Brady Coyne 24-Hell Bent, page 28
part #24 of Brady Coyne Series
Greeley was down at the other end, bending over a tech’s shoulder. I waved my hand at him. He looked up. I pointed at my phone. He shrugged and nodded, then returned his attention to the monitor in front of him.
I turned to face the back wall, opened my phone, and said, “Yes?”
The deep voice was unmistakable. “Happy Veterans Day, Mr. Coyne. Are you celebrating?”
It was John Kinkaid. It occurred to me that, calling my cell, he had no idea where I was. “Where are you?” I said.
“I wanted you to know some things, Mr. Coyne,” he said. As he spoke, I could hear the band playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” through the phone. It came to my ear a fraction of a second behind the music from outside the trailer.
Kinkaid was here, in Lexington, somewhere outside.
I turned and waved my hand frantically at Martin Greeley.
“First off,” Kinkaid said, “I hope you know that I could have killed you and Herb Croyden the other night. I chose not to. I had no reason to kill you.”
“I figured that,” I said. “I’m grateful. I guess you had your reasons.”
Greeley came over to where I was standing. He was frowning.
I pointed at the phone, then drew a big K in the air.
Greeley mouthed the word “Kinkaid” with his eyebrows arched.
I nodded, made a circle in the air with my finger, then pointed at the floor, indicating that Kinkaid was in this area.
Greeley nodded, held up his hand, and flapped his fingers against his thumb. He wanted me to keep Kinkaid talking. Then he moved to one of the techs at his monitor and spoke into his ear.
“So why did you have to kill Gus Shaw and Pedro Accardo?” I said to Kinkaid. “I wouldn’t have thought you were a coldblooded killer.”
“I’m not,” he said. “We had a plan. They intended to betray it. They left me no choice.” He paused, and it sounded like the band music coming from his phone was getting louder. “Soldiers die for lesser causes all the time. Shaw and Accardo made their sacrifices.”
Greeley came over, tugged on my sleeve, and pulled me to one of the TV monitors. The agent with the camera was somewhere on the battle green panning back across the street toward our trailer. The monitor showed several scraggly groups of people, including many men in various military uniforms, heading in the direction of the green, latecomers to the festivities.
“Aren’t you tired of running and hiding?” I said to Kinkaid.
Greeley pointed at a cluster of old veterans moving up the sidewalk toward our trailer. The tech zoomed in on their faces.
“I’m not done yet,” said Kinkaid. “I have a message for Martin Greeley. Will you deliver it for me?”
“Of course,” I said.
The camera closed in on one soldier’s face.
I shook my head.
Three or four more close-ups. None was Kinkaid.
Then I noticed a man lagging behind the others a bit farther down the sidewalk. He wore army khaki and was operating an electric wheelchair. You couldn’t tell how tall he was, or if he walked with a limp. He had flowing white hair under his creased cap, and thick glasses, and he didn’t look much like the Phil Trapelo I’d met—but he had a cell phone pressed against his ear.
I jabbed Greeley’s shoulder and pointed at the wheelchair on the monitor. The camera zoomed in on it.
“Tell Agent Greeley,” Kinkaid was saying, “that I have never thought of this as a game. It’s never been about him, or about me. Nothing personal. I have been absolutely sincere about my convictions all of these years. Will you tell him that?”
“Sure,” I said.
The man was steering his wheelchair up the sidewalk toward our trailer while he was talking on his cell phone. I could read his lips on the TV monitor as his words came to me through my phone. The white hair and the glasses and the wheelchair weren’t a bad disguise, but as I studied him, watched the way his mouth moved and his eyebrows arched as he talked, I saw past it. It was John Kinkaid.
I pointed at the image of the vet in the wheelchair and gave a thumbs-up sign to Greeley. He snatched the headset from one of the techs and began speaking into it.
“So what are you up to today?” I said to Kinkaid as I watched him on the monitor. “How are you celebrating this Veterans Day?”
“It’s a day for mourning, not celebrating,” he said. “People forget. Heroes, yes. But for every surviving hero there are thousands—millions, probably—of forgotten martyrs. Men who’ve died for stupid, senseless causes at the whim of ignorant, self-serving politicians. It’s been the work of my life—”
Kinkaid’s voice abruptly stopped, and simultaneously, on the TV screen, I saw his chin slump to his chest, his arms fall onto his lap, and his wheelchair begin to veer slowly off the sidewalk.
The band was playing the final strains of the national anthem, “. .. and the home of the brave.” Then came the sound of applause, both from outside the trailer and through my cell phone.
