Capitol Punishment (An Art Jefferson Thriller Book 3) (28 page)

Mustafa reached up and slid the brimless NALF cap off.

“Where’d you ditch the Volkswagen?” Darian asked.

“In the river back off Ninety-five,” Mustafa answered, turning back to Roger. “What was the name of the place?”

“Laurel, wasn’t it?” the smooth-headed revolutionary responded without surety.

Mustafa shrugged. “Anyway, it’s nowhere near here.”

Roger bent down and looked past Darian to the passenger seat. “Brother Moises. How goes it?”

“It goes, Brother Roger.” Moises ran a hand over his still intact buzz cut. “But I’ll keep my doo, if you don’t mind.”

“Better put some whiskers on that baby face, then,” Roger ribbed. “Make that boy look full-grown, Brother Darian.”

The NALF leader ignored the joking and looked to his number two. “I made the call.”

“Good.” Let them know that the black man knows how to strike back, Mustafa thought.

“Did you find a place?” Darian asked.

“A little apartment over by Mercy Hospital. You and Brother Moises?”

“We’re going to look now.”

Mustafa removed a piece of paper and handed it to Darian. “This is the phone booth across the street from our place.”

“Okay. Settle in and lay low. We’ll call you a week from today.”

Mustafa nodded. “Next Monday.”

“Two in the afternoon,” Darian said, putting the cream-colored Volvo in reverse. “Don’t be late.”

“Never,” Mustafa promised.

*  *  *

Art exited the “headquarters” of the New Africa Liberation Front on South Vermont to the sound of thunder in the distance and the sight of Director Gordon Jones approaching from his car. The director’s accompanying entourage was hanging back.

“Sir,” Art said as Jones stopped just short of him.

The director acknowledged the greeting with a nod and looked past the agent to the nondescript front of the NALF’s apparent home. “They’re the ones?”

“It appears so,” Art said without conviction. He saw the director notice his hedging straight away. “They have to be. No one outside the team or the Army captain in charge of the building search knew where that cylinder was found.”

“Are we sure it was these guys who made the call?” Jones inquired.

“A note left inside says the same thing their call did,” Art informed him. “I can’t see any reason not to believe their claim.”

Jones looked to his agent now. “Then why don’t you sound as sure as your words?” An answer didn’t come, and that didn’t surprise the director. “Not the perps you expected.”

“No, sir.”

The drizzle that was almost nonexistent suddenly gained form. Drops tapped Art’s head, while Jones opened a collapsible umbrella for them both. “I read the reports your A-SAC was sending. You were leaning toward John Barrish as a suspect.”

“Yes, sir.”

The New
Africa
Liberation Front. Jones looked again to the storefront, then back to Art. “And now? What explains this? It doesn’t exactly fit into that theory.”

From any other person, in any other tone, Art would have seen this as a mocking attack on the work he’d done so far. But it was not. The director was simply searching for answers. For
the
answer.

“Barrish was still involved with Allen, Kostin, and Royce,” Art began. “I’m sure of that. These guys... I don’t know.”

“Customers?” Jones suggested.

“Kostin the salesman.” Art considered that.

“Selling his wares to whoever on the side,” Jones added. “The ‘whoever’ in this case was the NALF.”

Art nodded, but it was only a series of muscle contractions. He couldn’t add complete agreement to that scenario. But he couldn’t dispute it with any credible evidence to the contrary, either.

“You didn’t screw up, Jefferson,” Jones said. “You had a target. A good target. No one knew there was more than one.”

Screw up? Did I?

“A-SAC Los Angeles says you’re still on this. Find these bastards.”

Again Art nodded, but little was behind this gesture either. Too little, too late...at least for those in the World Center. “Will do, sir.”

Jones lingered for a moment, then walked back to his car as the sky opened to a full downpour. Art Jefferson stood in the rain and watched him drive away.

EIGHTEEN

Direction

Frankie grabbed the phone on the second ring as Art paged through what information the LAPD had provided on the New Africa Liberation Front. “Aguirre.”

The prolonged silence after that brought Art’s eyes up. His partner’s head was bobbing gently at what was being said over the phone, her pen jerking like a seismograph’s stylus back and forth across a legal pad.

“Spell it,” Frankie said. “O-R-E-M.” She listened for a few seconds more before hanging up.

