“This sort of appointment, I have to do them alone. You stay here. We’ll talk later. Move into Duke’s room, OK? I like my security closer to where I sleep.”
I put the spare magazines in my other pocket.
“OK,” I said.
He walked past me into the hallway, back toward the kitchen.
It was the kind of mental somersault that can slow you down. Extreme tension, and then extreme puzzlement. I walked to the front of the house and watched from a hallway window. Saw the Cadillac sweep around the carriage circle in the rain and head for the gate. It paused in front of it and Paulie came out of the gatehouse. They must have dropped him there on their way back from breakfast. Beck must have driven the final length of the driveway himself. Or Richard, or Elizabeth. Paulie opened the gate. The Cadillac drove through it and away into the rain and the mist. Paulie closed the gate. He was wearing a slicker the size of a circus tent.
I shook myself and turned back and went to find Richard. He had the kind of guileless eyes that hide nothing. He was still in the kitchen, drinking his coffee.
“You walk the shoreline this morning?” I asked him.
I asked it innocently and amiably, like I was just making conversation. If he had anything to hide, I would know. He would go red, look away, stammer, shuffle his feet. But he did none of those things. He was completely relaxed. He looked straight at me.
“Are you kidding?” he said. “Seen the weather?”
I nodded.
“Pretty bad,” I said.
“I’m quitting college,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because of last night,” he said. “The ambush. Those Connecticut guys are still on the loose. Not safe to go back. I’m staying right here for a spell.”
“You OK with that?”
He nodded. “It was mostly a waste of time.”
I looked away. The law of unintended consequences. I had just short-circuited a kid’s education. Maybe ruined his life. But then, I was about to send his father to jail. Or waste him altogether. So I guessed a BA didn’t matter very much, compared to that.
I went to find Elizabeth Beck. She would be harder to read. I debated my approach and couldn’t come up with anything guaranteed to work. I found her in a parlor tucked into the northwest corner of the house. She was in an armchair. She had a book open on her lap. It was Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak. Paperback. I had seen the movie. I remembered Julie Christie, and the music. “Lara’s Theme.” Train journeys. And a lot of snow. Some girl had made me go.
“It’s not you,” she said.
“What’s not me?”
“You’re not the government spy.”
I breathed out. She wouldn’t say that if she’d found my stash.
“Exactly,” I said. “Your husband just gave me a gun.”
“You’re not smart enough to be a government spy.”
“Aren’t I?”
She shook her head. “Richard was desperate for a cup of coffee just now. When we came in.”
“So?”
“Do you think he would have been if we’d really been out for breakfast? He could have had all the coffee he wanted.”
“So where did you go?”
“We were called to a meeting.”
“With who?”
She just shook her head, like she couldn’t speak the name.
“Paulie didn’t offer to drive us,” she said. “He summoned us. Richard had to wait in the car.”
“But you went in?”
She nodded. “They’ve got a guy called Troy.”
“Silly name,” I said.
“But a very smart guy,” she said. “He’s young, and he’s very good with computers. I guess he’s what they call a hacker.”
“And?”
“He just got partial access to one of the government systems in Washington. He found out they put a federal agent in here. Undercover. At first they assumed it was you. Then they checked a little further and found out it was a woman and she’s actually been here for weeks.”
I stared at her, not understanding. Teresa Daniel was off the books. The government computers knew nothing about her. Then I remembered Duffy’s laptop, with the Justice Department logo as the screensaver. I remembered the modem wire, trailing across the desk, going through the complex adapter, going into the wall, hooking up with all the other computers in the world. Had Duffy been compiling private reports? For her own use? For postaction justification?
“I hate to think what they’re going to do,” Elizabeth said. “To a woman.”
She shuddered visibly and looked away. I made it as far as the hallway. Then I stopped dead. There were no cars. And twelve miles of road before I would even begin to get anywhere. Three hours’ fast walk. Two hours, running.
