by Tom Clancy
He managed forty push-ups before he ran out of steam, and one set of crunches where he normally did two. After which, he was tired enough so that actually going through the course seemed to be a lot more trouble than it was worth.
The devil on his shoulder said, Hell, Abe, you’re a general now, you can delegate things. Nobody expects you to be out in the cold rain running the obstacle course like some raw recruit! You don’t need to be able to beat men young enough to be your grandchildren! Bag this! Go home, take a hot shower, catch a few more winks—you earned it!
Kent smiled. Yeah, that’s how it started. Listen to that voice and pretty soon, you’re sitting in front of the television most of the time, drinking beer and thinking about how tough you were in the good old days. He might fall over dead from a heart attack, but if he did, at least it was better to do it here than sitting on his butt at home.
He headed for the course.
Only a few people out here this early, in the cold and wet. One of them looked familiar, just ahead of him. . . .
“John?”
“Morning, Abe.”
The two men shook hands. “I didn’t know you still came out here.”
“Got to,” Howard said. “Too easy to turn into a couch potato, now that I’m a civilian.”
“You could join a nice warm gym.”
Howard laughed. “When I can come here for free? Nah. Besides, there are too many sweet young things in tight spandex at the gym my wife doesn’t want me staring at. Gets hard to keep your mind on your workout. Not a problem out here with old jarheads in dirty sweats.”
Kent laughed.
“I thought for a minute there you were going to turn around and leave,” Howard said.
“For a minute there, I was. There are days when inertia is really hard to overcome.”
“I hear that. You want me to give you a head start?”
“Oh, I don’t think so. I expect an old jarhead can keep up with a fat and out-of-shape ex-Army civilian, even if I have twenty years on him.”
Both men laughed.
Richmond, Virginia
“Trust me, Tommy, it couldn’t have gone any better. Compared to Ruth and Amos, my parents—if they ever get back from their Canadian vacation—will be a walk in the park.”
Thorn nodded. “I liked them.”
“Good thing.”
“So, when are we going to do this wedding?”
She shrugged. “We could do it Friday, if it was just me, but my mother will want a big church to-do. Even though I am getting long in the tooth for a white dress. I don’t think she ever really expected it would happen, so that’s the least I can do.”
“So, you figure it’ll take a couple months to set up?”
She laughed. “A couple months? Lord, even a shotgun wedding would take that long. A regular wedding takes at least a year to plan.”
“You’re kidding.”
“You keep saying that when you know I’m not.”
“What’s to plan? Get a church, buy a dress, print some invitations, hire a preacher.”
She laughed again. “So much to learn, so little time . . .”
16
Washington, D.C.
As she drove to the meeting where she was to talk to Carruth, Lewis considered her new problem. She had started this knowing that there were some risks when dealing with people who wanted the ability to raid U.S. Army bases. Like Aziz, such men would not be above killing anybody they needed to in order to get what they wanted. She had thought to mitigate this risk going in. She had first strained possible buyers for her information through a series of blind e-drops and cutouts strung out around the world. She used a server in North Africa, piggybacked on a military communications satellite in geosynch over the Virgin Islands, and a wireless plexus in Argentina, all of these, and others, feeding their sigs back and forth among themselves before forwarding it to a generic server she kept in a rented apartment in Delaware. The server put things into a file that she could access anonymously and only via a password, and in theory nobody knew it existed save her and the domain-namers. This was a weave complex enough so that nobody was going to thread their way through it to show up on her doorstep. And if they opened the apartment door in Delaware without deactivating it, there was a block of C4 wired to a detonator that was going to reduce the server and anybody standing too close to it to little pieces, so even if they got that far, there wasn’t going to be any there there. . . .
Some of what came her way were half-assed offers, some she was sure were law enforcement agencies from different countries, including, probably, the U.S., and a very few seemed legit.
These latter, she had separated out.
She had a highly discreet investigator working for her, and she sent him the names. Simmons had been a military intelligence op, then a contract agent for the CIA and NSA until he had been caught dealing in the black market in Syria. He apparently knew where too many bodies were to risk any public legal action, so he had been quietly cashiered out of government service and told to keep his mouth shut and a low profile, or risk being nailed using antiterrorist laws.
Being able to dig down and uncover bodies was useful to Lewis.
This was how she had wound up with Aziz, and had he not been greedy, he might have panned out.
With that buyer dead, she had to start over again. So she had gone back to the cutouts, and come up with a couple more potentials.
One of them was supposedly another Middle Easterner, the other, of all things, an Australian. Before she met anybody else, she had to make sure that they weren’t cops, and that they had some references she could run down. So she sent the names to Simmons as she had before. This was the riskiest part of the whole operation, and she was very careful here.
She couldn’t assume that the next potential buyer would be some kind of fundamentalist terrorist who would be impressed by the gun of a dead martyr, so it looked as if Carruth might need to make another run at an Army base. And this time, best he return with something of more substantive value than a fancy handgun.
