Truth or Die (21 page)

Spinning around again, I sprayed bullets back and forth like a windshield wiper before stepping aside so Owen could throw. I was giving him light from my Glock the best I could. As soon as he released his sock, he unloaded the rest of his magazine and peeled to the side.

My turn.

There was no time to aim, but there was also no time to think about it and choke. I just let it fly.

It was the second little fireball tossed through the air. Who knows what they must have thought? Maybe nothing at all. They were too busy trying to gun us down as we dove back out of the doorway.

I tossed another magazine to Owen, who quickly reloaded. There was one thing he’d forgotten to mention.
When this CTF stuff mixes with water, how long does it take before—

BOOM!

The explosion shook and shattered everything around us. Every wall, every nearby window. Suffice it to say, anyone standing outside was no longer on their feet. The proverbial rug not just yanked out from beneath them, but incinerated.

But how long until one of them got back up? Good question.

Run! Right now!

Owen and I did our best Butch and Sundance, launching out of the building with guns blaring. We were sprinting as fast as we could, hoping against hope that we’d bought ourselves enough time. That made for an even better question.

Was that boom the result of one sock or two?

That was when I saw him. Looking over my shoulder—it was one of the shooters. A clone of the two guys up in New York. Was there a factory somewhere?

Dazed but clearly determined, he was staggering to his feet with his arm raised, and it wasn’t to wave hello.

Thank God it was only one sock.

BOOM!

Owen and I caught the edge of the second blast; it seared our backs and sent us hurtling forward across the pavement for the Evel Knievel of road rashes. It hurt like a son of a bitch, like I was being skinned alive.

And I’d never felt luckier in my life.

As we helped each other up, we looked back to see we were the only ones still standing. Not that we were about to linger.

“I’d high-five you, but I have no skin left on my palms,” said Owen.

“Me, neither,” I said. “C’mon, I know a doctor we should see.”

THERE’S ANGRY. Then there’s smoldering. And then there’s literally smoldering.

“What’s that smell?” asked the cabdriver. “It’s like something’s burning.”

“It’s just our clothes,” I said matter-of-factly. The smell was also our singed flesh, but I didn’t feel the need to mention that.

Either way, that little tree-shaped air freshener hanging from the guy’s rearview mirror didn’t stand a chance.

We’d been burned, all right. Set up big-time.

And now it was time for a little follow-up visit with Dr. Douglas Wittmer. No appointment necessary.

He was so convincing in his kitchen. Of course he was. He was telling us the truth. The only lie was his allegiance. Who the hell did he call after we left him?

We had the taxi drop us off one block down from his town house. There was no telling if Wittmer was still alone, but first we had to see if he was there at all.

Maybe he’d gone to church for confession.

If he had, he’d walked. His black Jaguar was still there, parked in the driveway as when we’d first approached him.

Too bad he hadn’t given us a second key, the one to his front door.

“How soon before a neighbor calls nine-one-one?” I whispered to Owen, only half joking as I peered inside one of the windows.

With our tattered, bloodstained clothes and shredded hands, knees, and elbows, the two of us looked like we’d just wandered off the set of
The Walking Dead.
At best, we were a couple of burglars. At worst, it was the zombie apocalypse.

I turned back to Owen when he didn’t respond. He’d been right behind me.

Now he wasn’t anywhere.

Finally, I found him back down by the street. He was staring up at a telephone pole.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Looking for the camera.”

“What camera?”

“They were watching from either inside or outside. Actually, probably both,” he said. “Inside, though, gave them audio.”

I stood there trying to reverse engineer what he was saying. If we were being watched when we first showed up to see Wittmer, then that meant …

“Jesus, why didn’t you say anything?”
I asked. “We were coming here to confront him; he ratted us out.”

“I never said that.”

“You didn’t have to. It was a given,” I said. At least, I thought it was. “You mean, he didn’t tip them off?”

“Highly unlikely.”

“Then why are we even here?”

