Дэвид Балдаччи - Long Road to Mercy

Pine said, “Only I don’t know if it’s because he actually did it, or because I knew he was in the area at the time and I wanted to believe I finally had an answer to what happened to my sister.”

“I can see your dilemma.”

“You know about Tor?”

“Of course. I was at the Bureau when they captured him in Seattle. He’d killed women and young girls in the Southwest, too. One in Flagstaff.”

“And one in Phoenix and one in Havasu City. Those three sites formed a triangle.”

Blum nodded thoughtfully. “Right. I remember now. He did mathematical patterns. That’s how they caught him. What an idiot.”

Pine shook her head. “Granted, Tor is missing some key chromosomes, but he’s no idiot.”

“So you met with him?”

“I did.”

“How did it go?”

“Badly,” replied Pine.

“Did he admit to taking your sister?”

“No. I didn’t expect him to. Certainly not at the first meeting.”

“First? So you’re going to see him again?”

“That’s my plan.”

“With what goal?” asked Blum.

“The truth . Call me naïve, but it’s the only goal I’ve ever had.”

“And if you don’t get it? Because I just don’t see a creep like Tor giving that up, ever. I could see him twisting you in knots while he plays all of this for a game. What else does he have to do up there?”

“That’s a chance I’ll have to take.”

Before Blum could respond, Pine’s burn phone buzzed.

She looked at the message. It was from Kurt Ferris.

Roll right now. They know where you are. They’ll be there in ten.

“Let’s go,” barked Pine.

Pine and Blum grabbed their bags, which they’d never unpacked, and raced down to the parking lot.

Sixty seconds later the Mustang blew out of the underground garage and headed south. Pine turned at the next corner and then worked her way back around, to where she was three blocks away from the condo building and sheltered just inside the mouth of an alleyway.

“What are you doing?” asked Blum.

“Just making sure of something.”

A minute later, four black SUVs rolled up to the condo building and about twenty soldiers in military gear climbed out and flooded into the lobby.

In the Mustang, Blum looked at Pine. “Is that what you wanted to see?”

Pine nodded and drove away from the condo building.

“Kurt didn’t tell me in the text who was coming. I thought it might be the Bureau.”

“Well, whatever, that was definitely close. How do you think they found out we were staying there?”

“Military intel has eyes and ears everywhere. And there are cameras all over the place. Luckily, Kurt found out about it somehow and was able to warn us.”

“Big Brother lurks,” said Blum.

“Big Brother on steroids. And they’re going to be coming after us, full bore.”

“So which one do you want to be?” asked Blum abruptly.

Pine shot her a glance as she turned onto the highway and punched the gas. “What?”

“Do you want to be Thelma or Louise?”

They paid in cash at a motel in Stafford County, Virginia, about an hour south of DC.

They settled into the small, drab room, again leaving their bags packed, as they had throughout the trip.

Blum sat on one of the twin beds.

“Do you think Kurt will get into trouble over this? Allowing us to stay at his place?”

“I had told him before to just plead ignorance. As far as he was concerned, I was a friend requesting a place to stay while he was out of town and I was in town. He had no way to know about what I was really doing.”

“How do you think he knew they were coming for us?”

“Kurt’s with CID. He has lots of friends in the military, of course, and in the intel area. They must have tipped him off, or else he heard some chatter through the vines he listens to.”

“What do you believe the FBI thinks about all this?”

Pine sat down on the other bed and took off her shoes and lay back. “Hard to tell. They know I lied about where I was going. They know I’m working this case after I was ordered off it. They probably know about the two guys at Dulles Airport by now.”

“Do you think the Bureau has tied in Simon Russell to all this?”

“Anyone’s guess. And they may not know about the Army chopper that took Priest and his brother away. Hell, they may not even be looking into this at all.”

“Why not?”

“National security trumps all. They might have gotten called off, like they tried to call me off.”

“What would an overthrow of the government look like?” said Blum slowly.

“In other countries, the president or a group of generals takes over the media and says due to — fill in the bullshit reason — martial law is being declared and elections are being suspended because there are enemies of the country all over, and also in high places. That justifies them snubbing their noses at democratic norms. Then the president says he’s going to serve for life. I mean look at what happened in China. Or the generals could drive tanks to the capital and tell everyone that they’re in charge and will save them. All the citizens have to do is follow orders. Or it could be a group of top-level advisors pulling off a junta. Or a bunch of billionaires tired of simply throwing money at the problem through their super PACs, and opting for a more direct route to get what they want.”

Blum stared at her. “What can we do about it? Really?”

“This is new territory for me, Carol. At Quantico, they didn’t have a course on countering a coup of the U.S. government. Maybe they need to rethink that.”

“What’s our next move?”

In answer, Pine took out the pages with Ben Priest’s files on them. “We have to crack the password for the flash drive. And the answer may be in Priest’s other file names.”

Pine opened her laptop on the bed and set the pages with the file lists next to it. She said, “Priest has shown himself to be the sort who bases passwords on personal items.”

“What else might he have based the password on?” asked Blum.

“Something in his house, maybe?”

“What was in it besides the basketball and the jersey?”

“Again, not much that seemed personal to the man.”

“How about something personal but not connected to his house?”

“What else is there?” asked Pine. “He has a brother who has kids. That makes them Ben Priest’s nephews. Wait a minute, you had lunch with his wife. Did you—”

“Of course I did. Billy and Michael are their names.” Blum thought for a moment. “Billy is eleven and Michael is nine.”

Pine jotted all of this down on a slip of paper. “Any other details?”

“Billy likes to water and snow-ski and is the pitcher on his Little League team. He’s terrified of having to date when he becomes a teenager. Michael is the reader in the family, plays lacrosse, and often gets on his mother’s last nerve. And he plays bass guitar. They both spend too much time on social media, have their phones glued to their hands, especially Billy, and they think their dad’s sole purpose in life is to act as their personal ATM. That may be because he works all the time.”

“You learned all of this at lunch with a woman you just met?”

“Moms don’t screw around when it comes to information exchange. She knows a lot about my kids, too. We do it very efficiently. And in great detail.”

Pine had been writing notes down as Blum was speaking. “Okay, you’ve given me a lot to use as possible passwords.”

She worked away for several hours after using a program on her computer to put together a graph of possible password combos based on what Blum had told her and also using the names from the file list she’d taken from Priest’s office.