Election Day (John Taylor #6) - Chapter 6

When they finally tracked down Agent Cole and got him on the phone, the man sounded particularly annoyed to hear from them.

“We’re busy here, Agent Whitaker,” he said.

Taylor couldn’t help but notice how he usually addressed Whitaker first. It made sense. Even though she wasn’t in the Secret Service, she was still traditional Law Enforcement. Taylor was a wild card that people like Cole had trouble getting a handle on. He was fine with that, since keeping them off balance worked in his favor.

“We’ve identified your suspect,” Taylor said.

“What!? How?”

“We followed leads in the letter.”

Taylor’s tone made it clear he was saying ‘I told you so,’ since that was exactly what he said the Secret Service needed to do.

“Who is he?”

“Peter Hubbard,” Whitaker said. “Former Special Forces and EOD, kicked out of the military on a psych discharge. We believe he’s schizophrenic from people we’ve talked to, but we’re waiting to get records on him now. He’s bought into the beliefs of an ancient Christian sect from the first century, and thinks that Senator Caldwell is some kind of religious antichrist figure and he’s the only person who can stop her.”

“We’ll get his picture out, now. If he’s that crazy, it won’t be that hard to find him.”

“Cole, he’s …” Taylor started but stopped when Whitaker gripped his forearm, silencing him.

“We saw him today,” Whitaker said instead.

“You saw him? Why is he not in custody?”

“He was ready, set up a pipe bomb,” Taylor said.

“So you let him get away? We’ll get men headed that way now. Where are you?”

Taylor knew that Cole was just taking a cheap shot, probably in response to Taylor’s ‘I told you so.’

“Rochester, New York. He was here to talk to a professor he knew when he studied theology before joining the service in two-thousand one. We’ve already interviewed her, and she doesn’t know where he lives. I think he was only here to talk to her, since she was the one who originally introduced him to the Christian sect that he believes in. I don’t think he’ll stick around here.”

“We’ll still need to interview her as well. I’ll have agents there in a few hours.”

“We might not be here,” Taylor warned. “I think he’s going to head back to Washington, since that’s where Caldwell is.”

“You do what you need to do; we’re still going to send agents up there. Have you bothered to put out a BOLO on him and get him boxed in?”

“Yes,” Whitaker said, ignoring the implied insult. “Both local and highway patrol are on the lookout for him. We don’t know what he was driving and he has nothing registered in his name. He has no known current address and hasn’t filed for either taxes or unemployment since he left the military. He’s completely off the grid.”

“No one is completely off the grid, Agent Whitaker. Good job finding out who he is, we’ll take it from here.”

With that, Cole disconnected the line.

“We’ll take it from here? He didn’t want us going this far, and if we’d listened to him, we still wouldn’t know who Hubbard was.”

“They’re just territorial,” Whitaker said.

“All of you are. It’s one of the biggest things that keep all of you from being as effective as you could be. Each agency has its own specialty; they don’t need anyone else with a different specialty.”

“Either way, that’s what we have to deal with, so what’s next?”

“I think we should head back to D.C., Caldwell is his target, so ultimately he’s going to be wherever she is. I’m positive the only reason he was here was to talk to Professor Wood. We won’t know till we start backtracking his life, but I’m betting she’s one of the few people he talks to about his delusion, since she was there at the beginning. He won’t stay here though. He’s going to go back to Washington, and we need to be where he is.”

“You don’t think we’re going to get him in between here and there?”

“No. Guys who get picked up like that make mistakes. Hubbard hasn’t made any yet. Besides, the Secret Service is going to have people here in a few hours. We don’t need to duplicate what they’re doing; we need to do what they aren’t doing. Let them do the legwork here.”

They were both startled when the conference room door opened and a small dark-haired woman stuck her head inside the room.

“Agent Taylor?” she asked.

“I’m Taylor.”

“You have a phone call on line three,” She said before stepping back into the hall, closing the door behind her.

Taylor looked at Whitaker, confused. Nearly all of the calls he received were on his cell phone, and other than the Secret Service and the FBI agents Whitaker had requested out of Buffalo, he couldn’t think of anyone who knew they working out of the Rochester federal building. The Secret Service wasn’t likely calling him back and the FBI would have called looking for Whitaker, not Taylor.

Picking up the phone Taylor said, “This is Taylor.”

“Hello, John. I was impressed that you managed to get out of the way of my diversion. You’ve got pretty good reflexes.”

