After I drove Tessa back to the safe house, Sheriff Wallace called to inform me that his men had contacted Alice, but she refused to leave her home. “We can send a squad to surveil her house, but other than that our hands are tied.”
I thought back to the hairbrush and the fingerprints and made a couple calls. When I found out Alice had only been working at the bank for less than a week, it gave me an idea. I called Lien-hua and put things into play.
Then I got a text message from Ralph telling me Governor Taylor was scheduled to speak in Seattle to a consortium of tech companies next Monday.
Aha. So that’s where Kincaid is planning to strike.
At least we had a week to find him.
Governor Taylor stood in front of the mirror and tried to concentrate on his speech for Monday. Tried, tried, tried, but the words just wouldn’t come.
“We are on the brink of a new chapter in our nation’s history,” he said to the well-groomed man in the mirror. “A chapter defined not by the throes of terrorism, but by the footnotes of freedom.”
No, that wasn’t it. The “footnotes of freedom”? Horrible. He’d have to fire his speechwriter tomorrow. He pulled out a pencil. Um, the banner of freedom? Clarion call of freedom? The resounding shout of freedom? Yes. That was good. He liked that.
He scribbled some notes across the page. He liked to use pencil instead of pen since he often wrote, erased, and rewrote phrases dozens of times. He was a precise, careful man. When Sebastian Taylor did something, he did it well. He did it right. It was one of the reasons he was such a good leader.
The presidential election was less than two weeks away, and he was actually glad the Democrats were polling so well; if the Republicans lost this election it would give him a better chance in 2012. Two years to plan, two years to run.
Actually, four years to run. Starting now. With the video bloggers and nearly everything you do showing up on the Internet these days, every speech, every word mattered.
So why did the distant past and his previous career have to come up and haunt him now, right when everything else was coming together?
Kincaid peered out the plane window at the countryside far below. “David,” he said without turning to the man beside him.
“Yes, Father?”
“I never told you what happened on November 19th after I woke up by the river. It’s time you know.” Kincaid rubbed his finger over the scar, caressing the moments, remembering them all. “As you know, a Peoples Temple guard shot me in the shoulder. When I awoke I was in shock, too weak to find my way through the jungle. The only thing I could do was head back to the compound to look for help. I figured there would be others like me who’d fled in the night, who would be returning then, in the daylight. I thought maybe they could help me.”
Governor Taylor snapped the pencil in half.
It had been nearly three decades since the assignment. Yes, of course, he’d been in charge of the wet work on the congressman, but he was only doing his job. When Dwyer blew his cover and then Jones spun out of control, he’d needed to make some split-second decisions to diminish the fallout, to make sure all the evidence pointed where it was supposed to point.
That’s when the problems began.
“And were there others left alive, Father?”
“No. I waited all morning. No one came back. I was alone with the bodies. Nearly everyone I knew was dead. I went to the hospital-really, it was only a small cabin-and found some painkillers for my shoulder. I didn’t want to go near the pavilion, but I didn’t want to leave either… I had nowhere to go, so I spent most of the morning waiting, trying not to look at the pavilion. I hid when some looters from the tribes living in the jungle came through. And then. ..”
Kincaid’s voice slowed. Became even and hard. “The members of the Guyanese Defense Force arrived. They were laughing, my son, joking about the bodies; about my family and my friends. ‘Their brains were asleep before, and now their bodies have joined them.’ That’s the kind of thing they were saying. But the word they used for ‘asleep’ could also be translated ‘dead’ or ‘lifeless.’ They were saying those things about the people I loved, David.”
“Your first family.”
“Yes. My first family.”
He’d almost finished editing the tape when that stupid kid showed up.
“After they left, three Americans arrived-two men and a woman-and I was about to run up to them when I heard them talking. ‘Not quite what we planned, huh?’ and then one of them laughed and said, ‘No big loss, though.’ Then one of the men said something about cleaning out the files, and they headed to Father’s cabin. I hid in the shadows and watched them. They started pulling files, grabbing notebooks.”
“Destroying evidence?”
Kincaid nodded. “Yes. The links to the CIA’s involvement in the shooting, I assume. A radio was on in the background; I could hear news reports of the killings. I wanted to see more, so I pushed open one of the screen doors, and I think they heard me.”
