The Honorable Traitors

by John Lutz

  Laker told the story from the beginning. Mason did not interrupt. He was still and expressionless. The man had remarkable powers of concentration. You never had to tell him anything twice.

  When Laker was finished, he thought it all over, polishing his spectacles with his tie. “First off, Josh Milton of the Post is a conspiracy nut.”

  “We can forget about the ‘FDR knew Pearl Harbor was coming’ business?”

  “FDR is dead. World War II is over. This is about something that matters now. I’m an expert on D.C. shitstorms, and the one we’re in is a Force 5.”

  “Ava says there’s nothing in the journal but the nighttime mutterings of a Japanese diplomat who’s long dead and forgotten.”

  “She must be missing something. I’ll have our specialists go over the journal. Maybe there’s a coded message that Ava missed. Or something sewn into the binding. A microchip, maybe.”

  “Possible. But Ava isn’t going to want to let go of that book.”

  “She’ll have to. You two have hit a dead end.”

  “Once word gets out that the journal exists, there’ll be a mad scramble for it.”

  “Word won’t get out. The Outfit is the most leakproof shop in town. You know how many people I’ve fired to keep it that way.”

  Laker did. He said, “All right. I’ll bring the book in. I want a moment alone with you in your office to put it in your hands. Then I’ll be happy to let the Feebs drag me off to their headquarters for a few hours of chat.”

  Mason gave one of his rare, brief smiles. “When it comes to bullshitting the Bureau, Laker, you’re a past master. Just don’t let on how much you’re enjoying it.”

  18

  “I’ll let you have it,” Ava said. “On one condition.”

  This was better than Laker had expected. He’d worried she wouldn’t surrender the journal without a fight. He’d found her in his kitchen, making coffee in a press and heating milk to go with it. She gave him a mug and they sat at his dining table, a long, plain wooden refectory table that looked as if it had come from a monastery. He could host a dinner party for a dozen guests, but since he rarely did, the table provided space for books, magazines, and projects. There was a sailing ship model that had reached the rigging stage and a disassembled carburetor from the 1964 Mustang he was gradually restoring. Next to the chessboard lay Tillie’s journal. Ava gazed at it as she sipped coffee.

  He said, “I’m glad you understand. It really is the only thing we can do now.”

  “Your boss is quite right.” There was an edge to Ava’s voice. “Of course my grandmother was able to come up with a code so subtle and ingenious that I, a mere NSA cryptographer with a Ph.D. from MIT, failed to break it. Or even recognize that it was a code.”

  “Mason didn’t mean to be insulting, just—”

  “No, no, I’m amused by his notion that my grandma was up on all the latest spycraft. Microchips sewn into the binding. Give me a break. But you can take him the journal. After I go through it one more time.”

  Unsure he’d heard right, Laker turned his good ear. “You’ve gone over it many times. What else is there to look for?”

  “Something so simple that I’ve overlooked it up to now.”

  Reaching for a magnifying glass that lay next to the ship model, she shifted to a seat where the sun came over her shoulder. She opened the book.

  Laker left her to it. He went to his walking desk, flicked the switch on the treadmill, and moseyed along at one mile an hour while he dealt with his email. Any faster and he made typing mistakes. A lot of people who’d been unable to reach him by phone had sent him messages. They weren’t happy with him.

  “Laker.”

  She was sitting with her elbows on the table and hands folded, propping up her chin. The journal lay open before her. “Please bring me a pencil.”

  “You found something?”

  “Yes.”

  “In the Japanese or the English?”

  “In the blank pages.”

  He went over to the table. Handing her the pencil, he looked over her shoulder at the journal. He saw only white paper. Ava picked up the book, angled it to take the light. Now he saw a few faint scratches.

  “Tillie must have made them with a pin,” Ava said. “It would have been difficult for her, with her arthritis.”

  “The marks were made recently?”

  “Yes. It’s a message to me.”

  She was rubbing the page with the side of the pencil point, to make the angular block letters stand out:

  AVA LAST BDAY

  “I don’t understand,” Laker said.

  “North family shorthand for birthday.”

