The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 16

  She held out her hand, and Jensen shook it. “One day at a time,” she said. The recovering addict’s creed.

  One day at a time, she repeated to herself as she set off on foot toward the corner coffee shop.

  Especially when the world crumbles around you.

  Jensen’s MacBook whirred, ingesting the contents of the CD ROM that she and Jensen had found locked in the music box.

  Sam still had no idea how Phil Quartermain had come to be in possession of the box, and she had no idea whether it would contain anything useful. She was desperately searching for a link between John Abrams, the murdered CIA agent whose fake suicide she’d investigated on Saturday night, the gang of crooked Metro cops who had been following her around, and some character named Arturo Dibiaso.

  Sam forced herself to relax. Her deep breath brought in the soothing aroma of coffee, and she took another sip of her Americano while the contents of the CD ROM popped up on the screen.

  There were only two files, and she opened them both. They looked like payment records. Each file contained dozens of transactions, most into unique account numbers that didn’t repeat.

  But all of the payments shared just two origins, tracked by what looked to Sam like employer identification numbers, or EINs, the corporate equivalent of social security numbers. The IRS kept track of corporate taxes through EINs, and reconciled claimed expenditures with individual employees’ income tax records to ensure that no dollar went untaxed, and no expense went unverified.

  Sam logged into the coffee shop’s free Wi-Fi. A quick search of the IRS’ public database revealed that the two numbers common to all of the transactions contained in the CD ROM files were indeed EINs, belonging to two corporations.

  The first was called Executive Strategies. It didn’t ring a bell for Sam, but it felt like it was a name that she should have been familiar with. Where have I heard of Executive Strategies before? She wasn’t sure, but felt a strong suspicion that she would recognize the connection when it appeared. And the connection would inevitably reveal itself, she knew, if she applied the right amount of doggedness and patience.

  The second EIN belonged to JIE Associates, a name that meant nothing to her.

  She called Dan Gable at the office and asked him to research the two companies, and she read off a few of the recipients’ account numbers from the list of financial transactions for him to investigate as well. “Follow the cash” was a hackneyed investigative truism for a reason. It usually worked.

  “I’m on it, boss,” Dan said. “And FYI, Ekman’s already asked about you.”

  Sam groaned. “I feel a fever coming on.”

  “I’ll tell him you’re taking a personal day.”

  She thanked Dan and signed off, just in time to receive a call from Jeff Jensen on one of her other burner phones. “That was quick,” she said. “What did you find?”

  “The matches came back quickly because they’re all federal or state employees,” Jensen said.

  Interesting. “Hit me,” Sam said.

  “Phil Quartermain, and. . . sorry, I just lost the slip of paper. . .”

  Sam tapped her finger impatiently while Jensen shuffled papers. Quartermain’s prints weren’t a surprise – the music box had been in his possession, and he had actually called her minutes before his murder to invite her over for a discussion. She assumed he wanted to talk about evidence germane to the Abrams scene, but she would never know for sure.

  “Here it is,” Jensen said. “Sorry about that. John Abrams and Everett Cooper are the other two names.”

  Holy shit. Abrams and Cooper? Abrams was the dead Agency guy, suspected to be a double agent of some sort. And Everett Cooper was the creepy cop who had jumped out of the bushes in front of Abrams’ house, and later, whose brains had been splattered all over her entryway.

  So they knew each other?

  That wasn’t a conclusion she could yet draw, Sam knew, because it wasn’t fully supported by the prints – both Abrams and Cooper clearly handled the music box and its contents, but it was possible that they did so at separate times, which meant they didn’t have to know of each other’s existence.

  Still, it was worth further investigation, and there was clearly a link of some sort between the two of them.

  “Thanks, Jeff. That’s really interesting. What else did you find?”

  “There’s also a fourth set of prints, but I only got partials and wasn’t able to match them. The system’s still grinding away on it, but the partials were small, and I don’t expect a match any time soon.”

