White: A Novel (21 page)

Mitchell looked down the barrel and touched the trigger, which discharged immediately with a bright metallic click.

“Hair trigger. Just like the books say,” Mitchell observed. Some said Hamilton missed on purpose. Others argued that improper handling of the hair trigger caused the gun to discharge before Hamilton took effective aim.

“They were his pistols,” Trask argued. “He would have known their individual personalities.” This was an important yet unanswered question of history, after all. Had this founding father died for honor or fallen to poor aim?

“He was also a politician,” another voice interrupted. It was a woman’s voice, a sound Trask had never heard in a situation like this. “Ready, aim, fire—right? I mean, what the hell do politicians know about gunfighting?”

Mitchell turned toward a tidy woman with short hair and bloodshot eyes.

“Pleasant trip?” he asked. The visitor had just driven up from New Jersey.

“You wanna play with guns all day or get down to business?” she asked, ignoring his courtesy. This woman wasted no time on small talk. Mitchell liked that.

“Tea for the lady,” Mitchell said to Trask.

“Black,” she added.

“Of course.” Mitchell smiled. How appropriate for a woman everyone seemed intent on calling GI Jane.

BREAKING AND ENTERING
had never struck Satch as something he’d be very good at. Working at the Home Depot had kept him happy the past few years. It was steadier work than roofing and a whole lot cooler during those summer months in Little Rock. He’d fallen into the work honestly, however, and it had treated him well. The money stunk, but the rewards of eternal salvation seemed worth the risk.

“It’s a bloody keypad,” his partner whispered. Ollie spoke with a British accent and swore too much for Satch’s liking.
Bloody
may have been a reverent allusion to Christ’s blood, as Ollie claimed, but it sounded base and disrespectful to the hulking former roofer. God’s name was not to be taken in vain, even during burglaries.

“Use the sequencer,” Satch urged in a muffled voice.

Ollie reached into a large duffel bag and pulled out a device the size of a calculator. They’d been told to expect a card swipe and had brought an appropriate magnetic access badge. The keypad would pose no significant hindrance, but it would slow down an operation that hinged on extremely tight tolerance with regard to time.

“Five bucks says I take it down in less than thirty seconds,” Ollie said, expertly attaching the device to a black keypad next to a steel-casing door.

“Just open it,” Satch responded. He didn’t care for gambling, either.

Click.

The door opened, and both men silently thanked God for speeding things along. Once through the door, Satch and his London-bred partner moved quickly down a wide corridor lined with classrooms. They turned right at a T intersection, then right again to a door marked
HENRY VOGT CANCER RESEARCH INSTITUTE, LAB 4.
Beneath the room indicator blazed two warning signs:
BIOHAZARD
and the yellow, black, and red sign for radiation hazard.

To the right of the door sat the card swipe they had expected to find earlier.

“We got five minutes,” the Londoner advised, moving quickly past it into a university research lab. The place smelled of industrial disinfectants, stainless steel, and stale coffee.

Intelligence indicated regular physical patrols by a seventy-year-old former cop who used the seven-buck-an-hour job to pad his retirement check. He would pose no real problems, but neither burglar wanted to hurt the old codger if they could avoid it.

“Southeast corner,” Satch said. “Let’s go.”

He pulled a red-lens penlight out of his right front pocket and twisted the head until it illuminated their path in a foreboding glow. Both men’s hearts raced with adrenaline as they crossed the dark, windowless room. It wasn’t the difficulty in this black-bag operation as much as the consequence. Discovery would compromise the larger . . .

“Ssshhhh!” Satch whispered louder than most men talked. Something had caught his attention—someone else’s noise.

He tucked the penlight into his armpit, stranding the two men in the middle of the room. When nothing happened after a few seconds, he turned his light back on and started toward the vault.

“Don’t be so paranoid,” the Brit said. “We don’t have time to . . .”

Creeaak . . .

The lab door opened, spilling in fluorescent light from the hallway outside.

“Somebody in here?” a curious voice asked. He sounded more annoyed than alarmed at first, as if he was used to having students steal in after class.

