Authors: Eric Van Lustbader
She was only a hand’s-breadth from it when Waxman used his walking stick to flick the weapon away. Her head came down, hanging between her shoulders as she tried to marshal her energy, but it was no use. The drug injected into her was too powerful. She fell onto her face. Someone caught her, picked her up, and bundled her into the backseat of the Lincoln.
Dimly, she could see Waxman walking briskly, without his limp, to where Herr and Bridges were grappling hand to hand. She tried to move, but she was paralyzed. She tried to cry out, but she was mute. The muscles of her throat wouldn’t work.
“Stop!” Waxman commanded.
At once, Herr pushed Bridges away. Rolling onto his back, Bridges levered himself onto one knee. He scrabbled for his fallen handgun, but Waxman trod hard on his hand.
“That will be enough,” Waxman said gruffly.
Herr leapt at Bridges, arms around his neck and the side of his head. Bridges, caught off guard, struggled mightily, but Herr’s hold was immovable. Herr gave a powerful wrench, and Bridges’s neck cracked. Bridges’s eyes rolled up in his head and his hands flopped into his lap. Herr kicked the corpse into the gutter.
Waxman stared down at Herr. “Let that be a lesson to you, Reginald. You should have broken his neck in the first ten seconds.”
December 9–December 13
The most secret fear is that a blind,
unthinking passion might rip us away from
the group we belong to, make us guilty of betrayal.
—C
ARLOS
F
UENTES,
Diana: the Goddess Who Hunts Alone
A
LAN
F
RAINE
had not slept in thirty-six hours. Still, he didn’t feel tired, and it wasn’t just the caffeine released by the coffee and chocolate circulating in his system. Secretary Paull had assigned him the task of electronically breaking into the group the only known member of which was Leonard Bishop.
Fraine rose from his task chair and, fists pressed to the small of his back, stretched his aching muscles. He walked about the room Paull had provided at the Dupont North Hotel, which, despite its tony name, was a slightly run-down establishment in a not altogether savory neighborhood. Not a good idea to be working on this project within Metro’s building, where Bishop held an eagle’s-eye view. In fact, the computer Fraine had been working on day and night was not tied into any government server—that would have been too dangerous. Fraine was working with the other member of Paull’s SITSPEC, a twenty-one-year-old hacker named Leopard. At least that was his hacker name. Fraine knew him only by this handle, and was glad of it. Leopard knew him only as Alan. He had no idea what Fraine’s real job was, and most likely was also glad of it. Compartmentalization was paramount in any black op, but especially this one, where high-level homegrown adversaries were lurking in the tall grass inside the Beltway.
Leopard was a tall, lanky, towheaded kid with angry zits blooming on his forehead and chin. His love of all things junky, greasy, and sugary guaranteed those blemishes weren’t going away anytime soon. Still, the computer screen didn’t seem to mind, and neither did Fraine. When it came to slipping unnoticed through firewalls, the kid was a stone-cold genius. Plus, he knew how to brew coffee so strong it made Fraine’s heart pound. Under what rock Paull had found him was anyone’s guess.
Fraine stared out the window at the Hahnemann Memorial in the distance while he sipped some of the kid’s liquid caffeine. Hahnemann had been a German doctor, the father of homeopathy. Curious that he would have a statue here.
Fraine turned away, knowing that he was trying to distract himself. He wondered how Nona was handling Bishop; according to Paull’s directive, they had had no personal contact since she had agreed to dive into the chief’s personal private hell pool. Fraine didn’t like it; that wasn’t required. Though he felt a natural protectiveness toward her, he also knew she was hard as Satan’s heart. She would not break because of what the SITSPEC assignment required of her. But still. Whoring herself out had never been in her job description; taking one for the team had.
“Yo, check it,” Leopard said.
He’d been sitting beside Fraine for six hours without getting up even to relieve his bladder. Fraine was beginning to suspect he didn’t have one. All that crap went down his throat and got burned up by his furious metabolism. I
should be so lucky,
Fraine thought, as he crossed the room and sat back down.
“Fifteen years ago, this dude Bishop was in the Horn of Africa.” Everyone was “dude” to Leopard.
