“Good. I’m on my way to where she’s taking you. Traffic’s going to be hell, but I shouldn’t be more than thirty minutes. I’ll tell you more then.”
“We’re going to need a vehicle. And a Civic won’t do it.”
“It’s taken care of. I’ll see you soon.”
He clicked off. I put the phone back in the beverage holder. “Sounds like we’re on schedule,” I said.
“Good.”
The ride to the mall took about forty minutes. Dox entertained the kids by telling them stories of parachuting out of airplanes and what happens if a chute doesn’t open, and insisting they had to be patient and wait until they were older before doing it themselves, and advising them they’d have to get permission from their mother before they could go with him. I envied his touch. I’ve never been good with children. I think because they sense things adults have learned to suppress.
Yuki made a right into the parking lot and circled counterclockwise over to a satellite parking area. It was far from the mall and mostly empty, the few vehicles belonging to employees, I guessed, not to mall patrons who would have had to trek across the baking pavement to reach the stores. One of the vehicles was a large U-Haul truck-twelve feet, I estimated, maybe fourteen. It struck me as a little odd that it would be parked in a shopping mall, and so far from the building itself, and I wondered if this might be what Kanezaki meant when he said the vehicle was “taken care of.”
It was indeed. As we pulled closer, the driver-side door opened and Kanezaki stepped out. He looked like pretty much any other D.C. area drone on his way home from the office-suit jacket gone, tie loosened, skin a little oily from repeated trips between air-conditioned buildings and the blast furnace outside. He still had the wireframe spectacles, but he was a little thinner than I remembered, a new maturity in his eyes and his features. Still the same guy I’d first run into in Tokyo so many years earlier, yes, but no longer a fresh-faced, idealistic kid. He’d been grappling with the real world since then, and its weight had left marks.
Yuki pulled in alongside the truck. I got out and shook Kanezaki’s hand. “Keys are in it,” he said, characteristically dispensing with small talk. “You should go.”
“You have anything new for me?”
He waved to Yuki. “The truck’s not enough?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No. No new intel. But when I do, I’ll upload it to the secure site.”
“What do we do with the truck? When does it need to be back?”
“I got it for a month. Hopefully by then the pressure will be off and we’ll figure something out. The rental agreement is in the glove compartment.”
The side door slid open and Rina and Rika both exclaimed, “Uncle Tomo!”
Kanezaki waved to them.
I said, “Uncle Tomo?”
He shrugged. “You know, for Tomohisa. Uncle Tom sounds odd, anyway.”
Dox squeezed out and shook Kanezaki’s hand. “Good to see you, man,” he said. “Seems like you’re always helping us out of a jam.”
“And always in exchange for something,” I said.
Larison and Treven got out. Rina called out, “Uncle Tomo, what are you doing here?”
“Your mom’s picking me up, hon! It’s a long story. I’ll tell you on the way.”
He turned to the four of us. “I don’t know where you’re going, and it’s better if I don’t. Just make it far away. They’re going to be looking for you in the capital, and they can look hard there.”
Larison eyeballed the truck. “I like your choice of ride.”
Kanezaki nodded. “Nobody’s going to notice a moving truck. This one’s got Wyoming plates and no one looks twice even here in Maryland. Plus, two or even three of you can stay concealed in back while one drives. They’re looking for four, so best if you’re not seen together. Speaking of which. You should go.”
“My lord,” Dox said. “It’s going to be a goddamn sauna back there. Anybody mind if I drive?”
No one said anything. Dox got in the truck. Treven and Larison went around to the back.
“I didn’t have time to pick up water or anything else,” Kanezaki said. “It’s got a full tank of gas and I bought a bunch of boxes and rolls of bubble wrap so you’ll at least have something to sit on in back, but that’s about it. When it’s dark and you’re well clear of the city, you can stop and pick up whatever you need. I’ll be in touch as soon as I learn more.”
“There was a problem at the hotel,” I said.
He looked at me, his expression strained. “What do you mean?”
“Four guys. They must have been Horton’s. Somehow they followed us, or anticipated us. They came up short. I’m sure you’ll be hearing about it.”
He didn’t say anything. He just looked over at the van. At his nieces.
“Sounds like your sister’s pretty smart,” I said. “She told me she borrowed the plates on the van from some random car in a suburban neighborhood. There must be tens of thousands of vans like hers in the D.C. area. She’s safe. No one can track her.”
He wiped the sweat off his forehead and ran his fingers back through his hair. “Jesus. I didn’t…Jesus.”
He went to the van and slid the side door closed, then got into the passenger seat. I walked over and he rolled the window down.
“Thanks,” I said. “To both of you.”
Yuki looked at me and I could have sworn she was almost smiling.
“I don’t want to know,” she said, shaking her head. Then she pointed at Kanezaki and said, “We’re even, Mister State Department.”
He nodded grimly. “You could say that.”
I wondered what the hell he’d done for her. Whatever it was, he’d called in his marker, and she’d paid it off.
Hopefully not at higher interest than she’d been expecting.
We stayed off the interstates on our way out of Maryland, heading northwest and crossing the Potomac at the Point of Rocks Bridge, far from the Beltway and Route 95, Dox driving while I rode shotgun. The sun was getting low in the sky, but there was still plenty of daylight left. I wanted it to get dark. I kept half-expecting a phalanx of police cars to swing into position behind us, lights on and sirens screaming. It didn’t make sense, of course, but then neither did those four guys at the Hilton. The only thing I was sure of was that the farther we got from the city, the better I’d feel.
We kept the radio on to see if there was any news about the hotel shooting. There was plenty, but it was confused and incomplete. Witnesses claiming to have heard gunshots; police cordoning off the hotel; the cops saying little other than that they were investigating a possible shooting. It might have been routine; it might have been Horton behind the scenes, leaning on the locals in the name of “national security,” and concealing the identities, and affiliations, of the dead men.
We talked about what had happened at the hotel, about what could have been the flaw in our security. If we couldn’t identify it, we had to assume it was still a problem, and the feeling of some hidden vulnerability that could undermine us at any time was maddening.
“You’re sure you weren’t followed,” I said as we drove.
“Hell, yes,” Dox said. “We did a solid detection run from the airport. Multiple cab changes, a subway ride, you know the drill. No one could have been on us without our knowing.”
I fought the urge to remind him that he shouldn’t have been using the airport itself. But I recognized the impulse as driven by an urge to lash out, not by anything possibly productive. Besides, even if they should have steered clear of the airport to start with, if they weren’t followed, they weren’t followed.
“You said you went to a gun show,” I said. “What about that?”
“We did a run after that, too. One hundred percent clean.”
“What about-”
“The hotel, right? Made the reservation from a gas station payphone in Merrifield, Virginia. After I was
