“Not me,” Jake Grafton said with finality. “I have no reason to go prying into someone else’s dirty little business. And no levers to pry with even if I were foolish enough to try.” He tossed Toad’s summary at him. “Put this into the burn bag and let’s get back to work.”
* * *
On Friday evening Jake took Callie and Amy to a movie. Afterward they stopped for ice cream. It was a little after eleven before Amy wheeled the car into the driveway and killed the engine. Jake got out of the passenger seat and held the rear door open for Callie.
“Well, Mom, what’d’ya think?” Amy asked.
“You drive too fast.”
“I do not! Do I, Dad?”
“Wasn’t that a great movie?” said Jake Grafton.
“Dad!” Amy exclaimed in anguish. “Don’t avoid the issue. Oooh, I just hate it when you do that!”
From the porch — this rambling three-story brick built in the 1920s still had its porch — Jake waved to the federal protective service guard standing on the corner under the light, then opened the door with his key.
“You two are just so narrow bandwidth,” Amy continued, “so totally random.” Still talking in a conversational tone of voice, she made for the stairs and started up. “It’s like I’m stuck in an uncool fossil movie, some black-and-white Ronald Reagan time warp with all the girls in letter sweaters and white socks and the boys in duck’s ass greasecuts—”
“Amy Carol,” Callie called up the stairs. “I’ll have none of that kind of language in my house.”
Her voice came floating down. “I’m the last kid in America growing up with Ozzie and Harriet…”
“You’re very narrow bandwidth, Harriet,” Jake told his wife, who grinned.
“What does that mean?” she asked softly.
“I don’t know,” her husband confessed. He kissed her on the forehead and led the way to the kitchen. After Callie made coffee and poured him a cup, he took it upstairs to the study.
He flipped on the light and started. A man was sitting behind the desk. Another sat on the couch.
Automatically Jake’s eye went to the door of the safe. It was still closed.
The men were in suits and ties. The man on the couch had blond hair and spoke first. “Come in and close the door, Admiral.”
Jake stood where he was. “How’d you two get in here?”
“Come in and close the door. Unless you want your wife and daughter to hear this.”
Jake obeyed.
“Want to tell me who you are?” he said.
Now the man behind the desk spoke. “You haven’t hit the right question yet, Admiral. Ask us why we’re here.”
Jake remembered the coffee in his hand and sipped it as he examined the visitors. Both under forty, but not by much. Short hair, clean-shaven, reasonably fit.
“Get out of my chair,” he said to the man behind the desk.
“Admiral, that confrontational tone is not going to get us anywhere. Why don’t you sit down and we’ll—”
Jake tossed the remainder of the coffee at the man’s face.
The liquid hit the target, then some of it splashed on the desk. The man grunted, then wiped his face with his left hand. He stood up slowly. As he got fully erect the blond man on the couch uncoiled explosively in Jake’s direction.
Jake had been expecting this. He smashed the coffee cup into the side of the blond man’s face with his right hand — the cup shattered — and followed it up with a hard left that connected with the man’s skull and jolted Jake clear to the elbow. But then the man had his shoulder into Jake’s chest and slammed him back against the bookcase. The other man was coming around the desk.
Jake tried to use a knee on his assailant’s body. No. He tried to chop with both hands at the back of the man’s neck. He succeeded only in getting himself off balance, so his blows lacked power.
The man from the desk drew back a right and delivered a haymaker to Jake’s chin.
The admiral saw stars and lost his balance completely.
When his vision cleared he was on the floor, the blond standing and the other man kneeling beside him. Blondie was using a handkerchief on the side of his face. When he withdrew it Jake could see blood.
“You’ve had your nose in a matter that doesn’t concern you, Admiral. You’re not Batman or Jesus H. Christ. This visit was just a friendly warning. You’ve got a wife and kid and it would be a hell of a shame if anything happened to them. Do you understand me?”
“Jake?” It was Callie’s voice. She was outside the door. She rattled the knob. The men had locked it. “What’s going on in there, Jake?”
“What matter?” Jake asked.
“The same thing that happened to Nigel Keren could happen to you. It could happen to your wife. It could happen to your daughter.”
Outside the door Callie’s voice was up an octave. “Jake, are you all right? Jake, speak to me!”
“Be a hell of a shame,” Blondie said, “if your fifteen-year-old daughter died of heart failure, wouldn’t it? A hell of a shame. And you’d have only yourself to blame.”
“Jake!”
“Think about it,” the first man said, then stood up. He unlocked the door and pulled it open.
“Excuse us, please,” he said to Callie and walked by her for the stairs, the blond man at his heels.
Stunned, Callie stared after them, then rushed to Jake, who was getting up.
He was still dizzy. He leaned on the bookcase. “Make sure they leave,” he told his wife and pushed her gently toward the door.
He sagged down onto the couch and lowered his head onto the arm. His jaw ached badly. He felt his teeth. One seemed loose.
When Callie came back he was sitting at his desk. “Jake, who were those men?”
“I dunno.”
