Travis Starnes
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Election Day (John Taylor #6) - Chapter 13
🕑 Added 2021-05-04 12:49:03 +0000 UTCIt turned out the wait for the subpoena was longer than the wait on the lab. Taylor had spent most of the day out, tracking down leads on his own, and it was already fairly late by the time they started hunting around for a judge to sign off on their subpoena. They knew where they needed to check next, since only one company made Dinitrophenol, but that was only the starting point. Once federal law enforcement starts asking questions companies tend to shut down all communication and direct everything to their lawyers. That went doubly for companies that sold a controlled substance that ended up in the hands of someone who then used that product to murder multiple people. When the lab called back with their checks on the chemical analysis of Hubbard’s previous explosives, they were still waiting on the subpoena.
Taylor's first instinct was to say screw it and head down to the company’s offices and knock some heads together. Whitaker, however, convinced him that would be counter-productive. U.S. chemical manufacturers weren’t exactly lowlifes that could be beaten into telling them what they needed to know. Besides, there wouldn’t be anyone at the offices that late anyways. Showing up at empty offices wouldn’t do them any good.
Instead, they caught what sleep they could in Whitaker’s office, her on a couch and him lying on the floor. Caldwell’s house was still more or less off-limits since Hubbard’s attempt on her life, and Taylor wanted to be at the company’s offices the minute employees started arriving. Besides, he’d slept worse places than a carpeted office floor.
On the positive side, the lab results confirmed their hypothesis. Dinitrophenol was found in each of the explosives Hubbard had set off since they began looking into him. While the results didn’t surprise Taylor, it at least confirmed they were on the right track. More importantly, it also allowed them to give Whitaker enough probable cause on the subpoena application to convince a judge.
They were at the manufacturers’ offices first thing in the morning, subpoena in hand. Of course, as with everything when dealing with the law, it still wasn’t that easy.
“Agent Whitaker,” the lawyer said, “We appreciate you have a public service need for assistance in this matter, but we still believe it is in the best interest of our employers that we avail ourselves fully of the legal process, including our right to appeal this subpoena.”
“You haven’t been granted a stay yet,” Whitaker said. “As of right now this subpoena is in effect, and if you don’t start bringing up the documents we’re asking for now, I’m going to start putting people in cuffs for obstruction of justice.”
“Agent Whitaker …” the lawyer started to say.
“No. This is a matter of life and death. As of right now, I’m just looking to track shipments of Dinitrophenol to our suspect, that’s it. I’m not looking to come after you or your employers. I assume everything was done on the up and up on your end. If someone else dies while I’m waiting on you, however; then everything changes. While you have all kinds of checks and procedures to keep stuff like this from going where it shouldn’t, we both know those only work as long as no one cuts corners for the sake of 'efficiency.' Someone will not have done something they were legally required to do. Do you really want us to go through your records with a fine-toothed comb?”
In the end, the lawyers decided to be reasonable, although not without another hour delay while they got promises in writing that the Justice Department wouldn’t go after them for anything they found while looking into the companies transactions short of a major felony.
Taylor couldn’t help but think that if Cole had listened to them instead of sticking his head in the sand, they wouldn’t have wasted almost half a day with this nonsense. The man had an entire task force including ATF agents whose agency was one of the ones that tracked this chemical.
Getting the records was, however, just the first step. It was unclear how long Hubbard had been at this or if he’d stockpiled at some point in the past. The most they could safely guess was that he’d taken a fondness to this particular company while still in the Army, so they could use that as a start date. Even with two employees who understood the companies systems helping them go through the records, it took hours more to find what they were looking for.
“That’s weird,” one of the assigned clerks said looking over a dense spreadsheet.
“What’s weird?” Taylor asked.
“After the last few hours of looking through these orders and shipping records, I’ve started seeing some patterns to the orders. Except for a few years where this was used in diet pills, before it started getting people sick and you guys started handing out fines, there aren’t a lot of orders for this stuff. A lab will order some here or there when they need to test something out, but that’s all pretty small quantities. A couple of years ago though, there was this fairly large shipment to an address in South Carolina. Levels we haven’t seen since the diet pill days.”
“Y’all shipped it out?”
“Yeah. I just cross-referenced the purchase orders and it went to you guys.”
“The FBI?” Taylor asked.
“No, but the federal government. The only listing I could find was for the DOD, which hadn’t ordered it for some time. It stands out as unusual, but there wouldn’t be any reason for us not to ship it.”
