The Perfect Candidate: A Lance Priest / Preacher Thriller (No. 1) (12 page)
Read The Perfect Candidate: A Lance Priest / Preacher Thriller (No. 1) Online
Authors: Christopher Metcalf
He knew from the first moment he read about Lance Priest that he was something. The short answers on the questionnaire confirmed that gut feeling. He had finally found what he had been searching decades for. He’d found that perfect candidate. And if he had to be completely honest, it scared him a little. Kind of like holding a 50-karat diamond or a tiny premature infant in his hands. One wrong move and it could be dropped, shattered, destroyed. Perfection is always amazingly delicate.
Chapter 14
Twenty-seven hours later when the phone on his antique cherry desk rang, Seibel was waiting. He had been sitting there staring intermittently at the phone and the clock beside it.
The desk phone he had brought from one of his many offices rang precisely 24 hours after the second call the day before; exactly when Lance told him to be here. This time Seibel played coy. He picked it up on the third ring and put the receiver to his ear without saying a word.
At the other end he heard an assortment of noises that immediately led him to assume Lance was calling from a public area, most likely a pay phone. Seibel didn’t have anyone tracking this call. A few moments of silence passed at each end before Seibel spoke.
“Are you there my boy?”
“I’ll assume this is being recorded like yesterday so I’ll keep it short. McLean, Virginia.”
“Yes I’ve heard of it.” Seibel’s eyebrows rose. The old pro didn’t skip a beat.
Lance continued, “Of course you have. You’re there right now.”
“If you say so my boy.”
Damn
.
“If you’d like, I can call you back in about twenty minutes with your address.”
“And how would you do that Lance.”
“Just like I did to get as far as McLean, I’d ask nicely.” Lance was sparse with his words.
Seibel remained silent this time. He was processing the information and working through protocol to see how Lance could have possibly tracked him down through a line that was sterile, switched so many times it was beyond traceable.
Lance broke the silence, “You probably want to know how, but you know I won’t tell you. And you also know I won’t be at this phone for more than another 30 seconds so tracing this one probably won’t work.”
Seibel finished with a few calculations that had taken him away for a moment. “Lance I’ll ask you to please not hang up. I need to speak with you for just a few minutes. We have some items to discuss.”
“Don’t feel much like talking right now.” Lance was short.
“I’d rather talk right now. Shouldn’t take long.” Seibel implored.
“No let’s talk later. How about 8 o’clock?”
“Actually I have a dinner appointment this evening.” Seibel lied.
“In McLean or maybe over in D.C?”
“I’m not in McLean or anywhere near Washington,” Another lie.
Lance replied, “How about 7 then, before your dinner meeting? That’s only 45 minutes from now.”
“Lance, why don’t we speak now? What’s the point in delaying?”
“Because I prefer to speak with you in person.” The words were a thunderbolt. He had been under the assumption that Lance had likely made his way back to Tulsa or somewhere near; or was still hidden in Dallas. Seibel did a completely natural thing for a veteran of three decades of espionage. He stepped to the window and looked out. The street was clear.
“In person?” Seibel played it cool.
“Yep. And I have just the place.” Lance’s turn to be coy.
“You’re in McLean?”
“No. I figured you just lived over there but worked either in D.C. or close by. Maybe up in Langley. Am I right?”
No reply at the other end of the line, just silent processing.
Lance continued, “I’m sure you want to hear all about how I tracked you down to McLean and the 837 prefix for your home phone. But not right now. I need to hang up in nine seconds.”
“Where do you want to meet?” Seibel blurted out.
“Ah-hah. Got you.”
“Got me, yes.” Seibel shook his head.
“I’m thinking a very public place with lots of people.”
“There are lots of them in Washington, but you really don’t need to worry about your safety Lance. You passed the test with flying colors. We don’t want to harm you, we want to get to know you better and see about possibly working together.”
“So that’s why you had those guys trying to kill me?” Lance’s voice ice cold.
