The train was halted soon after. The passengers were forced to hike single file down the tunnel’s narrow service walkway to the nearest station-still Oakland, at that point. The tunnel was shut down for hours afterward so it could be inspected for damage and so the crime-scene techs could do their thing, and BART service between the cities was suspended.
The news identified Segreti by name and peddled a slanted version of the whole sordid tale. A gangster in hiding. A retired federal agent recognizing him and making it his mission to track him down, hell-bent on bringing in the one who got away. A bloody altercation leaving both men dead. One was painted a two-bit lowlife, the other a hero.
If you asked Hendricks, that wasn’t far off-only they had it backward which was which.
Segreti’s death didn’t dominate the news cycle for long. Later that evening, the White House announced that government operatives had raided a body shop in South San Francisco and-after what was described as a protracted gun battle-had killed two members of the True Islamic Caliphate, one of them the man from the video. Inside, they found handguns, assault rifles, and a pair of partially assembled explosive vests, as well as a map of San Francisco on which the Federal Building and several targets in the Castro District were marked.
The statement never mentioned Bellum by name, but come Wall Street’s morning bell, their stock soared nonetheless.
Hendricks’s memories of the next sixteen hours or so were spotty. His wound was in bad shape, and a brutal fever had taken hold of him. He slathered it with antibiotic ointment and popped aspirin like Tic Tacs until his fever broke. Cameron was so worried about him, she refused to get checked out at the nearby urgent care clinic until he threatened to go off his meds. It turned out she needed stitches and a tetanus shot, but thankfully, Yancey and the assholes at the hospital hadn’t broken any bones.
When Hendricks was feeling well enough to move, he and Cameron parted ways. She seemed bummed but didn’t argue. “Guess it was silly of me, thinking I could help you…do what you do,” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “You did all right out there. And I may still need a favor from time to time. IDs. Aliases. A little background work, maybe. You know-the kind you can manage from your dorm room, well out of the line of fire.”
“Deal,” she said. “But I’m not going back to college, not until I decide what for.”
“What are you going to do in the meantime?”
She shrugged. “There’s a lot of advocacy groups out there that need volunteers. I think I’ll try to do some good while I figure out what’s next.”
“Something tells me you’ll do plenty.”
They hugged. She squeezed him so tight, his stitches hurt. When she finally let him go, tears brimmed in her eyes. “Do me a favor out there, would you?”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t die.”
Hendricks smiled, but said nothing.
He didn’t want to make a promise he couldn’t keep.
43.
CHARLIE THOMPSON STOOD in an apartment full of boxes and wondered where the hell she’d put her keys.
Officially, she’d moved out of O’Brien’s house four days ago, once her transfer had come through. That’s when the movers picked up her boxes and drove them here. But unofficially, she’d been sleeping at a hotel every night since the shit went down in San Francisco. Hard to believe that less than three weeks ago, she and Kate were engaged. Now she was single, living in a condo with a partial view of Lake Michigan, and working out of the Milwaukee field office.
She’d never seen a transfer go through so quickly. But O’Brien had been motivated. “You’re lucky you’re keeping your badge,” she’d said. “If it were up to me, you’d be leaving here in chains.”
Thompson spotted her keys atop the mantel. Snatched them up and headed for the door. She was late. Halfway out, she doubled back and grabbed the manila folder on the counter. She’d brought it home from the office yesterday and needed it today. If she’d forgotten it, she would have had to turn around.
Once she was on the road, she let her car’s GPS guide her through the unfamiliar streets to I-43. She headed not south toward the field office, but north toward a small town called Grafton. Toward her new assignment.
The sky was clear and bright, the Saturday-morning traffic sparse. The September air was just crisp enough to remind her of summer’s passing. She drove with the windows down, the radio off, her hair blowing, enjoying the roar of the wind in her ears, and the sun’s warming glow through the windshield.
The drive was flat and green, the highway divided by a strip of grass and lined with trees on either side. Occasionally, the trees would fall away, and farmland would peek through.
She exited the highway and headed west on a commercial stretch. Best Buy, Costco, Home Depot. Eventually, a town sprung up around her.
Ever smaller streets, ever more residential, until finally she stopped outside a modest ranch in a nondescript suburban neighborhood. The house was white with red shingles. Arched windows and doorways lent it an almost Spanish air, making it something of an oddity on this block.
Thompson strode up the short walkway onto the porch and rapped twice on the front door. An agent peeked through the narrow window to the side of it. He unlocked the door-bolts clunking, chains rattling-and let her in. “Where is he?” she asked.
“Kitchen,” the agent replied.
He was eating breakfast when she walked in. Half a grapefruit. A cup of coffee. A pill organizer sat beside his plate, the kind with a compartment for every day of the week. A tan ball of fur snored quietly on his bony lap. “Agent Thompson,” he said, smiling.
“Morning, Frank,” she said.
She hadn’t liked Hendricks’s plan one bit when he’d called to read her in. It was too dangerous, she thought, and there were too many opportunities for it to go wrong.
Honestly, it had gone wrong. The deal had been that Yancey would be delivered alive and made to answer for what he’d done. But in the end, he’d given Segreti no choice. Thompson wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. Yancey was a bad man. The bomb blast that leveled Segreti’s safe house killed nine federal employees, some of them her friends. And then there was that poor bastard who Yancey shot dead in the parking garage-a case that officially remained unsolved because Cameron could never testify without compromising the Bureau’s case against the Council.
Thompson knew nothing about Yancey’s role in bringing the members of the True Islamic Caliphate into the country. Bellum made sure anything that could implicate them in the bombing of the Golden Gate was buried.
Segreti’s apparent suicide, which was supposed to happen once Yancey was safely neutralized and removed from the train car, was another sticking point for her. She thought it reckless and unnecessary. But Segreti refused to testify against the Council unless the world thought him dead-not to protect himself, he insisted, but because he couldn’t stand another Albuquerque on his conscience-so it was unavoidable.
Staging it had been easy enough. Every BART train is equipped with between eight and twelve cameras; they simply leaked the most convincing angle to the press and had Hendricks’s Bellum contact, Reyes, delete any footage that made it clear Segreti shot six inches past his own left ear.
Enlisting Reyes in the effort, however, had taken some work. Hendricks reached out to him a few hours before he was supposed to exchange Segreti for Cameron, using the number from the texts Cameron had intercepted. At first, Reyes was furious-Hendricks had assaulted him, after all, and put several of his men in the hospital. Hendricks let him vent. When Reyes finally ran out of steam, Hendricks told him what he knew of Yancey’s interest in Segreti.