Stone Cold

CHAPTER 77

CARTER GRAY WAS a remarkable fisherman. Only he had not caught the fish he most prized, and that was because he could not find the right bait. He had burned thousands of man-hours and looked at a mountain of digital files until his eyeballs were ready to fall out. And yet for all that trouble he only had one name to show for it: Harry Jedidiah, son of Lesya and Rayfield Solomon, a.k.a. David P. Jedidiah the second.

He had tried to find Oliver Stone’s ragtag band of freaks: the big man and ex-military Reuben Rhodes that Gray remembered from Murder Mountain; the mousy librarian Caleb Shaw who had not been to his home or job at the Library of Congress in recent days; and Milton Farb, the cherubic genius with OCD. Gray had a dossier on each man, and yet they had simply vanished. Farb and Shaw hadn’t used their cell phones and Rhodes didn’t have one registered in his name. And Rhodes had recently moved and left no forwarding address. Nor was wherever he was living listed on any real estate records, because Gray’s men had checked. Still, with Carter Gray’s resources no one should be able to simply vanish. No wonder these terrorist sleeper cells were proving nearly impossible to uncover. America was too damn big and too damn free. In some ways the Soviets had had it right: Spy on everybody because you never know when a friend might turn into an enemy.

He now turned his attention to locating Lesya’s son. And he had focused on one aspect in particular as the point of least resistance. He rose from his chair in his bunker and flipped on the TV. Then the intelligence chief hit a button on the remote he was holding.

The scene he was looking at was from the Hart Senate Office Building. Roger Simpson clearly would be a target of Lesya’s son. If so he could either hit the senator at his home or office. Gray had already checked the surveillance cameras at Simpson’s condo building and found nothing helpful. Now he had turned to the office.

He watched hour after hour of people coming and going into the building. There were many and their numbers tended to dilute everyone down to useless silhouettes. Then Gray thought of a second angle. He put in another DVD, sat back and started watching the hallway outside Simpson’s office. He spent three hours doing this, methodically checking out each person coming into frame.

Finally. He sat up and viewed it again. The man working on the door to Simpson’s office. He zoomed in on the man’s face. Penetrating disguises was something Gray had been long trained in. In the cheekbone was that a touch of Solomon? The chin, the eyes, that of Lesya? Contrary to what he’d told the president, he knew the woman well.

He made numerous calls, and the story came into focus quickly. No one from Simpson’s office had called for a government repairman for the door. Simpson’s receptionist, though, reported that that’s what the man had said-that he’d been told to come. Yet he hadn’t gone in the office in the footage Gray had, and a review of the other surveillance discs turned up no such penetration. A bomb-sniffing dog was brought in but found nothing at which to bark. No one bothered to check for bugs, because a bug couldn’t kill a man.

The next step was to take the picture of the door repairman, pare it down to its essentials and run it through every database the government had. They were doing the same with the video feed from the airport and the descriptions that had been received from the nursing home. Even though the computer age had infinitely speeded this process up, it would still take a little time, something Gray did not have an abundance of. Allowing Lesya to be taken by the authorities was not an option. She had far too much she could tell. It was certain that she had passed this knowledge on to her son. And if Carr was with them, none of them could be allowed to live. It would be cataclysmic for the country, for the world. And for Carter Gray.