When the lights flashed on, however, the man’s curiosity quickly turned to fear. There in the middle of the lab stood two men dressed in custodian’s uniforms. Under normal circumstances, this might not have bothered him, but the semiautomatic handgun coming out of the short man’s belt line made this anything but normal.

“Lab four! Break-in!” the security guard yelled, raising a handheld radio to his mouth and keying the mike. He had no gun of his own; it was the only thing he could draw.

“Doggone it, old man,” Satch growled. “You hadn’t oughta done that.”

JORDAN MITCHELL PLACED
the instrument of Alexander Hamilton’s death back into its red-velvet resting place and motioned for Trask to leave them. Ordinarily the senior aide would have thought fetching tea beneath him, but not today. Despite Trask’s intimate access to his boss’s personal and professional lives, there were still some areas that both men respected as off-limits.

“I’ll be back shortly,” was all Trask said. He took the gun box and pulled the door closed when he left.

“You didn’t answer me about your trip,” Mitchell reminded his new guest. She stood in front and to the right of him, just inside the shadows of a pleasant sun. “It’s not small talk I’m after. I want to assess your mental state.”

“My mental state is fine,” the woman said. She looked up at the stuffed animal heads above them.

“You have been busy, with little sleep.”

“Yes. I don’t need much.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Well, how is he?”

Mitchell reached for his lunch. Mrs. Hartung had served it peppered, with fresh Hollandaise, the way his father had always liked it. Mitchell had told her a dozen times that he preferred salmon neat, but she paid no heed.

“He lost an eye. Sounded weak and kind of disoriented.”

GI Jane brushed hair away from her face. She looked road weary despite her claims to the contrary.

“What did he tell you about the plan?” Mitchell asked. “Do we know where they will strike next?”

“No,” she lied. GI Jane was a master manipulator, but this was a delicate line she had to walk. “He is going back to the Homestead while field operatives set up the next wave of attacks. That’s all I know at this point.”

“What is your next objective?” Mitchell asked. He slowly scraped Hollandaise from his salmon, then tasted it, without taking his eyes off her. Strange how much like Sirad this woman should have been and how different they had turned out. GI Jane seemed even more manipulative, despite her lack of beauty.

“My next objective . . .” GI Jane paused for a moment. “My next objective is to write up a false confession for the Guantánamo prisoner and submit it to Langley with a report of my findings. They want to cover any trace of Jafar al Tayar or the Megiddo project.”

“I don’t believe you,” Mitchell said. “There’s more.”

“Colonel Ellis is a very bright man. And very careful. He has to suspect that someone—some agency, some threat—is waiting out there to stop him. Why would he give me a larger role?”

“The same reason I do,” he said. “Because he needs you.” He paused to watch her face. “But you’re not going to tell him. I know that, you see, because I’m better at this than you are.”

Mitchell rested his fork on the lunch tray, got up, and walked to within two feet of her. His voice dropped to little more than a whisper.

“That’s why I hired you. That’s why I hired each of your colleagues. But don’t ever forget that one thing: I’m better than you will ever be.”

He loved this, the seduction inherent in the dance. He savored the grace of the steps, the posturing, the tease, and the rebuff. This is what had drawn him to the trade in the beginning.

“I know you don’t believe that,” he told her, “because you are full of ego. You work well without reference. You thrive on uncertainty. You can’t wait for someone to corner you because you so love the threat of impossible odds.”

He leaned in close. Close enough to smell the way the moisture on her skin was turning from perspiration to sweat.

“Never forget,” Mitchell said, “that I’m the one who lifted you out of that bleak little world you used to wallow in, and I’m the one who can put you right back in. You are a cog in a mechanism you just think you understand.”

Mitchell reached out with a bony finger and traced the bags under the woman’s eyes. He wanted her to feel his weight.

“It’s a mechanism so complex, you won’t even see it coming to crush you. Your next objective is something considerably more audacious than a false report to the CIA. I knew that before you did.”

Mitchell lowered his hand and leaned in close enough that GI Jane could feel his lips against her ear.

“But I don’t care about your relationship with Ellis at this point. All I care about is what you are going to do for me.”

