Nowhere to Hide (19 page)
Authors: Sigmund Brouwer
“Good faction, bad faction. How about bad fiction?”
“Let me get where I was going,” King said, “and you'll see I agree there's no good faction or bad faction. Because it couldn't be the good faction, and if a bad faction was bugging our room, why would they report to the president and try to get us involved after learning our parents didn't want us involved? So that meant someone outside of the agency had planted the bugs. Someone who wanted us to keep looking for what Evans and Moore were looking for.”
“Now we're getting somewhere. It's Moore and Evans who went rogue, and they refuse to tell us why.”
“With all due respect,” King said, “I'm also going to refuse to tell you why.”
“We were just starting to build some kind of relationship here,” Mundie said, clearly irritated. “Don't pull this garbage on me.”
“If I were you,” King said, “I would assume that if Evans and Moore are prepared to risk jail time by refusing to speak, and that if I'm prepared to face the same thing, then it must be pretty important. So it might not be smart to shut me down at this point without looking for the person who put the bugs in the room.”
“That doesn't put me in a better mood,” Mundie said.
“And if I show you a photo of the person who bugged the room?”
That startled Mundie. “You were searched at the FBI building. You didn't have a photo.”
“Not on me. But in the cloud. Lend me your smartphone, and I can pull it up for you.”
Mundie unlocked his phone with a password and handed it to King.
King handed it back. “Can you download the Dropbox app?”
Mundie sighed. “I hate Dropbox. Too secure for us to crack.”
It took Mundie less than a minute. “Here.”
King entered his account info, found the photo of Kelli Isaac, and pulled it up on the screen. He handed it back to Mundie, expecting an aha reaction.
Instead, Mundie's eyebrows furrowed.
“Nothing,” Mundie said. “This does nothing for me.”
King hid the disappointment he felt. He'd believed that the photo would give him some good levers to pull with Mundie.
“And the president calling us on FaceTime? Shouldn't that be worth looking into?”
Mundie was silent for a moment and then gave his own one-word answer. “Yes.”
“Then email this photo to someone in DC,” King said. “See if that brings up any flags. You've come this far with me.”
“Five minutes,” Mundie said. “Five minutes more.”
He walked away from the bench. King watched and waited and watched and waited. Finally Mundie returned.
“I'll drop you off at your parents,” Mundie said. “This photo means nothing to the CIA.”
“You mean drop me off so you can start your search for her without me? You think I'm so stupid I'd believe you and the pretended lack of interest in a video with the president?”
Mundie couldn't help but smile. “I can neither confirm nor deny.”
“If you want her,” King said, “I can get her for you. And a lot more. But only if in return you give me what I want.”
Forty minutes later, Mundie led King, in zip-tie handcuffs again, past the wide-eyed receptionist in the FBI building. King's internal clock told them they were down to less that eighteen hours before Amanda drowned.
Mundie had one hand on King's back to guide him. In his other hand, Mundie held a cloth bag with a drawstring.
A silent, square-jawed FBI agentâthanks to Mundie's earlier description, King now couldn't help but think of the man as a Feebâescorted them to the elevator and, once inside, used a key to access the fifth-floor button.
When the elevator stopped and the door opened, Mundie said to the Feeb, “We'll take it from here. All I need is the magnetic swipe.”
“Not a chance,” the Feeb answered. “SOP makes that impossible.”
“This is not a standard operation,” Mundie snapped. “My direct boss reports directly to the president on a weekly and sometimes daily basis. Your direct boss is a lot lower down the food chain. Don't make me flex my muscles here, or you'll be spending a couple years in an office in the middle of Kansas.”
They traded stares until the Feeb blinked first.
“Watch your back,” the Feeb said, gritting his teeth as he handed Mundie a plastic card that looked like an ordinary hotel room key. “Any chance I get, I'll do my best to see you get to Kansas first. It makes me almost hope the prisoners you're taking out of custody manage to bust free and leave you hanging at the end of a noose.”
Mundie stepped out of the elevator with King, and the Feeb stayed behind. When the doors slid shut, Mundie said, “See what I told you about agency infighting?”
“Yes, sir. I just don't understand why your diplomatic approach failed to create extra goodwill.”
It took Mundie just the slightest of pauses to understand that King had been sarcastic, and that earned King a chuckle from the agent.
They walked down the hallway. King was aware of the video cameras in place.
“What's âSOP'?” King asked, remembering that Mundie had also written the abbreviation on a note in the conference room earlier.
“Standard operating procedure,” Mundie said. “And that's something you forced me to abandon about when you made a bomb threat to the Feebs. Because of it, I'm much crankier than I appear. Everything I do this morning will be reviewed exhaustively, and I'm thinking there's an even chance I'll be in Kansas soon enough to give that Feeb the last laugh.”
Mundie stopped at an interrogation room and used the plastic card to unlock the door.
Two men inside looked at him from behind a table, both in orange jumpsuits.
Evans and Moore.
“King?” Evans said.
“Gentlemen,” Mundie said, “it's your lucky day.”
Mundie tossed the bag with a drawstring onto the floor. “You'll find your street clothes in here. Your friend here found a way to bust you loose.”
“Finally,” Evans said. “A chance to talk to Murphy. Two floors down. Same kind of room.”
“Would have been a lot easier if we had reached him first,” Moore said. “Don't like it that we needed help to get there. Without King, we're still in orange suits. So, King, thanks.”
