by Tom Clancy
Ah, well. His loss.
38
Midtown Grill
Washington, D.C.
Kent sipped at the wine, which was considerably better than the house red—he had called Gino and arranged for that, and also spoken to Maria for the other little surprise he had in mind.
Set it up well in advance.
Jen chatted about the handmade-guitar show she’d attended last weekend, with mini-concerts provided by the luthiers to showcase their new instruments.
“—amazing that brand-new spruce-top classical could sound that good after what the player said was forty-five minutes of playing time. In another four or five years, it will open up and probably sound so good you won’t be able to listen to it without crying.”
Kent nodded. Said, “Uh huh.”
“I asked one of the makers what the difference was between a guitar-maker and a luthier. ‘Luthier,’ by the way, comes from ‘lute,’ but has come to mean anybody who makes fretted instruments like guitars, lutes, ouds, and the like. He said that the difference was about two thousand dollars. . . .” She stopped and looked at Kent. “Where did you go?”
“Nowhere. I’m right here.”
“No, your mind isn’t. What’s up?”
He took a deep breath. He had once stutter-stepped across a field littered with bodies, charging a Colombian machine-gunner trying to chop him down; once, had crawled into a dark underground tunnel in which he knew an enemy soldier with a shotgun was waiting. As a first lieutenant, he had, once upon a time, told a bird colonel to go to hell, and what to do to himself when he got there. He wasn’t a coward when it came to risking his ass, and he had been living on borrowed time for years. He didn’t worry about a lot of stuff.
He was worried now.
“Abe?”
“I’ve got a question for you.” He glanced away, caught Maria’s attention where she was on standby. He nodded, giving her the signal. She started toward their table.
“Yeah? I’m right here. Anytime.”
“Give me a second. I’ve only done this once, and it was almost forty years ago.”
She frowned, trying to make the connection. If Maria didn’t hurry, she would, too.
Maria arrived. She set a covered plate on the table in front of Jen. Jen looked up. “What’s this? We haven’t ordered yet.”
Maria smiled. She pulled the metal cover from the plate. . . .
Lying on a piece of black velvet was the engagement ring Kent had bought. It was white gold with a half-carat blue-white diamond mounted in a solitaire setting. He’d had it sized to match the ring he’d found in her medicine cabinet. He hoped it fit.
She blinked, stared at the ring. Then looked back at him.
“So, what do you think?” he said.
She smiled and shook her head. “What do I think about what, General?” She locked gazes with him, waiting.
He managed another breath, his heart pounding as if he had just finished the obstacle course. “Will you marry me?”
Her smile got bigger. “Sure.” She picked up the ring, slid it onto her finger. It seemed to fit okay. She put her hand back down, picked up the menu. To Maria, who was grinning like a pack of happy baboons, Jen said, “So, what’s the special tonight?”
Butter wouldn’t have melted in her mouth she was so cool. “Miss Jen!” Maria said. She sounded horrified.
“I thought the wine was better than usual,” Jen said.
“Does this mean I’ll get a break on the cost of my lessons?” Kent asked, smiling.
“Only after the wedding,” she said.
Kent laughed. If he thought he was going to one-up her, he realized, he was wrong.
London, England
1890 C.E.
Jay walked through the grimy streets, the vile, choking miasma of coal smoke and fog so thick you couldn’t see half a block. He was following a short man wearing an opera cape and silk top hat. So far, he was getting nothing more than dogs-not-barking-in-the-night, and he could have used Conan Doyle’s master detective and his doctor sidekick to help out here.
Rachel Lewis had been a dead end. She was too good to leave obvious clues that he could find.
Carruth had spent hardly any time on the web; there were few net-trails to find, and most of those didn’t go anywhere useful.
Jay was about ready to pack it in, but he figured he might as well follow up this last line of inquiry.
The figure fading in and out of the reeking smog was headed somewhere, and he might as well see where.
It wasn’t a direction connected to Lewis, as far as Jay could see.
Ahead, the caped man paused, then turned into an alley.
Probably Jack the Ripper’s turf.
Jay followed, and was rewarded by seeing the fellow enter a low doorway with a fitful oil lamp mounted on the wall next to it.
Jay went in, and found himself in a pub of some low standing. Thieves, cutpurses, trulls, sailors, a hard-looking lot drinking bitters and gin.
Rachel Lewis wasn’t here. Even in disguise, he would have known her, he was sure. Ah, well. That would have been too much to hope for, he figured.
“End scenario.”
Net Force HQ
Quantico, Virginia
Jay leaned back in his chair, shucking gear a piece at a time. So what he had found in the killer London smog was nothing more than an address for a cabin that Carruth had rented a couple of times, way the hell out in Montana. No sign that Lewis had anything to do with that, and Carruth wasn’t going to be using the place again.
Jay voxaxed the cabin’s rental site. It took only a few seconds to find out that it had just been rented. Details of the renter were not available for public consumption, but, of course, Jay wasn’t the public. He hacked the website and found the name of the person renting the place:
“M. Lane.”
Jay frowned. Something about that rang a bell, what was it . . . ?
