Blowout (37 page)

“You having any problems with the coffeemaker, Ben?”

“He’s a guy, Mom. It’s in his genes.”

Margaret laughed. “Stewart never had that particular gene.” Her voice dropped off, but she didn’t start crying. She walked to the cabinet and reached for coffee mugs.

Ben’s cell phone rang. “Raven here.”

Both women watched him as he listened for several moments. When he punched off, he said, “I’m sorry, but something’s come up. Mrs. Califano, Callie, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

And he was gone.

Callie started to go after him, then stopped. “I wonder what’s going on?”

“He’ll tell you tomorrow.”

“Yeah, but in the meantime I’ll miss all the fun.”

Margaret said, “I think I’d rather have tea. Will you join me?”

BETHESDA NAVAL HOSPITAL

SURGICAL INTENSIVE CARE UNIT

*
T
HE LARGE ROOM*
was filled with shadows except for the semicircular workstation where six nurses and three clerks manned computers and monitoring equipment, filed reports, and wrote notes in the patients’ charts in the muted light of their individual desk lamps. Conversation within the group was low but frequent, just above the hum and repetitive beeping of the monitoring equipment.

Only the curtain to cubicle twelve was pulled back slightly.

At eleven-thirty, an X-ray technician slid her I.D. badge through the slot reader in the SICU door and maneuvered in, pushing the portable X-ray unit in front of her. She was wearing rubber-soled shoes and made no sound when she walked over to the dry erase board to find the cubicle of her patient. She nodded to one of the nurses, who looked at her from behind the console, nodded toward cubicle twelve, and looked back down at the chart she was checking. The X-ray tech located the patient, and disappeared inside uncurtained cubicle number five. There was a soft murmur of voices, the sound of a machine being positioned, then silence.

The X-ray tech emerged from the cubicle five minutes later, gave a small wave to the staff behind the large workstation, and wheeled out her equipment. Minutes later, another I.D. badge slid through the door slot. A tall older man walked in silently, wearing a white lab coat over green scrubs, carrying a plastic tray with blood-drawing paraphernalia. He was whistling under his breath. The nurse gave only an infinitesimal start, then shook her head at the obvious black dye job on his hair and mustache. Her fingers moved away from a small button at her side.

The lab tech smiled at her, and then, like the x-ray tech, checked the dry erase board for his patient. “You’d think,” he said, “that docs would try to schedule these nonemergent blood draws when the patient has a chance of being awake.”

“Nah,” one of the nurses said, “better to catch them half asleep, they don’t worry as much.”

The lab tech carried his tray to cubicle number four and quietly pushed the door open, disappeared inside.

After the lab tech left, it was silent again in the large room, and in fact hardly anything seemed to happen in the SICU for the next two hours. The monitors continued their repetitive low-hum vigil, and the patients’ heart rates and blood pressures read out as curiously stable for an intensive care unit. None of the nurses left the central workstation.

At a quarter to one in the morning, the door to cubicle twelve opened. Agents Savich and Sherlock came out stretching.

Savich said, “It’s time for a shift change. Are all the new patients ready?”

“I got a buzz from Agent Brady. He says all’s clear, and they should be arriving as a group just about now.”

In the next moment, the door to the SICU swung open and three men and two women dressed in hospital nightgowns came walking in, behind them a score of new nurses, clerks, and techs.

“Hurry,” said one of the patients. “Brady said they just spotted a guy coming this way from the pathology lab.”

A patient with a huge bandage wrapped turban-style around his head waved an IV line toward his assigned nurse, who rolled her eyes at him.

Within two minutes, new patients were lying in beds in five of the cubicles. The nurses and staff were settled in behind the workstation, and the machines and monitors resumed their low buzz, the sign all was normal once again.

Savich paused a moment in the doorway to check over the SICU once more. “Let’s go home, Sherlock.”

F
ORTY*
-*
FIVE MINUTES LATER
, Savich pulled the Porsche into his garage. Sherlock punched in the code to disarm the security system, saying over her shoulder, “I’m bushed. Nothing’s as tiring as waiting for someone who doesn’t show.”

Savich rubbed her shoulders as they walked into the kitchen. She turned on the overhead light.

