Capital Crimes (23 page)

“I have to go to the White House, then to Atlanta on some mission or other for the president. I’m awfully sorry.”

“It can’t be helped,” she said. “I’ll be here when you get back.”

“You have your key to the apartment?”

“Yes, you go ahead. I can walk home.”

He stood up, kissed her, and ran for a taxi. On the way to the White House, he called the duty officer in the Hoover Building. “This is Deputy Director Kinney,” he said. “I have to fly to Atlanta immediately. Call Andrews and order a plane, fuel for Charlie Brown Airport, then call Agent Kerry Smith and have him meet me at Andrews.” He hung up and wondered what the hell was going on.

BOB KINNEY WAS USHERED into the family quarters of the White House only moments after Kate had arrived. Will offered him a seat, then handed him the envelope.

“Agent Kinney, I’d like you to fly to Atlanta immediately and hand-deliver this letter to Edward Rawls, who is an inmate at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.”

“Yes, sir,” Kinney replied.

“Mr. Rawls says that he knows where to find Theodore Fay. The letter says that if his information is good he will receive a presidential pardon and the reward we are offering for Fay’s capture. I want you to interrogate him thoroughly, then act on whatever information he gives you.”

“I know who Rawls is, Mr. President, but may I ask, how can he possibly know where Fay is?”

Kate spoke up. “They both worked for the CIA, and they probably worked together at one time. We don’t know the details, but Rawls says he knows where to find the man. We have nothing to lose by playing his game. If his information is incorrect, he stays where he is.”

“I understand,” Kinney said. “I’ve already ordered an aircraft for the trip.”

“Phone me after you’ve talked with Rawls,” Will said. “I’ll leave word with the switchboard to put you through.” He stood up and shook Kinney’s hand. “Good night, and good luck.”

“Thank you, sir,” Kinney said. “Oh, excuse me. Could you arrange for a car to take me to Andrews Air Force Base? I came here in a cab. My car is at home.”

“Of course,” Will said, picking up a phone.

KERRY SMITH was waiting when the White House car pulled up to the hangar. A Gulfstream III was sitting on the ramp, its engines running.

“What’s up?” Smith yelled over the noise.

“I’ll tell you when we’re aboard,” Kinney shouted back, beckoning for him to follow.

When they were aboard the airplane and the door was sealed, Kinney sank into a large armchair.

“You’re not going to believe this,” he said, “but we’re flying to Atlanta to talk to a convicted traitor who says he knows where Fay is.”

“Who’s the traitor?”

“Ed Rawls.”

Smith shook his head.

“You’re too young to remember. He’s been inside a long time.” Kinney pulled out the envelope. “This is a letter from the president, offering him a pardon if his information is good.”

“Now
that
I don’t believe,” Smith said.

49

ED RAWLS WAS AWAKENED from a sound sleep by a guard at 10:30 p.m.

“Get up, Ed, and get dressed. The warden wants to see you.”

Rawls splashed some water on his face and got into his clothes. He didn’t ask what it was about; he knew. He followed the guard downstairs from his tier and through a series of corridors until he came to the warden’s suite of offices. The warden was standing outside his office door waiting.

“Some people want to see you, Ed,” the warden said. “In my office.”

Rawls was ushered into the office, and the door closed behind him. Two men who were sitting at the warden’s conference table stood up.

“Mr. Rawls,” the bigger one said. “My name is Robert Kinney and this is Kerry Smith. We’re from the FBI.” Both men flashed their ID. “Have a seat.”

Rawls pulled up a chair to the table and sat down. “Good evening, gentlemen, what can I do for you?”

Kinney took an envelope from his pocket and slid it across the table. “This is a letter for you from the president of the United States.”

“For me?” Rawls asked with mock surprise.

“Read it, please.”

Rawls took his time. He slid a finger under the flap of the envelope and carefully pried it open, as if he wished to preserve the envelope. He fished out the letter, unfolded it, and put on his reading glasses, which were on a string around his neck. “Well, let’s see what the president has to say to me.”

He read the letter twice, carefully. “Well, gentlemen, you can tell the president that this isn’t going to do it.”

Kinney blinked. “Do you mind if I read the letter?”