  “That’s interesting too.” There was evidently a fourth player, one who had been careful not to leave a full set of prints, but who had also chosen not to wipe things clean. The fourth guy wanted us to ID the other three, she thought.

  She thanked Jensen for his trouble. He asked, somewhat timidly, that she not discuss his involvement in the case with anyone.

  Sam laughed. Office workers. So naïve. “Jeff, you realize that we’re in a mutually assured destruction situation, right? If one of us talks, we both go down. I don’t have any more desire for a jail sentence than you do.” Jensen’s anxiety seemed assuaged, and Sam thanked him again before hanging up.

  Her mind churned over what she had just learned, and she had an important realization: There was another key connection between Cooper and Abrams, and she was that connection.

  Her name and address were on Abrams’ night stand, her photo was in the music box with fingerprints from both of them, and Cooper had attempted to ruin her night on numerous occasions before he met his demise in her entryway, shot by a fellow beat cop and an Internal Affairs officer.

  So Cooper and Abrams were working the same job. That seemed pretty clear.

  But on whose dime? Agency? If the CIA was behind an attempted murder of a fellow federal officer, it really wouldn’t be all that surprising. No one alive has plumbed the full depths of the Agency’s intrigue, Sam thought.

  But it would be highly unusual, on the other hand, if the Agency was working with a DC Metro cop to get the dirty work done. The Agency didn’t outsource from other organizations, and Cooper wasn’t some impostor in a cop’s uniform – he was a full-fledged Metro officer. At least, he was a bona-fide cop until he clocked out permanently a few nights earlier.

  But if Ekman and Jarvis were correct, Cooper was also moonlighting for someone with Venezuelan ties.

  Random. Who works for Venezuelans?

  Who even knows a Venezuelan? Sam wondered.

  Then it struck her. Maybe Abrams! While it made no sense for Cooper to be working with the Agency, it would make much more sense if Abrams were moonlighting as well. In fact, there were significant rumors to that effect, even before Abrams had turned up in a pool of his own blood.

  So maybe Cooper and Abrams share an employer of convenience. . . but who whacked Abrams? The job they both seemed to be working on together – getting rid of Special Agent Samantha Jameson, for some reason she couldn’t yet wrap her mind around – wasn’t nearly complete, so it wouldn’t make much sense for the Venezuelans to snuff Abrams. If, indeed, they were both in fact on the Venezuelans’ payroll.

  Of course. CIA.

  The Agency was a jealous employer. Double agents only occasionally went to jail, because trials were public and embarrassing. More often, when discovered, double agents met an end similar to Abrams’ recent outro. So she surmised that Abrams and Cooper were likely on the Venezuelan payroll, and both the Agency and Metro Internal Affairs were wise to it.

  At least those loose ends seemed to tie neatly together, and Sam felt marginally better. The landscape wasn’t so thoroughly foggy any more.

  But she still had no idea why anyone from Venezuela – or, for that matter, why anyone who knew any Spanish whatsoever – might want her dead. She’d locked up or smoked plenty of bad people, but none of them were from anywhere further south than Florida.

  The paranoid voice in the back of her head warned her that she had already spent
too long in the same place, so she slammed Jensen’s laptop shut, gathered her things, and walked out of the coffee shop toward the bus stop.

  She had another important question in need of answers.

  28

  Sam exited the L’Enfant Plaza Metro station on C Street, one block south of the National Mall, and headed west on foot. The late morning sun warmed her back uncomfortably, and she sweated beneath the scarf she had bought in Shirlington the day prior to cover her blazing red hair.

  Being on the lam sucks, she lamented, suddenly annoyed to no end by the unfairness of everything that had gone wrong in her life since Ekman’s call late Saturday night.

  It had only been a little over seventy-two hours since she had exchanged witty banter with Phil Quartermain while sniffing around the Abrams scene. Now, two days later, Sam found herself betrayed by her lover, on the run from a faction of Metro cops who apparently had orders to do her harm, and distrusted by her two bosses at Homeland, who were themselves clearly hiding something important from her.

  She stepped off of the curb to cross the street and was almost run over by a taxi. Wake up, she chided herself as the cab’s horn blared.

