David Ellis - The Wrong Man

“The Hartz Building,” said Lee. “At noon. And guess where it ends?”

“Either the state or federal building at one o’clock,” I said.

“Close enough. One o’clock is probably a safe estimate. The procession should get there earlier. But even if it does, there’s a brief outdoor memorial in the federal plaza following the march. There will be probably a hundred people in the plaza. Who knows, could be five hundred. Could be thousands.”

We were driving now, presumably toward that very federal building. A helicopter flew overhead. I wondered if it had anything to do with this.

“So I take it the governor’s coming again this year?” I asked.

“Like always, yeah.” Lee paused. “Governor Trotter, Mayor Champion, and Senator Donsbrook are going to be there.” He looked back at me.

“They should cancel the whole memorial,” I said. “You guys should evacuate the entire downtown.”

Osborne reacted with a bitter sniff. “If we reacted that way based on the level of information you’ve provided us, do you know how often we’d evacuate the downtown?”

It seemed like a rhetorical question. “A lot?” I said.

“A lot. Our citizens would live in constant fear. Commerce would shut down. Our economy would collapse.”

A little heavy on the drama, but I took his point. That was his job, to do the worrying for the rest of us. I didn’t envy him.

Clearly, these guys had taken me more seriously than I’d realized, but still-something new must have developed to make them think I was onto something. They had developed more information. “What happened that made you guys suddenly believe me?” I asked.

A pause followed. I assumed there was rank within the car, and Osborne had it, so it was his call. “We don’t work on ‘believe’ so much as credibility of evidence,” he said. “But you’re right. We just recently learned that three You-Ride truck rentals were made, from three separate locations, all charged to the same bogus credit card, over a week ago. We’ve reviewed security cameras in the stores and it was all the same guy.” He showed me a grainy black-and-white photo of a stocky guy in a flannel and blue jeans, wearing a baseball cap and a silly-looking beard. ZZ Top at a Cubs game. But I recognized the face.

“Bruce McCabe,” I said. Randall Manning’s attorney, recently departed.

Osborne nodded.

McCabe rented three trucks. Carriers for bombs. “Have you located them?”

“No. Any thoughts? Anything from what you’ve learned that would give you an idea where they might be?”

“Nothing off the top of my head. Except that they’d probably be parked in three separate locations.”

“Probably,” said Agent Clemens.

“And why the Hartz Building first?” I asked. “Then two separate bombings of government buildings an hour later? It doesn’t make sense. If a building went down in the commercial district, wouldn’t you guys immediately barricade all government buildings?”

“Sure we would,” said Clemens. “But does Randall Manning know that?”

“Sometimes with these radicals, logic doesn’t play into it,” Osborne said. “Or it’s logical to them, but not to us.”

That was comforting.

“I would probably want the trucks close by,” I said. “Maybe already parked here in the city. Or someplace close. If I were you, I’d search every place a You-Ride truck could be parked right now. Parking garages, alleys, whatever.”

Osborne looked back at me. He didn’t seem impressed with my suggestion. I figured that was because he was already doing that very thing.

Everyone went quiet for a while.

“What about those two guys-Patrick Cahill and Ernie Dwyer? I mean, those guys probably know everything.”

Osborne was shaking his head before I finished my sentence. “We haven’t been able to crack them. Those boys are hard-core. We don’t know if there’s an operation at all, of course. And if there is, I’m not sure they would have operational knowledge. If everything you believe about Randall Manning is true, then he has managed to prepare this entire attack without drawing our attention. It means he’s meticulous. It wouldn’t shock me if the soldiers didn’t know the details.”

We reached the federal building-known derisively by the criminal element as the “brown building”-and drove down the ramp leading underground. I could already see a heightened presence at the perimeter of the building.

“Put on your thinking cap, Jason,” said Lee. “It’s all hands on deck. We need all the help we can get.”

The federal agents and I went to the fifteenth floor of the federal building, which appeared to be command central. I’m not usually the nosy sort, and this wasn’t a tour-they were walking me along one wall and taking me into a conference room-but I snuck a few peeks around me. There were projection screens showing satellite coverage of what I assumed to be the city’s downtown and near north. Agents were tapping on computer keyboards and reviewing all sorts of information and speaking into headsets.

I really didn’t have a sense of the scope of this operation. What Osborne had said to me in the car rang true-they reviewed threats or potential threats all the time, on a daily basis, around the clock. Where did this one fall in the spectrum?

Inside the conference room, there were documents lying on a long table. There were dossiers on Randall Manning, Stanley Keane, Bruce McCabe, Patrick Cahill, and Ernie Dwyer. There were photographs of Summerset Farms that looked awfully familiar, as well as shots of Global Harvest International.

There were photographs of a standard You-Ride rental truck, too. It was a yellow truck with a front cabin and then a large cargo area behind. Not the longest model-not quite the size of truck you’d rent to move out of your house-but not the shortest, either. I was no expert, but there had to be plenty of room in that cabin to transport a bomb.

“Stay in here and let us know if anything occurs to you,” said Osborne. “We’ll be in and out ourselves. We’ll have questions, you might have an idea. That kind of thing. Remember, the key is trying to figure out the location of those three trucks. The best outcome is that we stop them before they get anywhere near their targets.”

“I’m impressed,” I said. “Usually you feds think you’re so smart, you don’t need any help.”

He stared at me for a moment, then smiled. “True enough, Kolarich. But if you’re right and something’s about to go down, then we’re way, way behind these guys. We’ve only had a couple of days, and they’ve probably had a year. I’ll take all the smart minds I can get.” He nodded at me. “And you can help, too.”

A nice parting jab. I spent the next two hours reviewing everything I could get my hands on. To their credit, the feds had done a pretty thorough job, on very short time, of trying to put together information on Manning and GHI and all of this. It was probably a good thing that Lee Tucker and I had some history and that, no matter what he may have thought of me on a personal level, I had established some credibility with him. From my circumstantial ruminations, they had managed to do a lot of digging in short order.

I was in a windowless room and time seemed to be a fleeting concept, which was interesting given the ticking clock with which we were working. My watch, and stomach, told me it was approaching dinnertime.

My cell phone buzzed. I didn’t recognize the number, so I didn’t answer. But I listened to the voice-mail message. It was Dr. Baraniq, our expert, in his clipped, precise manner, wondering what the time frame might be for his testimony this week in the Stoller trial.

I’d forgotten to call him and give him the news that there wouldn’t be any testimony. It brought me back momentarily from a terrorist plot to Tom’s case, a case I felt, deep down, that I had botched. I’d been arrogant. I’d overplayed my hand.