Almost instantly a dark-haired woman was at the handles of Kinkaid’s wheelchair. She steered it behind our trailer and off the edge of the TV screen that I’d been watching.
I looked at Greeley. “What just happened?”
He headed for the door. “Come on.”
I followed him out of the trailer. The woman—I assumed she was an FBI agent—was wheeling Kinkaid toward us.
As they got closer, I saw the red blotch under Kinkaid’s chin.
“You shot him?” I said to Greeley.
“Let’s hope you didn’t misidentify him,” he said.
“Jesus,” I said. “Just like that? Murder him?”
“We’ve got sixteen snipers with silenced scoped rifles here today,” Greeley said. “What did you think was going to happen?”
The woman who’d been pushing the wheelchair was joined by another agent, a man. They bent over Kinkaid and blocked him from my sight.
After a few minutes, the two agents beckoned Greeley over. He joined them.
A minute later Greeley turned to me. “Come here, Mr. Coyne. Have a look.”
I went over and looked. John Kinkaid—the man I’d known as Phil Trapelo—was wearing a fishing vest under his khaki army jacket. The round stain at the base of his throat was crimson. The vest’s many pockets were stuffed and lumpy. Plastique and gunpowder and buckshot, I guessed. Strapped around the bottom of the vest at his waist was a belt of batteries linked with a patriotic snarl of red, white, and blue plastic-coated wires. Two strips of one-inch nails crisscrossed his chest like bandoliers.
“They disabled this rig, I hope,” I said.
Greeley nodded.
“So he was going to do it,” I said.
“He aimed to blow us up with him,” said Greeley. “He was coming right for the trailer.” He showed me what he was holding. It was a television remote similar to the ones I’d seen in the steel cabinet in Herb Croyden’s carriage house. “This was in his pocket. The way it works, you press the power button and hold it down to activate it. When you release the button ...”
“Boom,” I said. “If he was holding the button down, even if you killed him, it would detonate. A dead-man’s switch.”
He nodded. “If we’d waited till he had this in his hand, it would’ve been too late.” He patted my shoulder. “Identifying him when you did and keeping him talking made all the difference.”
“I had no idea you’d just shoot him.”
Greeley turned to me and smiled quickly. “Did you have a better idea?”
“No,” I said. “I think that was quite a good idea.”
* * * *
We went back into the trailer. I realized that “neutralizing” John Kinkaid—that was Martin Greeley’s word for shooting him in the throat—had not relaxed anybody. They all continued to proceed on the assumption that there were others out there wearing suicide bombs.
But they didn’t expect me to help identify them. I’d done what they hoped I’d do, and now my job was just to stay out of the way. So I leaned against the back wall and sipped coffee and watched the TV monitors as the techs and the agents worked the crowds with their hidden cameras.
The spectators saluted the flag, and Senator Kerry, himself a vet, gave a short speech, and the military band played a couple of patriotic marches, and the chairman of the Lexington Board of Selectmen read a proclamation from the governor, and the band played “America the Beautiful,” and then, not much more than an hour after it had started, the Lexington Veterans Day celebration was over. Clusters of spectators headed for their cars, and groups of vets in uniform shook hands with each other, and band members wandered away carrying their instruments.
Agent Greeley and his cameramen and techs kept scanning the people until the only ones left on the green were the town workers disassembling the scaffolding, and the electricians rolling up their wires and stowing their gear, and the vendors packing up their wares, and a few uniformed Lexington town cops.
Then Greeley touched my arm and we went outside. Agent Neal was waiting behind the trailer at his black van. He held the back door for me, and I climbed in. Greeley slid in beside me, Neal got behind the wheel, and we headed back to Boston.
We were on Route 2 approaching the Fresh Pond rotary before Greeley spoke. “Your country thanks you,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” I said.
He smiled. “There won’t be any commendations or speeches or newspaper stories, I’m afraid.”
“Suits me fine.”
He was looking out the tinted side window, facing away from me. “Thirty-five years,” he said softly. “I don’t know who was more obsessed, him or me. He thought he’d been put on earth to end all war, and I was hell bent on nailing him.”
“On the phone,” I said, “Kinkaid wanted me to give you a message.”
Greeley turned to look at me.
“He said he wanted you to know it was never a game with him,” I said. “He wanted you to know that it wasn’t about you. It wasn’t personal. He said his convictions were sincere.”
Greeley smiled quickly. “He was a true believer, all right.”
“So he really was going to blow us up?”
