Wildfire (29 page)

He was trying to remember how big a 20mm cannon was. Had to be at least six or seven feet long, not counting the base mount, he thought. So how the hell would you conceal something like that in a civilian vehicle?

Grynard stepped away from the van, using his flashlight to look back along the side of the roadway. He was half-expecting to see caterpillar-tread tracks, or maybe the distinctive wide wheel base tracks of a military Humvee in the glare of the surrounding generator-powered lights. But the dirt along the roadway looked undisturbed.

"Any witnesses?" he asked.

"Nothing so far." The holding facility commander shook his head. "But whoever did it locked the toll road gate at the entrance to the off-ramp, so we figured we'd put a broadcast out over local radio and TV this evening. Might get lucky."

Grynard nodded, then walked around to the back of the van where the rear doors gaped open.

Moving in close, the FBI agent swept his flashlight beam across the metal box, reflexively keeping his hands away from any smooth surface that just might provide a useful set of latent prints. Might, that is, if they really
were
going to get lucky tonight, although Grynard was already convinced that they weren't. The whole situation looked much too smooth and professional for the perpetrators to have made that kind of amateurish mistake.

Then he realized he wasn't seeing what he had expected to see. Either that or the duty agent hadn't gotten his facts straight.

"Where's Chareaux?"

"We don't know."

"You mean they killed him too?"

"Apparently not. We found some blood on the floor, but we're thinking now it probably came from his nose or mouth. Probably knocked him out, keep him from causing a fuss. Looks like they used some kind of bolt cutter to cut him loose from the chair."

"Those crazy bastards. They actually took him alive," Grynard whispered, shaking his head slowly in disbelief.

"Who's they?" the holding facility commander demanded, his eyes lighting up.

"Some people we haven't got identified yet," Grynard said with audible bitterness. "That's one of our problems right now."

"You're going to let us know when you do, right?"

"I'll call you myself," the FBI agent promised as he pulled a field notebook and a pen out of his jacket pocket. "You know when these guys left the Arlington courthouse?"

"Yeah, they cleared the gate at fifteen-twenty-two hours."

Grynard furrowed his eyebrows in confusion as he looked down at his watch. It was seven-fourteen exactly. Almost four hours ago. Then he looked around the scene again and realized that the crime scene investigation was just getting started . . . what, three hours after the van would have arrived at the exit?

"Uh . . . what about the shooting?"

The supervisory U.S. marshal hesitated.

"You mean when did the shooting actually happen?"

Grynard looked up at the uniformed federal officer and realized that in addition to being shocked and angry and frustrated, the commander of the McLearen Federal Holding Facility was clearly embarrassed.

"You don't know?" Grynard blurted out before he could catch himself.

"Not exactly."

The holding facility commander went on to explain how the duty officer had left his desk at fifteen-fifty-five hours to get a cup of coffee because there hadn't been anything on the air other than periodic and routine check-in signals from Tango-Uniform-Three. The transport unit had been expected in at
1615
hours, assuming that they managed to stay ahead of Friday rush-hour traffic.

At sixteen-twenty hours, when Tango-Uniform-Three didn't show at the gate, the duty officer had gone back to his desk to call for an ETA. That was when he'd discovered that the unit's homer beacon was no longer flashing on the computer generated map.

"Is the duty officer normally allowed to leave his desk?" Grynard asked.

"Yeah, sure. In fact he has to when we're running on a short duty list. It usually isn't a problem because we have speakers mounted throughout the entire officers' block, so they can hear any emergency broadcast."

"But they can't see the monitor."

"Right." The holding facility commander nodded glumly.

"Any idea what time the beeper cut out?"

"Yeah, we were able to call it up from the computer memory. Sixteen-twelve hours. At the intersection of Centreville Road and McLearen Road. At that point they were supposedly about two minutes from the holding facility."

"What happened then?"

"Since we hadn't received any kind of emergency signal, I sent out two members of our emergency response team to see what happened, assuming that there had been some kind of mechanical breakdown."

"Does that happen occasionally?"

