Thin Line (31 page)

"He should." She paused, then added, "That was my ex-husband. His name's Joe Dunne. He's a good guy, we just had…"

"Philosophical differences?"

"Guess you could say that. I'm a New York cop, he's FBI."

"Like putting together a Baptist and a Catholic."

"I suppose."

"Bound to happen at some point, Reese. Better you found out sooner."

She said nothing, despite the fact that I'd called her by her first name.

"McSweeney, do something for me?"

"Sure, what?"

"Go check up on Clarissa. I trust the guy we left her with, but, you know."

"I do."

"Thanks."

"Think nothing of it. Hey, how bad are the philosophical differences between the two of you?"

"That's not a conversation we're having. Call me and let me know how she's doing."

We continued north on the route to Brandon's. Along the way, Bear and I didn't speak. I barely managed a thought beyond recounting everything that had
happened over the past few days. There had to be something I was missing, but no matter how many times I replayed it, I couldn't find the one thing that
would tie this together. Even the odd triangle with Dunne, Brett, and McSweeney seemed insignificant. Chances were she knew he'd been involved in the case
the entire time. They'd played me from all ends.

I supposed this was where Brandon's expertise would come into play. Hopefully, he'd managed to isolate the specific room that the signal had come from.
Even if not, narrowing it down to five offices would help. All we had to do was take those names and start drilling down. Committees, constituents, service
records. Something would give the guy, or gal, away. And the thread would cinch tight.

I pulled off on the same exit on I-83, short of Harrisburg. The roads were still covered in ice. The driveway still snaked through the woods. I didn't see
the cameras this time; it was too dark. But I knew they were there, swiveling to follow us through the woods. As we pulled into the clearing, the garage
door opened. I drove in, cut the engine, and Bear and I got out. The door to the house was open. Brandon was waiting for us in the kitchen.

The man smiled. It looked forced. At once, he went back to staring at his computer screen, biting his bottom lip on the right side. He tapped at his
keyboard, but not in any kind of pattern. A single key, repeatedly.

"What's wrong?" Bear said.

Brandon shook his head. He forced air through sealed lips.

"Tell us," I said.

He wheeled back a few inches and turned to face us. "Better I show you, because I don't think you'd believe me if I told you." He backed up some more and
maneuvered around the kitchen table. "Come over here."

Bear took the opposite side. I stood at the head of the table. Laid out on it was a diagram of the Cannon House Office Building. There were markings in
various spots. Coordinates, I presumed.

"Good work," I said.

Brandon said nothing. He reached for another sheet of paper. It was folded. He took his time opening it. Once unfurled, he sat it on a space above the
blueprints. On the printout was a general diagram, an outline of the building. There was only one mark made on the paper.

"That dot is where your signal stopped and transmitted for fifteen minutes and change." He dragged his finger across the printout. "It went from this
entrance to this exact spot. Stayed there. Then it exited the same door it came in through."

"Great," I said. "Tell us which offices line up with that spot and we'll take it from there. We can even bring the GPS, and you can watch from here and let
us know if we're even a hair off."

Brandon shook his head. He leaned over to his left and reached down. The process was painfully slow, with the man grunting as he forced his weak body to
contort into positions it hadn't formed in months or years. He returned with a clear piece of plastic.

"Bear," he said. "Grab a marker off the counter."

Bear did.

Brandon placed the plastic over the outline printout. "Now use that marker to trace the outline of the building and put an X on that signal marker. Then
transfer it to the blueprints."

Again, Bear did as instructed. After he finished the tracing, he slid the plastic diagram on top of the blueprints.

"I'd say that lines up," Brandon said. "Agree?"

I nodded. So did Bear.

"So take a close look and tell me what you see."

"Shit," Bear said.

"Shit," I said.

"Shit is right," Brandon said.

"A STAIRWELL?"

I couldn't believe what I was looking at. Everything we planned hinged on knowing one of the five possible offices Frank visited with the phone I'd given
him after the man had Bear left for dead and abducted the guy we'd been sent to kill. Instead, we had nailed down a stairwell.

