The Short Drop (23 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

“Meiji.”

Jenn played George’s voice mail for Hendricks. They looked at each other. She played it again, listening for nuance that she’d missed the first five times. There was none, but the meaning was unequivocal. It meant George was in trouble and so were they. It meant get to high ground and lie low. Don’t be heroes. Don’t go looking for him and don’t try to make contact. Wait for his all clear.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“I think I hate Pennsylvania.”

“What about George?”

“Probably loves it.”

“Hendricks. What do we do?”

“What was wrong with getting out of here?”

He had a point.

It took the rest of the day and night to scour Grafton Storage of their presence. Hendricks bleached and scrubbed down the unit where they had held Tate. Jenn reinventoried their equipment in case their party crasher had taken more than just the gun.

Empty storage units rarely catch fire, so they needed to paint a believable picture. It wouldn’t get much scrutiny unless the fire department was given a very good reason. Hendricks dressed the unit to look like a homeless person had been squatting in it and had foolishly tried to build a fire inside the unit. When he was satisfied, Hendricks struck the match and watched his Rube Goldberg arson project go up in flames.

Jenn was already in the SUV when he slid behind the wheel.

“I used to like Fridays,” he said.

It took her a minute to do the math. “It is Friday, isn’t it? What a fucking week.”

“Anything more from George?”

She shook her head.

“Damn.”

“There’s more. You’re not going to like it.”

“What?”

“The phones at ACG are disconnected,” she said.

“Jenn . . . That is not protocol.”

“I know.”

“Wait. All of them?”

“All of them.”

“Our direct lines?”

“All of them.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Told you.”

Hendricks sat in silence, digesting the implications. Jenn watched him work through it. They had kidnapped a man from his home, questioned him aggressively in an abandoned storage locker, and now that man was dead. The shooter had taken the time to frame Hendricks with one of his own guns. George Abe was in sufficient trouble to hit the panic button. Oh, and sometime in the last twenty-four hours, ACG’s phones had all been disconnected.

They were in uncharted territory.

There was a lot more at stake than a job now. Hendricks was going to have to decide for himself, and she was going to have to let him. She’d already made her choice.

“To go forward or to run,” he said. “That is the question.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Running makes sense.”

“Agreed.”

“I’m a little old to take up running,” he said. “I’d have to buy those ugly-ass shoes and those flimsy little shorts. I’m the wrong kind of black for that shit.”

“You do have bony legs.”

Each looked away out a window.

“So. Where to?” he asked.

“To Gibson Vaughn.”

“Yeah, I’ve been meaning to look him up,” Hendricks said. “Where is he?”

Jenn showed Hendricks on her map.

“Why do I know that address?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“At this point, I’d believe it if you told me it was Hitler’s bunker.”

“It’s Terrance Musgrove’s old beach house.”

“Perfect,” Hendricks said. “But for the record, I preferred my guess.”

“Yeah, me too,” Jenn said.

George came to in a wooden chair, head down on a crude metal table. His wrists were handcuffed to a sturdy metal bar set into the center of the table. The surface of the table was cool on the side of his face, but he sat up grudgingly, and his chair swayed as if someone had taken a screwdriver to it, intentionally loosening the legs.

There wasn’t much else to look at; the room was a standard eight-by-ten-foot cinder-block interrogation room. The brittle hum of the fluorescent lighting made George’s head throb like a cruel dentist was excavating his eyeteeth. His throat was tight and dry, his back knotted and bruised. Judging by his hunger, he’d been out at least twelve hours, which would make it, what? Friday morning?

George checked himself in the wide mirror set in the wall. He didn’t look too much the worse for wear. Hadn’t had his ribs broken in transit. Thank you, gracious host. His tie was crooked, and it bothered him that he couldn’t straighten it.

A door opened to his left. A man entered and sat opposite George. He placed a cup and a pitcher of water on the table. It was chilled and condensation stippled the sides.

George gave the man a once-over. He was a neatly trimmed drone in an off-the-rack suit. They stared at each other like two ex-friends who had awkwardly bumped into each other on a street corner. This was the part where George was supposed to yell indignantly, demand a lawyer, make bombastic threats of the “do you know who I am?” variety. He was thirsty, but he didn’t ask for a drink. He had questions, but the suit was too cheap to have the answers to them.

“Can we just skip the overture? Is Titus in there?” George gestured with his head toward the mirror.

This time the drone’s eyebrow contracted slightly. George looked up at the mirror.

“Titus. Is all the pageantry really necessary?”

The drone’s eyes went down to the table, listening to instructions in his earpiece. He stood and left the room without a word.

George waited.

The door opened. A short, stocky man entered. He was only a few years older than George, but those years had been spent outdoors in some of the hardest places on Earth. The sun and elements had charred his skin, and the man had a face like steel wool, deep lines etched into it under a head of sparse hair the color of ash. A vivid scar ran down the man’s jawline from his left ear and disappeared into the collar of his shirt. A souvenir from Tikrit. The pinky and ring fingers were missing from his left hand. Stories varied on how many times the man had been shot, and George believed Titus preferred it that way. Colonel Titus Stonewall Eskridge Jr., founder and CEO of Cold Harbor, was in the myth-making business.

“George.” Titus sat in the recently vacated chair.

