Election Day (John Taylor #6) - Chapter 2

Taylor and Whitaker walked out of the Senator's office, looking for the Secret Service agents who’d been with her previously. Taylor was readying himself for another fight, knowing how they would react to outside interference in one of their investigations. Taylor had dealt with a lot of the U.S. law enforcement agencies over the last few years, and all of them had resented his involvement, even when he’d been right.

They’d only made it a few steps out of the Senator's office when a short, plump, balding man intercepted them.

“John, do you have a moment?”

It took all of Taylors' willpower to keep from rolling his eyes. Edward Packer was Caldwell’s campaign manager, and apparently, a shrewd political operative who’d had success getting several Republicans elected in competitive races. Taylor hadn’t been impressed with him during the few times he’d had to deal with the man while acting as one of the Senator's surrogates at veterans events. He found most politicians to be superficial and worthless, the Senator excluded. Packer managed to take those traits and punch the dial up to eleven.

“I’m busy, Mr. Packer.”

“I know John, and I promise this will only take a few minutes. I just want to get a few things cleared up before you start helping the Senator.”

Most people called Taylor by his last name, even Whitaker. He didn’t hate his name it was just something he’d grown used to when he was in the service. He didn’t usually care if people decided to call him by his first name and actually sort of liked the way the Senator did, although he’d never tell her that. When Packer did it, it made his skin crawl.

Packer herded them into a small side office and shut the door.

“John, I know the Senator asked you to come in and look into our little problem, and I wanted to make sure we were all on the same page.”

“Little problem?” Whitaker said. “A man is dead and someone is trying to murder your boss.”

“I know, I know, and I am taking this every bit as seriously as you are, I promise you. However, we must keep things in perspective. I’ve spoken to the Secret Service several times about the letters before this point and while we all agree this person is dangerously deluded, I think we need to consider our actions carefully. The Senator is on the verge of being the first woman to be elected President of the United States, and I don’t want anything to derail that.”

“Her being killed by a crazed assassin would derail it,” Taylor said. “The Senator said she hadn’t been told about the letters until this morning. You knew about them?”

“Yes, and I can see where you’re going with this, John. We felt it was best to keep the Senator focused on her campaign and her duties in the Senate, and that this was a distraction. The Secret Service has assured me that they’ve taken all necessary precautions, and that they will be able to keep everyone safe.”

“Someone’s dead.”

“Yes, and it’s terrible, but you know what I meant. We are down to the wire, and this is going to be a big distraction for the Senator. She’s always been a shrewd operator, but she sometimes lets her compassionate side get in the way of her politics. I know she has a lot of faith in you and I appreciate that she wants you to help with this, but I want to make sure we can get on the same page. We need to keep this from distracting her as much as possible, and keep it from the campaign, and keep it out of the public eye. Can you promise me you’ll keep this away from the Senator?”

“Packer, the Senator needs to know what’s going on so she can protect herself. The Secret Service is good at their job, but they can’t stop someone truly determined to get to a protectee. They’ve lost several high profile protectees over the years, not just Presidents. This isn’t a knock on the service, just a realization that you can’t predict and stop everything. The best line of defense is the person they are protecting taking all the necessary precautions. Besides all of that, she’s a personal friend, and I’m not going to keep her in the dark to make your job easier. Her public image isn’t what I’m here to protect.”

“I told her this was a mistake. You’ve been fine on the trail as one of her surrogates, but I’ve seen your record. You’re a hothead with no self-control. Half the investigations you’ve been involved with have ended in chaos. You’re as dangerous as whoever sent this packadge and have left a trail of bodies behind you. I’m warning you now that I will not let you upset this campaign.”

“Mr. Packer, I couldn’t give two shits what you think of me. What matters is what your boss thinks of me. She trusts me to do this. She’s my friend and I’m not going to let some political weasel stop me from keeping her safe. If you want to try and stop me, more power to you. Before you do though, consider that trail of bodies you mentioned were all people who tried to get in my way and stop me before. Do you really want to put yourself between me and what I need to do?”