“That was a test. Merely a trial of your innate survival skills. And as I said, you succeeded on all parameters. We have placed a great amount of value and invested significant time and resources into learning as much as we can about you. The exercise in Dallas was a stress test to see how you’d react under pressure, that’s all. We wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.” Seibel was indeed a skilled and experienced liar.
“Great. So you won’t mind meeting me at the Washington D.C. police station on 4
th
Street.”
“Very good, excellent choice. You assumed that you would be safe there with all those uniforms and guns right?”
“Something like that. Do you know the place?” Lance asked.
“Yes. Just a few blocks off the mall.” Seibel knew the place.
“That’s right. Between School and E.” Lance replied.
“You must have been there before, huh?”
“No, just standing right outside now. I’m going to step inside the station in 30 seconds. See you here at 7 or any time you’d like before then.”
The words hung there. Seibel was flabbergasted, knocked out.
How the hell did he do it?
He asked himself as he turned to hundreds of books on the shelves beside his desk. He would have known by now if he had asked communication ops to monitor and track this call. He still would have been amazed. But nonetheless, this kid had somehow tracked a virtually untraceable call. He’d left Dallas yesterday afternoon and traveled to Washington D.C. What a find.
“Very good. I’ll start heading that way shortly.” Seibel covered up any emotion in his voice with years, decades really, of experience and countless times like this in which he was presented with a situation bordering on the impossible.
“And you’ll come alone right?” Lance suggested.
“Yes, just me. You’ll recognize me from the smile on my face.”
Lance remained deadpan in his response. “I’ll be looking for you, Smiley. Come alone.”
Seibel added, “In the meantime Preacher, I want you to think about something.”
“What’s that?”
“Joining the Army.”
Chapter 15
Lance hung up the phone and looked both directions up and down 4
th
street just off the National Mall in Washington, DC. He could see the top of one of the buildings on the mall, the Smithsonian, he guessed.
It was his first time to the nation’s capitol. He’d devoured the road atlas folded in his jacket pocket and memorized the streets surrounding the mall. No time to go up to 5,000 or 10,000 feet and take in all in. He closed his eyes and caught his breath.
Lance had been riding a whirlwind for just over 27 hours and more than 1,300 miles. A half hour earlier, he was dropped off by a nice trucker from Anderson, Indiana. The police station seemed like a naturally safe place, but he’d just come up with that about three minutes ago. On the fly. Seat of his pants.
It had worked for about 21 years. He didn’t see an immediate reason to change. He looked briefly at the phone booth he’d just used. It was hanging up a phone yesterday that started him on his cross-country journey.
Twenty-seven hours earlier and 1,371 miles to the west and south.
He didn’t know where he was going with it, but right after hanging up from the first call to Seibel, he picked up the phone again and pressed “0.” Talking to operators had always been something of a treat for him because he could be anyone in the world and take the conversation in any million directions with the nameless, faceless Ma Bell operator at the other end of the line. They were almost always female.
“Operator, how may I help you?” A friendly female voice came on. Lance guessed her age at 39 or 40. He put her accent south from where he now stood which meant Louisiana, maybe Mississippi.
“Yes ma’am,” Lance affected an accent equal to or even more southern than the operator. “I just hung up from a call on this line with my brother and I’m afraid he’s going to hurt himself.”
“What’s that?” The operator asked.
Lance’s voice dripped with emotion and quivered. “I think he might kill himself. He just flunked out of boot camp and his girlfriend back home broke up with him. He just hung up on me a few seconds ago and I need to call him back or find out where he was calling from so I can get him some help.” His voice cracked.
“Oh my, oh my, okay just a moment sir. Let me do a quick check on that line.” The operator clicked away on her keyboard.
“Thank you so much ma’am. I really appreciate it.”
She came back on the line. “Can you please confirm the number you are calling from sir?”
