Gone Too Far (8 page)

“We’ll be in touch,” Conseco said.

“I’m sure you will,” Sam drawled, as he put his baseball cap back on, adjusting it until it fit just right.

Noah took out his cell phone. “I’ll call us a cab.”

Sam stopped him with one hand, but waited until Conseco was gone before he spoke to Alyssa. “Would you mind dropping Noah off on the way to . . . wherever it is we’re going?”

“Of course not,” she said. It would give her a chance to check out where this guy lived—this childhood friend of a man she couldn’t quite believe had actually had a childhood.

“Thanks.”

“You know you’re welcome to stay at our place,” Noah told Sam. “Claire’s probably already got the bed made in the spare room.”

“I know,” Sam said. “And I appreciate it. I might take you up on it. Just . . . not tonight.”

Noah looked from Sam to Alyssa and back. “Oh,” he said. “Sure, uh . . . okay.”

“No,” Sam said, shaking his head and laughing. It was the laughter of a man who was told during a five-mile tightrope walk that hurricane-force winds were approaching. It wasn’t about humor, just faintly amused desperation. “I know what you’re thinking, Nos, and believe me, you’re wrong. I need to
talk
to Alyssa.” He turned to her, all laughter gone from his voice and face. “I need to find out why my dead ex-wife is so
important
that Max Son-of-God-Almighty Bhagat is coming all the way to Florida tomorrow. I’d like to know what the fuck is going on that I haven’t yet been told.”

Noah shot Alyssa an apologetic look. “Excuse his language,” he said. “He’s still acting out against his father.”

“That’s not funny, fuckhead.” Sam’s patience had obviously all been used up. “And you goddamn well know it.”

Alyssa stood silently by as Noah was contrite. “Sorry, Ringo. It’s late and . . . I didn’t mean to make light of you or any of this. You know that.”

Sam nodded, his anger instantly evaporated. “Yeah. I’m sorry, too.”

Noah took out his cell phone again. “I’ll catch a cab home,” he said. “The sooner you guys talk, the sooner Sam here can try to get some sleep.”

“That’s not necessary,” Sam said, but Noah was already walking away.

“Call me tomorrow, brother. Hey, call me tonight if you want to talk. Or just come on over. You know the way. I’m here if you need me, man. Day or night.”

“I know. Thanks, Nos. Thank Claire again, too.”

“Will do.”

Alyssa could have sworn she saw a glint of tears in Sam’s eyes. But then he turned toward her, and beneath the bill of his baseball cap, his expression was grim.

“What haven’t you told me?” he asked.

Tom stood up from the desk where he’d been making notes on a legal pad that the lieutenant from the JAG office had left behind. “Hey. I am
so
sorry. They wouldn’t let me call you.”

“I figured,” she said. She was wearing that dress that he loved—the one with the sweeping long skirt and the print with the tiny blue flowers that matched the color of her eyes. With her hair down around her shoulders, she looked sweetly feminine and barely old enough to drink.

She looked completely harmless. Which was obviously her intention.

“Five minutes,” one of the guards told her now. “Sorry it’s so short, ma’am, but I’m not supposed to let you in here at all.”

“I know, and thank you
so
much.” She was holding Tom’s dress uniform—his choker whites—still under the plastic from the dry cleaners. She brought it inside the room and hung it in the closet as the guard left the door just slightly ajar. She had the box that held his medals, too, and she set that down on the bed. “I thought you might need these.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t know if it’ll help, but it sure as hell can’t hurt.”

She stood there then, just looking at him, a flash of color in the otherwise antiseptic room. Worry for him radiated from her.

“Nobody’s told me anything,” Kelly said. “Just that they were holding you here. I couldn’t even get them to tell me how long they intended to keep you. And they wouldn’t let me in to see you, wouldn’t even let me call. Admiral Tucker’s been particularly nasty. He says I have no rights—that technically I’m not even allowed onto the base because we’re not married.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Tom, what is going on?”

“I don’t exactly know,” he said. “I haven’t been able to get many answers from anyone, either. But it’s, uh, bad, I think. I haven’t been charged with anything, but the implications . . .”

“What do they think you’ve done?”