“Can you get me those purchase orders?” Taylor asked.
“Sure.”
“Get me those and somewhere we can make a quick call. If everything checks out, we’ll be out of your way.”
“Sure, I can do that.”
It took a little longer, but they were given printouts of the purchase orders and shown to an empty office.
“Did the guy at Fort Hill give you what you need?” Watson said when he answered.
“Yes. We found something we can use to track him down, but I need your help with one more thing.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“I just texted you a picture of a purchase order for a chemical called Dinitrophenol. The DOD had been ordering this stuff for a project, but stopped for a while and then placed this random large order for it. Could you check out these purchase I.D.s for me?”
“Sure, hold on.”
The one benefit of calling Watson is he didn’t have to go and call anyone else. With his clearances and being inside the Pentagon, he had access to a wide range of DOD paperwork. It didn’t take Watson long to come back with an answer.
“This isn’t one of ours.”
“The I.D.s aren’t?”
“No, the coding tracks back to a black bag account used by the DIA, which is why the company thought they were real, but this purchase order was never made. At least, not by us.”
The Defense Intelligence Agency was similar to the CIA, its more famous cousin, but specifically focused on gathering military intelligence. It was lucky Hubbard had used their codes and not the CIA’s. Since the DIA was part of the DOD, Watson had access to some of the agency's records from inside the Pentagon.
A black bag was slang for areas inside highly classified areas of the Department of Defense. Money and men would go into those organizations, but no one knew for what. The people assigned were never allowed to talk about what they did on those assignments and the money was never fully accounted for. They tended to pull personnel from the various branches of special operations and Taylor himself had been assigned to a few black bag operations run by the CIA. While the DIA wasn’t as prolific in their use of black bag assignments as the CIA, it was completely believable that Hubbard would have been assigned to an operation run by them at some point in his career. Given the nature of most black bag assignments, it also made sense why it wouldn’t have shown up on even the unredacted version of Hubbard’s files. Despite the Army’s love of paperwork, many of those assignments were never recorded or even written down.
More importantly, for Hubbard at least, no one would have double-checked those accounts to make sure he was actually ordering for something official. A purchase order like this could have easily sailed through channels without anyone second-guessing it.
“What about that address. I’m assuming it isn’t a DOD site, even an off-the-books one.”
“I looked that up and no, not that I could find.”
“I didn’t think so. That’s what I needed, thanks, Colonel.”
“Sure thing. Good hunting.”
Hanging up, Taylor turned to Whitaker and said, “We need to go check this place out.”
“Yeah. While you were on the phone I did a couple of checks and this address isn’t a lab or anything. It looks like it was a small warehouse but I can’t find any records of who owns it now. The last company to actually use it went bankrupt ten years ago, and since then it’s been empty, sitting in receivership with the bank.”
“So before this order happened then?”
“Yes.”
“So I guess we need to go check it out then.”
Thanks to their technically being part of the task force, they could take a government jet, avoiding the hassle and additional time spent waiting for a scheduled commercial flight. A few hours later they were standing in a warehouse district at Charleston port, looking at a fairly dilapidated warehouse.
“I still think we should have backup,” Whitaker said.
Charleston, South Carolina
On the flight down Whitaker had wanted to call in local police and agents from the Charleston offices to secure the scene before they got there, but Taylor talked her out of it. He was certain that Hubbard would have booby-trapped the place, and the last thing they wanted was someone blundering around the site. Besides the chance that it would have cost the life of a fellow law enforcement officer, Hubbard would have made sure that any explosion would have erased anything he was working on.
For the moment, Hubbard was in the wind and this was their only lead at the moment. They’d gotten lucky so far, both in finding him the first time and finding this lead. Taylor didn’t want to keep pushing that luck and having to find yet another lead to track the man down.
“I know.”
“They could have their demolitions team come out and check the building over. These guys deal with explosives for a living. They’ll be better at finding and deactivating any devices we find than either of us.”
“Yes, but they’re trained not to take chances. They’ll blow any device with countermeasures in place before trying to disarm it. I guarantee Hubbard will have thought of that and made sure if they went off, they’ll set off a chain reaction. It’s what I’d do.”
“If we’re not going to diffuse them, then what are we going to do?”
“We’re going to leave them alone completely. We’ll go around them. Once we find what we need, we’ll call in the locals, who can deal with the explosives.”
“You’re taking chances.”
