“Next day, I’m at the little post office, getting my mail, and I ask the postmaster if there’s somebody on the island named Fay. He says he’s never heard of anybody by that name. Now, on the island, the postmaster knows everybody, and I mean absolutely everybody, so I figure Teddy is working.
“Then I go home, and I think about it, and I figure there’s no way he’s working, because this is not the sort of place to attract any Agency operation, and if it did, I’d know about it, because the Agency knew I had the house and would have informed me that something was happening on my turf. Also, Teddy is Tech Services, not an operational agent, so I think maybe he’s renting on the island for a couple of weeks.
“A week or so goes by, and I’m stopping at the post office for my mail, and as I pull up to park, Teddy comes out, gets into an old pickup, and drives away. I go into the post office and say to the postmaster, 'Who’s the guy who just left in the pickup?' He says, 'Oh, that’s Mr. Keane, Lawrence Keane, just bought himself a place up on the north island.'”
“So what?” Kinney asked. “Don’t CIA people use false names all the time?”
“Not when they’re not working, and especially not tech people. You see, what Teddy was doing was establishing himself a hidey-hole, a safe house, in a remote place.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll bet if you call the postmaster up there, he’ll tell you that Mr. Lawrence Keane is still getting mail, and he’ll tell you where that mail is forwarded when Mr. Keane is not in residence.”
“What’s this island called?”
“It’s called Isleboro.”
“And where in Maine is it?”
“In Penobscot Bay.” Rawls got up and went to the warden’s bookcase. “The warden has an atlas somewhere. I’ve seen him use it.” He looked among the books and plucked out an atlas of the United States, brought it back to the table and opened it.
“Here we are-State of Maine. Here’s Penobscot Bay, the biggest bay in the state. This long island, here, is Islesboro. You take a ferry from Lincolnsville, on the mainland, just north of Camden, to get there.” He pointed to the northern end of the island. “This is North Islesboro, and that’s where Teddy’s place is.”
“Where exactly?”
“I don’t know, but the postmaster would. His name is Seth Hotchkiss. He’ll be in the book.”
“And the ferry is the only way to the island?”
“Well, you can go by boat. The main harbor is here, at Dark Harbor. Oh, and there’s an airstrip.”
“Where?”
Rawls pointed to a spot on the page. “It’s not on this map, but it’s right here. It’s a paved strip, I think twenty-four-hundred feet. You can get a light airplane in there, or a chopper, of course.”
“Where’s a bigger airport?”
Rawls tapped the map. “On the mainland, right here at Rockland. I don’t know the runway lengths, but you can get just about anything in there.”
“What else?”
“That’s it. I promise you, he’s going to be at one of those two places. I’d try Manassas Airport first. That’ll be where he’s operating from. Islesboro is where he’ll run to when he’s done.”
“You think he’ll finish killing people at some point, then?”
“From what I heard on the news, he’s gotten his assets moved somewhere. He wouldn’t do that if he was trying to martyr himself.”
That coincided with Kinney’s thinking. “Okay, Mr. Rawls, we’re done here.”
“I’ll be looking forward to hearing from you,” Rawls said. “A cashier’s check will be fine, but I’d like a few grand of walking-around money in cash.”
Kinney left the room. “He’s all yours,” he said to the warden and the waiting guard.
In the car, Smith asked, “What do you think?”
“I’d call this a very low order of information,” Kinney said, “if we had anything else at all to go on. But we don’t.”
50
TED WOKE UP in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, as was his habit, and when he came back to bed, he couldn’t sleep. He got up, turned on his laptop, and went to the ACT NOW website. Something had been troubling him. He had passed over a target because he was so obvious and because he would be difficult to kill. Now his conscience was hurting him. He felt he couldn’t end his little crusade without knocking off this one man, who had, Ted felt, done so much to harm his country. He stared at the photograph, and his dander rose.
Eft Efton, speaker of the House, had given this administration fits in getting legislation out of the lower house. The president had a slim majority in the Senate, but in the House he was half a dozen votes shy, and he had had to deal with the speaker to get any legislation through at all.
The speaker had protection, though, and since he was third in line for the presidency, he was guarded by the Secret Service, which had put Ted off. Now Ted reconsidered. The Secret Service detail would be much smaller than the president’s, perhaps only three or four guards. He opened his file on the speaker and read the notes he had kept when researching a possible kill. He had decided earlier, on the evidence, that the easiest shot, and one with the greatest chance of escape, would be while the speaker was in a moving car. The car, of course, would be armored, but Ted had a solution for that.
He looked at the routes the speaker’s driver took from his house in Georgetown to the Capitoclass="underline" There were four, but it hardly mattered, if he followed the car from his house.
The time was more important; the speaker left his house at eight o’clock sharp each morning, walked quickly from the front door to the car, and didn’t emerge from it until he was safe in the Capitol garage.
Ted stayed up most of the rest of the night planning the killing, and finally, he was satisfied that it would work. He would have to sacrifice the Mercedes, but he had planned to sell it, anyway, and, once clean, it couldn’t be traced back to him.
He opened one of his weapons caches in the RV and found the piece that would defeat the glass in the speaker’s armored vehicle. It was, essentially, a large, semiautomatic handgun with a folding stock that would fire a.50-caliber, armor-piercing shell, and it had a ten-round magazine. He had made the first one in the Agency’s shops and the second one in his home shop, and, as far as he knew, the two examples were the only ones in existence. The weapon would be a nasty surprise for the speaker.
Ted chose a cotton jumpsuit for clothing and a brown wig and a Vandyke beard for a disguise. With his planning done, he wiped down the Mercedes thoroughly, set his alarm clock, and went back to bed.
AS SOON AS the G-III took off, Kinney was on the phone to the duty officer in the Hoover Building.
“I want a twelve-man SWAT team assembled and ready to roll by three a.m.,” he said. “Be sure they’re equipped with listening equipment. I’ll call you back with a destination.” He hung up the phone and went forward to talk to the pilots.
“We’ve just cleared the Atlanta Class B airspace,” the pilot said.
“There’s a Manassas Regional Airport in Virginia,” he said to the pilot. “Can you land there?”
“Just a minute.” The pilot picked up an airport guide and checked Manassas. “They have a fifty-seven-hundred-foot runway. We can land there.”
Kinney took the book from him and looked at the airport plan. He could see a row of T-hangars on the west side of the field and, behind them a larger single hangar. He picked out a fixed base operator from the list in the manual. “All right,” he said, “change our destination to Manassas. We’ll stop at Dulles Aviation.”