Tom shook his head, hating to have to tell her. It would almost be easier to list the things they thought he
hadn’t
done. “I don’t know for sure, but from the questions I’ve been asked, I think they want to try to charge me with providing assistance to known terrorists, theft and sale of weapons and/or government property, conspiracy to assassinate the United States President, and oh, yeah, the big T. Treason.”

Kelly was gaping at him. He’d managed to shock her completely, twice in one day. “That’s absurd!”

“Yeah, well, they don’t think so,” he told her. “There’s this senate investigation thing going on and, I don’t know, some kind of bullshit-squad fingerpointing antiterrorism subcommittee from hell that’s really doing little more than providing some nasty politicians with a whole lot of airtime on CNN.”

“They honestly think you’ve been
providing assistance
to
terrorists
?”

He motioned for her to keep her voice down, and she glanced back at the open door.

“They can’t be serious,” she said more quietly but no less intensely. “Tom, anyone who knows you—”

“Yeah, that’s the thing,” Tom said. “They kind of waited to do this until Team Sixteen was out of town. And Admiral Crowley’s still in the Middle East. He won’t be back until the end of the month.”

Admiral Chip Crowley was a SEAL himself. He was the commander of Naval Special Warfare Command, and in the past he’d been one of Tom’s staunchest supporters.

“They’ve been asking a lot of questions about an incident that happened about a year and a half ago,” Tom continued. “An Army helo went down in a lake in . . .” He didn’t know how much of this he was at liberty to tell her. Up until a few hours ago, he’d believed it was still classified information. But if everyone and their uncle in the U.S. Senate knew about it . . . Still, until the word came down his chain of command, he was going to keep it cryptic. Kelly was smart enough—she’d figure out what he was saying without his saying it. “A country that Team Sixteen visited recently.

“It was carrying certain essential equipment when it crash landed,” he told Kelly. “The flight crew was rescued by Air Force PJs, but the helo sank. The lake was pretty deep, so Team Sixteen came in to try to salvage both it and that equipment, but it turned out to be too much of an al-Qaeda hot spot. It’s hard to run a salvage op in the middle of a firefight, so we ended up scuttling the helo and everything on board. I signed off on it—that all that equipment was properly destroyed.

“No one’s told me directly," he continued, “but I’ve been getting a pretty strong hint that some of that equipment has since surfaced.” He could tell from her eyes that Kelly knew damn well that the equipment he was referring to was weapons. “And I know I’m prone to coming up with the worst-case scenario, but I’m starting to believe that that
equipment
surfaced in Coronado last year, when the President was attacked.”

“What?” Kelly breathed.

“Maybe I’m wrong—no one’s telling me anything. But the questions they’re asking make me think that’s what happened.”

“Could it be coincidence?” she asked. “Or—”

“A setup,” he grimly finished for her.

“But who?”

“I don’t know.”

Kelly started to pace. “Were you part of the team that did the dive and set the explosives?”

She was going to hate hearing this. “No, but I was part of the team that went down after to make sure the explosives did the trick.”

And he’d gotten shot on his way back out of the water. It wasn’t serious, little more than a nasty nick on his left forearm. Kelly had looked at him hard when he came home, and he’d skillfully avoided all of her questions, letting her believe without flat-out lying that he’d cut himself while climbing into a helo.

Which was pretty much the truth. He’d just happened to cut himself on a ricocheting bullet.

But right now she was distracted by the time—they had very little of those five minutes left—and she didn’t connect that op to his injury.

“Who went down to rig the explosives?” she asked him.

Tom was already shaking his head. “No,” he said. “No way, Kel. It was Sam Starrett and Cosmo Richter and I’m pretty sure Ken Karmody. And a bunch of the tadpoles. Gilligan, Muldoon, Lopez, and maybe Silverman. Oh, and Mark Jenkins, too. I’ve been sitting here trying to remember the details of that op. One thing I do know for sure is that those men—
any
of my men in Team Sixteen—would rather die before letting terrorists get their hands on that kind of . . . essential equipment.”

She nodded. “I know you believe that, but—”

“What I’ve been trying to remember is the timeline of the events. When did the Black Hawk go down? How long was the flight crew in the water before the PJs got them out? How long before Starrett and his squad made the scene?”

