Stephen Frey (30 page)

“How?”

“Through the network.”

“What network?” Bo demanded.

“I have complete access to all individual records at two very large companies.”

Bo caught his breath. “Let me guess. Global Media and AFG.”

“Yes.” Trajak struggled against the rope binding his wrists. “How the hell did you know?”

“Just keep talking.”

“Through the network I can access all individual records. We have also developed technology that enables us to follow people all over the Internet.”

“You place cookies,” Bo said. He knew enough about the Internet to understand that codes could be attached to URLs, or Web addresses.

Trajak shook his head as he lay on the ground. “No, I can follow you individually. We can identify your specific e-mail address, then match that address against a list of names and home addresses we keep on computer file. I can know everything about you even if you are one of the few people who aren't touched by Global Media or AFG, because there are always transactions going on between AFG and other financial institutions. I can get to you through AFG. People have no idea how easy it is.”

“And you needed the two billion for . . . ?”

“For infrastructure. Computer storage, servers, et cetera.”

“My God.”

“Yes, I can know more about you than you know about yourself.”

Bo untied the rope from the bumper, then loosened it from around Trajak's neck. “Who is your superior?”

“Untie me all the way first,” Trajak demanded.

“Tell me.”

“Untie me!”

“You aren't in a position to negotiate.”

“You don't think so, huh?”

Bo studied Trajak through the gloom. “What do you mean?”

“That bodyguard you threw in the trunk of the limousine is supposed to check in with somebody every fifteen minutes. If he doesn't, they come looking for me. He forgot to once and they were in my office ten minutes later.”

Bo glanced back down the fire road. “They'll go to your home and the office.”

“They'll come right here, asshole. You have maybe five minutes before they're swarming up that dirt road.”

Bo's gaze snapped back to Trajak. “How would they know?”

“I've got a homing chip surgically implanted in my leg. They did it to me when they hired me. It isn't very high-tech, but it will lead them right to me. I'm not lying! They'll kill us both!”

Bo's eyes narrowed. Trajak could be bluffing but what he was saying made sense. And the man didn't look as if he was bluffing. He looked terrified.

Bo picked Trajak up, tossed him onto the rental car's backseat, jumped in behind the wheel, and gunned the car backward down the fire road, swerving crazily from side to side as he tried to steer the car through a gauntlet of trees, guided by only the red hue of taillights. As he skidded out onto Georgetown Pike, he could see headlights coming at him through the back window. The other car was just crossing the bridge over Difficult Creek. He slammed the car into gear and jammed his foot on the accelerator. “Come on!” he shouted. The car seemed to be reacting in slow motion, wheels spinning on the dew-slick asphalt.

Finally it lurched forward, but now the headlights of the other car were directly behind him, darting to the left and right as the driver tried to pull alongside. Bo jerked the wheel to the left, slamming fenders with the other car. “Who's your boss?” he shouted to Trajak, watching the other car lag back after the impact.

There was no answer, just a groan as Trajack was hurled onto the floor of the car when Bo slammed on his brakes, then hit the accelerator again.

“Tell me, dammit!” Bo shouted. “We're in this thing together now. Your best bet right now is to throw in with me.”

“Gerald Wallace!” Trajak shouted back.

“Senator Wallace?”

“Yes.”

Bo checked his side mirror. Whoever was in the car behind them was gaining ground quickly. “No wonder you've been going to Iowa.”

“Yes, no wonder.”

“Who is Wallace's boss? How high up does it go?”

“I don't know any more than what I've told you.”

A hundred yards ahead was a traffic light and the top of the long hill they had been climbing since pulling out of the dirt road. Bo checked his rearview mirror for a split second as they crested the hill. Suddenly a pair of high beams appeared directly in his path and he jerked the wheel to the right to avoid a headon collision, grazing the oncoming car and hurtling off onto a side road at the intersection. For several moments it appeared that the car would plunge into a gully by the side of the road. It hung on the edge for what seemed an eternity, but at the last second the tires grabbed hold of the roadway and leapt ahead, fishtailing several hundred feet before he could straighten out the front wheels.

