“Dark,” Moses said a few moments later. “Blessed dark.”
Bo glanced up where fingers of light poked through the trees on the hilltop.
Moses took three short breaths, air grasped desperately from the night, then he uttered the final word of his life. “Home.”
Bo saw him yield, saw his body go slack and relax into the earth. He waited and watched, looking for a twitch that would give away Moses’s charade, if charade it were. He heard crickets now, felt the kiss of a breeze, saw how lovely the river was, strewn with diamonds of light thrown down by the moon.
The pain of his knee gradually drew all his attention. He slid to the ground and sat propped with his back against the rock. He was sitting this way when the men with drawn weapons swept down the hill and gathered atop the sandstone outcropping.
“Down here,” Bo called.
Several powerful flashlight beams played across him.
“Police! Freeze!”
Bo didn’t move.
“It’s Thorsen, for God’s sake.”
Bo recognized the voice of Stu Coyote. A minute later, Coyote was at his side.
“You hurt, Bo?”
“S’okay,” Bo said. “I’m getting pretty used to it. What’re you doing here?”
“I located Otter,” Coyote said. He gently took the gun from Bo’s hand and sat on the ground beside him.
Special Agent Stan Calloway joined them and directed the beam of his flashlight toward the body. “Who’s this?”
“Moses,” Bo said.
“David Moses?” Calloway threw the beam up to the outcropping.
“How about up there?”
“The enemy,” Bo said.
Calloway looked him over and said, “Don’t go anywhere.”
“Wasn’t planning on it,” Bo said.
Calloway headed back up the hill.
“Otter sent you?” Bo said to Coyote.
“In a way. I came back as soon as I heard about Diana. I figured you’d turn to a friend, and the only friend of yours I ever met was Otter. I got his address from the visitor’s log security kept during your stay at the hospital.”
Bo smiled grimly. “You and Moses.”
“What?”
“Never mind. So you put two and two and two together?”
“That’s pretty much it. I talked to Calloway at Wildwood. We kept the First Lady off the bluff tonight.”
“And then you came over here because you thought he’d try the hit from here.”
“Not exactly. We got a call from the St. Croix County Sheriff’s Department. A farmer a mile north of here found a pickup truck parked on his land. Truck was full of ordnance. Had a Minnesota plate.”
“Let me guess,” Bo said. “Registered to Luther Gallagher.”
Coyote nodded. “We were up there investigating when we got the call on shots fired here.”
“Agent Coyote, I have to ask you to step away.” A man in a dark suit stood looking down at them. “This man is still wanted for questioning in the death of Diana Ishimaru.”
“FBI,” Coyote said to Bo. Before he stood up, he said, “Need anything?”
“A doctor would be nice. My knee’s pretty screwed up.”
Coyote glanced up at the federal agent. “Get paramedics down here.”
“We’ll take care of everything.”
Bo looked across the river. The bluffs at Wildwood were so bright in the flood of moonlight that even from this distance he could make out details. But it was not what he saw that made him smile even in his pain. It was what he did not see.
chapter
forty-seven
Bo lay on the hospital bed, staring up at the ceiling light in his room. A casing of wire mesh protected the bulb. Tendrils of cobweb fuzzy with dust hung from the mesh like unraveled threads. Although there was no breeze that Bo could feel, the tendrils gently waved in some high current of air.
They’d transported him to the nearest medical facility, the St. Croix Regional Medical Center. They’d done a CAT scan to make sure there was no internal damage from his fall. They’d x-rayed his knee, had found bone chips, and had immobilized the joint pending surgery. They’d cleaned and dressed the wound on his head. Then they’d isolated him in the Psychiatric Unit. No one had come to see him since he’d been taken into custody and had told his story. He hadn’t been read his rights, nor had they given him an opportunity to make a phone call. He was not under arrest, they said. Since they’d locked him in the room hours before, he hadn’t seen a living soul.
He didn’t mind the isolation. It gave him time to think. And what he thought about was David Solomon Moses.
Moses had done terrible things. Killed many times over. Murdered agents Bo knew and respected. That he’d lived, according to Dr. Jordan Hart, in a world that he perceived to be in a constant state of war, much of it directed against him, didn’t alter greatly Bo’s impression of the man. He’d hunted Moses as he would an animal, a sick, dangerous animal. He’d thought of him as hate stuffed into a thin sheath of flesh. Yet on the cliff, with Kate on her knees, Moses had offered her a chance at life. Why? And later he’d killed the men whose assignment it was to assassinate her. Had that been for his own dark reasons? Or had Bo, in that St. Paul church, actually convinced him to let go of vengeance? Father Don Cannon claimed people came into the world with much of their spirit already formed. If that was true, then maybe something had been in David Moses when he was born, some possibility of goodness that all the cruelty and betrayal in his life hadn’t managed to destroy completely. Bo would never know for sure. Moses had taken all the answers with him.
Like the ceiling light, the windows in the room were covered with heavy wire mesh. Above the door a security camera was mounted to the wall. Bo guessed he was being watched. By whom was a concern, for he knew all too well that NOMan was everywhere. They could shoot him in that room and make it look like anything they wanted to. He had refused the pain medication the medical staff offered. If he was going to die, he wanted to be awake for the event.
They came for him after many hours. There were three of them, men in dark blue suits, accompanied by an attendant in a white uniform. It was the attendant who unlocked the door, and who brought a wheelchair.
“Let’s go, Thorsen,” one of the suits said.
“Where?” Bo asked.
“Shut up,” another suit said.
Bo didn’t want to give them any reason to kill him if that’s what they were looking for. He went without protest.
They didn’t go far. He was wheeled into an adjacent room, this one with a table and three chairs and no window. Most of one wall was reflecting glass, a two-way mirror. Two of the chairs were already occupied by other men in suits. One suit was light gray, the other a charcoal pinstripe. Bo was positioned across the table from the two men. The gray suit nodded to the blue suits, who left the room.
“Do you know who I am?” the gray suit asked.
“No.”
“I’m Assistant Director James Norton, Secret Service.”
Bo knew the name, although not the man.
Norton nodded toward the pinstripe. “This is FBI Assistant Director Hector Lopez.”
Lopez said, “We’ve been looking into the story you told. Your allegations concerning National Operations Management are, quite frankly, pretty crazy. We’ve done some preliminary investigating, and we can find nothing to indicate that NOMan is anything other than what it purports to be.”
Norton said, “You contend that NOMan wanted the First Lady assassinated, and you’ve alleged that Senator William Dixon is involved. Yet you have no evidence of this. Nor can you give us any reason why any of these people would instigate such an action.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Bo said. “My guess is that it has something to do with the president’s reelection. Newly widowed, Dixon would be hard to beat. And NOMan could lay the blame on Moses.”
“I’ve got to tell you, Agent Thorsen,” Lopez said, “this conspiracy theory of yours sounds like paranoid raving. The raving of a man already wanted in connection with a murder in St. Paul. As a matter of fact, we believe there is sufficient evidence at this point to seek an indictment against you, should we choose to advise the federal attorney to do so.”