Hell's Corner

CHAPTER 81

^“So how do we get to Garchik?” asked Chapman as they drove away from Gross’s house. “We’re not official anymore. I’m supposed to be on my way to London and you…”

“Right,” said Stone. “Me.” He pulled out his phone. “Well, I can always try calling him.” He hit the numbers.

Chapman said, “If they have him stashed somewhere he might not answer. Especially if they’ve told him what happened. We could be off-limits.”

A voice came on Stone’s phone.

“Hello, Steve, Agent Stone here. Right. I know you disappeared right off the case. We were worried about you until we got the heads-up.” Stone paused as Garchik said something.

“Well, we’d like to meet with you, if that’s okay.”

Garchik said something else.

“I understand, but if I could just ask you about something Agent Gross was—”

Chapman cut the car to the right and nearly slammed into the curb. Stone was jerked sideways in his seat and his head would have hit the window glass if it hadn’t already been down.

Stone looked in front and behind at the vehicles that had boxed them in. The men were already out of their SUVs and striding toward them.

Not again.

One of the men passed a paper through the window and into Stone’s hands.

“What’s this?” Stone asked in surprise.

“Congressional subpoena. Courtesy of Director Weaver. And if you’re really smart, you’ll never go near Tom Gross’s family again.”

A few seconds later the men were gone.

Stone looked down at the subpoena. He heard chatter. He realized he’d dropped his phone on the car’s floor and snatched it up.

“Steve? Right, sorry about that. Little problem on our end. Look, can you — Hello? Hello?”

Stone clicked off. “Line went dead.”

Chapman put the car in gear again. “Weaver’s people must’ve gotten to him too.”

“Must’ve.”

“Now we can’t find out what Garchik told Gross.”

“What if what he told Gross is something he told us too? As far as I know we were with him pretty much every time he spoke to Garchik.”

“I can’t remember anything critical off the top of my head.” She glanced at the paper. “When do you have to appear?”

Stone read through the document. “Tomorrow. Before the House subcommittee on intelligence.”

“Not a lot of notice. Can they do that?”

Stone read over the document some more. “National security apparently trumps even due process.”

“Lucky you.”

“Yeah,” Stone said dryly. “Lucky me.”

“Do you need a solicitor?”

“Probably, but I can’t afford one.”

“Want me to see what Sir James can do?”

“I think Sir James is pretty much done with me.”

“I think he’s pretty much done with me too. So is there a silver lining here somewhere?”

“We have to start from square one. Go over everything.”

“Well, I’ve got extensive notes and the video of the park on my laptop still. And before we fell out of favor Agent Ashburn provided me with electronic files for a lot of the other video feeds.”

“Let’s go.”

They drove to her hotel and set up a mini command center. For the next several hours they pored over the notes of the case and the video feeds from Chapman’s laptop.

“Well, one thing’s figured out,” said Stone as he stared at the screen.

Chapman joined him. “What?”

“The homeless woman who poured the bottle of water on the tree and killed it?” He pointed at the screen showing the image.

“What about it? That’s one of the few things we can be reasonably sure about.”

Stone hit some keys and zoomed in on the image of the woman. “I was puzzled that they’d bring someone in for such a minimal task.”

“It wasn’t minimal,” Chapman pointed out. “It was the catalyst that set everything else in motion.”

“I wasn’t talking about poisoning the tree. I meant Judy Donohue. Why bring her in just to lie about Sykes and increase our suspicion of him? They could’ve come at it some other way. Now I know.”

“I’m not following.”

“Look at the back of the woman’s hand.”

Chapman hit some keys and zoomed into the image even more.

“Her hand is pretty dirty, but if you look at the bottom right.”

Chapman gasped. “That’s a bird’s foot. The tattoo Donohue had on her hand. What was it? The western meadowlark. She was the homeless woman in disguise.”

“They used her for that and then got her to try and implicate Sykes. I don’t think her bosses cared whether she succeeded or not. Sykes was a dead man, and they always intended to kill her too.”

Chapman sat back down and went over some notes. “You know, Garchik said that bombers like to do trial runs to make sure their equipment is working properly.”

“But usually they’ll do it in someplace inconspicuous. At least to the extent you can be inconspicuous when you’re setting off a bomb.”

“And Lafayette Park is hardly inconspicuous. Which means it wasn’t a trial run. It was the mission, albeit part of a larger one.”

Stone looked thoughtful. “Right. The bombing at Lafayette had to take place in order for some other event to occur.”

“We have that list of upcoming events at the park.”

“I don’t think the answer lies there.”

“I agree,” said Chapman. “The bad guys won’t know where the event is going to be, or if the event will even be held.”

“Right.”

She said, “The nanobot thing that has everyone’s knickers in a knot. They occur at the molecular level, which means they can get into anything.”

“And they apparently can be manufactured into just about any bio-or chemical contagion. Synthetic plague or anthrax or ricin maybe. In large quantities.”

“But again, you load all that into a root ball in a tree across from the bloody White House with a bomb attached and you don’t put the plague or another deadly microbe on it? Makes no sense.”

“It’s never made any sense,” agreed Stone. “At least it doesn’t the way we’ve been looking at it.”

Chapman perked up. “Maybe we go back to where it all started.”

“You mean Lafayette Park?”

“Let’s call it for what it is. Hell’s Corner. In fact, I can’t think of it any other way now. Might’ve known.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s named after a bloody Frenchman,” snapped Chapman.