“Dammit!”

“What's wrong?” Despite the fact that his hands were still tied behind his back, Trajak had managed to get back up on the seat and into a sitting position.

“I don't like this,” Bo answered, keeping the accelerator pressed to the floor.

“Don't like what?” Trajak shouted, leaning against one side of the car to keep his balance as they raced forward.

“We're going downhill.”

“So?”

“The Potomac is ahead of us somewhere and this road doesn't look big enough to have a bridge.” A sign flashed past. “Shit, I was right. Look at the damn sign.”

“What did it say? I couldn't read it.”

“It said that the park closes at dusk!” Bo shouted. “This road leads to a state forest or something. It's a dead end.” Then he saw a small darkened ranger station bisecting the road ahead and a sign detailing the cost of admission to the park. “Four bucks for passenger cars!”

“I can't get to my wallet right now!” Trajak yelled back. “I hope you understand.”

“Get down!” Bo ordered as they hurtled toward the white pipe gate obstructing the road beside the ranger station, leaning down into the passenger seat at the last moment.

The pipe slammed into the windshield, shearing off the roof of the car.

Bo rose up from the passenger side covered with tiny pieces of broken glass. “You all right?” he asked, wind whipping past his face.

“Just great!”

Bo skidded to a halt in the parking lot. It made no sense to try to go back up the hill. He could already hear vehicles racing through the forest toward them. He jumped out of the car, then leaned into the backseat, dragged Trajak out, and frantically untied the rope. “You're on your own now.”

“Don't leave me,” Trajak pleaded, brushing glass from his hair as he scrambled to his feet.

“You've got a homing device in your leg. I'm getting as far away from you as I can.”

Trajak reached out and grabbed Bo strongly by the shoulder. “I understand. Thanks for untying me. You didn't have to do that.”

Two sets of headlights raced past the ranger station as Bo bolted to the left and sprinted past a Plexiglas-encased map of the area toward a hospitality center. Then he was beyond the wooden structure and running down a dirt path into darkness, aware that the headlights were following him. His pursuers had leapt the curb of the parking lot in their vehicles and were racing after him down the walkway.

Bo darted left down a smaller path and over a footbridge, then turned left again, racing through bushes that grabbed at his clothing. He held his arms up and forged ahead blindly, wishing he hadn't forgotten to grab the revolver from the top of the car back at the fire road. Then he heard a great roar and came to a sudden stop, balanced for a moment on a rock ledge that seemed to fall away straight down into nothing. In the moonlight he could make out the Great Falls of the Potomac stretching out before him, the spring thaw from the combined Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers thundering over the rocks below.

Bo gazed into the darkness. It was seventy feet down to the swirling mass of white water. He started to turn back toward the path, but he could see the flashlights of his pursuers bobbing toward him.

He took a deep breath and jumped. Instantly the air was rushing past his ears, then his feet hit the frigid water and he was in the midst of chaos, fighting for a breath. A swirling current dragged him down, cartwheeling him over and over to the bottom, where a huge rock caught him flush in the chest. He blacked out momentarily, then the current sent him shooting up as if he were riding the crest of a large wave so that his entire body burst through the surface and he sucked life-sustaining oxygen into his lungs.

All at once the water turned calm and he was floating in a quiet pool. Slowly he swam toward the trees and dragged himself up onto the bank, exhausted, unconcerned that his pursuers might find him. He had been swept downriver at least a half mile and they would have no idea where he was. He crawled back about thirty feet into the woods, where night-vision glasses wouldn't be able to spot him, and collapsed on the ground, spent.

Ten minutes later he pulled himself to his feet, bracing his body against a large oak tree. He had a long trek ahead. He tried to get his bearings. If this was the Maryland side of the river, he thought, that would put even more distance between him and the people who had been chasing him.

Suddenly a flashlight beam shone directly in Bo's eyes, blinding him. He turned to run, but a rifle butt slammed across the back of his head and Bo dropped to the ground unconscious.