“This is what I’m talking about. It’s always violence and rash action with you. You’re a God damn neanderthal who can’t think about the consequences of his actions. It’s your fault I have to deal with the Senator's daughter's ‘roommate.’ Reporters are having a field day with her. If you spent one second to consider what the hell you were doing, you would have realized how idiotic it was to bring a god damned whor… gahhh…”

Taylor lunged forward, one hand wrapping around Packers fat neck, fingers squeezing as he slammed the campaign manager against the wall.

“Say one more word!” Taylor said, fury in his eyes.

“Uruph…” was the only sound Packer could make as Taylor squeezed his neck and pressed against the wall.

“Taylor,” Whitaker said, pulling at his arm.

Taylor squeezed once more, as a reminder, making Packer's eyes bulge before releasing him and stepping back. Packer gave him a frightened glance and fumbled behind him, looking for the doorknob. Pulling the door open, the campaign manager scrambled out of the room, eyes still on Taylor. Taylor never broke eye contact, tracking him like a lion tracks a gazelle.

Packer never looked away, fear on his face, until he bumped into a table, almost falling over. He scuttled around it and disappeared around a corner, barely blinking the whole time. Once Packer was out of sight Taylor closed his eyes and took a deep breath, calming down.

“You know that’s just going to make him cause more problems, right?”

“I know. I lost my temper.”

“I get it. He’s a worm. He can also make everything harder if he really tries to be a problem.”

“I could always shoot him,” Taylor offered.

Whitaker rolled her eyes and said, “Don’t even joke.”

“Sorry,” he said, although the grin on his face said he was anything but sorry.

They made their way out of the office and saw no sign of Packer, who’d managed to make a fast getaway. Several staffers were staring in their direction, probably wondering what the commotion had been about.

Taylor ignored them. He'd lost his temper, which he shouldn’t have, but he didn’t regret shutting the man up. People like that acted the way they did because people let them get away with it, afraid they might miss out on some of the scraps of power the person might throw their way. Taylor didn’t care anything about fame or recognition; he just wanted to live his life.

The Secret Service was in the Senator's conference room, waiting on them.

“Sorry we’re late, one of the Senator's people needed to ask us some questions,” Taylor said as they walked in.

“That’s fine,” the person who was clearly in charge said. “I want to make it clear up front that I think this is a terrible idea. I know you’re a friend of the Senator and if you really want to help her, the best thing you could do is go home and let us do our job. Every minute spent explaining our investigation to you and keeping you in the loop on updates is a minute we’re not working to find this perpetrator. I’m asking you now to go tell the Senator you’ve reconsidered and you think it’s best if we handle this.”

Taylor opened his mouth to speak, but stopped as Whitaker grabbed his hand and squeezed it hard. Taylor knew what she was thinking and she was probably right. He didn’t think she’d have any luck in getting the service onboard with their being part of this investigation, but she almost certainly had a better chance of getting their active cooperation than he did.

“Agent?” Whitaker said, prompting the man standing at one end of the conference room table.

“Michael Cole, SAIC for Senator Caldwell’s detail.”

“Agent Cole, I can appreciate your position. I’ve been with the Bureau for ten years and I know how territorial we can be, so I get it, I really do. I can also understand someone in the Senator’s position wanting to pull every lever she can when she and her family's lives are on the line. I can promise that we will try and keep our investigation parallel to yours and try and stay out of your way. We will, of course, share with you anything we find. I think, if you look at the situation, you’ll acknowledge that we bring a different set of skills to the situation. If you let us do what we excel at, I can promise you’ll find we will be an asset in this situation.”

“Agent Whitaker, we know very well who you two are. Even if you hadn’t been on the news so much earlier this year, you’ve been in Senator Caldwell's orbit long enough for us to have looked you up. I’ll admit until recently, you’re own record has been exemplary. However, Mr. Taylor here doesn’t have a law enforcement background, and from your colleagues we’ve talked to, he has been fairly reckless. While we would still have an issue with someone from an outside agency being part of this investigation, Mr. Taylor’s presence is what really concerns us.”