  A phrase from a book she read recently popped into her head: Never let your life situation ruin your life. She knew from experience that it was almost always best to live in the moment, tackle just one issue at a time, and let the bullshit sort itself out.

  She knew better than to fret, but she also knew that she could be forgiven for sweating things at the moment, because she was in one hell of a pickle. But the only way out of the mess was to keep calm and focused.

  The light changed. Sam crossed C Street, and walked into the Federal Aviation Administration’s national headquarters.

  “May I help you, ma’am?” The desk clerk was rail-thin, and his smile didn’t reach all the way to his eyes.

  Sam flashed her badge, and mentioned that she was just following up on a case, and needed some information about all of the aircraft that happened to be airborne over Alexandria around three a.m. on Saturday morning.

  “Oh. Are you with the other guy?” the clerk asked.

  Shit. Someone else thought of this too, Sam realized. “Maybe. What was his name?”

  “I don’t remember. But he had curly black hair. He was here yesterday about this time.”

  Ekman. Her heart sank. “That sounds about right,” she said, hoping she had successfully concealed her chagrin. “I’m just double-checking a couple of things. Can you point me to the flight records room?”

  The clerk walked toward a large set of double doors and motioned for Sam to follow. He waved his badge in front of a keypad, which beeped. He typed a few digits, and the doors opened. “Third left. Just knock, and tell them I sent you.”

  She did as the front desk clerk suggested, and soon found herself sifting through computer-generated logs of the air traffic into and out of DC during the preceding weekend.

  Sam wasn’t certain that the bomb that had exploded in her front yard in the wee hours Sunday morning had been dropped from an airplane or helicopter, but the video surveillance footage hadn’t revealed any other clues, so it was the most logical hypothesis to explore.

  At three-seventeen on Sunday morning, the minute prior to the bomb explosion that had rocked her house on its foundation, there were three aircraft flying in the airspace above.

  Sam copied down the flight plan and aircraft registration information she thought might be relevant, then took it to the records clerk. “May I get the owner registration and flight crew manifest for these flights, please?” She showed her badge to help incentivize the clerk.

  “Sure thing. You brought the warrant, right?”

  Warrant? “Um, I thought Special Agent Ekman brought that by yesterday.”

  “Yes, ma’am. But you need to have a warrant, or I can’t release the information to you. See what I’m sayin’?”

  Unfortunately, she did. “Of course. Silly of me. May I borrow your phone?”

  She dialed Dan Gable’s office phone, and felt relief when he answered. She passed the information on to him, charging him with finding out who owned the planes, and who was flying them at the time the bomb exploded in her yard.

  “Sure thing. I have nothing else to do, because I finished playing forensic accountant, and I’m all done conspiring to help people commit felonies by tampering with evidence.”

  Sam rolled her eyes. “Count your blessings. You could be Ekman’s deputy instead of mine. You’d be straightening his tie all day.” She heard Dan chortle. “Anyway, you said you’re done playing forensic accountant – what did you find out about those two companies?”

  “Is this a clean line?”

  “FAA phone.”

  “Close enough. JIE Associates is a US subsidiary of a foreign thing,” Dan began.

  “Wait. Don’t tell me. Venezuelan?”

  “That’s right. You should consider becoming an investigator.”

  “I’ll consider it,” Sam said. “And Executive Strategies?”

  “I’m waiting on a call from a guy I know. Had to call in a favor. The records are sealed.”

  “Interesting,” Sam said. “Call me when you hear something?”

  “No, I plan to keep it a secret from you,” Dan deadpanned.

  He waited for a laugh that didn’t come, then said, “Sam, listen, don’t take this the wrong way, but you should really keep your private business private, okay? Brock stopped by the office this morning looking for you. He wouldn’t stop asking questions. I was this close to giving him the number to your burner, just to get him to go away. He mentioned he was going to try to find Ekman because he’s worried about you.”

