First Family by David Baldacci
“Chances of it being discovered and taken out of operation?”
“Slim at best given the time parameters, but if it does you’ve got to resort to the backup.” Quarry slipped a pair of heavy binoculars from his knapsack and handed them to Carlos. “An old-fashioned decent pair of optics and two good eyes. I’ve got a sightline for you that won’t reveal your position. You just slide the lever I showed you in the bunker open, like a gun turret.”
Carlos nodded in understanding. “And the other thing?” he said, eying the house, the treeline, and the critical ground in between.
Quarry smiled. “That’s the beauty of the whole damn thing, Carlos. It’s all activated when you hit the one button.” He grinned like a schoolboy who’d just won the science fair. “Took me a while to build, little tricky, works off a split feed, but I got there. And once you push it, Carlos, there ain’t no going back, my friend.”
“And how do I contact you at the mine?”
“First, you’ll contact me whether things go right or go to hell. And you’ll do it with this.” Quarry handed him a boxy device. “Like a SAT phone,” he explained. “The call will get to me, even up at the mine. I’ve already tested it. But the slit in the hole you’ll be in has to be open so it can communicate with the satellite. But it’ll only take you a few seconds to make the call. No long-winded messages, just yea or nay.”
Carlos held the phone. “Where did you get this?”
“Built it out of spare parts.”
“But the signal from the satellite?”
“Piggybacked on an existing platform. Went to the library and got some info off the computer that showed me how to do it. Easier than you might think if your mind works that way. Hell, Carlos, all this stuff I did here is easy compared to what we had to jury-rig in’Nam. So this way saved me a lot of money. Money I ain’t got.”
Carlos looked at him in unconcealed awe. “Is there nothing you can’t do?”
“There’s lots of things I can’t do. Most of them important. I’m just a working man. Don’t know squat about shit.”
“So when is all this going to go down?”
“I’ll let you know, but it’ll be soon.”
Carlos once more looked over at the knoll. Quarry watched him closely.
“You’ll be hidden, but exposed at the same time,” Quarry said. “Close quarters.”
“I know this,” answered Carlos, whose gaze shifted to a buzzard making lazy ovals in the sky.
“It’s only an issue if they make it one. Otherwise you walk away.”
Carlos nodded, but kept his gaze on the bird.
“You want me to switch with you I got no problem with that, Carlos. But I’ll ask this one time only.”
The wiry man shook his head. “I told you I would do this and I will do this.”
Carlos left and Quarry unlocked the door to the little house and walked in. Everything was ready, except for one missing piece. But that would come.
An hour later Quarry lifted into the sky in his Cessna. The low-level winds were rough and his little plane crab-walked across the sky, but it didn’t bother him. He’d flown through a lot worse. A little turbulence would never kill him. A lot of other things could, though. And probably would.
He had a lot to think about, and he did his best thinking while flying along. At a few thousand feet up, his mind seemed to clear even as the air thinned. In the back of the plane was a box filled with cables and wires. In that box, and in a second box up at the mine, he would draw out his doomsday scenario. He would only use it if he had to, and he hoped he didn’t.
As he flew, Quarry’s thoughts went back to the last time Tippi had ever spoken. He and his wife had rushed to Atlanta when they’d been told how desperately ill their daughter was. Quarry had never wanted his little girl to move to the big city, but children grow up and you have to let them.
When the doctor at the hospital told them what had happened, neither of them could believe it. Not their Tippi. There must have been some mistake. But there had been no mistake. She had already sunk into a coma because of the blood loss. However, the physical evidence was conclusive, they’d been told.
Cameron had left the room to get some coffee and Quarry had been leaning up against the wall, his jeans dirty, his shirt stained with sweat from the long ride over from Alabama in summer heat with no air conditioning. He’d come right from the fields after his wife had raced across the tilled dirt screaming about the phone call she’d gotten. The compressed, artificial air in the big hospital had been foul, suffocating for a man used to wide-open spaces.
The police had also come in and Quarry had had to deal with them. He’d become so enraged at their line of questioning that Cameron had been forced to make him leave the room, the only person on earth, other than Tippi, who had that sort of influence over him. The cops had finished and gone on their way. From their sour looks as they trudged past him down the hall, Quarry held out little hope of getting any justice that way.
