The President's Henchman (44 page)

“That police escort would be comforting … if they can keep up.”

“They probably have a few fixed-wing planes that can. Important thing, though, they’ll be radioing ahead, clearing the roads for us.”

“That
is
good,” Welborn agreed.

“But the rest is up to us. Cops tried to set up a roadblock on a vehicle pushing 160 miles per hour, the debris field would cover three counties.”

“So your suggestion would be?”

Leo might have been a commuter driving to work with a cup of coffee in one hand for all the concern he showed. “If I had just a bit more confidence in that boy up there, I’d pull alongside and swap a little paint with him. Maybe throw a spark or two. Take the starch out of him.”

“Let’s not do that,” Welborn said.

Leo shot him a look. “You
really
used to fly jets?”

“Yeah. Give me a minute or two to adapt here, will you? There weren’t any bridge abutments where I worked.”

“Okay, maybe you’ve got a point. We’ll just squat on him then.”

Leo narrowed the gap between the Viper and the Chevy. There wasn’t room for a stray thought between the two cars. Welborn was able to read Cowan’s speedometer.

“The point of tailgating is?” he asked.

“It’s my comfort zone,” Leo said, “but I doubt it’s his.”

Or mine, Welborn thought. “You don’t want him comfortable?”

“I want him holding on for dear life and running out of gas real soon. Him going dry is our best play now.”

“There’s something I have to tell you,” Welborn said.

“What?”

Cowan goosed the Viper, swerved right, and shot into the lanes for I-495, the Washington Beltway. He gained maybe five feet on Leo for maybe two seconds. Once again, the Chevy drew close enough for Welborn to see Cowan’s instrument cluster.

“I was going to say he wasn’t running flat out, but he is now.”

Leo was having a grand time. “I’m beginning to like that ol’ boy.”

SAC Celsus Crogher was right where he belonged, guarding the president of the United States at Camp David, when he got the news.

“Holmes is out.”

The bulletin came from Winston Strawn, the officer in charge of the uniformed detail at the northwest gate of the White House.

“What do you mean
out?”
Crogher demanded.

“He left the building in a cab.”

“A cab?”
Crogher would have found it equally credible to hear McGill had been taken away in a flying saucer. “Who’s with him?”

“Nobody. Just the cabbie.”

“And you let him go?”

“He’s free, white, and over twenty-one.”

Strawn, being African-American and about to retire after thirty years of flawless service, felt free to be politically incorrect and crack wise to his boss.

“Besides,” he said, “who’s going to tell the president’s henchman no?”

Everyone in the Secret Service knew that Crogher hadn’t been able to do it.

Goddamn
that James J. McGill, Crogher thought. The SAC
really
wanted to quit. But that bastard McGill had been right. He’d never forgive himself if he left and something bad happened to Holly G. Like everyone else who spent any time with her, except her demented political enemies, Crogher had fallen in love with the president. Platonically, of course.

“Did you hear Holmes’s destination?” he asked.

“Negative.”

“But you got the cab’s number.”

“Affirmative.”

“Find that cabbie immediately. I’ll be touching down in thirty minutes.”

McGill stepped out the front door of his P Street building. He carried Dikki Missirian’s unconscious form. He laid the man down on the welcome mat outside of A-Sharp Sound. Dikki was more than heavy enough to activate the pressure plate under the mat. The light at the back of the business, near the recording studios, still glowed. Max Lucey would come out and find Dikki.

He’d see the Post-It note on the landlord’s chest:
Call 911. I’ll be up in my office. Jim McGill.

He’d have called for an ambulance and the Metro police if the phone in Dikki’s office hadn’t been disabled. As for Dikki himself, McGill hadn’t been able to rouse him, but his pulse was steady, and he showed no signs of physical distress. He had to be drugged.

Ketamine hydrochloride would be McGill’s bet.

He went back into the building. The prudent thing to do, of course, was wait for the Metro cops to come. Let them make the pinch. Lead Damon Todd away in handcuffs. Except he didn’t know the response time for the local PD. Should be pretty good for a gilded area like Georgetown, but if the cops already had their hands full on a Friday night with other calls, it could be an hour or more. Todd might slip away.

McGill wasn’t going to let that to happen.

He drew his gun and started to climb the stairs. Not a single one creaked. The silence was perfect for having second thoughts. Even if the Metro cops were busy, the Secret Service would come on the run. He arrived at the second-floor offices of Wentworth & Willoughby. No light came through the frosted-glass panel in the top half of W&W’s door. He tried the door. Locked.

Didn’t necessarily mean that Todd wasn’t inside. Dikki had keys to every door in the building; he kept them in his office. Where Todd had waylaid the landlord. So you had to figure the psycho-shrink had access to —

Jesus!

It could be Todd, not Max Lucey, who was inside A-Sharp Sound, and he’d left Dikki down there on the welcome mat with a note to call 911. Saying where he could be found, too.

Not a good time to get sloppy, he told himself.

Question was which way did he go: up or down.

Up, he decided. He was the reason Todd was in the building. He was the one who’d been lured there that night. That spoke of a desire for a confrontation. A showdown. Where would a lunatic like Todd most want that to happen? McGill’s personal space, of course.

McGill also found the setting apt.

He ascended to the third floor. The landing where lobbyists had once waited to court his favor looked as innocent as at any other time he’d seen it. The door to his suite from the hallway was on the left; the door to the stairs leading to the roof was straight ahead. Both were tightly closed. No light bled through either doorframe.

McGill glanced over his shoulder. No one was climbing the stairs behind him.

