Chapter Nineteen
Her burner phone dinged with an incoming message as she headed along Whitehaven Trail in Dumbarton Oaks Park. It was still dark. She hadn’t gotten much sleep lately and the strain of living a double life was beginning to tell.
She couldn’t wait for the subterfuge to be over, to deliver her final message and openly begin the fight. She couldn’t wait to reveal who she was and revel in her achievements with the thousands of people who thought the way she did. This was a call to action that her people would recognize. The federal government had stolen the republic from the people. The people were stealing it back.
She slowed to read the text message in case it was relevant to this morning’s mission.
A weblink appeared. An image slowly downloaded. She stumbled to a halt, panting in the cold air as a photograph of a burned-out farmhouse revealed itself. Her heartbeat reverberated in her ears like an echo chamber. Nothing remained of the building except two unstable-looking chimney stacks, the embers still smoking under bright klieg lights. The snow was blackened with soot and torn up dirt.
But she recognized it.
She quickly read the article. “One man, Henry Jessop, believed dead. Arson suspected. Feds investigating.”
She squatted, resting one hand on the ground. No! He couldn’t be dead.
She covered her mouth with her hand. Why was his death being investigated by the Feds? Had they connected him to the DC killings? Had they connected him to her? She stared around, looking for signs that this was a setup and that agents were hidden in the bushes ready to pounce. But it was too dark to make out much.
Rage filled her.
She needed to destroy the phone and figure out what the Feds might have found out. The old man wouldn’t have given them away. That’s no doubt why he was dead and the house destroyed. He’d sacrificed himself rather than give away the cause. He was a martyr. Another hero who’d dedicated his life to the revolution. She wouldn’t let him down.
The faint sound of footsteps approached from around a bend in the path, masked by the noise of the nearby creek rushing toward downtown at full spate. She was in a secluded section of the trail, along a narrow gorge, hidden from the road by the heavy shadows and a thick stand of trees. Even though the branches were bare of leaves she couldn’t see anybody hiding. If Feds were there she wouldn’t go down without taking a few of them with her. She pulled her ball cap lower, then reached up to grip the weapon that nestled in a holster in the small of her back. She didn’t have a suppressor this time. It wouldn’t fit.
She started jogging, slowly, as if she was in this for the long haul—which she was.
Congressman Adam Trettorri came into view in keeping with his winter pre-dawn routine. He was one of the youngest politicians in DC. Handsome. An Army vet. Openly gay.
He was an abomination. The worst kind of monster because the outer package was so perfect.
She waited for him to pass before she drew the pistol. She turned and aimed for center mass. The noise was deafening and reverberated off the ravine walls.
He stumbled and crashed to his knees.
She approached, moving fast. She needed to get out of here ASAP. The Naval Observatory wasn’t far away, and the home of the new Vice President, along with all the Secret Service that entailed.
Trettorri lay on his front now, not moving. Blood bloomed on his right side. She used her foot to try to roll him over onto his back, but he was a heavy sonofabitch.
She leaned down to wrestle him over, surprised when he grabbed her foot and yanked. She fell on her ass and scrambled backwards, Nikes slipping in the wet leaves. He reared over her despite the gunshot wound and tried to snatch the weapon out of her hand.
Even wounded he was stronger than she was. She twisted and fought within his grasp. She looked into his determined blue eyes and felt a spurt of fear.
“The Taliban didn’t get the better of me.” His voice was hoarse, but he kept right on talking. “I’ll be damned if some hate-filled little bitch back home will.”
“This isn’t your home,” she spat. “Your filth should be drowned at birth.”
“I was thinking the same thing about you.” He laughed despite the fact he was bathed in sweat and blood and in obvious pain.
She dug her fingers into the wound on his back and he reared away in agony. She jumped to her feet. She was covered in his blood and it wouldn’t be long before the cops came to investigate the gunshot. She had to get out of here.
Without another word, she pointed the gun at where the freak lay panting in the dirt and pulled the trigger.
Blood spurted and she nodded in satisfaction and smiled. Seemed this hate-filled little bitch had gotten the better of him after all.
