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“I’d say so.” Stokes looked to his deputies for a consensus and both men nodded.
“Has the man admitted to anything?”
“Not to us, but the CIA claims he confessed during transit from Cyprus back to the States.”
“While he was being tortured,” Ross said with his best, you’ve got to be kidding me look.
“That is what he’s claiming.”
“The suspect?”
“Yes.”
“Shit. Do you have a tape of the confession?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“We’ve been asking the CIA for over a day, and have gotten nowhere.”
Ross cocked his head to the side. “Excuse me?”
“I assume you’ve heard it was Rapp who found this guy.”
“I have heard that rumor.”
“Well, it’s true. The problem is no one knows where he is. This was his op. He was the one who found him.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“We don’t have a single shred of evidence in our possession that can connect this guy to the crime. The prisoner has submitted to and passed a lie detector test, and the Greek government has no record of him leaving Cyprus during the time of the attack. The suspect claims to have witnesses that will swear to the fact he was at home, on Cyprus the day of the attack.”
Ross turned to look at Garret who in his typical unvarnished manner blurted out, “It sounds like Rapp grabbed the wrong guy.”
The three men from the Justice Department all shared uncomfortable looks and then Stokes said, “No one is willing to say it yet, but that’s our worst fear.”
“For Christ’s sake,” Ross swore. “Have you told the president any of this?”
“I’m heading over to the White House for lunch. I’ll break it to him then.”
“What about Josh?”
Stokes shook his head. “Maybe you could break the news to him.”
Ross acted like he didn’t want to, but he did. It was an opportunity to prove to his running mate how well connected he was. “I’m having lunch with him today. I’ll tell him then. In the meantime, you’d better find Rapp. We don’t want our new administration to start out under the cloud of scandal.”
Ross had intentionally used the first person plural possessive our. Stokes was a useful man in that he was both politically hungry and well liked. For months they’d been dangling the possibility of carrying him over into the next administration. They’d even hinted that there might be something bigger on his horizon.
35
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
The warehouse was old. Built during the early days of WWII, it housed crucial supplies for Britain. It was all part of the Lend-Lease program that FDR had fought so hard for. Once the United States entered the war, the brick building doubled in size and became a beehive of activity until the Nazis surrendered. After the war U.S. Steel moved in and the Marshall Plan kept things busy as the U.S. continued to ship supplies to help rebuild Western Europe. Business remained good for U.S. Steel until the mid-seventies, and then things really slowed down. The entire area fell into a long cycle of neglect and disrepair.
When Scott Coleman first looked at the place, there wasn’t a window that wasn’t broken, the roof leaked, and a series of bad tenants had come and gone without bothering to take their junk with them. For most people the smell of urine and years of neglect was hard to get past, but Coleman, who had traveled the world with the U.S. Navy, was used to such things. Where others saw nothing but neglect, Coleman saw an opportunity. As a friend in the Navy used to say, “They aren’t building oceanfront property anymore.”
The place was out on Sparrows Point, just south of Baltimore on the Patapsco River. The SEAL Demolition and Salvage Corporation was Coleman’s brainchild. He’d seen too many of his fellow special forces operators leave the military and grow miserable living the civilian life. Coleman himself used to have nightmares that one day he’d be forced to take a job as a greeter at Wal-Mart. During long deployments, he began to flush out the idea for his own company. Going to work for someone else didn’t seem very appealing. Not after taking orders from others for so long. He asked himself one simple question. What skills had the navy taught him? There were many, but some of the more unique ones were diving, shooting, and blowing things up. Legally speaking, the first and last skills were more transferable than one might think. Ports and shipyards all over the world were in need of expert divers who knew how to get rid of debris.
