Part 28 (1/2)
”Troy is my kid brother, but he was always showing me stuff like that,” Jack whispered, wondering where Karen had been taken and if she was still alive. He'd called the police as he and Skylar were lifting off from the riverbank in the chopper, as he gazed at Troy lying on the road surrounded by police officers, and there was now an ongoing nationwide search for his wife. ”I wouldn't let him for a long time. But I finally sucked up my pride and gave in when I got tired of him laughing at me . . . and of missing my targets. As soon as I let him show me, I started nailing the bull's-eye. I swear he could hit anything by the time he was ten, even while he was moving. His hand-eye coordination is still the best I've ever seen.”
Jack pulled the collar of his coat up around his neck. The rain had let up, but it was getting cold as night approached. Landing in the small plane at Corning had been a harrowing few minutes as the gales tossed the little craft around in the air like a cork on a rough ocean. But the storm had eased during the drive to the cabin.
Skylar hadn't seemed bothered by the chaos on the way to the ground, but it had been a white-knuckle landing for Jack. Mostly because it looked like the young pilot, who'd been brash and c.o.c.ky back in Maryland, didn't seem very confident about getting to the ground in one piece as they'd begun final approach.
”Your wallet's pretty impressive, too,” Skylar spoke up. ”Well, I guess technically it was your checkbook I saw in action back in Maryland.”
The young pilot had laughed when Jack offered him twenty grand to fly them to Corning. But when he transferred the large amount with his cell phone to an account the guy reeled off as the three of them were standing together in the hangar, and the money had shown up seconds later, the laughing stopped, and the three of them were climbing into the Cessna.
”I wish these people would get the h.e.l.l out of here,” Jack muttered impatiently, gesturing toward the cabin. There were only two vehicles left in front of the place, but it had been a while since the other six had left. ”What's taking them so long?”
”Relax.”
”They'd better not find the Order.”
Jack had explained everything to Skylar on the drive from Corning even though she wasn't a member of RC7. At this point he didn't care about protocol. Besides, he wasn't actually a member of the cell. So, technically, he wasn't violating anything.
”They won't,” she said rea.s.suringly. ”Hey.”
”Huh?”
”Look at me.”
Jack turned to face her. ”What?”
”Thanks for covering me at Harpers Ferry.” She reached out and touched his arm. ”I owe you.” She shook her head as if she couldn't believe what she was about to say. ”No one's ever saved my life before. I've always had to do that myself.”
Jack stared back at Skylar for several moments. ”Sure,” he murmured. She was a fascinating study, a walking conflict on so many levels, a pretty young woman who murdered at close range on orders from the highest levels of the U.S. military. Right now she seemed gentle and compa.s.sionate, but Jack knew that in reality she was a cold-blooded killer.
”I'm sorry about Troy.”
”Thanks.”
”Karen, too. I know you-”
”Every second we wait this thing gets riskier,” Jack interrupted, turning back to look at the cabin through the pine trees surrounding the place. He didn't want to talk or think about any of that anymore. Somehow he had to focus, and talking about them wouldn't help him. ”Dorn and Baxter's people could be here, too,” he said, searching the trees. ”If they aren't, they're close.”
An hour ago the story had broken in the national news. Bill Jensen, ex-CEO of First Manhattan, who had been missing for nine months, had been found critically injured in a cabin in western New York with a dead man lying beside him. The news agencies hadn't identified the exact location yet, but Jack figured it wouldn't take the president of the United States long to find it, even if the reporters couldn't. And he had no desire to run into the people Baxter would send-even with Skylar alongside.
He glanced around through the gloom. He could feel enemies closing in.
The team that had accompanied Skylar to Harpers Ferry was heading this way, but they were still thirty minutes out. And Jack was going into that cabin as soon as the last of law enforcement cleared out.
”We stopped Operation Anarchy,” Skylar said. ”You should be proud of that.”
”You, too.”
A few of the a.s.sa.s.sins had made it into the woods around Harpers Ferry and eluded capture-for now. But they had to be desperately focused on getting as far away from Was.h.i.+ngton as possible, not completing their mission. They had to realize that all prominent federal officials in the District were deep in protective holes and weren't coming out anytime soon. Their targets were protected, and they had become the prey. Their only reasonable strategy at this point was to run.
Two men finally emerged from the cabin, walked to separate cars, waved to each other, and then headed down the long driveway toward the main road.
”Ready?” Jack asked when both cars had disappeared, pulling out his gun and chambering the first bullet.
”Yup.”
