As if he knew who the hell Mr. Grossman was. “Thank you for that.”
“Are you going to need me to testify?”
Jonathan brought the fingers of his free hand to his forehead. “We’ll see.” He was already finished with the conversation. Now he just needed a way to shut it down. “Thank you so much for your help.”
“Don’t you need my contact information?”
He took it and ignored it. After three phone numbers and two e-mail addresses, he said, “I have to move on now,” and he clicked off.
Boxers laughed. “That’s one of your very best G-man impersonations ever.”
Jonathan flipped him off. “We’re going to his house now. Not his office.”
“Works for me.” They were maybe ten minutes out.
Warrenton, Virginia, lay in the near part of Fauquier County, about an hour and a half west of Fisherman’s Cove. Twenty years ago, the sleepy little burg defined the leading edge of nowhere, but as people flooded to Washington, DC, and its suburbs in pursuit of government and computer jobs, there wasn’t much about Warrenton that was country anymore. Travel a mile beyond it, though, and you’d feel naked if you weren’t carrying a hunting rifle for food.
They’d taken the Batmobile. With Boxers at the wheel — Jonathan never drove when they were on an op together — the trip took fifteen minutes less than it should have. With a right foot made of lead, the Big Guy seemed empowered by the FBI creds in his pocket. If you drove like Boxers, the get-out-of-jail-free badge was a significant benefit of impersonating a cop.
“This guy’s a lawyer, right?” Big Guy asked. He weighted the word to reflect his disdain.
“Civil engineer,” Jonathan corrected. A much nobler profession, he thought, since engineers made their living building things that never were, while lawyers made theirs by sticking their hands into the pockets of others.
“How are we handling this?”
“Softly. We’re going to talk and to learn.”
“Suppose he doesn’t want to cooperate?”
Good question. Banks might very well have a critical piece of information, or he may have nothing. Jonathan didn’t mind twisting information out of someone he knew to be a bad guy, but he needed to be really sure before he resorted to physical persuasion.
“If it comes to that,” Jonathan said, “we’ll just have to wing it. For now, we’ll proceed on the assumption that he has Mrs. Darmond’s interests front and center in his heart.”
“So you’re telling me you don’t have a clue.”
“Pretty much.”
Boxers’ laugh made a low rumbling sound. “Just sidearms?”
“Yes.” Jonathan made sure the answer sounded emphatic. The weapons and explosives locked in the compartment under the cargo bay weren’t the kind of hardware you could carry out on the street. Jonathan would make do with the Colt 1911 .45 on his hip, and Boxers with his ever-present 9 millimeter Beretta.
“Our cover is just the FBI thing,” Jonathan said. “We’re there to ask him questions about why he was downtown last night.”
“Suppose he denies it?”
“Then we’ll know he’s a liar.” Effective planning was defined by baby steps.
Venice had loaded both the work and home addresses into Jonathan’s GPS, so the shift in targets meant little. The residential neighborhood where Albert Banks lived might as well have been Levittown after a deep breath. The lots and houses were two or three times the size of those 1950s suburbs, but the sameness of the construction was nearly identical. Two stories instead of one, colonials instead of ramblers, but still the worst that suburbia had to offer. The yards were an equal shade of green, and even cut to a uniform length. Jonathan didn’t begin to understand what compelled people to live in a place where every house had the same floor plan.
“That’s his up there,” Boxers said, pointing past the windshield. Banks’s iteration of the ubiquitous colonial sat on a corner before a cul-de-sac. Red brick, green shutters. His lawn had bald spots, though, which no doubt made him a pariah of the community.
Boxers nosed the Batmobile into the driveway and parked it diagonally, blocking the whole thing in case Banks tried to make a run for it in the Subaru that sat parked outside the garage. A ridiculously heavy vehicle when it rolled off the factory floor, the Batmobile was so massively armored that the Subaru would shred itself if it tried to ram it. And it wouldn’t even scratch the Hummer’s paint.
They climbed out of the vehicle and closed the doors quietly. Boxers thumbed the button on the key fob and the locks seated without a honk of the horn.
Jonathan produced an earbud that looked remarkably like an invisible hearing aid and pressed it into his ear canal. It was a wireless transceiver mated to a radio on his belt. He pushed the transmit button on the radio and said, “Radio check.”
Venice answered first. “Loud and clear.”
Boxers gave a thumbs-up, and then said for Venice’s benefit, “Me too.” To his boss, Big Guy said, “I’ll find the back door and give you a shout when I’m in place.” Often as not, the back door man got a lot of action after the front door was knocked on.
Jonathan loitered on the lawn while Boxers disappeared around the back. The place had a startlingly unkempt look about it. Beyond the bald spots in the lawn, the shrubs along the front porch were untrimmed in the extreme, with one errant boxwood branch extending to within a foot or two of the porch roof gutter. Jonathan wondered if the scofflaw boxwood triggered apoplexy among the residents of Warrenton Woods.
Of greater concern to Jonathan were the drawn curtains on a sunny day. While the world was filled with people who preferred darkness to light, Jonathan’s experience had taught him that people who chose to live behind closed curtains did so because they had secrets to hide.
“I’m in place in the rear,” Boxers said in Jonathan’s ear. “To my eye, it’s shotgun construction.”
Jonathan understood that to mean that you could fire a shotgun through the front door and the pellets would exit the back door. Translation: the front door and the back door were both located in the center of the building.
Jonathan thumbed his mike. “Roger that. Here we go.” He paused ten seconds to scan the environment behind him to make sure that there were no curious children or intrusive dog walkers who could screw things up. He mounted the three steps up to the porch and then walked two strides to the cheaply constructed red door. He pounded heavily with his fist. “Albert Banks! FBI! Open the door!”
He waited five seconds and then said the same thing.
No response.
“I’m kicking the door,” Jonathan said into his radio. He drew his Colt.
“Me too,” Boxers replied.
A big concern in kicking a light hollow-core door like this one was the threat of plowing all the way through and trapping your leg. Jonathan took careful aim at the strong part of the door, along the edge, and fired the sole of his boot into a spot just below the knob, where the tongue of the lock met the jamb. The door blasted open as if he’d used explosives.
He stepped into the foyer, half-crouched in an isosceles stance, weapon drawn and safety off, to find Boxers thirty feet away on the far side of the house, amid twice the amount of doorjamb shrapnel as that which surrounded Jonathan.
“Albert Banks!” Jonathan yelled. “Federal agents. Show yourself.”
Movement upstairs. Boxers heard it, too. They moved as one, Jonathan leading the way, first up seven steps to the landing, where he paused to scan what he could see of the second floor, and then up the remaining six steps to the top. “Albert Banks! Step out and show your hands!”
The second floor presented four closed doors that Jonathan could see at a glance: One at the far end of the house on his left, and then two on the front side on the left of what appeared to be a louvered door linen closet, and then beyond that, a door in a longer wall that he assumed must be the master bedroom.