WORD HAS IT THAT HAIGHT GRAHAM IS CABOT’S FIRST CHOICE TO take over as White House SAIC. He is part of the investigative team that deployed to the cabin at the North Laurel Fork overnight. Graham and I are headed back there on a beat-up, eight-seat Citation Jet the Service uses when it needs to get in and out of D.C. in a hurry. Something – I don’t yet know what – has required my presence urgently in West Virginia.
The interior reeks of cigarettes and take-outs. There are burns on the beige seat covers, the armrests and the matching Formica surfaces, and the john doesn’t work. Within the Service, it’s known, ironically, as ‘Corporate Air’ – a testament to the cutbacks Cabot was brought in to oversee – but the agents call it the Vomit Comet.
Reports of the Clarke’s Crossroads shootings started to hit the wires just before midnight. Within a half-hour, despite a total news blackout, thanks to social media, the names of the three dead men were public. There is every kind of speculation, but the networks are already right across the connection to the church shooting. It’s a shit-show.
Reuben and Cabot have been working through the night to ensure the party line, the murder–suicide narrative, is the one that sticks, and my involvement is kept away from it. Meantime, a covert manhunt is underway for the killer. The working hypothesis is that Lefortz stumbled across the execution and became a victim himself. I am lucky to be alive, but it doesn’t feel that way. Like everyone else, I am mourning the loss of a friend. A friend who made me feel safe too.
Graham sits across the table from me, looking more likely to file the President’s tax returns than to take a bullet for him. He is tall, wiry, and shaves his head. In his rush to act as my escort this morning, he’s cut his scalp.
As the plane levels out, he gives the top of his ballpoint a double click.
‘Army CID showed up at the site this morning. No warning. First we knew they knew was when three Black Hawks circled overhead twice and touched down by the lake. There must have been a leak from the Service to Army Intel or the Joint Special Operations Command.’
‘JaySOC’ is responsible for coordinating the activities of all US Special Forces and pretty much for executing the war on terror. Graham tells me that Cabot placed a call of complaint to its commander, General Zan Johansson, shortly after 9 a.m., only to be accused of withholding information about a fugitive from the Department of Defense. This forced a compromise: Army CID has been allowed on site, but only under supervision by the Secret Service.
‘You know that the Army has consistently lied about its recruitment of Gapes, don’t you?’ It lied to his mom and aunt and it lied to Katya, their lawyer. I suspect that it lied to his rehab guru – his recovery support specialist – unless he was in on it, too, before the road traffic accident that killed him.
‘I don’t like it any better than you.’ Graham picks at the scab on his head. ‘But they want their pound of flesh. Gapes was their man.’
With two more clicks of his pen, he abruptly changes the subject. ‘You served in Iraqi Freedom with the President’s Chief of Staff.’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you tell me about the nature of your relationship?’
‘The nature of our relationship?’
‘If you prefer: how’d the two of you meet?’
‘We trained at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida just before the Gulf War. Kantner was Special Forces – Combat Search and Rescue. I was a combat medic with the 304th Rescue Squadron and attached to his unit. We fought together in Mosul, Fallujah and Tikrit.’ I pause. ‘Can I ask where you’re taking this?’
‘We have to assume, Colonel Cain, that Duke Gapes knew something about you we don’t. Our starting point is your security check.’
Everyone who works for the President and Vice President needs Yankee White security clearance. I had to undergo a Single Scope Background Investigation, an aggressive, invasive review of my past.
He taps his iPad. ‘Your wife was an artist?’
‘Art therapist.’
‘And what is that, exactly?’
‘She worked with the emotionally distressed. Old people, mostly. People with cancer or in recovery. Stroke victims. Alzheimer’s sufferers. Veterans. The art helped them to relieve symptoms of depression and anxiety. She was very good at it.’
‘Might she have come across Gapes in that capacity?’
We hit some turbulence. The bulkhead rattles and a locker flies open. Several flight manuals spill onto a seat next to us. I wait for things to settle before returning my verdict: impossible.
Graham considers this. ‘Before you married, she took part in several protest marches, didn’t she?’
‘Does the Secret Service have a problem with that?’
‘Per se, no.’
I’m glad to hear it.
‘Tell me.’
‘About what?’
‘The first time you met.’
He hands me a photograph. Hope and me sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. An hour, maybe, after we’d left the Artiste. A green placard with ‘PEACE’ emblazoned on it in big yellow letters sits on the ground by her feet.