“What is it?”

“Utah Highway Patrol had an officer killed the night of the World Center attack,” Frankie explained. “The officer had a camera setup running and it recorded the thing on tape. There was some bad glare from his spotlight on the back window of the car, so they sent it to our lab in Washington for enhancement. It came back this morning, with—guess who—Darian Brown shown gunning down the officer. There were three other male blacks in the car.”

“It was at
our
lab and
our
people didn’t recognize him?” Art shook his head.

“Well, they found the car torched right after the shooting and traced it back here,” Frankie continued. “The RO sold it just before the attack to some guy. It was a cash-under-the-table deal, so no paperwork. They had no way of knowing the two were related until they got the tape back and matched it with our bulletins on the NALF.”

The drip of Art’s decaf filling the pot marked the silent seconds as he thought. “Three other males plus Brown, huh? We only know of Brown and two others. They picked up someone new.”

“Or someone we didn’t know about.”

“Hmmm,” Art grunted. “They found the car in Orem?”

“Yeah.”

“I assume they’re running down all stolens there.”

“Six the night of the murder,” Frankie reported.

“Quiet city,” Art commented. “Get a copy of that tape directly from our lab in D.C. Have Hal and Omar run the pictures of the known NALF members past the guy who sold them the car.”

“Got it,” Frankie said.

Art turned off his coffeemaker and poured himself a cup of unleaded. “Four black guys in Utah? Not the best place to hide out.”

“A common place to travel through, though,” Frankie observed.

“Yep.” Art sipped from his mug. The small stack of plastic hot cups next to the coffeemaker was for visitors. “You know what this means.”

Frankie nodded. “They’ve got somewhere to go.”

*  *  *

Earl Casey surprised the president’s chief of staff in his West Wing office just before lunch.

“Earl, I was just heading to Duke’s for a bite. You want to join me?”

“No, thanks.” Casey walked to Gonzales’s desk and stood at its side. “I want you to do something.”

“What?”

Casey explained his idea in less than the predicted sixty seconds. When he finished the chief of staff was smiling thoughtfully.

“I ran it by the Man a few minutes ago, and he liked it. He even thought there might be an opening to the speech in the whole thing.”

“I think he may be right,” Gonzales agreed blindly, though not without some sense of what the president might be thinking. “Interesting.”

“I want to do it,” Casey said. “It smells right.”

“Agreed.”

“Will you take care of the invitation?”

Gonzales nodded and made a note to take care of it right away. “With pleasure.”

*  *  *

Toby entered the spacious living room from the kitchen scratching his dyed and shorn hair. “How do I look?”

“Like a bad Elvis impersonator,” Stanley commented from his seat by the roaring fire.

“Funny. Mom’s ready for
you
now.” Toby pulled a short punch at his little brother and took the vacated seat by the crackling fireplace. His father sat quietly in an overstuffed chair. Behind him out the huge window the purples and oranges of the setting sun draped the skies above the George Washington National Forest. “I like this place, Pop. The view’s a lot nicer than back home.”

“It’s temporary, Toby,” John Barrish reminded his son.

“I know. But it’s nice. I think Mom likes it a lot.”

John looked over his shoulder to the expanse of meadow behind the house. Five grand a month it was costing them, plus a twenty grand deposit, and for that he had a fireplace, three thousand square feet, solitude at the end of a country road near Fulks Run, Virginia, and a view of a doe browsing near the tree line. An expensive and comfortable way station, but a way station nonetheless.

“What color contacts are you getting?”

“Brown,” Toby answered.

John surveyed his eldest boy’s new appearance. It wasn’t right. It needed something. The lines of his face were still too familiar. “Grow a mustache, and make sure your mother dyes it.”

“Okay.”

A log, consumed to the point of being a single roll of orange embers, collapsed in the fireplace, sending a plume of sparks upward into the dark recesses of the riverstone chimney. A burst of heat accompanied the disintegration, causing John to slide his chair back from the hearth.

“What about you, Pop?”

John touched his growing gray locks, which he’d maintained at a military-like one inch since high school. “Shaggy red hair and a goatee.”

“That’ll do it,” Toby commented, smiling at the thought of his father as a carrot-top.

“What about the Africans?” John inquired.

