Last Man Standing by David Baldacci
camera.
Nemo Strait knelt next to the dog and touched it gently. Then he looked up at Cove like the man had just slit his mother’s throat. Strait raised his pistol and stepped forward.
“I had Old Cuss for six years. Damn good dog.”
Cove said nothing. Another man punched him in the back with his gun but only got a grunt from Cove.
Strait drew closer and spit in Cove’s face. “Damn me for not making sure you were dead when we shoved your car down that slope. You should’ve just called that your luckiest day on earth and got yourself out of town.”
Cove said nothing, but he took one tiny step closer to Strait. He glanced at some of the other men. The buyers of those prescription drugs were from the city and all were black. Cove didn’t look to his own race for help here. Money trumped everything else in the criminal world.
Strait looked over his shoulder, toward where the horse trailer with Bobby Lee was, and then looked back at his prisoner and smiled.
“Man, you always got to be in other people’s business? Huh?” He tapped his gun against Cove’s cheek and then slapped it hard with the metal. “Answer me when I ask you a question.”
Cove’s response was to spit in the man’s face.
Strait wiped off his face and put his gun against Cove’s temple. “You can just kiss your ass good-bye.”
The knife came out of the same sleeve that Cove’s second gun had. He had never had anyone check for weapons in the same spot where one had already been found. He aimed for the heart, but Cove’s foot slipped in the mud, and Strait was a bit quicker than Cove had anticipated, and the knife plunged deeply into Strait’s shoulder. Strait fell back into the swampy water, the knife still in his shoulder.
Cove stood there staring at the men surrounding him.
For a split second every sound in the world seemed to stop for Cove. In his mind he could see his wife and children running to him from across a field of nothing but beautiful flowers, and their smiles and anticipated hugs carried away every foul thing that had ever happened to him in his whole life. And there was a great deal to wash away.
And then the guns opened fire. Cove was struck several times and went down. At the same instant all the men looked to the sky because they could hear the drone of a chopper. Seconds later, lights appeared over the treetops.
Strait jumped up. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Even with his injury, the powerful Strait was able to cradle his dead dog and carry it off. In less than a minute the place was empty. The chopper soared on, its crew apparently unaware of what had happened down below. Strait had been wrong—the chopper was merely ferrying a group of businessmen back from a very late meeting.
As the sounds of the night resumed, there came a groan out of the darkness. Randall Cove tried to get up, but as strong as he was, he couldn’t make it. The body armor he was wearing had absorbed three of the five shots. The two shots that had hit him directly had taken their toll though. He dropped back to the ground as his blood turned the water red.
Claire Daniels was in her office, working very late. The outer door was locked and the building had security, so she actually felt safer here than at the hotel where she was staying. Her pharmacist friend had gotten back to her on the odd-looking pill that she had taken from Web. Claire had assumed it was some powerful barbiturate because she still thought it possible that a bad drug interaction with a delayed effect had incapacitated Web in that alley. At some level it might seem far-fetched, but it did cover the facts as she knew them, and right now nothing else came close. The phone call had changed all that.
“It’s a placebo,” her friend had told her. “Like they use for control groups in drug tests.”
A placebo? Claire was stunned. All the other pills were what they had appeared to be.
As she sat in her office now, Claire tried to figure it all out. If it wasn’t a drug interaction, what could it be? She refused to believe that Kevin Westbrook had placed a curse on Web with the words “damn to hell.” And yet, clearly, the words had had an effect on him. Had he just cracked?
Claire looked at some of Kevin’s sketchbooks that Web had allowed her to keep. The one with Kevin pointing the remote control had gone right to the FBI, and there were no other drawings like that in any of the other sketchbooks. Claire studied the drawings she had, many of them quite expertly done. The boy had considerable artistic talent.
Nowhere in the sketchbooks were the words “damn to hell” written. It couldn’t be that easy, Claire supposed. She wondered again about the words. Old-sounding—Civil War, maybe before. “Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead,” or something like that Admiral Farragut had reportedly said during a naval battle in the War Between the States.