Rawls handed it over.

Kinney read the letter and looked up at Rawls. “This is a get-out-of-jail-free card,” he said. “What’s the matter with that?”

“It isn’t a pardon,” Rawls said.

“As I read it, and I’m an attorney, it’s a firm promise of a pardon, providing you give us good information.”

“It’s not a pardon,” Rawls repeated.

“You expect the president to hand you a pardon—signed, sealed, and delivered—without hearing a word from you?”

“That’s what I expect,” Rawls said.

“Well, Mr. Rawls, you’re a fool,” Kinney replied, standing up. Smith stood up, too.

“I’ll convey your message to the president, but I can tell you from my conversation with him on this matter that this is a letter he was very reluctant to sign, and he’s certainly not going to send me or anyone else down here with a full pardon that you haven’t paid for.” Kinney put the letter in his pocket and started for the door, followed by Smith.

“All right, all right,” Rawls said. “Sit down and let’s get this done.”

The two agents sat down again and waited for Rawls to speak.

“Can I have the letter back, please?”

Kinney took the letter out of his pocket and handed it to Rawls.

“I’m taking it back in thirty seconds if you haven’t started talking.“

“I’m going to need some money and some transportation,” Rawls said.

“There’s a reward of a million dollars up for grabs. You can buy your own transportation. Now stop wasting my time.”

“The guy you want is Teddy Fay.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“Teddy was the tech guy on an operation I ran a long time ago. He made a car bomb for me that was a beaut—small, powerful, and set to go off when the guy got out of the car, not into it.”

“Like the Vandervelt bomb.”

“Exactly like the Vandervelt bomb. At the time, the Agency was short of space, and Teddy and some of his people were working in a rented hangar at a small airport south of Washington.”

“Go on.”

“I remember Teddy telling me that he was moving his people to Langley in a few weeks, and that he was really going to miss his hangar. He was very fond of it”

Kinney stared at Rawls. “That’s it? He was fond of his hangar?”

“I think Teddy bought or rented the hangar after he moved his people out.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Call it a hunch.”

“A hunch,” Kinney repeated tonelessly.

“I’m very good with hunches,” Rawls said. “Something about the way he talked about the hangar made me think he wanted it for himself.”

Kinney turned to Smith. “Do you believe this?”

“No,” Smith replied, “I don’t”

“Now wait a minute, guys,” Rawls said. “Think about this: The hangar is a nice, cozy place to work, with no interference. It’s on the west side of the airport, away from the terminal and the flight school. It’s private, and it has the space to hide his RV, plus, it has all the services—power, computer communications, workshop area— that Teddy would need.”

“What airport is this?”

“Manassas.”

“I know it,” Smith said.

“All right, Mr. Rawls, we’ll check it out, but I have to tell you, this is a very long shot. If I’d known what you were going to say, I wouldn’t have made the trip.”

“Wait a minute, fellas,” Rawls said. “I’m not through.”

“We’re listening.”

“I have a house—an old family place—on an island in Maine, been in the family for nearly a hundred years.”

“Go on.”

“The last summer I was up there, the summer before I, ah, ran into difficulties with my freedom, I’m in a little grocery store—it’s the only one on the island, so everybody uses it. And who should I see shopping there but Teddy Fay. Now, it’s standard operating procedure with Agency people that, if you see a colleague someplace off the campus, you don’t go up to him and slap him on the back, because you don’t know if he’s working. So I said nothing, and Teddy never saw me.

“Next day, I’m at the little post office, getting my mail, and I ask the postmaster if there’s somebody on the island named Fay. He says he’s never heard of anybody by that name. Now, on the island, the postmaster knows everybody, and I mean absolutely everybody, so I figure Teddy is working.

“Then I go home, and I think about it, and I figure there’s no way he’s working, because this is not the sort of place to attract any Agency operation, and if it did, I’d know about it, because the Agency knew I had the house and would have informed me that something was happening on my turf. Also, Teddy is Tech Services, not an operational agent, so I think maybe he’s renting on the island for a couple of weeks.