The clock was ticking. But Simmons hadn’t gotten back to her, and that was worrisome. Could be any number of valid reasons for this—but even if he didn’t have anything useful for her, he was usually quick to pass that along. Whenever she had something for him, she got herself a cheap, one-time phone, sent him the number via an encrypted file, and he would get back to her the same day, or sometimes the next day.
But it had been three days since she’d heard a word from him, and this was bothersome.
The place where she was to meet Carruth was just ahead. A ratty cafe on a street that was torn up for roadwork. You had to park a block away and walk in, and it wasn’t worth the effort. The food was crappy and, of course, the coffee was commercial brew that sat in the pot all day. . . .
She grinned. She and Carruth both were going to lose weight if they kept meeting at such places.
She parked her car and alighted.
Midtown Grill
“Simmons. Here’s the address,” Lewis said.
“Who is this guy?” Carruth asked.
“He’s a former intelligence op—worked for Army Intel, JMTS, then freelanced for the CIA and NSA—now on his own. He’s the man I’ve had running down potential buyers for our product.”
Carruth nodded. “Okay. And I’m going to see him why?”
“To find out why he’s not answering my e-mail and calls.”
“Maybe he forgot to pay his cable bill.”
“And maybe he turned into a butterfly and flew off to Central America.”
Carruth looked at the address and grinned. “What do you want me to do when I find him?”
“See why he hasn’t gotten back to me on the two names I sent him to check out.”
“Which are?”
“You don’t need to know,” she said.
He laughed. “Remember when you were standing on the walk down in New Orleans and Abdul and his Ugly Brother stepped out of the
trees with pistols, ready to shoot you?”
“I recall it, yes.”
“Captain, we are together in this to our eyeballs and I demonstrated my loyalty by punching holes in those bad guys and killing ’em deader than black plastic. I’m not going to run off and start a business of my own here. Aside from which, if I ask this guy Simmons about the names, he might just, you know, blurt them out by accident.”
She considered it for a few seconds. “All right. I take your point. One of the men is an Australian, name of Brian Stuart; the other one is another Middle Easterner, using the name Ali bin Rahman bin Fahad Al-Saud.”
Carruth shook his head. “One of the princes? These guys are big on naming every man related to them, aren’t they? Bin-this and bin-that.”
“I expect the name is phony,” she said. “No more a prince than you are.”
“So I get the dope from Simmons on Brian and binwhosit, and we’re back in business, right?”
“If one of them turns out to have access to the kind of money we’re talking about, we are. But I suspect they won’t be as impressed with that PPK you lifted, so I’m thinking we need to hit another base and come back with something a little more useful.”
“Such as?”
“Oh, I have a couple ideas. We’ll meet again when you get back. Here’s the new place, and the new one-time phone number.” She handed him a yellow sticky-pad sheet with an address and telephone number written on it.
“Another hole-in-the-wall with bad coffee?” he said. He read the note, apparently memorized it, then wadded it up and put it into his pocket.
“Yes. Places with good coffee have customers, and we don’t want the attention.”
“You could always come to my apartment,” he said. “I got Seattle’s Best I can grind up and brew.”
“Yeah, and hell could freeze over, too.”
He laughed.
Cleveland Park
Washington, D.C.
This guy Simmons had an office on Connecticut Avenue, not far from the old art-deco Uptown Theater. Nice enough area, mostly low-rise commercial, and still part of Cleveland Park. The office was a brick building, the address upstairs over a storefront. Must not be doing too bad.
Carruth looked around for cameras. He didn’t spot any looking right at the place he was going. If Simmons was some kind of spook, he’d probably picked a location that wouldn’t get much attention.
No name on the button over the address Lewis had given him. Carruth tapped the button and waited.
No answer.
There were four other offices upstairs, and he could have leaned on those buttons until somebody buzzed him in, but he didn’t want to leave any more memories than he had to.
The security door was a steel-framed job, made to look like wrought iron, with expanded metal grating filling the gaps, backed with glass. The lock would open via an electric pulse from upstairs, or with a key, and it wasn’t a dead bolt, but a basic latch hitting a strike plate. Meant to keep honest people out.
Carruth had a thin and flexible piece of spring-steel a little smaller than a credit card in his wallet. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his Nike wide-receiver gloves. They offered a little protection from the weather, but were still thin enough to allow you to use your hands. He could pick up a dime wearing them. No point in leaving any prints around.
He used his gloved fingertip to wipe the button clean, then worked the spring into the edge of the door.
To people passing by on the sidewalk in the cold, he’d look like he was using a key.
Using the flat spring, it took all of four seconds to slip the latch and open the door. Hell, it might as well have been a key. . . .
He grinned as he started up the stairs.
Simmons’s door was unmarked, save for the office number—4—all the way at the end of the hall to the right. All the doors were solid, no glass, and no windows into the hall, so nobody saw him pass. There didn’t seem to be a security cam in the hall.
Simmons’s door was unlocked. Carruth opened the door. “Hello? Mr. Simmons?”
The smell hit him as he stepped inside. It was that sickly-sweet, something-spoiled odor that, once you’d sniffed it, you never forgot.