  “Ava’s last birthday.”

  “Grandmother warning me I’ll never see my next birthday? That’s a cheerful thought.”

  “Let’s assume she’s using ‘last’ in the sense of ‘previous. ’”

  “Let’s do. My previous birthday was just a few weeks ago. May 11.”

  “Did Tillie give you anything?”

  “A present? I’m trying to remember.” She sat back and closed her eyes. “I had a lot of work that day. And I was thirty, so I didn’t feel much like celebrating anyway. Friends from the office bought me a drink, and I went home and to bed. I didn’t visit Tillie. Didn’t even talk to her on the phone.”

  “A card?”

  “She’d stopped sending birthday cards. Afraid she’d forget a date and offend somebody.”

  “Anything else you remember about the day?”

  She sat still, eyes closed and brow furrowed, for a couple of minutes. Then she gave an impatient toss of her head. “What did your esteemed boss say? That I’m at a dead end? He was right.”

  She snapped the journal closed and handed it to him. He slipped it into the side pocket of his suit coat and went back to the office area, where he knelt in front of a low shelf.

  “So you have a real safe,” Ava said. “In addition to the one you use as a liquor cabinet. It’s kind of small. What’s in it?”

  He spun the dial to the last number and opened the safe. Withdrew his service weapon. Like the Army, the Outfit issued the Beretta M9.

  “Oh,” Ava said.

  He slid a magazine into the butt, jacked a round into the chamber, made sure the safety was on. Then he took off his jacket and shrugged into his holster. Laker favored a shoulder rig, with the gun slung butt down at his left side. Belt holsters seemed too cowboy to him.

  Ava was hovering, looking worried. “Are you expecting trouble?”

  “No. But I told Mason I’d put the journal in his hands. No one else’s. I’m making you the same promise.”

  19

  After Laker left, Ava had a spell of restlessness. It was a good thing his loft had plenty of room for pacing. She was able to do laps around the exterior walls, by the windows, getting up a good head of steam.

  She told herself to stop thinking about the journal. She should be sending texts and making calls, trying to mollify her superiors at the NSA. But she kept being distracted by the feeling that she was failing her grandmother. She imagined Tillie taking a pin or paperclip in fingers made shaky and clumsy by the years, painfully scratching a message that was meant for Ava alone. Only Ava just didn’t get it.

  On her tenth or eleventh circuit of the loft, a new possibility occurred to her. Maybe Tillie hadn’t been referring to Ava’s birthday, but to her own.

  It was easy to remember, because it was even more recent than Ava’s. June 2 was Tillie’s birthday. It had fallen on a Tuesday. Ava had stopped by the Cheltenham Long Term Care Community after work. The visit had been brief, because Tillie was always tired in the evening. But otherwise she was feeling good. Ava had brought her earrings—Tillie still loved earrings, even though she needed help to put them on—and an audio book. It was the latest rip-the-lid-off-Washington bestseller. Tillie thanked her for that, too, saying she enjoyed such books now that she could be fairly sure she wouldn’t be mentioned in them.

  But
had Tillie given her anything?

  Not a present, of course. But she and her grandmother exchanged paperwork on every visit. Doctors, lawyers, and investment advisers were prodigious generators of correspondence. Ava always arrived with a big envelope filled with letters to explain to Tillie, documents for her to sign. What papers had they huddled over on June 2?

  Weary of walking and straining to remember, Ava lay down on the couch, closed her eyes, and emptied her mind. Sometimes things came to her when she stopped trying to remember.

  The trick worked. On Tillie’s birthday, Ava always prepared for her signature a new living will. Tillie feared that she would lapse into a coma and be kept on life support for weeks or months. She wanted to make sure her wishes were made clear in a document that was up to date with the law.

  But the living will was just a few pages of legal boilerplate. It couldn’t have any larger significance.

  Abruptly Ava swung her feet to the floor and sat upright. The scene in her grandmother’s room on June 2 had just flashed into her mind, bright and clear. Tillie was in bed, the papers resting on a tray on her lap. After going over the living will, she had left it with Tillie to read over and sign. They were expecting Ava at the nurses’ station, to talk to her about Tillie’s medication. It had taken some time. When she returned, Tillie was asleep. She had glanced at the last page to make sure it was signed, then put the will in the envelope. When she got home, she’d filed it away. She hadn’t looked at it since.