“A week or so goes by, and I’m stopping at the post office for my mail, and as I pull up to park, Teddy comes out, gets into an old pickup, and drives away. I go into the post office and say to the postmaster, ‘Who’s the guy who just left in the pickup?’ He says, ‘Oh, that’s Mr. Keane, Lawrence Keane, just bought himself a place up on the north island.’”

“So what?” Kinney asked. “Don’t CIA people use false names all the time?”

“Not when they’re not working, and especially not tech people. You see, what Teddy was doing was establishing himself a hidey-hole, a safe house, in a remote place.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, but I’ll bet if you call the postmaster up there, he’ll tell you that Mr. Lawrence Keane is still getting mail, and he’ll tell you where that mail is forwarded when Mr. Keane is not in residence.”

“What’s this island called?”

“It’s called Isleboro.”

“And where in Maine is it?”

“In Penobscot Bay.” Rawls got up and went to the warden’s bookcase. “The warden has an atlas somewhere. I’ve seen him use it.” He looked among the books and plucked out an atlas of the United States, brought it back to the table and opened it.

“Here we are—State of Maine. Here’s Penobscot Bay, the biggest bay in the state. This long island, here, is Islesboro. You take a ferry from Lincolnsville, on the mainland, just north of Camden, to get there.” He pointed to the northern end of the island. “This is North Islesboro, and that’s where Teddy’s place is.”

“Where exactly?”

“I don’t know, but the postmaster would. His name is Seth Hotchkiss. He’ll be in the book.”

“And the ferry is the only way to the island?”

“Well, you can go by boat. The main harbor is here, at Dark Harbor. Oh, and there’s an airstrip.”

“Where?”

Rawls pointed to a spot on the page. “It’s not on this map, but it’s right here. It’s a paved strip, I think twenty-four-hundred feet. You can get a light airplane in there, or a chopper, of course.”

“Where’s a bigger airport?”

Rawls tapped the map. “On the mainland, right here at Rockland. I don’t know the runway lengths, but you can get just about anything in there.”

“What else?”

“That’s it. I promise you, he’s going to be at one of those two places. I’d try Manassas Airport first. That’ll be where he’s operating from. Islesboro is where he’ll run to when he’s done.”

“You think he’ll finish killing people at some point, then?”

“From what I heard on the news, he’s gotten his assets moved somewhere. He wouldn’t do that if he was trying to martyr himself.”

That coincided with Kinney’s thinking. “Okay, Mr. Rawls, we’re done here.”

“I’ll be looking forward to hearing from you,” Rawls said. “A cashier’s check will be fine, but I’d like a few grand of walking-around money in cash.”

Kinney left the room. “He’s all yours,” he said to the warden and the waiting guard.

In the car, Smith asked, “What do you think?”

“I’d call this a very low order of information,” Kinney said, “if we had anything else at all to go on. But we don’t.”

50

TED WOKE UP in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, as was his habit, and when he came back to bed, he couldn’t sleep. He got up, turned on his laptop, and went to the ACT NOW website. Something had been troubling him. He had passed over a target because he was so obvious and because he would be difficult to kill. Now his conscience was hurting him. He felt he couldn’t end his little crusade without knocking off this one man, who had, Ted felt, done so much to harm his country. He stared at the photograph, and his dander rose.

Eft Efton, speaker of the House, had given this administration fits in getting legislation out of the lower house. The president had a slim majority in the Senate, but in the House he was half a dozen votes shy, and he had had to deal with the speaker to get any legislation through at all.

The speaker had protection, though, and since he was third in line for the presidency, he was guarded by the Secret Service, which had put Ted off. Now Ted reconsidered. The Secret Service detail would be much smaller than the president’s, perhaps only three or four guards. He opened his file on the speaker and read the notes he had kept when researching a possible kill. He had decided earlier, on the evidence, that the easiest shot, and one with the greatest chance of escape, would be while the speaker was in a moving car. The car, of course, would be armored, but Ted had a solution for that.

He looked at the routes the speaker’s driver took from his house in Georgetown to the Capitol: There were four, but it hardly mattered, if he followed the car from his house.

The time was more important; the speaker left his house at eight o’clock sharp each morning, walked quickly from the front door to the car, and didn’t emerge from it until he was safe in the Capitol garage.