“I need orders, Boss,” Boxers said from the landing, below and behind.
“Albert Banks, we are federal agents! Don’t make us—”
Jonathan heard movement — sounded like the shuffling of papers — behind the door directly ahead, just to the left of the linen closet. “Cover the hall,” he said to Boxers, and he darted forward. He covered the ten feet of distance in two long strides. He tried the knob on the door and was surprised to find it unlocked.
As the door swung inward, Jonathan brought his pistol to bear, again gripped with both hands, his finger poised just outside the trigger guard. The room was clearly intended to be a home office, but with all the trash and papers and assorted junk on the floor it had a ransacked look about it. At first glance, the closed closet doors concerned him, but when he realized how much crap was stacked in front of them, he all but eliminated the possibility of someone hiding inside. If they couldn’t get the doors open, they couldn’t pose much of a problem.
The more immediate concern was the terrified man on the far side of the desk. He was pounding frantically on his keyboard, his eyes never straying from the screen. Jonathan recognized the features he’d seen in the old photographs, but they hid behind folds of jowls. This was a man who needed to stay away from all-you-can-eat buffets for a while.
“Mr. Banks,” Jonathan warned, “I’m a federal officer. Step back from the desk right now and show me a set of empty hands.”
Boxers appeared in the doorway behind Jonathan, filling the frame. “Floor’s clear.”
Banks never looked up from his screen. If he thought he was pretending not to hear, he needed to work on his poker face.
“Banks!” Jonathan shouted it this time. “What could possibly be more important than getting shot?” He took a step forward.
“No,” Banks said. “Please don’t.”
“We just need to talk to you, sir.”
The speed of his typing seemed to pick up, as if that were even possible. “Please stay away,” Banks said. He never made eye contact, and his hands remained concealed behind the stack of crap and his computer monitor.
“Mr. Banks, you need—”
“I said please!” Banks yelled. When he finally looked up, his hand held a big chrome-plated .357 magnum.
“No!” Jonathan shouted.
Banks brought the revolver to his own temple. His eyes burned wild, as if he’d been pushed past anything that resembled reality and reason.
“Mr. Banks, don’t,” Jonathan said.
“I won’t let you do that to me,” he said.
Jonathan’s hands never moved from his weapon, and his eyes never left Banks. “Suicide doesn’t solve anything,” he said. “Just put—”
Banks’s face hardened. He started to lower the weapon from his head, but Jonathan didn’t buy it. He prepared for—
Banks jerked the gun up and pointed it at Jonathan.
The .45 barked twice, as if by reflex, sending two bullets through the same hole into Banks’s heart and dropping him in a heap into his chair. As the echo cleared, the man looked as if he might have fallen asleep at his desk.
“Goddammit!” Jonathan spat. “Really?”
“That went well,” Boxers said.
“He’s a moron. He pointed a weapon at me.”
Boxers’ hand touched his shoulder. “You had no choice, Boss. Suicide by cop.”
Jonathan kicked the front of the desk. “Shit.”
“I don’t think we should be dawdling here,” Boxers said. “In case the neighbors heard or get curious.”
Jonathan didn’t disagree, but he wasn’t going to let this be a total bust. He holstered his weapon and walked around to Banks’s side of the desk. He rolled the chair and the body out of the way and examined the computer screen. It showed lists of files. Jonathan figured he must have been trying to erase them. If they were worthy of being erased, they were worthy of being read.
Jonathan pulled his Leatherman tool from the pouch on his belt and tossed it to Boxers. “Pull the drives out,” he said, nodding to the CPU that sat among the detritus atop the desk. While the Big Guy took care of that, Jonathan scanned the assembled crap for anything that looked relevant. There wasn’t enough time to scour thoroughly, but his attention was drawn to the stack of ancient five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks that seemed to have been staged at the edge of his desk. He hadn’t seen any of those in years — since, say, the early nineties, just about the time when Banks would have been hanging out with his revolutionary buddies.
There were also a dozen or so thumb drives and a couple of CDs. Jonathan pulled the plastic liner out of the trash can, dumped the garbage onto the floor, and loaded the bag with the disks.
A minute later, Boxers held two hard drives in his hand. He gave the Leatherman back to Jonathan, and then it was time to go.
CHAPTER TEN
“Please tell me you’re calling from a secure line,” Irene said.
“Encrypted satellite phone,” Jonathan assured. He and Boxers were in the Batmobile, on their way back to the Cove.
“You killed him?”
“He pulled a weapon on me. I had no choice. I thought you should know.”
“How thoughtful. I presume the body is still in the house?”
“Yes. He’s not dead an hour yet. Can you, uh, take care of that for me? As far as I know, he lived alone.” A small but very profitable slice of the covert world dealt with the surreptitious disposal of bodies. The contractors were good enough at their jobs that many of their projects remained listed as missing persons forever.
Wolverine’s sigh came through the speakerphone loud and clear. “Good God, Scorpion. Yes, I’ll take care of it. Did you kill Gutowski too?”
“Haven’t yet had the chance,” Jonathan said. “He’s next on our list to visit.”
“Don’t bother,” Irene said. “He’s already dead.”
Boxers and Jonathan exchanged looks. “When?”
“His body was found this morning in his house.” Irene spoke as if she were describing a household event. “His fingers and toes were broken. A needle had been inserted in his right eye.”
“Suicide?” Boxers asked with a chuckle. Ever the king of bad timing.
Jonathan silenced him with a raised hand. He wanted to think this through.
“Is anyone there?” Irene asked after the long silence.
“I’m thinking,” Jonathan said. “People are tortured to deliver information, Wolfie. The more important the info, the more brutal the torture. Banks was out-of-his-head terrified. He said, ‘I’m not going to let you do that.’ Somehow, I think he knew about Gutowski’s torture. That would certainly explain the suicide. Anything’s better than death by torture.”
“You’re suggesting that they shared a secret?”
“I think so, yes. We pulled the hard drives out of his computer and made off with a bunch of data storage. We’ll start plowing through that stuff and get back to you when we know something. Meanwhile, what’s happening on your end? Any developments?”
“The White House press corps is beginning to sniff around Mrs. Darmond’s absence, but that hasn’t reached critical mass yet.” Irene cleared her throat.
Jonathan had learned that that was a tell. “But there’s more, right?”
“Well, yes, there is. I’ve been made aware of a disturbing blog post by a young man named David Kirk. Have you ever heard of Kirk Nation?”
“Um, no.” A glance to Boxers confirmed that he hadn’t heard of it, either.
“Well, it’s fairly influential among some of the, shall we say, more paranoid sector of the commonweal. It’s got thousands of followers, and Mr. Kirk posted this afternoon that a DC cop named DeShawn Lincoln was killed last night by the Secret Service in the middle of the Mall.”