And so he’d been alone in her room, just him and his little girl. The machines had been clunking, and the pumps pumping; the monitor making its little screeches that felt like the boom of artillery to Quarry. Even screaming shots of anti-aircraft fire aimed at his Phantom in the skies over Vietnam had never scared him as badly as the whine of that damn machine while it dutifully recorded his baby’s desperately poor condition.
It was extremely doubtful she would ever recover, the doctors had warned them. One unsympathetic white coat with the bedside manner of a hyena had been especially pessimistic. “Too much blood loss. Brain damage. Part of her mind had already died.” He added, “If it makes you feel any better, she’s not experiencing any pain. And it’s not really your daughter there anymore. She’s already gone, actually.”
This had not only not made Quarry feel better, he’d knocked the doctor’s front teeth out and nearly been banned from the hospital because of it.
And then while he’d been standing there Tippi had opened her eyes and looked at him. Just like that. He remembered every moment of it precisely, vividly, as he flew along the thermals in his Cessna.
He’d been so shocked that at first he didn’t know what to do. He’d blinked, thinking his vision was just messed up, or he was merely seeing what he wanted to see rather than what was actually there.
“Daddy?”
He was next to her in an instant, holding her hand, his face bare inches from hers.
“Tippi? Baby. Daddy’s right here. Right here.”
Her head started swaying from side to side and the monitor was screeching like it never had before. He was terrified he would lose her again to the shadows, to the part of her mind that was no longer there.
He squeezed her hand, gently held her chin in place, stopping the swaying so her eyes focused only on him. “Tippi. I’m right here. Your momma’ll be right back. Don’t you go away now. Tippi! Don’t you go away!”
Her eyes had closed, panicking him. He looked around to maybe call somebody. Get some help to hold his daughter with them.
“Daddy?”
He jerked back. “I’m here, baby.” Despite trying to hold them back, the tears came hard and fierce down his lined face, a face that had aged more in the last day than in the last ten years.
“I love you.”
“I love you too, baby.” He put one hand against his chest trying to stop his heart from ripping through. “Tippi, you got to tell me what happened. You got to tell me who did this to you.”
Her eyes started to lose focus again and then closed. He searched frantically through his mind for anything to keep her attention.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,” he said.
It was the first line from Pride and Prejudice.
They’d read the book back and forth to each other over the years.
Tippi opened her eyes, smiled, and a gush of air came out of Quarry, because he was convinced that God
“Tell me who did this to you, Tippi. Tell me, baby,” he said as firmly as he could.
She mouthed only four words but it was enough. He understood them.
“Thank you, baby. God, I love you so much.”
He looked up at the ceiling. “Thank you, sweet Jesus.”
The door to the room had opened. Quarry turned. It was Cameron with two coffees. He nearly leapt the width of the room and grabbed her so violently that she spilled both cups. He dragged her to the side of the bed.
“Our little girl’s awake, Cam, she’s back.”
Cameron Quarry’s eyes had gotten so big and her smile so wide that Quarry hadn’t known how her face had contained them. When she looked down at the bed, though, the eyes grew small and the smile had vanished.
Quarry had looked down too. Tippi’s eyes were closed. Her smile was gone. She would never wake up again. He would never hear her voice again.
It was because of the smile he’d gotten, the last one from his daughter he would ever receive, that Quarry had read Austen’s work to her all these years. It was a tribute to the author for what she had given him, he felt. A few precious last moments with his daughter.
The quartet of words Tippi had said that day were forever seared in Quarry’s mind, but he did not act on them then, because they did not clearly point to one person. And, more maddening, even though the doctor had been called and Quarry had told him about Tippi awakening, it was clear that the physician didn’t believe him.
“If she did wake up,” said the doctor, “it was only an anomaly.”
It was all Quarry could do not to break his teeth too.
No, he didn’t act on those words, and he wasn’t exactly sure why. But after Cameron died, he didn’t have anything holding him back. And that’s when he’d begun his long journey to the truth. To the point where now justice might be closer for him and Tippi than it ever had been.
As he flew along he thought that there was only one thing more terrible than dying alone, and that was dying unfinished.
He would not die unfinished.
CHAPTER 59
I’M SORRY.”
Michelle was sitting fully dressed on the edge of the bed in the guest room. Sean was just waking up, the towel still around his middle, the pillow wet from his damp hair.
He turned to look at her, working a kink out of his shoulder. “There’s nothing to be sorry about. You’ve been through hell and back. Anybody would’ve broken down.”
