was two-inch-thick wooden planks. He’d sanded the boards down fine; there wasn’t a splinter anywhere. What there was, though, was an eighth-of-an-inch gap between each floorboard; again barely discernible to the naked eye.
The subfloor was also special. Quarry could say with great confidence that probably no other floor of any home in America had an underbelly such as the one he’d built here. The interior walls were covered in hand-applied plaster over chicken wire. The roof was tied down to the walls as tight as anything on an oceangoing tanker. He’d used incredibly strong bolts and fasteners to ensure strength and to prevent any settling or movement. The foundation was poured cement, but there was also a sixteen-inch-high wrapped-in-cement crawlspace that ran underneath the structure. That lifted the house up by the same amount, of course, but because of the porch it was hardly noticeable.
The furnishings were simple: a bed, a ladder-back chair, a battery-powered generator, and some other equipment, including an oxygen tank that sat against one of the walls. He stepped off the porch and turned to face his creation. Every mitered cut on the walls was perfect. He had often worked under the generator lights as he lined up the studs and joists on his sawhorses, his gaze a laser on the cut-line. It was hot, tiring work, but his limbs and mind had been driven with a determination wrought from the two strongest human emotions of all:
Hatred.
And love.
He nodded in appreciation. He had done good work. It was solid, as perfect as he was ever going to make it. It looked unexceptional, but it really was an extraordinary bit of engineering. Not bad for a boy from the Deep South who’d never even gone to college.
He looked to the west where in a tree shielded from both the burn of the sun and prying eyes was a surveillance camera. He had designed and built this too, because nothing he could afford was good or reliable enough. With a bit of careful pruning of leaves and branches the camera had a good sightline of all that needed to be seen here.
He’d notched out a hole and a long trench in the bark on the rear of the tree and run the cable feed from the camera down it, and then glued the bark strips back over it, concealing the line completely. On the ground he’d buried the cable and run it several hundred feet away from the tree, to a natural berm that also featured one man-made attribute.
There was another underground cable running from this same spot up to and under the little house inside a PVC pipe that Quarry had laid in before he’d poured the foundation. That cable line had a dual end splitter with more cable running in two routes off it. All of it was concealed behind lead sheathing he’d overlaid on the metal sheets in the wall.
He locked the door to the house and climbed back in his old Dodge. Now he had somewhere else to go. And it wasn’t by pickup truck.
He looked up at that perfect Alabama sky. Nice day for a plane ride.
CHAPTER 6
AN HOUR LATER the decades-old four-seat Cessna raced down the short runway and lifted into the air. Quarry looked out the side window and down as the end of his land raced by. Two hundred acres sounded like a lot but the fact was it wasn’t much.
He flew low, keeping an eye out for birds, other planes, and the occasional chopper. He never filed a flight plan so a good lookout was essential.
An hour later he dipped down, landed softly on the tarmac of a private airstrip, and refueled the plane himself. There were no fancy corporate jets here. Just sheet-metal hangars with open fronts, a narrow strip of asphalt for a runway, a windsock, and aircraft like his, old, patched together, but looked after lovingly and with respect. And as cheap as the plane had been when he’d bought it thirdhand years ago, he couldn’t have afforded to buy it today.
He’d been flying ever since he’d joined the Air Force and raced his sturdy F-4 Phantom over the paddy fields and dense waterlogged jungles of Vietnam. And then later over Laos and Cambodia dropping bombs and killing folks because he’d been ordered to in a phase of the war that he only found out later hadn’t been officially authorized. Yet it wouldn’t have mattered to him. Soldiers simply did what they were told. He wasn’t second-guessing anything riding that high up while people were shooting at him.
He climbed back in his little plane, throttled up, and once more lifted into the sky. He headed on, zipping into a forgiving headwind of less than five knots an hour.
A short time later, he pulled back on the throttle, pushed the yoke forward, and rode the thermals down. This was the tricky part, landing at his other property. It was set in the mountains and there was no runway, just a long strip of grass that he’d leveled and mown with his own sweat. It was firm and flat and yet the crosswinds and shears up here could be challenging. The balls of his cheeks tightened and his strong hands gripped the yoke as he swooped down, his landing flaps set on full. He touched, bounced, touched again and bounced up once more, the tiny plane’s suspension system getting a nice quiver. When he came down the third time his wheels held to the earth and he pushed hard on the tops of the foot pedals with his heels to engage the front-wheel brake. That along with the landing flaps allowed the Cessna to come to a halt well short of the end of the makeshift landing strip.