He scrolled down, found a handwritten signature on the rental agreement. It was pretty much an unreadable scrawl, looked like it said “Margie,” or maybe “Margaret,” or . . .
Margo? Margo Lane? Lamont Cranston’s friend?
The Shadow’s girl . . . ?
“Holy shit!” he said. He reached for the phone. He needed to talk to the rental agent, to find out if the person in the cabin was, indeed, a woman. And if so, what she looked like . . .
39
Net Force HQ
Thorn nodded. “Looks pretty good, Jay.”
They were in his office—Thorn, Jay, and Abe Kent. “What do you think, Abe?”
“I’ve looked at the aerials. There’s a shiny new OwlSat footprinting the place. Couple feet of snow on the ground, but it is approachable. Small team, a quad, that would work. We could mount up, be there this afternoon, hit it after dark.”
“ ‘We?’ ”
“I’m a lousy desk jockey,” Kent said. “This is what I do.”
Thorn smiled.
Jay said, “I want to go, too.”
Thorn regarded him. “I thought you didn’t want to risk field operations.”
“This one I do.” He paused. “This is personal, Boss. She suckered me. I want to see her face when she realizes she’s caught.”
Thorn nodded again. “Okay.”
“I need to mention there are some legal issues,” Kent said.
“Posse Comitatus,” Thorn said.
“Yes, sir.”
Jay blinked. “Posse who?”
“In the earlier days of the Republic, the civilians got worried that some sleazy politician might get himself elected and use the military to kick ass and take names,” Thorn said. “So Congress passed a law that forbade the use of the federal military, save the National Guard, from police activities here at home. The Posse Comitatus Act. General Kent is a Marine, as are his troops. They aren’t supposed to be traipsing about in the woods hunting people for civilian crimes.”
“Lewis isn’t a civilian, though. You pointed that out
yourself earlier.”
“Even so. The FBI has jurisdiction, or the local police, not the Army. Certainly not the Marines.”
“So, does that mean we can’t go?”
Thorn grinned. “Oh, no. That just means we have to be very careful. We’re going.”
Kent nodded.
“You could get fired,” Jay said.
“I don’t think that’s gonna happen,” Thorn said. “I think the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs would make a whole lot of things disappear if we deliver Captain Lewis to him. As long as there isn’t a big, smoking crater in the ground out there when you get done, I don’t think there will be any record that General Kent and his Marines ever set foot in Montana, except to do a little fly-fishing.”
Kent grinned at that.
Thorn stood, as did Jay and Kent. Thorn extended his hand to Kent. “Good luck, General.”
“Thank you, sir.” He turned to Jay. “Let’s go. We’ve got places to go and terrorists to catch.”
After they left, Thorn considered his course of action. He had places to go, too. He took a deep breath and let it escape slowly. Should he call Marissa?
No. He’d made his mind up. He had to do what he had to do. She’d understand that.
40
The Pentagon
Washington, D.C.
In Hadden’s office, Thorn sat across the big desk from the general. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs had listened to what Thorn had to say without interrupting.
Now he said, “Are you a student of history, Thorn?”
Thorn shrugged. “I know a little.”
“What would be the most famous duel in the U.S.?”
“Burr and Hamilton.”
Hadden nodded. “Two men who didn’t get along politically and who hated each other personally. Burr was Jefferson’s Vice President. He blamed Hamilton for all kinds of things, not the least of which was being dropped from the ticket for the reelection campaign. So, the sitting Vice President challenged the former Secretary of the Treasury to settle things once and for all. Since dueling was illegal in New York in 1804, they barged across the river to the Weehawken, New Jersey, dueling grounds. There were seconds, a doctor. The two men loaded their single-shot pistols—.56-caliber, I believe they were. They squared up at ten paces, were given leave to shoot. Burr fired and hit Hamilton. Some say Hamilton fired into the air rather than at Burr; some say he was simply a lousy shot. In any event, Hamilton’s wound was fatal, though he lingered, dying the next day at his home in Manhattan.”
Thorn nodded, wondering where this was going.
Hadden continued: “Hamilton was shot in New Jersey, but died in New York, and Aaron Burr was indicted for murder in both states. He was never prosecuted in either. Burr left town, went to the Carolinas, and then back to Washington, where he served out the last of his term as Vice President. I do believe that’s the only time a sitting VP was under indictment for murder while he was in office. He traveled after that, but eventually returned to New York, after the heat had died down.
“Burr’s fortunes sagged—a few years later, he was arrested for treason in connection with some land scheme connected to the Louisiana Purchase, but he got off. He didn’t die until 1836, making him about eighty.”
Thorn looked at Hadden. “Fascinating.”
“And why in hell am I telling you this?”
“Exactly. Not to put too fine a point on it, sir.”
“RHIP. Rank has its privileges, son. Aaron Burr killed a prominent man, but he had powerful supporters, and was at the time the Vice President. However unhappy his life might have been after his duel, he had more than thirty years of it left after Hamilton was laid beneath the cold ground. Three decades wherein he was able to eat, sleep, make love, travel, all the things that the living do. He got away with what the state called murder. He wasn’t the first. Won’t be the last. Had he been an ordinary citizen, that probably wouldn’t have happened.”