‘You were about to graduate into the Air Force. Why were you protesting the invasion of Afghanistan?’
‘I wasn’t. She was.’
Except she never did.
The protest had moved on by the time we got to the Mall, so we’d strolled into the Lincoln Memorial instead, a place I’d not set foot in since my dad had brought me to D.C. as a kid.
She asked what had happened to him.
‘He died. Quite suddenly. When I was twelve.’
She reached out and touched my hand. I can feel the electricity now. The extraordinary sense of serenity that followed. And the lingering fragrance of what I later discovered was Ô de Lancôme.
‘How did you know about the Rockwell?’ I said.
‘You own a Rockwell?’
‘A print of a Rockwell. It was the last thing my father gave me.’
‘Which one?’
‘Glen—’
‘Canyon Dam? I love that painting.’
That was when I knew for sure I’d met the girl I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.
‘Hope worked in a number of hospitals and residential care homes across the Metro area. She also assisted at her mother’s nursing home in Pennsylvania. If you’re implying she might have forged some kind of relationship with Gapes via her politics, dream on. Far as we can tell, he was a dedicated Marine until he suffered his brain injury in Iraq in 2007 – the date listed in his medical records. Though they appear to have been tampered with, the year is consistent with the estimate made by the medical examiner. My wife was killed the same year.’
‘Doctor Cain, Gapes’s connection to you is the best lead we have. Why did he single you out? If you didn’t come across him in Iraq or through your clinical work, perhaps he and Mr Kantner encountered each other during the war.’
‘What has this got to do with my wife?’
He glances at his watch, a flicker of annoyance in his eyes. ‘We’ll be landing shortly, so I suggest we pick this up again when we’re onsite.’
The engine note changes and the plane starts to descend.
North Central West Virginia Airport is a military-civilian field the Service uses when it wants its movements within the state to remain sub-radar.
We turn off the runway and aim for a hangar where a helicopter waits, beacons and blades turning. After a twenty-minute low-level flight, we pull up and over a ridge and throw a hard left turn. The rotors struggle for lift in the thin mountain air.
The lake is powder blue under the midday sky. It looks very different from when Hart and I got here last night.
Trees have been cut down to make way for a landing pad.
There’s a small squadron of helicopters on the ground. To its north is an olive-drab tent big enough to house several platoons, linked to the cabin by a muddy trail. Cables snake their way up the hill.
On the ground, last night’s silence has been replaced by the rumble of generators. It has rained here too. The scent of earth and fresh pinesap hangs in the air.
The filaments of an industrial heater glow bright red inside the tent. Graham guides me toward one of the smaller ‘rooms’ and closes the flap-door behind us. It contains two whiteboards, a table and four chairs. Hetta is sitting on one of them.
‘Hey.’ She puts down her coffee, gets to her feet and stiffly offers me her hand. ‘How was the flight up?’
‘Bumpy. How are you?’
‘Cold.’ She draws her camouflage jacket more tightly over her shoulders. She doesn’t look at me.
‘Hetta, I’m sorry—’
‘Lefortz?’ She wipes her nose with her sleeve. ‘Bad call, I guess.’ She pats the weapon on her hip. ‘If he’d asked me to go to D.C. ’stead of you, maybe he’d still be alive.’
I’m back in Hetta’s world of black and white and say-it-like-it-is.
I put my briefcase on one of the chairs.
The left-hand whiteboard contains a rundown of Gapes’s career alongside mine. Arrows point to areas of intersection in Iraq.
The right-hand board is blank except for the words ‘Layer 1’ and ‘Layer 2’, and a vertical line between them.
‘Hart suggested we subject the walls to infrared,’ Graham says. ‘To see if there’s anything beneath the surface layer. And there is. In what you called the sanctum; the part he constructed behind the drape.’
He picks up a marker pen, draws five rectangles under ‘Layer 1’ and numbers them. They correspond to what Hetta and I ID’ed as the patchwork of themes Gapes had built around Thompson and me.
‘Left-hand panel.’ Graham turns to me. ‘Panel 1A depicts an image of the Crucifixion. Panel 2A is devoted to nothing but images of the President.’
He writes ‘3A’ on the next panel, the one filled with sketches of the ‘hijacker-priest’ and ‘4A’ on the one that appears to lay bare my entire life. Finally, there’s the area devoted to the Jerusalem skyline, taking in the holy sites of the three religions: the Dome of the Rock, the Western Wall, churches, dominated by two prominent towers atop the Mount of Olives. Above this, he scribbles ‘5A’.
