No Way Back (A Shannon Ames Thriller Book 5), page 14
They watched as the second man, a ghostly figure captured on the low-light video taken by the construction foreman, crossed the street toward Fain. And then, thanks to the video provided by the artist who’d been recording the sunset, they watched the two men converge on Fain. To grab her and hold her still as the van screeched up to the curb. How they threw her – and her suitcase – inside and sped off.
After Shannon pressed stop, Nickerson sat back, looking pale. Sickened. Cutter had the look of a man considering a problem to be solved; he wandered away from the desk, arms crossed, fingers brushing his lips.
Nickerson stayed slumped in his seat, staring into space. Then he bent forward and put his head in his hands. “Oh God …”
“Why would they take her?” Shannon asked. She looked from Nickerson to Cutter. “Because of a dispute on Twitter? Because of the way she wrote about them in the Atlantic?”
Cutter slowly shook his head; he had no answer.
Nickerson, snuffling back emotion, said, “Kristie is in danger.”
It was an odd statement. Clearly, Fain was in danger. But Nickerson seemed to mean something else. “What are you saying?”
The senator stuttered, “I thought maybe … When she disappeared, I thought … But clearly she’s in trouble. She’s in trouble, and they could hurt her.”
Shannon checked Cutter for a reaction. Nickerson’s chief of staff had stopped looking lost and gained an emotion: worry, perhaps over what Nickerson was about to say.
Shannon began to feel light-headed, like someone had pumped laughing gas into the room. Her pulse quickened as she asked her next question. “Senator Nickerson, did you have something to do with Kristie Fain’s disappearance?”
His eyes slowly came up, and he looked at Shannon for a long time. “To answer that, I have something to show you.”
She both heard and felt the reaction from Cutter this time: a disapproving exhalation. It sounded like the sound someone makes when the jig is up.
Her insides contracted. She stayed zeroed in on Nickerson as the senator pulled out his phone. He made a couple of motions and then pushed it across his desk to her.
21
A camera angled down from the corner of an elevator. Roughly three-quarters of the space was in view, the remaining quarter hidden. The back wall consisted of three long panels, silver and gray, a pattern like ridges of sand in a desert. Two panels adorned each of the side walls. Shannon knew what she was looking at – or could at least guess. This was an elevator at the Takano Hotel.
A man stepped into view. Nickerson.
A moment after, a woman followed. She was also familiar – Shannon had seen enough photos of the fundraiser to recognize the black dress, the wavy fall of auburn hair. Even though the woman’s back was to the camera, her face only partly in profile, it looked like Kristie Fain.
Nickerson said something to her in the elevator, but only his lips moved.
Shannon leaned closer. “Is there volume?”
“No,” Nickerson said.
Shannon stayed riveted to the small screen. The Nickerson in the elevator pressed a button. The image vibrated slightly; the elevator was moving. He said something else to Fain – Shannon again saw his lips move but couldn’t read them.
He laughed. He shook his head. His body language was revealing. The way he was standing close to her.
When he reached out and grabbed Fain’s waist, Shannon wasn’t surprised.
He leaned toward her. She seemed hesitant and dipped her head back.
Nickerson said something else, then his face disappeared as he leaned in to kiss her. At least, that was the impression. One hand on her waist, the other on her back, pulling her to him.
When Fain pushed him off, Nickerson was momentarily idle. His face, imperfectly resolved on the small screen, seemed to convey both sadness and determination.
Then he moved in on her again, this time more forcibly.
It pushed Fain partly out of frame. Shannon could still see her shoulder, some of her hair. Her reflection in the elevator panels was murky and indistinct. Mainly she could see Nickerson shoving himself against her, pinning her arm as he continued to kiss and grope her. Judging from their hazy reflection, it looked like he reached between her legs.
Shannon exhaled a held breath, her heart starting to knock. Seeing a woman in distress was itself distressing. And this was a major piece of the puzzle unfolding before her eyes.
On top of that was the prospect of arresting a US senator. What it was going to mean, the media circus that would ensue …
She managed to drag her eyes away from the video and look at Nickerson beside her. He watched with that same stricken look he’d had after witnessing Fain’s abduction. Was he feeling remorse? Was that why he was confessing? Why did he seem so shocked by Fain’s abduction? Or maybe he just didn’t like to see something he himself had set in motion.
She had a hard time not judging him, and forced herself to finish watching the video through to the end.
The struggle continued, with Nickerson kissing and fondling Fain. His face was visible intermittently as he came up for air or she pushed him back. His hair was messed up by the encounter.
And then the elevator seemed to stop – to reach its floor – and Fain shoved him back one final time before leaving the car in a hurry.
On the video, Nickerson stood there a moment, breathing heavily, and wiped his mouth. He might’ve flicked a look at the camera, might’ve not – hard to say with the small screen – but then he stepped out of the elevator and out of sight.
The video ended.
Shannon took a cleansing breath as she wondered where to begin.
Maybe it wasn’t that hard to decide.
“Senator, you have the right to remain silent.”
