James Grippando - Born to Run

The photographer announced that he was finished, and Paulette stepped aside to let him out the door.

“Can I come in now?” she asked Edwards.

The detective was fixated on Chloe’s computer.

“Detective?” said Paulette.

He looked up. The crime scene investigators had finished with the carpet and had moved to the kitchen area.

“Come on over here,” said Edwards. “Take a look at this.”

Paulette ducked beneath the tape and crossed the room. Displayed on Chloe’s computer screen was the inbox to her e-mail, the typical collection of information: sender, date received, subject.

Edwards said, “Do you recognize any of these senders?”

Paulette took a closer look. There was the usual smattering of obvious spam-collectively, important messages for men with erectile dysfunction who needed to lose weight and borrow money fast. Paulette was only halfway down the list when another visitor knocked on the door frame.

“FBI,” the woman said with authority. “Step away from the computer.”

“What?” said Detective Edwards.

“Supervisory Special Agent Lloyd,” she said, as she stepped beneath the police tape and flashed a badge. Then he showed Edwards her papers. “We’re here to exercise a search warrant.”

“Since when does the FBI investigate homicides?” said Edwards.

“Could you step aside, please? I need the computer.”

Paulette watched the two law enforcement officers square their shoulders and stiffen their jaws, a sure sign of an ensuing state/federal jurisdictional squabble. The computer was obviously a significant piece of a larger puzzle that she hadn’t even begun to understand. Paulette studied the screen, but she couldn’t possibly commit Chloe’s inbox to memory. She snatched her iPhone from her purse and quickly snapped a photograph of the screen.

“What are you doing?” Agent Lloyd said sharply.

“Nothing,” said Paulette.

“Did you just take a photograph?”

“Gotta go. See ya.”

Paulette was under the tape and out the door faster than the FBI agent could say J. Edgar Hoover. She didn’t slow down until she was beyond the courtyard gate and outside on the sidewalk. A gust of cold wind nearly slammed her against her car, but it didn’t faze her. She stopped and pulled up the photograph on her iPhone. It was a little blurry, but the zoom made it legible.

More spam. A few messages looked legitimate, but nothing of moment-until she spotted the third one from the bottom. It had been delivered yesterday afternoon. The sender was unrecognizable, an apparently random selection of numbers and letters rather than a coherent screen name. The subject line was what caught her attention. It read more like the opening lines of a full message than a “re” line. In fact, it was too long to fit in the allocated space, so Chloe’s inbox had cut it off with an ellipsis:

I can bring down Keyes. No bullshit. Meet me at…

Paulette felt chills, and it had nothing to do with the December cold front. Even ten minutes earlier, the message would not have hit her with this impact, but the FBI’s sudden interest in Chloe’s computer changed the picture entirely. Last night’s unexpected phone call-Chloe’s last words to Paulette, perhaps her last words ever spoken to anyone-had just taken a quantum leap in credibility.

It looked like Chloe had a meeting with a source.

She really was on to a story.

A big one.

Jack exited the subway at Smithsonian Station and started walking along the National Mall toward the Capitol. He was following the instructions contained in his anonymous e-mail exactly. More important, he was doing it all under FBI surveillance.

“We see you,” said Andie, her voice transmitting through Jack’s tiny earpiece. “Move to the far left of the walkway if you can hear me clearly.”

Jack drifted left, comforted to know that he wasn’t going it alone.

It was an overcast Monday afternoon, the gray-white skies as cool and washed out as the surrounding sea of stone buildings and marble monuments. Jack stopped at the foot of the museum steps, his back to Madison Drive and the mall. He wasn’t looking to be a hero-especially a dead one. The National Mall was a busy place in the middle of the afternoon. Jack was fairly certain, however, that he was the only visitor wearing an FBI-issued Kevlar overcoat and FBI surveillance electronics.

“I’m here,” he said for Andie’s benefit.

“Don’t talk unless you have to,” she said, her voice in his earpiece. “If he sees your lips moving, he’ll know you’re wired.”

Jack stood and waited, glancing about nervously at strangers coming and going from the museum. The block-long, granite-faced building was a classic design, and the fact that Jack actually recognized it as Beaux-Arts style was yet another disturbing sign that he was indeed forty. His last visit to the Smithsonian had been as a teenager, one of several bonding trips that Harry Swyteck had arranged in hopes of dealing with the rough spots in their relationship the same way he had always dealt with them: by pretending they didn’t exist. The trip was nonetheless memorable, not because the Hope Diamond had turned out to be much smaller than Jack had expected, but because the burning question of the day was whether to commit suicide or homicide before his old man could drag him to every last one of the museum’s 126 million specimens.

Jack’s cell rang, and the display flashed “Out of Area,” no incoming number. Jack answered it, and the instructions came quickly:

“Go inside to the rotunda. Walk around the stuffed elephant and come back outside.”

The call ended before Jack could respond. It seemed like a pointless exercise, until Jack realized that the museums probably had metal detectors. It was a clever way for his caller to find out if he was armed. He wasn’t-but he did worry that his wire would be detected, screwing up everything.

Andie’s voice was suddenly in his ear, as if she could read his mind. “Don’t worry about the metal detectors. The museum only has enough staff to turn them on at random intervals. Your caller obviously doesn’t know that.”

Jack was only partially assuaged. It somehow seemed way too predictable that the terrorist with a bazooka would get through security, but the good citizen trying to thwart a possible presidential assassination would be stopped.

Jack climbed the granite stairs and entered through the revolving door. The rotunda was as impressive as he’d remembered it, though some things had changed. The simulated habitat around the eight-ton African bull elephant in the center appeared more natural. And in the post-9/11 world, there were of course metal detectors. As Andie had predicted, however, Jack breezed right past them without setting off alarms. The security guards didn’t pick up his FBI-issued surveillance equipment or Kevlar overcoat either. He paused to check out the elephant-he suddenly wondered if his caller was a Republican-and then he circled around and exited to the mall side of the museum.

Jack stopped at the top of the stairs, expecting the phone to ring at any moment. He heard only traffic noises from Madison Drive and the whistle of the wind through barren tree branches on the mall. A young mother pushed a stroller along the walkway. A man on the bench had his nose buried in the newspaper. At the base of the stairs, a docent was giving a brief history lesson to a group of tourists. Jack wondered if his caller had lost his nerve. It was starting to feel like a hoax, until he heard the voice from behind.

“This is for you.”

Before Jack could speak-before he could even turn around and see what the guy had in his hand-an entire team of undercover FBI agents sprang into action. The man reading the newspaper, the mother pushing the stroller, the docent and his tourists-every single one of them rushed forward, guns drawn.