The man who had struck Bo chuckled as he bent down and inspected his shoulder in the beam of the flashlight. “I guess Trajak wasn't lying to us,” he called to his partner. “The tracking device is right here on Hancock's shirt at his shoulder, just like he promised.”

CHAPTER 21

T
he hood was removed by someone behind him and for the first time in several hours Bo was able to breathe freely without drawing velvety material halfway up his nostrils. When the handcuffs were gone, he clasped and unclasped his fists several times to get the circulation going in his hands again.

Michael Mendoza sat behind Jimmy Lee's desk in the mansion's study, calmly smoking a cigar. “Hello, Bolling,” he said smoothly in his deep voice. “Sorry about all the rough stuff, but I had to make certain I got to you before you did something rash. I wanted you to have all of the facts.”

Bo sat in a chair in front of the desk. “Something rash?” he asked, watching the man who had removed the hood and the handcuffs exit the study. Now they were alone. “Like what?”

“Like calling the FBI or the Justice Department.”

“Why would I have done that?”

Mendoza shrugged. “Maybe you wouldn't have.” He puffed on the cigar. “But I wanted the opportunity to lay it all out for you first, just in case.” He nodded at a scotch bottle on the desk and two glasses beside the bottle. “Have a drink,” he offered.

Bo gazed at the bottle. “No, thanks,” he finally said. “You're looking awfully fit for a man who is supposed to be clinging to life by a thread.”

Mendoza chuckled. “There was a lot going on so we decided it wouldn't be a bad idea for me to look like a target as well. Just in case we needed to throw somebody off the trail.”

“
We
decided?” Bo repeated. “Other than Gerald Wallace, who is involved?”

“Did Trajak tell you about Wallace?” Mendoza wanted to know.

“Yes.”

“Well, I still consider him a loyal guy,” Mendoza muttered, more to himself than Bo. “He put a tracking device on you at Great Falls so we could find you. And I imagine you can be a pretty effective interrogator when you want to be.”

“Who else is involved, Michael?”

“Several others, but I sit at the top of the cell. Only Wallace knows that I run the operation. And now you, of course.”

“Which is basically an information network,” Bo said, standing up to stretch his legs. He'd been sitting for several hours, on the trip up from Washington to the estate in the helicopter. He moved to the window overlooking the lake and peered into the light of breaking dawn, then turned back to face Mendoza. “Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“A Big Brother infrastructure that allows you to conduct constant and widespread surveillance on the American people. A surveillance system that can be used as a weapon of intimidation when you so require by mining the data warehouse of individual files you're probably storing in computers all over the country.”

“That's exactly right,” Mendoza admitted. “And it's a damn effective operation.”

Bo moved back toward the desk. “In fact, RANSACK allows you to make policy by circumventing the political process.”

Mendoza smiled at Bo's casual use of the top-secret project's name. “In many cases we still use the political process.”

Bo sat down before his old friend once more. “You mean you intimidate the process. You make people do what you want by scaring them, people like politicians and judges who are unfriendly to your way of thinking.”

“We
facilitate
the process and enable those who have the wrong ideas to see the light. It can take years to enact legislation in our society because of all of the damn checks and balances built into the system. Justice is constantly impeded by bleeding hearts and whistle-blowers who don't understand the bigger picture. RANSACK has addressed all of that inefficiency, and we don't use our power indiscriminately. We let things function normally for the most part. We pick our spots and act only out of necessity.

“We've talked about it so many times, Bo,” Mendoza continued. “About how often the guilty go free because we in this country seem to have a fascination with protecting the criminals, not the victims. About how a democracy is such an inefficient form of government.”

Bo nodded. They had discussed and agreed on that fact many times. “What you're doing sounds good in theory, but you know as well as I do that actually practicing that kind of vigilantism is an entirely different matter. We've talked about that too.”