GI Jane fought an overwhelming urge to tremble. Mitchell’s breath smelled of pepper and heavy cream. His eyelashes slowly opened and closed against her cheek.

And then he told her what she had to do.

Knock! Knock!
Sharp knuckles tapped against the door.

Trask entered after a beat, holding a pale-blue cup on a matching china saucer.

“Earl Grey, black—just like you requested,” he said.

Mitchell had moved to his desk; in his hand was the Alexander Calder biography.

“I’m afraid our guest has changed her mind about refreshments,” he told Trask. He seemed amused, filled up with rare good humor. “She needs to go.”

Mitchell didn’t bother to look up as GI Jane hurried past him on unsteady legs. He lifted a finger to his cheek where one of her tears had fallen against it. The liquid tasted salty but pure.

SATCH HAD NO
particular interest in guns. They hardly seemed worth messing with—especially considering the physical strength God had given him.

“Please . . . ,” the guard squeaked out before the brute of a man crossed the floor and grabbed him by the throat. The radio fell to the ground, sending a clatter echoing through the lab, but the man died silently with a quick snap of his neck.

“We better move,” Satch said, motioning toward the locked vault. He dragged the body out of sight, picked the radio up off the floor, and hurried over to catch his partner, who had already attached his electronic sequencer to yet another cipher pad.

“Lab Four, disregard,” Satch spoke into the radio, hoping it might cause enough confusion to buy them more time. He pulled out two six-sided Luxel radiation exposure badges from his pocket, broke them open, and tucked one inside his breast pocket.

“Got it,” the Brit said, bouncing open the storage vault door even more quickly than the one outside.

“Here.” Satch handed his partner the second Luxel badge and followed him inside a stainless-steel vault. They moved quickly from shelf to shelf, selecting cylindrical shipping containers marked
Caution: Radioactive Materials
above the orange-and-black hazmat symbols. They took only the containers marked Amersham 60-C, 137-cesium, 133-xenon, 192-iridium, and 99-technetium—all highly toxic gamma emitters: radioactive research isotopes bound for the university’s nuclear medicine facilities.

The two men pulled large expedition-built backpacks from the duffel bag and took turns stuffing them with bulky transportation containers. Satch guessed his pack weighed at least 130 pounds and wondered how well his partner would handle the load.

“Time,” Satch ordered, pulling the top flap over his partner’s pack. He turned toward the door and started as quickly across the floor as possible. Even with his huge strength, Satch felt the pack shorten his stride, test his balance.

They made the door just as the first campus police officer rounded the corner from the elevators. He looked annoyed more than alarmed. But then he saw the enormous Satch lurching toward him and knew this was no idle call. The giant hurtled down the hallway, an expedition pack swaying behind him with every labored stride.

“What the hell are you . . . ?” the guard started to ask, but Satch’s forward momentum buckled the man like a linebacker anticipating the run. The guard landed on his back, his hat tumbling across the floor, his pepper spray breaking off his Sam Brown belt, his black shoes and white socks flipping up over his head.

Satch’s boot caught him in the temple, ending any further resis-tance.

“Darn it, that’s two,” he said, regaining his feet. He didn’t relish killing, though he knew that’s what he’d signed on to do.

They got to the elevators without further interference. It made sense that campus police wouldn’t waste more than one officer on the call.

“This stuff is heavy,” the Brit said as they stepped out of the elevator. He had trained hard, but the load added up to almost 70 percent of his body weight. No matter how much he’d prepared, it still felt like a sizable hump.

They said nothing else until they got outside to the van. The vehicle—marked on each door with a University of Louisville logo—had been easy to steal. No one would even know it was missing until long after they’d made the switch.

“CP to twenty-seven,” someone said before Satch remembered he still had the night watchman’s radio in his pocket. “Are you clear at the scene?”

Satch shrugged off his pack and lowered it carefully into the back of the van.

“Clear in Lab Four,” he said, holding the radio away from his mouth and trying to emulate the police officer’s voice.

“Copy, twenty-seven,” the dispatcher radioed back. “See the man at twelve seventy-seven Maplehurst about noise coming outa the Alpha Omega house. Looks like they got a big party over there.”