Taylor turned and put his hands on Whitaker’s shoulders, “I know, but we don’t have a choice. Our friend’s in danger and Hubbard isn’t going to stop. We’ve already taken too long. We need to put an end to this. Not just for her sake, but for the sake of anyone caught in the middle. We got lucky with Kara and unless we tell her she can’t associate with Mary Jane until it’s all over, she’s one of the ones most likely to get caught in the middle.”
“She wouldn’t listen to us anyway, if we told her to keep away.”
“No, she really wouldn’t.”
“Fine. You lead the way, but if you blow us both up, I’m going to kick your ass.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Taylor said with a lopsided grin.
Taylor moved slowly around the outside of the building. While he hadn’t been specialty trained for explosives, Special Forces operational detachments were small. No one did anything in a vacuum. Everyone member of a team drafted off the other members when their specialty came up. Taylor might not have had the formal training, but he had a mountain of field experience. Especially serving in the sandbox where insurgents set IEDs constantly, not just on roads but wherever they thought they’d find U.S. soldiers to trap.
He found his first one on the front door, which was wired. Taylor couldn’t see the actual explosives, but he knew they were there. Hubbard probably had a way to deactivate them when he needed to get inside, but Taylor didn’t want to chance trying to figure that out. The windows were likewise wired, as was the back door.
“Everything’s locked down, we can’t get in without blowing the whole place,” Whitaker asked.
“Maybe,” Taylor said, standing back away from the building, thinking.
“We can’t use any of the doors or windows. We could check the roof I guess, but what are the odds there’s an entrance up there he hasn’t wired?”
“Not good.”
“So we call in the locals, see if their bomb techs can get one of these diffused and get us in intact?”
“Too risky,” Taylor said, still staring hard at the building.
“So, what?”
Taylor didn’t answer right away. He could feel Whitaker getting frustrated by his silence, but she knew him well enough to know how he was when he was working a problem.
“What?” She asked after several minutes, when his expression changed, a small smile creeping onto his face.
“Hubbard had been thorough, no doubt, but he’s been out of the teams too long. EOD has its own way of doing things. Thorough, meticulous, and always by the book.”
“He’s gone a little far off the page.”
“Sure, but he still thinks like an EOD guy now. Everything is a checklist, making sure you don’t blow yourself up. They don’t wing it.”
“You’re going to get to a point eventually, right?”
“Look at this place. It’s a wreck.”
“Yeah, he picked somewhere no one would just stumble into. This place is practically ready to be condemned, so no one’s going to just find his setup.”
“Right, but the downside is it’s ready to be condemned.
“I don’t follow.”
“The place is falling down, so all we need to do is …” Taylor started to say before pausing, walking along one of the walls of the building, running a hand across its surface. “… find the weak point.”
Stepping back Taylor kicked the wall at shin height. Chips of brick and mortar came off the wall. A second and third kick send more, this time with a scraping sound. Kneeling down, Whitaker could see what Taylor had seen. The mortar was pitted, chipped, and worn. Plants had started taking seed inside the wall, further weakening it.
She joined in, kicking hard next to the area he’d been working on. It was less than a minute’s work before the first brick cracked free and dropped inside the warehouse. Five minutes later and sections started breaking off. There was still enough stability to keep the whole wall standing, but just barely.
“Can’t get in a door, then we make our own,” Taylor said, grinning at Whitaker.
“Don’t get cocky. You know he’ll have set devices inside, too; just in case someone got through his traps on the doors.”
“No doubt.”
They’d come prepared and both pulled out small flashlights. There wasn’t a skylight, but there was enough light coming in through the dirty windows to give the entire building a hazy light, filtered through thick dust that seemed to fill the air everywhere around them.
They moved slowly into the building, flashlights sweeping back and forth. They weren’t disappointed. Tripwires, pressure plates dug into the concrete floor, and false boxes with motion-sensitive devices greeted them every few feet. There was probably a safe path that let Hubbard come and go safely, but Taylor couldn’t work out where it was. The whole place seemed a maze of death traps.
It was obvious, however, when they got through the boxes and machinery left behind by the previous tenets, that they had found Hubbard’s work area. Besides two large drums with the name of the chemical company they’d left a few hours before and a workbench littered with small parts and blueprints, the area was spotless. The dust and debris they’d seen everywhere else in the warehouse was gone. It was hard to tell when Hubbard had been here last, but it hadn’t been that long ago.