Tom rubbed the back of his neck. “One thing I didn’t do was order an inventory of the equipment that was submerged in that lake. The cargo area of the helo was intact—I do remember Starrett including that information in his report. His team didn’t have to search for stray crates scattered at the bottom of that lake. But we didn’t have the time or resources to open boxes or even count them. I had an inventory list that had been made when the helo was loaded. I signed off on that equipment, saying that it had been destroyed, but there were quite a few opportunities for some of that stuff to walk away pretty much anywhere down the line. All I know for sure is that
I
didn’t take it, and
my men
didn’t take it.” He sighed. “I’ve told this to the investigators about fifteen thousand times. But it’s not getting through. It’s like some kind of witch-hunt, Kel. They only hear what they want to hear.”

“What can I do to help?” Kelly asked.

“I don’t know,” Tom said. He reached for her, and she went into his arms, holding him as tightly as he held her. “I honest to God don’t know.”

The streetlight filtered in through the windshield, casting shadows on Sam’s face. This was surreal. That she was sitting in a car in Sarasota, Florida, with Lt. Roger “Sam” Starrett and discussing the fact that Tom Paoletti had been brought in for questioning in connection to a terrorist attack on U.S. soil was completely surreal.

“We’re the most powerful nation in the world, and those men came into
our
country, onto one of
our
military bases, and nearly managed to kill our leader,” she continued. “And here we sit, looking foolish, because we
still
don’t know much more about who was behind this attack than we did just a few days after it happened.”

“Don’t you think it’s possible that those three shooters planned it themselves, without any outside help?”

“Only one of them wore a radio,” Alyssa told him. “The others didn’t. As far as we can tell, the radioman signaled the two other men to let them know that the shooting was going to start by putting on a white baseball cap.”

“Yeah, I know that.”

That’s right. Sam had been there.

“Maybe that radio was just a mindfuck,” he said. “Maybe there was no one else involved. Maybe the real terrorist act wasn’t the shooting. Maybe the real terrorism is in the way this investigation has tied up the FBI for all these months.”

Alyssa shook her head. “No,” she said. “There’s more. We know all three of the shooters entered the base as part of a group tour four days before the President’s visit. Someone helped them join that tour. We also found information on their computer hard drive that provides evidence to the fact they had help both obtaining those weapons and transporting them onto the base.”

“But nothing that IDs exactly who it was who helped, right?” Sam laughed. “If I were a terrorist, I’d leave shit like that behind, too, to confuse the hell out of the infidels.”

“We have an extra set of fingerprints on one of the weapons, belonging to a still unidentified person known as Lady X, believed to be female from the size of the prints.”

“Big deal. All that means is Abdul duk Fukkar got himself laid before he went to his heavenly reward. Just in case there really weren’t seventy-two virgins waiting there for him. ‘Hey, baby, want to touch my gun?’ It’s amazing how often that line gets results.”

“Okay, work this into your mindfuck theory, Starrett,” Alyssa challenged him. “We have a 911 call that warns of the attack. It came in right as the first shots were fired. It was made from a public phone
on
the base, also by an unidentified female. By the time we located that pay phone, we were unable to get any readable fingerprints—although there are some who theorize the voice on the tape belongs to that same Lady X.”

She glanced at him.

But Sam just shrugged. “If I were duk Fukkar, I’d leave the gun-toucher a little note telling her what’s going to go down. Just to add to the confusion. So maybe that tape
is
your Lady X.”

“So where is she?” Alyssa asked. “Why would she make that call and then drop off the face of the earth if she
weren’t
somehow involved?”

“Maybe she didn’t want to go down in history as the woman who laid some terrorist loser who then tried to kill the President.”

She braked as the traffic light in front of them turned yellow and then red. “Maybe she loved him. Maybe he conned her into believing that they had a future. Or maybe he loved her, too. Maybe he fell in love with her and left a note to try to explain.”

Sam laughed. “Yeah, I’m sure that’s what happened. No, thanks, I’ll stick to my mindfuck theory.”