Claire wrote the words on a piece of paper. Civil War–era, Web had thought. Slavery. Black and white. White supremacists. Her brow wrinkled as she thought about it, but then it dawned upon her. Yet Claire’s next thought was that it couldn’t be.
The Free Society? Damn to hell. She looked at her computer. It was just possible. A few clicks of the mouse and a few minutes gave her the answer. The Free Society had a website. A disgusting, hate-filled propaganda tool that they presumably used to recruit the ignorant and demonic into their ranks. When she saw it, the breath froze in her throat.
At that very moment her office went completely dark. The timing of the blackout coupled with what she had just learned caused her to cry out. She immediately picked up the phone and called the front security desk.
The reassuring voice of the guard came on the line and she explained what had happened. “It’s not the building, Dr. Daniels. We’ve got lights down here. Probably a tripped circuit breaker. You want me to come up?”
She looked out her window and saw that surrounding buildings were also lit. “No, that’s all right. I think I’ve got a flashlight. If it’s just that, I can turn it back on.”
She hung up, rummaged through her desk and finally found a flashlight, then felt here way out of her office and into the darkened reception area. She made her way to the closet where the power box was and turned the handle. It was locked. That was a little strange, she thought, but then she remembered that the closet also housed the phone and security system lines for the office, and those lines needed to be protected from interference. But how was she supposed to trip the breaker back, then? She contemplated packing up and going to the hotel, but all of her notes were here and she didn’t have a laptop computer on which she could access the Internet from the hotel.
She shone the light on the lock. It looked pretty simple. She went into the small kitchen and found a screwdriver. She went back to the door, held the light under her armpit and worked on the lock. It took about five minutes, and resulting from more luck than skill, the lock finally gave and she opened the door. She shone the light inside and looked around. She quickly found the power box, and the main circuit had indeed tripped. She popped it back and the lights came on. She was about to close the door when something caught her attention. A small device was wired into the power lines that ran up the wall. Claire didn’t know much about such things, but it still looked out of place to her, almost like a bug.
Perhaps it was because of what she had just discovered, or that she had suddenly become unduly paranoid, but in a flash it hit her. She raced from the room, never noticing the tiny wireless trip button on the doorjamb that was activated whenever someone opened the door to the power closet.
She ran to her office and looked around. Her gaze went from floor to walls and finally to the ceiling and stopped. She grabbed her desk chair, slipped off her shoes and stood on the chair to reach the smoke detector. She had been working with law enforcement folks for enough years to know that smoke detectors were favorite places to house listening devices. She pulled the piece off the ceiling, and there appeared to be wiring there that shouldn’t have been. Was it only her office, or were others bugged as well?
She left the detector dangling from the ceiling,
It went against all of her professional instincts to examine a colleague’s files, but the circumstances were particularly extenuating, she told herself.
She picked up the file. The name on it was Deborah Riner. Web had mentioned her, the widow of one of the men from his team. She ran her gaze through the many pages. Riner had been coming to see O’Bannon for quite some time and at frequent intervals. What surprised Claire was the number of notations for hypnosis sessions that they had engaged in. O’Bannon had hypnotized the woman almost every time she had come to see him.
Something truly awful dawned on Claire as she noted some of the dates that Riner had come in. Three days before the slaughter of Web’s team in the courtyard had occurred was one date that popped out at Claire.
She put the papers down and went over to the filing cabinet. It was locked too, yet cheaply constructed, and she quickly levered it open with the screwdriver, no longer caring about professional etiquette. She started pulling out files. There were many agents and spouses of FBI agents represented in here from many parts of the Bureau. She scanned some of the files. Like Riner’s, they involved an inordinate number of hypnosis sessions.