She ran down to the creek and washed the blood off her hands and face. Her clothes were black so bloodstains wouldn’t show. She sloshed her sneakers in the icy shallows and decided to cross the stream then cut through the woods into the nearby Rock Creek Park Trails system. She needed to scrub every centimeter of her skin to eliminate that bastard’s vile residue from her body. His scent was acrid in her nostrils.
Another message sent.
Shivers wracked her body and her teeth hammered against each other until she started running again. After a few hundred feet, her blood heated as her muscles burned. Half a kilometer south of where she’d shot the congressman she removed the SIM card and tossed it in the creek. The cell followed ten seconds later.
She grinned and picked up the pace on the race home.
The Feds didn’t know a damned thing and they wouldn’t figure any of this out until it was too late. Henry Jessop’s death marked the start of the revolution. It wouldn’t be long before the whole world knew what a hero he was. What heroes they both were. She was ready to lead this war. Hell, she’d already started. Soon others would follow and this charade would be over.
* * *
Mac clasped hands with Alex Parker who was a cybersecurity consultant for BAU-4. He’d worked with the guy during the Minneapolis mall investigation, but they’d never actually met. Now they, along with Lincoln Frazer, were in some sort of specially shielded room in the laboratory complex at Quantico where experts examined the effects of viruses and trojans on different computer systems. They’d had to leave all electronics outside and they were effectively cut off from the world.
“Thanks for the use of your jet.” Mac smiled though part of him felt grim. “I enjoyed meeting your business partner.”
“Haley’s one of a kind,” Parker agreed.
Mac had gotten a call around five a.m. to say he could hitch a ride straight to Quantico on Parker’s company jet if he wanted. Tess had opted to wait for the commercial flight they’d booked, saying she needed to be in DC by noon. She was trying to put a little distance between them.
Yeah, after their not so innocent encounter, she was definitely trying to put some distance between them.
He’d let her.
He forced Tess out of his head. Maybe he’d call her when this was over, just to say goodbye. They were both better off pretending they’d never spent the night together listening to other people have sex and then, finally, giving into temptation.
Sonofabitch.
“Haley’s a talker.” Parker eyed him. “Don’t believe half of what she tells you unless it’s about the cost of her shoes. You could arm a third world nation with what she spends on shoes.”
“I saw the shoes.”
Parker grunted. Mac knew some of his history from friends at the Bureau. Alex Parker had once been incarcerated in a Moroccan jail and rumors were he’d got there by working for the CIA though they’d always denied any connection.
They’d never admit anything else.
Haley had filled in a few gaps. She, Alex Parker, and another friend from their days at MIT had started their own private security business from scratch and were now in such high demand they could barely keep up. She dealt with the management side, recruiting the muscle, handling logistics and basically telling everyone what to do.
“You have the hard drive?” Parker asked.
Mac handed over the evidence bag containing Jessop’s computer. Wearing gloves, Parker signed and dated it and removed the item from the bag. Mac tried to concentrate on what Parker was doing as he plugged the drive into something that looked more like a complicated circuit board than any actual PC.
What Mac hadn’t known was that he and Parker had more in common than he’d realized. Both of them had lost their mothers to cancer at a young age, and Parker’s father had been a professional gambler who’d gotten his ass murdered in a back alley in Carson City. The guy sounded as much of a loser as Mac’s own father had been.
Parker’s friendship with Lincoln Frazer, who was notoriously distant and aloof, was the subject of much internal gossip inside the Bureau, but Haley didn’t know any more about that than he did. Mac had first met Frazer during a posting to LA. Frazer had a reputation for being critical and cynical. A perfectionist who didn’t tolerate fools. Mac and Frazer hadn’t really spoken much until they’d been assigned together on a task force looking for a serial killer hunting street prostitutes in Hollywood. They’d caught the guy and he’d been executed in record time for California.
Happy days.
Mac and Frazer had gradually become good friends when they’d both worked out of Quantico, but it had taken a lot of years to establish that relationship. Frazer and Parker had hit it off almost straight away. There was something intriguing about Parker—the way he seemed capable on so many different levels. Mac had a feeling the guy had more secrets than the politburo.
