“It is truth you seek, Oliver?” she said, smiling. “Like your sign say, it is truth you want. I can tell. You are such a man who seeks this.”
“I’m afraid as the years go by, my chances of actually finding it are fewer and fewer.”
Adelphia suddenly glanced over at a person who was staggering through the park. Anyone who had been on the streets of Washington over the last ten years had probably seen this pitiable sight. He had short stubs of bone and skin where his arms should have been. His legs were so horribly twisted that it was a miracle he could even remain upright. He was usually half-naked, even in winter. He had no shoes on. His feet were scarred and covered with sores, the toes oddly bent. His eyes were largely vacant, and a steady current of spittle slipped down his face and onto his chest. As far as anyone knew, he could not even speak. A small pouch hung from a string around his neck. Written across his tattered shirt in childlike scrawl was one word: “Help.”
Stone had given money to the man on numerous occasions and knew that he lived over a steam grate by the Treasury Department. He’d tried to help the man over the years, but his mind was simply too far gone. If any government agency had stepped in to help, Stone was unaware of it.
“My God, that man, that poor man. My heart, it bursts for his suffering,” Adelphia said. She raced over to him, pulled out some dollars from her pocket and placed them in his pouch. He babbled something at her and then staggered off to another group nearby, who also immediately opened their pocketbooks and wallets to him.
As Adelphia was returning to her spot next to Stone, a large man stepped in front of her, blocking the way.
He said gruffly, “I don’t look as shitty as that guy, but I’m hungry and I need a drink bad.” His hair was ratty and in his face, but he wasn’t dressed that shabbily. However, the stench coming off his body in waves was overpowering.
“It is no more I have,” Adelphia answered in a frightened tone.
“You’re lying!” He grabbed her arm and yanked Adelphia toward him. “Give me some damn money!”
Before Adelphia could even cry out, Stone was beside her.
“Let her go now!” Stone demanded.
The man was a good twenty-five years younger than Stone and far bigger. “Get out of here, old man. This doesn’t concern you.”
“This woman is my friend.”
“I said get out of here!” He followed this with a vicious swing that caught Stone flush on the chin. He dropped to the ground, clutching his face.
“Oliver!” Adelphia screamed.
Other people in the park were yelling at the man now, and someone was running off, calling out for a policeman.
As Stone struggled to get to his feet, the man pulled a switchblade out of his pocket and pointed it at Adelphia. “Give me the money or I’ll cut you bad, bitch.”
Stone made a sudden lunge. The man let go of Adelphia and staggered back, dropping his knife. He fell to his knees, every muscle in his body trembling, and then he collapsed onto his back on the grass, writhing in agony.
Stone picked up the switchblade and then palmed the weapon in a very unusual way. He reached over and ripped open his assailant’s collar, exposing the man’s thick neck and throbbing arteries. For an instant it seemed that Stone was going to slice that neck open from ear to ear as the knifepoint edged very near a pulsing vein. There was a look in Oliver Stone’s eyes that virtually no one who had known him over the last thirty-odd years had ever seen. Yet Stone abruptly stopped and gazed up at Adelphia, who stood there staring at him, her chest heaving. At that moment it was not clear which man she feared more.
“Oliver?” she said quietly. “Oliver?”
Stone dropped the knife on the ground, rose and wiped off his pants.
“My God, you are bleeding,” Adelphia cried out. “Bleeding!”
“I’m fine,” he said shakily as he dabbed at his bloody mouth with his sleeve. That was a lie. The blow had hurt him very much. His head was bursting, and he felt sick to his stomach. He picked at something in his mouth and yanked out a tooth the man’s punch had loosened.
“You are no fine!” Adelphia insisted as she watched him.
A woman came running up to them. “The police are coming. Are you both okay?”
Stone turned to see a patrol car, its lights flashing, pull to a stop at the curb. He quickly turned to Adelphia. “I’m sure you can explain everything to the police.” This came out a little garbled because his lip was swelling.
As he staggered off, she called out to him but he didn’t turn around.
When the police came up and started asking her questions, all Adelphia could think about was what she had seen. Oliver Stone had dug his index finger into the man’s side, near the rib cage. This simple move had caused a very large, angry man to drop to the ground, helpless.
And the way Stone held the knife had struck her deeply, for a very personal reason. Adelphia had seen a man grip a knife that way only once before, many years ago in Poland. The man had been a member of the KGB, who had come to forcibly take her uncle away for speaking out against the Soviets. She had never seen her uncle alive again. His gutted body had been found in an unused well in a village twenty miles away.
As Adelphia glanced around, she gasped.
Oliver Stone had disappeared.
CHAPTER
30
“THIS IS WHERE PATRICK JOHNSON worked,” Carter Gray said, sweeping his hand across the room.
Alex slowly took it all in. The space was about half the size of a football field with a large open area in the middle and cubicles along the perimeter. Computers with flat screens were on every desktop and servers hummed in the background. Men and women dressed in business attire either sat at their desks totally focused on their work or else walked the halls speaking into phone headsets using cryptic jargon that not even Alex, with all his federal time behind him, could understand. The sense of urgency here was palpable.
As Gray led them over to a set of corner cubicles, Alex caught images of people’s faces flashing across some of the computers, most of them Middle Eastern, with data, presumably about each person, flowing down one side of the screen. The thing he didn’t see was a single scrap of paper.
“We are paperless,” Gray said.
Alex was startled by this comment. Has the man added mind reading to his repertoire?
“At least the people working here are. I still like to feel the material in my hands.” He stopped at one cubicle, larger than the rest, whose walls, instead of waist level, were six feet high.
“This is Johnson’s office.”
“I take it he was a supervisor of some sort,” Simpson commented.
“Yes. His precise task was to oversee the work on our data files of all terrorist-related suspects. When we took over N-TAC, we combined that staff and their files with ours. It was an ideal fit. However, we, of course, didn’t want to strip the Secret Service of all involvement. That’s why Johnson and others here were joint employees.”
Gray said this in a magnanimous tone. However, as Alex looked around the space, he thought to himself, Nice but useless bone to throw our way, since we had no control over our “joint” employee. His gaze came to rest on the only personal item in the office. It was a small framed photo of Anne Jeffries sitting on Johnson’s desk. Alex noted that when the woman was all made up, she looked very pretty. He wondered if Anne Jeffries was meeting with a lawyer right now. A moment later another man joined them.
Tom Hemingway flashed a smile as he put out his hand to Alex. “Well, I guess my cover’s blown, Agent Ford.”
“I guess so,” Alex said as he winced at the man’s crushing grip.