  Sam was silent, and her eyes moistened. She hadn’t had the time or energy to process what had happened between her and Brock. He had told her he didn’t know Arturo Dibiaso, yet his cell phone records demonstrated unequivocally that he and Dibiaso had spent time together, probably while driving somewhere. She had no idea why he would lie about something like that, but she was sure that there was no room for deception in the most important relationship in her life.

  “I’m sorry, Dan. It’s, uh. . .” She paused to compose herself a bit. “It’s complicated.”

  “Can I help? Do you need something?”

  “It’s kind of you to ask, but I wouldn’t dream of asking any more of you. I can handle crooked cops and Venezuelan gangs, but your wife scares the shit out of me.”

  Dan laughed. “God, me too! She’s a ball buster, isn’t she?”

  “I haven’t exactly let you two enjoy a normal home life over the past few days.”

  “Past few years,” Dan corrected.

  “Yeah, that.”

  “Really, whatever is going on, I think you should talk to him. You’ve had your house blown up, and a guy got shot in your doorway. There’s probably a few things to discuss.”

  Sam was quiet again, mulling whether to tell Dan what was going on. She trusted Dan. But I trusted Brock, too, and look how that worked out, she thought. Plus, Ekman and Jarvis had specifically told her not to tell Dan about what they had discussed in Jarvis’ office on Sunday.

  Thinking of Jarvis’s jowly, officious stare and Ekman’s refusal to stand up for her settled it for Sam. She decided to let Dan know what was going on. Speaking in hushed tones on the office phone in the FAA records branch, Sam filled him in.

  “Wow,” Dan said when she finished. “That’s a gut punch. I don’t know what to say. Is there any chance there’s a logical explanation?”

  “Yeah. Brock lied. That’s logical enough, I think. I haven’t had time to snoop around our finances to figure out exactly what’s going on with the Dibiaso thing, but I know all I need to know from a personal standpoint.”

  “I’m sorry, Sam. I always thought you guys were great together.”

  “Me too.”

  “Will you let me do some digging for you? A fresh set of eyes can be helpful.”

  “Okay. Thanks, Dan.”r />
  “Please be careful. I would ask you where you’re staying, but I don’t want to have to lie about it later,” Dan said.

  “Good plan. Call me on the burner when you hear something about Executive Strategies, and maybe dig around the Homeland database for that flight plan information. I’m pretty sure DHS keeps a copy of aircraft ownership registrations, and I’m mildly curious about who the hell might have dropped that bomb on my house.”

  “I’m on it.”

  29

  Peter Kittredge wiped sweat from his brow, widened his stance, and straightened his elbow as he lined up the front and rear sights of the .45 caliber pistol. He did his best to superimpose the sights together over the center of the target several meters away. The black circles scribed on a piece of paper nailed to a tree in the Venezuelan jungle seemed blurry, and his hands couldn’t seem to steady themselves.

  “You are a natural, Señor Kittredge,” El Grande said, chuckling.

  It was far from true. Kittredge had initially resisted learning how to shoot a firearm, but El Grande had pointed out the obvious: Kittredge needed all the protection he could get his hands on.

  “You have heard about the scorpion and the frog crossing the river, no?” El Grande had asked. Kittredge had nodded – it was a familiar old saw, the one about the scorpion convincing the frog to carry him across the river, then suddenly stinging him to death before they could reach the other side. “Your new friends, they are scorpions. They will hurt you because that is their nature.”

  Kittredge didn’t need further convincing. His relationship with the CIA had started with a belt sander and a bag of salt. The scabbed abrasions on his back still hurt like hell every time he sat down, stood up, or twisted his torso too far.

  He held his breath and tried to pull the pistol trigger slowly and steadily. He missed the target entirely. “You try too hard,” El Grande said. “Do not pull the trigger. Just think about pulling the trigger, and let it surprise you. Try again.”

  Another miss. “Now, breathe deeply, and relax. Tense mind makes crooked bullets.” El Grande was like Yoda with a Spanish accent, Kittredge thought. He did as instructed, and was rewarded with a small hole appearing on the edge of the paper.