She started to speak and he held up his hand. She cocked her head quizzically. He held a finger to his lips. Then he reached for paper and wrote:
The place may be bugged. I’ll search it later. Please go downstairs and throw away all the food in the house. Everything except the stuff in sealed cans. All milk, soda pop, beer, frozen food, coffee, everything.
She read it and looked puzzled.
“I’ll explain later,” he said. “Please, go do it.”
She went.
Jake Grafton sat looking out his window for about fifteen seconds, then he knelt by the safe and opened it. His gun was still there, an old Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum that he had carried when he flew in Vietnam. All the classified documents seemed to be as he had left them. After he closed and locked the safe, he rooted through his bottom desk drawer for the box of shells. He loaded the pistol and stuck it in the small of his back, under the belt.
Downstairs in the kitchen he kissed his wife. “Where are the car keys?”
“In my purse.”
Jake helped himself, then snagged his coat from the hall rack. “I’ll be back in a little while,” he said.
“Where are you going?”
“Tarkington’s. There’s a chance those guys stopped here first. They’re delivering messages tonight.”
“Why don’t you call Toad?”
“I want to see these guys again.”
“Jake, be careful.”
“You know me, Callie. I’m always careful.” He kissed her again and let her close the door behind him.
The uniformed guard was walking the beat on the sidewalk. Jake stopped beside him and rolled down his window. “Did you see two men come out of my house?”
“Yessir. They got into a car parked across the street.”
“What kind of car?”
“I don’t know, sir. It was a sedan with government plates. Is there a problem, Admiral?”
“No. No problem. They forgot something, that’s all. Thanks.” He took his foot off the brake and got the car in motion before the man could ask any more questions.
The pistol was a hard lump where his back pressed against the seat.
* * *
As he walked back he kept looking in parked cars. He saw no one.
These guys were sloppy. No lookouts, no driver waiting behind the wheel, a government sedan, for Christ’s sake! They were just out putting the fear of God in a few people tonight and not bothering to do it right.
Jake tried the door of the sedan. It was unlocked. He popped the hood latch and eased the door shut. Feeling in the darkness he jerked the leads off the spark plugs, then let the hood down gently. Then he got behind the front of Rita’s car, got the pistol out, and waited.
Jake was under no illusions. This was going to be dicey. He was going to have to get control of this situation quickly before these two clowns had a chance to think about it. If he pulled the trigger the cops would be here in short order, someone was going to be arrested, and someone was going to have a lot of explaining to do. And someone — Jake suspected that he might wind up as this someone — would probably find himself in more trouble than he could get himself out of.
He had waited no more than three minutes when he heard the Tarkingtons’ front door open.
He got down on his hands and knees in front of Rita’s car and looked under it. He saw their feet. They got into the sedan. A muttered oath.
The passenger door opened and a set of feet came around to the front of the car. Grafton straightened and peered through the window of Rita’s car.
The sedan’s hood was up. The blond man was looking into the engine compartment.
Jake went to his left, around Rita’s Mazda. The hood obscured the driver’s view and the blond had his back to Jake. He heard Jake coming at the last instant and started to turn just as the pistol butt thunked into his head. He went down like a sack of potatoes.
Jake grasped the butt of the revolver with his right hand and stepped around to the driver’s door. He jerked it open.
“Get out.”
The dark-haired man looked slightly stunned.
Jake reached with his left hand and got a handful of shirt and tie. He jerked hard. The man half fell out of the seat. Jake jabbed the gun barrel into his ear and kept pulling.
“Jesus, you can’t—”
“Get up and walk or I’ll blow your brains out.” He jabbed savagely with the gun barrel.
The man came along.
“Tarkington,” Jake called. “Get out here.”
The door opened and the stoop light came on.
“Toad, turn off that light and get out here.”
Tarkington came out. He was in his pajamas and they were torn half off his chest. “That one on the ground,” Jake said, nodding. “Clean out his pockets. Everything. Put him into the sedan and bring all the stuff inside.”
Rita held the door.
In the living room Jake hooked the dark-haired man’s leg and sent him sprawling.
“Search him, Rita, and tell me what happened.”
Rita Moravia was wearing a robe over a nightie. Her hair was down. She began pulling things from the man’s pockets as she talked. “They rang the doorbell and told Toad they were from the DIA and you sent them over here. He let them in. I heard a scuffle out here in the living room and came out and they had knocked him down. They made some threats.”
“How long were they here?”
“Seven or eight minutes. No more.” Rita had finished with the man’s rear trouser pockets and side coat pockets. She rolled him over without ceremony and emptied his inside jacket pockets. She turned his front trouser pockets inside out.
“Feel him all over for weapons.”
Rita did so. “Nope. Just the one wallet, and this.” She held up a card encased in plastic attached to a chain. Jake had seen ones like this before. It was a pass to the CIA’s Langley facility.
Jake picked up the wallet and examined it. He extracted the driver’s license and held it out so he could read it. “Okay, Paul Tanana of 2134 North Wood Duck Drive, Burke, Virginia. Want to tell us who sent you on this little errand?”
Rita was finished. She gathered the CIA pass and the change, keys and pens and placed them on a coffee table.