  Ava was sure that if she paged through the will, she would find a piece of paper that Tillie had slipped into it. She was going to have to return to her apartment. Laker had warned her that the building would be under surveillance by the NSA. She’d have to slip by the watchers somehow. Or talk her way past them. What was the worst thing that could happen? That she’d end up in a conference room at Fort Meade, answering questions. Just as Laker would be doing.

  She grabbed her purse and took out her iPhone to text for an Uber car. Once she was in it and on her way across town, she would text Laker. She wanted him to know where she’d gone.

  Once it was too late to stop her.

  20

  The Gray Outfit’s headquarters was located on Capitol Hill, in a row of ornate Victorian-era townhouses with mansard roofs and bay windows and minuscule front gardens behind low wrought-iron fences. The plaque by the heavy wooden front door said, National Alliance of Auto Parts Distributors. It was calculated to inspire disinterest in passersby. Generally it worked as intended, but every couple of days a member of the public would press the intercom, wanting to know if the Alliance could help him locate some hard-to-find auto part.

  After stating his business, he would be buzzed into the paneled front hall of the mansion, where Joanie, the receptionist, sat at an antique desk. She was supposed to give visitors a phony brochure about the good work being done by NAAPD and send them away. But she’d fielded so many inquiries over the years that by now she actually knew a lot about rare auto parts and could be helpful.

  As he opened the door, Laker was thinking he ought to ask her where he could find a replacement headlight for his vintage Mustang.

  He found himself facing not Joanie, but a security man in a Kevlar vest, holding a Heckler & Koch MR556A1 at port arms. The door swung shut behind him. He glanced over his shoulder at another armed man.

  “It’s Laker all right, everything’s cool,” the man in front of him was saying into the mic clipped to his vest. “Hi, sir.”

  Laker recognized the shaved head and long, crooked nose of Brad Bartel. “What’s up, Bartel?”

  “One of the roof sensors flashed us a warning light. I went up there and didn’t find anything. Probably a pigeon, but we have to stay in perimeter mode defense for another twenty minutes. Better hang your creds, sir.”

  As Laker took out his ID and slipped the tab into the breast pocket of his suit coat, Bartel stepped closer and whispered, “You know the Feebs are waiting for you?”

  He nodded and patted Bartel’s shoulder as he went past. Joanie, who was stout and gray-haired, was trying to maintain her dignity as she scrambled out from under her desk. They exchanged waves as he mounted the staircase, which made up for its narrowness with a red carpet held in place by gleaming copper rods and a banister held up by curved wooden balusters.

  A stocky African American man in a blue suit appeared at the top of the stairs, in front of the large bay window. “Hi, Tom.”

  At least it was Ray Hilton, one of his friends at the Bureau, who’d be escorting him across town. “Hello, Ray. Sorry to keep you waiting.”

  “No problem. I’ve been catching up on current events.” He held up a copy of The Economist. “The kid here has been wasting his time playing games on his iPhone. Boothroyd, this is the celebrated Thomas Laker. Try not to genuflect.”

  Boothroyd, a young man with a blond buzz cut, smiled and shook hands.

  “Who’s going to be grilling me, Ray?” Laker asked.

  “Deputy Director Frances Wilson.”

  “Wilson herself?”

  “She gets mad whenever the Outfit operates on American soil and doesn’t coordinate with us. Personally, she likes you. You could do worse.”

  “I’d like to report to my own boss first.”

  “DD Wilson is champing at the bit, so don’t take long.”