22
“That’s not me,” Nickerson said.
His statement was so out of line with her perception, for a moment Shannon was mute with incomprehension.
“It’s not me on the video.” He stared at her with sorrow, anger, and resignation all mixing in his eyes. “I didn’t do this.”
Her pulse was pounding in her head. He was denying it? After just showing her the evidence? The pivot made her head spin. “Senator, I just watched video of you assaulting Kristie Fain. I’m going to need you to come with me.” She moved toward him with her handcuffs.
“I know it looks like me.”
“It looks exactly like you.”
“But it’s not me.”
She let out an exasperated breath and felt herself at a momentary loss.
Cutter, standing near, spoke up. “It’s a deepfake. It’s very possible now, the technology getting better all the time. They take someone’s face – usually someone famous – and put it on someone else. A body double.”
“I know what a deepfake is.” Irritability was creeping in, covering her profound unease. “But that’s a very convenient thing to say right now, after I just watched you assault your aide.” She studied Nickerson. “Why didn’t you show me this before? When did you get this?”
He glanced at Cutter before answering, “Sunday night.”
“You’ve had this for three days?”
“Yes.”
“Why? Why not come to us?”
“I panicked. I didn’t know what to make of it.”
She shook her head, feeling the resistance. Like a living thing, a gravity inside her, pulling her toward the conclusion: he’s lying. It was hard not to trust her senses. Her primary sense. She’d just seen him sexually assault Kristie Fain at the Takano Hotel. Not misconduct, not harassment, assault.
But – Eddie Caprice.
If he hired Caprice, it now made more sense as to why. To keep things quiet while Caprice dug for answers.
While he searched for Fain.
Shannon kept shaking her head, micro-movements, back and forth as she waged this internal debate. She’d just watched Nickerson do this horrible thing. She’d seen it plain as day.
But she’d seen it because he showed it to her.
She blurted her question: “Senator – did you hire someone to look for her?”
Nickerson didn’t answer, but his eyes affirmed it.
“You sent someone to the Silver Towers.”
He finally nodded. “An ex-cop. A friend of mine. I knew he’d keep it completely quiet. I told him I’d pay him, but he wouldn’t take the money. He said he’d check her place. And I asked him to visit the Takano.”
“Why?”
“I wanted the original video from the hotel elevator. The real video.”
Shannon remembered. “But they were hacked.”
Cutter interjected, “Exactly. But that video – the original video – if we’d been able to get it, would show what really happened in the elevator. Who that really was.”
“Isn’t that another convenience? The video proving that this is a fake is stolen?”
“Why would we arrange that? The original video would be proof of what we’re telling you. What you won’t believe because of what you saw.” He pointed at Nickerson’s phone. “That’s the video that’s been altered. They mapped his face onto whoever that is.”
She thought of the man she’d seen in the photos gathered by Reese, the one who looked like Nickerson, but wasn’t. She closed her eyes a moment. “So who are you saying did this?”
“We have no idea.”
It flashed through her mind, and she opened her eyes: “Do you think this is the Time Keepers?”
Nickerson answered, “I considered it. We both did. But then I got something else.” He leaned across the desk and switched his phone to the text app. He scrolled until he found what he was looking for. “This message came in last night. Late. Two in the morning.”
Shannon read it.
Vote yes Monday or the video goes public.
It took her a few moments to process. Once she did, she thought of La Jeunesse saying that TIK wanted Nickerson where he was supposed to be on Monday, voting no. That their interests were aligned.
Politics, after all.
So who wanted him to vote the other way?
Whoever it was, they were playing for keeps. If she was to believe Nickerson, then not only had the criminals faked him in a video assaulting someone supposed to be Kristie Fain, they’d had the real Fain abducted.
Shannon said, “And if this video ever gets out, it looks like you abducted her.”
Nickerson’s brown eyes were dark, haunted. “Yes. That’s what it’s supposed to look like – that I assaulted her at the Takano, and then, three days later, I kidnapped her. So she wouldn’t say anything.”
After another few minutes with the senator, Shannon stepped out. From the hallway outside Nickerson’s offices, she called Jim Galloway and told him.
“What do you want to do?” he asked.
Her voice sounded far away to her own ears. “I want to take him into custody.”
“Because you think he’s lying? About whether it’s really him in the video?”
There were too many people around, coming and going, so she started outside.
“I want to arrest him for the same reason we prepared the complaint and the judge signed the warrant. He’s withheld critical information from a federal investigation. We were ready to arrest him based on his connection to Edward Caprice. But I think we both knew that was shaky. We wanted to see what happened when I showed him Fain’s abduction, when I gave him a push. Well, something happened. He showed me a video where he appears to sexually assault her. The fact that he’s had it since Sunday and not shared it is grounds enough to arrest and charge him.”
Her blunt statements seemed to quiet the assistant US attorney for a moment. “Shannon, I like you. I’m familiar with your reputation. You’re not a hothead. You don’t create animosity between yourself and the local authorities. You’re deferential to your superiors. And you’ve been steadily moving up the chain.”