Taylor snapped at Whitaker, pointing at the phone, mouthing ‘it’s him.’

As Whitaker pulled out her cell phone, Taylor said, “I try to keep sharp. How’d you manage to track me down?”

“It wasn’t hard. You’re not based out of Rochester and would have needed somewhere to work out of, hoping to catch me. This was the most logical first option for me to check.”

“Impressive, although I’m a little surprised that you know who I am, let alone where I work out of.”

“You’re her warrior, John, how could I not know who you are. We were always warned that she would work through servants. While the beast has many who serve her, most of them are lackeys, playing at being important. I recognized you for what you were, however. You might have given speeches for her, but that wasn’t who you are. You and I aren’t all that different, aside from serving different masters.”

“Who do you serve, Peter?”

“God, of course, and the Archangel Michael. He has shown me the truth and tasked me to be the latest to stop her machinations. I am Agamemnon, leading armies to stop Helen at the walls of Troy. I am John Fitzalan on the fields of Compiegne, putting Joan of Arc in irons. I am Suetonius Paulinus ending the rampage of Boudica.”

“Why do you think Senator Caldwell’s this person you’re fighting?”

“I don’t think she is,” Hubbard said, his voice finally breaking from its calm cadence into anger. “I know she is. I’ve watched for the signs. I will stop her before she is in place to break the final seal.”

Taylor had clearly hit a nerve, although he wasn’t clear on what all the insane ramblings actually meant.

“You could come in and talk to me. You’re right, we aren’t that different. I joined the 10th right before you got out. I’ve been to a lot of the same places as you. The army kicked me out on a section eight too. I promise I’ll hear you out and do right by you. Come in and talk to me.”

Hubbard laughed. It was a strange, cackling laugh that sent shivers down Taylors back.

“I appreciate the offer, but I don’t think so. To serve the beast is to sell your soul. You may have been like me once, but we chose different paths. While I was recruited by Michael, you took your silver. There is no coming back from that degradation.”

Whitaker waved at Taylor to get his attention. Once he made eye contact with her, she made a ‘keep going’ gesture with her hand, pointed at her phone, and then held up two fingers. Taylor gave her a nod. If he kept Hubbard on the phone long enough they might be able to work out where Hubbard was. While it would have meant that Taylor was wrong when he predicted Hubbard wouldn’t hang around, he’d accept that if it meant catching the man.

Whitaker had been working on both her and his cell phones while he talked to Hubbard. Whitakers FBI agents were already in town and Taylor assumed she’d already alerted them to be ready to move as soon as they had his location.

“If you don’t want to come in and talk to me, why did you track me down?”

“I wanted to get a sense of you. While everyone else runs around like ants, you found me. I’ll be honest; I was surprised when I saw you walk through the door. I do hope you don’t hold my actions against Professor Wood. She’s a good woman, but she’s not part of this fight. She deserves to live her life, but I can’t allow her to remain in captivity. Better to be dead than in the beast’s chains. You may serve the beast, but that doesn’t mean you’re without honor. If you promise me she will be spared my actions, I’ll believe you.”

“I promise nothing will happen to the professor,” Taylor said, scribbling a note down for Whitaker to have someone placed on the professor. “Why’d you come see her then?”

“The Word isn’t always easy to understand. I’d hoped she’d be able to help me interpret some of the visions God has given me, but you interrupted before that happened. Honestly, I’m impressed you managed to get that close. Had you been a little faster, you might have the victory the beast has wanted. I won’t underestimate you again, now that I know you’re in the fight.”

“Hubbard, you don’t need to kill anyone else. You need to stop, now.”

“I haven’t killed anyone. The beast’s minions aren’t people, John. I know you look like people and you even probably think you are, but you’re not. Not really. Of course, if I have to kill a real person to get to the beast, I will. God will recognize their sacrifice and lift them into heaven. I have to go now John, before you can get your minions here to find me. I think we will be seeing each other again, though.”

“Wait. Hubbard …” Taylor said, but the line clicked off. “That guy is bat-shit crazy.”

“Is he going after Professor Wood?” Whitaker asked, her cell phone still to her ear.

“He made a threat against her. Apparently, he likes her, which means if she’s in custody he has to kill her for her own good.”

“The locals said they’d put a car outside her office and home, but I don’t think she’s in trouble. We have a trace on Hubbard, and people are on their way there now, but it’s a ways out. He’s at a rest stop an hour south of here.”

