“Join the club.” McKinsey, glancing up, got rainwater in his eye. “Once again in the fucking trees.”
“The fun never stops.” Naomi knelt down beside the body. “As advertised, dead as a doorpost.”
“And twice as ugly.”
She sighed, rising. “Does anyone know what the hell went on here?”
“Not the cops, but a million bucks says McClure does.”
She checked her phone, frowning. “He’s not answering his cell. No one knows where he is.”
“Ditto the First Daughter.” McKinsey put his hands on his hips. “Odds are they’re together.”
Naomi said nothing, but she knew that he was probably right. Jack had a habit of going off the reservation, but this was a particularly bad time for it. The Virginia State Police were howling to question Alli—at the very least. She was the prime suspect in Laine’s death.
“The two guards said Alli Carson attacked Laine in the library, ran out, struck Conlon down as he was about to exit a bathroom, then she and Laine got into it for real. The fight spilled out to the rear of the house, he heard gunshots being fired. One guard was busy in the shower washing off the drain cleaner he said Alli threw at him, but by the time Conlon got here the other one was dead and the First Daughter was gone.”
“What if the guards are lying?”
McKinsey shot her a skeptical look. “I know you’ve got a soft spot for the girl, kiddo, but come on. First off, the guards’ stories corroborated one another.”
“They had time to concoct it before the police arrived,” Naomi pointed out.
“Secondly, they work for Fortress, one of the most highly regarded security firms in the country. The First Daughter’s uncle hired them to keep her safe and out of lockup.” He spread his hands. “Face it, everything’s against her.” He cast a glance back over his shoulder to where Henry Holt Carson and Harrison Jenkins stood conferring heatedly with a chief of the state police. “Murder, battery, violating a federal judge’s order of recognizance, I don’t know if even her uncle’s contacts or his famous lawyer’s legal tricks can save her from being locked up and indicted.”
Naomi was busy using her phone to go online.
McKinsey stared down at Rudy Laine’s corpse. “Man, for a little girl she packs some wallop.”
We can thank Jack for that, Naomi thought distractedly. “You forget, she’s not a little girl.”
“Well, right now what she looks like is a murderer.” He squinted. “And if McClure has spirited her away, that makes him an accessory after the fact.”
* * *
PAULL’S NEXT stop was the VIR section of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The VIR section was where new weapons ready for the field but not yet in the distribution pipeline were available to Alpha-level personnel.
He tried to keep thoughts of what complications the death of one of the men guarding Alli Carson might cause him—meaning, very specifically, how badly the incident would distract Jack from their mission to track down and kill Arian Xhafa. He’d punched in Jack’s cell number several times, always canceling the call before it could be made. There was nothing he could do for either Jack or Alli at this point, and he preferred not to hear whatever lies Jack would tell him regarding his involvement.
Paull needed Jack, of that he had no doubt. Given what the president had told him about Xhafa’s capabilities, there was no point in going to Macedonia without Jack’s brilliant tactical sense and his uncanny ability to figure out how the enemy thinks and, therefore, what traps, disinformation, and the like he would toss into your path. No matter what, Paull needed Jack on that plane with him at midnight.
Meanwhile, he had to pick out the weaponry that was both portable enough for a difficult mountain trek in hostile territory and powerful enough to both counter Xhafa’s firepower and assure his annihilation.
Slowly and methodically, he walked up and down the aisles while his assigned DARPA sorcerer, as the engineers were called familiarly, explained the uses of each strange-looking item.
After a time, Paull began to hum “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” The president had been right—he wasn’t meant to be a desk jockey no matter how high up in the hierarchy that desk might be. He was back in his element, as happy as a pig in mud.
* * *
MCKINSEY AND Naomi were about to leave the crime scene when Henry Holt Carson waved them over. His face was grave, by which Naomi deduced that his conversation with the state police chief hadn’t gone well.
“The police have issued a warrant for my niece’s arrest in connection with this disaster,” he said without preamble.
