Capitol Murder (14 page)

Ali walked far away from everyone into the field at the side of the barn. Steve followed. Bob and his bodyguards stayed near the entrance to the barn. Ali stopped when he found a spot in the yard where the dirt was soft. He dug down deep and buried the blasting cap and the dynamite. Then he carried the other end of the lamp cord to the van and popped the hood. Steve followed. Ali attached the ends of the exposed lamp-cord wire to the positive and negative terminals of the car battery. There was an explosion. A geyser of dirt flew into the air. In the pasture behind the barn, the horses panicked and the sheep froze.

“Have your boys get the rest of the goods and put it in the van,” Reynolds told Bob.

Bob turned to his bodyguards and pointed at the open boxes. “Seal that shit up and bring out the rest of the boxes.”

The bodyguards picked up the open boxes and returned to the barn.

Steve turned to Ali. “Good job,” he said in Urdu. “Now bring me the gym bag and the duct tape.”

Moments after Ali handed him the bag and the tape he’d taken from the van, Bob’s men reemerged from the barn carrying the first two boxes, which had been resealed with duct tape, and several other boxes containing dynamite and blasting caps. While Bob checked the money in the gym bag, Steve opened each box to make sure of the contents, then resealed the boxes with the duct tape.

“What you boys fixing to do with this shit?” Bob asked with a grin, knowing damn well that Reynolds wasn’t going to tell him.

Reynolds let his eyes flick across the Baltimore Ravens logo on Bob’s T-shirt and grinned.

“That’s for me to know and you to find out, Bob, but you’re going to be pleasantly surprised when the time comes.”

W
hen they got back to the house, Reynolds parked the van next to the side door.

“Have the others help you unload the van, and bring everything into the basement,” Reynolds told Ali.

When the three other members of the cell came out of the house, Reynolds opened the back of the van. Stacked in the back were four trays identical to the ones the men carried around their necks when they sold food and drinks in the stands during the Redskins games. Reynolds told the men to bring the trays to the basement after they brought down the blasting caps and the dynamite.

When everyone was downstairs, Reynolds ignored the explosives and put one of the trays on a table. The men were silent, very tense, and totally focused on the tray. Reynolds removed the top and revealed a hidden compartment lined with ball bearings, which were glued to the bottom of the tray. Next to the ball bearings was a space large enough for two sticks of dynamite and a detonator. A nine-volt battery was already in place.

After Reynolds explained to Ali how to attach the dynamite, detonators, and battery so that the tray would be primed to explode, he slid aside two panels on opposite sides of the outside of the tray revealing two red buttons.

“Each of you must push both buttons at the same time to set off the explosives,” he told the four men. “This way, no tray will explode accidentally.”

Reynolds’s features hardened into a mask of hate. “During the game, you’ll carry your tray into the stands and inflict horror on the infidels. Remember, this game will be televised to American troops in their bases around the world. They will see the cost of their unholy crusade. We will bring their war home. We will make them suffer.”

Chapter Twenty-one

A
fter days of being raped and beaten, Dana was numb to almost all sensation. She no longer smelled the dank odor of mold on the basement walls or the stench from the foul water that pooled against them. She didn’t shiver when the chill air stroked her naked, battered body. She was dead to the pain caused by each thrust of the meth cook who was inside her.

There were, however, sensations she was capable of experiencing. There was the tactile pleasure she got from holding the smooth, cool rounded glass of the broken beer bottle the meth cook had foolishly discarded in his haste to satisfy his sexual desires. There was the joy she felt when she drove its jagged edge into the meth cook’s face and watched blood erupt from his eye socket. And there was the rage that gave her the strength to slash his face and throat until he was dead.

As the biker fell toward Dana, his lacerated head on a collision course with her face, she shot up in bed and screamed. It took a few seconds for her to realize that she had been dreaming. Dana fell back on the bed. Her breathing was ragged, and she was soaked with sweat. If Jake had been home, he would have comforted her until her night terrors smoothed out, but Jake was in Afghanistan, and she had to deal with her personal demons alone, in the dark.