“If you’ve looked at his track record, I think you’ll find his success rate is extremely high. Besides stopping an imminent terrorist threat, the conviction rate and rate of guilty pleas on cases he’s been involved with are very high. I would argue that he has one of the higher ratios of anyone attached to the Bureau at the moment.”

“That’s only because two-thirds of the investigations have ended in mounds of corpses across three continents. Look, we aren’t trying to say that you two aren’t successful at what you’ve done. We were all impressed by your involvement in that terrorist attack last spring, but this is not the same situation. Chaos can make guarding the principle harder, not easier. We will find this person, but our focus has to be to protect the Senator until we do. I’ll say it again, the best thing you could do for your friend is to tell her you’re too close to this and that you’re going to leave it in our hands.”

“Agent Cole,” Taylor said, tired of being talked about in the third person. “Whitaker is too diplomatic to say this bluntly, but we’re going to investigate this. You guys are great at protecting someone, but this isn’t what you do. I find people. It’s what I do. I will find this guy, and I will make sure he isn’t a threat to the Senator, her staff, or anyone else around her anymore. I’m sure Agent Whitaker will do her best to make sure we don’t get in your way. I’ll promise to keep my ‘chaos’ down as much as possible. I’ll promise to keep you in the loop on anything we find. Really, though, none of that matters. Unless you’re willing to go back in that office and tell one of the most powerful members of the U.S. Senate and quite possibly the next President of the United States that you’re not going to let us in on the investigation, then this is all useless posturing. Instead of trying to show each other who’s boss, why don’t we actually get down to work.”

"Fine,” Cole said after a long pause. “We believe the package was the fourth item mailed to the Senator. The three previous letters were obviously not booby-trapped, but did contain an increasingly aggressive language, threatening the Senator. While they were filled with paranoid rants about some kind of religious belief that clearly suggest the suspect is dangerous, they did not hint towards the ability to perpetrate an attack this sophisticated.”

“How long have these letters been coming in?” Whitaker asked.

“Three months.”

“That’s a while,” Taylor said. “In three months you haven’t been able to track this person down?”

Cole’s mouth tightened at the implied insult and Whitaker’s foot tapped Taylors in silent warning, but he didn’t break eye contact with the agent. Taylor needed the Secret Service to be forthright, and the timeline didn’t make sense if this was the fourth letter over three months without any heightened state of security until now.

“I will be honest; we discounted the first two letters. Once you read them you will see they are insane ramblings. Since you probably haven’t been involved in screening a public figure’s mail before, you are probably not aware of how common this is. Protectees of the Senator’s level get unhinged mail in the dozens every day, some angry, some supporting, and some threatening. We take these seriously, but we also understand that the vast majority of these are generally harmless cranks unorganized to the point of being incapable of actually harming the protectee.”

“You said you still try and find them though, right?”

“We do look into the threatening ones, although it isn’t always possible to track them back to their sender, especially if they have a bad return address and were dropped in a corner mailbox. That is what happened in this case. They had different return addresses and were both dropped in mailboxes. To make matters more difficult, they were sent from two different cities, New York City and Savannah. We know what mailboxes they were dropped in, but one did not have a camera with an angle, so we couldn’t review footage from the days the letter would have been put into it.”

“You had video of one of the mailboxes though, right?”

“Yes. I’ll tell you now that unless the person is raving at thin air or pops on facial recognition in a federal database, one person posting a letter looks pretty much like everyone else. Of course, if you want, we will make available the videos of the day the letter was posted and you can go through them yourself.”

“I appreciate that, but no,” Taylor said.

He could just imagine what a colossal waste of time that would be. Once they had some kind of description or a better idea who this person was, that video might be useful in trying to track them back to somewhere they could ID them, but Taylor had no intention of wasting time on an obvious wild goose chase.”

“Why did you start taking it seriously at letter three, and where was it mailed from?”

“It was mailed from here in D.C., and again there was no camera with a good angle on the box. That was our first clue this was serious. Once was a coincidence, twice and there’s a good chance the suspect was making sure they didn’t show up on video, which suggests a level of organization that makes them immediately more dangerous. The other thing was that the letters started becoming more specific and more threatening.”

