"Oh?" Trench Coat raised both eyebrows. "You'll take care of it, huh? Because you've done such a bang-up job of that so far? Sorry, but I'm going to need a little better than 'I'll take care of it.' Come on, Porter. You don't even know where he is."
"You just said he's in Atlanta."
"So? He could be anywhere by now. What if he left the country? Then what are you going to do?"
Porter sighed. His employer had a tendency to panic, overreact, and just be plain impatient. It was understandable. He had a lot riding on this mission. If Wyatt was able to find anything on the Denali Project, there would be big trouble.
"He didn't leave the country, sir. We took precautions."
"Precautions? What kind of precautions?"
"Wyatt is on a national watch list. If he so much as tries to take a leak across the river in Canada or look at a churro in Mexico, we'll know, and we'll grab him. Every airport will be on the lookout for him, too. All of his credit cards, his bank accounts, even his mortgages have been frozen. So, sir, he couldn't have gone far. Odds are he's still in the Atlanta area. I'll have my team check all his contacts in and around the city. More than likely, he is lying low at a friend's or colleague's place. That's what I mean by I'll take care of it."
"You burned Wyatt?" Trench Coat asked, sounding mildly impressed.
"This is why you pay me, sir. I get things done. So, if Wyatt did survive and he is in Atlanta, he won't be around for long. I can promise you that."
Trench Coat turned his head, facing toward the street beyond the cemetery fence. "I hope I don't need to remind you the price of failure, Porter. I realize you're a tough guy with lots of resources and know-how. But if you screw this up—"
"Yes, sir. I understand. Don't worry. I said I'll take care of it, and that's exactly what I intend to do."
Trench Coat seemed to accept the response and gave a curt nod. "Good. See to it you do."
He turned and started walking back down the winding sidewalk.
Porter watched him disappear around the bend on the path before he rolled up the window and looked ahead.
One more reason to hate bureaucrats, he thought.
They thought they knew everything.
He flushed his anger deep down inside and thought about the problem at hand. His team had been decimated in New York. He still had two men he knew he could count on. Luckily, they were in Washington awaiting further instructions. So, they would be easy enough to pick up.
Porter would also need someone he could trust in Atlanta. And he'd need it immediately. Getting to Atlanta would take time. Time wasn't something he had in spades at the moment.
Fortunately, he knew a guy. Porter just hoped he was available.
Like the man in the trench coat said, he and the men he worked with didn't take failure lightly. It wasn't an option, and Porter knew it. He'd seen what those men were capable of. It made what he'd done to Sean Wyatt look like child's play.
Porter hadn't mentioned his plan for the president to the guy in the trench coat. He thought it better that way. The less his employer knew, the better. He'd be thanked later on, of course, once the president was out of the way. The vice president would be a puppet, easy to manipulate.
He pulled up his phone contacts and found the first name he needed. It was time to put the presidential plan into action. As soon as he issued the order to take down Dawkins, Porter would take care of the situation in Atlanta.
Sean Wyatt might be alive, but not for long. And soon, he'd have every person in the country with a badge looking for him.
Chapter 9
Sean didn't sleep much during the night. When he finally drifted off after an hour of tossing and turning, it was into a fragile, troubled sleep.
He, Tommy, and June arrived at Joe and Helen McElroy's place late into the night. Sean lost his phone in New York and had been forced to pick up a burner phone. At his request, Tommy and June both shut off their devices and removed the batteries — further insurance against being tracked.
He knew the hour was late, but Sean also knew that Joe and Helen wouldn't mind them showing up at a moment's notice. They'd been friends for a long time, and eventually Tommy ended up hiring them to work for the IAA. That fact turned out to be a problem when the three arrived at the McElroy cabin in the woods just outside Cartersville.
Joe and Helen were gone on a trip, taking a little vacation time to tour around the county and do some camping with their dog.
Luckily, Sean and Tommy both knew where the spare key was and helped themselves into the home. The alarm started beeping, but as soon as everyone was inside, Sean reset the alarm.
They were all too tired to discuss things further and went to bed.
Sean woke early, after scraping together a tight five hours of rest. The sun still hadn't come up over the mountains to the east. There wasn't even the residual rim of light yet.
The utter exhaustion had been no match for his overactive brain. Hundreds of ideas and hypotheses about James Andrews and his Raiders blitzed his mind. Some were wild, fanciful notions that had absolutely no plausibility. A few, however, were certainly worth checking into.
He looked out the window from his seat at the computer desk, staring into the darkness for several minutes until the caffeine from his coffee kicked in. His fingers wrapped around the computer mouse, and he moved it around on the desk, bringing the monitor to life. The most promising theory revolved around an old story he'd heard from his dad when he was a child. He'd heard it several other times throughout his life, due to the fact that his father told and retold tales without knowing who'd heard them and who hadn't.
According to the story, during the Confederate retreat from Chattanooga, the army had to take the Old Federal Road and pass through a gap between White Oak Mountain and Taylor's Ridge, where Interstate 75 South cut through in the present day.
The legend went on to say that some of the men in the retreating army had loot they'd taken earlier in the war. Knowing that time was of the essence and they'd need to move fast, some of the soldiers broke ranks and made their way up the side of Boy's Mountain, two miles to the southeast. A Confederate hospital wasn't far away, located by Cherokee Springs. Knowing the group would rendezvous at the hospital before heading south toward Atlanta, they ran up Boy's Mountain to a cave.
During their occupation of the area, Confederate forces had built trenches on the side of the mountain from which they could fire upon the enemy from a high vantage point. The cave was just below the trenches, having been seen by almost everyone who was assigned to that area, so hiding anything in there before then wouldn't have made much sense.
The story suggested that these men hid gold, money, and other valuables inside the cave. Another detail that made the tale less credible was that it suggested the fleeing men stuffed their treasures inside the barrel of a cannon.
The legend certainly had some blurry spots to the tale. Things got twisted, added, and lost through the passage of time.
There had been other stories about hidden Confederate gold somewhere along the Old Federal Road. They seemed far less credible than the one about the fleeing soldiers, however, and it wasn't the treasure in a cannon that had Sean's interest. It was a story about the men from Andrews' Raiders.
Sean heard the story from his grandfather, which told him early on in life exactly where his dad got the habit of spinning long yarns.
According to Sean's grandfather — and history — the Raiders ditched the locomotive in the valley near White Oak Mountain. The few men who ran toward Chattanooga ended up safely behind Union lines. Some ran toward the mountain, hoping they could get the high ground and have a defensive advantage or perhaps find better hiding places to wait out the pursuit.