If Taylor had to guess, it was shortly before their run-in in Rochester. There hadn’t been time for him to come here after that and still pull off the diversion near Caldwell’s home, but it hadn’t been so long that this place no longer looked pristine.
“He’s not coming back here,” Taylor said.
“No.”
They both knew that Hubbard was nearing his end game. Besides the fact that he clearly didn’t want Caldwell to become President, he’d also been picking up his tempo. The letters had been gathering speed over the last few months before he’d sent the first device. Since then things had only accelerated. While Hubbard was probably sure his other attempts to kill Caldwell would have worked, he wasn’t relying on any of them specifically. He would have had multiple plans, doing one after another until he ran out or Caldwell was dead. Which also meant he had on him whatever he was going to need to pull them off. The election was tomorrow, which meant Hubbard didn’t have time to come up with anything new at this point.
“The thing I don’t get is, why is this all still here,” Taylor said.
“Maybe he expects to come back after it’s all done.”
“Which means he expects to live through this?”
“He’s a fanatic who believes he’s a servant of God on a mission to literally kill the devil. If he’s a real true believer, maybe he thinks God will protect him. I’ve chased crazies before. You can’t expect them to do things in a way that makes sense. Everything is filtered through their delusions.”
“I guess, still, it works out in our favor.”
They checked the area once more thoroughly, but they couldn’t find any devices in the immediate vicinity of the work area itself. That made sense. Someone like Hubbard would have respect for the devices he dealt with. He wouldn’t be working right on top of any. Besides, considering the number of devices they had to tip-toe around on the way in, it wouldn’t have mattered. Anyone who was good enough to avoid all those would avoid anywhere else too, and anyone who wasn’t good enough wouldn’t have made it this far.
There were multiple building blueprints, blueprints of various devices, and handwritten notes all over the table itself. Taylor was still baffled that Hubbard would have left this stuff just out in the open. Maybe Whitaker had been right and he thought he was somehow blessed and this workshop would never be found or maybe he had planned on coming back but their surprising him in Rochester had changed his plans.
While most of the plans had some kind of name of what the building was, or at least an address on them, Taylor didn’t recognize any of them. Whitaker, however, had taken better notes at Cole’s briefings that Taylor, who’d tuned much of it out as a waste of time.
“These were all on Caldwell’s itineraries.”
“Really?”
“You didn’t look at the schedule Cole put out?”
“Not really, no. Wouldn’t that information be kept secret?”
“I thought you went out and campaigned with her. She’s trying to get in as many public events as possible to drive up support for the election. You can’t do that by giving secret speeches from undisclosed locations. These stops have been announced for months, both where she’d be and when she’d be there. They’ve been selling tickets.”
“So it’s public information?”
“Pretty much, although I’m not sure what the point is of getting all of these and then not using them. I recognize the names of several of these locations from events that have already happened.”
“Maybe these are the ones he discarded. I don’t see plans for Caldwell’s house.”
“I assumed that was out of desperation. You think he managed to get plans for her house?”
“Maybe. He seemed to know where he was going. Besides, the house didn’t belong to a Senator when it was built, and she bought it from someone else. It was on the market when she bought it. It would have had pictures on those home selling websites, maybe a drawing for a layout. It’s hard to completely scrub everything off the internet. Besides, in Kara’s description of what she heard, there wasn’t a lot of wandering around. He went to the master bedroom and then he came to her bedroom. He knew where he was going, even though he didn’t know exactly what room was Mary Jane’s.”
“Maybe. Is there anything else missing?”
“Let me look,” Whitaker said, pulling out her phone.
She pulled up the schedule Cole had emailed out, and started checking off names as she went through blueprints.
“Yeah, six stops are missing. This one, the day before he hit Caldwell’s house, was marked as a last-minute addition, so he wouldn’t have been able to get the plans for it ahead of time.”
“Okay, any others that have already passed?”
“Umm, yes. Two others have already come and gone without any attempts on the Senator, although one was yesterday morning, which was canceled.”
“Okay, that’s four. What about the other two?”
“The last two stops for today. A hotel in two hours and then the convention hall for tonight, where she’s having her last rally before the polls open tomorrow.”
“We’re going to have to call Cole. We can’t make it back in two hours.”
They made the call to Cole on their way back to the plane after calling ahead to the pilots so they could file flight plans and get the plane ready to go.
“We have new information. We think Hubbard has plans to hit either the Grand Hilton or the convention center while she’s speaking.”
