The Fallen: A Derek Stillwater Thriller (7 page)

President Langston, standing by his desk, flung on his coat and paused to take a deep breath. McCullough had seen him do this before. It was an interesting shift, from a normal man with more than just the burdens of the world’s most powerful leadership on his shoulders, to the president of the United States of America. The man in private was different than the man who occupied the presidency. The private man was aging at an accelerated rate due to personal tragedies and the pressures of the job. He was often preoccupied, indecisive, and malleable. The man who was the president was none of those things. He was vigorous, focused, and decisive.

Like everybody else who had close contact with the president, McCullough recognized that the president’s personal personality was showing up more often where the presidential personality should have been. More than anyone else, she was worried. It was part of her job to make sure he was able to do his job. She just wasn’t sure he was.

“Ready.” He strode past her, announced in a loud voice, “Let’s go change the world, folks!” and headed for his Secret Service contingent and the plane’s hatch.

Three agents inside the plane escorted him to the ramp, then nodded. “Down the steps, Mr. President.”

“Press?”

“A few.”

“Very good.”

Langston stepped through the hatch, pausing at the top to turn to the small contingent of media. He raised a hand and waved, expression grave and confident. Then he moved down the steps and was enfolded in the embrace of another set of Secret Service agents who ushered him into the back of a limousine, where Leeman awaited him.

“Good morning, Mr. President.”

“Not so far, Tobey. How’s it going?”

“Ed seems to have everything under control.”

President Langston glanced at McCullough. “Well, there’s a first time for everything.”

McCullough said, “Ed’s good at this. He just acts hysterical while he’s doing it. It’ll be fine. Things holding up with Israel and the Saudis?”

“Not according to Ed.”

Langston rolled his eyes. “Bad idea. We’ve been inviting the Saudis for years and they always turn us down. We invite Israel, and the next thing you know, the Saudis insist they attend. Are we on schedule?”

“Perfect,” Leeman said.

“Well, at least one thing’s going okay.”

In moments the limo arrived at the Peterson Air & Space Museum. They pulled up in front of the peculiar building, roughly the shape of a B on its side, the curved humps of the B facing forward, all done in white. They escorted the president toward the main entrance.

Leeman nodded. “Mr. President, I’d like you to meet Brigadier General Stephen Newman, base commander.”

Newman was a hard, bald man with skin the color of charcoal. He saluted. “Welcome to Peterson Air Force Base, Mr. President.”

“Thank you, General. A pleasure to meet you.” As they shook hands the staff photographer snapped away.

“The other leaders are on their way, sir,” Newman said. “You have time to meet my staff before they arrive?”

“Of course. My pleasure.”

They strode into the interior of the museum. Several dozen military men and women stood at attention, awaiting their commander-in-chief’s presence. Slowly, with great ceremony, President Langston made a few remarks, then shook hands with each person in the building.

Lauren McCullough watched from the sidelines, pleased how
Langston was doing. Beside her, Leeman checked his e-mail on the tablet computer. He said, “He seems preoccupied.”

“He’s always preoccupied.”

“More than usual.”

McCullough frowned. “Tobey, you do your job, okay? I’ll do mine. He’ll be fine.”

“They say these things are casual, but you and I know better. You don’t put the world’s top eight leaders around a table with twelve others observing from the sidelines without everybody scrambling for position. He needs to be at the top of his game.”

She stabbed him with her sharp gaze. “You worry too much.”

“You’re not going to be at the table alone with him.”

“I said he’ll be fine.”

Leeman glanced around the room, focusing for a moment on President Langston’s words. “— this emblem of our country’s courage in the face of sacrifice—”

Voice low, Leeman said, “He hasn’t been fine since the terrorist attacks. We all would have been happier if Richard Coffee had been caught before this summit. It’s what’s on his mind, isn’t it? That The Fallen Angels are going to somehow make a run at him again.”

“This summit is the most secure place in the world for the next three days, Tobey. Let Coffee take his best shot.”

