and posture must have told them everything.
“Did you do it?” Kanezaki said. “Shorrock? Finch? Was it you?”
I didn’t answer.
“Jesus Christ, John. You’re not preventing a coup. You just cleared the way to one.”
Still I didn’t answer. I was struggling to connect the dots. Larison was right. I’d been an idiot. An idiot.
“Do you get it?” Kanezaki said. “Horton isn’t trying to stop this thing. He’s one of the plotters. He mixed a lot of truth into his lies just to-”
“Stop,” I said. “Let me think.”
Dox said, “What’s going on?”
I held up a hand, palm out, and said to Kanezaki, “This announcement about Horton’s new position. When is it scheduled to happen?”
“I don’t know. But the word is, soon.”
“What about Gillmor? When will that be announced?”
“The same.”
I put my thumb over the phone’s microphone and looked over at the others. My mind was racing but I kept my voice calm. “Schmalz is a setup. We need to get out of here. Get ready. Just trying to learn a little more, then I’ll fill you in and we’ll talk about how to bug out.”
The three of them stood. There was an electric feeling building in the room that I didn’t like.
I moved my thumb and said to Kanezaki, “Anything else?”
“Yes. Why are you asking about the timing? Of the announcement about Horton and Gillmor.”
“If the announcements are any time soon, Horton didn’t care that I could hear of them before doing the third target. That means the third target was a setup.”
“Third target…there’s another? Who?”
“Diane Schmalz.”
“The Supreme Court Justice? Are you fucking insane?”
“Relax. I was already going to turn it down. But he never expected me to do it in the first place. It was just a ploy to get me to Washington.”
“Shit. You’re in Washington now?”
“Yes.”
“You need to get out of the city. D.C. is the last place you want Horton hunting for you. Especially now, he has local resources that can lock down that place like he’s closing the door on a closet.”
“Thanks for the information,” I said, preparing to click off. “I’ll call you when I’m somewhere safe.”
“Wait,” he said. “Hold on. Just got something on my screen. It’s…oh, fuck.”
“What?”
“Terror alert. Goes out to everyone in the intelligence and law enforcement communities. CIA, FBI, local and state police, everyone. It says…hang on, okay, Shorrock and Finch didn’t die, they were murdered. According to toxicology tests, with cyanide. And that you were involved. You, the two ISA operators you asked me about, and Dox. And that you’re all armed, special-ops trained, and believed to be in the Washington metro area right now, planning another terror attack.”
It had to be Horton. No one else knew about the cyanide. And Horton didn’t know that I hadn’t even used it.
“You can’t get out of there now,” Kanezaki said. “Every airport, every train station, every bus station, they’ll be crawling with personnel. Every surveillance camera in the city will be looking for you.”
“Do they have photographs?”
“Grainy in the alert. Like blow-ups from surveillance cameras.”
Las Vegas, I guessed. Our best bet would be cabs, at least to start with. The farther we got from the city center, the less concentrated the opposition would be. But we had to move fast.
“All right, at least they’re grainy,” I said. “I doubt the average cop-”
“You don’t get it. You’re not going to be arrested. The president has an assassination list, don’t you know that? There’s a NOFORN addendum to this alert that says you’re on it. All four of you. They’ll shoot you on sight. And if you do wind up captured, there’s Guantanamo, Bagram, Camp No, the Salt Pit…and those are just the ones that have been disclosed. There are others they can put you in the Red Cross has never heard of, let alone visited, you understand? You’ll have a number, that’s it. No one will know your name. John, some of these places, you might as well be on another planet, or in another dimension. You get there, you’re just-”
“I need to go. I’ll call you.”
“Wait. Let me help you.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because you’re the only ones who can stop this thing now.”
“Bullshit. Spill it to the media. Don’t you have contacts at the New York Times?”
He laughed. “You think the Times would do anything with this, even if I had proof? They sat on Bush’s illegal domestic surveillance program until after he was safely reelected. Their editor-in-chief asks the White House for permission to publish, for God’s sake, and is proud of it, too.”
“Then one of the networks. ABC, CNN, whatever.”
He laughed again. “Did you catch Jeremy Scahill’s report about the Agency’s secret prison in Somalia? The seventh floor had apoplexy, it was so dead-on accurate. They used Barbara Starr and Luis Martinez to discredit it. ABC and CNN, the watchdog media.”
“Then call Scahill.”
“The people we’re up against will just instruct the networks to ignore or discredit him. The networks work for us, John. Which I admit is mostly useful and I’ve taken advantage of it many times myself. But it’s working against us right now.”
“Wikileaks, then.”
“Now you’re making sense. But I don’t have any proof. Get me some.”
“No. I don’t want to get further into this. I want to get out.”
“You’re telling me you’re not going to make Horton pay for setting you up?”
I didn’t answer.
“You think he’s going to stop coming after you? You know as well as I do that he’ll be more motivated now than ever.”
Again I said nothing.
“Damn it, John, let me help you.”
I was in a box and I couldn’t see a way out of it. “Goddamn it. How?”
“I’ll come to you. Put you in the trunk of my car and drive you out of the city.”
“The trunk? There are four of us. What kind of car do you have?”
“Honda.”
“What model?”
There was a pause. “Civic.”
I looked over at the collective mass of Larison, Treven, and Dox. “No way,” I said.
“You’d be amazed what you can fit into a tight space with a little Crisco,” Dox offered, apparently having intuited what we were talking about.
“You have a better idea?” Kanezaki said.
“We’re talking about eight hundred, maybe nine hundred pounds. You couldn’t get us all in there with a chainsaw and a blender. And even if you could, the back of the car would be riding suspiciously low.”
“I’ll borrow my sister’s minivan. You can all hunker down. As long as no one stops me, no one will see you. It’s built to hold seven, the shocks won’t even be noticeably compressed.”
That sounded more promising. “When can you be here?”
“Where are you?”
If it had been anyone but Kanezaki, I would have been suspicious of a setup. But I trusted him as much as I did anyone other than Dox. Plus, I had no choice.
“Capital Hilton,” I said.
“She lives in Chevy Chase. It’s not that far, but we’re getting into rush hour now.”