During her yearlong stay in the mental hospital, Dana had learned how to deal with the horror of her captivity and the insane violence that had characterized her revenge against the men who had imprisoned her. She doubted that she would ever shake loose the graphic memories of her days in captivity, but those memories no longer had the power to paralyze her.

The nightmares had come less frequently by the time she was released from the hospital. For a while, she thought there might be a time when she was completely free of them, but they kept coming. At first, the nightmares had terrified her, because dreaming about the rapes was like being raped again. After a while, the nightmares made her furious, because the bikers were stealing a part of her life each night and she could not kill them again. Now the night terrors depressed her. They robbed her of sleep and left her exhausted.

Dana walked into the kitchen. She was tempted to unscrew the cap from the bottle of scotch Jake kept in their liquor cabinet, but she knew better than to go there. Instead, she filled a glass with ice-cold water and carried it into the living room. She sank down on the couch, closed her eyes, and held the glass to her forehead. The cold felt good.

Dana’s flashbacks and nightmares were usually triggered by stress. So what had triggered her dream? Was it her fear that something would happen to Jake? She loved Jake. For a long time, she could not tolerate even the thought of a man touching her. Jake had understood that, and he had been there for her anyway. It had taken her a long time to open up to him and admit that she loved him, because love made you vulnerable. Jake’s assignments were usually in places where violent death was common, and Dana suffered until he was home again and safe.

And then there was her business, which was not going well. All of the notoriety she had gotten from the articles in
Exposed
about the incidents involving President Christopher Farrington and Supreme Court Justice Felicia Moss had worked to her disadvantage. She was too well known to go undercover, and she heard that some potential clients worried about the fees someone as famous as Dana would charge.

The loss of income bothered Dana. She could not tolerate the idea that she wouldn’t be carrying her own weight in her relationship with Jake. For a good part of that relationship, Dana had lived in her own small apartment and stayed in Jake’s spacious house when she chose to. Jake had given her space after she was released from the hospital, and she had not let go of her apartment and moved in with Jake until she was able to admit to herself that she loved him. Although it wasn’t necessary, she insisted on splitting all of the expenses, and she worried that she might not be able to do that if the money from her private-investigation business dried up.

Dana forced herself to think about Brad and Ginny to take her mind off subjects that were making her anxious. Dana had been a policewoman, and she was used to danger. Brad and Ginny were ordinary citizens who had become involved in nation-shaking scandals due to forces beyond their control. What she admired most about her friends was their normalcy. They both came from loving families and had been raised in middle-class comfort. Until the Farrington affair, their biggest problems had been grades, dating, what college or law school would admit them, and what job choice they should make.

Dana’s mother had walked out on the family when Dana was a sophomore in high school, and her father had died of a stroke while working on a carburetor in the garage he owned. Money was always tight in Dana’s family, and she’d worked in high school and paid her way through community college by waitressing. She thought she’d found her niche when she joined the police force, but she’d left the force after being kidnapped and tortured while working undercover.

Dana was exhausted, but she doubted she could get to sleep right away, so she turned the television to CNN. Two talking heads were discussing a story that she gathered had led off the evening news programs. From late afternoon until eleven, Dana had been working surveillance for an insurance company and had not watched any TV. The newscasters paused while they replayed a clip of a press conference that had been held by United States Senator Jack Carson.

“Senator,” one of the reporters shouted, “didn’t you think about coming back to Washington when you heard about the murder in your town house?”

“Our cabin is in a remote area in the mountains, and I go there to decompress. Cell phones don’t work up there, we don’t have a television or radio, and I’m miles from a store that carries newspapers. So I had no idea that Miss Koshani had been killed.” Carson broke eye contact with the camera. “I guess I picked the wrong time to go on vacation,” he said with an embarrassed smile.

“Why was the murder victim staying in your town house?”

“We’re getting into areas of national security here, so I can’t respond to that question. And now, if you’ll excuse me.”