'Yeah, every now and then. The reason I wasn't as anxious as I probably should have been is that we had a branch break off a tree and take out both antennas on a transport unit last week. And it was windy this afternoon, so . . ." The base commander shrugged helplessly.

Grynard wanted to tell him that it didn't matter, because his men were probably already dead by then, but he let the anguished supervisor continue talking.

"They called back in at sixteen-forty-five hours, saying they'd searched around the intersection and down to Barnsfield road—which is about three quarters of a mile south on Centreville—and hadn't found anything. At that point I sent out the full team. Six deputies in three cars. They took a loop around Sully Road, then searched the Franklin Farms area. At seventeen-fifteen, I called Fairfax County and asked for a helicopter sweep. About that time, I guess, people started calling in complaining about exit two being blocked off, and that's when the helicopter spotted the van.

"I don't know how the hell . . ." the base commander started to say, but Grynard wasn't listening. He was starting to feel sick to his stomach, numbly aware of how much time they'd lost already and that it was probably too late . . . but he had to try.

"Bascomb. B-A-S-C-O-M-B," he said, speaking to the local FBI duty agent through his portable radio. "First name Jason, common spelling. He's an attorney for the law firm of Little, Warren, Nobles & Kole. Find him, now!"

At five-thirty that Friday afternoon, Dr. Kimberly Wildman and her field assistant decided that they had put in enough overtime for one week.

They were in the process of picking up their survey gear and transferring it into the bed of their truck when one of the fire crew trucks pulled alongside their truck and stopped.

"Dr. Wildman?" the young driver asked.

"Yes, I'm Kim Wildman."

"My crew chief asked me to find you and give you this," he said as he reached down on the seat and then handed something wrapped in a burlap bag out the truck window. "And he said to tell you he's sorry he forgot to give it to you earlier this morning."

"What is it?" she asked, realizing that the burlap-wrapped package was heavier than she had expected. She had to use both hands to hold it, and she quickly handed it over to her field technician.

"It's some kind of sign, I guess. We found it Wednesday evening when we were cleaning up some of the hot spots from that fire. It was attached to that old eagle nest tree that got burned."

"Oh, yes, one of those stupid blank signs." She nodded. "In fact, we saw this one when we were surveying that area. You'd think that whoever put it there would know better than to risk killing a nesting tree. I'm sure it must be a violation of the fish and game regs."

"Yeah, that's why my crew chief wanted you to have it." But then, with a confused look on his face, he added: "But I'm pretty sure this one wasn't blank, ma'am."

"Oh, but I'm certain it was," she said. "In fact I—"

But then her field technician interrupted.

"Uh, Kim, you'd better take a look at this."

He held up the green-and-brown camouflaged sign.

"What in the world?"

The word
Wildfire
glared back at her in bright, deeply carved, three-inch-high letters.

"That's the sign, ma'am."

"But that's not the same one that we saw attached to the eagle nesting tree," she said. "The one we saw was completely blank. I'm absolutely certain of that."

"Yeah, me too." The field technician nodded.

"I don't know what to say, ma'am," the young fire crew member said hesitantly. "I mean, I don't want to argue with you, or nothing like that, but I saw them take this sign off that tree. Fact is, I helped them do it."

"We must be talking about different trees."

"The one just off the main fire road, about a quarter mile in? Two big granite boulders about twenty feet away, to the—uh—north?"

"That's the one." The field technician nodded.

"I don't understand this
at all,"
the group survey leader said.

"Me neither, ma'am, but I'd better get back to work before the crew chief comes looking for me."

"Oh—uh—yes, please tell your chief thank you for me. And also, if any of you see any more signs like this, would you ask him to please get hold of me immediately?"

"Yes, ma'am!"

She waited until the fire crew truck disappeared back down the dirt road. Then she turned to her field technician, who was staring at the sign as if he were still having trouble believing his eyes.

"Let's get packed up and then get back to the office," she said. "I intend to find out what's going on around here."

Chapter Eighteen

To the absolute amazement of his two legal assistants, and in spite of all his pretentious mannerisms and aggressive tactics in the courtroom, Jason Bascomb III was starting to lose his nerve as well as his patience.

