Safe House

left.”

I didn’t laugh at that one. And if he said anything about some fake mercenary recruiters who ended up dead in a shabby little Manhattan office, I was going to take something besides tobacco out of the pack of cigarettes I’d left on the dash after I’d smoked the last one.

“There’s a long list,” he said ambiguously, letting me wonder what else he knew. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t work.”

“I didn’t mean me,” I told him. “I got somebody else. Somebody perfect.”

He sat quietly, wrapped around himself. If he was thinking, it didn’t show on his face.

“ ‘Perfect’ is a big word,” he finally said.

“Let’s leave that for a minute,” I told him. “Say I’m right. Say I’ve got a man you could put in there. That means Lothar goes too, you care about that?”

“No.”

“And this other guy, he gets the same deal?”

“If he’s not involved with the . . . if he’s only going in to pipeline back to me, he wouldn’t need the same deal.”

“New face, new ID, full immunity,” I said like I hadn’t heard him.

“Immunity for what? For whatever he had to do to prove himself to the cell?”

“Full immunity. Not ‘use’ immunity, not ‘transactional’ immunity. No-testimony, walk-away-clear, no-arrest, no-prosecute, dis-a-fucking-peer immunity. You can do that?”

“Yes,” he said, like I’d asked him a stupid question.

“And you can make this Lothar bring someone in? Even this late?”

“If that person had the right bona fides. But they’d have to be good.”

“How much time are they looking at?” I asked him, thinking about how even a double-crossed Lothar could be out in a few years. And go looking for his son.

Pryce held up his webbed hands, ticking off the counts on his fingers. “Conspiracy to commit mass murder, possession of the means to do it, dozens of assorted felonies—mostly armed robbery—in furtherance,” he said. “Plus a load of individual crimes committed by individual members for which they’ve never been arrested. Yet. Homicides, rapes, firebombings . . .

“A couple of thousand years apiece,” Pryce concluded. “Enough to make any of them resist arrest.”

“Okay. This Lothar, he’s not the only one you got, right?”

“I’m not sure what you mean. The only what?”

“The only Nazi. No way you just stumbled on him blind. You’re running some others, maybe in different spots around the country.”

“And if I was?”

“You wanted a credential. I’m gonna give you one. The best. Gilt-edged. Can you get word of a contract put out on someone? Call him a race-mixer, a closet Jew . . . I don’t give a damn.”

“A contract?”

“Don’t be cute,” I told him. “We’re both over the line now. Don’t worry. Your guy doesn’t have to do anything. Just say he heard about this contract, that’s all.”

“When would that have to start?”

“A few weeks ago.”

“I don’t under——”

“Something already . . . happened, okay? Let’s say this guy I’m talking about, he’s gonna say he did it. If he did it off a contract, if he whacked someone for the cause, that’d ace him up, right?”

“Yes,” he said, nodding at the truth. “That would do it.”

“And you can put that together?”

“I can. But I’m still not—”

“I got two things that’ll convince you,” I said. “Number one: You get to meet the guy. Face-to-face. Ask him any questions you want. Satisfy yourself. You like it, he goes in. Deal?”

“You said two things,” he reminded me.

“You think you know me,” I said, my voice as intimate as a caress. “You parked this big white target of a Taurus out here, all by itself. And then you stood aside, waiting in the shadows. Just in case I decided to lob a bazooka round into it, right? One big bang, you’re gone and the problem’s solved. That’s why you wanted me to get in this car with you. You’re a puppeteer, Pryce. Information is your strings. Before you pull them, you better be sure they’re connected.”

“Which means what?” he said, only boredom in his voice.

I tapped the pack of cigarettes to take one out. A tiny black cylinder fell into my hand. “This is a flashlight,” I said in the same gentle tone of voice I’d been using. “If I had taken it out, shined it in your face at any time, we’d be done talking.”

“Nobody’s that good a shot,” he said. “Even with the window—”

I touched the flashlight, but I didn’t aim it at his face. A tiny dot of red light showed in the windshield. And then Max the Silent touched the back of his neck.

“Don’t turn around,” I told him. “Don’t do anything stupid. You’re not gonna get hurt, understand?”

“Yes,” he said, holding his head rigid.

“It wouldn’t take a bullet,” I said. “And it wouldn’t have to make any noise. Or it could make a lot of noise. But one thing would always be the same. You know what that would be?”

“No.”

“You’d never see it coming,” I told him.

He sat there without moving for a couple of minutes after Max pulled his hands away and went back into the night.

“This is a battlefield friendship,” I said quietly. “You and me. Your enemies are my enemies, that makes us friends, right? Or allies, anyway.”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to do my piece. Do it right. Like I promised. You too. No more threats. You already did your threats, and you’re gonna get what you want. Don’t do them anymore, okay?”

“Yes.”

“We’re going to have to meet again. You’re going to need to see the man I have. You’re going to have to know some things about him. That’s the only way we can play this, you and me. Together. The way I scan it, you’re a lone wolf. Whatever you know, you’re the only one. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s be clear. You want this cell. Lothar’s a chip. You’re going to ante that chip. I’m going to put up my man. He goes in. Lothar brings him in. You take care of that. I take care of getting you the information. I make sure the information is right. I guarantee you keep getting it even if Lothar turns unreliable. Information, that’s what you get from me. You cash that information when they all go. That about cover it?”

“Yes.”

“And when you get paid, I get paid.”

That got his attention. He shifted position for the first time since Max took hold of him, his lipless mouth twitching to match the muscle under his eye. “We never discussed that,” he said.

“Yeah we did. In the restaurant. Only thing we didn’t agree on was the price. How much is ZOG paying for hard-core terrorist cells these days?”

“It . . . depends. On a number of factors out of my control.”

“Sure. Look, I know we’re not fifty-fifty on this. All I could do is take a wild guess. And I’m not gonna do that. But I don’t think I’d be much off if I was thinking seven figures. . . .“

“That’s—”