The Shop (22 page)

They went through the house. Jolie doubted Kay was capable of violence, but it was second nature for Jolie to question assumptions. Wary, she kept her eye on Kay’s purse. She knew Kay carried. She had a small snub-nosed revolver, a “girl’s gun.” Kay moved with jittery purpose. They landed in the kitchen, the old round-shouldered refrigerator humming. A card from the realty office sat on the round table. Kay picked up the card, which had been folded in half so it stood up in a triangle. She took out a McPeek Realty pen and scribbled something on the card.

Kay finished writing and looked at Jolie, her breath coming quickly. Her arm draped over the shoulder bag, which rested high on her body.

Jolie looking for a quick move.

“Zoe told me she’s not going to Brown.”

“Why not?”

“She told me she doesn’t want to go, and I can’t make her.”

“What does she plan to do?”

“The big thing? The most important thing? Get back in Riley’s good graces. Be best friends again. She cried for an hour
straight
last night. All because of you. She…she threatened suicide.”

The thunder in Jolie’s chest grew. She saw Kay’s hand inch toward the clasp of her bag. “Do you believe her?”

“I don’t know. She was destroyed. What did you say to her?”

Jolie told her the truth. Eye on the shoulder bag, she told her that she asked if Luke knew about the passageway. If they had been spying on people at the cabanas. Thinking, it wasn’t that important. Thinking, Riley was overreacting. Thinking, you were a kid once, too.

“Are you investigating my family? Is that it? You befriend me, worm your way into my family, and then try to gin up something against us? Is this all revenge?”

“Revenge?”

She swept her arm out. “For
this
! For the squalid, stupid lives your mother and father led, all because she wouldn’t listen to reason? And now you’ve spoiled everything for my daughter. Just what do you want to know about my family?”

Jolie stuck with what she knew to be true. “I did not try to worm my way into your family. If you recall, I never even wanted to set foot on Indigo. I was not interested. And my parents loved each other—”

“Loved each other! You don’t know the first damn thing about their relationship.”

Kay held out the card, and Jolie took it. Kay had written “Belle Oaks,” on it, and underneath, “Tallahassee.”

“Belle Oaks?”

“Yes, Belle Oaks.”

“What is it?”

But Kay didn’t appear to be listening. She stared into middle space, in her own world—unaware of Jolie. She was working something out behind her eyes. Then her expression cleared, as if she’d decided on something. “Did you see the bathroom?”

“The bathroom?”

“Miss Baby Soap—did you see the bathroom?”

“Yes I saw it, the last time I was here.”

Kay said nothing. Went back into that middle space. Jolie could almost feel the electricity in the air between them. Kay was like an exposed wire. Jolie had the feeling that if they touched, she would get a shock.

Then Kay came out of it again. When she spoke, her voice sounded neutral, almost dead.

“Right now, the way I’m feeling, I could do you real harm. You know why I brought you here? No, you don’t.” She stopped. The air seemed to go out of her. “This is fucked.”

Jolie had never heard Kay use that word. “Kay? What’s this about?”

“I can’t. You deserve it for what you did, but I’m not like you. I’m not going to be the one to tell you. I can’t.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re the detective. You figure it out.” She hitched her bag higher on her shoulder. “This is the end, though. We’re not friends anymore.” She turned and walked to the front door, opened it, and was gone.

Jolie’s ears burned. What was Kay talking about?

I’m not going to be the one to tell you
.

Kay brought her here to show her something. Something that would hurt her.

Jolie couldn’t fathom what she could have asked Zoe that would upset Riley so much. It was clear Zoe wanted to be Riley’s friend in the worst way. Kids, these days especially, could be devastated by bullying. They could think the whole world was falling apart, that their lives were worthless. Yes, Zoe could quit college over this. Yes, Zoe could contemplate suicide. Maybe Jolie had been so intent on the prize, she had forgotten that.