“I’ll put an ad in the
Baltimore Sun
in a couple of weeks. They’ll be expecting it then.”

“And Vorhees?”

The sound of scissors clicking rapidly drew Toby’s eyes toward the kitchen briefly. “Stan’s going to start on that soon. We’ll be ready. What about the tools and stuff?”

In his earlier life, before exposition of his views generated the kind of money that could finance an organization
and
support a family, John Barrish had made a modest living as a machinist. Nothing so complicated would be needed in this instance. Mostly hand tools, an arc-welding rig, and several types of metal. Light metal. Strong metal. Yes, expensive metal, but the money had to be spent on something. “I’ll take care of those.”

Toby nodded and let his body press into the soft cushions of the couch. They had been on the move, always busy, for so long that relaxation felt alien. But it also felt good. “Hey, Pop. You wanna go find a lake tomorrow? There’s got to be one around here somewhere. We ain’t got anything else to do. Maybe have a picnic, or go fishing?”

“It’s winter, Toby,” John said. “The fish don’t bite well this time of year.” The father-to-son instructions on life’s important matters flashed in John’s mind. His father had said something about fishing then.
Don’t fish in the winter
, or something like that. He hadn’t passed things such as that to his boys. He wondered if he should have.

“I didn’t say we had to catch anything,” Toby said. “C’mon. You, me, Stan. We’ll just sit, and throw some lines in the water, and shoot the shit.”

His eldest boy had a way of conversing with innocent vulgarities, John knew. He’d never gotten that out of him. But the suggestion behind the four-letter word did hold some appeal. Some day, when all that was to come had run its course, there would be much time to relax, to recreate. It might be a good time to practice for that day.

“What do you say?”

John nodded, realizing he should accept the calm before the storm. “All right, son.”

NINETEEN

Arrangements

Frankie held the three-year-old police mug shot up to the freeze-frame image on the conference room’s thirty-inch television monitor. “That’s him.”

“Roland Kirk,” Art said, referring to the enhanced image of the Oldsmobile’s right front passenger. “AKA Ronald Christopher. AKA Mustafa Ali.” He flipped back to the man’s arrest and conviction record. “Hmmm.”

“What?”

“The two most recent hits—B and E, and a simple assault—go under the Ali name. He must have changed it legally.”

“Converted to Islam,” Frankie observed.

“This is a hell of a way to exemplify the religion.” Art set the three suspect profiles side by side on the dark brown table. “Darian Brown, Roger Sanders, Mustafa Ali, and a mystery rider.”

“I remember Sanders from his playing days,” Frankie said. “He blew his knee out, I think.”

“He also liked punching folks out,” Art told his partner. “Two counts of aggravated assault, served a year at Chino.”

Frankie spun Brown’s profile around to face the seat she took across from Art. “Fearless leader here has one aggravated, two petty thefts, one GTA, one burglary. He beat a murder one. He’s spent a total of three years inside, a combination of county and state time.”

“And for every time they were caught...” Art, like all law enforcement officers, knew that an arrest or conviction on a person’s record represented just a fraction of the crimes actually committed. The sad fact was that men like Brown, Ali, and Sanders put their hands in the cookie jar without getting caught more than anyone would ever know.

Art looked to the screen and rewound it to a point before the enlargements of each individual. “Sanders driving.” They knew now that he had purchased the Oldsmobile in a plainly illegal transaction in Los Angeles before the attack. A glance at Sanders’s picture and a threat to bother the man with “accessory” charges had refreshed his memory quite fast. “Ali in right front. Brown, right rear.” His eyes locked on the small head in a darkened profile. “The lab wasn’t able to do much with him, were they?”

“The light was coming in at the back of his head,” Frankie said.

“Looks young,” Art observed, though there was little else he could discern. The profile as the head turned showed sharp lines, tight skin, smooth even. Short, neat hair. Familiar, almost, but then a kid in silhouette was likely to look like any other.

The tape raced back, then slid forward from the time that the left rear window exploded. Trooper Fitzroy rocking side to side as the bullets stitched across his torso, sound on the tape ending as a round cut the trooper’s body mic, falling, crawling with only his legs driving him, Brown coming out, following—no, stalking Fitzroy, his mouth moving as something was said, and two shots.