Fraine stared at the document on the screen. It had
TOP SECRET
and
EYES ONLY
stamped across the top. “How the fuck did you get this?”
“Firewalls, firewalls, firewalls,” Leopard said. “They’re all just video game levels to me, puzzles, see, that have to be figured out. You know the code, there’s always a path inside, and if you discover the source code, then shit, dude, you got it made.”
“Whose firewall?”
“DoD,” Leopard said. “But some branch that doesn’t exist.”
Now we’re getting somewhere,
Fraine thought. “Officially.”
“Well, yes, ’cos here it is.” Leopard bobbed his head. “You gotta get all the way to Oz to find it, though.”
“This branch have a name?”
“Negatory. Just a number designation: Three-thirteen.” The kid picked at a dirty mess of cold fries overlaid with congealed cheese the color of a Day-Glo sun. “So, anyway, Horn of Africa.”
The text on the screen began to change so fast Fraine’s head hurt.
“Your man Bishop was assigned to a unit, name: Acacia. I’ve been trying to bring up that name elsewhere in here, to cross-reference, but so far no luck.”
Fraine was trying to make sense of the text on the 313 server. “What was Acacia doing in the Horn of Africa?”
“Not clear. Could be anything. One thing I do know, their deployment lasted a month. Then they were flown home and debriefed for a week in DoD HQ.”
And apparently let go, because six months later, Bishop joined Metro. Why did he go from a black ops unit of DoD to D.C. police? And how had he risen through the ranks so quickly?
“I want to find out what Acacia’s assignment was.”
The kid nodded. “Okay, but from the look of things I’d say Acacia was a death squad, deployed maybe to assassinate some politically hot football the Pentagon wanted to get rid of.”
“That’s quite an imagination you’ve got there,” Fraine said.
Leopard gave him the hairy eyeball. “You think this is
my
first deployment?”
“Clearly not,” Fraine said. “I would feel better if we had confirmation. A month’s deployment is an awfully long time for a death squad.”
“Not if you’re ending up elsewhere, like for instance the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
The kid had a point and Fraine conceded it. “Keep on it.” Fraine rose and grabbed his coat. “Meanwhile, I’m going to see if I can find out who Bishop’s rabbi was at Metro way back when.”
“Dude!”
Fist-bump.
* * *
“S
TAY HERE!
” Lenny ordered, already half out of the car.
Vera, filled with fear for Alli, did no such thing. Instead, she went around, felt under the driver’s seat, but didn’t find what she was looking for: a service pistol. The stiff leather holster bolted to the underside was empty. Hesitating for only a moment, she moved off cautiously, following in Lenny’s footsteps.
She hurried across the street, feeling vulnerable in the complete absence of foot traffic, moving from parked car to parked car, crouched down, peering above fenders and around bumpers. She saw Lenny running full-out now, but even when she changed position she could not see any sign of Alli. She kept moving forward, changing her angle of view each time in order to get a sense of the whole scene.
She saw Dick Bridges sitting awkwardly on the street, then Bridges was dead, his neck snapped by a hulking man Vera did not know. And here came Lenny, Glock 9mm in one hand, sprinting toward the men. He yelled something Vera couldn’t make out, and Waxman turned toward him. Slowly, almost leisurely, Waxman lifted his walking stick. Something zipped out of its end and struck Lenny, who staggered and went down to his knees. He tried to lift the handgun to aim it at Waxman, but apparently he lacked the strength. The man with Waxman threw Dick Bridges aside and stood up, strode over to Lenny, and kicked him in the face. Lenny keeled onto his back and lay on the ground, unmoving.
At that moment, Waxman looked up, as if he were aware of Vera’s presence. She ducked down behind the Chevy van she had been using as a shield, and, keeping herself motionless, held her breath. When she heard footsteps approaching, she slid under the van, keeping herself perfectly still. This was the moment in thriller films when you could hear the woman in peril breathing hard but whoever was after her couldn’t. If her situation had not been so dire, Vera would have laughed. Women in those films were so stupid.