Mendoza took a deep breath. “Let me give you an example of why we need RANSACK, Bo. Not long ago we discovered that a defense contractor executive, just this one guy, had decided on his own to shut down a top secret project only weeks from completion. It was a new attack submarine the navy badly needed. The guy had decided to blow the whistle on some insignificant overbilling by his superiors. He was going to testify to the overbilling in front of a congressional committee, and you know what would have happened, Bo. They would have delayed the project, maybe even shelved it, over a measly twenty million bucks. I know twenty million sounds like a lot of money, but in a multi-trillion dollar budget with world peace hanging in the balance, it's a pimple on the ass of an ant. Now we will have that attack submarine and it will prove itself invaluable. Without RANSACK, who knows what would have happened?”

“Where does it stop?” Bo asked.

“What do you mean?”

“When we had these discussions, that was the point we could never agree on. How far does this type of thing go? Immense power concentrated in a few people's hands can easily spin out of control. Look at your history books. It has happened time after time down through the centuries.”

Mendoza took a long puff from his cigar. “That's one of the reasons I want you involved, Bo,” he said softly. “That's what all of this is about. I know you will always act as a voice of reason. I've known you for more than forty years, and I have more confidence in you than I have in anyone other than myself. You always do the right thing, and you have more courage in your little finger than most people have in their entire bodies. I saw it on that mountain the day you saved my life, and you were just a teenager then.”

Bo hesitated. “You want me involved?” he asked, his eyes widening.

Mendoza nodded. “I want to bring you into the inner circle. I want you to run Warfield Capital as a legitimate business and take control of the family empire. At the same time I want you to run cutouts through the firm for us. For those of us at the highest levels of the US intelligence structure.”

“Cutouts?”

“Like Online Associates,” Mendoza said. “Warfield will make the investment so that the government can never be linked to anything. We spin the money through a maze of money-laundering systems, then bring the cash into the private sector through an offshore vehicle that appears to be controlled by European or South American investors.”

“Like you did with the original two billion into Warfield.”

“Yes.”

“And the five hundred million that came in after that.”

“Yes.” Mendoza pointed the cigar at Bo. “I'll give you a lot of credit on that one. You had me over a barrel and you knew it. You knew I couldn't afford to have Warfield fail. You knew I'd send the money to prop you up.”

On his way back to the mansion after putting Paul in the ambulance, Bo had called Allen Taylor. Taylor had confirmed on the call that the additional five hundred million Warfield had received that morning had ultimately been routed through the same Italian bank that the first two billion had come from. The two billion Ramsey had alerted Bo to the day Jimmy Lee had died. Once again, Taylor had been unable to follow the money any further back than Italy, but it didn't matter to Bo. He had confirmed what he needed to know.

“If Warfield had gone down, the federal regulators would have crawled all over the firm and dug through everything in detail,” Bo pointed out. “All of our records and all of our investments. They might have found Online Associates, and RANSACK might have been exposed. At the very least, damaged, and you couldn't have that.”

“It was a helluva bluff, Bo,” Mendoza agreed. “I thought about not sending the money, but my people checked out the Bloomberg and Reuters stories about Warfield being in serious trouble and the information was confirmed. Warfield had failed on a transaction with Stillman and the markets went crazy.” He puffed on his cigar. “How did you manufacture that whole thing?”

Jack O'Connor had been hesitant to honor Bo's request, but in the end had acquiesced. The fail on the fifty million in bonds had been arranged quietly and O'Connor had instructed his traders not to deal with Warfield at the open. Finally, O'Connor had called contacts at Bloomberg and Reuters to exacerbate the problem and accelerate the effect. “That was easy,” Bo said, not wanting to give away O'Connor's identity. “And once a rumor gets started on Wall Street, it's harder to stop than a nuclear reaction.”

Mendoza tapped an inch-long ash into a tray beside the scotch bottle. “Well, it was a nice piece of poker playing.”

“Where did the money actually come from?” Bo asked, curious how Mendoza could so easily and quickly manipulate such an immense amount of money.

“The Energy Department,” Mendoza replied, allowing Bo the kind of high-level information that would make him feel right away like a part of what was going on. “Energy has a huge budget with the least amount of oversight. A little-known and closely guarded Washington secret,” he added.

