Blood List(62)
"Bates. Special Agent Bates. And yes, I'm coming with you. Let's get these three to the boats, pronto."
The driver nodded in the rear-view mirror and, triggering the lights but no siren, headed off toward Aquinnah and the docks that would take the wounded into Boston.
Sherriff Josephson droned on in his ear, and a flash of red lights caught Gene's eye as the first of the ambulances pulled out. Good, he thought. He spoke into the COM.
"Marty, which prisoners just left on those ambulances?" Josephson grunted in annoyance, and Gene realized he'd just interrupted him in mid-sentence. He held up a hand for patience.
"Marty, come in please?"
Nothing.
"Hey, Sam, can you check COM status, please?"
"Sure, Gene," Sam said. "Checking your signal." There was a brief pause. "Relays are still working fine, or they seem to be from this end. Carl, can you verify?"
"It'll take me a few minutes," Carl said. "Relay's back at the lighthouse."
"Where are you now, Carl?" Gene asked.
"I'm in the Hummer. I can do diagnostics on the way over."
"Hold on a second," Gene said. "Team, check in," he said.
"Brent here."
"Goldman."
Silence.
"Doug, meet Carl at the Hummer," he said. "Marty's supposed to be with the ambulance crew. Jerri's inside with Paul. Find them, now, and go together." He ran toward the house, leaving Josephson, mouth open, standing on the beach.
Marty took three pints of blood before the helicopter arrived and airlifted him to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Jerri Bates's windpipe had been crushed. Forensics would tell them the murder weapon later, but Gene already knew. Paul Renner had killed her with his bare hands.
They found the ambulance at the Aquinnah docks. The critically injured men were still inside, unconscious. The EMT and driver were both dead, shot at close range with Jerri's sidearm, which Renner had left at the scene. They found no sign of Paul Renner or the uninjured mercenary. Gene put out an APB on the missing speedboat, and Massachusetts State Police found it forty minutes later at a small private dock in Boston Sound.
Chapter 21
February 2nd, 8:27 AM EST; J. Edgar Hoover Building, Gene Palomini's Office; Washington D.C.
Doug and Carl made the trip back to Washington in silence. Sam let them. Marty was in ICU, and Gene had stayed with him, almost unresponsive. That left only the two of them and Sam in their heads when they needed her. Missing Jerri's talents already, Sam had brought in an outside team to conduct the interrogation, leaving Doug and Carl with little to do but wait for results.
Sam, unflappable despite her grief, continued to trace down leads on Renner's whereabouts. Acting on the assumption that Renner still hunted the man who had hired Lefkowitz, she focused on the killers from Martha's Vineyard and brought the full might of the Patriot Act to bear.
Airport security cameras had captured the commandos coming off a commercial jet. They picked up another two on Amtrak camera tapes. The plane tickets were purchased by an offshore dummy corporation, the train tickets from a numbered account in the Caymans. Sam started in on the grueling process of following the money trail in the hope of finding Paul Renner's next target.
* * *
February 2nd, 3:13 PM PST; Home of Geoffrey MacUther; San Francisco, California.
Geoffrey MacUther was a large, grizzled man with a gray beard and a shaved head. Fifty-six years old, he was in better shape than most twenty-five-year-old athletes. Former Secret Air Service for Her Majesty the Queen, he was highly trained in stealth, surveillance, martial arts, modern weapons, and linguistics. A veteran of the first Gulf War and peacekeeping operations in Serbia, he was intelligent, charismatic, and had retired a highly decorated officer. He was also somewhat paranoid, but not without reason.
Geoffrey MacUther was proud to be known in the right circles for providing the best private security forces that money could buy. Private security forces weren't bodyguards or sentries. They were mercenaries, private armies hired out to the highest bidder.
He lived just north of Daly City, an affluent suburb south of San Francisco, where property values kept most of the riff-raff away. San Francisco wasn't far from Silicon Valley, and he managed much of his small empire from an office he had there. He bought goods coming up from L.A. and across the Pacific Ocean into the Port of San Francisco. He trained his men in the rugged Rockies, in the deserts of Nevada and Utah, and in boarding actions out at sea, all no more than a helicopter ride away.
For the past two years, he'd managed his business and laundered his money through a local startup called SoFiaK, named for his daughter, Sophia Karen MacUther, now Sophia Karen Brown and a proud mother of one. The brilliant thing about startups is that nobody really knew what they did, and everyone assumed that you couldn't talk about it for fear of competitors stealing your ideas. SoFiaK vans came and went from his home and his work at all times of the day or night, and people never got suspicious.