Scott nodded, both agreeing to the point and acknowledging that they had no simple solution.
“There is one way to pull the fox out.” Parker looked across the distant trees as he spoke his thoughts.
“Short of assassinating the president of the United States, we have license to do whatever it takes.”
“You know my ANGLICO team.”
“Yes.”
There was no point in being coy. Parker would assume that Scott would remember the team from Korea and, if not, would have at least researched Parker’s contacts.
“One of them was Hernandez.”
“Staff Sergeant Enrico Hernandez.”
“Yes. He’s with the Centers for Disease Control now. Works on their security team.”
“He mentioned to me a doctor there named Stewart. I think his name is Paul Stewart. I would need to start by talking to Dr. Stewart.”
“When?” Fire had appeared in Scott’s eyes. If he wasn’t already seeing the direction of Parker’s idea, he was at least energized by the fact that Parker was hatching a plan.
“Now.”
Scott nodded. “One more reminder, Colonel Parker, of the stakes involved. If Yousef wants to make a name for himself, it will take something very violent.”
“Yes,” said Parker. “I can only imagine.”
CHAPTER 8
William Parker tried to hold the steering wheel steady on the road while he glanced at the iPhone in his hand. He would look down at the electronic map loaded on the iPhone, then glance up at the roadway and then again down to the map. Each time he glanced down, the rental car tended to pull to the left and the center line. The occasional pickup truck coming in the opposite direction laid on the horn as he wandered closer to the paint.
This is stupid. He knew better as a pilot. Lesser distractions had caused many an airman to plow into the ground.
Waldrip Road. He knew the turn was somewhere to the left. He had seen it from the air as he flew over the western portion of the lake. There it was. Parker took the turn.
Can’t be more than a few miles to this house.
He’d reached the western side of Lake Sidney Lanier. Lake Lanier sat an hour’s drive northeast of Atlanta, just west of Gainesville, and squarely in the path of the tidal wave of people moving from Detroit to Atlanta. Property on the lake, if you could find it, went for millions.
In a few miles the turn would be to the right. He glanced down at the iPhone again. Up ahead, a street sign stuck out from the bushes with a visible lean to the right.
Martin Terrace. His next turn. Parker saw a driveway to his right and the lake beyond as he crept down the single lane that twisted through pine trees. Another house lay ahead.
MONCRIEF PAINT COMPANY.
Finally. The sign hung on a tree below another that advertised Lake Lanier Construction. Parker turned onto the gravel driveway and saw an old beaten truck with a tailgate that looked broken and a slew of empty five-gallon buckets tied together in the bed. The side of the truck also showed MONCRIEF PAINT COMPANY and, below it, PAINT CONTRACTOR. And below that, in smaller but perfectly neat type: GUNNERY SERGEANT — USMCR (RETIRED).
The Cape Cod house was in its final stages of construction. The copper gutters and shake shingles gave it that distinctive look of an expensive cottage, as if pulled up and dropped down from a lake in the White Mountains, but the front yard was still a wide mess of red clay dirt. Deep tire tracks puddled full with water showed the recent rains. Black plastic tubes from the sprinkler system stuck out of the dirt in a regular pattern across the yard. It was only a few weeks away from the final touches, landscaping, and plantings that would take the house from this rough stage to something ready for Architectural Digest.
As he neared the front door, Parker heard a fast, loud voice engaged in a conversation with another, similarly energetic voice. Parker smiled and swung the door open quietly, as if sneaking into his parents’ house well past midnight. He could have called out to Moncrief, but catching him by surprise would be worth it.
“Goddamn it, the prince was right!”
The sound of a hotly contested debate came from the small living space just to the right of the front door. There, a man, maybe a hand’s width at most under six feet, spread cream-colored paint on the walls. He was solid, with broad, muscular shoulders that reminded one of a charging bull or linebacker. His shoulders tapered down to a tight waist, giving him a dogged, self-assured bearing. A high-and-tight haircut helped frame the head with a new Yankees baseball cap squarely on top. His garb looked far from spotless — white paint overalls splotched with a variety of colors — but the Yankees hat was spotless. It might have just been issued by the team uniform manager.
“Yeah, well, the Astros were fools,” he replied.
Parker looked around the room and smiled, realizing there was only one voice in this conversation. Yes, maybe two minds, but only one voice. He decided to watch and listen for a while.
“In the sixth round.”
Kevin Moncrief actually sounded angry with himself, painting all the while. Parker quietly pulled up the sleeves to his blue denim shirt and leaned against the wall in the hallway, enjoying the show.
“The kid was drawing pictures of pinstripes in Mrs. Padley’s class! Hell, Newhouser knew what he had. Soft hands. A feel for the game. A natural. A pure, goddamn natural.”
Parker tried not to laugh, listening to this high-strung conversation between Kevin Moncrief and his good friend, Kevin Moncrief.
“An American League MVP drives three and a half hours to see a kid play, and then the front office tells him to go to hell.” He kept rolling paint as he continued to talk, his attention focused fully forward the entire time with no clue that anyone else had joined him in the room.
Moncrief’s debate was over the rejection of Hal Newhouser’s advice to the Houston Astros to sign a kid from Michigan named Derek Jeter. Newhouser told management that this skinny teenager would be the anchor of a winning Major League club. They signed a no-name instead. The teenager went on to have five World Series rings locked up in his safe-deposit box. Newhouser, the man who was always perfectly dressed, quit baseball for good after his advice was rejected.
“Newhouser should have been a Marine.” He sighed and then paused for a split second. “Colonel?” he said suddenly, never once looking back. “Your fancy denim shirt has some Sherwin-Williams Copper Harbor on it now.”
Should have known. Parker checked his shoulder, only to find a streak of yellow-orange paint. Oh, well. It was worth it.
“Gunny Ndee.” Moncrief’s nickname explained much. Only three men on the planet had license to call him by that name. A biker once overheard it being used in a bar in San Diego. He thought it was funny. He made the mistake of expressing that fact. The biker didn’t even get the final syllable out, trying to repeat the word, before he was unconscious on the floor in a pool of blood. Moncrief was one-eighth Chiricahua Apache on his father’s side. Although Apache was the name that their enemies gave them, the warriors called themselves Ndee. And there had been no more determined warriors on earth than the Ndees. The tribe, when necessary, could strike their tents and move — warriors, squaws, barefoot children, the crippled and ill — more than a hundred and fifty miles without stopping and without hesitating once for a drink or rest. Moncrief had that same relentless, strong-willed, pit bull mind-set. And like an Apache warrior, Kevin Moncrief had a sense of perception, especially on the battlefield, that had become legendary in the brotherhood of the few good men.