‘We’re using your nomenclature. So, from left to right: God, Threat, Proof, Mac, Jerusalem.’
He turns to face us again.
‘When we did the infrared scan we found a single image beneath each of the five panels. Under Rembrandt’s painting of the Crucifixion is another of his, looks like Christ in Heaven I guess, but hey, I’m no fucking expert. You’ll see it when we take you up there.’ He writes ‘1B’ in the right-hand column, beside ‘God’.
‘Next, beneath the pictures of POTUS, we have one word: ‘Church’. Why a word and not an image? Church … He chose a church to reveal himself to you. The Church of the Presidents. We’re redoubling our efforts to search the area around St John’s for anything that constitutes a threat.’ He writes ‘2B’ in the right-hand column, beside the word ‘Threat’.
‘Then we have our mystery guy, Rasputin hair and beard, killer blue eyes, and beneath him that one word in Arabic. The word transliterates as Al-Mohandis.’
‘It means “Engineer”,’ I say.
Graham’s expression tells me to shut the fuck up and leave this kind of talk to the experts. ‘Underneath it there was another word, this time in Cyrillic. The word is Pitnatsat. Any idea why?’
‘I don’t speak Russian.’
‘It means “fifteen”.’
Graham scribbles ‘15ski’ and ‘3B’ in the right-hand column, next to ‘Proof’.
He looks back at the board, clearly pleased with himself.
‘I’m now going to skip to the final panel. I’ll come back to panel four momentarily.
‘Beneath Jerusalem, we found an image of a church – gold domes; ornate, like a wedding cake. Russian Orthodox, the Church of St Mary Magdalene on the Mount of Olives.’ He writes this down next to ‘Jerusalem’, and labels it ‘5B’.
‘Any of this make sense to you, Colonel?’
‘No.’
Apart from the emergence of a Russian theme, the standout, for me, is the ‘Proof’ panel.
‘Did you run the Engineer through face recognition?’ I ask.
‘Yes. Nothing so far. And maybe it is nothing. Gapes was here months. Possibly for all of the three years that he was on the run. And on his own the whole time. So, what did this place mean to him and how did he get a hold of these images? What are they? And where did they come from? But here’s the thing, Colonel: you were integral to his thinking from the start. I agree with Hart, except “Mac” isn’t shorthand for you alone. It also includes those close to you.’
He continues before I can get a word in. ‘There’s little hard science on what makes an assassin. Eighty-six per cent are men; seventy-seven per cent are white; forty-four per cent had a history of depression; twenty-three per cent had been evaluated by a mental health professional. Only ten per cent had voices in their heads. But nearly all had suffered a recent trauma. And more than fifty per cent of those strongly identified with other victims of trauma and perceived injustice. The road traffic accident that killed your wife, Colonel, also killed the driver of the truck. And there were questions, too – questions local detectives raised—’
‘They were unable to reach a conclusion about the Highway Patrol’s tire mark analysis.’
‘I was referring to the Hillsborough Sheriff’s Office’s investigations into your mental state at the time.’
I struggle to maintain my composure. ‘What has that got to do about anything?’
‘A number of your colleagues referenced the fact you were stressed. You’d just returned from Iraq. There were reports of higher than usual alcohol consumption, of possible trauma reactions …’
For the first time since we’ve been together, Graham smiles to temper what he’s just said. ‘Look, Colonel, if it hadn’t been for your diligence, we wouldn’t be where we are with Gapes. Nobody wants to turn the spotlight on you. My director has made that very clear. We just want to get to the truth. So, if we can back up to the night your wife was killed, we can be done with it and move on.’ He pauses. ‘You’d been with the Kantners, hadn’t you?’
‘Yes. Reuben had just been hired by Senator Abnarth. We were celebrating at a restaurant near Lakeland, halfway between our two homes.’
‘And this was …?’
‘Eight months after we both returned from Iraq.’
‘You were at MacDill?’ Graham looks at the timeline on the left-hand board.
‘Yes.’
‘So, this celebration, was it really only about Kantner landing a job in D.C.?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just answer the question.’
I look at Hetta, who avoids looking at me.
Then I glance at the empty fourth panel.
Whatever’s beneath the surface layer is the reason I’m here. I ask Graham to get to the point.
‘OK. This is a hard thing to ask, Colonel. And a lot harder, I guess, to answer. Your wife, sir … is there any way Gapes could have known she was pregnant when she died?’