Split Second (3 page)

T
HE FUNERAL PROCESSION
was stopped and each car was searched, as was the hearse. It
was
Harvey Killebrew, devoted father, grandfather and husband, lying in there when they opened the casket. Virtually all the mourners were elderly and obviously frightened by all the men with guns, and there didn’t seem to be a kidnapper within the bunch, but still the agents directed all the cars and the hearse back to the funeral home.

Rent-a-Cop Simmons approached a Secret Service agent who was climbing into his sedan to lead the caravan back to the funeral home. “What next, sir?”

“Okay, what I need is this road watched. Anyone trying to come out, you stop. Anyone coming in, you stop and check for appropriate credentials. We’ll get you some relief as soon as we can. Until then, here is where you’ll be. Got it?”

Simmons looked very nervous. “This is really big, isn’t it?”

“Sonny, this is the biggest thing you’ll ever have happen in your entire life. Let’s just hope it turns out okay. But I kind of doubt that.”

Another agent, Neal Richards, ran up and said, “I’ll stay, Charlie. Probably not a good idea to leave him here all by himself.”

Charlie glanced at his colleague and said, “Sure you don’t want to come back and join the party, Neal?”

Richards smiled grimly and said, “I don’t want to be within a mile of Michelle Maxwell right now. I’ll stay with the kid.”

Richards climbed into the vehicle next to Simmons, who maneuvered his van so that it blocked the road. They watched as the caravan of agents and mourners passed out of sight, and scanned the countryside in all directions. There was no sign of anyone. Simmons kept his hand firmly on the butt of his gun, his black leather glove crinkling as he squeezed the pistol grip. He reached over and turned up the volume on his police scanner and then looked nervously at the veteran agent.

He said in a loud voice, “I know you probably can’t tell me, but what the hell happened back there?”

Richards didn’t bother to look at him. “You’re right, I can’t tell you.”

Simmons said, “I grew up here, know every inch of the place. If I was trying to get somebody outta here, there’s a dirt lane about a half mile down the road. You cut through there and go out the other side, you’re five miles away before you even know it.”

Richards now glanced at him and said slowly, “Is that right?” He leaned toward Simmons and reached inside his coat pocket. The next moment Secret Service agent Neal Richards was lying facedown on the seat, a small red hole in the center of his back, the stick of gum he had pulled from his pocket still clenched in his hand. Simmons looked in the back of the van, where the woman was taking the suppressor off her small-caliber pistol. She had been secreted in a small area under the van floor’s false bottom. The chatter from the police scanner had covered the slight noise she made coming out. She said, “Low-caliber dumdum, wanted to keep it in the body. Less mess.”

Simmons smiled. “Like the man said, this
is
really big.” He pulled out the dead agent’s wireless mic and power pack and threw them deep into the woods. He drove off in the opposite direction of the funeral home. Eight hundred yards down the road he turned onto a weed-covered dirt lane. They pushed Agent Richards’s body out there in an overgrown ravine adjacent to the road. Simmons had been telling the agent the truth:
this road was the perfect escape route. Another hundred yards and two bends in the road brought them to an abandoned barn, its roof starting to fall in, its doors open. He drove directly into the space, got out and shut the barn doors. Parked inside was a white pickup truck.

The woman emerged from the back of the van. She looked nothing like an elderly widow now. She was young, blond-haired, slender yet muscular and agile, dressed in jeans and a white tank shirt. She had used many names over her brief life and currently went by “Tasha.” As dangerous as Simmons was, Tasha was even more lethal. She had that essential trait of a polished killer: she possessed no conscience.

Simmons took off his uniform, revealing jeans and a T-shirt. Next he pulled out a makeup kit from the rear of the van and removed the wig, matching sideburns and eyebrows and other parts of his facial disguise. He had been hidden in the hollow platform under Bill Martin’s casket; after helping to carry John Bruno out, he assumed the role of “Officer Simmons.”