"What the hell was he doing there for fifteen minutes?" Bear asked.

Brandon shrugged. "Too far away for anything to have been recorded. And, really, how much would this guy discuss in a stairwell?"

"Could have gone to the roof," I said. "Even the top floor landing. No one would be coming down. You'd hear every single person that entered. Their
footsteps would echo up. Wait until they exited, then resume."

"Where was Brett during this?" Bear said.

"The trunk, maybe. One of Frank's associate's houses. Don't know."

"So what can we do?" Bear asked.

Brandon backed up until his chair hit the wall. "Don't know how much I can help you guys from here on out. You get some signals, or a bug on Frank, I'm
your guy. But I already searched everything that's come through the past few days and there is nothing on any of y'all."

Bear said, "How can that be?"

"Got me, man. Almost like whoever is really behind this is off the grid." He wheeled back, pivoted, and slipped past me. "You know me, Jack. I can find
water in a rock in the desert. But this time, there's nothing but sand out there."

I said, "Nothing you've done is going to get you in trouble, right?"

"Me?" The light from the open refrigerator shone down on Brandon. He smiled wide. First time all night he looked confident. "They'll be searching
Indo-China for me. Or Siberia. The UAE. Hell, Mobile, Alabama if I want them to." He aimed a frail arm in the direction of his computer. "I route my
traffic all over the world. Can make it look like it originates from pretty much anywhere. None of it ever leads back to Harrisburg."

"OK." I glanced at Bear. The big man looked worse than earlier. The adrenaline had worn off, and every time he spoke, he winced or flinched. It was
counter-productive for him to even stand at this point. He needed to heal. "My man here had a rough day. I can leave him here to watch out for you if need
be."

"I'm good," Brandon said. "I see someone on my monitors that I don't like the looks of, they got a nasty surprise coming."

"He's good, Jack," Bear said with a slight edge to his voice. "Besides, I trust Brandon to take care of himself more than you."

I smiled. A weak effort at best. No one liked being frozen out. Bear was no exception.

"When's the last time either of you slept?" Brandon said.

Neither of us answered. I'm not sure either of us knew. A span of days like we'd had made it feel as though a month or more had passed. I'd reached a point
where my actions were on autopilot. This was good and bad. I could trust myself to get out of just about any situation. The problem was that I couldn't
trust myself to not get into the situation to begin with right now. Poor decision making was a concern.

"Crash here for the night," Brandon said. "You're safer here than anywhere else."

"Unless they bugged me when I went down," Bear said.

Brandon rolled his eyes as he made a production out of sweeping an arm out in front of himself. "Bells'd be ringing and chimes'd be chiming if you were
bugged, my man. Trust me, you're clean."

We decided to stay, get some rest, then start the day around five a.m. I found a bottle of Bud and nursed it on a broken-in leather couch that practically
swallowed me whole when I flopped back on it. I found the TV remote on the coffee table and switched the television on. None of the news broadcasts had
anything to say about the events of the day. Didn't expect them to.

As my eyelids grew heavy enough to remain closed, my phone buzzed inside my pants pocket. McSweeney.

"I checked on Clarissa."

"How is she?"

"Good. Seemed calm. That bodyguard you sent over is vigilant, to say the least."

"He give you trouble?"

"A bit." She paused, and then added, "Even called in my badge number to make sure I was legit. Anyway, I offered to stick around, too, but she declined.
Can't blame her, I guess. I'd feel plenty safe with that guy around."

"He's good at what he does. Always has been." At that moment, my mind slowed down. One less thing to worry about. Clarissa was safe.

"I'm gonna close this case, Jack."

Make that two things.

She continued. "In fact, I'm going to walk it to the back of the storeroom and bury it under all the unsolved cases from the sixties. No one will look in
there. Not with all the crap we've got going on in this city now."

"I appreciate that," I said. "There are things we still don't know. You sure you don't want to get to the bottom of it? Doesn't your brother? Your ex?"

She sighed into the phone. "I'm sorry about that, Jack. I knew he was working the McLellan angle. And before you ask, no, he didn't give me any of the
details. He always withheld information from me, both in our professional and private lives. He kept too many secrets. Probably the biggest reason we
didn't last."