Leeman glanced sharply at her. “Don’t tempt fate.” He tapped his tablet PC and groaned. “Hollenbeck’s plane just landed. Here we go. The British are coming, the British are coming—”

Secret Service Agent Lee Padillo was in the International Center’s basement security office when FBI Agent Sarah Macklin stepped through the door. Padillo was lead agent for this event, in charge of all security. Macklin was the bureau’s point agent. Padillo, lean, swarthy, intense, sat back in an Aeron chair and stared intently at a computer screen in front of him, listening on an earpiece to an update from Peterson Air Force Base.

“Yes, everything’s ready here. All assets in place?”

His agent at Peterson Air Force Base said, “Finally got things settled down between the Saudis and Israel enough to let them land. There’s some quibbling over who rides with whom that should have been settled before now, but we’re on top of it.”

“ETA?”

“Thirty minutes. Wheels up in ten.”

“Affirmative.”

Padillo clicked off and spun in the chair to face Macklin. “Everybody’s gathered at Peterson and are loading onto the choppers as we speak. ETA thirty minutes.”

Macklin nodded. Slender, tall, athletic, she wore her auburn hair cropped just below her ears. Her navy blue suit was tailored to emphasize her broad shoulders, which made her appear more willowy than she actually was. She came off as determined because of a square jaw that she tended to lead with, and her habit of speaking through clenched teeth. “I need a minute in private.”

Padillo frowned. “Can it wait?”

She shook her head.

He waved her over to a private office and kicked out the agent who was using it. It was a utilitarian box, a few photos of mountain vistas on
the wall, a large metal desk, three chairs, and a computer. It was a temporary office used by whatever visiting security agent was running a particular security event. The resort’s security director, a former FBI agent, had a much nicer office down the hall.

Macklin shut the door and said, “I just got a phone call from Director Bray. Something’s going on. It’s political, but it has some security implications. Are you familiar with a DHS troubleshooter by the name of Derek Stillwater?”

Padillo searched his memory and shrugged. “Name rings a bell, but I don’t know why.”

“He retrieved Chimera during last year’s—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. He’s dead, though.”

“So we were led to believe.”

Padillo arched his eyebrows. “Meaning what?”

“Director Bray just received a phone call from Senator Weschel, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Weschel claims that Derek Stillwater isn’t actually dead, and that he’s here at the summit. Undercover.”

Padillo blinked. “Undercover.”

Macklin nodded.

“We weren’t informed of this. Not at all. He didn’t turn up on any background checks. Do we know what his cover is?”

“No,” said Macklin. “And we haven’t confirmed any of this.”

“Who’s Weschel’s source?”

“No idea.”

Padillo swallowed. Hard. The Secret Service was under the blanket of the Department of Homeland Security now. If Stillwater was really here, an undercover asset, he should have been informed.

“I don’t—” He stopped, not wanting to make it appear he was out of the loop or that he didn’t know how to handle this situation. “I see,” he said. “I’ll look into it. Thank you.”

Macklin cocked her head. “Look, Lee. It’s not completely clear if Stillwater’s one of the good guys or not. We were investigating him. There were hints he was involved with The Fallen Angels. When he died it got set aside. This smells like a cover-up.”

Padillo leaned back in his chair, hands up in a surrender gesture.
“All right. Thank you. I get your point. I want a couple people looking for him. Once they find him, we want him locked up. We can deal with the particulars after the summit’s over. Take care of it. He’s your baby. Work for you?”

Macklin shot him a thumbs-up. “Absolutely.”

Derek finished fixing the two sabotaged stoves under the harangues of Chef O’Grady. They fell off him the way water flowed off a rock. Derek wondered whatever would possess a man to scream at someone holding tools in his hand— an overwhelming desire to have a wrench jammed up his ass?

“Finally,” O’Grady said. “You took long enough.”

Derek stood up and turned to the chef, expression flat. He held a screwdriver pointed at O’Grady’s swelling midsection. “It took as long as it took,” he said. Something in his tone of voice and the look on his face must have gotten through to the chef, because he lapsed into silence for a moment.

Derek nodded. “Unless there’s something else out here, I’ll get to work on the walk-in.”

“No,” O’Grady said with a shake of his head. “That’s it for here.”

Derek collected his tools and walked away with a wink at one of the cooks. It was a short-lived respite. As soon as he was out of the area he heard O’Grady screaming: “Those are supposed to be carmelized! Not fried! Carmelized! We want the sugars! We’re not doing Cajun here! Nothing’s blackened! Where did you learn to cook? McDonald’s?”

