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We trailed Whitaker a mile back, watching his progress on an iPad connected via satellite to the GPS transmitter. We thought the colonel might go north to his home on Chesapeake Bay, but instead he headed west and drove to the George Washington University Medical Center in DC.
He parked in the visitors’ lot, and we drove into it just in time to see Whitaker walking toward the hospital. I jumped out and trotted after him.
Because of the limp, the colonel wasn’t hard to keep up with. But once we got inside the hospital, I had to hang back, and I lost Whitaker when he got an elevator. Before the doors closed, though, I heard him tell someone he was going to the ICU.
I waited a few moments. My cell beeped, alerting me to an e-mail from Judith Noble, the FBI gun tech. Subject: Remington .45.
I pressed the elevator call button, opened the e-mail, and read it. Then I read it again, trying to get my head around her conclusions. Sonofabitch, I thought. How was that possible?
The elevator dinged and the doors opened. I rode the elevator up to the ICU, thinking of all of the ramifications of the e-mail I’d just read.
Part of me wanted to back off, let Mahoney know, and stand aside, let the Feds do their job. Instead, I went to the nurses’ station, showed a nurse my badge, and asked if a Marine officer with a limp had come in. She said he was down the hall, third door on the right.
“Whose room is that?”
“That would be Mr. Potter’s,” she said. “George Potter.”
I squinted, said, “The wounded DEA agent?”
“That’s the one,” she said.
“George and I have worked together quite a bit lately. Think I’ll pay him a visit, see how he’s doing.”
Chapter
91
Sometimes it pays to hang back. Other times it pays to rattle a few chains.
I didn’t knock, just stepped quietly into Potter’s room. Colonel Whitaker sat at the DEA special agent’s bedside. The patient looked waxy and sallow, but alert. The two of them were deep in a heated conversation when Potter spotted me.
He tensed, said, “Alex?”
“Came by to see how you were doing, George,” I said, ignoring his reaction. “Last time I saw you, you were hurting pretty bad.”
“I’m still hurting pretty bad,” Potter grumbled as he shifted in bed. “Do you know my old friend Jeb?”
I looked at the colonel and acted like I recognized him from somewhere but couldn’t place him.
“We met once, Dr. Cross,” Whitaker said, getting up from his chair. “In a parking lot at the Naval Academy.”
I snapped my fingers, pointed at him, and said, “That’s it. Colonel…”
“Whitaker. Jeb Whitaker.”
“Small world,” I said. “You knowing George and all.”
“Colonel Whitaker was my commander in Iraq,” Potter said. “Best damned combat officer I’ve ever seen.”
Whitaker made a dismissive flip of his hand. “That’s the painkillers talking. George was the b
rave one, taking a bullet like that.”
“For all the good it did Elena Guryev,” the DEA agent said, crestfallen.
I said nothing, just looked at Potter and then at Colonel Whitaker.
Potter licked his lips and asked, “You found anything new?”
