Hack, page 6
Sam had exited the plane with her carry-on luggage ahead of her colleague and turned right at the bottom of the stairway toward the terminal. What transpired next was still a mystery. Robbins had an overnight bag and small briefcase in one hand and his cell phone cradled between his shoulder and ear when he, inexplicably, turned left at the bottom of the gangway and walked straight into the churning propeller and was decapitated.
There were plenty of theories as to what happened—Robbins’s head was down and he was distracted by the call; he was light-headed from too many drinks on the plane; the antianxiety medication he had been prescribed after he and his wife separated had clouded his judgment.
Sam remained on Sea Island for two days while the accident was under investigation. Blood tests revealed trace amounts of alcohol and medication in Robbins’s system, but hardly enough to impair his judgment. Sam never interviewed the congresswoman, and she never told anyone that she and Robbins were having an affair. There was nothing to gain by causing more grief for his widow, and she kept the secret even now.
Two days after Robbins’s funeral, she had resigned from the Post and dropped out of sight for the next twelve months, eventually resurfacing as a spokesperson and investigator for Sheriff Korum’s department. Sam seldom dated and had not been romantically involved with anyone since.
Of course, it had been a couple years since the tragedy, and Nik, new to town, wouldn’t have been aware of her history.
“Wanted a change of scenery, I guess,” Sam said, issuing her standard reply. “And I like Korum. He’s a good soul. Why’d you decide to move to DC?”
“For the climate,” Nik said. “Who doesn’t like walking around in a steam bath for half the year and over the carcasses of thousands of dying cicadas? Only place I’ve ever lived where they sweep the bugs off the sidewalks in the morning. Then there’s the Duke University graduates. They’re thicker than the cicadas but infinitely more annoying.”
“Dook, as we Hoyas call it, sucks,” Sam said.
They clinked glasses and cheers-ed to that, too.
“Go ahead and ask,” Sam said eventually. “I know you’ve been dying to.”
“Is it that obvious?” Nik said.
“Only since the moment you arrived, but you put up a good front.”
“Okay,” Nik said, “what is it that Sheriff Korum wanted you to tell me?”
“It’s about Cal Walker, OmniSoft’s CEO.”
Nik sat straighter in his chair. “Yeah, what about him? They identify his body?” Nik asked.
Rescue workers had pulled three mangled corpses from what was left of Walker’s building in the office park and were awaiting DNA results, bringing the total casualties from the explosion to seven.
“He’s not dead, or, at least, he wasn’t in that building when it collapsed,” Sam said.
“You sure about that?”
“Positive. The guy who owns the little country grocery store ’bout a mile down the road from Trident said Walker was in his parking lot when the gas line blew. He said Walker bought coffee, soft drinks, and some snacks and said he was in a hurry to get back to his office for a meeting. Store owner said Walker’s been going there for years and they were on a first-name basis.”
“I’ll be damned,” Nik said.
“There’s something else,” Sam said.
“You know where he is?” Nik asked.
“No. It has to do with the guys in the van.”
“Oh?”
“Investigators think they may have stumbled across them,” Sam said.
“Really, where?”
“Indiana, a truck stop.”
“What the hell they doing in Indiana?” Nik asked.
“Apparently killing a cop and a store clerk,” Sam said.
__________________
After Nik pumped Sam for all the information she had on Walker and the guys in the van, they spent the rest of the evening at Nora’s sipping drinks, nibbling on crab cakes, and slurping raw oysters while swapping stories about their favorite pastimes—Sam was an avid downhill skier, mountain biker, and backcountry camper. Nik loved fly-fishing and bridge and was struggling with Chinese. They compared notes on restaurants, books, and Netflix series they binge-watched. When Nora’s emptied and Charles wiped down the bar in front of them for the fifth time, they decided it was time to call it a night. Nik left Charles a 25 percent tip, and that seemed to soothe the barkeep’s ruffled feathers. Nik helped Sam on with her coat and offered to give her a ride home. She resisted at first, planning to summon an Uber, but when she stepped outside and saw how deserted the streets were and how cold it was, she reconsidered.
Maybe it was the alcohol, the holiday spirit, or Nik’s easy manner, but Sam found herself warming to Nik as the night drifted pleasantly along. He reminded her of a goofy, if somewhat misguided, boy next door with a good heart. Sam’s weakness had always been what she called a guy’s S&S—smile and shoulders. She insisted both be broad, and Nik’s features fit the bill.
“Nice place,” Nik said when he nudged his vehicle to the curb in front of her house, a restored Craftsman just off Foxhall Road.
“It was my aunt Sally’s. She left it to me. I’ve done quite a bit of cosmetic work on it. New roof, windows, steps, paint, but the bones are good.”
Nik sighed.
“Everything okay?” Sam said.
He nodded. “Reminds me of a place I once had.”
“What happened to it?” Sam asked.
“Life happened,” Nik said, and leaned across the seat to give Sam a good-night peck on the cheek. He was surprised when Sam didn’t turn away and instead met him full on the lips, but perhaps no more surprised than Sam was herself as she lingered in the moment.