“It’s just that we’ve traced the shooters’ trails back over the past two years of their lives, and we still have no clue as to how they got those weapons onto the base. We don’t know much, but we
do
know that none of the three terrorists was a rocket scientist. It’s hard to believe they’d be able to mastermind an assassination attempt on this scale. I mean, how did they even know that the President was coming to the base in Coronado?”

“Maybe it was just dumb luck,” Sam suggested. “Maybe their original target was Admiral Crowley.”

“Or maybe someone else
was
involved. There’s a theory out there that the weapons were placed on the base—hidden there, waiting for them. All they had to do was pick them up.”

“I can tell you who
wasn’t
involved,” Sam countered. “Lieutenant Commander Paoletti. He saved hundreds of lives that day. He should get a medal instead of being locked up and treated like some kind of criminal.”

“I’m with you on that,” Alyssa said. And when he looked over at her and into her eyes, she had another flash of unreality. She and Sam were in complete and total agreement about something.

Something that had absolutely nothing to do with sex.

They’d agreed quite passionately, and in rather loud unison, in the past when it came to having sex, but to little else.

The traffic light turned green, and she pulled her gaze back to the road.

“So how can I help him?” Sam said simply.

“You can start by providing a written and verified account of where you spent your time over the past few weeks,” she told him, “so we can officially cross you off Conseco’s list of suspected murderers.”

He understood why, and he nodded. “I’ll do that tonight.”

Alyssa glanced at him again. “Will you be able to account for all your time?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Yeah. I think so. I mean, I haven’t been doing much of anything. I was either out of the country with the team, or . . . shoot, I don’t know. Watching TV.” He glanced at her. “Either alone or with my neighbor Don DaCosta. Who’s mentally ill. The aluminum-foil-on-his-head-to-keep-aliens-from-reading-his-mind kind of mentally ill. He’s not the best alibi, but that’s what I did. Football, basketball, and hockey with crazy Donny DaCosta. Once or twice I went to Nils and Meg’s, or Savannah and Ken’s for dinner. They always wondered where Mary Lou was. It was . . . weird.”

She knew what he was telling her, and she found it very hard to believe. Sam Starrett without female companionship for six solid months? She purposely kept the conversation directly on topic. “Then we’ll have to provide an alibi from your work schedule.”

“That I can do. I went into the base early and stayed late. And I did some, you know, volunteer shit, too. Believe me, I was never home from the base long enough to get out to Florida and back. I’m pretty sure I can prove that.”

Volunteer shit. Wasn’t that interesting? Alyssa had heard through the Spec Op grapevine that Team Sixteen had done some kind of program at an inner city high school in Los Angeles. She tried to picture Sam with high school students and had to fight to keep herself from smiling.

“You know, I’ve been thinking about this,” Sam mused, “and it makes sense that it’s Janine, not Mary Lou, who’s dead. Janine just split up from her husband—a guy named Clyde Wrigley. Although, Jesus, I met him a few times and he’s like some kind of throwback to 1972. A real pothead hippie type. Soft-spoken, you know? I’m not sure I ever saw him get up off the couch. I can’t picture him getting closer than ten feet to a shotgun.” He laughed with disgust. “As far as shotgun-wielding types go, I’m the one who fits that bill, huh?”

Alyssa sensed more than saw him turn toward her in the dim light from the dashboard. His voice was soft in the darkness. “Thanks for believing me, Lys.”

“You’re not a killer.”

He laughed quietly. “You left off the first part of that—’You might be an asshole, Roger, but you’re not a killer.’ ” He did a very decent imitation of her voice.

She had to laugh. “You said it, I didn’t.”

“I made a shitload of mistakes in the past few years,” he told her. “But none of them involved a shotgun.”

What could she say to that? Alyssa just drove, wishing she knew where she was going. Her hotel was around here somewhere, but she was
not
taking him there. Maybe there was an all-night restaurant they could go to. Have a cup of coffee. Then go their separate ways for the night—and hopefully for the rest of their lives.

Sam cleared his throat. “This is where you’re supposed to tell me you’re not seeing Max anymore.”

It was too dark in the car for her to see his eyes. Was he actually serious?

