“Quiet city,” Art commented. “Get a copy of that tape directly from our lab in D.C. Have Hal and Omar run the pictures of the known NALF members past the guy who sold them the car.”
“Got it,” Frankie said.
Art turned off his coffeemaker and poured himself a cup of unleaded. “Four black guys in Utah? Not the best place to hide out.”
“A common place to travel through, though,” Frankie observed.
“Yep.” Art sipped from his mug. The small stack of plastic hot cups next to the coffeemaker was for visitors. “You know what this means.”
Frankie nodded. “They’ve got somewhere to go.”
Earl Casey surprised the president’s chief of staff in his West Wing office just before lunch.
“Earl, I was just heading to Duke’s for a bite. You want to join me?”
“No, thanks.” Casey walked to Gonzales’s desk and stood at its side. “I want you to do something.”
“What?”
Casey explained his idea in less than the predicted sixty seconds. When he finished the chief of staff was smiling thoughtfully.
“I ran it by the Man a few minutes ago, and he liked it. He even thought there might be an opening to the speech in the whole thing.”
“I think he may be right,” Gonzales agreed blindly, though not without some sense of what the president might be thinking. “Interesting.”
“I want to do it,” Casey said. “It smells right.”
“Agreed.”
“Will you take care of the invitation?”
Gonzales nodded and made a note to take care of it right away. “With pleasure.”
Toby entered the spacious living room from the kitchen scratching his dyed and shorn hair. “How do I look?”
“Like a bad Elvis impersonator,” Stanley commented from his seat by the roaring fire.
“Funny. Mom’s ready for you now.” Toby pulled a short punch at his little brother and took the vacated seat by the crackling fireplace. His father sat quietly in an overstuffed chair. Behind him out the huge window the purples and oranges of the setting sun draped the skies above the George Washington National Forest. “I like this place, Pop. The view’s a lot nicer than back home.”
“It’s temporary, Toby,” John Barrish reminded his son.
“I know. But it’s nice. I think Mom likes it a lot.”
John looked over his shoulder to the expanse of meadow behind the house. Five grand a month it was costing them, plus a twenty grand deposit, and for that he had a fireplace, three thousand square feet, solitude at the end of a country road near Fulks Run, Virginia, and a view of a doe browsing near the tree line. An expensive and comfortable way station, but a way station nonetheless.
“What color contacts are you getting?”
“Brown,” Toby answered.
John surveyed his eldest boy’s new appearance. It wasn’t right. It needed something. The lines of his face were still too familiar. “Grow a mustache, and make sure your mother dyes it.”
“Okay.”
A log, consumed to the point of being a single roll of orange embers, collapsed in the fireplace, sending a plume of sparks upward into the dark recesses of the riverstone chimney. A burst of heat accompanied the disintegration, causing John to slide his chair back from the hearth.
“What about you, Pop?”
John touched his growing gray locks, which he’d maintained at a military-like one inch since high school. “Shaggy red hair and a goatee.”
“That’ll do it,” Toby commented, smiling at the thought of his father as a carrot-top.
“What about the Africans?” John inquired.
“I’ll put an ad in the Baltimore Sun in a couple of weeks. They’ll be expecting it then.”
“And Vorhees?”
The sound of scissors clicking rapidly drew Toby’s eyes toward the kitchen briefly. “Stan’s going to start on that soon. We’ll be ready. What about the tools and stuff?”
In his earlier life, before exposition of his views generated the kind of money that could finance an organization and support a family, John Barrish had made a modest living as a machinist. Nothing so complicated would be needed in this instance. Mostly hand tools, an arc-welding rig, and several types of metal. Light metal. Strong metal. Yes, expensive metal, but the money had to be spent on something. “I’ll take care of those.”
Toby nodded and let his body press into the soft cushions of the couch. They had been on the move, always busy, for so long that relaxation felt alien. But it also felt good. “Hey, Pop. You wanna go find a lake tomorrow? There’s got to be one around here somewhere. We ain’t got anything else to do. Maybe have a picnic, or go fishing?”
“It’s winter, Toby,” John said. “The fish don’t bite well this time of year.” The father-to-son instructions on life’s important matters flashed in John’s mind. His father had said something about fishing then. Don’t fish in the winter, or something like that. He hadn’t passed things such as that to his boys. He wondered if he should have.
“I didn’t say we had to catch anything,” Toby said. “C’mon. You, me, Stan. We’ll just sit, and throw some lines in the water, and shoot the shit.”
His eldest boy had a way of conversing with innocent vulgarities, John knew. He’d never gotten that out of him. But the suggestion behind the four-letter word did hold some appeal. Some day, when all that was to come had run its course, there would be much time to relax, to recreate. It might be a good time to practice for that day.
“What do you say?”
John nodded, realizing he should accept the calm before the storm. “All right, son.”
NINETEEN
Arrangements
Frankie held the three-year-old police mug shot up to the freeze-frame image on the conference room’s thirty-inch television monitor. “That’s him.”
“Roland Kirk,” Art said, referring to the enhanced image of the Oldsmobile’s right front passenger. “AKA Ronald Christopher. AKA Mustafa Ali.” He flipped back to the man’s arrest and conviction record. “Hmmm.”
“What?”
“The two most recent hits — B and E, and a simple assault — go under the Ali name. He must have changed it legally.”
“Converted to Islam,” Frankie observed.
“This is a hell of a way to exemplify the religion.” Art set the three suspect profiles side by side on the dark brown table. “Darian Brown, Roger Sanders, Mustafa Ali, and a mystery rider.”
“I remember Sanders from his playing days,” Frankie said. “He blew his knee out, I think.”
“He also liked punching folks out,” Art told his partner. “Two counts of aggravated assault, served a year at Chino.”
Frankie spun Brown’s profile around to face the seat she took across from Art. “Fearless leader here has one aggravated, two petty thefts, one GTA, one burglary. He beat a murder one. He’s spent a total of three years inside, a combination of county and state time.”
“And for every time they were caught…” Art, like all law enforcement officers, knew that an arrest or conviction on a person’s record represented just a fraction of the crimes actually committed. The sad fact was that men like Brown, Ali, and Sanders put their hands in the cookie jar without getting caught more than anyone would ever know.
Art looked to the screen and rewound it to a point before the enlargements of each individual. “Sanders driving.” They knew now that he had purchased the Oldsmobile in a plainly illegal transaction in Los Angeles before the attack. A glance at Sanders’s picture and a threat to bother the man with “accessory” charges had refreshed his memory quite fast. “Ali in right front. Brown, right rear.” His eyes locked on the small head in a darkened profile. “The lab wasn’t able to do much with him, were they?”