He pressed the tops of the lower foot pedals with his toes to work the inner flaps and direct the plane back around so it faced in the opposite direction; then he cut the engine. Quarry climbed out after grabbing his knapsack and a set of roped-together triangular parking blocks that he carried in the aircraft. He placed them under the wheels of the lightweight plane to keep it stationary. Then his long legs ate up the rising, rock-strewn ground to the side of the mountain. He pulled a ring of keys from his coat pocket and flicked them around until he found the correct one. He stooped and unlocked the thick wooden door set into the side of the mountain. It was mostly hidden behind some boulders that he’d levered off an adjacent outcrop and then chocked down tight.
For decades his grandfather had worked the coal seams inside this mountain, or rather his crew of underpaid men had. As a child Quarry had come here with his ancestor. Back then they had traveled here by a road that had been accessible until a day ago when Quarry had blocked it off. It was by this road that the dump trucks had carted away the coal when the mine was in operation, and he had used the same route to ferry by truck all the supplies he’d needed up here. They wouldn’t have fit in his little plane.
This chunk of mountain hadn’t always been a mine. Cavernous rooms had been created over time by the corrosive force of water and other geological muscle. In these spaces, long before any coal was ripped out of it, imprisoned Union soldiers had slowly and horribly died here during the Civil War, eking out their final days without sun and fresh air as the flesh fell off their bodies, leaving only glorified skeletons on the day they stopped breathing.
The shafts were now set up with lights, but Quarry didn’t use them unnecessarily. The power came from a vented generator and fuel was expensive. He used an old flashlight to see. The same one, in fact, that his father had used to hunt down “uppity” blacks—as his daddy had called them—at night in the swamps of Alabama. As a child he’d spied on his old man coming home at night, all giddy about what he and his comrades in hate had done. Sometimes he would see the blood of the old man’s victims on his father’s sleeves and hands. And his daddy would cackle as he sucked down his whiskey, in sick celebration of whatever it was he thought he was accomplishing by killing folks who didn’t look like him.
“Old hateful bastard,” Quarry said between clenched teeth. He reviled the man for all the misery he’d caused, but not enough to throw out a perfectly good flashlight. When you didn’t have much, you tended to keep what you had.
He opened another door set against a rock wall off one of the main shafts. He grabbed a battery-powered lantern from a shelf and switched it on, setting it on a table in the middle of the room. He looked around, admiring his handiwork. He’d framed out the room with sturdy two-by-fours and put the Sheetrock up himself; every wall was plumb and painted a therapeutic light blue. He’d
gotten all the materials for free from a contractor buddy of his who had supplies left over from jobs with no place to store them. Behind the walls was the solid rock of the mountain’s innards. But anyone looking around the room would think they were in a house somewhere. That was sort of the idea.
He walked over to one corner and studied the woman who sat slumped in the straight-backed chair. Her head rested on her shoulder as she slept. He poked her in the arm, but she didn’t react. That wouldn’t last.
He rolled up her sleeve, pulled a sterilized syringe from his knapsack, and stuck her in the arm. That did drive her awake. Her eyes opened and then slowly focused. When they settled on him, she opened her mouth to scream, but the tape across it prevented this.
He crinkled a smile at her even as he efficiently filled two vials with her blood. She stared down in horror at what he was doing but the restraints held her tightly to the chair.
“I know this must seem strange to you, ma’am, but believe me, it’s all for a good cause. I’m not looking to hurt you or anybody else, for that matter, really. Do you understand that?”
He pulled the syringe free, dabbed the wound with a cotton swab doused with alcohol, and carefully placed a Band-Aid over it.
“Do you understand that?” He gave her a reassuring smile.
She finally nodded.
“Good. Now, I’m sorry I had to take some of your blood but I really needed to. Now, we’re going to feed you and keep you clean and all that. We won’t keep you tied up like this. You’ll have some freedom. I know you can see that was necessary at first. The tying-up part. Right?”
She found herself locking gazes with him and, despite the terror of her situation, nodding once more in agreement.
“Good, good. Now, don’t you worry. It’s going to turn out okay. And there won’t be any funny business. You know with you being a woman and all. I don’t tolerate any crap like that. Okay? You have my word.” He gently squeezed her arm.
She actually felt the edges of her mouth curl up in a smile.
He put the vials in his knapsack and turned away from her.
For a moment she imagined him whipping back around and, with a maniacal laugh, firing a bullet into her brain or slitting her throat.
Yet he simply left the room.
As Diane Wohl looked around she had no idea where she was, why she was here, or why the man who’d kidnapped her had just relieved her of some of her blood. She had gone shopping at Talbot’s, he had been in her car with a gun, and now she was here, wherever here was.
She began to sob.
CHAPTER 7
SEAN KING SAT in the dark. The light blazing on made him lift a hand to shield his eyes and squint up at the intruder.