Owen was still staring up at the pole. “To search for more evidence,” he said. “Stuff he didn’t share with us.”

“What, you think he’s going to let us just waltz right in and take what we want?”

Finally, Owen turned to me. “We’re hardly going to need his permission,” he said.

Before I could ask why not, he was already halfway back to Wittmer’s town house, heading up the steps.

Once again, the best I could do was try to keep up with him.

THERE WAS zero hesitation, none whatsoever.

In fact, Owen had already taken off his T-shirt—what was left of it—and wrapped it around his hand by the time he reached the top step. I was only a few feet behind him, but I could see what was coming next a mile away.

What’s a little breaking and entering among friends?

With a quick right jab, the window to the left of Wittmer’s front door all but disappeared. Working clockwise, Owen knocked away the few holdout shards until we could both climb through without donating any more blood for the evening.

Just a guess, but being two pints down on a cavernously empty stomach is probably not recommended by the American Medical Association.

Owen put his T-shirt back on, entering first. I followed. And at no time did I bother asking him what he wasn’t telling me. I figured I’d know soon enough.

Even sooner, as it turned out, when our arrival in Wittmer’s foyer was greeted with nothing and no one. Just a dead silence.

The proverbial “bad feeling about this” was suddenly spreading fast from my gut.

“Upstairs,” said Owen.

He might have just been talking to himself. I couldn’t tell. Either way, there was no sign of the doctor on the first floor.

If “sparsely furnished” was the polite way of describing the downstairs of Wittmer’s home, the upstairs made the first floor look like an episode of
Hoarders
. Of the first three bedrooms we looked into, only one actually had a bed. And by bed, I mean a queen-sized mattress on top of a box spring on top of a Harvard frame. No sheets. No pillows.

And still no Wittmer.

Which only made it worse, that feeling of dread. The tightening of the chest muscles. The extra pull on the lungs with each breath.

The inescapable truth of something inevitable.

Because at no time—not for one fraction of a second—did I think there was a chance that Wittmer wasn’t there in his home. The only question was where.

“Here,” said Owen.

This time, he was definitely talking to me. Pointing, too. He’d turned the corner into the master bedroom.

Two steps past the doorway, I saw him. Wittmer, wearing the same clothes as when we’d left him, was lying in the bed on his back. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have said he was simply asleep.

But I did know better, if only because Owen knew better.

Wittmer was never waking up.

MEANS AND motivation. The whole story was right there in front of us, exactly as intended. Although it wasn’t intended for us.

On the bed next to Wittmer, where the ghost of his wife surely slept, was a large photo album opened to a spread filled with happy, loving pictures of the two of them in Paris. They were kissing in front of the Eiffel Tower, arm in arm beneath the external Habitrail-like piping of the Centre Pompidou in Beaubourg, and playfully leaning against Louis Derbré’s
Le Prophète
in the Jardin du Luxembourg, the golden head of the statue—and their faces—beaming in the sunshine.

Claire and I used to talk about going to Paris together. But life is ninety percent talk, isn’t it?

As if connecting the dots, my eyes moved from the photo album over to the empty pill bottle, the orange-brownish variety you get from your local pharmacy. Only, there was no label on it, no indication of a prescription.

Ironically, that made the story even more convincing. Wittmer was a doctor, after all. What pills
wouldn’t
he have access to?

It all made so much sense. Of course, that was why it was all bullshit.

I was catching on quick, all right. Certainly faster than the police would, if at all. Odds were they never would.

This was no suicide.

“Temazepam, if I had to guess,” said Owen with a nod to the empty pill bottle. “Very effective for insomnia, Michael Jackson notwithstanding. One injection, probably to the carotid artery, and the coroner would never know the drug wasn’t swallowed.”

The image of Wittmer giving injections to the prisoners in Stare Kiejkuty flashed through my mind.
Oh, the irony …

Without even thinking, I leaned in, looking at Wittmer’s neck for a needle mark. I didn’t know why, I just did. I felt sorry for him. He’d made his choices, but he didn’t deserve this.

