"Keep the engine going for now."
I scanned the gin and everything around it for maybe a quarter of an hour.
"Okay, kill the engine."
We sat there watching the occasional vehicle pass and listening. I strained to hear sirens or a helicopter thrumming. But the darkness carried only the occasional loud stereo from passing cars along with the distant rumble of thunder. We also enjoyed the blues music carried sporadically by the night air. No sirens, No choppers.
Just before 1:00 a.m., I climbed over my laptop bag, our packed luggage, and the sniper armament and ammo in the back of the SUV and left Jasmine in the SUV with her Ruger in her lap. I headed for the gin with the H amp;K automatic tucked in the back of my cargo shorts.
My cargo pockets were jammed with every spare magazine I could find. It was all covered by the tail of one of my blue oxford-cloth shirts left unbuttoned and hanging out. My clothes and white skin made me a good target in the dark, but unlike Jasmine I had brought no dark clothes and all of Tyrone's were too small.
I carried the dead sniper's small night scope casually in my right hand as I made my way down a weed-covered track toward the old, rusty hulk. A young child's irrational fears of the place stirred in my belly. It took me more than half an hour to make my way around the building and inside it. I couldn't make a full circle because some sort of annex at the back was attached to another block of structures.
Waning moonlight sifted through holes in the tin roof, casting subtle shadows across the vast, vacant space. The shadows rustled. I feared rats, but the night scope showed a mother possum with her young clinging to her underside. I looked around and found the interior crawling with the sluggish and shy marsupials. They crawled over the tall rafters and beams high above the floor and nested almost everywhere I looked.
Snakes undoubtedly lived here as well, feeding off the possums and their young. I feared the copperhead most because, unlike rattlesnakes, it struck without warning. Finally, I walked outside and stood under the wagon-shed overhang, right under the big suction pipe that had once terrified me, and used the small, thin LED light attached to my Leatherman to signal Jasmine. I followed her through the night scope until she was safe next to me.
Shortly before 2:00 A.M., we went inside to wait.
CHAPTER 69
From his vantage point half in a culvert leading under Martin Luther King Jr. Drive close to its intersection with Sunflower Road, the compact, muscular man surveyed the ramshackle cotton gin with his small monocular night-vision scope. Brad Stone had been good with his caution and preparation, but nobody was perfect.
The man bristled with a poised aggressiveness that made his fingertips pulse with every beat of his heart as he crouched in the standing water left by the previous night's rain.
He was as dark as the shadows embracing him, dressed entirely in black from his tightly laced, government-issue, high-top tactical boots to the summer-weight, cotton, skistyle mask never found in retail stores and designed for cool concealment, not warmth on the slopes. His black turtleneck was turned up to meld darkness with the bottom of the mask. Thin, black latex gloves covered his hands. A small earphone wire led to the man's portable radio as he monitored the law enforcement channels.
In the round image intensifier, the man observed Jasmine Thompson cross the street and give Brad Stone a hug as they stood under the tin-covered overhang where cotton wagons once stopped to be emptied.
Not long after the two had gone inside, the man watched an Itta Bena police car approach from the direction of Balance Due with its headlights out. Three men got out of the police car and walked over to a pale silver SUV. One of the policemen checked the license number against a sheet of paper, then proceeded to transfer the SUV's contents to the squad car. They drove away as stealthily as they had come. The man frowned as the taillights disappeared. There had been absolutely nothing in the radio chatter about this.
After the police cruiser left, the man made his way like a shadow to the gin and tucked himself under a tumbled-down loading dock near the wagon shed. The distant sounds of blues music trailed off about a quarter before three. The man waited easily with his thoughts. Nine minutes later a dark, older-model Jeep turned off MLK Jr. Drive, cut its headlights, and bounced slowly along the dirt path. The man raised the monocular and spotted attorney Jay Shanker's face through the windshield. Pay dirt.
The Jeep stopped under the shed. The engine died. Shanker sat still as the engine cooled with its simple tune of tinks and creaks.
CHAPTER 70
"I'll be back," I whispered.
I slipped through a siding gap and scrambled toward the Jeep on all fours. After seeing no one else in the vehicle, I tapped on the window.
Shanker's startled face whined toward me, wide and white. It took him several seconds to recognize me. Then he got out.
"Where's Jasmine?"
"Inside."
Shanker followed me through the hole.
Jasmine shook his hand and without preamble asked, "Did you bring the second CD?"
Shanker shook his head. "There isn't one."
Jasmine and I stood speechless.
"There never has been," Shanker said, his voice heavy with regret. "They got to Talmadge before he told me where he hid the rest of the documents. But they don't know that. They would have killed him by now if they knew the CD didn't exist."
"You lied!"
"I'm sorry. I had to. It was the only way to save his life. I had to get you involved."
"That's no excuse-"
"Please, hear me out."
Pain colored Shanker's words. "More's at stake than Talmadge. Braxton's a psycho car bomb headed for the White House. Even if he doesn't disintegrate like Talmadge, Braxton has no compassion, none at all. We can't afford to have his finger on the trigger of the world's most powerful military power."
Something rustled against the tin siding. Instinctively I ducked and pulled Jasmine down with one hand and brought the H amp;K up with the other, thumbing the safety off as I did. The rustling stopped. I let go of Jasmine and scanned the room with the night-vision scope. Nothing.
"Possums," I said as I stood up and offered my hand to Jasmine.
Shanker exhaled loudly.
"Jay, do you have any idea where the documents might be?" Jasmine asked.
"I suspect they're buried in or near one of the duck blinds he used, but those are scattered all over the state from the Ross Barnett Reservoir down in Jackson all the way up this side of the Mississippi River to Tunica. It might be anywhere."
"Do we have to have those documents to make the case?" I asked.
"Absolutely" Shanker said. "Without the original records, and preferably Talmadge's testimony to establish the trail of evidence, Braxton just might get off the hook."
"Meaning we somehow have to spring Talmadge, recover the documents, and keep him alive to tell his tale."
"Not an awfully practical matter," Jasmine said. "He's being held in a guarded, topfloor room at the VA hospital in Jackson."
Suddenly, the shrieking syncopation of a helicopter shattered the silence, followed by a swift blur of simultaneous terror. First came a red laser dot's lethal dance, which found its mark faster than I could react. The unmistakable crack of a Heckler and Koch MP5 reached my ears an instant after Jay Shanker's head opened up like a dropped melon.
Before Shanker hit the ground, the red dot danced over Jasmine like a red wasp heavy with death. I threw myself against her and prayed.
CHAPTER 71