“Headed back to D.C.?”

“That direction, yeah.”

“We won’t get him. He’ll have been back on the road the minute he hung up on me. By the time you get someone there, he’ll be miles away.”

“Yeah, I assumed; but it’s a major gas station, so I’m hoping they have video of the parking lot. If we can get him on security footage we might see his car. Even if we don’t get the license plate, knowing what he’s driving will help find him.”

“Maybe,” Taylor said, almost certain that Hubbard would have thought of that and kept anything that could track him off-camera. “He knew he had a window to talk before he needed to be mobile again. If he thought of that, he thought of security cameras too.”

“Maybe, but it’s worth checking.”

“Yeah. Get them on that and then let’s get a flight out. He won’t be in D.C. until sometime in the morning. I want to be there ahead of him.”

Washington, D.C.

It took time for them to wrap up and head for the airport. Whitaker had to coordinate with the agents from Buffalo as they both searched for Hubbard and worked the crime scene at the college. She also had to coordinate between them and the Secret Service, which wasn’t exactly easy, as neither group wanted to give the other a chance at taking a newsworthy case away from them.

While she did that, Taylor made calls to friends to start the wheels rolling on his next plan to track down Hubbard. While nothing he needed was sensitive or otherwise impossible to obtain, all of it took time for people to pull together. It was already fairly late, so he knew he wouldn’t have answers even when they landed back in Washington. He didn’t want to add any more delay, however, so he got the wheels turning now, hopefully meaning he’d have something in the morning.

Finally, both finished up what they needed to do and decamped from the federal courthouse, catching a red-eye flight back to Washington. Taylor managed to fall asleep as soon as they were in the air, getting a nap in while they were out of contact. Whitaker was always annoyed by how easily he could sleep just about anywhere. While he wasn’t well-rested, he could still keep going when they landed, while Whitaker was practically the walking dead. She wanted to go straight to the Hoover building to follow up on leads, but Taylor convinced her to let him drive them back home instead. They’d need to be up early and if Whitaker kept pushing herself, she’d be no good to either of them.

He managed to convince her that they were ahead of Hubbard, and they had the time to rest. The man might be crazy, but he was still human. Hubbard had been up all day, too; presumably driving up to Rochester and then driving back overnight. He’d have to stop and sleep, which meant they had time. Although Whitaker relented, she still had both of them up by seven in the morning, headed back to the Bureau’s offices.

They didn’t get as much rest as Taylor would have wanted since, with the identification of Hubbard and his sighting in New York, Cole had announced a task force to apprehend Hubbard. While it would be composed of agents from Homeland Security, the FBI, U.S. Marshalls and headed by the Secret Service, a tersely worded email informed Whitaker that she and Taylor were definitely not part of the task force. It went on to say that, while they were entitled to be present at the meeting, they were there as a courtesy, and not entitled to take part in the planning or activity of the task force in any way.

Whitaker was annoyed by the email, railing against the short-sighted stupidly of playing interagency games at this point. Taylor, on the other hand, felt right at home. He preferred to operate on the outside, since it afforded him less scrutiny and more latitude to do things his way.

They arrived early for the task force meeting, sitting in the back of the large room in the now reopened EEOB. The room started filling up with small groups of agents from various agencies, each of whom would be assigned different roles in the manhunt for Hubbard. Some of the groups knew each other and chatted, while others didn’t seem to know anyone, and just found a seat and sat quietly.

Whitaker exchanged nods with a few of the attendees, including the group from the FBI, but none of them came over to talk to them. It was clear the message had gotten out that he and Whitaker were on the no-go list, and they didn’t want to get themselves on the same list. While she was pissed at Cole, their behavior didn’t seem to bother her, since she understood that people needed to play the politics, if they were going to make it after a certain level at any of the agencies.

Cole came in a few minutes behind the last attendees and strode purposefully up to the front of the room. Several other Secret Service agents that Taylor hadn’t met yet came in with him.

“Thank you all for coming. Last night my agency submitted a request to the Department of Justice for an interagency task force to find and apprehend a priority suspect, which they granted early this morning. I know you were all sent the current case file we have opened but since some of you have only had access to these files for a few hours, let me summarize the current situation.”

“For several months we have been intercepting increasingly threatening letters sent to Senator Caldwell. While all candidates received their fair share of threats, most are just angry people looking to vent. After opening a formal investigation, we concluded that this was not one of those instances. The letters, all of which you should have a copy of, were filled with disturbing threats and statements that suggested the sender was both severely mentally ill and a credible threat to the protectee.”

