Both Ends Burning (Whistleblower Trilogy Book 3) (8 page)

It was gone.

I leaned out into the hallway, but the sound of leather squeaking and then footsteps coming up the stairs made me pull my head back in.

“We should let him cry,” came the woman’s voice from down the stairs.

“Not right now,” Edgar said. “I’m coming, baby,” he said, sighing. “Hold on, just a minute, I’ll be right there.”

What if my cell phone was sitting out in the hallway? What if he was picking it up off the carpet, right now? This was Texas, after all, so what if Edgar had a revolver strapped to his hip?

I felt an irresistible urge to make a run for it. Jump out into the hallway and smack Edgar in the throat with an open fist.

But Edgar didn’t come rushing into the room. Next time I heard his voice, he sounded like he was in the baby’s room.

“Daddy’s here.”

I closed my eyes and counted to ten. The baby’s cries became interrupted gurgles, as if Edgar was bouncing him.

Felt something on the leg of my jeans, and I looked down as a meaty, hairy spider was crawling across my shoe. Wolf spider, maybe, or something more sinister. I hate spiders like bankers hate government regulations.

I stifled the urge to yelp, and instead just shook the leg of my pants a bit until the thing dropped onto the carpet. I leaned down and flicked it across the room.

I peered out into the hallway, and the flip-phone was sitting right there, a few feet in front of the guest room. A dark rectangular island in a sea of white carpet. Even with the darkened hallway, it was plainly visible.

“Hey now, little guy,” Edgar said in a baby-talk voice. “You don’t want to be fussy, now, do you?”

Had to take my chance. I dropped to my knees and snatched the phone, then fell back into the room. Too much noise. I’d made too much noise.

I held my breath as I scooted back to my spot next to the door. Edgar stopped talking.

In a few seconds, the sounds of lullabies resumed, and then his footfalls thumped on the stairs. The spider held firm in his spot across the room.

I waited a few more seconds, then slipped out of the guest bedroom and continued down the hall. Master bedroom on the left, and office on the right.

Inside the office, on a grand desk, sat a computer. Couple of file cabinets up against the walls. Outside, the wind picked up, thrashing the branches of trees against the windows.
Thwack. Thwack.

I sat in a high-backed mesh captain’s chair before the computer and tapped at the keyboard. The keys felt strange with a pair of latex gloves on. In a second, the screen came to life, desktop wallpaper showing green rolling hills, with a single text entry field lit up, hovering over a hill.

Password.

I considered a few options.
Password1. DallasSucks.
IntelliCraftisEvil.
What was the name of his kid? That’s usually a safe bet. But he and his wife hadn’t mentioned the name.

Trying random words in the password field was pointless. Besides, he probably had some kind of mechanism that would wipe the hard drive after too many failed attempts. Then in some room somewhere, IntelliCraft employees get a notification of a hacking attempt, and someone calls Edgar. Then game over.

I spun and opened the file cabinets behind me. Medical forms, tax returns, standard stuff that anyone shoves in a drawer when you don’t know what else to do with official documents.

“Shit,” I whispered. “Come on, Edgar. Where do you keep the things you don’t want anyone to know you have? What am I looking for?”

I checked the drawers of the desk, and the first two contained pens and staplers and paper clips. But the third one was locked. That was a good sign.

I lifted a gold-plated letter opener from the top of the desk and jammed it into the space above the drawer. Pressed hard, using all my leverage.

It snapped open. Too loud. I crept to the door and peered out, listened to Edgar and the woman chatting about something. Seemed okay.

Inside the drawer, I found birth certificates, social security cards, and a key.

A key.

Etched into the metal: the word
SENTRY.
This was a safe key. Of course.

The most logical place for a safe was either in the garage or in the basement. With the enormity of this mansion, I didn’t even know where to find the garage. So I put everything except for the key back where I found it, then returned to the stairs and took them all the way down into the basement.

On this floor, I found a huge, unfinished room. Pipes and electrical boxes weaving through the wooden frames in front of the exposed concrete walls.