  As the Feebs sat down on the bench in the bay window, Laker turned and walked down the short paneled corridor to Mason’s office. The door was open, Mason at his desk. The office had been a back bedroom and its one window looked out on a blank wall, so in his rare moments of idleness, Mason gazed up at a stained-glass panel in the ceiling. No daylight reached it, and he had ordered an electric light put in the attic, so the clusters of grapes, and birds against an azure sky showed up clearly. Laker closed the door and advanced to the desk, taking the journal from his pocket. “One development since we last talked—”

  There was a crash and pieces of multicolored glass showered down on them. The roof panel had shattered. Laker looked up to see something drop though the hole, bounce on Mason’s desk, and explode. It was as if a bolt of lightning shot across the small room, simultaneous with a crack of thunder. Laker was blinded and deafened. Losing his balance, he collapsed to the floor. Stun grenade, he thought.

  After a few seconds his vision came back, dim and blurry. A man in combat boots and dark clothing was standing atop the desk. He wore a flak vest and balaclava mask and held a machine pistol in his hands. A ribbon of spent shells unfurled from it. Laker couldn’t hear the reports.

  He swiveled his head. Hilton and Boothroyd were in the doorway. He saw the muzzle flashes of their automatics but heard nothing. In the next instant blood was gushing from Hilton’s chest, and Boothroyd’s young face turned into red mush as the hail of bullets from the machine pistol found their marks.

  Laker managed to get to his knees and reach for the killer’s boots in an attempt to pull his legs out from under him. But he was too slow. The killer jumped to the floor and scooped up something that was lying there.

  The journal, Laker thought.

  Mason saw too. Blinking and grimacing from the effects of the grenade, he surged up from his chair and threw himself bodily at the killer, who pivoted and swung the metal stock of the machine pistol at Mason’s head. Blood sprayed across his white shirt and he collapsed.

  Now the killer turned on Laker. The mask hid his face except for his blue eyes. Grasping the edge of the desk, Laker was pulling himself to his feet. He saw the killer drop into a crouch and knew the kick was coming but couldn’t get his muscles to respond in time. The kick landed hard on his chest, knocked him flat on his back. He started to roll away, knowing it wouldn’t do any good.

  The bullets he expected did not strike him. He looked up at Bartel in the doorway, standing over the bodies of Hilton and Boothroyd, firing his HK. The bullets ripped into Mason’s desk, sending splinters flying. The killer was behind it. The hand holding the machine pistol came up. He fired b
lind, swiveling his wrist, unleashing a scythe of bullets. A line of holes was punched in the wall and blood jetted from Bartel’s thighs, below the Kevlar vest. He dropped.

  Instantly the killer was on the move, rounding the desk, jumping over the bodies in the doorway. Laker struggled upright and lurched after him. He was running down the corridor toward the bay window, firing. The heavy glass shattered. The man leapt through it and dropped out of sight.

  One hand on the wall, the other on the banister, Laker was able to stay upright as he followed. He reached the window in time to see the killer, who had landed in the soft earth of the flower beds in the small front yard, rolling over and regaining his feet. He bounded over the low fence to the sidewalk.

  It was a fifteen-foot drop, and Laker was in no shape for it. He ran down the stairs, passing more guards coming up. He could hear them shouting at him but not make out the words. He shouted back that Mason and Bartel needed help right away, especially Bartel, whose femoral artery was probably severed. He ran on, passing Joanie, who was talking on the telephone and looking at him with wide, shocked eyes.

  Outside frightened passersby were taking shelter behind parked cars. Traffic was tangling. Looking down the sidewalk, Laker could see the running man. He had a big lead already. Laker’s hand touched the butt of his Beretta, but his vision was still blurred and jumpy, not good enough to take a shot. He started running.

  His thoughts were in tumult. God, what a shambles. Ray Hilton and that poor kid Boothroyd were dead. He could have no hope for them. Brad Bartel was going to bleed out if help didn’t reach him in the next few minutes. And Sam Mason? Laker had no idea what shape he was in.

  At least the effects of the grenade were wearing off. With every stride he felt more sure of his footing. He was a block away from the Outfit now, and the usual street life of Capitol Hill was humming along obliviously. People stared at the two running men, more curious than afraid, and were slow getting out of the way. Laker called on years of football experience to dodge pedestrians on the sidewalks and vehicles and cyclists at the street crossings. He was hoping to gain on the killer, but the man was fast and sure-footed. His lead was holding up.