Jenkins looked like he’d just lost his beloved pet dog. “Hank—”
Carson held up a hand. “I want you two to find Alli before the police do.”
“Hank, this is inadvisable,” the attorney said. “Inserting yourself into a second—”
Carson glared at him. “What did I tell you?”
“You pay me to protect you.”
“I’m thinking of Alli now,” Carson snapped.
“When we find her,” Naomi said, “then what?”
“Call me,” Carson said. “I’ll tell you where to bring her.”
“Hank, I’m an officer of the court,” Jenkins protested. “I can’t be a part of what is most certainly a felony crime, and I can’t allow you to be part of it, either.”
“I can’t hear you, Counselor. You’re not here.” Carson cocked his head. “In fact, I’m quite certain I just heard you drive away.” He addressed the two Secret Service agents. “Harrison Jenkins isn’t here, is he?”
“No, sir,” Naomi said.
McKinsey shook his head.
“Christ on a crutch.” Shaking his head, Jenkins took his leave, picking his way back to where his car was parked.
“Now then,” Carson said, taking a deep breath.
“Sir, with all due respect,” McKinsey interjected, “we’re Secret Service.”
“My niece is still Edward Carson’s daughter, all that’s left of the former First Family,” Carson said shortly. Then he waved a hand dismissively. “Besides, I cleared it with your boss. For the time being, you report to me and to me alone. Is that clear?”
“Yessir,” they said more or less simultaneously.
“Then what are you still doing here? Get to it.”
* * *
ALLI, COCOONED in a blanket Jack kept in the trunk of his car, smiled up at him, then fell back to sleep. Jack bent over her, kissed her lightly on the forehead, adjusted the blanket slighty, then tiptoed out of the room.
He found Thatë down the hall, listening to Kid Cudi on his iPod, a pair of cheap earbuds cutting him off from the rest of the world. Jack pulled the cord and as the buds popped out of the teenager’s ear, said, “Everything’s going to sound like crap with those.”
Thatë shrugged. “It’s supposed to sound like crap. That’s the point.”
Jack wanted to tell him how ignorant he sounded, but instead, sat down in a chair opposite the kid and said, “Take a listen with these.” He handed him the Monster Copper earbuds he had bought to listen to the music on Emma’s iPod, an essential part of her he was never without.
Thatë shrugged, supremely indifferent, as he plugged in the earbuds and fit them into his ears. Three seconds after he pressed Play, his eyes opened wide, and he turned to Jack and mouthed, “Fuck me!”
Jack watched him listening to music he’d never really heard before. They were in a kitchen-cum–living room, tattered and gloomy in an all too authentic way that would make most young Goths cream in their tight black trousers.
Thatë lived in a bombed-out building in a section of Southeast Washington that could have been Beirut. The neighborhood was as desolate as a creaking old tree in winter. Out on the pocked and pitted street, trash held a special position of reverence. It was used as clothing, housing, shelter from a storm. The endless inventiveness of the destitute was forever on display. Inside, bare bulbs hung from lengt
hs of wire, though at any given moment the electricity might or might not work. In one corner, the ceiling plaster was distended like a pregnant woman’s nine-month belly, sopping with moisture, as if she had just broken her water. In the tiny, airless bathroom, there was a plastic bucket of water beside the toilet to ensure flushing. The apartment smelled of old pizza and pot. Forget dust; soot was everywhere, greasily ingrained on every horizontal surface. Occasionally, small sounds came from inside the walls, as if creatures were scuttling through the tenement’s arteries and veins.
As for Thatë, he seemed perfectly at home in a place that had the impermanence of an army tent or an Alaskan house. He was one of those people who wore grime like a tattoo or a piercing, a rebel yell that very deliberately gave the finger to society.
Jack got him to listen to Howlin’ Wolf from a playlist on Emma’s iPod. His eyes lost their focus as he sank deeper and deeper into the music. Thatë might be a teenager, but he had the eyes of an adult who had already been witness to too many despicable acts. It was likely he had committed some of those acts himself.