He tried both doors; they were locked. He used his left hand to turn the key in the door bearing his name on frosted glass. He pushed it open a couple of inches and waited. If Max Lucey was the one who found Dikki out front, it shouldn’t be too long before he heard the sound of an ambulance. On the other hand, if it was Todd downstairs, waiting McGill out, Dikki would be easy pickings for the first street thief to happen by.

McGill couldn’t just stay where he was and mark time.

He kicked the door to his office open and burst through the entryway like a sprinter coming out of the blocks. He cut left around the reception desk, skidded to a neat stop, and flicked a light switch with his gun hand. But just as if Thomas Edison had never been born, the lights stayed off.

Behind him, McGill heard a soft laugh mock his efforts.

He whirled, and, in the light from the hallway, he saw a cylindrical object heading straight at him. Not high where he could duck or low where he could jump. But smack-dab in the middle. A rib crusher. A gut buster. A fight ender.

Unless you knew Dark Alley.

“I know where he’s going,” Welborn said of Cowan. “Where he wanted to go, anyway.”

“Where’s that?” Leo asked.

They were loafing along at 140 mph. Welborn had grown accustomed to the speed. Liked it actually. He was able to enjoy the velocity without worrying about g-forces messing up his inner ear. The navy blue Viper was a mile or so ahead.

They didn’t have to worry about losing Cowan any longer.

“He hoped to take the Beltway to Route 50. From there you go east, and you’re in Annapolis. Where Cowan has a lot of Naval Academy buddies. Or go west and you come to Landover. Where Colonel Linberg lives. Unless she’s moved out by now.”

Welborn had given Leo an overview of his case earlier that night.

“So which is it? The guys or the babe?”

“He’s got to know he won’t get away. So if I was him —”

“The babe.”

“Colonel Linberg, definitely.”

“Too bad,” Leo said. “He had his only chance for female company earlier tonight.”

The fact was, Dexter Cowan was already caught. He just hadn’t given up spinning his wheels. His critical mistake had been getting on the Beltway. Acting with admirable speed, the highway cops in Maryland and Virginia had shepherded all other traffic to the shoulder of the road, or off it entirely, as circumstance allowed, and then the cops did what Leo said they wouldn’t. They set up roadblocks.

At every exit and entry ramp on the whole of the I-495 loop.

They didn’t use valuable police cruisers to do it. Oh, no. They brought in hundreds of out-of-service school buses and stacked them four deep across every ramp. They’d learn later that a pragmatic highway patrol officer working on the homeland security problem of how to trap terrorists driving a car bomb on the Beltway had come up with the idea. And it worked like a charm on a naval officer fleeing arrest. If Cowan wanted to end his days by turning his fancy car into a pile of scrap metal, more power to him.

Welborn and Leo followed along to make the bust in case Cowan saw the light of reason.

“I’ve been thinking about one or two things since all the excitement went out of the evening,” Leo said.

“Yeah, what’s that?”

“First off, that lady out in Falls Church, the captain’s wife.”

“Arlene.”

“I was wondering if what she did, prancing around up there in the altogether, maybe that was a signal for our boy to take off. Which he surely did.”

“Most people would think the opposite. Come hither, you know.”

“Well, yeah. But these two were getting a divorce. And what if even when things were good between them, she’d always liked to do it in the dark? He comes home tonight, sees her all brazen like she was, what’s he going to think?”

Welborn thought even a bonehead like Cowan would figure out something was wrong. He’d take off. Which was exactly what he did. And Arlene had expressed to Welborn her regrets at betraying her mate. Damnit! But how the hell could he prove complicity? There was no way. So he was going to write it up that Arlene had cooperated. He owed her that much … he thought.

So much of his job, it turned out, hadn’t been covered at Glynco.

“What else are you thinking?” Welborn asked Leo.

“Well, let’s say our boy hadn’t taken off. He goes inside, has his roll with the wife, she gets emotional as women are apt to do, and she confesses. Now we’ve got ourselves a hostage situation. What would you have done then?”

Looking at the road ahead, Welborn said, “I think he’s slowing down.”

“I believe you’re right. Out of gas most likely.”

“If he’d taken Arlene hostage, I’d have taken his car hostage.”

Leo grinned. “You think his car would mean more to him than his wife?”

“The Viper is his
new
love.”

“Good point.”

“Hey, what the hell’s he doing?” Welborn asked.

“That there’s called a bootlegger’s turn; it was nicely done, too.”

Cowan had spun his Viper counterclockwise 180 degrees.

He was headed straight back at the Chevy.

Closing speed between the two vehicles was already over 200 mph and climbing.

“Nurse, please.”

Daryl Cheveyo had awakened from a nap and remembered everything: who he was supposed to see; who was in danger; who was the threat. Respectively, they were the Deputy Director of Intelligence; James J. McGill, the president’s husband; and Dr. Damon Todd, the off-center psychiatrist who wanted to join the CIA and start a program of crafted personalities.

Todd had been casing McGill’s office building on P Street.

The DD needed to know about that.

The nurse entered his room, took one look at him, and said, “You’re feeling better, aren’t you? You look better. Let me get the doctor.”

“Yeah, get him. But first get me the deputy director.”

The nurse’s eyes narrowed. Maybe the patient wasn’t fully recovered.

“Please,” Cheveyo said in a calm voice. “I’m rational. I know what I’m doing. He’ll want to talk with me. A very important person’s life might be in danger at this very moment.”

Dark Alley taught that if someone came at you with a bat, you became a baseball. If you had room, you were a knuckleball, dancing crazily just out of reach while the batter took his cut and missed. If you didn’t have room, you were a fastball thrown at the batter’s head. That way he had to drop the bat and get the hell out of the way.