When the clip of the press conference ended, Dana was frowning. Something didn’t feel right. Brad had told her that Koshani was going to be a witness before a committee on which Carson sat. He put her up at his town house. Why would he leave before she testified? Then she shrugged. Whatever the reason, it was none of her business.

D
ana had gotten back to bed at three thirty. The phone rang at seven. Dana struggled out of a deep sleep and managed to find the receiver after the third ring.

“Cutler?” a familiar voice said.

Shit!
Dana thought.

“Cutler, wake up,” Patrick Gorman barked.

Dana struggled into a sitting position. “You called at a great time, boss. I ran into Elvis last night pumping gas at a Shell station in Bethesda, and he said he’d tell me how he was abducted by aliens if I slept with him. This could be a big scoop. You want me to wake him up?”

“Have a little respect for the fine newspaper stories that make it possible for me to pay your exorbitant fees,” Gorman answered, trying his best to sound like a gruff, old-time editor from a responsible newspaper. Patrick Gorman was the publisher of
Exposed
, D.C.’s most outrageous supermarket tabloid, and he couldn’t care less that he made his money by printing stories that only the most gullible readers would believe. He had also made a few pennies by running exclusives based on Dana’s inside knowledge of President Christopher Farrington’s involvement in a serial murder case and the attempts by an ex-CIA bigwig to rig the result in a case before the United States Supreme Court.

“If you didn’t know I was screwing Elvis, why did you wake me up?”

“Have you heard that Senator Jack Carson has surfaced?”

“Yeah,” Dana said as she rubbed her eyes.

“He says he was exhausted and went on vacation in a remote mountain cabin in Oregon to, open quote, ‘recharge my batteries,’ close quote.”

“And you’re calling me because . . . ?”

“I don’t believe a word of it, so I want you to fly to Oregon and check out his story.”

A few days in Oregon’s spectacular mountains, all expenses paid, sounded like a great cure for the blues.

“My usual rates?” she asked.

“Yeah, and I’ll have the corporate jet fly you there. I’m probably not the only newspaper editor with this idea. When can you leave?”

“When can you fuel the jet?”

Chapter Twenty-two

A
quick check of property records was all it took to locate the senator’s cabin. It was a few hours east of Portland and several miles up in the mountains on back roads, so Dana called ahead and rented a Range Rover with all-wheel drive. It was waiting for her when the jet touched down just before sunrise.

Dana was wearing jeans, hiking boots, a flannel shirt, a cable-knit sweater, and a parka, because snow and freezing temperatures were expected in the mountains. She was also carrying a selection of concealed weapons, even though she wasn’t expecting trouble. Ever since her kidnapping, Dana never went anywhere unarmed, and her precautions had paid off on several occasions.

Dana threw her duffel bag in the backseat of the Rover, set the GPS, and drove out of Portland toward the wilderness. The sun was up by the time she left the airport, and the sky was clear even though the temperature was hovering around 32 degrees. The ride down the interstate was boring, and she had time to think about Jake and how much she missed him.

The scenery was spectacular once Dana got off the interstate, and it proved enough of a distraction to take her mind off of her troubles. Suddenly Dana was surrounded by a forest still bright green because of all the Douglas firs scattered among the leafless deciduous trees. Runoff from the mountains created unexpected waterfalls. Every once in a while, the road would curve and Dana would be treated to a brief glimpse of a towering snowcapped mountain through a break in the foothills. Then, as suddenly as it appeared, the mountain would vanish at the next turn in the road, like the object of a spectacular magic trick.

The elevation increased as she drove through the pass that took her over the Cascades, and a light rain turned to snow. In no time, the state highway looked as though it had been dusted with powdered sugar. Dana drove through a one-street town with a café, a general store, and a garage with a sign announcing that this was the last place to gas up for fifty miles. Fifteen minutes later, the GPS told her to make a left onto a narrow road that curved up into the mountains. The road was paved for a few miles, but the snow was falling fast and there were only a few spots where the asphalt could be seen beneath the accumulating flakes.