At length, the playlist came to an end and Thatë pulled off the earbuds. His face seemed transformed.
“Shit,” he said.
“Yeah.” Jack gestured to the refrigerator. “Beer?”
The kid nodded, still half in a trance.
Jack rose and opened the refrigerator, which wheezed like an asthmatic. Beer, Coke, a couple of half-eaten slices of congealed pizza, and not much else. At least the beer was imported.
“That girl’s too young for you,” Thatë observed.
Jack handed him a bottle, then twisted off the cap of his own bottle and took a slug. “She’s my daughter.”
Thatë looked away and picked at a scab on the point of his elbow.
“Where are your parents?”
Thatë took a swig of beer. “Don’t have parents.”
“You mean you don’t talk to them.”
“I mean I never met ’em.” The kid rolled the bottle around on the table, making a pattern of wet circles. “Good thing, too. I’d probably kill them.”
“Maybe they’re already dead.”
“Christ, I hope so.”
“No school for you, I see.”
“I’m in school. I don’t want trouble with the law.”
“So who’s subbing for you?”
“Fuck if I know,” Thatë said with a sly grin. “Twenty bucks a day does it.”
“I doubt that,” Jack said.
“Okay, an eighth a week.”
There was an upside-down cross and a skull with an arrow through it on the kid’s right biceps.
“Where’d you get the tats?” Jack said.
Thatë shrugged. “Here and there.”
“Not in this country.” When Thatë made no reply, Jack added: “Albania.”
“Shit, no,” the kid said rather defensively. “Russia.”
That told Jack a lot. “Which family?”
The kid was still picking at his scab. “What?” His fingertip was bright red.
“Which family of the grupperovka?”
Thatë jumped as if Jack had jabbed him with a burning needle.
“I know about the Russian mob,” Jack said. “I’ve had dealings with them.”
“No shit?”
The kid stared down at the Monster earbuds. He handed them back with no little reluctance. His body shifted subtly. By the alert way he sat, Jack could tell that his disinterest was feigned.
Jack leaned over to take a closer look. “Initiation, right? So which family became your parents?” He had seen these same tattoos on Ivan Gurov in Moscow last year. “No, wait, let me guess.”
The kid laughed, but he shifted again and Jack knew he was uneasy. “Izmaylovskaya. Am I right?”
“Jesus Christ!” Thatë stared at Jack as if he were a demon from hell. “Who the fuck are you?”
Jack finished off his beer and set the bottle down. He had nowhere to go until after dark. “I’ll tell my story,” he said, “if you’ll tell me yours.”
* * *
“I THINK we should split up,” Naomi said.
McKinsey regarded her with no little skepticism. “Are we really gonna do this?”
“I am.”
“What the fuck’s in it for us?”
She contemplated him in the same way someone would a slice of moldy meat. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”
“I just don’t like taking orders from some entitled prick.” He shrugged. “I’m just a working stiff.”
“Yeah, in a Giorgio Armani suit.”
“What? I like to look good on the job. You think I’d be caught dead in one of those Simm’s specials the other guys wear?”
Naomi shook her head as they headed toward their car. “No matter. I think you should follow up with the state police chief who’s taken over this case.”
McKinsey raised an eyebrow. “And you?”
“I’m going to check out the guards’ background.”
“A complete waste of time, if you ask me.”
Naomi hauled open the car’s door and got behind the wheel. “Then it’s a good thing I didn’t ask.”
* * *
AFTER DROPPING McKinsey off at his own car, Naomi drove to G Street NW, where Fortress Securities had their offices in one of those gigantic stone-faced buildings, fraught with dentils and Doric columns that dwarf any human who walks up the glittery white steps.