“That was . . .” she began to say when she pulled back.
“Unexpected,” Nik chimed in.
“No. Well, yes, but what I was going to say was ‘nice.’”
Sam reached for the handle, pushed on the passenger door, and slipped out of the seat, sensing she just might wind up in Nik’s lap if they were to continue kissing.
She dropped down and popped her head back inside and said, “I have a confession to make, Nik.”
“Oh,” he responded. “Is this the point in the evening when you tell me you have a boyfriend?”
“No.” She laughed. “Nothing like that. But I told you a white lie. I don’t have any New Year’s Eve plans.”
“Fantastic,” Nik said, “because I’m not really working. I know a great little jazz club that’s hosting a party. Whaddya say?”
“It’s a date,” Sam said and bent in and gave Nik another kiss, putting a little extra charge in it this time.
She withdrew her head but, after a moment, bent down again and said, “Nik, do you know the inside of your vehicle smells like dog?”
“Is that a problem?” Nik said.
“Only if you don’t have a dog,” Sam said and turned and walked to her front door.
Chapter 13
December 22, Washington, DC
Other than the brief encounter in Adams Morgan, Nik had not seen or spoken to his ex-wife in months. After a rocky marriage and at times contentious separation, the couple eventually had an amicable divorce and remained, if not friends, friendly. But neither went out of their way to stay in close contact, and while they shared memories—some great, others painful—and a few close friends, they didn’t have children to keep them bound together. At times, Nik regretted not staying in touch, if only because he had a sense that he was losing a part of his past. After the divorce was finalized, he had to fight the impulse to reach out to Maggie just to check in, but eventually those urges subsided. He often wondered if she felt the same way, though somehow he rather doubted it. Maggie’s unvarnished advice to Nik—“It was real, but it’s really over”—stayed with him long after the divorce and propelled him to move forward.
He had not given a lot of thought to Maggie until now, but when Sam asked about a wife, it sparked an idea.
Nik and Maggie’s professional relationship was nearly as fraught as their personal one. As an assistant US attorney, Maggie was often in a position to have firsthand knowledge about government information Nik was pursuing as a reporter. The opposite was also true. Nik’s sources would reveal secrets to him the government was trying to discover. He and Maggie had always been guarded about what information they shared with one another and were careful not to leave sensitive documents or notes lying around the house where the other person could find them, even if unwittingly.
Their efforts to conceal information led to a strange Kabuki dance, which was the cause of endless frustration and friction between the couple when they were married and living in the Midwest. Both were pleasantly surprised to discover how much their separation had dialed down the tension. The only issue that remained between them was Gyp, a copper-colored vizsla Nik got when it was an eight-week-old puppy. Maggie didn’t want a dog but was stuck raising it when Nik moved out of their house to a small apartment during their separation.
Maggie saw in the dog the same undisciplined and at times ill-mannered attitude that she found so maddening in Nik and was thrilled when he announced he would be taking Gyp to DC with him once he was settled.
Nik was uncertain what work Maggie had been assigned in the US Attorney’s office in DC, but he knew she was a rising star and had been actively recruited to the nation’s capital to get her more exposure to the top brass at the Justice Department.
Nik figured if she didn’t have direct information about the Trident explosion, she’d at least know someone who did. The question was, would she share it with him? And there was only one way to find out.
____________
Maggie had just stepped into a meeting with her assistant about a money-laundering case she was prosecuting when her cell phone buzzed and Nik’s name popped up on the screen. Her first thought was What’s he want? And she debated whether to answer.
“Go ahead and start the meeting without me, Louis,” she said to her colleague. “I need to take this call. It shouldn’t be long.” Maggie stepped back out in the hallway and answered the phone.
“Is everything all right?” she asked worriedly. She and Nik had agreed to keep each other informed in the event something happened to someone in their immediate families.
“Everything’s fine, Maggs,” Nik said. “No deaths, serious illness, missing persons.”
“So, why are you calling?” Maggie said, a sharper note in her voice now.
“I’ll get to that in a second,” Nik said, “but before I located your new cell number, I called the AG’s switchboard and they said they didn’t have a Maggie Byron working there.”
“That’s right, Nik. I went back to using my maiden name, Stone, Margaret Stone. Now, what is this about? I’m very busy.”
The news wasn’t totally unexpected, but it still caused Nik’s voice to catch in his throat, even if just a little. “I’m calling about the Trident Park explosion. I need some help with information.”
Maggie wasn’t involved with the case, but she knew about it. Her colleague Gaylord Spence—an ex-college jock and one-time semiprofessional weight lifter—had told her the Justice Department had quietly launched an investigation into the explosion, and she had been following the events ever since.
Spence was a political appointee with a degree from a third-rate law school whose father, an ethanol fuel titan, had raised millions of dollars for the president’s campaign, and when his man won, old man Spence’s reward was a patronage job for his slow-witted son with the Justice Department. Spence Junior’s title was special assistant to the attorney general, which meant he created PowerPoint presentations and ran the audiovisual equipment for his boss.