“You wouldn’t have.”
He sat up and stuck the pillow behind him. “You might be surprised.” He looked out the window. It was growing dark. He glanced at Michelle in surprise. “What time is it?”
“Nearly seven in the evening.”
“I’ve been asleep all this time? Why didn’t you wake me?”
“I haven’t been awake that long myself.” She looked down. “Sean, did I say anything? I mean, while I was sort of out of it?”
He rubbed her arm. “Michelle, you can’t be perfect all the time. You bottle stuff up until you blow. You’ve got to stop doing that.”
She rose and looked out the window. “And speaking of which, we’ve blown a whole day.” She whirled around. “What if something came in on Willa?”
She obviously didn’t want to dwell on what had happened here.
Sensing this, Sean reached over to the nightstand for his phone. He scrolled through messages and e-mails. “Nothing. We’re in a holding pattern until some of the leads we ran down click. Unless you can think of something else.”
She sat back on the bed and shook her head. “It doesn’t help matters that Tuck and Jane Cox have been basically lying to us from day one.”
“No, that didn’t help. But we’re here now and maybe we can get something done on your mom’s case. Like tracking down Doug Regan.”
“Okay.”
The house phone rang. It was her brother Bobby.
“What are you doing there?” he said.
“We got in this morning. Just… just coming to check on Dad.”
“So how is he?”
“He’s not here.” Michelle suddenly froze. Was her Dad here? Would he be thinking that she and Sean were in bed together, in their home, after her mom just died? “Wait a minute, Bobby.” She put down the phone and hurried out of the room. She came back a minute later and picked up the receiver.
“No, he’s not here. His car’s gone. Why?”
“I’m over at the country club.”
“Okay. You a member?”
“Not a full member. Cops don’t make that much money. I play a few rounds every now and then.”
“Little dark to be playing a few rounds.”
“There’s a lady here I’ve been talking to.”
“What lady?”
“Lady who was walking her dog the night Mom was killed. She doesn’t live in the neighborhood so the police never questioned her.”
“Did she see something? If so, why didn’t she go to the police?”
“Scared, I think.”
“What made her change her mind?”
“Friend of hers. A Nancy Drummond told her to come forward. So she called me.”
“I talked to Nancy.”
“That’s what she said. That’s why I called in fact.”
“What, you mean you were tracking me down?”
“Yeah.”
“Bobby, why didn’t you just call me on my cell?”
“I did, like six times over the last few hours. Left four messages.”
Michelle glanced over at the nightstand where her cell phone also sat. She picked it up and saw the list of recent calls. “I must’ve turned it to silent mode by accident. Sorry about that.”
“I thought Dad might know where you were, but this kills two birds.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I mean is this lady will only talk to me if you’re here. Apparently you made quite an impression with her friend, Nancy. Nancy told her she can trust you.”
“But you’re the police, Bobby, she should talk to you.”
“She’s stubborn. And a grandmother of twelve. I don’t think I can break her. But I’ll take the simple route. She tells you while I’m here too. And then we nail the bastard who did this to Mom.”
“She’s at the club now?”
“Right now.”
Michelle’s empty stomach rumbled. “Do they serve dinner there?”
“It’s on me.”
“We’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
CHAPTER 60
WITH DARYL’S HELP Quarry strung the cables up and down the mineshafts at strategic points, finishing off at the entrance.
As they worked away Daryl said, “You looking pretty happy.”
“Tippi’s back home so why wouldn’t I be?”
“She’s not really home, Daddy, she’s—”
Daryl didn’t finish because his father’s forearm was across his windpipe.
Daryl could feel the hot, stinging breath of his old man. “Now why don’t you think real long and hard about what you were about to say, boy. And then why don’t you keep your damn mouth shut!”
Quarry pushed his son away. Daryl bounced off the hard rock. But instead of going meekly away he lunged at his father and drove him up against the wall. Quarry wedged an arm under his son’s thick neck and, using the wall of rock for leverage, forced him off. The two struggled over the uneven ground, each trying to get the upper hand as their breaths shot out of their mouths and the sweat stained their armpits despite the chill.
Daryl stumbled backward but then regained his balance. He charged forward again, wrapping his arms around his father’s middle and lifting him off the ground and slamming him up against the rock.
All the air went out of Quarry’s lungs, and his front teeth popped through his bottom lip with the impact. But when Daryl dropped him he found the strength to launch a knee into his son