Fortress was on the seventh floor. Walking into its lobby, you could imagine yourself in the waiting room of a medium-sized advertising firm. The space was formed almost completely from horizontal planes of veined white marble, cut glass, bronze tubing, and glittering black granite. The only clue as to Fortress’s actual purpose was the bas-relief of an ancient Greek helmet, sculpted out of bronze, that rode over the receptionist’s head like the cloud of combat.
When Naomi produced her ID and asked to see Fortress’s president, she was politely but firmly told to wait while the receptionist—a young man in a sleek dark suit—spoke quietly into the mike of the headpiece encircling his head like a halo.
A short time later, another young man in a sleek dark suit escorted Naomi down a softly lit, carpeted hallway, lined with paintings of famous battles throughout history. Naomi recognized Alexander the Great, the great Spartan stand against Xerxes’s Persian army, Ajax and Achilles outside the walls of Troy, Napoleon at Waterloo, George Patton rolling over Europe, and so on and on, a seemingly endless display of man’s propensity for bloodlust and warfare. It was no surprise to Naomi that not one woman appeared in any of the paintings.
Andrew Gunn, the president of Fortress, rose from behind his desk as she was ushered into the room. Her guide immediately withdrew, closing the door behind him. Gunn seemed to unfold like a praying mantis. He was tall and thin with prematurely white hair and a nose like the prow of a ship. His steel blue eyes regarded her out of a rugged face, as scarred and pitted as the curve of the moon.
He came around, extended his hand, and smiled. His teeth seemed to shine in the muted afternoon light. Naomi had dealt with the top echelons of the private security firms. They all seemed to fall into two groups. Either they were ex-Marines, hard, angry, and bloodthirsty, or they were ex-CIA assets, anonymous, slippery, and bloodthirsty. She found it interesting that Gunn fell into neither of these camps. Rather, he seemed like a good old American cowboy, the way he had been played by Gary Cooper or depicted in the iconic Marlboro Man ads. He smelled good, as well, like the woods at night.
Instead of returning behind his desk, he led her to the far more informal seating area, which was comprised of an ultramodern sofa, two matching chairs, and a low coffee table made of a thick slab of white granite.
As they settled themselves, he said, “I assume, Ms. Wilde, that your visit concerns the death of one of my men, and the attack on two others.”
She nodded. “That’s right.”
He shook his head. “Well, then, I’m at a loss t
o understand the involvement of the Secret Service.”
“The prime suspect is the First Daughter.”
“Ah, Henry Holt Carson’s niece.”
“That’s right.”
His serious expression deepened. The frown made him look like a caricature of himself, as if he wasn’t used to frowning. “With all due respect, I find the notion that this young girl could have overpowered three of my men inconceivable.”
“Nevertheless, Mr. Gunn, that is very well what might have happened.”
He spread his hands. “Surely there must be another explanation.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I, but perhaps together we can find out.” She took out a small memo pad. “Mr. Carson came to you directly?”
“Yes, that’s right.” The phone rang, but Gunn ignored it. “Hank and I are old friends.”
“So you and Mr. Carson have done business before.”
“I said we’re friends.”
Naomi glanced up, trying to discern whether Gunn’s mood had changed. “Has he had occasion to avail himself of your services before?”
“Once.”
Only Naomi’s training allowed her to pick up on the minuscule hesitation. “And when was that?”
Gunn unfolded his lanky frame again and walked over to his desk. “Can I get you anything to drink?”
“Thanks, no.”
“We have our own barista.”
She laughed. “A double macchiato, then.”
“That’s the spirit!” Using the intercom, he ordered a double macchiato and triple espresso, then returned to the sitting area.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Naomi said.
“I’d rather not, Ms. Wilde.”
“And I’d rather not get a federal order, but I will,” she said. “I take this investigation very seriously.”
Gunn nodded in that grave way presidents of corporations sometimes do. Naomi often wondered whether they taught that at Wharton. The young man who had escorted her opened the door and, crossing the room, set down a tray with two small cups, and bowls of two different sugars and packets of Splenda.
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