Vanessa closed her eyes, swallowed. “I don’t know. Maybe. If he does, it will be worse than Bayway. I think he only used a small part of one of his bombs there. With the plans, Matthew and Andy will know how to get into Yorktown and plant one of his bombs. You have to find him, stop him.” She tried to press Mike’s hand, but didn’t have the strength.
A low, angry male voice sounded behind them. “You will all leave now. As you can see, Ms. Grace is gravely injured. All of you, out, now.”
It was Dr. Pruitt, her surgeon. They stepped back to watch him lean over her, listen to her heart, take her pulse, then fiddle with the IV. In the next moment she was asleep. Pruitt turned on them. “If she is well enough, you may see her tomorrow, but not until then. Do I make myself clear?”
He left the room without waiting for an answer, Craig Swanson following him out. Carl Grace said, his voice lowered, “I know you have more questions, need more information to make sense of all this. I brought some recordings Vanessa has sent me over the past four months. We’ll go in the corner, keep our voices down, and listen until you’re satisfied you’ve got the full picture.”
But first Savich called the Secret Service to warn the detail searching Yorktown.
59
KNIGHT TAKES E1
Grace hit play on his tablet, and they heard Vanessa’s voice, calm and strong.
Darius came to COE with a bag of money and the Devil’s tongue. Don’t get me wrong, Darius wasn’t a hammer, he was subtle about it, slow, easy, methodical. It took me a while to realize that he was poisoning Matthew, convincing him to stop targeting oil refiners because it did no good. He needed to target people. And he needed to finish creating his magic gold coins—his bombs—and do it quickly. It was time to strike.
She paused a moment, then:
How to describe him so you’ll understand, Uncle Carl? Matthew Spenser was an idealist, a genius, a man with a bright future, until the terrorist bomb that killed his family in London on July 7, 2005, changed everything. He became committed to destroying all our ties to terrorist nations and to him that meant stopping all Middle East oil imports into the West. His plan was to destroy infrastructure because without funding from oil wealth, big organized terrorist groups couldn’t continue. Then Darius came and he changed.
Darius talked to Matthew day and night about how he could leave his mark, how he could attack the terrorists by taking out the people who wanted to protect them, fund them, empathize with them. Darius convinced him the Americans, our own president, wanted to make peace with them, and yet our president, instead of doing his job, protecting the American people, protecting our allies, is at a supposed peace table in Geneva, drinking tea with these soulless maniacs, and working on diplomatic solutions, ridiculous, all of it.
Matthew works well into the night on his bomb, but he won’t tell me how close he is to perfecting it, won’t even tell Ian, his very best friend.
Carl Grace hit stop, loaded in another recording.
I overheard Darius and Matthew talking. Darius was supposed to meet someone, get a package. They never discussed what it was. I listened and knew the pickup had fallen through and now he had another, at a diner in Baltimore, the Silver Corner. I saw his contact once when he delivered some information about the grids to Darius, but I couldn’t find out his name. I took photos of him. I hope you can identify him.
Carl Grace punched off the recording. “We do have his photos and have been running them, but we’ve come up empty so far. I’ll get his photos to you, see what you can find. The secondary pickup for the diner was for yesterday. We’re getting the video feeds as I speak.”
He turned the recording back on. “This is three days before Bayway.”