“I asked you a question,” Jake said.
Tanana glowered. “You’ll be sorry for this.”
“I’m sorry I ever laid eyes on you. Who sent you?”
Silence.
“Rita, check on Toad.”
The gun felt heavy in Jake’s hand. He kept it pointed at Tanana, who was rubbing his ear. Jake rubbed his fingers back and forth across the stiff plastic of the driver’s license.
In a moment Rita and Toad came in. “Guy didn’t have a gun,” Toad said. “Just a wallet and a CIA pass and a little pack of lock picks.”
“Who sent you to see me tonight?” Jake asked Tanana.
The man snorted. “You ain’t gonna shoot me.”
What’s wrong here?
Jake looked again at the driver’s license, at the clear plastic, the perfect edges.
He put the license into his pocket and eared back the hammer of the revolver. He approached Tanana. He bent down and placed the barrel of the weapon against the man’s temple.
“You’re right. I’m not going to shoot you tonight. But if anything ever happens to my wife or kid — if you ever get within a mile of my wife or kid — if I ever see you within a mile of my house — I’ll blow your fucking brains out and I’ll take a great deal of pleasure in doing it, Paul-baby. Are you getting the message?”
“I got it.”
Jake rose and backed off. “I jerked the wires off the spark plugs on your car. Put them back on and get the hell out of here.”
Tanana got slowly to his feet. “What about our stuff? Our wallets?”
“We’ll keep them. Maybe I’ll frame the CIA passes and display them over at the DIA. They’ll be wonderful souvenirs. Now get out.”
Tanana went.
Jake watched from the doorway as Tanana worked on the car. It took a couple minutes. “Rita, get a pencil and write this down. U.S. government plate, XRC-five-four-five.”
He was wondering if he’d hit the blond man too hard when Tanana slammed the hood down. He got behind the wheel, started the engine and backed out onto the street.
“I think you cracked the other guy’s skull,” Toad said as the sedan drove slowly away. Typical Tarkington, Jake reflected. He could almost read his boss’s mind.
Jake closed the door and locked it. “I could sure use a cup of coffee.”
* * *
Callie was sitting on the stairs waiting for him when he came through the front door. After he ensured the door was locked behind him, he hung up his coat and took a seat on the step beside her.
“Who were they?”
Jake passed her the wallets. She opened them and looked at the licenses, credit cards, and other items. When she had finished he handed her the CIA passes.
“CIA,” she whispered.
Jake extracted his own wallet from his right hip pocket and took out his driver’s license. He held it out so he could see it. “I got this about a year and a half ago. Look how it’s curved from being in the wallet and how the edges have frayed. Now look at those other licenses.”
Callie did so. “They’re like new,” she said.
“They shouldn’t be. They were issued a couple years ago. And the credit cards. Notice how the black ink on the raised numbers has yet to rub off. I don’t think they’ve ever been used.”
“So?”
“These two clowns were over at Tarkington’s when I got there. I slugged one and we searched the other.”
“They let you do this?”
“That’s an interesting question.” Jake pulled the pistol out and showed it to Callie. “You wave a gun around and everyone does what you tell them, just like in the movies.” And he had had the oppor
tunity to surprise them. A couple of klutzs, or were they?
“What if they had had guns?”
“Then I’d have cheerfully shot the bastards and called the cops.” He stood. “So they didn’t have guns. They were betting I wouldn’t panic.” The more he thought about it, the more sure he was that the whole scene was just an act. But why?
“Let’s go to bed.”
He helped her to her feet.
“I still don’t understand,” she said. “Were they CIA or not?”
“I don’t know,” Jake said slowly. “Through the years several people have accused the CIA of using agents to deliver warnings — of intimidation attempts. Yet in every case where the accusation was made public, it turned out that the CIA had no agents like the people supposedly involved. Now you tell me — were those two guys CIA agents carrying their own ID, CIA agents carrying false ID, or someone else’s hired help using false CIA ID?”
“But the message is clear. Lay off.”
“Precisely. It’s from someone very powerful, someone who cannot be reached. And that is part of the message.”
* * *
He had the toothpaste on his brush and the brush in his mouth when it hit him.
He took the brush out of his mouth and stared at it. Then he examined the toothpaste tube. Nothing could be easier than poisoning a tube of toothpaste. Merely unscrew the cap and stick a syringe in, then screw the cap back on.
But they had had no syringe on them. At Tarkington’s house, anyway. For all he knew they could have thrown it in the gutter or put it in the garbage pail out behind the Graftons’ house where it would be hauled away on Tuesday.
A knot developed in his stomach.
He started to put the toothbrush back into his mouth, but he couldn’t.
Damn!
He rinsed out his mouth, then threw the toothbrush and the toothpaste into the wastebasket under the sink.
When he and Callie were in bed with the lights out, she asked, “How do you get yourself into these messes, anyway?”
“You make it sound like I’m a juvenile delinquent.”
“I’m scared.”
“That’s what they intended.”
“They succeeded. I’m frightened.”
“Me too,” he told her.
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