Also, stacks of children’s toys, a row of file cabinets, and most odd: a metal thing that looked like the frame of a car. Edgar was a hobbyist, apparently, judging by the car parts arranged all around the frame. But how would he get it out of the basement?

“Focus, Candle, focus.”

I walked around the room, searching every nook and cranny. No safe. Then, finally, I spotted a half-sized door in one corner of the room. I ducked down and opened the door and found a black box. A safe. Except it didn’t just have a keyhole, it also had a keypad on the front.

Shit. Same problem as the password on his computer.

Except, this time, an idea materialized. I crept back upstairs, pausing in the gym to listen. After a full minute of Edgar’s voice staying at the same level, I went back up to his office, then opened the drawers with the birth certificates. I found the social security cards for Edgar, his wife, and his son. Studied the numbers until I was sure I’d had them memorized, then eased my way back into the basement.

I sat in front of the safe. Inserted the key, and turned it with no problem.

I started entering Edgar’s social security number, and the safe beeped at me, flashing a red light after I’d entered the first four digits. So, that told me I needed a four-digit code.

The last four of the social.

I tried Edgar’s number first. 2879. Red beep. Tried his wife’s next, 4537. Same red beep. Finally, I tried the last four digits of his son’s social security number.

0478. Blue beep.

I pressed the bar down to open it, and inside I saw a series of manila envelopes closed with wax seals, stacks of cash, a small leather-bound journal, and a few pieces of jewelry. No piles of cocaine or heroin, which helped nullify the theory that IntelliCraft sold drugs.

Then the safe beeped again, and an alarm sounded.

CHAPTER TEN

As the safe alarm blared all around me, I panicked. Reached inside and snatched the journal and the manila envelopes, then slammed the safe shut. As the metal clicked closed, the alarm continued to bellow.

Blont blont blont
.

Onto my feet. Jumped over the car frame, sprinted to the stairs, then up into the gym room. Heard voices echoing from all around me. I dashed across the spongy mat floor of the room as bile billowed up into my throat. I reached out to open the door, and a split second before my hand touched it, light from the hallway shone under the door. By the time I’d realized it, though, I’d thrown open the door, and on the other side, Edgar Hartford’s wife stood there, fifty feet away in the dining room. Her hand was still on the light switch.

Our eyes met. She hesitated, blank-faced. Then her face pulled down as the whites of her eyes grew. She gulped in a breath and screamed.

“Eddie! He’s right there!”

Edgar, who was behind her and with his back turned away, turned to face us. I saw it happen in slow-motion, then I planted my foot and jumped left, into the laundry room. Had he seen me? With one look, he’d know who I was. He’d probably know why I was here, too.

If he saw me, it was all over. Total failure. Death for my family.

A door on the other side of the laundry room led outside. I raced for the door, hopped over a basket of folded clothes, and threw it open. A second alarm sounded. The two alarms competed with each other, bouncing back and forth. My ears rang and my head throbbed from the barrage of noise.

I ran past a small concrete patio, then across the tennis court. I nearly ran straight into the net, but spun and changed course at the last second. I set my sights on a row of shrubs at the edge of the tennis court. Lifted my knees and swung my arms to run faster than I’d thought possible.

As I tumbled over the shrubs, hidden spiked branches tearing my latex gloves to pieces, the laundry room door opened behind me. Heard some garbled yelling, then a gunshot rang out. It echoed through the night air. My foot caught on a low branch, and I landed on my face.

I got to my feet and ran as fast as I could across the lawn as a few more gunshots added a third noise to compete with the alarms.

Nestled in the shack in South Point, huddled next to Omar, Glenning had claimed that Edgar was an idealist. The idealist was shooting at me and screaming bloody murder.

I hit the edge of the property and spun to make sure he wasn’t directly behind me. Took a half second to catch my breath. I stuffed the loot down the back of my pants and scrambled up the stone pillar to reach the other side.

I landed in a bed of mulch past the fence. My chest heaved and my hands tingled, like the sensation of sticking them in hot water after spending a long time in the cold.