“Forget it,” Elizabeth called. “Nothing to do with you.”
I turned around and stared in at her.
“Forget it,” she said again. “They’ll be doing it right now. It’ll be all over soon.”
The second time I ever saw Sergeant First Class Dominique Kohl was the third day she worked for me. She was wearing green battledress pants and a khaki T-shirt. It was very hot. I remember that. We were having some kind of a major heat wave. Her arms were tanned. She had the kind of skin that looks dusty in the heat. She wasn’t sweating. The T-shirt was great. She had her tapes on it, Kohl on the right and US Army on the left, both of them kicked up just a little by the curve of her breasts. She was carrying the file I had given her. It had gotten a little thicker, padded out with her notes.
“I’m going to need a partner,” she said to me. I felt a little guilty. Her third day, and I hadn’t even partnered her up. I wondered whether I’d given her a desk. Or a locker, or a room to sleep in.
“You met a guy called Frasconi yet?” I said.
“Tony? I met him yesterday. But he’s a lieutenant.”
I shrugged. “I don’t mind commissioned and noncommissioned working together. There’s no regulation against it. If there was, I’d ignore it anyway. You got a problem with it?”
She shook her head. “But maybe he does.”
“Frasconi? He won’t have a problem.”
“So will you tell him?”
“Sure,” I said. I made a note for myself, on a slip of blank paper, Frasconi, Kohl, partners. I underlined it twice, so I would remember. Then I pointed at the file she was carrying. “What have you got?”
“Good news and bad news,” she said. “Bad news is their system for signing out eyes-only paper is all shot to hell. Could be routine inefficiency, but more likely it’s been deliberately compromised to conceal stuff that shouldn’t be happening.”
“Who’s the guy in question?”
“A pointy-head called Gorowski. Uncle Sam recruited him right out of MIT. A nice guy, by all accounts. Supposed to be very smart.”
“Is he Russian?”
She shook her head. “Polish, from a million years ago. No hint of any ideology.”
“Was he a Red Sox fan up at MIT?”
“Why?”
“They’re all weird,” I said. “Check it.”
“It’s probably blackmail,” she said.
“So what’s the good news?”
She opened her file. “This thing they’re working on is a kind of small missile, basically.”
“Who are they working with?”
“Honeywell and the General Defense Corporation.”
“And?”
“This missile needs to be slim. So it’s going to be subcaliber. The tanks use hundred and twenty millimeter cannons, but the thing is going to be smaller than that.”
“By how much?”
“Nobody knows yet. But they’re working on the sabot design right now. The sabot is a kind of sleeve that surrounds the thing to make it up to the right diameter.”
“I know what a sabot is,” I said.
She ignored me. “It’s going to be a discarding sabot, which means it comes apart and falls awa
y immediately after the thing leaves the gun muzzle. They’re trying to figure whether it has to be a metal sabot, or whether it could be plastic. Sabot means boot. From the French. It’s like the missile starts out wearing a little boot.”
“I know that,” I said. “I speak French. My mother was French.”
“Like sabotage,” she said. “From old French labor disputes. Originally it meant to smash new industrial equipment by kicking it.”
“With your boots,” I said.
She nodded. “Right.”
“So what’s the good news again?”
“The sabot design isn’t going to tell anybody anything,” she said. “Nothing important, anyway. It’s just a sabot. So we’ve got plenty of time.”
“OK,” I said. “But make it a priority. With Frasconi. You’ll like him.”
“You want to get a beer later?”
“Me?”
She looked right at me. “If all ranks can work together, they should be able to have a beer together, right?”
“OK,” I said.
Dominique Kohl looked nothing at all like the photographs I had seen of Teresa Daniel, but it was a blend of both their faces I saw in my head. I left Elizabeth Beck with her book and headed up to my original room. I felt more isolated up there. Safer. I locked myself in the bathroom and took my shoe off. Opened the heel and fired up the e-mail device. There was a message from Duffy waiting: No activity at warehouse. What are they doing?