From the van they lifted a large box containing Bruno. The box was marked as containing communication equipment in case anyone had bothered to look. A large tool case was situated against the back of the white pickup’s rear window. They took Bruno and placed him inside the tool case and locked it. There were vents in the sides and top of the case, and its interior had been padded.

Next they loaded bales of hay that were stacked in a corner of the barn into the bed of the truck; that mostly concealed the tool case. They jumped into the cab of the truck, donned John Deere caps and pulled out of the barn, taking another weed-infested dirt road back to the main drag about two miles farther down.

They passed a stream of police cars, black sedans and SUVs heading, no doubt, to the crime scene. One young cop even smiled at the pretty woman in the passenger side of the truck cab as he sped by. Tasha gave him a flirty look and waved back. The pair drove on with their kidnapped presidential candidate safely unconscious in the back.

Two miles ahead of them was the elderly man who’d sat by the entrance to the funeral home when John Bruno and his entourage passed by. His whittling done, he’d escaped Maxwell’s lockdown by a few minutes. He drove alone in his ancient, muffler-rattling Buick. He’d just received the news from his colleagues. Bruno was safely tucked away, and the only casualty had been one Secret Service agent unlucky enough to pair up with a man he undoubtedly believed was harmless.

After all this time and work, it had finally begun. He could only smile.

T
HE RED
F
ORD
Explorer pulled to a stop near a large cedar log structure shrouded in deep woods. The place was intricately constructed and far closer to a lodge in scale than a single-family cabin, though only one person lived there. The man got out and stretched his limbs. It was still early, and the sun had just begun its ascent.

Sean King went up the wide hand-hewn timber steps and unlocked the door to his home. He stopped in the spacious kitchen to make coffee. As it percolated, he looked around the interior, appraising each mitered corner, the placement of each log, the proportion of window space to wall. He’d pretty much built the place himself over a four-year period while he lived in a small trailer on the perimeter of the fifteen-acre spread about thirty-five miles west of Charlottesville in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The interior was furnished with leather chairs and overstuffed couches, wooden tables, Oriental rugs, copper lighting fixtures, plain bookshelves filled with an eclectic assortment of volumes, oil and pastel paintings, mostly done by local artists, and other items one collects or inherits in the course of a lifetime. And at forty-four years old King had lived at least two lives thus far. He had no desire to reinvent himself yet again.

He went upstairs, made his way along the catwalk that ran the length of the house, and entered his bedroom. Like the rest of the place, it was very organized, things neatly arranged and not an inch of wasted space.

He stripped off his police deputy’s uniform and climbed into the shower and let the sweat of a night’s work wash away. He shaved, washed his hair and let the hot water loosen up the surgical scar on his middle finger. He had long ago learned to live with this small souvenir of his days as a Secret Service agent.

If he were with the Service now, instead of living in a beautiful log house in the middle of lovely central Virginia, he’d probably be packed into a town house in some stultifying cookie-cutter bedroom community outside the Washington Beltway and still married to his ex-wife. He also wouldn’t be getting ready to go to his thriving law practice. He certainly wouldn’t be a volunteer deputy police officer one night a week for his rural community. He’d be about to hop on another plane, watch politicians smile, kiss babies and lie, waiting patiently for the moment when someone tried to kill his guy. What a gig that was, and it included all the frequent flier miles and Tums he wanted!

He changed into a suit and tie, combed his hair, drank his coffee in the sunroom off the kitchen and read the newspaper. The front page was dominated by reports of the kidnapping of John Bruno and the subsequent FBI investigation. King read the main story and related articles carefully, absorbing all relevant details. He clicked on the TV, found the all-news channel and watched as the newsperson reported on the death of Neal Richards, veteran Secret Service agent. He’d left behind a wife and four kids.

It was undeniably tragic, sad, all of that, but at least the Service took care of the survivors. Neal Richards’s family would have their full support. That couldn’t take away the loss, but it was something.