I dashed into the street, not bothering to look. I barely heard the sound of screeching tires as something pushed me and I felt my body twist. As I went sailing into the air, I stole a look at a woman behind the wheel of a white BMW, and the expression of horror on her face.

I landed on my shoulder, the same one still sore from Jed’s blast of shotgun birdshot. I felt myself skidding along the pavement, then rolling over and bumping into the curb. My head throbbed.

A car door open and shut. “Oh my lord, are you okay? I didn’t see you there. What are you doing running out into the street like that?”

I looked up at a silver-haired woman with a foofy perm, clutching her purse in her hands. Pushed myself up onto my feet, felt around for broken bones. My shoulder ached, but aside from that, I seemed to be okay. Checked the back of my pants, and the goods were still there.

I cast one look at the lady and took off in the opposite direction. She called after me, but I kept running.

A few other houses on the street had turned on their porch lights. I put my head down and commanded my legs to work harder. Sprinted as fast as I could, as far as I could, not bothering to stop or look where I was going or pay any attention to what was behind me.

***

Eventually, I came to a stop. I’d run a mile, maybe more. My pulse thumped against my neck with such a percussive ferocity that I couldn’t hear anything else, and I coughed until I thought I might choke.

I dropped to my hands and knees and gulped air, then turned to survey the area. Felt cold and damp grass under me. Heard the sounds of cars whooshing by on a major street behind me. I focused until I could see the brakes and headlights of the cars, but no shouts came, no gunmen jumped from those cars with guns pointed at me.

Shoulder pulsed with ache. My jacket had been torn and rubbed raw, and I could see through the fabric to my shoulder, which was covered with red streaks, bleeding.

I stood up, carefully, and noticed I’d stopped a few feet from a pond with a fountain in the middle of it. A lighted gazebo twenty feet to my right. A park of some kind.

I shed my latex gloves, jacket, and shirt, then leaned over the pond and took a handful of water. Splashed it on my shoulder, gritting my teeth to keep the scream inside. I rotated my arm, and it didn’t feel broken. Just some burns, and those I could treat with Neosporin. The woman in the BMW must have only been going a few miles per hour. Thank God for that, or she might have killed me.

I stumbled to the gazebo and slumped onto a picnic table. It was plastic, made to look like wood. I ran my hands along the table, feeling the grooves and the circles that were supposed to simulate knotholes.

The manila envelopes in the back of my pants crinkled, and I reached behind me. Set them and the journal out on the table. I was either about to solve this damn mystery or find another dead end inside these materials. I couldn’t tolerate any more dead ends.

I checked around one more time, but no one was watching me. Maybe I was breaking some kind of park curfew, but I didn’t see any cops. A shadow next to the water danced, and I squinted to bring it into focus. A squirrel had hopped up onto the park bench.

I started with the journal. I opened it to find a series of markings scrawled inside.

10.14 - Dumb row: 10x45, 10x45, 9x45

10.14 - Chin: 5x,4x,3x

And more like this, for two dozen pages of the journal. The rest was blank. I studied these cryptic writings, page after page of the same shorthand scrawls filling up each one.

Then it hit me. Dumb. Dumbbell. It was a workout log.

I tossed the journal aside and moved on to the envelopes. The first one was closed with a wax seal, and an indentation pressed into the wax was in some foreign language. Swirly and angular.

I broke the seal and pulled out a set of documents. Clean, crisp paper. They looked official, with stamps and seals all over. Half in English, half in some language I didn’t recognize. The same lettering as on the seal.

I scanned and noticed a name typed below a scribbling signature at the bottom.
Major General Muhammad Ali Jahari, IRGC
.

IRGC
? I didn’t recognize the acronym.

I flipped a page and came to what looked like an invoice. There were several items listed in one column, and prices listed opposite each one. Millions of dollars for each of these items, many of them with strange and cryptic names like
SN14-SomNav
and
QRTA74 SmartCard System
. Jahari had inked his signature in tiny lettering next to each item.

I flipped through pages of this invoice, finding more of the same on each page. Edgar Hartford’s signature was in places, as well as Frank Thomason. What these little signatures meant, I had no idea.