“Titus.”

Each man regarded the other. Eskridge’s ties to Lombard went back decades. George hadn’t liked him then, and nothing he’d heard in the intervening years had caused him to reconsider.

Cold Harbor was a midsize private military contractor based east of Mechanicsville, Virginia. It was named for a particularly nasty one-sided battle of the Civil War that had inflicted terrible casualties on Ulysses S. Grant’s forces. Never able to compete with the big boys for the major contracts, Cold Harbor did well for itself by fostering a reputation as an outfit that got the job—any job—done.

Sometimes ruthlessness trumped size.

Titus broke into a grin. “All right, I gotta know. How’d you know I was back there? You spooked my team, Obi-Wan. Was it one of my boys? Were they talking when they should have been listening?”

“No,” George said. “Just a lucky guess.”

“Where are my manners? You must be thirsty,” Titus said and poured a cup of water. He pushed it within inches of George’s fingers. “Was it one of my boys?”

“No. Surprisingly, I just don’t have a lot of enemies.”

“I’m not your enemy,” Titus said.

“Weren’t,” George corrected.

“Weren’t.”

“Who was the largest donor to Lombard’s Senate campaigns?”

Titus didn’t answer.

“Who championed Cold Harbor for defense contracts over the big PMCs like Blackwater and KBR? It’s not rocket science. If Lombard needs someone snatched, whom else is he going to call?”

“Guess that’s what I’m here for.” Titus smiled his affable good-old-boy grin. Just a couple of pals shooting the breeze. “Not bad, George. You always were a sharp guy. Not real practical but sharp. You put my boy in the hospital.”

“I thought I missed.”

“Nope, he’s going to be talking funny for a long time. You haven’t lost your touch sitting behind a desk.”

“That’s generous of you, but since only one of your boys is in the hospital, and I’m chained to this table, I’d say my touch is very much in question.”

“I admire a man who takes stock of his failings.”

Titus pushed the cup of water closer. George didn’t ask for the shackles to be removed so he could drink it. Nor was he about to lap at it like some dog.

“Have you thought about what it means that Lombard called you and not the FBI?”

“Don’t care,” Titus shrugged. “Man’s going to be president.”

“In which case, you stand to make a fortune.”

“Another fortune,” Titus said with a crooked smile. “First one’s getting lonely.”

“Is he here?”

“The VP? Surrounded by Secret Service? Come on.”

“Being a public servant can be inconvenient,” George said.

“Never saw the appeal myself.”

“What does he want?”

“He wants to be president. But right now he very much wants to know what you did with Abe Consulting Group.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t,” Titus said wearily. “Don’t play that game with me, George. I mean, where did it go?”

Mike Rilling had been unemployed for twelve hours. He, along with everyone at ACG, had been terminated via e-mail at eleven p.m. Thursday night. No warning. No exit interview. Nothing. A massacre—the entire company laid off without warning. His coworkers had all received the same e-mail explaining that unforeseen financial setbacks were forcing ACG to close its doors permanently.

It was a betrayal. Not of the company—Mike didn’t give a damn about any of them—but of him personally. What about all their man-to-man talks about integrity, about doing things the right way? To be stepped on this way? It just proved that George Abe was as big a hypocrite as anyone.

It validated Mike’s decision to funnel information to the vice president. After all, it was the man’s daughter. In Mike’s mind, Benjamin Lombard had a right to be kept informed. He didn’t really see the need for all this secrecy. Finding the creep that snatched his daughter was a good thing. The vice president would be grateful.

Jenn Charles would be pissed. Well, she would just have to wait her turn. He had a few things to say to George Abe himself.

The ferocity of his emotions surprised him. Mike wouldn’t admit it, even to himself, but he felt a certain gratitude and loyalty to George. He looked up to George. So after seven or eight beers, he’d screwed up his courage and called George to give him a piece of his mind. George hadn’t answered then or any of the subsequent times Mike had called back.

Coward.

Well, George wasn’t getting off that easy. Mike appreciated the severance package—it was generous—but this wasn’t about the money. It was the principle of the thing. He’d been there since the start, and you didn’t fire a guy after seven years. Not without some kind of explanation.

Mike rode the elevator up to their floor, his resolve wavering. Last night, he’d had a hellfire sermon prepared for Saint George Abe, but now the idea of facing his ex-boss seemed daunting. George had that unflappable calm thing down to a science, which tended to fluster Mike pretty quick.

Mike came off the elevator and walked down the hall to Abe Consulting Group. The doors were propped open with doorstops, which was unusual.

Reception was empty. Mike stopped in his tracks. Not empty as in no people. Empty as in
empty
empty. Everything was gone: couches, chairs, tables, lamps, artwork . . . everything. Right down to the carpet tacks and nameplates. Mike went room by room but found the same thing everywhere. Even George’s office had been stripped bare. It was unbelievable. He’d left last night at seven p.m. and everything had been normal. And now it was as if Abe Consulting, like a band of gypsies, had pulled up stakes and moved camp in the night, leaving no trace that it had ever been here.

Mike’s cell rang. He checked for the number but there was none. It wasn’t blocked; the screen was just blank. These calls always freaked him out a little. As if they came from nowhere at all. A familiar voice came on the line, flinty and mechanical.