“Just returning the favor,” King said to Evans and Moore. “Thanks for setting us up with that lawyer and getting us out of there. She was a force of nature.”
They were walking down a hallway on the ninth floor of the building. Both Evans and Moore were adjusting their ties. Their clothes were rumpled, but King doubted either would complain. Better than orange jumpsuits.
King didn't have a tie to adjust, but he rubbed his wrists, glad the pressure from the plastic zip locks was gone.
“She?” Evans asked. “She?”
“Tanya Daniels,” King answered.
Both men stopped.
“I say something wrong?” King asked.
“In the mobile home, when we promised you legal help,” Evans said, “I sent an email to my personal attorney. Clint Bortsky.”
“Wasn't him,” King said. “Really.”
Evans pointed at an open office and the desk with a phone.
“Hang on,” he said.
Evans slipped inside, leaving the door open. King heard the conversation clearly. He wasn't surprised when Evans came back to the hallway and said, “My email never reached him. He had no idea what was going on.”
Moore said, “Someone showed up and got you loose?”
King nodded.
“That means,” Moore said, “someone knew you were in custody and where.”
King had to agree with the conclusion.
“Not CIA,” Evans said. “Not us.”
“Your parents?” Moore asked King. “Anywhere along the way, did you have a chance to call your parents before Mundie brought you here?”
“No, sir,” King said. “Mundie kept telling us we had no rights and he would not call anyone on our behalf until we told him everything.”
King saw a question appearing on Moore's face. “But all we told Mundie was the Disney World story. Like we agreed in the mobile home during the standoff.”
“A third party sent the lawyer then,” Evans said. “Someone who wanted you back in motion.”
King nodded. “There's something you should know about a woman named Kelli who showed up at our hotel room this morning.”
So he told them.
King had seen Jack Murphy only on video footage taken from a drone that was moments away from being blown out of the sky by a SWAT-team missile. Then, Murphy had been in handcuffs, stumbling between two men as they dragged him away from the mobile home on the high desert on the other side of the Cascades.
Now, King sat across from Murphy in an interrogation room on the fifth floor of the FBI building.
King was flanked by Evans on his left, Moore on his right. Three against one. Mundie was in the hallway. A confidential interrogation of Murphy had been part of King's negotiation.
Murphy, still in orange, was Hollywood handsomeâfor the role of the guy who drank a lot during the day and had been doing so for at least a decade. Murphy was about the age of King's dad, but Murphy had deeper wrinkles and jowls and a trace of a beard that was showing lots of gray. His dark, curled hair hung over his forehead and showed lots of grease.
Even though his wrists were in chains and snapped to a ring on the table, Murphy's attitude was not defeat, but defiance.
He glared at Moore. “I should have known my ex-father-in-law
was behind this. I miss a few alimony payments, and you bring in the Homeland Security Act. I want to thank you for the favor. By the time I finish suing the government, I'll be living in a gated golf community, and you'll be in a mobile home in the desert.”
Murphy had been Moore's son-in-law?
As King tried to absorb this new information, Moore leaned forward.
“What you don't understand about the Homeland Security Act,” Moore said to Murphy in cold anger, “is that we can keep you in here for years, and you won't even get close to a lawyer. We can move you out of the country and make you disappear. The sooner you understand this, the better for you. Because I'm going to ask you some questions andâ”
“All this for late alimony payments? I've always known you hated me, but talk about abuse of power!”
Moore said, “Mr. Evans here will list the charges you're facing.”
Evans nodded, grim faced. Evans and Moore had rehearsed how the interrogation would go.
Evans said, “Kidnapping. Blackmail. Death threats. And about a dozen major charges for attempting to harm national security with illegal coercion to gain access to classified files. Want more? We can come up with more.”
Moore jumped in. “All of it goes away if you tell us where Amanda is.”
“Huh?” Murphy said. His defiance was replaced by genuine surprise.
“Amanda Moore. Your stepdaughter. My granddaughter. The one who chose her mother's maiden name instead of your name.”
“Let me get this straight,” Murphy said. “The whole SWAT-team thing and a day of cooling my heels in isolation is so I will tell you where Amanda is?”
“One-time offer. Take it now, or you won't be out of a federal prison until you're so old you'll need a walker to enjoy the freedom.”
Murphy's expression became calculating. “Just so we're straight here. I tell you where Amanda is, and all charges are dropped. I go free.”
“All charges except the kidnapping. That's going to get you ten yearsâseven with good behavior.”
Murphy said, “And if the kidnapping charge is bogus?”
“Who did you give her to?” Moore said. “Where is she?”
“To her mother,” Murphy said. “They're on vacation.”
Moore launched himself across the table, and his right hand became a claw on Murphy's neck. Murphy had no chance to defend himself and gargled helplessly for air.
Evans pulled Moore away.
“Steady,” Evans said. “Kill him and we won't get anything.”
Murphy made circles with his chin, trying to stretch his neck.
“You're a crazy man,” Murphy hissed at Moore. “Crazy.”
“I'm going to go crazier,” Moore said, “if I don't get answers from you. If you don't have her, you might have thought handing Amanda over to someone else would be an easy hundred grand, but now she's less than twenty-four hours away from her execution.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Did you actually believe she wouldn't come to harm when you handed her off?”
“I didn't kidnap Amanda, which means I didn't hand her off,” Murphy said. “I want to hear that part again about a hundred grand. What are you talking about?”