“Along with himself.” Greeley nodded once. “Absolutely. We’ve managed to track down several members of his support group in the past week or so, and as well as we can figure it, Kinkaid’s original scheme was to have several suicide bombers detonate themselves simultaneously, PTSD victims like Shaw and Accardo, at Lexington and other Veterans Day celebrations. Unexpected, shocking, devastating, deadly, symbolic, to replicate what innocent citizens in other countries experience on a regular basis. In the seventies he blew up buildings. Now he wanted to blow up people.”
“So Gus Shaw and Pedro Accardo squelched that plan?”
Greeley shrugged. “That’s how we figure it. That’s why Kinkaid killed them. We’ll probably never know exactly what happened. For all we know, there are other John Kinkaids, his disciples, out there.”
“That,” I said, “is not comforting.”
“You should never feel comforted,” he said.
* * * *
After lunch on the Friday after Veterans Day, as I was daydreaming about a quiet weekend without suicide bombers or FBI agents or old girlfriends, just Henry and me and maybe a couple of football games, Julie buzzed me. When I picked up the phone, she said, “I’ve got Attorney Kenilworth on line three.”
I hesitated. “Who?”
“Kenilworth. Charles Kenilworth. Chuck. New Hampshire. The Epping case?”
“Aha,” I said. I hit button number three on my telephone console and said, “Chuck. How’s it going?”
“That was damn good,” he said. “The picketing and the television and everything. Civics 101, huh?”
“My clients are merely exercising their rights as American citizens,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “it’s a helluva story, but my client thinks it’s time to write The End to it.”
“You spell The End with dollar signs in front of it, you know.”
“I’ve got your letter here,” he said. “Mr. Delaney will meet your terms. I can have a certified check in the mail to you this afternoon.”
“Did you see the Eppings on television?”
Kenilworth laughed softly. “I sure did.”
“Did you hear what Doug said he was looking for?”
“Everybody’s looking for money, right?”
“Doug said he wanted to be acknowledged,” I said.
“A fat check is a pretty good acknowledgment.”
“How’s about,” I said, “Mr. Delaney himself personally invites the Eppings to get together so they can see that he’s not such a bad fellow, and he can see that they’re a nice retired couple who just don’t like getting fucked over? How’s about he gives them the check himself and apologizes for being tardy with it and maybe explains himself? I’m assuming he’s not the complete asshole that he seems to be.”
“Actually,” said Chuck Kenilworth, “Nick Delaney’s a pretty good guy. In this housing market, the moving business is pretty shaky, and he’s had to hustle to stay afloat. Takes a lot out of a man, worrying about his business going under.” He hesitated. “I think he’ll go for it. No TV cameras or reporters, though. Let’s keep this private. The last thing Mr. Delaney needs to do is grovel and apologize and admit his mistakes in public.”
“No lawyers, either,” I said.
“Wouldn’t you like to be there?”
“Nope,” I said. “This is simple. Delaney walks out of his office there in Nashua and goes up to Doug and Mary, who are carrying their signs up and down the street outside his door, and he says, ‘Why don’t you folks come inside, have a cup of coffee and get warm, and we can talk about this thing?’ You don’t need lawyers for that, Chuck.”
Kenilworth paused, then said, “You know, you’re right. Okay. Lemme give him a call right now. Pleasure doing business with you, Brady.”
“You, too, Chuck,” I said.
* * * *
We closed the office at noon on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and by four o’clock that afternoon Henry and I were crossing the Piscataqua River Bridge on Route 95 entering Maine.
Henry disliked seat belts, so I banished him to the back, where he liked to stand on the seat behind me and rest his chin on my shoulder and watch the road.
Alex had called the previous Sunday evening. When I answered, she said, “So what’re you doing for Thanksgiving? No, wait. That’s not really any of my business. I mean, do you have any plans for Thanksgiving? No, that’s not right, either. Um, okay. You better not turn me down, Brady Coyne, because I’ve been thinking about this for a week and I know you’d never know it, but I’ve been rehearsing this stupid telephone call. So here it is. I would love for you and Henry to join me for Thanksgiving. Okay? That’s it. Old Mr. Terry down the street gave me this huge goose he shot, and I’ve got big plans for it that include cranberry-and-walnut stuffing, sweet potatoes, my mother’s four-bean casserole, butternut squash, mince and pumpkin pies, and . . . and I think it would be nice. Maybe you could come on Wednesday and stay through the weekend and the three of us could just relax, walk in the woods, eat, listen to music, whatever? You want to watch a football game, that’s fine by me, and I’ve got a pile of wood that needs to be split and stacked.” She stopped and I heard her blow out a long breath. “Right. Shit. I feel like an idiot.”
“We’d love to,” I said.
“You would?”
“It sounds great,” I said.
Tapply, William G, Brady Coyne 24-Hell Bent
