Mr. Wooten looked at his wife, bewildered, and she looked back at him the same way. “There has to be some mistake, Agent Rogers — Anthony isn’t even in the country.”
Was there any way Miggie might have misidentified the shooting victim? No, the file photo matched. And she was not about to show these parents the photo from the coroner’s office. On the burner phone, she called up Tony Wooten’s military file and his photo.
She held the phone out to the father who studied it, squinting at it, as if trying to make out a distant figure on the horizon. He gave Rogers a look that asked for the phone, and she nodded and gave it to him.
Soon father and mother were looking down at the photo on a phone that was in both their hands.
“That is your son?” Rogers asked.
They didn’t need to reply. Tears trailing down the mother’s cheeks, and the tremor in the father’s hand as he handed back the phone, gave the answer.
Rogers said, “We’re very sorry for your loss.”
Mrs. Wooten’s head tipped forward and a small sob escaped. Hardesy got up and went to her and handed her his handkerchief. She accepted the offering with a nod of thanks, and he went back to his chair.
Mr. Wooten gave Rogers a hard, direct look. “What happened to Anthony?”
“He was shot. From a distance, by a man with a rifle.”
Tears welling, the father asked, “Who in God’s name would want to shoot our son? In Maryland! He was a good boy — he served his country honorably.”
“We were hoping, sir, that you and your wife might have some idea.”
Spreading his hands in surrender, the father said, “We told you! We didn’t even know he was in the country. We thought he was overseas.”
“Where, specifically?”
The barest hint of a smile crossed the man’s face, then disappeared into sorrow. “He always said that if he told us, he’d have to kill us.”
The echo of what Miggie had said to her a few hours before gave her a shiver.
Mrs. Wooten looked up from her lap and said, “It was all top-secret work for the government.”
Great. No help. “What kind of government work was he doing if he was out of the Army?”
Mr. Wooten shrugged and shook his head a little. “Well... he was working as a contractor.”
“Do you know what he was contracted to do? Who might have contracted him?”
The father shook his head. “Anthony just said ‘top secret,’ and we respected that.”
Another dead end.
“Whatever it was,” Mr. Wooten volunteered, “there’s a strong possibility it was... that it wasn’t strictly... legal.”
His wife drew in a breath and gave him an I-can’t-believe-you-said-that look, and Rogers felt her stomach tighten.
Resting a hand on his wife’s knee, Mr. Wooten said, “Connie, these people are from the FBI. If they look into our financials for five minutes, they’ll find the money. I used to work for the government — I know.”
“Sir,” Rogers asked, trying not to betray the stir within her, “what money are you referring to?”
Mr. Wooten glanced at his wife, who closed her eyes and gave him a tiny nod.
Then he said, “A few months ago, Anthony put some money away for us.”
“Away where, sir?”
“In an account in the... what are they called? Cayman Islands. Under our name.”
“How much?”
“... Quite a bit.”
“How much, sir?”
“... One hundred thousand dollars.”
The agents traded looks.
Rogers asked, “Did Anthony tell you where that money came from?”
Mr. Wooten tried to maintain eye contact with her, but couldn’t. “Anthony said his contract work was paying nicely, and he just wanted to put some retirement money away.”
Hardesy asked, “For himself or for you?”
“For... well, for all of us. Whichever of us needed it more. I have a decent pension, and we don’t want for much of anything, so... really, I suppose it would eventually go to Anthony. Would have gone.”
Rogers asked, “You didn’t press him on where he got that kind of money?”
Shaking his head a little, Mr. Wooten said, “Agent Rogers, I’ll admit to you that I... I didn’t really want to know.”
“Do you have the account information?”
He sighed. Seemed defeated, and not by his guests — by life. “Connie can get it for you. We’re going to lose that money, aren’t we?”
Rogers shook her head. “I don’t really know.”
Anthony’s mother got up and went to a bedroom in the back of the house, Nichols tagging along with her. Several awkwardly silent minutes passed before the two women returned; Nichols, with a manila folder in hand, gave Rogers a nod.
Rising, Rogers said, “We’ll look into this, Mr. and Mrs. Wooten. We will, I assure you, do everything we can to find the person responsible for your son’s death... Is there someone you can call to come stay with you?”
The Wootens were on their feet, too, standing hand in hand.
“Thank you,” Mr. Wooten said. “We’ll be fine. Our other children are still in the area, and we’ll call them right away. Do you... do you have any idea what Anthony was doing in Maryland?”
Rogers knew exactly what he was doing — he was plotting the assassination of the Secretary of the Interior.
“No, sir,” she told him, “no idea at all.”
“The point in history at which we stand is full of promise and danger. The world will either move forward toward unity and widely shared prosperity — or it will move apart.”
Nine
When he entered the Oval Office, Joe Reeder found the President in shirtsleeves and tie behind that familiar, formidable desk, looking like his best friend had just died. Chief of Staff Timothy Vinson, certainly not the friend in question, stood to Harrison’s left side, seething, mustache twitching, a boil in a three-piece suit on the verge of bursting.
Jesus, Reeder thought, this guy is in full-blown Yosemite Sam mode.
Harrison motioned to Reeder to join them, and he quickly did, standing opposite, nodding, saying, “Mr. President.”
The commander in chief asked the ex-Secret Service agent, “Are you getting anywhere, Joe? On the direct line, Krakenin is stopping just short of accusing us... of accusing me... of inciting war. And the back-channel chatter is even worse.”
Dubbed “the Kraken” by American media outlets, Boris Mikhailovich Krakenin, President of the Russian Federation, was a notorious saber-rattler. But the Russian incursion into Azbekistan was not just a threat, and the deaths of four CIA agents in the midst of it put both nations at the precipice.
Preferring not to brief the President with Vinson present, Reeder said, “Making progress, sir, yes.”
Vinson began to pace a small area near the big desk, words tumbling out of him. “Boris has taken to referring to the Azbekistani government as a ‘puppet regime,’ accusing us of propping up a handful of insurgents. He doesn’t consider his own country’s actions as an invasion, oh no... just rightfully putting down a rebellion.”
“A rebellion,” Harrison said dryly, “in the form of a freely elected democratic government going back six years.”
“Krakenin,” Reeder said, “makes Putin look like a pushover.”
Harrison cocked his head. “You know the man?”
“‘Know him’ overstates it. I met him once, years ago. Secret Service days, when now-President Krakenin was serving in the FSB under General Bortnikov.”