Richard Coffee and El Tiburón closed the ceiling panel by the entrance to the main banquet hall and stepped off the ladder. Coffee tapped his earpiece, listened for a moment, then said to El Tiburón, “Wheels up at Peterson. ETA twenty minutes.”

They pushed the now-empty dolly back into a storage area. Silently they stripped off their windbreakers and donned the white coats of the catering staff. Coffee spoke into his throat mic. “On schedule. I repeat, on schedule.”

The two men shared a satisfied glance. Everything was going according to plan. El Tiburón said, “This seems too easy.”

Coffee smiled. “Sometimes things go according to plan. But we’re not through yet. Are you ready?”

“I’m ready.”

The Fallen clamped a hand on the man’s shoulder. “A pleasure working with you.”

Without seeming to hurry, they separated. They exited the storage area, moving into the banquet room. El Tiburón headed toward one of the tables loaded with liquor, his job to mix in with the waitstaff. Coffee moved through on his way to the kitchen, where he would help deliver food to the banquet area.

Coffee checked his watch again. ETA: twelve minutes.

Agent Sarah Macklin sat at her computer in the FBI command center in the resort’s main building. It was a conference room with no windows, and they had brought in a dozen folding tables and loaded up the room with computers, telephones, and radio equipment. Eight or nine agents were monitoring the computers and talking on the phones, keeping tabs on various aspects of the security event.

Macklin compared the headshot of Derek Stillwater she had pulled off the bureau database with the headshots of male employees at the Cheyenne Hills Resort. She was able to winnow it down to about seven hundred faces just by eliminating the women. She started with last names beginning with the letters A through I. One of her agents, Bill Creff, looked at J through S. Joe Snyder sifted T through Z.

“Check this out,” Snyder said.

She and Creff glanced over at Snyder’s computer, peering at the face on the screen. Angular face, dark wavy hair, age thirty-five to fifty. The name was Stanley Federov and the file indicated he worked in the golf shop. They studied the image.

“Close, but not quite. Keep him on the list, though.”

They went back to their computers.

Macklin’s radio buzzed in her ear. She clicked it on. “Macklin.”

“This is Padillo. POTUS is on his way. ETA four minutes.”

“Understood.”

She clicked past the face on the screen, an African-American. The next up on the resort’s security database was a headshot of a guy on the resort’s maintenance staff. His name was Michael Gabriel.

She pulled up Derek Stillwater’s headshot and placed it alongside the one of Michael Gabriel that had been taken for his security badge.
The hair was different— much shorter and lighter in color, and he’d grown a goatee, but it was clearly the same man. “Bingo!” she said.

Snyder and Creff took a look. Creff said, “Been working here eight months. Timing’s right.”

“Good cover, too,” said Macklin. “Complete access to the facility.”

Macklin picked up the phone and dialed Steve Planchette, head of maintenance. When he answered, she said, “This is FBI Special-Agent-in-Charge Sarah Macklin. Is your employee Michael Gabriel working today?”

“Sure.”

“Where is he right now?”

“In the kitchen, I think. There a problem?”

“No, sir. No problem. Thank you.”

She hung up and looked at her partners. “Okay, gentlemen. Let’s go pick up this guy.”

Derek Stillwater was working inside the walk-in freezer. The Cheyenne Center’s kitchen area was large enough to support one walk-in freezer and two walk-in refrigerators. The refrigerators were convenient to the cooking areas, but the freezer was tucked away in a cul-de-sac near a service hallway, which was partly why Derek had chosen to sabotage it.

It was cold, so he propped the door open. For some reason known only to the contractors who custom made and installed it, the controls were inside the freezer instead of outside. The compressor was beneath the structure. The walk-in was large, easily twenty-five feet deep, seven feet high, and fifteen feet wide. Shelves ran along the walls and were jammed with frozen produce.

He had purposely created a short in the controls that would be relatively easy to fix. Still, it was a pain in the ass. In order to open the control panel all the way he had to shove aside a stainless steel shelf piled high with what looked like frozen turkeys—dozens of them. Then, jammed into the corner, he used his screwdriver to open the control panel, shut down the power so he didn’t fry himself, then reconnected the wires.