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“No, but I just came from there. The medical examiner is a friend of mine. He got called out to a suicide and found one of my fake business cards on the vic.”
“But it’s not a suicide.”
“No,” I said. “I have no idea what the hell is going on, but I’d surmise a murder victim clutching my business card wasn’t a coincidence.”
“Sounds like Carbonados could be involved,” he said, putting words to the fear that had been coalescing around me since I’d seen the soldier’s scars.
“Do you think this is a shot across the bow to tell us they know who we are and that we’re close to their Midwest operation?” I asked.
“That’s worst-case, so the one we have to assume. Who was the victim?”
“A soldier stationed at Fort Meade,” I answered, feeling calmed by TJ’s questions. Answering them gave me a distraction from the fact that I was alone and possibly in enemy territory. “Name of Patrick O’Dell.”
“Someone you knew?” he asked.
“I didn’t know him, but I’m convinced we met,” I answered. “I’m sure I’d recognize my own handiwork on any of the soldiers I patched up while I was deployed. TJ, that dead kid was one of mine.”
* * *
In the fiveminutes I’d been sitting in the lobby waiting for my rescuer and listening to TJ’s voice to keep me calm and anchored, the energy had shifted. The police presence on the street outside the hotel had swelled. A dozen cops, uniformed and plain clothes, had traipsed through the lobby on their way to the fourth-floor crime scene. No civilians were being allowed past the police barricade at the front door, and those who wanted to leave had to wait in a line, show ID, then move to another line where they waited to be questioned.
In other words, no one was getting in or out of the place without a police escort.
“Any chance your friend is a cop?” I asked TJ.
“Is the hotel already on lockdown?”
“Yes,” I said.
The line went quiet and I knew TJ had muted me. When he came back, he said, “Sit tight, Bond. I’ve put in a request to the FBI field office. After a long string of expletives, they agreed to send someone over. If that soldier was active duty and connected to NSA work, this should be their case anyway.”
“It should, shouldn’t it?” I watched the officers milling around outside. No feds to my rather trained eye. That sent another wave of panic over me, which I fought back with calming breaths. “So why aren’t they here yet?”
“I don’t think their slow response is nefarious,” TJ assured me. “They’re just in no rush to work on a Friday night, and Chicago PD hasn’t given them the heads up through official channels yet. They’ll depend on the locals to secure the scene and do the leg work of canvassing and interviewing potential witnesses, so they just planned to take their sweet time getting there.”
“But they know he’s a dead soldier, right?”
“They do, and now that I’ve called them, they’re on their way to take over the scene and to find you,” TJ said. “I promise you, Bond, one way or another, we’ll get you out of there soon.”
As he spoke, a tall, thin, balding guy in a black suit disengaged from the clump of people milling around in the center of the lobby. He approached me and I waited for him to flash an FBI badge.
“TJ, is it possible a fed is already here?” Even as I asked, I knew the answer, because the fake fed had yet to flash a gold shield.
“No, they have no one on the ground. Why?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but Fake Fed did flash metal—the steel end of the pistol that he showed me by pushing aside his suit jacket.
“Hang up,” he mouthed.
“Scorpio,” I said into the phone to let TJ know I was in deep shit. “Scorpio!”
Fake Fed grabbed the phone out of my hand and clicked it off. I glanced at the nearby uniformed cop and opened my mouth to scream, but Fake Fed shook his head, then inclined it toward the front desk, where a woman with two little kids stood arguing with a hotel clerk. The man with her, or whom I’d thought was with her, had turned away from the family to face me. He wore the same kind of black suit as the man with my phone, and flashed the edge of the same kind of gun from under his suit jacket. But Fake Fed 2 kept his fingers inches from his pistol and glanced at the two little girls who were a few feet away from him.
There were a hundred reasons he wouldn’t dare shoot anyone, let alone a child, in the middle of a hotel lobby full of cops and witnesses. But if he was with Carbonados, there were a hundred and one reasons he would. I wasn’t about to play chicken with the lives of those children or their mother.
I turned back to Fake Fed 1, who had pulled out my phone’s SIM card and now dropped it on the floor. He crushed it under his heel, then dropped my phone and gave it the same treatment. He kicked it all under the bench and motioned for me to stand up.
I followed his silent order. I wasn’t too shaken because my phone wasn’t the only way Jensen could track me. The minute I’d said the words “Code Scorpio” to TJ, he would have told Jensen to activate the other tracker. I hoisted my medical bag/purse over my shoulder and awaited further instructions.