They broke from the tree line and jogged toward the cabin through the quiet dusk, side by side. All seemed calm.
But when they reached the front porch, shots rang out from the tree line on the other side of the clearing, and bullets began smas.h.i.+ng into the front wall of the house all around them.
Skylar grabbed the k.n.o.b of the front door and desperately tried turning it, but the police had locked it tight. ”Follow me!” she yelled, heading for a large window beside the door. She dove through it, shattering the gla.s.s.
Jack lunged through it right behind her as bullets peppered the front of the cabin, and he tumbled to the floor beside her.
As they crawled across the floor and took cover behind the inside wall, the barrage intensified.
BAXTER FOLLOWED Dorn out of the heavily armored black limousine and onto the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base. But they were quickly separated as a swarm of Secret Service agents surrounded the president.
The agent in charge at the White House had begged Dorn not to make the trip out here because of what had happened in Harpers Ferry earlier in the day. But Dorn would not be deterred, even when the director had called personally and pleaded with him to stay put.
Baxter understood what Dorn was doing. His unwavering commitment to meeting Shannon out here on this cold, rainy evening had less to do with the guilt he felt for the kidnapping ordeal she'd just endured-and much more to do with politics.
The kidnappers had promised all along not to alert the press as to what was happening. But ultimately, and probably predictably, Baxter realized, they'd broken the deal.
Someone, as yet unidentified, had called the a.s.sociated Press's Was.h.i.+ngton Bureau chief a few hours ago and tipped her off. Within minutes the story had gone nationwide, and now it was on TV screens everywhere. President Dorn had an illegitimate daughter who'd been kidnapped and held for ransom-but was now being released.
Rumors raced across Twitter and Facebook that the young woman was an aspiring country singer from Nashville who performed under the stage name Leigh-Ann Goodyear, and that she hadn't even known President Dorn was her father until an hour ago. And that he hadn't known she even existed. None of that had been confirmed, but the public was swallowing every sound bite as the whole truth and nothing but the truth as the story unfolded in front of them. It was sweeping across the nation like a western wildfire racing through a tinder-dry forest, and people across the nation and around the world were glued to their screens in antic.i.p.ation of a father and daughter of such high profile meeting for the first time right in front of them.
Dorn had quickly decided that the only thing he could do to save face was meet Shannon at Andrews. And no one was going to stop him. He was determined to turn a negative into a positive despite any danger from Operation Anarchy, which the Secret Service believed might still exist.
Baxter watched Dorn wade through his ma.s.sive security team as the Gulfstream door opened and a pretty blond appeared.
She was wrapped in a blanket and s.h.i.+vering badly, Baxter could see, even from fifty feet away as he held a magazine over his head to s.h.i.+eld himself from the intensifying rain.
The agents tried to keep Dorn in check, but he fought his way through them like a knight in s.h.i.+ning armor, then climbed the stairs, wrapped his arms around Shannon, and pulled her close as she sobbed into his chest.
Baxter shook his head as a mother lode of cameras on the ground around the parked jet flashed so often it seemed to him that dawn had suddenly broken. The presidential floor model had done it again. David Dorn had s.n.a.t.c.hed victory out of the jaws of disaster.
Baxter's eyes narrowed as he glanced at Shannon when they stepped back from their hug. The young woman didn't look well at all. But after what she'd just been through, that was to be expected.
”WE CAN'T stay here!” Skylar yelled as bullets smashed continuously into the living room through the broken windows, ripping apart furniture and shredding drapes, destroying prints hanging from the walls, and ricocheting viciously off the big stone fireplace built into the wall behind them. ”Find the Order fast, and then we make a break for the woods!” she shouted as she returned fire through the blown-out window she was hunched down beside. ”We're sitting ducks in here.” She stabbed toward the hallway behind them with her pistol. ”The bedrooms are back there. Your father's was the first one on the left. It's got to be in there. Go, Jack!”
Jack crawled toward the back of the house as fast as he could. When he reached the hallway, where he was protected from the bullets, he scrambled to his feet and raced for the first bedroom on the left. There was one window in there, and he stayed away from it in case people outside started firing through it.
He left the light off, too, as he quickly turned the room inside out searching for the precious doc.u.ment. The dim lighting made the search more difficult, especially as he rooted through the clothes and boxes in the closet, but turning the bulb on would make him so vulnerable.
Finding nothing in the closet, he thrust his hand inside the pillowcases and reached beneath the covers. Then he threw the mattress from the bed and tossed the box spring aside. He dumped the contents of the nightstand drawer on the floor. He rifled through the small desk in one corner of the room.