I’M SHAKEN AWAKE, TO FIND GRAHAM’S FACE MILLIMETERS FROM mine.
‘Get up.’
He hauls me off the bed. I have no idea how long I have been out of it.
‘What’s the time?’
‘Oh dark thirty.’ He hands me my watch and my phone.
‘You haven’t arrested him yet?’
‘Who?’
‘The President.’
‘Funny,’ he says. ‘Save your breath. I’m surprised you’ve any left.’ He throws me my jacket. ‘Nice speech, by the way.’
In the Oval Office, Thompson is leaning against his desk, his hands clasped in front of him. He looks penitent. He is dressed in suit pants. The collar of his shirt is open. Behind him, through a gap in the drapes, a watery dawn is breaking beyond the trees.
Cabot is seated to his left. ‘Thank you, Haight.’
Thompson looks shattered. For a moment I think it’s because the dream has come for him again. ‘Josh, I’m truly sorry. There’s no need for this godawful charade any longer. A lie only begets more lies. I should have come clean the moment this thing started.
‘You should know that I’ve told Director Cabot and Special Agent Graham everything – about the nightmares, your treatment of them, about No Stone Unturned. I also said I would tender my resignation forthwith.’
‘And I said that would be quite unnecessary.’ Cabot magnanimously waves his hand, as if to erase everything that has just been said. ‘We draw a line under this. Everyone has suffered enough.’
I hold Cabot’s gaze. ‘No resignations? No prosecutions?’
‘No need.’
‘Where’s Reuben?’
‘Safe,’ the President says. ‘Hart too.’
‘We detained them, same as we did with you,’ Cabot says. ‘We needed to be sure. We now are.’
Thompson turns to Cabot. ‘Tell him, Tom.’
‘An hour ago, PIAD’s digital forensics lab got a lead on the network traffic in the moments before Gapes was shot. The data is now in: the system used to break the MPD’s tactical radio net is unlike anything we’ve seen before – quite beyond the capabilities of any organization save one. Park that thought for a moment.’
Cabot comes and stands next to Thompson. Despite his diminutive stature, there is something statesmanlike about him I’ve not seen before. ‘Our interests have always been aligned. My duty, first and foremost, is the protection of the President. We’re under attack and the only way we’re going to find out who is responsible is if we work together – I mean, truly, properly, work together. You, me, Reuben, Christy, Hart.’ He looks at the President. ‘All of us.’
For the first time, Thompson meets my gaze. ‘While you and Hart have been busy, so have they. You need to listen to this.’
Cabot makes a signal to Graham, who walks over to the desk and takes up position between him and the President.
‘Jimenez’s apartment. Forensics have wrung every molecule out of the place and they’ve found nothing – no hair, no skin, no blood beyond that of the victims that matches with anything intelligible on a database. Which left us with only two pieces of tangible evidence: the footprint and the bullet casings.’
The footprint was a size-ten-and-a-half Nike Air – new, no nicks or gouges on the sole or wear on the tread, which makes it the shoe equivalent of a clean skin. The bullet casing came from a Glock 19, a standard 9 mm.
The shooter fired five times, confirming what I heard from the stairwell. The working hypothesis is that our guy – the shoe size suggests a female assassin is unlikely, although not out of the question – was in the apartment with a gun to Jimenez’s head when Anders showed; that he would have needed Jimenez’s cooperation to lure the captain into the apartment.
Anders’ suspicions ought to have been raised the moment he pushed open the door, because, as I’d discovered, the light was off. That must have been when he pulled the trigger – one shot to Jimenez’s head and two to Anders’ chest, within a couple of seconds.
I’m guessing my call to Lefortz rang a second before Gentleman Jim kicked in the door.
Graham says the assassin lost his cool at that point and stepped back into the blood that had begun to pool from Jimenez’s head. He put his fourth and fifth shots into Lefortz then went for the fire escape. Lefortz staggered after him, but died before I reached him.
‘Sunday,’ Graham says, ‘we asked the FBI for the best forensic technician they have and they sent us this kid from the Quantico Lab. First thing he does is check the casings for prints and DNA, but again, nothing. Even if the shooter had handled the rounds unprotected, the heat of firing the gun vaporizes any prints and cooks the DNA in the chamber, making it unusable.
‘But moisture from the fingers of anybody handling the rounds will have corroded the surface of the brass. The lab can put a charge through the casing then dust it down with carbon powder. The current between the corroded layer and the uncorroded layer beneath it will attract the powder and reveal the print.’
‘And?’
‘And there is a print. It’s only a partial and doesn’t tell us jack, except that the shooter had eaten a processed meal within three hours of handling the bullet.’
‘Because the salt content acted on the metal?’
Graham nods. ‘So, we crunched every bit of CCTV in every Shake Shack, Five Guys, McDonald’s, Subway and Burger King in a five-mile radius of the hit. We whittled down the list from a pool of eighteen hundred males during our window, till we were left with seven guys wearing size-ten-and-a-half Nike Airs. We followed them to their cars, ran their plates and eliminated a couple more. We tracked the others through the JOCC’s license plate recognition cameras till we were left with four. Three of them amounted to nothing, but we tracked one all the way back to an underground parking lot in a building in Herndon.’
‘Herndon?’
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘That was Hart’s reaction.’
Herndon is filled with defense primes, telecoms giants, IT companies and security contractors. But I’ve only heard it mentioned once in the past week – when Hetta was telling me about the guy at the cabin identified from the three pubes he’d left behind in her bar of Camay – Karl Dempf of Triple Z Services.
‘Triple Z Services is a private military contractor,’ Cabot says. ‘It didn’t exist till a decade ago, but now it’s turning over a couple of billion from all the jobs outsourced its way by the CIA and the DoD in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Christ knows where else.
‘So, now we got a guy from the cabin – and a guy we’re ninety-nine per cent sure killed Jimenez, Anders and Lefortz, and both of them are with Triple Z Services.
‘Something else. Triple Z had a former employee take them to court for alleged war crimes in Yemen. The case was held in camera. The mission was secret. This was five years ago. Your friend Charles Land of Collins Lovelock Land represented them. He got the case thrown out.’
No wonder Katya looked so damn scared.
‘And who does Triple Z represent?’
‘I’ll let Hart explain.’
The Service, Cabot says, picked her up late last night – when she was on her way back to the White House after her meeting with her contact at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
‘Is she OK?’
‘Kind of. We just told her we had Lefortz’s killers.’
And you watched as it went to work on her – the one thing that would have unzipped her like the bullet through Gapes’s skull.
Cabot glances at the President, then me. ‘I had my differences with Lefortz, and I’ve had my differences with Hart, but she needed to know – as do you, Reuben, Christy and the President – that we all want the same thing. We’re going to get these bastards.’
‘The guy at Geospatial came through,’ Graham says. ‘He told Hart he was able to match the image of the bunker. It’s not on foreign soil at all. It’s here. Part of a complex built on a former National Guard training area southwest of Salt Lake City.’