Lincoln Frazer could have climbed as high as he wanted inside the FBI, but he’d chosen to stick with the Behavioral Analysis Unit. His focus was on catching criminals, not shaping policy, even though the guy liked power.
When the silence became oppressive Mac asked Frazer, “Was that a woman I heard at your house last night?”
Frazer eyed him narrowly.
“He has two of them now. And a dog,” Parker interrupted without looking up. “And despite his sour expression he loves every minute of it.”
Frazer’s lips twitched. “You and Rooney set a date yet?”
Parker grunted. “She didn’t tell you?”
“What?”
Parker eyed him grimly. “After telling me for months that she wanted to wait until after the baby was born, Mal suddenly decided she wants to get married in April.”
“Is that a problem?” Frazer asked.
“Nothing is a problem if it gets her down the aisle, but her mother wants a big fancy wedding, and I just want Mal and a preacher. Guess which one of us is getting their way?”
“Senator Tremont is a formidable mother-in-law to take on.”
“Don’t I know it.”
Frazer was clearly holding back a grin. “So you have six weeks to plan a wedding?”
“About that. Which is why, despite female objections, I hired a wedding planner out of DC. Hopefully all I need to do is show up and say ‘I do.’”
Mac and Frazer snorted at the same time. They’d both been through the grind of a wedding and a divorce. Frazer had obviously moved on though, something Mac had never expected to see.
The memory of sleeping beside Tess flitted through his mind. There’d been something unique about sleeping with a woman and not having sex. Which had been fine until she’d woken him up with her nightmare. And they’d had sex.
It was only natural he’d been turned on—an attractive woman beside him, an enthusiastic threesome next-door. Her sweet scent and lax warmth invading his senses. It would have been more worrying if he hadn’t woken up with a cast iron dick. But to act on it? Monumentally stupid. He had no idea how he’d found the strength to stop at third base when a home run had been screaming his name.
Thankfully he’d been able to prevent himself crossing that last line of self-destruction, but it was more a technicality than a save should anyone in the Bureau ever find out what had gone on in that motel room.
Fuuuck.
“What about you?” Frazer asked unexpectedly as Parker booted up the drive and bypassed the password.
Mac gave him a patented blank stare.
“I heard your ex split with her new husband.”
How the hell had Frazer heard that?
“She is the bane of my life,” he conceded.
“What’s the deal with the daughter, Tess Fallon?” Frazer asked.
Mac crossed his arms. “There is nothing going on with the daughter.”
“Never said there was anything going on.” Those blue eyes were amused now. “Just asked what the deal was. Think she’s telling the truth about her lack of involvement in these murders?”
Mac thought about the question objectively. “She has an alibi for the rabbi’s and the DJ’s murder. She was raised by a black woman and does taxes for a bunch of non-profit civil liberty groups. As far as I can tell she’s a model citizen.” He fucking hoped she was a model citizen after making her quiver and tremble and cry out in the darkness. Otherwise his career really was toast. “It could all be a cover,” he conceded. “She’s very protective of the little brother which raises a few questions about his possible involvement. She hadn’t contacted Eddie-the-asshole in all the years he’s been incarcerated.” He stared through the glass windows at the other FBI personnel going about their work. “When she was a kid she wasn’t like the other Pioneers. She was quirky and kind. She couldn’t exactly change her circumstances back then. I liked her,” he admitted reluctantly. “I still like her. She’s a nice person.”
“Nice?” Frazer’s voice held a bit of a sneer.
“What’s wrong with ‘nice’?” he challenged. Although nice wasn’t the most pertinent word he’d use to describe Tess.
Frazer raised his brow.
“Fine. She’s whip-smart and hard-working and, despite the crappy relations, is funny as hell.” Sexy, too. He kept that thought to himself. He desired Tess Fallon in a way he hadn’t allowed himself to desire anyone, not since he’d discovered his wife’s favorite dictation position was over her boss’s desk.
One side of Frazer’s lips curled but whatever he’d been about to say was interrupted when the machine Parker was working on gave a sharp beep.
Mac watched as Parker scrolled through lines of gibberish code. The guy wrote down a series of long numbers.