“What do you mean more specific?” Whitaker asked.

“It described both the Senator's driver and her personal assistant in detail, as well as some small other details that would almost certainly require some kind of surveillance.”

“She was being stalked and you didn’t tell her?” Taylor asked angrily.

“Stalking is a strong term for it. All of the details would be observable by just attending public events the Senator went to and paying enough attention. There wasn’t anything in the letter to suggest the suspect knows where she lives or has any inside knowledge of her schedule. We did take it seriously, however. As soon as we saw the letter, we doubled her detail and put uniformed patrols all over her neighborhood. The threats, while violent, were non-specific, as was the information we had on the suspect. There wasn’t anything to warn the Senator of, beyond an unspecified threat on her life. There wasn’t anything she could do that we hadn’t already done for her.”

“If a suspect is watching her at events, it’s not unspecified,” Taylor said, annoyed they were so cavalier with their protectee.

“It is because, until this attack, all the threats were non-specific. They just talked about her being some kind of religious boogie-man, woman, whatever, and vowed to stop her. This person is deranged, and it’s impossible to know what they meant by that.”

“Let’s move on,” Whitaker said, ever the peacemaker. “What did you do beyond increasing her detail once you got the third letter?”

“We added additional screening for her mail along with regular bomb sweeps of her home, offices, any hotel room she’d be scheduled to stay in.”

“How did the device got past the x-ray and bomb sniffers?” Whitaker asked.

“We’re still looking into that. The delivery device had no metal in it at all and was clearly designed to get around x-rays. We’re not sure how it got past the checks for known pathogens, since we aren’t sure exactly what the gas was. We sent the device to the FBI's lab in Quantico as soon as we cleared the room, but we haven’t heard back yet. After we show you the scene and the previous letters, feel free to go and talk to them about that.”

“Beyond picking mail locations without video surveillance, is there anything else that suggests this guy is hiding his identity?” Taylor asked.

“How would we know without knowing who he was to compare it too? I mean, the addresses were fake and he didn’t put his name on it. Other than that what would he need to hide?”

“I’ve chased down some wackjobs since I got out of the service, and the one thing the real crazies did was they didn’t try to hide who they were. On the other hand, they were so far gone that they didn’t think to not do things that normal people would do, that would give away information about themselves. Is it possible this guy’s given you enough information to find out who he is in the letters already, but you haven’t recognized it for what it is?”

“I’m not sure what you mean?”

“Have you tried looking at the letters from how he would have written them? Crazy people aren’t random. The stuff they do makes sense to them. It just seems crazy and random to us because we aren’t nuts. He might have left tons of information telling you who he is if you just consider it from his point of view.”

“You’re suggesting the way we find him is by thinking like a crazy person? How would that even work?”

“I wouldn’t know without looking at the letters. I’m just suggesting maybe he isn’t trying to hide his identity at all.”

“If you can figure that out, more power to you. I don’t think my directive to my agents will be ‘think like a crazy person.’”

Taylor gave up. For all the backhanded remarks Cole had made about the FBI, he wasn’t that different from most of the career FBI agents Taylor had met. They were all good at their jobs, but they all got extremely focused on the ‘right’ way to do things, and got tunnel vision. Cole had procedures for how he investigated threats to a target, and he couldn’t see outside of those procedures. That was the one thing he liked about Whitaker. As stuck in protocol as she sometimes was, she could also look outside of those protocols and see the bigger picture.

“What are your plans, now?”

“We have added more men to every shift and at the Senator's home and office. We’re doing more advanced work for her travel, and we’re still following up on places where these letters were mailed from. While we want to find this guy, we can’t bank on that.”

While Taylor was certain Caldwell only called them in because she was worried, he was now very glad she had. The Secret Service was good at its job, but multiple attempts over the years had shown that it was impossible to protect someone completely, especially from someone truly unhinged.

The ability to get his device through the various checks told Taylor that this guy had the skills to back up his determination, which made him extra dangerous.

“Fine, let's go see the site.”