When they reached the Camry, Cruz said, “Give me your coat.”
The guard removed the jacket and handed it to him. Cruz put it on. “Get in. You’re driving.”
After the guard was behind the wheel, the assassin took the seat directly behind him and tapped the back of his head with the gun barrel. “What’s your name?”
“Jared,” he said, flinching. “Jared Goldberg.”
“Nice to meet you, Jared,” he said. “Now drive.”
Chapter 83
Back at joint Base Andrews, as well as across the nation, anxiety was building. Despite the imposition of martial law, protests had broken out at peace vigils held in New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle.
No country had lobbed a nuclear warhead at us, but the threat remained. You could see it was on everyone’s mind. Agents were calling home as often as they called for investigative leads, and I didn’t blame any of them for it.
But I simply refused to let the possibility of a world war dominate my thoughts. If I did, I knew I’d be useless in my new role.
When I returned from talking to Dr. Winters, Carstensen, the FBI deputy director, had asked me to move to the team that was synthesizing information. I’d started to protest that I was more useful in the field, but she’d cut me off and walked away.
So I’d kept my head down through the evening, focusing on the flow of evidence crossing my screen and desktop. Twice I’d tried to return Nina Davis’s call, but I’d gotten no answer. But I couldn’t pay attention to that. Every minute seemed to bring an update, a field report, or a result from Quantico’s churning forensics laboratories.
We knew by then, for example, that, courtesy of a bright ER nurse at George Washington University Hospital, we had DNA material and blood from the president’s assassin and possibly his fingerprints off the rail of a hospital bed he’d used after the ambulance ride. We knew his blood type was O negative, but DNA testing still took several days. And so far, there were no matches to the fingerprints.
As I closed that file, I once again forced myself to consider who benefited the most from the assassinations.
Kasimov? I supposed if the Kremlin was behind the killings, then Kasimov would benefit as long as he could disappear and as long as his Moscow handlers could keep him hidden from the long arm of U.S. law enforcement. But Kasimov had vanished. Maybe it didn’t benefit him. Maybe his role in the plot was done, and some higher-up in Russia had ordered his plane shot down over the ocean.
Did Samuel Larkin still benefit? The acting president had been at an undisclosed location all day, huddled with a small circle of advisers, dealing with the existential threat to the nation and the constitutional crisis. Would Larkin, the former attorney general, agree that Senator Talbot, the Senate president pro tempore, was the right and legal person to be sitting in the Oval Office and calling the shots? If Larkin refused to cede power, wouldn’t that be an indicator of his involvement and of his intent?
For his part, Senator Talbot had been interviewed several times since the Lester Holt story appeared. Talbot seemed genuinely daunted by the idea of assuming the presidency, especially given his age. There’d even been talk of his retiring before this sudden change of circumstances.
So, did Talbot benefit? All in all, it didn’t strike me that way, but then again, I’d heard it said more than once that every U.S. senator fantasizes about becoming president. U.S. senators were powerful and influential in their own right, but for men and women of overwhelming ambition, being a senator wasn’t powerful and influential enough.
But having fellow politicians murdered to become president?
Before I could give that further thought, more forensics and field reports blinked into my in-box.
From Quantico’s ballistics lab: a report confirming Keith Rawlins’s suspicion that the bullets used to kill President Hobbs and wound the secretary of defense were made of carbon and built on a 3-D printer.
The next report came from Rawlins himself, who had been writing programs and devising algorithms to filter the huge amounts of data flowing in the wake of the assassinations. He’d found an incredible amount of speculation about the assassinations by various conspiracy theorists on the internet and dark web. But so far he’d discovered little to suggest the intricate dance of people and events that had to have occurred before the coordinated killings.
Mahoney came up to my workstation.
“A man and a woman with horses rented a remote cabin about forty miles north of the ranch where the Speaker and the secretary of state were shot,” he said. “They drove a heavy-duty green Chevy pickup with Wyoming plates, paid the landlord cash, and had cases that looked like they could have held rifles. Best part? They carried bogus Wyoming licenses in the names of Frank and Elizabeth Marker.”
“Do we have agents at the cabin?”
Mahoney’s face fell. “The landlord hadn’t been out there since he’d gotten his money. He led two agents from Dallas into the middle of nowhere, and, surprise, they found the cabin burned to the ground.”
Carstensen, who’d just walked up, said, “Nothing else?”
“The owner’s working with a sketch artist.”
I thought of something, got up, and went over to Keith Rawlins. I asked him if it was possible to craft an algorithm to sift through the vast NSA records of phone calls and data transmissions by specific location.
The FBI computer wizard said he thought so, and I told him what locations I had in mind. Rawlins said it might take him several hours, but he’d try.
When I returned to my work space, Mahoney, Carstensen, and half the other agents in the hangar were on their feet, their attention glued once again to the big screens dangling overhead.
Lester Holt sat at his anchor desk. “Acting president Larkin and Senator Talbot have agreed to let the chief justice of the Supreme Court decide who should lead the nation. In the meantime, Secretary of Defense Harold Murphy clings to life. If Murphy lives, he’ll also have a claim to the Oval Office. Could the situation be cloudier?”
Carstensen’s phone buzzed. She answered, listened, punched her fist in the air, and then looked at us and smiled. “The CIA just snatched Viktor Kasimov from a brothel in Tangier. They’re bringing him here.”
Chapter 84
Following Cruz’s instructions, the marina security guard, Jared Goldberg, had driven east by southeast, staying on residential and county secondary roads whenever possible. There were plenty of vehicles out after dark, which was a relief.
In the assassin’s worst-case scenario, he’d imagined a roadblock at every main intersection in a sixty-mile circle around Washington, DC. But he guessed that would have required calling out the National Guard from five or six states. Maybe more.
According to the all-news satellite station Goldberg had turned on, that had not yet happened and was unlikely to, given the projected short period of martial law. Three more days, Cruz thought. Three more days and I can make a real move.
He shivered. He almost swooned. He needed a doctor. Fast.
The radio was saying that the curfew would be in effect again at nine p.m. Any vehicles found traveling afterward could be stopped and searched.
Cruz forced himself alert. He needed medical care and a place to hide until—
“Where now?” Goldberg asked, gesturing at traffic signs.
They were coming up on Virginia State Route 17, a four-lane highway that could take them west toward Storck or east toward Interstate 95 and the bridge to the eastern shore of Maryland.