The lead agent nodded to one of his men. The man looked in the back of the vehicle. His glance back at his commander said it all.
Bagger said, “Now here’s what we’re going to do.” With his free hand he pointed at Paddy and Annabelle. “They’re coming with me.”
“We’re not letting you leave this building,” the commander said.
“Then I’m going to blow us all to kingdom come.”
“I don’t believe that,” the FBI agent said.
“Best I can hope for is lethal injection, right? Well, I ain’t going alone. So if you don’t think I’ll do it, you don’t know Jerry Bagger.” He glanced at twin snipers who had placed red dots on his forehead. “And your boys shoot me, hot-shit FBI man, this thumb is coming off whether you like it or not.”
The commander gazed uneasily at Alex and then Annabelle.
She stepped forward. “Okay, Jerry, you win. Let’s go.”
Alex stepped forward too. “I’m going too.”
“No you’re not, Alex,” she snapped.
Bagger smiled maliciously. “Alex? Alex, is it? You sound like you finally found a friend, Annabelle. And I don’t want to take your friends from you.” He looked at Alex. “Congratulations, jerk-off, you get to go too.”
Bagger eyed the commander. “Just so you know, I’m a fair guy, so you can keep a few of my boys to make you look good.” He pointed to Mike. “Including Mike there.”
“Mr. Bagger!” Mike started to protest.
“Shut up,” Bagger snapped before turning to Annabelle and the others. “Get in the SUV.” Several of his men retrieved their weapons and everyone climbed in.
Alex, Annabelle and Paddy slid into the middle seat. Bagger and one of his men got in the front seat, three others in the rear.
Bagger rolled down the window. “I see one car or hear one chopper following us, I start popping people, understand?” He waved to the FBI agents as the vehicle sailed out of the warehouse.
“Where to, Mr. Bagger?” the driver asked.
“Private airport in western Maryland where I had them park the jet. I thought I might need to get away on short notice. I’m calling ahead right now to tell them to warm it up.” He glanced at Annabelle. “I’m sorry to say you three won’t be joining us.”
CHAPTER 77
CARTER GRAY WAS a remarkable fisherman. Only he had not caught the fish he most prized, and that was because he could not find the right bait. He had burned thousands of man-hours and looked at a mountain of digital files until his eyeballs were ready to fall out. And yet for all that trouble he only had one name to show for it: Harry Jedidiah, son of Lesya and Rayfield Solomon, a.k.a. David P. Jedidiah the second.
He had tried to find Oliver Stone’s ragtag band of freaks: the big man and ex-military Reuben Rhodes that Gray remembered from Murder Mountain; the mousy librarian Caleb Shaw who had not been to his home or job at the Library of Congress in recent days; and Milton Farb, the cherubic genius with OCD. Gray had a dossier on each man, and yet they had simply vanished. Farb and Shaw hadn’t used their cell phones and Rhodes didn’t have one registered in his name. And Rhodes had recently moved and left no forwarding address. Nor was wherever he was living listed on any real estate records, because Gray’s men had checked. Still, with Carter Gray’s resources no one should be able to simply vanish. No wonder these terrorist sleeper cells were proving nearly impossible to uncover. America was too damn big and too damn free. In some ways the Soviets had had it right: Spy on everybody because you never know when a friend might turn into an enemy.
He now turned his attention to locating Lesya’s son. And he had focused on one aspect in particular as the point of least resistance. He rose from his chair in his bunker and flipped on the TV. Then the intelligence chief hit a button on the remote he was holding.
The scene he was looking at was from the Hart Senate Office Building. Roger Simpson clearly would be a target of Lesya’s son. If so he could either hit the senator at his home or office. Gray had already checked the surveillance cameras at Simpson’s condo building and found nothing helpful. Now he had turned to the office.
He watched hour after hour of people coming and going into the building. There were many and their numbers tended to dilute everyone down to useless silhouettes. Then Gray thought of a second angle. He put in another DVD, sat back and started watching the hallway outside Simpson’s office. He spent three hours doing this, methodically checking out each person coming into frame.
Finally. He sat up and viewed it again. The man working on the door to Simpson’s office. He zoomed in on the man’s face. Penetrating disguises was something Gray had been long trained in. In the cheekbone was that a touch of Solomon? The chin, the eyes, that of Lesya? Contrary to what he’d told the president, he knew the woman well.
He made numerous calls, and the story came into focus quickly. No one from Simpson’s office had called for a government repairman for the door. Simpson’s receptionist, though, reported that that’s what the man had said-that he’d been told to come. Yet he hadn’t gone in the office in the footage Gray had, and a review of the other surveillance discs turned up no such penetration. A bomb-sniffing dog was brought in but found nothing at which to bark. No one bothered to check for bugs, because a bug couldn’t kill a man.
The next step was to take the picture of the door repairman, pare it down to its essentials and run it through every database the government had. They were doing the same with the video feed from the airport and the descriptions that had been received from the nursing home. Even though the computer age had infinitely speeded this process up, it would still take a little time, something Gray did not have an abundance of. Allowing Lesya to be taken by the authorities was not an option. She had far too much she could tell. It was certain that she had passed this knowledge on to her son. And if Carr was with them, none of them could be allowed to live. It would be cataclysmic for the country, for the world. And for Carter Gray.
CHAPTER 78
BAGGER ORDERED HIS MAN to take a route through the city instead of getting on the Beltway to Maryland. They stopped once and switched out the license plate on the SUV in case the FBI had it. Then they drove on, blending in with dozens of other similar vehicles on the road.
Bagger sat back with a contented look as he clicked a button on the detonator, disarming it.
Paddy sat very still in his seat, his gaze on Bagger. Annabelle kept her eyes forward. Like Paddy, Alex was watching Bagger, or more precisely, the man’s thumb.
Annabelle said, “A bomb, Jerry? And it doesn’t seem your style to run like this.”
He smiled. “You taught me that lesson. Unpredictable. Sometimes you learn more from getting your ass kicked than you do from winning. You came right at me with the long con instead of targeting the casino. So I gave you some of your con stuff right back at you. Jerry Bagger never backs down, always stays and fights. Well, not this time, baby. And how sweet it feels.”
“Glad I could be such an example for you,” she said dryly.
“So what’s the plan?” Alex said. “Dump us in the woods on the way to the plane?”
“What the hell does it matter to you? You’ll be dead.”
“But once you get rid of us, you’ve got no more hostages. You think they’re going to let you just fly away?”
“They got no idea I have my jet here or where it is. I’ll be outta the feds’ jurisdiction in a couple of hours.”
“We have extradition with just about everybody.”
“I know the gaps there, trust me.”