Taylor couldn’t help but remember some of the things Cole had said just one day ago, when he downplayed the sender’s seriousness.

“Early yesterday morning the sender's latest letter arrived, this time containing a highly sophisticated device for delivering toxic materials that was capable of going undetected. Unfortunately, one of our agents was killed by this device while doing a routine check of the protectee's mail. The level of sophistication in the delivery mechanism meant the person we were dealing with wasn’t just dangerous, but very capable. We have since been able to identify the suspect as Sergeant Peter Hubbard.”

Taylor and Whitaker exchanged a look as Cole casually took credit for Hubbard’s identification without so much as a mention of their involvement.

“Hubbard was a member of both Army Special Forces and Army EOD before being released on a medical discharge. He’s been diagnosed with schizophrenia among several other mental disorders, and has built an elaborate belief structure around Senator Caldwell. I’m pointing this out because I want you to be aware of how capable this man is. He intends to murder one of the Presidential candidates, and has the abilities to succeed unless we stop him.”

“Hubbard is currently in the wind. He was sighted yesterday in Rochester and we know he was driving back towards the D.C. area last night. We put up checkpoints up and down the most obvious points between here and Rochester, as well as issued a priority BOLO, but so far nothing has turned up. I believe it’s safe to say he either is, or will shortly be, back in the District. While the Secret Service can provide enough protection for a candidate, as we all know, it is difficult to fully secure any protectee from an unpredictable and determined hostile. What we have requested from DOJ is assistance in particular areas where you are better equipped to investigate, hopefully bringing down this suspect before he kills anyone else.”

“Although you’ll find the specific areas where we need additional coverage in your packets, I’ll quickly go over them now so that everyone knows what everyone else is up to. If you need to coordinate with one of the other teams, please go through my office so we can make sure everything is centralized and intelligence is properly distributed. The ATF team will be looking into the chemical attack here at the EEOB and the small explosive used in Rochester. We’d like to know if any of these can be traced back to their source. The FBI will head the on-the-ground manhunt, so that we can reserve our resources for the direct protection of the primary. We asked the U.S. Marshalls to join us and support their investigation. I know your teams have worked together before, so I expect you’ll be able to coordinate the search without any issues. Lastly, Homeland will take the lead on watching and securing public transportation in the District, in case Hubbard decides to change his method of travel.”

He looked at each of the groups to confirm they were all clear on their assignments. When none of the agents had questions, he closed his notebook but didn’t move from the podium.

“For the time being, we have convinced Senator Caldwell to remain in the District. While it does keep her in a place where Hubbard can find her, he has shown that he is able to follow her effectively as she travels, so we aren’t giving him that much of an advantage. In return, we can limit the areas we need to secure and box Hubbard into a contained area. We’ve already received access to traffic cams from Metro P.D. If there are any other resources you need, please let my office know and we’ll get it for you. Good luck.”

With that, his team walked out of the briefing room. The rest of the agents milled around for a bit longer, but Taylor didn’t care to wait and see what they were going to do.

“We don’t want to talk to any of them?” Whitaker asked as she followed him out of the building.

“No. They’re taking Cole’s lead, and he’s still treating Hubbard like a normal criminal and not a highly trained professional with decades of experience and whose motivation, at least from his point of view, is to stop the literal end of the world. Hubbard isn’t going to show up at a bus terminal, ID in hand.”

“Tracing the chemicals used in that first attack might work.”

“Maybe. It’s the thing they’re doing that has the highest chance of working, anyway, so let them do it. If they find him through that, great. I’m going to go on the assumption that Hubbard is smarter than that and they won’t find him, though. If he’s paranoid enough to carry a bomb with him just in case, even when he doesn’t think the authorities know where he is, then I don’t think he’s going to use something he knows we’ll get our hands on that leads back to him.”

“Okay, so what should they be doing?”

“What Cole should have done was ask DOD to lend him some CID guys. Hubbard was career military. That gets soaked into your brain, and you don’t just lose it. They would know how he thinks and how to get ahead of him.”

“Let me guess, you’re going to use your powers as a vet to guess where he’s going.”

“Something like that. At least, I have an idea where we can go to start looking for him.”

“Where?”

“The post office,” Taylor said, smiling at her.

She just shook her head and followed him to the parking garage.