Stone Cold

Mike said nervously, “Yes sir, Mr. Bagger. I know. We crawled behind some trees, and Joe found a chunk of glass we used to cut the ropes off. Right as we were taking off the cops showed up. They must’ve called them. They didn’t see us, though.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes sir.”

“The guy who nicked you was a pro, huh? What’d he look like?”

Mike told him.

“Maybe a fed?”

“He wasn’t dressed like a fed. And he was a little old for that. But the guy was still a pro. And he and Conroy were tight.”

Bagger slowly sat down in a chair. Who the hell was A

CHAPTER 51

THE SENATOR WAS NOT IN TODAY, having departed on a sudden fact-finding trip, taking many of his staff with him and leaving only a skeleton crew behind. Fi

Fi

Getting off the elevator, Fi

He’d enlarged the photos he’d taken of the office and the woman on his previous visit here. They had clearly shown her nameplate on the desk.

He poked his head in the door and held up his phony work order. “Hey, Cheryl, Bobby from building maintenance. I was called about your front door lock a few days ago. Sorry I’m just getting to it, but we’ve had a backlog. Do you know what’s wrong with the darn thing? We’ve had complaints from other offices about theirs too.”

The harried young woman, who was fielding phone calls in rapid succession, cupped her hand over the phone receiver. “No idea.”

“I’ll just take a quick look at it, then. Just sit tight,” Fi

Fi

She gave him a wave. As Fi

Out in the hall there was a surveillance camera set up on the ceiling at the juncture of two halls. Fi

At two minutes after midnight, Fi

He hustled to Simpson’s office door. The piece of metal he’d inserted in the lock earlier performed only one function, but did it flawlessly. It made the door seem to be locked when it actually wasn’t if you had one special piece of equipment, which Fi

Fi

Fi

Next, he sat down at the computer and turned it on. The screen powered up but a password was needed. Busy senators didn’t have time to recall elaborate or obscure passwords, so Fi

He typed in the commands he needed and then shut the computer down. The last thing he did was place a miniature battery-powered surveillance device near a flowerpot on a high shelf by the senator’s couch. The vines of the plant provided an ideal cover for the tiny camera. Now Fi

He went back to the glass door and checked his watch, waiting for the surveillance camera to click to the other hall. As soon as it did, he was out the door and back into the storage room. He retrieved from his tool bag and powered up a small receiving unit that looked like a BlackBerry, and stared at the picture on the screen. He had chosen the location of his miniature camera well; he could see all of Simpson’s office clearly. He turned off the unit, lay on the floor and went back to sleep.

The next morning he slipped out of the storage room and spent some time going up and down elevators, pretending to be heading to assignments. Then he walked out of the building with a group of other people, caught the Metro out to Virginia, picked up his car and drove to the office.

Now all he had to do was wait for Roger Simpson to return. And what a homecoming it would be for the man who’d helped kill his father.

Yet even more than that, Simpson’s death would mean the end of Harry Fi

After doing some work at the office and going over still more details on the plan of attack against the Capitol, he left and picked the kids up from school. He spent an hour of batting-cage time with Patrick, helped Susie with her homework and went over high school choices with David. When Mandy got back from the grocery store, he helped her make di

“You seem to be in a good mood,” she commented as he scraped potatoes in the kitchen sink.