Claire’s thoughts raced. Hypnosis was a funny thing. You could, in very rare circumstances, use it to get someone to do something he or she ordinarily wouldn’t do. But what you also could do was put a person under, get him or her relaxed and comfortable and trusting and then subtly pry information on what this person as agent was doing—or, in the cases of a spouse of the agent, what the husband or wife was doing. Claire could envision O’Bannon coaxing out from a hypnotized and vulnerable and perhaps distressed Debbie Riner whatever details she knew of her husband’s work. Including what target was going to be visited by HRT and exactly when, if Teddy Riner shared that with his wife. And some men would, despite professional rules that prohibited it. Many marriages, Claire knew, trumped all such policies, if just to keep domestic peace. Or it could be as simple as a slip of the tongue by one of the HRT men, which a hypnotized wife would then unwittingly pass on.
It would all be fairly simple for someone as experienced as Ed O’Bannon. And, as she had done with Web, O’Bannon could always give a carefully crafted posthypnotic suggestion that would swab away from the person’s memory anything suspicious that might have occurred during hypnosis—even the fact that they had been hypnotized at all. My God, Claire thought, Debbie Riner might have unwittingly aided in her husband’s murder.
And on top of that, the listening devices recorded all of the confidential information that was given by the patients who came here. Valuable information that could later be used to blackmail them or set others up, as Web’s team had been. Without going into detail, Web had mentioned that things were going wrong at the Bureau. If Claire was right about what O’Bannon was doing the psychiatrist could be behind many of these problems.
As she stared at the file cabinet, Claire’s gaze settled on something that wasn’t there. Under the letter L there were several files for people with a last name that started with that letter. But there was a large and empty hanging file. Claire wondered if that was where Web’s file had been. Yet the one O’Bannon had given her wasn’t nearly as large as the space she was looking at, unless he had not given her the whole file. Would the man have kept part of the file away from her? O’Bannon was a supremely confident, even arrogant man, she knew. In his mind no one was smarter or more experienced. It was just possible he was withholding information to keep her in the dark. Perhaps he had had an even more powerful reason, beyond professional vanity, to keep Web as a patient.
She immediately started scouring the office. She worked through the man’s desk and any other space where the missing information could be hidden and found nothing. Then she looked up once more. The ceiling was a drop-down. She climbed on the chair again, holding her flashlight, and popped up one of the ceiling panels. On her tiptoes she could see above the ceiling. She shone her light around and almost immediately saw a small box that had been placed on the metal framework holding up the ceiling. She moved her chair over there and quickly pulled the box down. Inside was the rest of Web’s file, and as she sat down to examine it she discovered it was a treasure trove. Claire kept shaking her head as each new page held a stunning revelation.
O’Bannon, she knew, was organized to the point of obsession, something the two had laughed about before. And he kept meticulous notes. Those notes, though cryptic and indecipherable to a layperson, revealed to Claire that he had hypnotized Web numerous times, even more than Debbie Riner, when Web had come to him after his mother’s death. Each time O’Bannon had employed a posthypnotic suggestion, much as Claire had done, to suppress the session from Web’s consciousness. Claire jolted upright as she discovered that during one of the hypnotic sessions, Web had revealed to O’Bannon the entire episode about his stepfather’s death. The notes were almost in code, but Claire saw references to “Stockton,” “attic” and “DADDY DEAREST” written in all caps, enough to convince her that O’Bannon had gotten the same story she had from Web. Now Web’s shouting at her during the hypnotic session, “You already know this!” made complete sense. His subconscious had revealed it all once, only to O’Bannon and not to her. The use of the placebos was also discussed in the notes. Claire figured they were probably to gauge how firmly O’Bannon had insinuated his commands into Web’s subconscious. And in fact, as she read further, O’Bannon had noted that the placebo had been coupled with his hypnotic suggestion to Web that these were the most powerful sleeping pills on the market, and Web had duly reported that the pills were working. Web had also told O’Bannon about the contest among HRT members with the Taser guns.