"No worries, Reese. What about your brother? He seemed adamant about figuring this out earlier."

"Not anymore. In fact, he's the one that told me to do this. Said he just wanted to put it behind him." She took a deep breath, exhaled into the phone. It
sounded as though a hurricane force gust had taken over the line. "He's going to get out. Take his money, cut his losses, disappear. That's what he told
me. He also wanted me to tell you not to worry. He won't seek revenge on you for taking the job, or on whoever ordered it. I don't know if that's Joe's
influence on him, or what, but he honestly sounded at peace with the decision."

Discussing this over the phone made me uncomfortable, but the connection was secure. The number she dialed in on would route through a server that, if the
computer determined another party was on the line, or any kind of monitoring had been put in place, it would disable the call.

"Let him know that if he needs anything, I'm here to help. And I still want to figure out how and why this went down the way it did."

She laughed. "He knew you'd say that. Not the help part, but figuring it out. Jack, he insisted that you let it go."

I said nothing.

"OK. Anyway, give me a call sometime, if you're in the city."

We ended the conversation there. I tried to actively replay the conversation in my mind, but it was pointless. A few minutes of staring at the television
was all it took for my eyelids to grow so heavy I couldn't lift them. But then, trapped in a place between sleep and wakefulness, I thought about the
recent revelations. What I knew. What I didn't. Working backwards, certain things stood out to me.

In the span of a few hours, Brett had gone from telling me to end this to having his sister tell me to drop it. Why? What had happened in the time after we
left him? Had his ex-brother-in-law provided him with new information? Was it something we could use?

The only way to find out what was going on was to talk to Brett directly.

Frank's visit to a Cannon HOB stairwell bugged me. Did it mean anything at all? Meeting in the stairwell led me to believe that whoever he went to see
played a big part in this. Or it was a routine visit. If the former, could I get Frank to sell them out?

Brett's involvement in the incident in Paris - and on a larger scale, with the terrorist cell - still nagged at me. Too many things that didn't add up. And
the fact it led to al-Sharaa seemed too great a coincidence. Too perfect, too easy. At best, I had access to half the files that would clarify things,
assuming I could get a contact in the CIA to help me out. Would Pierre give up what the French had compiled? Maybe he'd divulge a little information, but
he had bigger things to worry about now.

Finally, why had McLellan been at Brett's apartment? Had the ex-SEAL come with him? Or was the older guy already there? Maybe someone had sent him in for
clean up, and he arrived afterward? I'd settle for knowing the truth about McLellan. My gut told me he'd had an order to kill someone. Was that someone
Brett? Or me? Or perhaps us both?

In the end, it was he who'd lost his life.

Anything I had been told about the events up until now had to be discounted. Brett's request I drop it, leave it, seeped down. Was it worth it to
investigate any further? I supposed I needed to talk with Frank again. So long as the man had plans on continuing to go after Brett, Bear and I were in
danger of being targeted as well.

Morning, I decided, was when I would make my decision.

ICE PELTED THE windows like dozens of pebbles had been tossed against the glass. The sound roused me from my sleep. I opened my eyes to darkness interspersed
with the soft, pulsing blue and green glow of lights emanating from Brandon's computer equipment.

I reached out for my phone, swung my feet out, and sat up.

Four a.m.

Bear was stretched out on the other couch, his legs extending a good foot past the armrest. He snored lightly every fourth or fifth breath. The floorboard
creaked the first step I took. The big man didn't notice. Not like him. But, after what he'd been through, his sleep was deeper than normal.

I went to the kitchen and started a pot of coffee. Eventually the thoughts I'd fallen asleep to circled back around. A decision was nowhere closer than it
was four hours ago. I'd start with Frank, and my message would be simple: We end this now, or I'll go live with the biggest tell-all the shadowy side of
D.C. has ever seen. It'd be the kind of thing that would make hardened men weep themselves to sleep at night. I'd end it there if he agreed and provided
confirmation that the job was terminated. I wouldn't be bothered by unanswered questions.