While Justice Sleeps(84)
With a migraine forming behind her eyes, she scrambled to figure out who might fit the bill. Someone almost as powerful and with a reason to share her findings. And she’d met the perfect candidate at the genetic frontiers conference this past fall, the last stretch of free time she’d enjoyed in many months. October in the Research Triangle of North Carolina was lovely, she’d thought then. Almost as attractive as the keynote speaker.
She’d get the address upstairs before she metered it and added it to the outgoing post. Using a marker she filched from a desk, she wrote the name of her Galahad in all caps across the box.
ATTENTION: NIGEL COOPER
GENWORKS, INC.
THIRTY-THREE
Vance sat alone in his office, scowling as he viewed the mirror image of Betty Papaleo’s computer on his screen. He swiftly punched numbers into his phone.
A cell phone rang inside the Atlanta airport. Castillo answered on the first ring.
“Yes?”
“Are you with them?”
Castillo glanced across the gate area from behind a pillar to the line of chairs near the boarding gate. “Full detail,” he reported in a low tone. “Six o’clock flight. We board in forty-five minutes.”
“Is Keene on a computer?”
“Affirmative. She and Jared Wynn are huddled together.”
The curse was short and effective. “Can you terminate access?”
Castillo scanned the crowded gate area. “Yes. I have some equipment with me.”
“Do it.” Too many ends were flying loose or unraveling too quickly to be snipped off. He shoved free of his desk, grabbed his briefcase, and jerked open the office door. Downstairs, the darkened subterranean parking structure fit his mood perfectly. He slammed his way into his car and revved the engine. Against his hip, his weapon lay heavy, and his fingers itched for action. Too many mistakes had been made, too much remained undone.
It wasn’t his way.
He drove down the first level, snaking through the labyrinthine design. As he rounded a corner, it was only by luck that he recognized the woman from the file on his desk. At the southwest corner of the garage, Betty Papaleo hurried across the concrete, arms filled with files. Files he’d bet his pension contained information on Hygeia.
The tiny turn of luck pleased him. For once, the operation was running on his schedule. He left the garage first and waited for her to come out of the structure. She merged into the late-afternoon traffic, where cars were already beginning to slow. Closing in two cars behind her, he kept sight of the ancient Volvo easily. Betty, he learned, obeyed all traffic laws, including the caution to slow as she approached yellow. The vehicles between them honked in annoyance as she eased her car into neutral rather than snaking below an amber warning light.
His field kit rested in the trunk of his car. Because his decision was spur-of-the-moment, he’d have to improvise. But the slow pulsing of excitement felt good in his veins. Control was what he needed. It had vanished the instant Jamie Lewis had placed her errant call. Soon, he’d hold the reins again.
Unaware of her tail, Betty plodded through traffic and across the freeway to one of the ubiquitous condo complexes dotting the Arlington/DC boundary. She paused outside a security gate to scan her pass, and Vance continued along the thoroughfare. A row of adjacent storefronts provided handy cover, and he pulled his car into one of the dimly lit spaces between buildings.
Before he left the unremarkable sedan with its government plates, Vance quickly surveyed the walls for video cameras. In the days after 9/11, amateur surveillance proliferated, capturing the unsuspecting in service of the mundane.
However, the owners of the liquor store and the sandwich shop next door had dismissed their merchandise as likely targets for high-end criminals. Vance popped the trunk and removed his field kit. In one motion he shrugged out of his coat and laid it inside the open trunk. Next came his pristine white shirt, tie, and cuff links, leaving him in a white undershirt. He tugged a maroon sweatshirt over his head.
The field kit contained glass bottles and the implements he’d require for completing his task. He removed a couple of items, then stuffed the remaining items into a black backpack, which he settled firmly across his shoulders. After jerking a baseball cap low over his forehead and shoving on wraparound glasses to fully obscure his face, he snapped latex gloves onto his hands. He put a thin piece of wire with metal bars on the ends into one pocket of the sweatshirt and a wad of material into the other. The trunk closed with a quiet click, and Vance eased out of the alley, head down.
He walked at a quick pace toward the garage entrance he’d seen Betty pull into, and he spotted her. A curious woman who could bring down a president, and the man who’d sworn to prevent his downfall. A cautious scan revealed that they were the only two occupants on this level of the structure. She had a corner spot bordered by a massive column used to stabilize the structure.
Oblivious to his advance, Betty leaned into the passenger door of her car, then stood up and set a stack of files on the roof. She rummaged in her oversized purse for her house keys. The clanging gave her some direction, and she dug them out.
As she loaded the copies of the Hygeia files into her arms, keys in hand, Betty mentally rehearsed her explanation to Undersecretary McLean for tomorrow. He would be her first stop after she returned from the Lincoln Memorial.
She turned toward the elevator and used her hip to bump the car door closed. The folders were unstable, and she silently chided herself for not putting them in a box at the office. Readjusting, she shrugged her purse strap higher; one of the folders started to slip.