No witnesses. Those were his orders. No survivors.
So when the kid opened up that screen door, what was he supposed to do?
“He grabbed a needle, David. And he started chasing me.”
The kid ran like a freakin’ rabbit through the compound.
Remembering it now, Sebastian Taylor realized he should have grabbed one of the AK-47s that he’d given to his contacts to pass along to Jones’s guards. Instead, he’d thought he could cover it up by using one of the needles. But the kid got away. Escaped into the jungle.
“I hid by the river, and watched him through the trees.”
The memories came back to him now in fits and starts, one image opening up the next like pages of a book he hadn’t opened in years.
He saw the two other agents step out of Jones’s cabin. “What were you going to do with that needle?” Felicity said in between sneezes. She was allergic to half the plants in the jungle.
“We have our orders,” he told her. “Cole was very clear about our mission.”
“You were gonna kill a kid!”
“We need to get out of here.” It was Tad.
“I’m not quite done with the tape,” he replied.
“I’m not going anywhere,” said Felicity. “I can’t believe you were going to kill a little kid. This whole mission is a disas-” And she never finished her sentence. Tad had embedded a needle into her neck and depressed the plunger. She was drifting to the ground, shaking.
“What did you do?” yelled Sebastian.
The convulsions began. Felicity was not dying delicately.
“She’s nearly compromised this mission three times already. We can’t let them know a kid survived,” said Tad. “She would have told.”
“But you just-”
Tad reached over and grabbed Felicity’s armpits; she wasn’t dead yet but would be soon. “Help me drag her over to the pavilion. No one will know.” She was trying to speak, but her head was jerking back and forth uncontrollably. It wasn’t pretty to watch. Tad continued, “We’ll tell Cole that Jones’s men got to her first. As long as we limit the number of autopsies, we should be all right. And we just won’t mention the kid, OK? He was never here. Remember, no survivors. Got it?”
Tad might tell too. He might mention the kid.
“Yeah,” said Sebastian, fingering the needle in his hand and eyeing the space between Tad’s shoulder blades. “No survivors. I got it.”
“They killed the woman. Injected her. I saw them do it. Then Sebastian killed the other American.”
Kincaid paused, reached into his suit coat, and produced a half-full syringe in a plastic bag. “Sebastian tossed the syringe. I’m not sure why I picked it up, but his fingerprints are all over it. It’s time the world knows exactly what kind of man Sebastian Taylor is.”
“Is the cyanide still potent, Father?’
“Quite. I had it tested just to be sure.”
Kincaid put the plastic bag away. “He was on his way back to Father’s cabin when the helicopters arrived.”
Then the Rangers and Green Berets showed up, and he had to disappear. Fast. If they saw him there, six other missions in two continents would go down in flames. And so, he never finished editing the tape.
All because of the kid.
“I knew some of the Temple members who came down to identify bodies. They took me back to America with them, said I was one of their children.”
Finally, Kincaid turned to look at his faithful son. “David, when I arrived in America, the media was saying the same kinds of things the looters had said about my family. The world has had thirty years to apologize, and no one, apart from a few fringe websites and a couple of self-published books, has tried to imbue compassion and humanity into their tale, has treated them with the respect and dignity they deserve as human beings, as children of our common God.”
“And that’s why the media leaders are going to pay.”
“Yes. That’s why they’re all going to pay.”
Governor Taylor looked at his face in the mirror. His was not the face of a murderer, but of a patriot.
That’s all he’d ever been. A patriot. A man who would do what needed to be done for his country. Just like the soldiers of the South had done in the War of Northern Aggression. They’d fought for freedom-freedom for states to make their own laws, to govern themselves. A real freedom. A true freedom.
He’d always done whatever he needed to do to promote freedom. That’s what a patriot does.
And now. What needed to be done?
It took him only a moment to decide.
He made the call.
“Yeah?” said the voice on the other end of the line.
“It’s me. I have what you want. Meet me in room 611 tomorrow morning at the Stratford Hotel. Ten sharp, before the luncheon. We can take care of things then.”
“It’ll look like an accident?”
“Don’t worry. I’ve got it all planned out.”
Click.
Yes, Sebastian Taylor would do whatever needed to be done.
He was a true patriot.
He scribbled some notes onto the page and set to work finishing his speech.