The reporter then said that the FBI had no comment. “Of course not,” King said to himself; they never commented on anything, and yet eventually somebody would let slip to somebody who would run to a friend at the
Post
or the
Times
and then everybody would know. Yet what they knew was usually wrong! However, the media beast had an insatiable appetite, and no organization could afford to totally starve it, not even the FBI.

He sat up and stared at the image of the woman on the TV standing near a group of folks at a podium. This was the Secret Service part of the story, King instantly sensed. He knew the breed well. The woman looked professional, calm, with a relaxed alertness so familiar to King. And something else was in her expression that he couldn’t quite read. There was belly fire, for all of them had some measure of that. Yet there was something more: subtle defiance perhaps?

The Service was assisting the FBI in every way, one of the men said, and they were, of course, also conducting their own internal investigation. The Service’s Inspection Division would be handling this investigation, King knew, because they had been all over his butt after the Ritter assassination. Reading the bureaucratic doublespeak, King knew this meant that blame had already been assessed and would be made public as soon as the relevant parties had signed off on the appropriate spin to put on the awful news. Then the press conference was over, and the woman was walking away and getting into a black sedan. She was not speaking to reporters on orders from the Service, the voiceover said, and the narrator also helpfully identified her as Michelle Maxwell, head of the security detail that had lost John Bruno.

So why parade her in front of the press? wondered King. Why wave red meat in front of a caged beast? He almost immediately answered his own question: to give a face to the coming blame. The Service was often very good about protecting its own, and agents had screwed up before, been given administrative leave and then reassigned. However, there might be some political pressure on this one that was screaming out for a head to fall. “Here she is, folks,” they might have said. “Go get her, although we still have to do our official investigation, but don’t let that stop you.” And now King understood the look of subtle defiance in the woman’s features. She knew exactly what was going on. The lady was attending her own hanging and not liking it.

King sipped his coffee, munched on a piece of toast and said
to her and the TV, “Well, you can be as pissed off as you want, but you can also just kiss your ass good-bye, Michelle.”

Next a picture of Michelle Maxwell appeared on the screen while some more background information on the woman was given. A high school all-American in basketball
and
track and a heavyweight academic as well, she’d gone on to graduate from Georgetown in three years. If that wasn’t high-octane enough, during college she’d turned her considerable athletic talents to another sport and had won a silver medal at the Olympics in women’s rowing:
a scholar athlete, what could be more inspiring?
After a year as a police officer in her native Tennessee she’d joined the Service, ferociously worked her way up the ladder at double-quick time and was currently enjoying the wonderful status of a scapegoat.

And a handsome scapegoat she was, King thought, and then caught himself. Handsome? And yet there
were
masculine qualities about her, the forceful, almost swaggering way in which she walked, the impressive spread of shoulders—no doubt all that rowing—the jawline that seemed to promise extreme obstinacy at frequent intervals. And yet the feminine side was certainly there. She was over five-nine and, despite the broad shoulders, slender, but she had nice, subtle curves too. The hair was black, straight and shoulder-length, regulation enough for the Service but still stylish. The cheekbones were high and firm, the eyes green, luminous and intelligent—clearly those eyes missed very little. In the Secret Service such X-ray vision was a necessity.

The overall look was not that of a classic beauty, but Michelle was probably the girl who was always faster and smarter than all the boys. In high school she likely had every male gunning to be the first to steal her virginity. From the look of the woman, though, he doubted any had succeeded on anything other than Maxwell’s terms.

Well, he said silently to the TV screen, there is life after the Service. You can start over and re-create yourself. You can be reasonably happy against all the odds.
But you never do forget.
Sorry, Michelle Maxwell, I speak from experience on that one too.

He checked his watch. Time to go to his real job drafting wills and leases and charging by the hour. Not nearly as exciting as his old occupation, yet at this stage of his life Sean King was very much into boring routine. He’d had enough excitement to last him several lifetimes.