The Deep Zone

There was a twenty-four-hour 7-Eleven and Mobil station in an otherwise deserted mile between Tucker and Bock roads, about halfway to his condo. He turned in and stopped by one of the pumps. A black Ford Expedition with tinted glass pulled up on the other side of the pump island. It looked like the kind of vehicle driven by upper- crust Washingtonians, and normally Lathrop might have glanced over in case a shapely leg emerged, but now he was too tired to care.

He took out his wallet to remove a credit card. He heard car doors open, and in less time than it took him to draw his next breath, two men were five feet from him, one in front and one to his right side. The Expedition was between them and the 7-Eleven. They both wore baggy Levi’s low on their hips, new Timberland boots, shiny Redskins jackets, and black ski masks. Gangbangers. Both held guns—Beretta 9mms. Thumb-sized silencers extended from the muzzles of both pistols.

Muggers must be doing better these days, he thought. Berettas cost as much as his SIG. And silencers? Another thousand per gun on the street, easy. Lathrop kept eye contact with them. He was not all that alarmed. For one thing, he was too tired for this. For another, he had been in many worse situations.

“Give me the wallet.” The man in front spoke calmly, no tension in his voice. Doesn’t sound like a gangbanger, Lathrop thought. The robber held out his left hand, palm up. He had brown leather gloves on, but between jacket cuff and glove Lathrop glimpsed black skin and the gleam of a blade-thin gold watch. Lathrop saw the man glance up at the security camera that covered this section of pump island. With any luck, Lathrop thought, the clerk inside would see what was happening and call 911. On the other hand, with the way things had been going lately, such a clerk was more likely to be mesmerized by iPhone porn.

“Relax, guys.” Lathrop still wasn’t particularly upset. “This isn’t the first time I’ve had guns pointed at me. Let’s do this the easy way. I’m going to hand over my wallet to you slowly. Is that all right?”

“Give it up.” The man’s calm was the third strange thing Lathrop noted. The first had been the expensive Berettas. The second had been the robber looking straight at the security camera. Why on earth would he do that, even with a mask on? And now, third, was how this man talked. From his days in intelligence Lathrop knew that you could tell a great many things from the way someone spoke, even a single sentence.

Holding the wallet between his thumb and forefinger, Lathrop extended his right arm slowly. The man in front of him didn’t move, but the man off to one side reached in and took the wallet.

“There. See—no muss, no fuss.” Lathrop’s voice remained calm, easy. He had no thought of reaching for his own SIG. For one thing, they could shoot him ten times each before he cleared the holster. No, a wallet was not worth getting shot for. It was just a typical D.C. mugging, like dozens or maybe even scores that happened every day in the beleaguered city. A bit unusual out here, but this was an isolated store with easy getaway routes. Nothing special, so don’t make anything special of it. Though why these guys would choose to do it under the bright lights of the gas pump island, with surveillance cameras watching their every move, was beyond him. But then, armed robbers were not generally known for their intellectual prowess.

“You good?” one said to the other.

“All good.”

The first one turned back to Lathrop. “Your cellphone.”

“Excuse me?”

“Give me your cellphone.” The man still spoke slowly and clearly, as if he had all the time in the world. They might have been chatting at a cocktail party, so relaxed was his voice. Lathrop had heard such a voice before. People who worked for him in the field, the ones who did the wet work, often had such voices. They could crush skulls and slit throats and feel not one flicker of remorse. In a way it was not their fault. Their brains were wired wrong. No true feelings of any kind, in fact. They inhabited an emotional wasteland where only two colors existed: black and red.

“You want my cellphone?” Lathrop pretended to sound astonished, but that was just a play for time. The wallet meant nothing. The cellphone meant a great deal, a mother lode of data that could confer tremendous power on anyone who knew what it was and how to use it.

The man smacked the butt of his Beretta into Lathrop’s face, gashing his right cheek to the bone. The impact stunned Lathrop but did not knock him out.

“I hate repeating myself, Mr. Lathrop. Give me the phone. Like you said, easy or hard. It’s all the same to us.”

They know my name. And they said my name. From the confrontation’s first moment, a part of Lathrop’s brain had detached itself and begun calculating odds, probabilities, and permutations. Until now, this whole meeting had been nothing serious. In an instant that had changed and, at last, Lathrop’s pulse rate went up and he felt the hot surge of adrenaline through his body.

“All right, all right.” Lathrop let his eyes go vague and wavered on his feet, pretending to be more concussed than he was. “It’s in the car.”

He watched the other man’s eyes flick sideways just once, as Lathrop had known they would. It wasn’t much, but it was the only opening he was going to get. He ducked and wrapped his left hand around the other man’s gun, covering the cocked trigger so that it could not drop and fire a round. He shoved up and pivoted to put that man between him and the other one. At the same time he drew his own weapon from the shoulder holster under his left armpit. He always kept a round in the chamber, and a SIG Sauer has no safety to release. All he had to do was point and pull the trigger. His index finger found it and he was an instant from firing when the man head-butted him so viciously that he lost consciousness for several seconds. When he came back, he was sitting on the pavement, leaning against his Accord’s rear quarter panel. Blood was pouring from his shattered nose and now he saw four men instead of two, but two were twin images and he knew it was a real concussion this time.

Still not hurrying, not moving like someone who wanted to do damage unnecessarily, the man leaned down and removed Lathrop’s cellphone from his inside pocket.

“Any more in the car?” Asking his partner.

“No.”

“You good, then?”

“All good.”

The man who had butted him looked down and Lathrop’s vision cleared. He was watching the other man’s eyes, which showed nothing more than the attention of a craftsman doing a job of work, as he fired two times into the center of Lathrop’s chest, the silenced Beretta making small sounds, like a child’s hands clapping. But the impacts: punches of a giant fist. Then pain, and then astonishment. They have the wallet. And phone. Why shoot?

But then, why not? In certain circles, murder had long since ceased being the greatest sin. Why didn’t matter anymore. Killing might be for fun, or to satisfy curiosity, or to pass a gang initiation, or for no more reason than a sneeze or a random thought. But not gangbangers, these. He kept his eyes on the other man’s, settling deeper into shock, a slow falling away, numb, his visual field graying, contracting. His brain produced no coherent thoughts but there were feelings too fast even for the shock to intercept, neurons firing and synapses sparking, and still the astonishment, blended now with an oceanic sadness as though watching the departure of a loved one who would never be seen again, but not regret, not one hint of it. David Lathrop had long since made his peace with death, and had tried to live each day of his life in such a way that when death came he would be able to greet it, if not with open arms, then at least without fear. The only thing he had always known about this moment was that he would never know when it would come.

The man then aimed his gun at Lathrop’s forehead, slightly left of center, and pulled the trigger. The last thing Lathrop saw was the Expedition’s license plate. The car was as immaculate as if it had just rolled off a showroom floor, but the license plate’s numbers were completely obscured by a layer of what looked like dried mud. They had done things like that in Baghdad and Kabul and Karachi. He understood.

THIRTY-THREE

Dr. Casey—it’s just after midnight. If you get this message before you go home, could you please come down to 4?