“Those are the only stops she has left today, not counting the one she’s doing now,” Cole said, annoyed. “You’re just throwing darts at the wall at this point.”
“We’re not. We have solid intel. We found Hubbard’s workshop where he’s been making his devices. He had blueprints of places the Senator is set to speak at.”
“He had blueprints for these two locations?”
“He had blueprints for every other announced speech except for a handful,” Whitaker said. “Of the ones he’s missing, these are the only two he could still hit. We think he took the plans with him.”
Taylor grimaced. He appreciated the need to share clear intel. Despite their reluctance to take the search to Hubbard, they weren’t inept. What they were, however, was overly focused on their one area of expertise. Anything outside of that they handled much more literally. Given time to fully lay out the reasoning they might get through to him, but over the phone, when he’s already predisposed to want to ignore them, that wasn’t going to happen.
“So you’re telling me you think he’s going to make a move at the two locations you found no evidence for? You hear how that sounds, right?”
“Cole,” Taylor said, “He sees America as some latter-day holy kingdom and her as the devil. He’s completely obsessed with her not becoming President. He only has a few more shots at her before she’s elected. He’s already gotten so close that he isn’t going to give up on her now.”
“Spare me the pop psychology. We have a team clearing both locations, top to bottom. We’ve got extra agents scheduled for both locations. No one is getting in or out without us checking them. We all agree he doesn’t have a partner, so it’s just him, and we know what he looks like. We’ve got this.”
“Cole, he’s been working on this a long time. He knows how explosive clearing works. He’s already set up whatever he’s going to do.”
“We’ve got this Taylor. I appreciate the intel, and we’ll keep an eye out,” Cole said, hanging up.
“Every time; head shoved right up his ass. Up to the shoulders.”
“You didn’t think that was going to work,” Whitaker said.
“No, but I had to hope anyways. If it is the hotel, we aren’t going to be able to do anything about it.”
“We can still call the Senator?”
“I know you think a lot of her. I do too, but she isn’t going to cancel anything. She’s at the finish line, and she isn’t going to let this stop her. People like her, doing what she’s trying to do, she’ll decide the risk is worth it. She’s more calculating than you think she is.”
“Maybe, but we still have to try,” Taylor said, pulling the SUV they’d arranged right up next to the plane.
They’d flown into a smaller airport that tailored itself to private planes. One of the benefits was that, once you cleared security, you could drive right up to the plane, since things like boarding passes weren’t needed. Taylor didn’t want to slow down the trip back to D.C., so he hurried onto the plane instead, letting Whitaker deal with the pilots while he picked up the airplane’s phone and dialed the Senator.
“Senator Caldwell's office,” a voice Taylor, unfortunately, recognized said.
“Packer, I need to talk to the Senator. It’s urgent.”
“I’m sorry Mr. Taylor, but the Senator has a very full schedule. I’m sure you understand. The election is tomorrow, so today is our last day of events.”
“Packer, I don’t care how busy her schedule is, she can’t get elected to anything if she’s dead. Hubbard has plans for the hotel she’s speaking at. We’re on our way back, but we can’t get there before the Senator is scheduled to speak. She needs to cancel this event.”
“I’ve spoken with agent Cole and he feels like our security arrangements are adequate. I appreciate the Senator has confidence in your abilities, but I think you might be overestimating your importance here. The Secret Service are the best-trained bodyguards in the history of the world. There’s nothing your being here could accomplish that they’re not able to do. Now, if you think you have some kind of valuable information, you should contact agent Cole. I’m sure he’ll look at whatever you have, and if they believe there is enough to warrant concern, we’ll of course look at changing our schedule then.”
“Packer, Cole isn’t taking this seriously. I’m telling you Hubbard has the plans for the locations of the Senators’ next two events. He believes he has to stop her before the election, which means he has to make his move tonight. You need to listen to me.”
“I’m going to have to hang up now. Again, if you think this important, please speak with agent Cole. Good day, Mr. Taylor.”
Taylor smashed the handset down when the line went dead.
“You know we’ll have to pay for that if you break it,” Whitaker said.
“None of them will listen.”
“We knew they wouldn’t before you called. Cole is good at his job and he has a lot of people there. They know what they’re looking for. We just have to count on them finding Hubbard without us if he hits the first event.”
“Just like we had to trust him to protect her house? I told him Hubbard was in the area, and look what happened.”
“There isn’t anything else we can do. It’s fifty-fifty which one he hits, so we might get lucky.”
“Yeah. We might get lucky.”