I ignored it and hit new message and typed: We lost Teresa Daniel.
Four words, eighteen letters, three spaces. I stared at them for a long time. Put my finger on the send button. But I didn’t press it. I went to backspace instead and erased the message. It disappeared from right to left. The little cursor ate it up. I figured I would send it only when I had to. When I knew for sure.
I sent: Possibility your computer is penetrated.
There was a long delay. Much longer than the usual ninety seconds. I thought she wasn’t going to answer. I thought she must be ripping her wires out of the wall. But maybe she was just getting out of the shower or something because about four minutes later she came back with a simple: Why?
I sent: Talk of a hacker with partial access to government systems.
She sent: Mainframes or LANs?
I had no idea what she meant. I sent: Don’t know.
She asked: Details?
I sent: Just talk. Are you keeping a log on your laptop?
She sent: Hell no!
I sent: Anywhere?
She sent: Hell no!!
I sent: Eliot?
There was another four-minute delay. Then she came back with: Don’t think so.
I asked: Think or know?
She sent: Think.
I stared at the tiled wall in front of me. Breathed out. Eliot had killed Teresa Daniel. It was the only explanation. Then I breathed in. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he hadn’t. I sent: Are these e-mails vulnerable?
We had been e-mailing back and forth furiously for more than sixty hours. She had asked for news of her agent. I had asked for her agent’s real name. And I had asked in a way that definitely wasn’t gender-neutral. Maybe I had killed Teresa Daniel.
I held my breath until Duffy came back with: Our e-mail is encrypted. Technically might be visible as code but no way is it readable.
I breathed out and sent: Sure?
She sent: Totally.
I sent: Coded how?
She sent: NSA billion-dollar project.
That cheered me up, but only a little. Some of NSA’s billion-dollar projects are in the Washington Post before they’re even finished. And communications snafus screw more things up than any other reason in the world.
I sent: Check with Eliot immediately about computer logs.
She sent: Will do. Progress?
I typed: None.
Then I deleted it and sent: Soon. I thought it might make her feel better.
I went all the way down to the ground-floor hallway. The door to Elizabeth’s parlor was standing open. She was still in the armchair. Doctor Zhivago was facedown in her lap and she was staring out the window at the rain. I opened the front door and stepped outside. The metal detector squawked at the Beretta in my pocket. I closed the door behind me and headed straight across the carriage circle and down the driveway. The rain was hard on my back. It ran down my neck. But the wind helped me. It blew me west, straight toward the gatehouse. I felt light on my feet. Coming back again was going to be harder. I would be walking directly into the wind. Assuming I was still walking at all.
Paulie saw me coming. He must have spent his whole time crouched inside the tiny building, prowling from the front windows to the back windows, watching, like a restless animal in its lair. He came out, in his slicker. He had to duck his head and turn sideways to get through the door. He stood with his back against the wall of his house, where the eaves were low. But the eaves didn’t help him. The rain drove horizontally under them. I could hear it lashing against the slicker, hard and loud and brittle. It drove against his face and ran down it like torrents of sweat. He had no hat. His hair was plastered against his forehead. It was dark with water.
I had both hands in my pockets with my shoulders hunched forward and my face ducked into my collar. My right hand was tight around the Beretta. The safety was off. But I didn’t want to use it. Using it would require complicated explanations. And he would only be replaced. I didn’t want to have him replaced until I was ready to have him replaced. So I didn’t want to use the Beretta. But I was prepared to.
I stopped six feet from him. Out of his reach.
“We need to talk,” I said.
“I don’t want to talk,” he said.
“You want to arm wrestle instead?”
His eyes were pale blue and his pupils were tiny. I guessed his breakfast had been taken entirely in the form of capsules and powder.
“Talk about what?” he said.
“New situation,” I said.