It was a meaningless job, but it gave Spence access to sensitive information, and in his desire to impress Maggie and get into her pants, he blabbed to her about the Trident investigation.
“The AG doesn’t believe a fucking word those cocksuckers at the CIA or the NSA say,” Spence had confided one evening to Maggie when she suspected he was particularly horny and desperate for something more satisfying than a hand job. “One lies and the other swears to it. If this Trident thing’s dirty, you can bet they’ll try to pin it on the FBI, which means the Justice Department. The AG has assigned a dozen agents, and that’s just for starters.”
Maggie found Spence to be a useful diversion, though she still hadn’t slept with him and wasn’t sure she would. He was good-looking enough and as randy as a bachelor at an all-girls boarding school, but he was also divorced with two kids, alimony payments, a mortgage, and a law degree from some college she’d never heard of until she met him.
“What sort of information you looking for?” Maggie asked Nik suspiciously.
“Don’t worry. I won’t ask you to violate your oath or any laws,” Nik said. “I just need to know if I’m on the right track or if I’m headed off a cliff.”
Nik told Maggie what he knew and what he suspected: that two men driving an older-model van might be linked to the explosion at Trident and possibly the deaths of a cop and a store clerk in Indiana; that Cal Walker, the CEO of OmniSoft, might have been targeted in the blast and apparently was on the lam; that a highly trained military unit had appeared on-site almost immediately after the explosion, as if they had been anticipating it, and that the guy in charge of the unit was a colonel.
“We call him Colonel Mustard because of his yellow mustache. We don’t have a last name, though it could be Calkins, but we haven’t had any luck verifying that so far. I don’t have any idea how any of it fits together,” Nik said, “and on top of that, my editor has threatened to fire me if I keep pursuing the story.”
Maggie entered a vacant office in the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building. She could see the top half of the Washington Monument down Connecticut Avenue from a small window in the office. She closed the door and propped herself on the edge of a desk and weighed what to divulge to Nik, if anything.
“All the old ground rules still apply?” she said.
“Yes,” Nik said. “I won’t use your name or identify you in any way.”
“And if you get anything significant, you’ll give me fair warning before it’s printed?”
This was the one part of the agreement Nik wished she’d forgotten. It made him cringe to release information before it was published, but he rationalized it by telling himself that East Coast news broadcasts were often delayed for viewers in West Coast markets.
“Deal,” he reluctantly conceded.
“You’re headed in the right direction. After the cop and store clerk were killed, the criminals shot up the computer server where the security video was stored,” Maggie said, “but our techs were able to retrieve the damaged files and are now working on restoring the images.”
“How’s that possible?” Nik asked.
“It’s called digital harmonics,” Maggie said, “and it applies technology that allows users to experience images that are otherwise too degraded or obscure for the human eye alone. The software tools analyze embedded data in waveforms to render the images decipherable.”
“That’s surreal,” Nik said. “You think I might—”
“Get a look at the files?” Maggie cut in. “Dunno. My understanding is the best we can hope for is that the images will confirm that the van is the same make and model as the one observed at Trident and that the two guys share similar structural, facial, and hair characteristics. It’s not like we’ll have actual mug shots. I might be able to supply you with an image, but no guarantees. I’ll know more in twenty-four hours. I gotta go now, Nik.”
“Thanks, Maggs, I owe you.”
“Listen, you took that damn dog off my hands, so I figure we’re even. By the way, how’s Gyp doing anyhow?”
“He’s had a little setback,” Nik admitted. “I left Gyp in my vehicle a couple weeks ago when I ran into the dry cleaners for about five minutes, and I think he may have had a panic attack. He chewed through all the seat belts. I had to send him to finishing school.”
“What’s he finishing, his brain? I don’t get your attachment to that dog,” Maggie said.
“Well, it’s like this, Maggs,” Nik said, “unlike women and cats, the later I come home, the happier Gyp is to see me.”
“Maybe next time get yourself a fish, Nik,” Maggie said, and then hung up.
Chapter 14
December 22, Three Rivers, Michigan
Nukowski.
That was Grant Dilworth’s first thought, lying in bed at night, when he heard the engine whine and saw headlights dance over the treetops as a vehicle bounced down the rutted lane that led to his secluded cabin in the pines. His second thought was Run.
And he would have, too, but his wife and newborn were asleep across the hallway and it wasn’t an option.
Dilworth scrambled from his bed and to the window just in time to see a dull-green van with the windows down pass under a sodium vapor yard light and roll to a stop in front of his machine shop. The light snow that had begun falling when he turned in for bed had intensified overnight, and the ground, trees, and the sculptures he forged for a living were covered in a blanket of powdered sugar. He glanced at the clock: three fifteen a.m.
His dog, Pontiac, an eighty-five-pound black-and-tan sway-back German shepherd, thankfully, was at the vet’s recuperating from an injury he had received after getting ensnared in a coyote leg trap, or he would have been bringing down the house with his barking and howling.
Dilworth darted across the hallway and looked in on his wife and daughter. Still asleep. He gently closed their door and went back to the window. He could see two figures inside the van, but so far, neither one had made a move to get out of the vehicle.