Thorn nodded.
“As the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, I have a lot of privileges not available to most men. I try and use them for the good of these United States of America as best I can. Sometimes I step over the line, and because I am who I am, I get away with it. That doesn’t make it right. I need all the help I can get, and people who will stand up to me and call it like they see it? They are hard to find. You’re an asset, son. I respect a man who will fight for his principles, even if I don’t always agree with them.”
Thorn nodded again. “I appreciate that, General.”
“But you’re leaving anyway.”
“Yes, sir. Net Force as it stands isn’t what I signed on for. I’m not a soldier. I didn’t like some of the end-justifies-the-means choices I had to make. I want to be able to look at myself in the mirror and believe I am part of the solution and not the problem.”
Hadden nodded. “That’s what I figured.”
“I don’t envy you your job. Rank does indeed have its privileges, sir, but with great power comes great responsibility.”
“Carl von Clausewitz?”
“No, sir. Spider Man.”
It took a second, but then both men grinned.
Hadden stood and extended his hand. Thorn took it.
“I appreciate your service, son.”
“Thank you. Good luck on finding somebody to run things.”
“It was good work, uncovering the terrorist we wanted. I’ll keep you posted on it, let you know when we catch her.”
Thorn smiled.
“Something?”
“No, sir. Nothing.”
Trooper’s Trail, Montana
The cabin had a solar panel that fed batteries, and once you scraped the foot and a half of snow off the cells, you could get enough trickle to run a computer and a cell-phone Internet connection okay, with a few lights thrown in for good measure. Even out here in the middle of nowhere, the phone worked most of the time—one of the joys of civilization. Lewis could reach her hidden server using a laptop, and that was all she needed.
She had been working the connection to the buyer, and it looked as if they had a deal. Less than she had hoped for, but she couldn’t really push it too hard. The Army might not crack her systems for a while, and even if they did, she didn’t care if the buyer got burned when he tried to break into a base, but she couldn’t give any more demonstrations, and that was that. He was firm on a million-five, and she was going to have to take it. Not the ten million it might have been once, but better than nothing.
She’d have to hire some muscle, but she thought she could manage that okay. She knew a couple places where mercs hung out, and all she needed was somebody who could look menacing and shoot if he had to.
The sun was going down. Lewis shut the computer off and went out to collect firewood. The only heat the cabin had was a potbellied wood stove smack in the middle of the main room, and she had to keep it going all the time. Aside from that, there was a wood-fired range in the kitchen, and no heat source at all in the single bedroom, just a mound of quilts and comforters on the bed. She left the door to the bedroom open at night to get the stove’s warmth. She didn’t want to be fumbling around outside for more firewood in the middle of the night, in the dark and at twenty below. Bad enough if she had to go to the bathroom, which required a trip to the outhouse—no indoor plumbing, and you had to get water from a hand pump outside the cabin—after you thawed it out.
Primitive, yes. On the other hand, nobody was going to accidentally stumble across her here—she was a long way from a major road.
It hadn’t snowed for a few days, wasn’t supposed to for a few more, so the AWD SUV she’d rented under a fake name would get her out okay. She could firm the deal up in the morning, and take off.
Not exactly as she’d planned things, the way they’d turned out, but she was still ahead of the game. Better that than not. “You sure you want to do this?” Kent asked.
Jay nodded. “I came this far. I want to be there at the end.”
Kent said, “Fro
m here, we have to snowshoe. It’s a couple miles. People out here will notice us and word will get around pretty fast, so we want to go in while it is dark, to minimize chances of being seen. We’ll use IR lights, cold-weather snow-camo clothes, and hike in on the double.”
“I’ll keep up.”
“I expect you will.”
“I heard you were thinking about getting married, General.”
“Not thinking about it, son, going for it. I’ll send you an invitation to the wedding.”
“Congratulations.”
“Thanks. Best we gear up and get ready.”
Not long after midnight, Lewis half-heard a sound on the cabin’s front porch. She came awake fast, listening. In the two nights she’d been here, she’d had a few animal visitors, foxes or wolves or raccoons. She had to keep a heavy lid locked into place on the trash can to keep garbage from being strewn all over the place. Probably a coon out there trying to get a free meal.
She grabbed the flashlight next to the bed, and the gun that Carruth had stashed under the mattress, an old Beretta 9mm pistol.
Probably, it was a hungry critter, but best she go and make sure.
When she opened the door, she saw a man standing there, dressed in white camo and a hood. She jumped, startled, covering him with the pistol as he pushed the hood back. . . .
“Jay?!”
“Hello, Captain.”
She steadied the gun, kept it aimed at his chest. “How did you find me?” She looked past him, didn’t see anybody else out in the dark.
“I found Carruth’s records, rental receipts for this place. I followed it up. Margo Lane? Come on.”
She shook her head. Amazing. “What, did you think I was just going to . . . surrender because you figured it out? Come out here like the Lone Ranger to take me in? I can shoot you dead where you stand and bury you in the snow. They won’t find your body until spring.”