She had silently counted off thirty-three seconds when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw the shoes and trouser cuffs. For a moment or two, they stood beside the van, then they proceeded on, the slap of leather soles against tarmac receding to silence. Vera licked her dry lips and allowed herself to breath more deeply. When nothing further happened, she slid out from under the van and risked a glance around its fender. A gleaming black Lincoln Town Car had its rear door open. Waxman, bending down, said something to someone inside. When he moved away, Vera saw that it was Alli. Then Waxman and the man who had killed Dick Bridges got in, and all the doors slammed shut.
She looked around for Dick Bridges or Lenny, but there was no sign that they had ever been there. The bodies must have been stuffed in the Lincoln’s trunk, she thought. It was certainly large enough.
As the Town Car backed up to make a U-turn, Vera saw part of the license tag and quickly memorized it as the Lincoln took off.
It was only afterward, upon reflection, that she realized her heart had been in her throat the whole time.
* * *
F
RAINE KNEW
a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy. That’s how things worked at Metro. Charlie Patrick was Fraine’s guy. Charlie was something of a self-centered prick, but it was just this knack for self-preservation that had kept him at his job through a handful of regime changes and budgetary layoffs at Metro. No one wanted to do without Charlie because he was the one who kept the overtime logs, who figured who was getting how much money above and below the table, so to speak. And, sly as a fox, he had made his software impenetrable to all but himself, so replacing him wasn’t an option. In other words, Charlie Patrick was indispensable, which was just the way Charlie Patrick liked his life, because, when you came down to the nub, he was nothing more than a clerk. His office cubicle was the approximate size of a shower stall, without a window or any other means of light besides the three mean fluorescent strips depending from the fiberboard ceiling like stalagmites that had fallen asleep. Looking at the bright side, however, being indispensable was a good enough reason for Charlie not to drink himself into the gutter or to put a gun under his chin and pull the trigger, both popular options for cops who had reached the end of their tether.
Fraine took Charlie Patrick out to Patsy’s, the local watering hole where Charlie was a living legend. At Patsy’s, at least, Charlie was the unconditional king of the hill.
“Looka those suits ovah there, with their silicone dates,” Charlie said darkly. “Only pussies drink wine.” Charlie himself never drank anything more potent than beer, and then he limited himself to two at the outside. “I already got me a life,” he’d say when queried about not going along with the frequent beer jags for which Patsy’s was famous.
They sat in a beery booth whose bones creaked alarmingly with his every move. Charlie was a big man, if you were judging solely by girth. Red-cheeked, flame-haired, nose like Rudolph, he had a notorious Irish temper, especially when someone tried to pee on his territory. Many precinct captains, it was said, were justifiably afraid of him.
“So, Al, long time no see,” he said, between ordering a double-meat Coney, plus fries, onion rings, and a beer. Lacing sausage fingers on the tabletop, he added, “What can I do ya for?”
Charlie wasn’t one for small talk. “Get the business end out of the way first, then sit back and enjoy the ride,” was his oft-stated motto.
“I’m looking for the answer to a question.”
“And I’m open for business.”
The beers came, along with a plate of pickles and a plastic basket piled high with rolls and prepackaged pats of butter.
“This particular question involves CoD Bishop.”
Charlie seemed not to have heard. He tore the tops off three pats and swabbed them all onto a roll. Charlie’s massive appetite was a component of his legend at Patsy’s.
“CoD Bishop,” Charlie said, his cheeks bulging with oily roll flesh. He had a knack of speaking with perfect diction while his mouth was crammed with food. “I hate that snotty fuck.” He swallowed. “But I gotta admit he’s got a lotta heads up his ass.”
“At Metro, you mean.”
Charlie sat back, hands in the air, at the ready position, as plates of food were set down in front of him. The Coney turned out to be thick-cut slices of prime rib smothered in melting pools of Cheez Whiz. “I mean everyfuckingwhere.” Charlie began to chow down, an astonishing sight any time of the day or night. “Bottom line, he’s got major juice behind him.”
Fraine automatically lowered his voice. “That’s the question needs answering.”
Charlie looked up, the lower half of his face glistening like glass. “Headwaters. The source of the Nile.” Putting down what was left of one of the Coney pieces, he wiped his lips. He needed three napkins to soak up all the grease. “Well, now, that’s a mighty dark continent you’re looking to penetrate, Al. You sure you want to go in that direction?”