“I’ll need at least four to get together the whole package.”

“Fine. Four hours then.”

“But there’s some options you need to specify on your shopping list.”

He understood this was Gideon’s cue for Tillman to communicate whatever he could about what he’d learned so far.

“Those last breaching charges you sold me were dog shit. I need the good stuff. Skip the Charlies, the Oscars, both of the things from Latvia, and none of that Irish stuff. I’d prefer the Eagles, but the Richards would also be okay.”

“No to Charlie, Oscar, double Latvia or Ireland, yes to the Eagles and Richards.”

“Write it down, man. I can’t afford to have a problem.”

Charlie, Oscar—that was radio letter code. He was pretty sure that’s what Tillman was getting at. He wrote down the letters. C. O. L. L. I. E. R. Tillman continued: “While I’ve got you, I don’t want you using that supplier you asked me about.” He hoped Gideon would understand he was talking about Mixon. “It’s a dead issue.”

There was a brief pause. “Understood.”

“Four hours.”

“One last thing. I have an inside source says the Feds are upping their scanning game. You need to burn this phone and move on.”

“Copy that. Thanks for the heads-up.” Tillman hung up. He’d wanted to tell Gideon that he’d discovered the target was the State of the Union address, but that would have to wait for their face-to-face meeting four hours from now.

Gideon switched back to Nancy. “That was Tillman. Verhoven was listening, so he couldn’t say anything directly, but he managed to tell me that Mixon is dead. And that the guy Mixon recorded talking to Verhoven: His name is Collier. Can you trace that?”

Nancy sighed. “Dahlgren grilled the hell out of me half an hour ago, and he’s trying to get me to tell him where you are. I convinced him that I didn’t know. And that’s when he suspended me. He’s in damage control mode right now. He won’t listen to reason, he won’t listen to me, and he especially won’t listen to you. If he brings you in, it’s just going to be so he can pin this whole disaster in West Virginia on you.”

Gideon felt a rush of anger toward Dahlgren. Nancy had just been trying to do her job, and now she was being punished for it by a bureaucrat who was more concerned with Mix qned with covering his own ass than with protecting the public. Worse still, Nancy was his only ally inside the Bureau, whose resources he needed.

“Do you have any way to check out Collier? If we get some solid proof, Dahlgren won’t have a choice except to listen.”

He could hear Nancy breathing on the other end. He knew he was asking a lot of her, but without her help he would be operating blindly. Finally, after what seemed like minutes, she said softly, “I’ll see what I can do.”

Then the phone clicked dead.

Gideon was coming up on a rest stop, the welcome station for the state of Virginia. He pulled in, set his phone in a rack full of brochures detailing the state’s many fine tourist destinations, and decided to forgo the cup of coffee he desperately needed so he could distance himself as quickly as possible from the traceable burner.

Nancy got off the phone and put her face in her hands. She was sitting at her desk on K Street, staring out the window. She knew Gideon was right. Dahlgren wouldn’t listen to reason, and without more evidence, they’d never be able to convince him. But what could she do? She’d been suspended. Someone from OPR was supposed to come in about five minutes and take her gun and her credentials.

She sighed and looked at her watch.

Dahlgren may have given the order for her suspension. But that didn’t mean the word had reached the IT department yet. She logged into her account and started typing furiously.

It only took a moment for the computer to find a correlation between the names Collier and Verhoven.

Collier, John C. SS# 000-41-3797. DOB 4/16/85. Born Pocatello, Idaho.

She pulled his credit bureau report and found that his second most recent address was listed in Anderson, West Virginia. Six months ago, though, he had moved to an address in Idaho.

She pulled up the address, found it registered to Wilco Partners, LLC. A few more minutes of data drilling revealed that Wilco Partners consisted of only one partner, a man by the name of Dale Wilmot. A quick scan of Google revealed that Forbes magazine named him the 957th richest man in America, with business interests primarily in timber, but also in heating, air-conditioning, and trucking.

He was a big handsome guy in his late fifties who looked like the older brother of the star in a cowboy movie.

According to an article in Forbes, Wilmot’s only son had been grievously injured in Iraq nearly two years ago, after which Wilmot had ceded daily operations of his companies to senior company management and, in the words of the article, “retreated to his majestic Idaho estate where he has devoted himself largely to philanthropic enterprises and to caring for his son.”

The address of Wilmot’s estate was unlisted, but Nancy managed to track it down through a federal tax assessment dated a year ago. But as the address came on screen, two tall men in dark suits walked into her office. “Special Agent Clement,” one of them said, “I would request that you surrender your duty weapon and credentials, and then accompany me to—”

Gideon's War and Hard Target

“Spare me the formalities. My gun and badge are already on...

“Let’s go, boys,” she said.

The FBI team sent by Deputy Director Raymond Dahlgren to seize Gideon Davis surrounded the Virginia welcome station with more than thirty men. The signal on the secure phone that Nancy Clement had given him had not moved in twenty-four minutes.

Teams were dispatched to lock down the men’s bathroom, the ladies’ bathroom, both doors of the welcome station itself, as well as the candy station. In addition, a roving group accompanied by a canine “agent” patrolled rapidly down the line of cars. The canine had been given a shirt believed to have been worn by Gideon Davis in the hope it might pick up a scent trail.

The dog pounced on a van before the entry teams had gotten situated around the welcome station. The canine team was forced to breach the vehicle while the other teams raced for the welcome station.

After eleven El Salvadoran nationals emerged from the van, the nearly uncontrollable dog had invaded the vehicle where it discovered half a kilo of low-grade Mexican tar heroin concealed inside a hollowed-out stack of Brazilian pornographic magazines.

Meanwhile, women had begun to scream, children were running, tiny dogs were escaping from their owners—in short, all hell was breaking loose as the various teams attempted to raid the welcome center.

It took nearly thirty minutes to gain control of the situation, with the result that a great many perfectly innocent travelers, including one Japanese consular official, were held on their knees at gunpoint. The consular official, a former national judo champion who did not share the conciliatory nature of most of his countrymen, spent a good ten minutes screaming at the chief of the HRT unit in his excellent English that he was going to lodge a formal complaint with the State Department.

It was only then that Gideon Davis’s cell phone was finally located, lodged behind a stack of brochures for Colonial Williamsburg.

27

WASHINGTON, DC

Special Agent Shanelle Greenfield Klotz liked to claim that she hated dog-and-pony shows. But the fact was, she was enormously talented at them, in large part because she enjoyed conducting them. She was a small, thin woman—as a matter of record, the smallest, lightest sworn agent in the entire Secret Service.

She was also—again, this was a matter of record—the smartest. At least as measured by the IQ test given to every prospective agent in the Secret Service. She was also the only biracial half-black, half-Jew in the Secret Service and generally recognized as the Service’s leading expert in facilities security. She was, by any measure, an odd bird. Despite that, it was nearly impossible to find anyone who would bad-mouth her. Everybody in the Secret Service loved the shit out of her.