“Bed never sounded so good,” Savich said as he pulled a bottle of water from the refrigerator, unscrewed the lid, and took a long drink. He wiped his hand across his mouth and said to his wife, who was leaning against the counter, “Günter is crazy, no doubt in my mind about that. Given the risks he’s taken to date, I was betting he’d take this one too. But he fooled me.”

“Maybe he’ll show in the middle of the night.”

Savich shook his head. “Too quiet. Too empty. He’s crazy, but he’s not stupid.”

He drank deeply again.

His fingers tightened slightly around the bottle when he heard a whisper of movement not ten feet away from the dark dining room.

Sherlock caught his eye. She picked up a dishcloth, wiped down the island surface, and turned to face him, looking relaxed, her arms crossed over her chest. “Even though Günter’s crazy, he must have realized his luck couldn’t hold out. He’s an old man, Dillon, old and used up. Quantico was his last hurrah. He’s got no more in him. So why is he here now?”

A man’s deep voice came out of the shadows, a bit of a slow Southern pace to his words. “Because I knew you flat-footed morons were setting another obvious trap at Bethesda, just like at Quantico. I’ve been waiting for you here, Savich, for quite some time. And now you’ll tell me where you’ve hidden Elaine LaFleurette.”

“I believe we have a guest, Sherlock. Günter, come into the light, no need to be shy.”

A tall barrel-chested man walked into the doorway, a SIG-Sauer held in his left hand. As soon as Savich saw he wasn’t hiding his face, he knew Günter intended to kill them. He was dressed in black, even his hands were gloved in black leather, a black cap pulled down to his ears. He looked fit and strong, but his face was deeply seamed, his mouth small and deeply grooved. He looked old, like he’d lived through too many long nights planning too much death. Did he look crazy? His eyes did, Savich thought, cold and empty.

“Günter Grass,” he said, savoring the sounds. “You found out that name very quickly. I haven’t used it for years.”

Savich asked as he walked slowly toward the man, “You came here even though Fleurette is in Bethesda?”

“Keep your distance, Savich, don’t try to rush me. I know you can fight.” Günter backed up so that he kept ten feet between them. “Both of you, drop the SIGs now and kick them over here.”

Savich and Sherlock both eased their guns from their belt holsters, laid them on the kitchen floor, and kicked them over to where Günter stood.

Günter pointed his SIG directly at Sherlock. “Both of you, come into the living room. Savich, keep her between us.” When they were in the living room, Günter motioned them to sit on the sofa. He walked to the living room archway, his SIG still pointed at Sherlock’s chest. “Enough now. Where’s Elaine LaFleurette?”

“At Bethesda,” Sherlock said. “In the surgical ICU. Don’t you remember? You shot her.”

Günter fired. The shot was deafening in the quiet living room. Sherlock sucked in her breath as the bullet grazed the outside of her arm and buried itself in the wall behind her. She jerked at the shock of it, but didn’t cry out. She clapped her hand to her arm. Savich was on his feet, in motion.

“Stop or I’ll kill her!”

Savich was breathing hard, adrenaline and rage pumping through him. He wanted to kill Günter, but he had his gun on Sherlock. He reined himself in and sat back down, heart thudding hard against his chest, afraid now. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, I’m all right, Dillon. I’m all right.”

Günter was smiling. “You don’t screw with me, you hear? I am as much a professional as you are. When I ask you a question, you don’t smart-mouth me, you got that?”

“Yes, I’ve got that.” Sherlock knew the numbness would fade soon and her arm would be on fire. But the wound wasn’t bad, he’d just wanted to scare her. His quiet threat of more violence scared her more than the bullet that had already torn through her flesh.

Savich said, “Put the gun down now, Günter. There are a dozen more FBI agents surrounding the house. It stops here, now. There’s no way out for you.”

Günter stared at him. “You set me up at Bethesda? And here in your own house?”

“Yes, that’s right. I underestimated you once. I wasn’t about to do it a second time. Put down the gun and we can end this without any more killing.”