“Sorry, didn’t know you were in here,” Michelle said, though she didn’t actually sound apologetic.
“I slept here,” he explained.
She perched on the edge of his desk. “Going off in a pout? Refusing to answer questions? Sleeping at the office? Sitting in the dark? Do I sense a pattern?”
He slid a newspaper across to her. “Did you see the story?”
“Read it online already. Got most of the facts right. You seemed appropriately thoughtful in the photo.”
“It’s a file shot they pulled from my Secret Service days.”
“I thought you looked remarkably youthful.”
“Had a bunch of reporters calling. I kept hanging up.”
“They’re not just calling. They’re parked out in front of our office. I came in through the back. I think someone spotted me, so that exit’s probably covered now too.”
“Great. So we’re trapped in here.”
He stood and paced, his long feet kicking out angrily.
“You want to talk about it now?” she asked.
He stopped, flicked a piece of carpet fuzz with his loafer. “It’s a tough situation,” he answered.
“Which part? Finding a woman cut up and a kid gone? Or something going on inside your head?”
He just started pacing again, his chin tucked to his chest.
“You said you knew the First Lady. How? You were long gone from the Service before Cox was elected. Come on, fess up.”
He was about to say something when the phone rang. Sean turned away, but Michelle snatched it up. “King and Maxwell. We snoop so you don’t have to.” She stopped dead. “What! I… Oh, yeah, sure. Here he is.”
She held the phone out.
“I don’t want to talk to anybody.”
“You will to this person.”
“Who is it?”
“Jane Cox,” she whispered.
Sean cupped the phone against his ear. “Mrs. Cox?” He listened and, giving a quick, embarrassed glance at Michelle, said, “Okay, Jane.”
Michelle did an eyebrow hike and watched her partner closely.
“I know. It’s truly a tragedy. Willa, yes, of course. Right. That’s right. You understood correctly. Have you spoken to Tuck? I see. Of course, I understand that. What?” He checked his watch. “Certainly, we can make that.” He glanced at Michelle. “She’s my partner. We do work together, but if you’d rather… Thank you.”
He hung up and looked at Michelle.
She snapped, “If you clam up and start pacing again I swear to God I’m going to pistol-whip you. What did she say?”
“She wants us to come by to see her.”
“See her? Where?”
“At the White House.”
“Why? What does she want us for? To tell her what we saw the other night?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what exactly?”
“I think she wants to hire us to find out who did this.”
“The First Lady wants to hire us? Why? She has the entire freaking FBI.”
“She doesn’t want them apparently. She wants us.”
“I’m not deaf. You mean she wants you.”
“Do you think we can lose the reporters? I don’t want them trailing us to Pennsylvania Avenue.”
Michelle stood and tugged out her keys. “I’m offended you even have to ask.”
CHAPTER 8
SAM QUARRY UNLOCKED the door and peered in, saw her sitting at the table having a bowl of cereal. She snapped her head around, jumped from the chair, and drew back against the wall.
He kept the door open as he walked in. “Willa, there’s nothing to be scared of.”
“I’m not stupid. There’s like everything to be scared of. Most of all you!”
Her cheeks quivered and fearful tears clustered at the corners of both eyes.
Quarry pulled up a chair and sat down. “I guess I’d be scared too. But I’m not going to hurt you. Okay?”
“You can say anything. How do I know you’re not lying? You’re a criminal. Criminals lie all the time. That’s why they’re criminals.”
Quarry nodded. “So you think I’m a criminal?”
“You are a criminal. You kidnapped me. People go to jail for that.”
He nodded again and then glanced at the bowl. “Cereal not too soggy? Sorry, but powdered milk is all we got.”
She stayed flattened against the wall. “Why are you doing this?”
“Doing what? You mean bringing you here?”
“Under the circumstances, what else could I possibly mean?”
Quarry smiled at her blunt logic. “Heard you were smart.”
“Where’s my family? I asked the other man but he wouldn’t say. He just grunted.”
Quarry pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his face, concealing a look of profound disgust as he did so.
“Why are you wearing latex gloves?” she asked, staring at his hands.
“Heard of eczema?”
“Sure.”
“That’s what I got and don’t want to give it to anybody else.”
“I asked you about my family,” she said earnestly. “Are they okay? Tell me.”
“They’re doing fine. But then if I’m a criminal, I could be lying.”
&n
bsp; “I hate you!” she screamed.
“Can’t blame you.”
“Is this because of my aunt?’ she said suddenly.
“Your aunt?” he replied innocently.
“Don’t treat me like I’m dumb. Jane Cox is my aunt. My uncle is the president.”