"What time is it now?" the theatrical defense attorney demanded of no one in particular, continuing, as he did so, to pace back and forth across the badly worn living room carpeting of the rented and decidedly unpretentious Warrenton, Virginia, home.

The most junior of the two legal assistants started to remind Bascomb that he had already asked that question three times during the past hour. But the young lawyer had the fortune to notice the slightly crazed expression in his boss's eyes and immediately changed his mind.

Instead, he made an elaborate show of glancing down at his expensive Rolex wristwatch.

"In precisely ten seconds," he announced to the room at large, "it will be seven-thirty-eight in the evening."

"It's pitch-black outside ... of course it's the goddamned evening, you idiot!" the senior attorney roared, whirling around and glaring at his youthful assistant—who immediately turned pale and took a defensive step backward, but then quickly recovered.

"Hey, come on, Jason, I was just trying to be helpful." The young attorney shrugged with an uneasy grin on his face.

For a brief moment it looked as though Bascomb might lunge for the throat of the young man who was inordinately fond of advising or reminding anyone in his immediate vicinity that he had graduated in the top five of his Harvard Law School class only eight months ago. It was, perhaps, understandable that the four security guards made no effort at all to intercede on the young attorney's behalf.

But then, before Bascomb could actually cause some physical damage to his legal team, he realized that Maas and Parker were watching him with expressions of pure amusement on their smiling faces.

More than anything else that he could think of at that moment, Jason Bascomb III wanted desperately to be able to unleash all his pent-up anger and frustrations on his clients. Making it clear to them, in no uncertain terms, that they would be rotting their lives away in a federal prison at this very moment if it weren't for
his
efforts and
his
considerable legal skills.

But Bascomb knew he couldn't do that, because he had long since discovered—to his amazement—that he was actually afraid of Roy Parker. And the mere thought of turning on Gerd Maas, whose chilling blue eyes seemed to have the capability of boring directly into a man's soul, was enough to turn the senior attorney's bowels to water.

So instead of venting his spleen on his clients, or following through with the equally appealing idea of strangling his unbearably pretentious assistant with the dangling end of his perfectly knotted Harvard tie, Bascomb simply looked around at the cheaply paneled walls of the rented safe house and cursed in a manner that would have done his Shakespearean mentor proud.

By this point he was absolutely convinced that this particular Friday would turn out to be one of the worst days that he had ever experienced in his entire life.

Fortunately for what little remained of his peace of mind, Jason Bascomb had no way of knowing how right he was.

Thinking back, he realized it had started to go bad from the moment that the urgent note from Leland Kole himself had sent them all hurrying out of the federal courtroom and down the service elevator to the secured underground courthouse parking lot. There, Bascomb, his two legal assistants, Maas, Parker, and their two primary bodyguards had been forced to wait for over an hour, until all the primary and decoy transportation vehicles—consisting of three identical town car sedans and three identical ramp-equipped vans—had arrived.

After a hurried consultation among the hired bodyguards and drivers, the six smoke-windowed vehicles had roared out of the underground parking lot—one after the other, with a driver and bodyguard team in each of the front seats—and then vectored away from the courthouse in six different directions.

For the next two and a half hours Bascomb had sat in the back of the town car, crammed shoulder to shoulder with his two legal assistants, while their professionally trained driver went through an extended series of tactical maneuvers designed to flush and evade anything but the most sophisticated surveillance.

Finally, at five minutes after six o'clock that evening, Jason Bascomb III and his two assistant lawyers had arrived at the northern Virginia safe house, all thoroughly carsick and with bladders about ready to burst.

Bascomb had lunged through the front door and then immediately locked himself in the one and only bathroom for a good fifteen minutes to empty his bladder and take a quick, refreshing shower. Much to the amusement of Maas and Parker—neither of whom had been the least bit hesitant to share a communal plastic jug with their driver and bodyguard—this act of consummate selfishness finally forced Bascomb's two legal assistants to abandon their carefully nurtured codes of propriety and urinate in the backyard.