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Outside the condemned building, Bijan said, “Thank you for bringing this to our attention, Ms. Stone.”
“You would have figured it out eventually,” Bree said, pulling a business card from her purse. She handed it to Volt. “Can I get your contact information?”
Volt hesitated, then went to her purse and brought out a simple off-white card with her name, email address, and phone number embossed on it in gold lettering.
“No company name?”
“We are a family office,” Volt said, and almost smiled.
Bree pointed to her sedan. “This is me.”
“And we are just there,” Bijan said, gesturing toward a Mercedes-Benz G-Wagon parked across the street.
“Goodbye, Ms. Stone,” Volt said, and they crossed to their car.
Bree got in her car, memorized their Delaware license plate, and drove off.
72
ON THE OTHER SIDE of the road, Egon Bijan climbed into the driver’s seat of the Benz, shut the door, and looked at Tatiana Volt, who was openly furious with him.
“Go ahead, get it off your chest,” he said in Russian. “You know you want to.”
She exploded, shrieking, “I told you that it was going too far! I told you, and now we are drawing attention!”
Bijan roared back at her, “How the hell was I supposed to know it would inspire copycats?”
73
I FOUND JOHN SAMPSON sitting with Nina Hanson, a Loudon County sheriff’s detective, outside Alejandro Rodriguez’s room in the overwhelmed emergency unit at Inova Fair Oaks Hospital near Chantilly, Virginia, the closest medical facility to the private airfield at Dulles.
The couple from Hilton Head were there too, as were the wounded mechanics and Nancy Brinker. The Clouds’ dogs had miraculously survived unscathed.
My partner’s head and upper arm lacerations had required stitches. Detective Hanson told me that Sampson had refused to leave Hawk’s bedside, so the doctor sewed John up at the foot of Rodriguez’s bed while the ex–Special Forces operator was treated with sedatives and IV fluids.
“You and I are not going to be able to hold him,” I told Sampson outside Hawk’s room.
“What? Why not? We busted him.”
“The FBI’s involved because of the airport, but don’t worry, Mahoney caught the case, and he knows we think Hawk is good for four murders.”
“Federal custody, then?” Detective Hanson asked.
I nodded. “They’ll probably take him to Alexandria.”
Sampson scowled. “Not before we—”
A harried doctor came out of Hawk’s room, shut the door, and looked at us. “He had a gorilla’s dose of psilocybin in him. It’s a wonder his brain didn’t drain out his ears.”
I said, “You’ll get us hard numbers on what was in his system?”
“They’re still in the lab, but yes.”
“He alert?” Sampson asked.
“Coming around,” she said. Her name, Allegra Le, was stitched on her white coat.
“Dr. Le, I read him his Miranda rights at the airport,” I said. “Would he have understood them?”