She looked at the Realtor’s card. It was made of good stock. Pleasant to the touch, excellent production values. Jolie looked at the inside again.
Belle Oaks
.
Tallahassee
. It meant nothing to her.

The bathroom. Jolie walked down the short hall to the open doorway. Kay had used the word squalid, but that description didn’t quite fit. The place was gloomy, sad, and small. Jolie had a hard time picturing young love flourishing here.

Loved each other!
Kay had said it with such contempt. Jolie looked in at the bathroom, glimpsed the cheap aqua tile she remembered from last time, when she took a cursory look through the house. The place had been cleaned, but she sensed an underlying grunge beneath the surface.

This was the real home of the Petal Soft Soap Baby. Her mother had bathed her in this bathtub. This room was nothing like the photo spread in the magazine—everything fresh and clean and white. This was the reality. Just two young people who loved each other and their baby—

She heard Kay’s scornful voice again.
Loved each other!

Jolie pushed the door open further, thinking of her small family, “just the three of us” as her dad liked to say. She thought about what little childhood she’d had here. The Soap Baby’s house. No memories. The card Kay had given her pricked against her palm—Belle Oaks. A bad feeling welled up inside, and her hand clenched, crushing the card. Something hot and hard as iron clamped around her chest, making it hard to breathe.

Then came the thunderclap, the chasm yawning underneath her feet. The feeling she was being crushed to death, blackness dropping like a curtain over her eyes. Her heart rate jumped into the red zone, fear hurtling through every synapse and nerve.

As he approached his building on F Street, Mike Cardamone glanced at the American flag flying above the mansard roof. It never failed to inspire him. He loved this country—its strength, its resilience, the fact that it was a beacon of light to the world—even if the world didn’t appreciate it. He climbed the steps briskly to the back entrance, glancing at the gold plaque by the door. Whitbread Associates, LLC. Suites 201 A-E. Discreet, not showy. Old Washington—exclusive.

He’d come a long way from trading fire with Iraqis in the heat and sand of Desert Storm. Even his stint at the CIA seemed like a century ago. He was where he wanted to be—the CEO of an up-and-coming security firm in DC.

His Jamaican administrative assistant told him the new advertising material was on his desk. Her name was Filigree, no kidding, and she wore bright colors, bracelets, and scarves; she gave everybody in the building the willies, but she was the best assistant he’d ever had.

He walked into his inner office and set his briefcase down on the chair by his massive mahogany desk. He could look out the bay window and see the Old Executive Office Building from here, but today he barely noticed it. He had a lot on his mind.

Two boxes sat on the desk. He opened one of them and took a promotional booklet off the top of the stack.

“Whitbread Associates LLC is uniquely positioned to address the challenges of a perilous world, drawing on experience, ingenuity and versatility to meet the global problems of the twenty-first century. We offer a roster of incisive strategies that transcend the traditional values of the past, forging a new order in an increasingly uncertain world.

“Whether you wish to open new markets in out-of-the-way places, require due diligence on recent acquisitions, or seek new strategies for old problems, Whitbread Associates LLC offers a full roster of services.”

Then the bullet points:

“When a Dallas CFO was kidnapped and held for ransom, a Whitbread team was sent to recover him, with a net result of two dead kidnappers and a fortune saved.

“When a foreign minister of an oil-rich country needed counterterrorism experts to protect their oil fields, Whitbread Associates LLC stood guard.”

“When a well-regarded pharmaceutical company fell prey to product tampering, Whitbread Associates LLC tracked down the culprit, who is currently serving a lifetime sentence in a federal prison.

“If you have a problem, we can solve it.”

He read it over, smiling. They’d managed to squeeze everything into this striking six-page booklet: risk assessment; providing due diligence on prospective mergers; personal protection for foreign and domestic executives; stolen asset recovery; and protection of prominent individuals and companies from media attacks.

Only one thing bothered him. If the actions of one unit ever saw daylight, he might as well take these boxes of slick booklets and chuck them in a landfill.

