she asked.
He held up the Idaho Freedom Militia file. “Take these guys, for example. You know what the connection was, why the computer spat this out?”
She shook her head, and he continued.
“Wes Dixon, the guy who runs this outfit? Turns out that after West Point he married a girl he met at a social there. His wife’s maiden name is Katherine Hodge Morgan.”
“So?” Miriam asked, arching an eyebrow.
“Exactly,” Tom agreed. “So Katherine Dixon-née-Morgan’s brother is Edward Thomas Morgan. He’s some banker in New York or London or wherever he is this week. Whoop-de-doo, right?”
“Except?”
“Except that he was a college fraternity brother of Senator Harrison Rice.”
Miriam laughed. “It’s like that game, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Grant Lawrence is running against Harrison Rice, whose old college buddy is a banker named Edward Morgan, who has a sister named Katherine, who married a young army lieutenant named Dixon, who later formed this Idaho-militia thing…so…”
“So,” Tom continued, “the new-and-improved computer spits out the Idaho Freedom Militia as possible suspects in the Grant Lawrence shooting. And that’s the kind of absurd horseshit we’re wading through.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Okay, well, do the usual checks in the morning. Then we can sign off on the file and move on.”
“To more absurd horseshit.”
“Probably,” Miriam agreed. “But they say the system is better than before. Used to be we couldn’t get from A to B in those files without a compass and a road map and a Saint Bernard. I suppose we should take their word for it.”
“If this is any indication,” Tom said, tossing the file on the floor beside the bed, “we can get from A to pi just fine. But A to B is still impossible.”
“Hey,” she said, “it’s still a government operation.”
The bitter irony was not lost on him as she said good-night. He put the rest of the files aside and turned up the sound on the movie, just as Bruce Willis stepped forward to assume responsibility and forfeit his life to save his men. Hollywood heroism. If only the real world were as tidy.
Then, suddenly, he jumped out of bed and went to fling the door open. “Miriam?”
“Yeah?” It sounded as if she were in her bedroom.
“Do you know somebody who can get us a copy of every bit of video, TV and security tape there is on that night?”
She popped her head out the door of her room. “Tom, you know we can’t go there.”
“I know.”
“As