“Christ, we can’t even call the police,” I said.

Wittmer lived alone. There was no telling how long it would be before his body was discovered. The same could be said for the guy in my bathtub back in Manhattan, but I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about him. This was different.

“Maybe we could somehow leave an anonymous tip,” I said. “What do you think?”

I was still staring at Wittmer’s neck, waiting for Owen to answer. When he didn’t, I turned around. Again, he was gone. I called out to him.

“In here,” he responded.

I followed his voice to the only room left on the second floor we hadn’t searched. Wittmer’s office.

Unlike every other room, though, this one looked the part. A large, messy desk, stacked bookcases, and a well-worn leather armchair with an ottoman. There was even a rug—a faded crimson and gold Persian with tassels, some of them frayed, some of them missing altogether.

To call it a lived-in look would be an understatement. In fact, what it really was, was depressing.

This wasn’t Wittmer’s office. This was Wittmer. Period. In the wake of his wife’s death, his life had become defined by his work. This was all he’d had.

“What are you looking at?” I asked.

“Something I shouldn’t be,” said Owen. “Not if they’re trying to cover their tracks.”

HE WAS standing by one of the bookcases, staring long and hard at a picture in a dust-covered silver frame. It was an old photograph of Wittmer from his undergrad days at Princeton, a group shot of some members of the Cap and Gown eating club.

Of course, if it hadn’t been for the engraving at the bottom of the frame saying as much, I never would’ve known that.

So why is Owen staring at it so intently?

I leaned in close, focusing on Wittmer. He looked so young. Happy. Alive. “What am I not seeing?” I asked.

“The whole picture,” Owen said.

If I’d somehow lost the forest for the trees, there was still no finding it as I canvassed the other half dozen faces staring back at me in the photo. Owen all but expected as much, giving me a hint.

“He had a lot more hair back then,” he said.

With that, he reached out with his index finger, tracing a line from Wittmer to the guy on the end, who was lanky and, yes, had only a hint of a receding hairline.

But now I could picture him bald, and in doing so, all I could see—and recognize—was the same smirk masquerading as a smile that he always flashed in interviews as if there weren’t a question in the world that could ever trip him up.

Of course, that was according to Claire, who had, in fact, interviewed him for the
Times.
She said he reeked of coffee and cockiness.

“Clay Dobson?”

“Exactly,” said Owen.

“Okay, so Wittmer went to school with the president’s chief of staff,” I said. “What are you suggesting?”

“A connection.”

“Or maybe it’s just a coincidence.”

“Yeah, except for one thing,” he said. “There are no coincidences in politics.”

That sounded a lot like an Aaron Sorkin line, but I wasn’t about to debate it. “What kind of connection?” I asked. “Do you mean, like,
orchestrated
?”

“Of course not,” said Owen, as facetious as I was incredulous. “Nothing illegal ever happens in the White House.”

Point taken. Multiple points, actually.
Arms for hostages … sex with an intern and then lying about it under oath … a certain botched burglary at a hotel only a handful of miles from where Owen and I were standing?

Suddenly, the only thing I could hear in my head was the voice of then-senator Howard Baker during the Watergate hearings, asking one of the most famous—if not
the
most famous—political questions of all time.

What did the president know and when did he know it?

Then again, maybe we were getting a wee bit ahead of ourselves.

I leaned in again, staring at the images of Wittmer and Dobson. “It’s still only a picture,” I said.

“You’re right,” Owen replied. “It’s possible that it’s nothing. Of course, it’s also possible that Lawrence Bass really did want to spend more time with his family instead of running the CIA.”

I’d forgotten about that. Owen hadn’t. We’d watched the announcement Bass had made with his wife and two young daughters in the East Room of the White House. The guy had been the president’s pick to become the next director of the CIA. Not only was he passing that up, he was resigning from the National Security Council.

Still. Forget Aaron Sorkin. This was starting to feel more like an Oliver Stone fever dream.