He said nothing.
“What’s your MOS?” I asked.
MOS is an army acronym. The army loves acronyms. It stands for Military Occupational Specialty. And I used the present tense. What is, not what was. I wanted to put him right back there. Being ex-military is like being a lapsed Catholic. Even though they’re way in the back of your mind, the old rituals still exert a powerful pull. Old rituals like obeying an officer.
“Eleven bang bang,” he said, and smiled.
Not a great answer. Eleven bang bang was grunt slang for 11B, which meant 11-Bravo, Infantry, which meant Combat Arms. Next time I face a four-hundred-pound giant with veins full of meth and steroids I would prefer it if his MOS had been mechanical maintenance, or typewriting. Not combat arms. Especially a four-hundred-pound giant who doesn’t like officers and who had served eight years in Fort Leavenworth for beating up on one.
“Let’s go inside,” I said. “It’s wet out here.”
I said it with the kind of tone you develop when you get promoted past captain. It’s a reasonable tone, almost conversational. It’s not the sort of tone you use as a lieutenant. It’s a suggestion, but it’s an order, too. It’s heavy with inclusion. It says: Hey, we’re just a couple of guys here. We don’t need to let formalities like rank get in our way, do we?
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he turned and slid sideways through his door. Ducked his chin to his chest so he could get through. Inside, the ceiling was about seven feet high. It felt low to me. His head was almost touching it. I kept my hands in my pockets. Water from his slicker was pooling on the floor.
The house stank with a sharp acrid animal smell. Like a mink. And it was filthy. There was a small living room that opened to a kitchen area. Beyond the kitchen was a short hallway with a bathroom off it and a bedroom at the end. That was all. It was smaller than a city apartment, but it was all dressed up to look like a miniature stand-alone house. There was mess everywhere. Unwashed dishes in the sink. Used plates and cups and articl
es of athletic clothing all over the living room. There was an old sofa opposite a new television set. The sofa had been crushed by his bulk. There were pill bottles on shelves, on tables, everywhere. Some of them were vitamins. But not many of them.
There was a machine gun in the room. The old Soviet NSV. It belonged on a tank turret. Paulie had it suspended from a chain in the middle of the room. It hung there like a macabre sculpture. Like the Alexander Calder thing they put in every new airport terminal. He could stand behind it and swing it through a complete circle. He could fire it through the front window or the back window, like they were gunports. Limited field of fire, but he could cover forty yards of the road to the west, and forty yards of the driveway to the east. It was fed by a belt that came up out of an open ammunition case placed on the floor. There were maybe twenty more cases stacked against the wall. The cases were dull olive, all covered with Cyrillic letters and red stars.
The gun was so big I had to back up against the wall to get around it. I saw two telephones. One was probably an outside line. The other was probably an internal phone that reached the house. There were alarm boxes on the wall. One would be for the sensors out in no-man’s-land. The other would be for the motion detector on the gate itself. There was a video monitor, showing a milky monochrome picture from the gatepost camera.
“You kicked me,” he said.
I said nothing.
“Then you tried to run me over,” he said.
“Warning shots,” I said.
“About what?”
“Duke’s gone,” I said.
He nodded. “I heard.”
“So it’s me now,” I said. “You’ve got the gate, I’ve got the house.”
He nodded again. Said nothing.
“I look after the Becks now,” I said. “I’m responsible for their security. Mr. Beck trusts me. He trusts me so much he gave me a weapon.”
I was giving him a stare the whole time I was talking. The kind of stare that feels like pressure between the eyes. This would be the moment when the meth and the steroids should kick in and make him grin like an idiot and say, Well he ain’t going to trust you anymore when I tell him what I found out there on the rocks, is he? When I tell him you already had a weapon. He would shuffle and grin and use a singsong voice. But he said nothing. Did nothing. Didn’t react at all, beyond a slight defocus in his eyes, like he was having trouble computing the implications.
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