“I checked her out,” Parker told him. “Frazer contacted me last night and I spent time getting into the One-Drop-2-Many site on the Darknet. I ran Tess’s IP address and usernames while I was waiting on some hacking tools to do their thing. I found no evidence of her trying to cover her tracks, or visiting anything more dubious than Tumblr.”
A sense of relief washed over Mac.
Parker looked up. “Couldn’t get a handle on the brother, mainly because I didn’t have enough time to dig around his VPN.”
The machine beeped and Parker switched his attention back to the task at hand.
“Find anything on the One-Drop site?” Mac asked.
Parker twisted his lips. “Plenty, but it’s all encrypted unless you’re signed in as a verified user and whoever set up the site knows their stuff. There’s no money exchanging hands so that makes tracing people harder. One of my more dubious online aliases applied for membership but I have a feeling these people have a more referral based membership than volunteers.” He shrugged. “I copied everything and sent it to the hate crimes people at HQ, but it’ll take time. I also gave the task of cracking anonymous IDs to one of my newest recruits. He’s just out of high school. Google and I fought to hire him.”
“Why’d he choose you?” Mac asked, intrigued.
Parker gave a sharp grin. “I challenged him to a contest as to which of us could hack a specific internal phone number from the NSA database.”
Mac’s eyes bugged. “You hacked the NSA?”
“I have an ongoing contract to conduct pen tests—penetration tests—at regular intervals. The contest was a setup. I let the kid win and had him call the number, which just happened to be the line in the office where we did the hack. As soon as I answered the phone all his systems crashed with ransomware.” A cool smile played around Parker’s eyes. “He wanted to know how I did it. I told him if he worked for me for six months I’d tell him.”
“But you’d trust him with information important to a federal investigation?”
Parker regarded him calmly. “These are identities the investigation won’t figure out without his help. You don’t learn to hack by signing into Facebook and saving your passwords in the keychain.”
“How do you know if you can trust him?” Mac wasn’t convinced.
“You look at what people do with secrets or zeros they uncover. If they auction them off to the highest bidder on the dark web, regardless of who the buyer is or what they intend to do with the information, then you probably don’t want that person working for you. If they offer it on the gray market to pay their mother’s medical expenses and carefully vet those they intend to sell it to, you’ve potentially got a keeper.”
Mac nodded. He didn’t understand much about computers beyond email and the internet, but he did understand the veracity of people’s actions. If they were honorable when they thought no one was looking, they were likely good guys. But good guys sometimes went bad.
“Anything on Jessop’s machine?” He nodded at the screen.
Parker grimaced. “You want the good news or the bad news?”
Mac groaned.
Frazer said, “Bad news.”
“I always knew you were a pessimist. Someone cleaned off this hard disk and reformatted the drive in the not too distant past.”
“The good news,” Mac pressed. He’d been banking on them getting something concrete out of this machine.
“Some of the people who work for me can recover a lot of information that hasn’t been written over, but it’s going to take a little time.”
“FBI can’t do it here?”
Parker shared a look with Frazer. “Chen might have a shot.”
Frazer frowned. “She’s in New Orleans until tomorrow night.”
“It’s up to you guys. The FBI will be able to crack it eventually, but I employ the people the FBI turns to when they get stuck.” Parker shrugged with an air of relaxed confidence. “I’m offering a free service but if you want to keep it in-house…”
Mac drew in a deep breath. “We’ll take all the help we can get.”
Parker grinned. “More good news is, Jessop has been using the machine since it was wiped.” He typed in some instructions and downloaded information to a blank thumb drive. “Here’s a list of his contacts and email addresses. Copies of his emails. I pulled his phone records last night and figured out he was regularly calling a burner in DC. Could be our shooter. I have a trap set so that the next time that burner hooks up to a cell tower it alerts me, but something tells me as soon as the owner of that burner realizes Jessop is dead they’ll ditch the phone and dump as many things as they can that link them. I do have historical information on where that phone connected to cell towers that I will send to you.”
“You were busy.”
“Didn’t get much sleep.”
Mac didn’t either. For different reasons. “That’s a big help. Thanks. Any idea who told Jessop I was a Fed?”