“If Mary Lou’s alive, you’re still married.” Oh damn, why in hell had she said
that
? It sounded as if she were interested in—

“No, I’m not,” Sam said, still in that same quiet voice. “She signed those papers. As soon as the lawyer gets them, they’ll be filed, and our divorce will be official. I spoke to Manny Conseco about it—those papers are evidence, but they’ll get copies notarized and sent to San Diego.”

“Don’t you have better things to think about—like the whereabouts of your daughter?” Well, that came out a little more sharply than she’d intended. But maybe that was just as well.

Sam was single again, and, now that it was convenient for him, he wanted to get back into her pants. Like that was a big surprise.

But she only had to keep him at a distance for a while. Max would be in town tomorrow, thank goodness. And if she was lucky, he’d send her back to D.C.

Alyssa wasn’t one to run away, but this was so much harder than she’d anticipated. And she’d anticipated that seeing Sam again was going to be very, very hard.

“Sorry. I’m . . .” He rubbed his forehead. “Yeah. I’m just . . . a loser.” He looked at her with eyes that were clearly haunted. “Do you think there’s hope that Haley’s still alive?”

“I don’t know,” Alyssa had to tell him.

“I haven’t seen her in six months,” Sam said wearily. “I don’t even know if I’ll recognize her.”

“How could you have let six months pass without even having gone to see your daughter?” Alyssa shook her head both at him and at the disbelief that rang in her voice. “Don’t answer that. That has nothing to do with this investigation. I’m sorry for—”

“Getting personal?” he finished for her. “Like you said to Noah—we’re friends. And you were right. We
are
friends, Alyssa. I value your friendship very much, and what you asked was a very valid question for one friend to ask another.” He sighed. “I guess I have to tell you honestly that I didn’t try very hard to visit. I made plans a few times to come out here for the weekend, but every time I did that, the team either went OUTCONUS or Mary Lou canceled on me.

“I might be a lousy father,” he continued, “but just for the record, it doesn’t mean that I didn’t miss Haley.”

Alyssa was silent, afraid that he was going to tell her more, and afraid that he wasn’t.

“You know, Mary Lou used to go out to meetings. AA meetings,” Sam said. “She had one mapped out for nearly every night of the week. I spent a lot of those nights with Haley. And yeah, I know, it was only a few hours compared to the time Mary Lou spent with her during the day, but still. . . . We had this agreement, me and Hale. I wouldn’t put her in the playpen unless I was in there, too—I mean, who could put their kid in a cage like that?—and she wouldn’t crap in her diaper.” He laughed. “I kept my end of the bargain, but she didn’t. You should have seen me the first time I changed one of those diapers, you know the kind filled with that really special type of baby poo? It’s amazing how after the fortieth or forty-first time you pretty much get used to it.” He laughed again. “God, you know you’re pathetic when you even miss your kid’s dirty diapers.”

He was silent for a minute, and then he said, “She used to fall asleep just, like, lying on my chest. You know, watching a football game or something. It was . . .” He stopped and cleared his throat. “It was something I missed very much when she was gone.”

“I’m sorry,” Alyssa said softly.

“Yeah,” Sam said. “Me, too.” He took a deep breath and blew it out hard. “I figure I’ll take a ride north tomorrow. Mary Lou’s mother lives somewhere up near Jacksonville, I think. I’m not sure where it is—I need to look at a map to jog my memory. I doubt that Mary Lou or Janine would’ve brought Haley there, but she might know something.”

“You should let the FBI handle this investigation.”

“Yeah, right.” He laughed his disgust. “You’ve done so well with the whole Coronado terrorist case. I’ll just sit back and wait for you to deliver Haley to me. Sometime before her eighteenth birthday.”

Her cell phone rang, and she flipped it open. “Locke.”

“Conseco,” the head of the Sarasota office said. “We’ve IDed the victim as Janine Morrison Wrigley. We’ve got APBs out on both her ex-husband and the missing sister and kid. I’ll keep you posted as we get more information.”

“Thank you,” Alyssa said. She hung up the phone and turned to Sam, who was watching her intently. “It wasn’t Mary Lou.”

“Oh, God, oh, Jesus, thank you,” he said, then covered his face with his hands.

He just sat there, head bowed, completely silent. Alyssa wasn’t even sure if he was breathing.