Savich saw the instant Günter believed him, the instant he knew it was over for him. Something in his eyes went dead and flat. He was suddenly afraid that Günter would shoot both of them before he could be stopped. He had to keep him talking. “Tell us why you murdered Justice Califano, Günter. Why you murdered Danny O’Malley and Eliza Vickers. Why you still want to kill Elaine LaFleurette. This is your chance to tell us and the world. Tell us who was working with you, it doesn’t matter now, does it?”

Günter continued to hold his gun locked on Sherlock’s chest. “You want the truth? All right, I’ll tell you a bit of truth.”

He paused, his eyes calm now, resigned, and Sherlock would swear she saw relief there as well. He continued in a slow voice. “I am actually impressed with you, Agent Savich, as one professional to another. But the end must come for all of us, me, Califano, you—the difference is that while you have chosen it for me, you did not choose this ending for yourself. But I have. I knew some time ago my life was coming to an end. The only question was, how to end the drama, how to make the exit?

“Do you know why I chose the name Günter Grass? Because my father was born in Danzig, as Grass was, and Grass wrote
The Tin Drum,
the story about where, and what, I came from. His Oskar’s world crumbled, and he built a life for himself with what skills he had, as I did. The Nazis literally sacked my parents’ home, destroying everything. Near the end of the war, it was a Polish judge who condemned my father to death. To save herself and me, still in her womb, my mother degraded herself, and slept with that judge, and so I am here. After my father’s death in front of a firing squad, my mother moved in with that judge. And then she married him, married the man who’d killed my father. She betrayed my father and slept with that monster. I never forgot. When I was seventeen, I became the judge and the executioner and avenged my father. I garroted both of them, just as I did that whore Eliza Vickers and her confidant Daniel O’Malley.

“I called myself Günter in a long-ago life. Let me tell you about that Günter. For a very long time he killed to earn his bread. It was the only thing at which he was truly skilled, the only thing he had a taste for. All of his targets deserved to die—they were evil people, drug dealers, revolutionaries, fanatics, terrorists, or just simply criminals who’d corrupted those around them. And of course there were the dishonest judges who accepted payoffs, who kept mistresses. But he tired of cleaning up society’s mess and being hunted for it all the while. And so Günter ceased to exist, and I came here and became an American.

“I thought it an act of fate—the complete turning of the wheel, if you will—when I saw Justice Califano kissing a young woman in the middle of the day in a small park, the two of them standing in the shade of an oak tree. There was no one else around. Except for me. She was laughing, kissing that old man’s mouth, her hands pressed against him, between them. This man was not just any corrupt judge like my stepfather—he was a Justice of the Supreme Court!

“I watched them, and felt my rage build until I wanted to kill both of them right there in the park, but I knew that would be foolish and dangerous for me, and because I must be sure. And so I followed them to a condominium. I found out the young woman he was taking advantage of was one of his law clerks. I saw soon enough that he had obviously turned this young woman into a whore, just like my mother. I loved killing her, loved her futile struggles, knowing you were hearing it all. And I saw my mother’s face when the life went out of her. Killing her was almost as gratifying as choking the life out of that corrupt justice. He disgusted me. He was a filthy, common little man, as bad as any of the garbage I killed in Europe. I savored the instant when Califano realized he was dying, realized he was paying the ultimate price. It was my destiny to end his life, or die trying.

“You want a bit more truth, Agent Savich? It surprised me that I actually succeeded, both at the Supreme Court and at Quantico. You really did a very poor job of damage control, don’t you think?”

Savich said, “And so you killed three people because two of them were having an affair?”

“You know as well as I do that evil is always banal and common, if you look at it closely, and it must find other evil, and feed. And so I will go down in history as the man who killed a Justice of the Supreme Court and two of his law clerks—those young acolytes who supped and slept with him, and drank in his words, and knew what he was, and reveled in it.”

Savich said, “You garroted Danny O’Malley and tried to kill Elaine LaFleurette because you believed they sanctioned Califano’s affair with Eliza Vickers?”

“They all knew what he was doing, and they did nothing. Just as no one did anything when my mother slept with that judge. They enjoyed his power, lusted after such power for themselves. They deserved to die.”

He was breathing hard, the gun jerking slightly in his hand. He was near the edge. Savich said quickly, his voice low and steady, “Why haven’t you told the world why you killed these three people? Don’t you want everyone to know why you made an example of Justice Califano?”