CHAPTER

16

 

Waiting for Hudson, Tolman sat back for a moment, then stood up, walked around the office, walked down the hall to the reception area, then back again. “Come on, Rusty,” she muttered. “Get your ass in here.”

She sat back down at her desk and clicked her mouse a few times. She checked her e-mail and saw the note from Nick Journey.

I have nothing to say at this time. The message had been sent shortly after her original e-mail went to Journey. She moved his reply into a folder she’d created for the case.

Two more clicks, and she checked phone messages. She had forwarded her voice mail directly to the computer, strictly a convenience factor so that she didn’t have to hold the phone when checking messages.

The messaging program showed a single voice mail. It had come in yesterday, early evening. Tolman turned on her speakers and sat back in her chair.

Sixty seconds later, she was sitting up straight, holding her breath. She checked the time of the phone message and compared it to the time of Nick Journey’s e-mail. He’d called her an hour and a half after he e-mailed her yesterday.

“Holy fucking shit,” Tolman said.

She heard steps in the hallway, and a few seconds later, Hudson was at her door, wearing a golf shirt and khakis. It was the first time Tolman had ever seen him without a tie.

“What is it?” Hudson said.

Tolman shook her head.

“Meg?”

Tolman finally looked away from the computer. “I called you about the DOD and the shooters in Oklahoma. I found—Jesus Christ, Rusty, I just picked up this message, right after I called you.” She clicked on the phone message.

“This is Nick Journey,” said a man’s voice, resonant but soft-spoken. Tolman detected no regional accent, remembering that Journey had grown up all over the country.

“You e-mailed me yesterday, about what happened to me a few days ago,” Journey said. “I wrote you back a little while ago, but I … I just…”

There was a beat of white noise, a moment of hiss on the phone line. “I just heard about the Speaker of the House being killed. I think … I think the chief justice is going to be next.”

Another pause. A high-pitched squeal sounded in the background of the recording. Hudson winced at the sound.

“Just a minute, Andrew,” Journey’s voice said, as if he’d turned away from the phone; then his voice was full volume again. “I think the chief justice of the Supreme Court is going to be assassinated, and very soon. I thought I…” His voice trailed off again. Another high-pitched wail. Journey made another sound, as if he were about to say something else; then the line went dead.

“Play it again,” Hudson said, and Tolman did. “Make a copy of that message and bring it with you,” he said after it played the second time.

Tolman pulled out her RIO-issued laptop and fished a USB drive from her drawer. “Where are we going?”

“There is a threat on the life of the chief justice. There will be a threat-assessment meeting. Bring your book on Journey.”

Tolman plugged the USB into her desktop and started copying the file. “Who’s in the meeting?”

“The Marshals Service, the Bureau, and us.”

“But you’ll handle the briefing on our side.”

Hudson shook his head. “No,” he said. “You built the case, you made the contact. You do the briefing.”

The big man turned and strode down the hallway. Tolman finished copying the audio file, disconnected the USB, grabbed her Journey file and laptop. She stopped in the doorway, seeing her shoes under the desk. Oh no, she thought, then: Fuck it. I’m not torturing my feet in those heels for the next God-knows-how-many-hours. Barefoot, she jogged down the hall after Hudson.

“I’ll drive,” Hudson said. He knew how Tolman hated driving.

Like everything else about the man, Rusty Hudson’s car was a paradox. When she first came to work at RIO, Tolman had pictured him as more of a Crown Victoria type, like her father, but he drove a bright blue Dodge Dakota pickup truck with a club cab. Tolman wondered how someone who obsessed over departmental budgets and time sheets could reconcile driving a vehicle that probably got all of thirteen miles to the gallon.

“Where were you today?” Tolman asked. “Ball game?”

Hudson shook his head. “Family reunion.”

She stared at him.

“Believe it or not, I do have family, Meg. If you didn’t call me about Journey’s message, why did you call?”

“This whole Journey thing is tangled up in DOD. There’s some kind of weird-shit deep cover operation going on.”

“Facts, Meg. You need to give me facts.”

As they turned south, Tolman outlined what she’d learned about Michael Standridge and Kevin Lane, and how she’d come by it. “I knew if you went into the DOD database, there would be trouble,” Hudson said when she finished.

“Oh, don’t be such a bureaucrat. This is not about protecting RIO’s ass. Why would DOD go to all the trouble to make sure these guys were legally and officially dead, only to have them turn up going after Nick Journey? I mean, Lane and Standridge couldn’t have faked their own deaths in Iraq, certainly not to the extent that the official army machine has covered it.”

“No,” Hudson said, “that isn’t feasible.”

“So someone with some real juice at the Pentagon had to be involved somewhere. Maybe this Colonel Meares I talked to. Maybe that’s why I was transferred to him in the first place.”

“No. To make two soldiers disappear would take something above a colonel.”

Tolman paused a beat. “You don’t have connections at DOD.”

Hudson smiled. “As you’re so fond of pointing out, I’m a bureaucrat. I have connections everywhere.” The smile faded. “But I’m not convinced that this is some grand conspiracy on the part of the U.S. Army. It doesn’t make sense for them to put these two men to death, officially speaking, and have them under deep cover. They were already Special Forces in the first place. On top of that, why would they attack Journey?”

“To get what Journey has: the document.”

“Whatever that document is, it has been in the ground since 1865. What could possibly warrant the army expending that much time, effort, and money to obtain it? There has to be another explanation, a mistake in data entry somewhere.”

“That’s what I thought. I’ve been over it and over it—they were reported as dead by the DOD, but yet there were no casualties from their unit reported on that date.”

Hudson was silent a moment. “What do you hope to find?”

Tolman lifted both hands, then let them drop into her lap. “I don’t know. But this Journey thing … it started out as an obscure historical find, and now there are somehow two Special Forces guys—dead Special Forces guys—caught on camera going after Journey. I don’t know if these guys faked their own deaths in Iraq and then somehow had the capability to hack in and create a trail that said they were dead … or if it’s actually the army that wanted them to appear dead, and has them on special assignment. It impacts our case either way.”

Hudson nodded. “Perhaps, but it doesn’t seem quite right to me.” He glanced at her. “And right now, we have a different priority.”

They didn’t speak the rest of the way to the meeting. Tolman closed her eyes and leaned back against the car seat. What did the Speaker of the House and the chief justice of the Supreme Court have to do with a history professor and the non-deaths of a pair of Special Forces operatives?

I don’t know, she thought, but I’m sure as hell going to find out.