“Why do I feel a warning coming? With due respect, sir, this morning you seemed for it. Even before I had a video that either incriminates him or at least proves he lied to us …”
“From what I’ve been told, the best thing about the Bureau is that you are left to investigate as you see fit … Within reason.”
“I feel perfectly reasonable,” she said.
“I might agree with you. But I can’t say you’re going to get the same feedback from anyone else.”
“So you’re worried about how others will perceive this?”
He hesitated. “No. I’m worried that everything right now is riding on you. All eyes are on you, Shannon.”
Within the hour, she’d heard from Tyler, from FBI headquarters in Washington, and the DOJ itself. Galloway was right. At least, they were unanimous that her very next move was to notify Nickerson’s attorney. Together with the senator, the attorney would arrange a time for Nickerson to turn himself in.
“That’s how the director wants it,” Tyler said. “Nickerson should not be arrested like a common thug. No perp walk, no six-o’clock news clip of him getting pushed into the back of a waiting police car.”
It left her uneasy. Not because she wanted Nickerson humiliated, but because Fain was out there somewhere, and the clock was ticking. The sooner Shannon had Nickerson in a room, the sooner he was formally interviewed, the sooner Fain might be found. She couldn’t wait for attorneys to negotiate a time and place for Nickerson’s surrender. She wanted him questioned immediately, not days from now in an SAC’s conference room.
She stood on the wide steps of the Capitol Building under a low, bruised sky and felt shaken, really. For the first time since she’d started this job, she didn’t plan to follow orders.
She told as much to Bufort when she called him.
“So where is he?”
“Inside. In his office. With Cutter and all of his staff.”
“Who are you going to get to help take this guy in? You’re not going to find anyone willing to blatantly disobey the top brass. There are no Charlie Buforts in Washington, unfortunately.”
She appreciated his humor – and loyalty – but she was in a serious mood. “It’s not a legal requirement that I wait for him to contact his attorney and come in when he feels like it. These are extenuating circumstances.”
“It’s three o’clock. If you wait just a little bit longer, you’ll miss the window for initial court appearance. He’ll end up sitting overnight with some undesirable people in county jail. You know what I’m saying? Might get him softened up.”
“He’s already soft. He wants to plead his innocence. That would waste time, too.”
She fell silent, her mind running ahead to next steps.
“You’re a badass, Ames. You’ll have the respect of every agent in the Bureau.”
“Thanks.” She didn’t care.
Though minutes later, as she reentered the Capitol Building through the security checkpoint and walked past the offices of other senators, it seemed like word of her presence was spreading; doors opened and congressional staffers watched as she marched down to Nickerson’s office.
When she went in and back to his private room, she found him sitting on the edge of his desk. His feet were off the floor a few inches. He was boyish, in that moment, and he looked up at her.
Cutter stood a short distance away, white sleeves rolled, arms folded.
Shannon held out her handcuffs to Nickerson. The senator watched her a moment, then nodded. He hopped down from the desk and put his arms out for her. She attached the first cuff to his wrist. “You have the right to remain silent,” she told him for the second time.
23
They’re not going to let you go.
Kristie fought against the fear. The sense of total helplessness.
They’re not going to let you go, and you’re never going to see anyone you love ever again–
Stop it, stop it, stop it–
But it was hard not to despair. To lose it. For one thing, she could see their faces now – the makeup was gone. Scraped away.
Why would they identify themselves? If they were going to let her go, they wouldn’t.
Think about something else.
Fine. There was something else she could preoccupy her mind with, push some of that stark fear aside: she didn’t think they were Time Keepers anymore.
Washing off the makeup wasn’t necessarily the clue; obviously even the most stalwart activists cleaned up. It was the language they spoke. The foreign tongue they used in the other room, the heavy accents when they spoke English. Well, one of them – the other two didn’t talk to her, but acted like she didn’t exist. When they spoke to each other just within earshot, it sounded Arabic. And the one who dealt with her – she’d heard them call him Mahdi.
While TIK membership had some ethnic variation – it wasn’t white and Christian, and some twenty-five countries claimed Arabic as an official language – she hadn’t encountered any Arab-speaking Time Keepers in her investigations. And she’d dug pretty deep.
It was also the type of guns they carried. The weapons resembled .22 LRs, small pistols that packed a punch, like the Beretta 70. She knew about these weapons from another series of stories she’d done, back in college, about the Mossad. The deep state intelligence agency of Israel.
She remembered because she’d been confused. “LR” meant long rifle, yet the guns once preferred by the Mossad were compact, single-action semiautomatic pistols. Apparently, “long rifle” referred to the ammunition. Guns were confusing, but she remembered the description of these. Lightweight design, light recoil. And the pictures of the men handling them she’d used for her journalism project – she remembered what they’d looked like, too.
Like these. One with a thick black moustache, another’s broad jaw unshaven, stubble that could sand wood. The third was a bit fairer haired and skinned, but still looked Mediterranean. Their mean age was probably forty-five. Time Keepers were younger, some as young as teenagers.