He didn’t bother to pull his gun, but moved into the outer office, down a short hall toward a closed door. If there was a corpse that had been there long enough to stink, there wasn’t gonna be a bad guy standing around watching it rot and waiting for visitors.
The inner door was also unlocked, and it opened to reveal, sure enough, a dead man lying on the floor next to a big wooden desk.
The guy was maybe fifty-five, bald, heavyset. He wore slacks and a sport coat, with a pale blue shirt open at the neck. One of his loafers had come off, revealing a pale gray sock.
There was a window behind the desk, but a set of blinds covered it.
Carruth bent down. Two, three days, probably. No obvious bullet or knife wounds. No blood.
He leaned the man’s head back a bit—gone past rigor—and spotted ligature marks around the man’s neck. Throttled, with a thin piece of rope or maybe wire. Not an amateur’s weapon. Getting ripe in the heated building. Another day or two, the neighbors would notice big-time.
He found a wallet in the man’s back pocket. It had maybe two hundred bucks in twenties, and some odd fives and ones. He also wore a nice-looking watch. So, it hadn’t been a robbery.
“Hello, Mr. Simmons,” he said, looking at the driver’s license. Actually, there were three licenses—from D.C., Virginia, and—of all places—Oklahoma. Also a gun permit for the District—that was impressive, those weren’t easy to get. Plus some very official-looking cards with photo IDs for the FBI, CIA, NSA, and Metro Police. Very interesting.
Carruth replaced the contents and slipped the wallet back into Simmons’s hip pocket. When he did, he noticed a small pistol holster on the man’s belt, but the gun it had contained was gone.
There was a computer terminal on the desk. He sat in the chair and touched the keyboard. The terminal was in sleep-mode, and it swirled to life.
He found the mail program and lit it. When he tried to access the in-box, it asked for a password. Carruth wasn’t a computer nerd who could break into files. He looked in the desk drawers, found a box full of blank C-DVDs. He inserted one into the computer’s drive. He copied the mail program and as many of the other files as would fit on the disk, ejected it, and slipped it into his pocket. Repeated the same thing three more times, copying the entire hard drive. Lewis knew how to fiddle with stuff like that, let her play with it.
He set the computer’s program to “Reformat Disk,” and started it. He hoped that would wipe the files so the cops wouldn’t be able to get them.
He picked up the phone and touched the controls. The man had a Cable Packet Service, including call-waiting, caller ID, and forwarding. Carruth thumbed the recent-calls button, and got a list of the most recent ones. He pulled a small notebook from his pocket and copied them down. He erased them with the delete button. The cops would be able to get a record of calls from the phone company, but no point in making it any easier for them.
There were a couple of file cabinets, and he went through those, along with the desk, but other than a checkbook in the desk’s center drawer, showing an account with forty thousand dollars and change in it, there wasn’t anything useful he could see. Probably anything important was on the computer and password-protected.
It was tempting, but he left the checkbook where he’d found it.
He stood. Somebody had killed Mr. Simmons here, and while a man in his line of work might have made all kinds of enemies and it didn’t necessarily have anything to do with Lewis and Carruth’s business, making that assumption was probably not a good idea. Could have just been coincidence, but then again, maybe it wasn’t. Which way of thinking would get you in the most hot water?
In the Navy, Carruth had been taught to assume the worst-case scenario and prepare for it until you had more accu
rate intel. If you thought there might be fifteen enemy soldiers and it turned out there were only five, well, then, that was a good kind of surprise. If you were figuring on five and there were fifteen? That could get you killed.
Whoever had garroted the late Mr. Simmons—who had been a pro and very likely armed when it had gone down—was a dangerous person or persons. And if Simmons had information in his possession that might allow the killers the slightest chance of being able to locate Captain Rachel Lewis, then that ought to be the working assumption. If they could, they would, and how best to deal with that when it happened?
Time to leave. There wasn’t anything else to be gained by staying here, and much to be lost—given he was home again and carrying a gun that had killed two Metro cops. Any more surprises like this, he would have to rethink hanging on to the piece. When this all got done, he’d have a ton of money—he could buy a matched pair and go off to hunt lions, if he wanted. Maybe he should at least hide his gun somewhere it wouldn’t be found until he got rich? After all, it wasn’t as if he didn’t have other guns he could carry.
Well, worry about that later. First, he had to get out of here unseen.
Carruth checked the hall. Nobody around. He hurried out and down the stairs, then into the cool afternoon. He walked quickly away from the building, not so fast as to draw attention, but he didn’t dawdle.
Lewis was probably not going to be happy to hear this, but better she knew it than not.
And what was it going to mean for their business?
17
Sinclair’s Fast Stop Market and Cafe
Washington, D.C.
Lewis had gone over the list of numbers Carruth had given her. That, plus the files he’d copied—no trouble breaking into those, Simmons had used his birthday for the password—gave whoever had killed him at least two fingers pointed vaguely in her direction. One of her one-time phones was on the list a couple times, and there was an e-mail drop.