He looked at me and then Mahoney before saying, “That’s bull.”
I pushed a second photo across the table at him. “Nope. He killed Bowman and a Treasury agent and wounded a second one, but not before that agent got a slug in your son. Martin tried to flee Manhattan, but a rookie cop gunned him down.”
Franks stared at the image of his son sprawled on the rain-soaked sidewalk. His lower lip quivered, and then he appeared disgusted.
Oozing contempt, he said, “You looked for a scapegoat, and you found my boy.”
“Your son was an assassin,” Mahoney said. “He was wearing fake Treasury identification and a badge when he was killed.”
“Planted.”
“We didn’t even have to do that,” Mahoney said.
I switched topics. “Tell us about Martin. Where had he been living?”
“I’m not saying anything. And take that picture away. I don’t want to see it.”
I left it where it was, said, “Your son’s dead, Mr. Franks. Unless you want us to believe you were part of the assassinations, I suggest you start talking.”
“I got nothing to say. I haven’t seen Martin or been in contact with him in... gotta be two years now.”
“Not a peep?”
“Nada.”
Mahoney said, “That’s funny. The agents who arrested you said your place was full of new solar technology, appliances, sat dish, and stacks of cash.”
“So? I don’t trust banks, and I got an inheritance at the same time as a guy who owed me money paid up.”
I sighed. “The cash was in mailers with fake return addresses, and three of them had notes signed by your son. One said he’d see you again soon.”
“Turn of phrase,” Franks said. “And the cash? He was just helping his old man. Other than that, like I said, we hadn’t been in touch.”
“Where’d he get the money?”
“Can’t say. But last time I saw him — couple years back, after he left the Marines — he said he was getting into contract security work overseas. He said there’s real money in that these days.”
“You declare that cash to the IRS?” Mahoney asked.
Franks chuckled and picked up another cigarette. “What do you think?”
I lit the cigarette for him, waited until he’d had a few puffs.
“Was Martin political?”
“Hell no.” He snorted. “I swear to you, I never heard him once talk about politics unless I was baiting him. Even then, he’d change the subject.”
“To what?” Mahoney asked.
“Anything. When he was in it, you know, combat. He liked to talk about that.”
That last bit did not jibe with my own experience, which was that people who’d been in combat rarely talked about it. Then again, Martin Franks was given the soft boot out of the Marines because his superiors thought he had psychopathic tendencies.
My cell buzzed, alerting me to a text. I chewed my lip in frustration, figuring it was Nina Davis again. But I slipped the phone from my pocket, glanced at the screen, and saw a text from Bree:
Scotland Yard coughed up Carl Thomas’s file! Call me ASAP!
Mahoney said, “Your son ever mention going to Russia? China? North Korea?”
Franks screwed up his face as he took a drag off the cigarette, then said, “Never. But you know? More I think about it, it sounds to me like my boy maybe came around to his pop’s way of seeing things. In my mind, Martin died to free us from tyranny. He sacrificed himself for the ideals of his country, and I salute him for his bravery. I predict Martin will go down in history as being as much of a patriot as one of them minutemen.”
I stood up to leave the room. “I hate to break this to you, Mr. Franks, but I am absolutely certain your son will go down in history as a coward and a traitor to his country. I have the distinct feeling you will too.”
Chapter 77
When making any long road trip, Dana and Mary Potter liked to travel around the clock. One would sleep while the other drove. Switching off every two hours and gassing up every four, they could cover close to eighteen hundred miles in a single day.
Indeed, they’d left Texas as fast as they dared, crossing on back roads into New Mexico in a stolen truck with stolen plates before any word of the assassinations surfaced in New York, Washington, or El Paso County.
But by the time they’d made the Colorado line, around five that afternoon, the news was full of the killings, with new, shocking developments almost every minute, very little of it coming out of the Lone Star State, which was exactly how they wanted it to stay.
The roads were dry. They made good time. Wyoming had come and gone before midnight. But the weather had turned sour south of Billings, Montana. Wind, snow, and bitter temperatures had plagued them in the long hours before dawn.
Shortly after daylight on Saturday morning, the storm intensified to near whiteout conditions. A prudent couple would have pulled off the road in Lewistown or Malta and waited it out.
But Mary wanted to be home, and her husband wanted as swift an escape as possible. And the storm wasn’t a bad thing when it came right down to it.
No one would be looking for assassins in a blizzard on Montana’s desolate Hi-Line highway. A killer could drive right by you, and you’d never know it because you’d be keeping your eyes on the white-knuckle road.
So the Potters had driven on toward Glasgow in northeast Montana, listening to the news coverage on the satellite radio. Word of President Larkin’s retaliatory cyberattack on the other nations had shocked them both.
“I want to get home, Dana,” Mary said in a fretful voice. “Before the world goes all to hell on us. My God, what have we done?”
He got angry. “We did a job to save our son’s life. That’s what we did.”
She got angrier. “They’re saying we may have helped start World War Three!”
“I’m a professional. You’re a professional. I did a job, and so did you. And we did it for a noble purpose.”
Mary said nothing, just stabbed off the radio. “I want to call home.”
“No sat phone,” he said firmly. “Radio silence until we’re in the...”
On the GPS navigation screen in the truck’s central console, he saw what he was looking for and slowed, feeling the trailer slide a little behind him before he came to a full stop and turned north onto Frenchman’s Creek Road.
The gravel road had not been plowed. They spun and almost jackknifed the trailer in nine inches of snow. But before they could go in the ditch, Potter wrestled the pickup and trailer back to the middle of the road.
When he was a full mile north of the Hi-Line, he stopped in a spot out of the wind, and they donned wool hats, quilted Carhartt parkas, and heavy leather mitts lined with sheep fleece. Both of them had already changed into insulated bib overalls and boots at the last gas stop.
While Mary saddled and fed the horses grain, he chained up all four tires and changed the stolen Wyoming plates for Montana tags. Despite their heavy clothes, they were cold to the bone when they climbed back in the pickup and started north again.
An hour later, the road doglegged and dropped down beside Frenchman’s Creek itself. The vague outlines of a ranch house and barns appeared through the snow.
Potter stopped and used binoculars to look at the windows for lights inside.
“She’s still in Arizona, right where she should be this time of year,” he said after a few minutes.
“Let’s get it over with, then,” Mary said. “We’ve got a cold ride ahead of us.”
They rolled into the ranch yard. Potter saw no tracks anywhere.
He stopped near a shed between the house and the barn, said, “Good a place as any. You clean up inside, and I’ll get the horses unloaded. We’ll put the truck and trailer back where we found them, and we’re out of here. No one the wiser.”