One small division, burrowed deep within Whitbread LLC like the smallest Russian nesting doll, could bring down the whole company. Whitbread Associates did many things, every one of them at a high level. But one division—a paramilitary unit, a domestic version of the Joint Special Operations Command—had become a liability.

Business was good. Mike was poised to reap the rewards of a decade of war, individual freedom, and intense paranoia. But the pet project they’d come up with during one of those fishing trips off Cape San Blas was outdated, and worse, dangerous. There was a new administration now, and that bitch with the Texas twang must have been a bookkeeper before she became the president of the United States. She had unloosed the bean-counters, and pretty soon they would get to Whitbread’s place on the ledger, and someone would start asking questions. Like: Just what do you do? What exactly are you outsourcing? At the very least, they’d cut Whitbread loose. At worst, they might start an internal investigation inside the DOJ.

The big money was overseas. Face it: the unit had outlived its usefulness.

Mike stared out the window at the sullen summer sky.

Times had changed. Celebrities weren’t the draw they once were. It used to be the media flocked to a Paris Hilton, or a Britney Spears, or a Lindsay Lohan. If one of them stubbed a toe, it was big news. But with all the troubles the country had suffered lately, there seemed to be a change of tone. People were preoccupied with their own problems, not personalities.

One thing the American people
weren’t
interested in: how the U.S. government did its business—even its dirty business. They were interested only when the government raised taxes. Then it was Katie Bar the Door. Nothing else mattered to them. They were too busy trying to hold on to their mortgages or keep their kids in college.

Frankly, the program he’d thought up along with the (now deceased) president and the attorney general wasn’t necessary anymore.

Although you have to admit, it did come in handy when the veep killed that boy.

Filigree brought in a contract for him to sign. Today she wore a saffron peasant blouse, a purple and green print skirt, and a red sash.

Moments after the boy’s body hit the water miles off Cape San Blas, the operation was a go. Doubtful anyone would have raised a stink about a promiscuous gay kid, but the vice president’s sexual proclivities had made the cover of the
Enquirer
twice. Even though it was the kind of sensational stuff the voting public as a whole ignored, the story had been released into the ether, like an invisible gas waiting for a lit match.

The lit match couldn’t have come at a worse time.

The day of the VP’s trip down to Indigo, Owen Pintek’s chief of staff received a call from a writer with
People
magazine concerning their upcoming article on Owen and a male prostitute.

People
wasn’t the
Enquirer
. This would be believable. In the interview, the prostitute, who was amazingly photogenic, said he feared Pintek.

And where was Owen? Down in Florida, choking the life out of a young man as if nothing had happened.

And so Whitbread deployed its A-Team to Aspen before the
People
article hit.

Mike was stationed in Kuwait during Desert Storm. He saw his share of oil rig fires, and he saw how KBR dealt with them—by setting off massive explosions that sucked the oxygen from the fire, thereby giving it nothing to feed on. Fight fire with something bigger—an explosion.

They’d needed to manufacture a virtual explosion to take up all the media’s considerable resources, something that would suck the air out of everything else in the news—

And it worked. The media always chased the Next Big Thing—one bright shiny object after another. The murders in Aspen swallowed the news week whole, like a python swallows a pig.

One thing Mike took away from it, though, was the realization that Indigo was bad mojo. Place was like a black hole, swallowing up all the good they had done, almost as if it were cursed. When you thought about it, where did the veep get carried away and actually
kill
a young man? On Indigo Island.

Franklin was a liability. Mike was sure Grace knew about the unit. Right there, that was enough. Not only that, but you couldn’t rely on Frank in any way. He’d turn on you as easily as he’d turn on his worst enemy. He was kind of endearing in a bumbling way. But the man had nothing inside him that was constant or reliable. It was all about self-preservation with Frank—he went on pure instinct. Like a cockroach.