The truth of what had happened to Web in that alley finally hit her. It was ingenious, she thought, because it didn’t have the problematic issue of making Web do something he didn’t want to do, like kill someone in cold blood, which Claire did not believe was possible, but rather commanded Web not to do something.
She contemplated calling Web to tell him what she had figured out and to enlist his help, but she couldn’t from here, not with all the listening devices around. She would have to leave the office and call him.
She continued leafing through the material. The cruelest aspect of this doctor-patient relationship was revealed on the very last page, and showed that O’Bannon had built in a level of certainty that Web would perform as instructed. O’Bannon had written in his cryptic manner that he had established an excellent rapport of trust with Web. And O’Bannon had noted that a psychiatrist (O’Bannon wisely was not claiming to have done so himself) could build into his hypnotic suggestion that he was a father figure to a patient such as Web and would protect him against his stepfather. And that if Web failed to carry out the psychiatrist’s commands, then the stepfather would come back and kill Web; in effect, his only safety lay in doing exactly as he was instructed. O’Bannon had concluded that Web would make an excellent candidate for posthypnotic suggestion, and thus posed a security risk. It was only Claire’s special knowledge and her familiarity with Web’s case that allowed her to read between the lines of O’Bannon’s report. Claire, with her clear understanding of Web’s psychological makeup, knew it would have been impossible for Web to counteract that command. And yet, with all that, Web had still managed to temporarily overcome the posthypnotic suggestion, go into that courtyard and fire at those guns, despite a potent mental barrage telling him not to. That had to have been Web’s most remarkable performance of the night.
Claire had to concede that O’Bannon had written his report very craftily and was obviously covering his track
It was time to call in the people who knew how to handle these things. She was way out of her league.
Claire turned to go back to her office, to grab her things and leave. The man was standing there watching her. She held up her screwdriver, but he pointed a gun at her.
And Ed O’Bannon looked as though he would have no problem using it.
45
Back at Quantico, Web put away his gear and gave his debriefing along with the rest of the crew. They couldn’t explain much. Web believed the shots could have come from outside the building. If so, those bullets would have to be in the room somewhere, though there were lots of slugs embedded in the walls that would have to be sorted through and matched to their respective weapons. The snipers were being debriefed as well, but Web didn’t know what they had seen or heard. If the shots had come from outside, then the snipers must have noticed something; they had the place pretty much surrounded. No one had come out of the building, so far as Web knew. Yet if the shots had originated from outside, the shooter was already there when HRT had shown up— and that, once more, meant a probable leak of HRT’s assault. None of it was good news.
WFO was combing though the compound looking for additional clues further linking the Frees to the hit on Charlie Team. Web hoped they could find enough to explain it all, though he doubted they could. How could you explain young kids and old men with that much hate in their hearts?
Showered and changed, Web and Romano were walking down the hallway of the admin building to leave when Bates appeared in front of them, motioned them to follow him into an empty office.
“I guess I’m bad luck, Perce,” said Web, only half jokingly. He really was wondering if he was suddenly jinxed somehow.
Romano piped up. “No, really bad luck would’ve had us losing guys, not them. I’m never going to apologize for walking out of a place alive. Like flying a plane, man, any landing is a good landing.”
“Both of you shut up,” said Bates, and they did. “The press will rip us on this, but we can handle it,” the man said. “What I can’t handle are two guys disobeying orders.”
“They were short-handed, Perce,” said Web, “and I can’t believe you never told me. I was the one who put you on to that camera.”
Bates got right in his face. “I didn’t tell you, Web, precisely to prevent what did happen from happening.”
Web didn’t back down an inch. “Whether I was there or not, the result would’ve been the same. If you get shot at, you shoot back. And I wasn’t going to let my guys go in weak. You can run me out of the Bureau if you want, but I’d do the same damn thing again.”
Both men stared at each other until their features grew calmer.
Bates sat down and shook his head. He looked up at the men and motioned them to sit too. “What the hell,” said Bates, “it can’t get any worse, so why should I worry?”