Frazer spoke up. “Yep. Jessop called a local deputy, but that deputy claims Jessop was asking about a couple of trespassers on his land so the guy tracked down your rental car information for him. When he realized you were an agent he told Jessop not to do anything stupid. Obviously, Jessop didn’t listen.”
Mac nodded. “We need to keep an eye on that cop. Just in case.”
Frazer nodded. “I already spoke to ViCAP. I’m on it.” There was a system in place to cloak investigations of law enforcement personnel so they couldn’t discover for themselves that they were under the microscope.
“Any sign of David Hines’s manifesto?” asked Mac.
“Is that what he called it?” said Parker.
“Nah. He called it something like The Pioneers’ Pathway, or some such bullshit,” Mac said.
Parker typed that in but got nothing.
“Can you get me any of the actual wording? They might have buried it under a layer of crap. Techs can search for hidden content.”
Mac tipped his chin. “I need to go to my apartment but I’m pretty sure I wrote notes on it. There was one paper copy but we never found it at the compound.”
Was Tess right? Had Hines had a girlfriend? Might she have kept the original?
“I’m done here.” Parker stood. “You can turn this over to the other analysts to see if they can find anything useful in the documents.”
Frazer nodded and they put the drive back into the evidence bag and Frazer signed off on it.
Mac checked the time. Almost ten. “I need to check in with the US Marshals Regional Fugitive Task Force. See if they picked up Eddie yet.”
Frazer grimaced. “The fact he escaped now when something is going down disturbs me.”
“I think he thinks the revolution is about to start and doesn’t want to miss it.” Mac was pissed. “He threatened Tess.”
“Think he meant it?” Parker asked.
Mac pressed his lips together and felt the pressure build up inside his chest. “Yeah. He meant it. But he isn’t smart enough to outwit the marshals.”
“Unless he has outside help.”
And there Mac was, thinking about Tess again.
They left the shielded room and his and Frazer’s and Parker’s cells all started dinging like slot machines.
Mac swore as he checked the messages. “There’s been another shooting. A congressman.”
“Burner pinged off a cell tower near the Naval Observatory,” Parker told him.
“That’s close to where Trettorri was shot.”
“So we have a likely connection between Jessop and the shooter,” said Frazer.
Mac’s teeth clenched together hard enough to shoot pain through his jaw. “I need to get back to DC.” They started walking towards the main entrance. Mac got another text that stopped him in his tracks. “Sonofabitch.”
“What is it?”
“Ballistics came back on the shell casing found at the rabbi’s murder. Harm traced it to a gun that was used in a robbery twenty-two years ago.” He looked up. “A pistol believed to be part of the cache stolen by David Hines and the Pioneers.”
The links to a group he’d thought eliminated years ago kept multiplying. This wasn’t over.
“I thought we recovered all those weapons?” Frazer said.
Mac nodded. “Most of them, but we were never sure exactly how many were sold before the raid or how many were stolen from the dealer. He wasn’t the most reputable witness.”
“What make is the gun?” Parker asked.
“Smith & Wesson Sigma Semi-Automatic Pistol, .40 cal.”
“They started making those in 1993, so it was a new weapon at the time of the robbery,” Parker told him.
“The fact it turned up now for these murders has to be symbolic. Maybe David Hines gave it to Jessop who gave it to the killer?” Mac shrugged. “I’m going to go have a quick chat with Harm as I’m here. See if he has anything else to tell me.”
Parker checked his watch. “I can give you a ride to DC in about an hour. I have to get fitted for a new tux.” His expression suggested he’d rather jump out of an airplane without a chute.
“You already have a tux,” said Frazer.
Parker’s lips pinched. “Apparently, I need another one to get married in.”
“Mal’s worth it.” Frazer suppressed a smile and slapped Parker on the back.
“Glad you think that way because you’re my best man. You’re gonna need one, too.”
Frazer squeezed his eyes closed. “Damn.”
Parker nodded. “You’re welcome.”
Mac’s cell buzzed with another text. “Can you drop me off at the George Washington University Hospital in DC?”
“Sure,” Parker said.
“What’s at the hospital?” Frazer asked.
Mac showed them the latest text from Walsh.
Trettorri was alive.