While Justice Sleeps(80)
Together, they walked through the house and into the kitchen. Jared ushered Avery out and twisted the lock. “You sure you’ve got everything?”
“All set.”
He pulled the door shut with a satisfying jerk. Behind the cabin, a small dock jutted out into the wide rush of water that hurried past on its way to Blue Ridge Lake.
“I’ll see if we can book an earlier flight,” Avery said quietly. “Unless you want to hang around for a while longer?”
“Thanks, but no. I’m ready to get back home. Too much nostalgia and fresh air.”
“Speaking of fresh air, mind if I walk down the dock first? I’ll be quick.” She wanted a second to clear her head.
“Sure.” He watched as she stepped across the overgrown grass and out onto the rotting wood. “Be careful. Watch your step.” His mother’s constant warning to him, and, in an instant, images of the three of them fishing off the end flashed bright and solid. His father patiently teaching him to cast. His mother laughing, a sound as pretty as the trickle of water on rock. A younger, happier Jared, secure in the permanence of family. He shut his eyes against the memories.
“Is that your—” Avery turned back and saw a man round the corner of the cabin, a black balaclava hiding his face. “Jared, look out!”
Avery’s scream sent Jared into a low crouch on the porch, moments before a bullet whistled past his head and lodged into the wood frame of the cabin. He lunged forward and rammed into the assailant. A grunt spit out overhead, and a second shot fired. With a swift twist, the man tossed Jared over his head.
Avery scrambled over the porch railing, scooping up a discarded canoe paddle. The gunman turned toward her, the gun leveling for a new shot. Before she could react, Jared burst up and tackled him. The bodies twisted, the gun a dark shadow as the assailant tried to gain purchase. With a grunt, Jared shoved at the gunman’s hand, forcing the weapon away from Avery. A fist clocked Jared’s temple and he sagged, giving the man precious seconds to heave him up and over in a hard throw. Winded, Jared struck out with his legs, catching the man in the kidneys and forcing him back down.
“Run, Avery!” Jared launched himself at the gunman, who roared with frustration and reared up as Jared grabbed his neck. They stumbled together toward the dock, and the gunman rammed an elbow into Jared’s sternum.
Jared saw the dull black metal of the weapon rise toward him, but suddenly Avery was swinging the canoe paddle at the masked face. It connected with a loud thunk, and the man fell sideways into the cold water.
Jared gave an instant’s thought to following him in, but remembered the gun in the fallen man’s hand. Instead, he reached for Avery and jerked her forward on the slippery, splintered wood. He had to keep her safe. He pushed her ahead of him and shouted, “Go!”
They raced to the SUV, and he shoved the key into the ignition. Another gunshot shattered the windshield. Jared jerked the truck into a tight circle, and the wheels dug into the gravel-pitted road and the vehicle lurched down the lane. The lane eventually merged into a county road, gravel ceding to pavement.
“I don’t see anyone following us,” Avery said, her eyes trained anxiously on the road behind them.
“Doesn’t matter.” The engine revved as Jared picked up more speed. “They knew how to find us at the cabin. Whoever it is, they’ll track us again.”
THIRTY-TWO
Betty Papaleo huddled in her office, her vision glazed and blurry from lack of sleep. As she scrolled through the data, she discovered layers and layers of false trails and dodgy leads. Holding companies and wire transfers that appeared and disappeared at will.
But she was nothing if not persistent—and this anomaly was as intriguing as anything she’d come across in her twelve years on the job.
Weary fingers tapped the computer keyboard to call up the data she’d culled from Treasury. Thousands of entries flashed by, and she swigged from a cup of stale coffee. Then she saw it. A name that jarred her attention. Hygeia.
Where had she seen that name before? Betty pulled up another screen and flipped through the various approved foreign vendors allowed to receive wire transfers from the feds. The name of the company appeared, vetted by a division of the FDA. Oddly, though, the authorization memo had been sealed and classified.
“That’s not standard procedure at all,” she murmured to her empty office. “Why would the FDA have a document with military security clearance?” She typed in her codes, trying every entry port she could think of. But the memo remained stubbornly out of reach.
Betty stood up and stretched limbs cramped from hours of hunching. After a career in government, she understood that secrets were hard to keep. The best way to keep information from the public was not to hide it, which broke laws and attracted attention.
No, the best way to hide information was to publish it in one of the millions of reports disseminated annually under Congress’s direction. Politicians routinely answered a crisis by demanding another audit or report or audited report. Minions and political appointees gathered in cloistered rooms for weeks, parsing out opprobrium about the agency that had failed in its impossible task of perfection. Then they published a report of their findings—that bureaucrats were fallible humans and the laws made the simple infinitely complicated. The report got published under a blue or red cover with a gold seal. Reams of paper to be shoveled into landfills after the apathetic populace ignored the dramatic truth.