“So you want me involved?” Bo asked, interested in where Mendoza was headed with all of this. “I assume I'm not the first civilian allowed inside.”

“We do this kind of thing quite a bit, though rarely at this level,” Mendoza admitted. “You'd be surprised how many CEOs and general counsels of large corporations allow us to run cutouts through their publicly held corporations. It's very effective.” He gestured toward the window. “As we expand our network, we'll need to make more investments related to RANSACK. Warfield gives us a perfect platform from which to do so. We can do things quietly and quickly.”

“Why did Jimmy Lee agree to set this thing up through Warfield in the first place?” Bo asked.

“First of all, he was a patriot. Your father understood the need for this kind of operation immediately. Second, he wanted Paul elected president.”

Bo smiled. That was the real reason. Jimmy Lee would never have done anything purely for the good of the country. There always needed to be a return on his investment. “So the understanding was that he would allow you to use Warfield as an investment vehicle in return for information on Paul's political opponents.”

“Yes.”

“Other than Jimmy Lee, who within the family knew about RANSACK?”

“Teddy.”

“Not Paul?”

“Paul knows very little. In case the thing ever blew up in our faces, Jimmy Lee wanted Paul insulated.”

“What about Bruce Laird?”

“He never knew anything about RANSACK. Paul told him only that it was imperative that you not be allowed back into Warfield, and he asked no questions. At the end Paul convinced Laird that you were attempting to get rid of him because you'd uncovered his problems at Davis Polk, which is why Laird tried hard to get you to accept Paul's offer to manage a billion of the family's money from Montana.” Mendoza chuckled. “He did, however, turn out to be quite a hero. He and a crew of men rescued Meg and your friend John Blackburn from a cave on the estate last night. Rest assured, Meg is fine. She is with her parents on Long Island as we speak.”

Bo's shoulders slumped and he felt himself choking up. He had not stopped thinking about Meg through everything. He'd truly believed that she was safer with Blackburn in the cave, but he had second-guessed that decision thousands of times since. “That was Laird who was chasing us?” Bo asked, trying to hide the emotion overcoming him.

“Yes,” Mendoza confirmed. “Laird happened to see our people breaking into your mansion and quickly rounded up estate security. When you came out from under the deck with Meg and Blackburn, it was the estate security staff chasing you. They were trying to save you, not hurt you. But you couldn't have known.”

“But it was your people who broke through the door in the basement?”

“Yes.”

“You killed Teddy and Tom Bristow, didn't you?” Bo asked. “Once Jimmy Lee was gone you saw the opportunity to consolidate power.”

“Teddy, yes, but we didn't kill Tom Bristow,” Mendoza replied, his voice dropping. “Teddy took care of that for us.”

Bo glanced up. “What?”

“Teddy and Tom were homosexuals. They were partners, though they kept it very quiet. Yes. We think that once Teddy saw he was going to be running Warfield, he panicked, understanding that his relationship with Tom made him vulnerable.”

Bo was silent for several seconds, trying to comprehend what Mendoza was saying. “Tiffany was working for you, wasn't she,” he finally said.

“Yes, I was trying to find out if you intended to come back to Warfield. Jimmy Lee had mentioned to me that you were becoming very restless out in Montana and I was worried, so I manufactured my trip out there under the cover of being keynote speaker at the Jackson Hole trade summit. Tiffany planted a microphone in the dashboard of your Jeep and when you told her that you were definitely coming back, we went into action. I knew that if you ever discovered what was going on at Warfield without me having the proper opportunity to explain everything to you, you'd notify the authorities. It's one of many things I admire about you, Bo. You are the most honest man I've ever known.”

“So that's why I was sent to Montana. To get me out of the way.”

“And because Jimmy Lee was worried about you screwing up Paul's campaign. Both factors were at work. No one has ever questioned that you were the right person to run Warfield. Now you can do so with no constraints.”

“Then you did write the memo to Jimmy Lee suggesting the change in Warfield's general partnership structure.”