by Mike Lawson
Emma just nodded, her mind still preoccupied with Li Mei’s fate. “Is there anything else?” she said to Mahoney.
“I guess not,” Mahoney said. “I just thought you’d want to know what Carmody did.”
Emma’s lips parted as if she had another lecture to deliver to Mahoney, but then she stopped and turned her head away. DeMarco thought he saw a sheen of tears glaze her pale blue eyes. He’d never seen Emma cry— and he wasn’t going to see her cry now.
“Good,” she said. “I have to go.” And without another word, she rose and departed.
“She’ll get over it,” Mahoney said to DeMarco as they watched her walk out the door. His normally gruff voice sounded surprisingly gentle.
“I don’t think so,” DeMarco said.
Emma had once told DeMarco that governments could always rationalize what they did in the name of national security. But that noble objective— preserving a nation— always seemed to be realized in an endless accumulation of individual tragedies: Li Mei’s stillborn child; the young FBI agent who had died in an alley in Vancouver; the young woman, Carla, who died protecting Emma. And individuals would go on dying and suffering because the people who governed just weren’t smart enough or humane enough to find a different way. DeMarco knew the next time he saw her, Emma would be her old self, as tough and cynical as ever, but he also knew she’d never forgive herself for the part she had played in turning a young woman into the person Li Mei Shen became.
Mahoney didn’t know what DeMarco was sitting there stewing about, but he did know that it was time to get the lad’s mind focused on something else.
“Well, I gotta get back to work,” he said, sounding like a guy taking a smoke break from a factory instead of being the chosen leader of the House. As he was putting on his suit coat, he said to DeMarco, “I heard something about Hutchinson, the other day.” Hutchinson was the minority leader in the House, a man Mahoney despised.
“Seems his kid has gotten himself into a jam, something that if it gets out, will embarrass that weasel pretty good. Now that I wouldn’t care about, but I’m thinking of Hutchinson’s wife. She’s a nice gal, I like her, and a mother doesn’t need to hear this sort of thing about her son. I was thinking…”
Outside the restaurant, as they were about to part company— Mahoney to return to the Capitol to try to turn partisan interests into good laws, DeMarco to go visit a man with a wayward son— Mahoney gestured with his square chin at a car parked at the curb.
“Didn’t I see you drive up in that thing?” Mahoney said. “You get a new car?”
“Yeah,” DeMarco said.
“What is it?”
“A 2005 Toyota. Only has twenty-four thousand miles on it. Gets over twenty miles to the gallon.”
Mahoney, whose personal car was a classic twelve-cylinder Jaguar Cabriolet, shook his big head in dismay. “Jesus, Joe,” he said, “you gotta learn to live a little.”
DeMarco nodded, then his mouth turned up in a small smile as he pushed the button on the cool little beeper thing that unlocked the doors.
EPILOGUE
Carmody watched as the black Mercedes pulled to a stop.
The Chinese man who stepped from the Mercedes was wearing a suit, but he looked like a man who normally wore a uniform. The man was as big as Carmody and he looked just as tough. He and Carmody stared at each other but neither man said anything. The Chinese man opened the back door of the Mercedes and a slender woman and a young boy stepped out.
Carmody nodded at the Chinese soldier and pointed at a Buick with a dented fender. The Buick was parked twenty yards from where Carmody was standing, halfway between him and the soldier. The soldier said something to the woman, and she took the boy’s hand and they started to walk slowly toward Carmody. As the woman and boy approached him, Carmody tossed a set of keys to the Chinese soldier.
The boy and his mother had only walked a few paces when the boy suddenly pulled his hand free of the woman’s and ran to Carmody. He swept the boy up into his arms and held him so tight that he was afraid he might break the child’s ribs. When the woman reached him, he encircled one arm about her, pulling her close, kissing her on the lips.
The Chinese soldier looked briefly over at Carmody, his face expressionless. If he was touched by the family reunion he didn’t show it. He walked over to the Buick, and taking the keys that Carmody had tossed him, opened the trunk. He stood for a moment, looking into the trunk, then reached down and touched the woman’s throat, to make sure she was still alive. She was. She was such a lovely woman, he thought. It was a shame.
The Chinese soldier looked at Carmody and nodded, then he surprised Carmody and gave him a quick smile and a two-fingered salute. Carmody couldn’t tell if the soldier was being sarcastic or if the salute was a gesture of respect— and he didn’t care.
He had everything he wanted.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The author ensured that all information in this book related to the United States Navy, naval shipyards, and nuclear-powered ships was already publicly available information and not classified.
The loss of controlled removable electronic media (CREM) discussed in this book is based entirely on events that occurred at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in July 2004. The loss of CREM at Los Alamos was documented in numerous newspapers and Web sites.
The fact that information for nuclear-powered ships exists in an electronic format, and the existence of reactor plant and steam plant manuals, is discussed online at a number of official navy Web sites. Similarly, discussions of submarines being used to collect foreign intelligence, and discussions related to noise-silencing and submarine-detection technology came from a number of online sources as well as the book Blind Man’s Bluff, by Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew.
The discussion of physical security at naval shipyards in this novel— such things as employee badges, barbed-wire-topped fences, perimeter monitoring cameras, and guards— is generic and even intentionally inaccurate in a number of areas, as my friends at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard will certainly recognize. (Marines don’t normally guard the gates, and classified materials are protected in other ways than discussed in this novel.)
Also by Mike Lawson
The Inside Ring
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, JANUARY 2007
Copyright © 2006 by Michael Lawson
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lawson, Michael, 1948–
The second perimeter / Michael Lawson.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Government investigators— Fiction. 2. Political fiction. I. Title.
PS3612.A934S43 2006
813'.6— dc22
2006040156
eISBN: 978-0-307-38692-2
www.anchorbooks.com
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