“Yes ma’am,” he picked up the phone off the reception desk in the office he had come to take the oral assessments. The lights were out in the offices. He hadn’t turned any on after breaking in. He’d actually been a little surprised to find a working phone. It seemed not every prop had been cleared off the stage. “It is 214…”
“Okay. Thank you honey. Please remain on the line and I will get with my supervisor and a technician to research that call. Just a moment, you hold on now.”
“Thank you ma’am. I will.” He sniffed to stifle a cry.
When the operator returned to the line four minutes later, she had a supervisor and a network technician on as well. They were stumped at first by the number and relay process of the call that the phone had just made. The 800-number Lance had dialed had evidently gone into a transfer station that then moved it to an alternate network before returning to another terminal and in the process switched to another protocol before terminating in Virginia.
All of this went way over Lance’s head. He heard the operator and her supervisor hem and haw as the technician traced the call across the country. It was obvious from the technician’s voice that he found this one challenging. His approach was methodical, but his tone spoke of the urgency he was employing.
“Mclean, Virginia.” The technician stated with confidence. “Prefix 837, but I am having real difficulty getting to the actual post. Do we know if this is a home or a pay phone?”
“No sir. I called the number he gave me. I thought it might be on his Army base.” Lance took a wild swing at that one.
“I don’t see any military codes attached to this one, but I am sure of the terminal point.” The technician typed on his keyboard and read the information off his green screen.
“Mclean, Virginia?” Lance asked.
“Yes sir. Mclean.”
“Where is that?” He knew, of course. He’d seen it many times when memorizing roads in and around the nation’s capitol.
“Right across from Washington D.C.” the technician replied.
“Thank ya’ll so much.” Lance replaced the handset on the phone base and made his way out of the empty office and down the stairs he had raced three days earlier.
On the way down, he thought about Mclean, Virginia and its proximity to Washington, D.C. It could only mean government. Had to be. And government meant something like CIA or FBI. He cracked a smile as he rounded the stairwell onto the first floor and opened the door leading into the lobby. “This is just like the movies,” he whispered to himself giddily. Spooks, spies, espionage, assassinations. “Damn. This might get interesting yet.”
Walking across the lobby, he thought of his next steps. He could grab a taxi and be at Love Field in 15 minutes, but the airlines had computers that tracked names. He needed to travel at a much lower profile and pay cash if possible. He still had $300 or so, not forgetting the $2,700 he owed Philip and the Adolphus. The bus station was just a block away, but he still thought that too public a means of transportation.
No, he knew what he needed and he knew where to find it. He hit the street on Commerce, after saying so long to Alfred, the federal building security guard from Beaumont, Texas who enjoyed fishing for bass up on Lake Texoma. Alfred was Lance’s newest friend and let him enter the building with no problem after learning that Lance was a bass man. Lance wasn’t, of course. But he could tell a good fish story.
He jogged over to the Hilton and caught a cab. The driver was a little surprised to hear that Lance wanted to go to nearest truck stop. Once there, it took Lance exactly seven minutes to convince a trucker named George P. that he desperately needed a ride east. George P., the guy insisted on including the “P,” listened with compassion as Lance spun his yarn about an uncle and prison and regrets for things left unsaid.
George P. and Lance were on the road nine minutes later bound for South Carolina along Interstate 20. From there, the George P would hook Lance, who was calling himself Billy for this performance, with a fellow trucker heading north on 95. With good traffic, the route would take 23 hours.
Lance did more uninterrupted listening on that drive than he had in years. He devoured George P.’s road atlas along the way, paid for dinner, coffee and breakfast 13 hours later on the east side of Atlanta.
He did a bit of thinking as well, but only when George P. stopped talking. Did he really need to go to Washington? Was he doing it for spite or fun? He thought of Seibel and his knowing smile and firing the gun beside his head to try to wipe the smile off.
He didn’t hate the guy, but wouldn’t mind the opportunity to point a gun at him again. Lance reached into his pocket and grasped the handle of the gun for maybe the hundredth time. If George P. saw him do it, he hadn’t mentioned it.
One thing just kept rolling through Lance’s mind, turning over and over.
Why did they pick him?