Mike took his lunch at his desk, a chicken Caesar sandwich from Cosi. Outside, the traffic was picking up. Horns honking. Cars whooshing by after the light. Mike could smell Filigree’s perfume—patchouli oil mixed with the scent of sandalwood. He’d told her to stop burning that fucking incense! The last thing he wanted to do was make the place smell like there were foreigners doing business with his firm, even if Whitbread worked mostly with foreign governments now.

He wondered for the thousandth time why he put up with her. Realized that if he ever fired her, she’d probably lay a curse on him.

But nothing could spoil today. He was relieved to have finally made the decision. It would be easy to erase all traces of the Shop. He’d set the unit up so there would be no blowback. From the beginning, the operatives had been kept in the dark. They didn’t know exactly where their paychecks were coming from. They only knew their employer was associated in some way with the United States government, that they were working for God and country. But they didn’t know the who or the how or the why. The company was concealed—again, like the Russian dolls, dummy company inside dummy company.

Long ago, Mike had drawn up a cover story in case he ever needed it, revolving around Grace Haddox’s church. The weird but charismatic minister, speaking in tongues and making the news regularly with his antics. He fit the mold—the Jim Jones/David Koresh mold. There was even a rival Congolese church with ties to human trafficking and money laundering—a group that would be easy to blame.

One last black op for the unit, and they would be disbanded and sent to one of the foreign divisions.

Keep it simple. Use both teams. Two targets—the cultist church and the attorney general’s compound. Take care of everything in one swift motion. The result would be a dangerous cult consumed by a cleansing fire. By sunrise, he would have wiped out every trace of the Shop.

The phone rang. Filigree came on the line. “Franklin Haddox, sir. Do you want to talk to him or should I make an excuse?”

Franklin? Was he a mind reader?

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer
. “It’s okay, Fil, put him through.”

Frank’s voice came on the line. “Mike.”

“How are you doing, Frank?”

“Not so good.”

“What do you mean, not so good?”

“I think the FBI is onto us.”

“Calm down. What makes you think the FBI could possibly know anything about what we’re doing?”

“I think…I think they’re watching me.”

“You’re paranoid.”

“Someone followed Grace home last weekend, from Tallahassee.”

“From the church?”

“What does it matter where she was? Jesus! You need to come down here. We need to have an emergency meeting.”

“I can’t come now. I’m in the middle of—”

“Right now, Mike. I’m this close to calling my lawyer and seeing what kind of a deal I can get.”

“For Christ’s sake, man, get a grip! No one can prove anything.”

“For all I know they’re tapping us right now.”

“This is a secure line, remember?”

“It’s time to pull the plug.”

“Well, we’re going to need to talk about—”

“You need to come down here, Mike.”

“No can do, Franklin.”

“There’s a jet waiting for you.”

“I thought you sold your jet.”

“Netjets. You’d better be on that plane, or you just might be the last man standing. If you’re not here by five p.m., I’m calling my lawyer. And we’re going to throw you to the wolves.”

“Frank—”

“Be on the plane, Mike. If you aren’t, if you aren’t here at Indigo by five p.m., you can kiss your ass goodbye.”

He hung up.

Mike looked at the phone in his hand. He had never heard Franklin Haddox talk that way.

He had no illusions. Frank meant every word he said. He was probably speed-dialing his lawyer right now.

Mike thought maybe he
should
go. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to get down there where the action was, but he’d prefer to maintain control by taking his own jet.

Unfortunately, both of Whitbread’s jets were already in Florida, one in Tallahassee, the other at a private airfield near Port St. Joe. They would stay there until early tomorrow morning. The jets were on standby. They would be used to get his teams out of harm’s way as soon as possible.

Both operations were scheduled for the small hours of the morning. Ultimately, it would be up to the teams when to go in and what resources they would use to complete the mission. He didn’t want to second-guess them. But now Mike was worried.

Clearly, Frank had some kind of sixth sense. Like a cockroach, scuttling out of the light just before you bring down your shoe.