here?”
“I have a question for you. And it’s a matter of national security.”
Hammersmith glanced at his wife. “Step in here.”
He guided Diana into a small den off the front hallway and closed the door behind her. As soon as he turned around, he lit into her. “How dare you show up at my house like this!”
Diana weathered the tirade in silence. When he subsided, she said quietly, “Are you done yet?”
He blinked.
“Look, I’m not kidding. Twice today I’ve barely managed to stop people from killing Gabe Monihan. But I still haven’t tracked down who’s behind these bastards. I need your help to do it.”
He glared at her. “You’re delusional.”
She yanked out the personal business card Gabe had given her that morning with his cell phone number scrawled on it. “Go ahead. Call him. Ask President-elect Monihan if I’m delusional or not.”
Hammersmith stared hard at the small rectangle of white and said nothing, his mouth pressed into a thin, white line.
“I don’t need you to believe me, Captain,” she said shortly. “All I need you to do is tell me who gave you and your partner the order to pick me up. Who tipped you off about me?”
The guy looked up at her and back down at the card in his hand. Silently, he handed the card back to her, his expression defiant.
She threatened with cool savagery, “I’m not leaving your house until you tell me, and you seriously don’t want to catch the heat I’m going to bring down on your head if you don’t cooperate. My grandfather was just the first of the big guns I can aim at you. You’ve gotten tangled up in something so much larger than you, I doubt you can even imagine it. You might as well just give me the name, because I am going to get it out of you one way or the other.”
She saw him weakening. C’mon, Hammersmith. Break already. Time’s awasting here.
She lightened her tone of voice to one of patient understanding. There was nothing like having to do a one- woman good-cop bad-cop routine. “Look. You can give me the name voluntarily, or I can call in someone way, way above you in your chain of command to give you an order. If you’d like, I can start with Gabe Monihan and let it roll downhill from there.”
Hammersmith huffed hard. “Fine. A guy named Smith called us. Colonel Al Smith. He’s an aide to General Pace.”
“General Eric Pace? As in the Army Chief of Staff?” she asked carefully. Holy cow!
“Yeah. Satisfied now?” he snapped.
“Yes, I am. Thanks. I’ll mention your cooperation to President Monihan when this is all over.”
“You do that.”
Not a happy camper. But she didn’t have time to care. Time to move on to her next interview. She left his house quickly and repeated her call to Delphi, this time obtaining the home address of FBI Special Agent Ronald Flaherty. He’d be a much tougher nut to crack if she didn’t miss her guess. The guy was a veteran agent. No way would she be able to bully him like she just had Hammersmith.
She pulled up to his house, a rambling colonial on a tree-lined street only ten minutes or so away from her home. Nice place. She walked up to the wide, covered front porch and rang the doorbell, huddling deep in her leather duster. Man, it was cold tonight. Of course, some of the chill was probably coming from inside her gut. First, a high-level Secret Service supervisor fingered her, and then someone attached to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. She dreaded hearing who’d sicced Flaherty on her.
Agent Flaherty himself opened the front door. He took one look at her and growled, “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Look. I’m sorry to bring work to your home like this. But I need to speak with you for a minute. I have a question for you. It won’t take long. I promise. It’s a matter of national security.” That phrase usually got to men like this, whose lives revolved around the idea of protecting that national security.
Flaherty snarled, “Call me in the morning. At my office. And don’t ever show up at my house like this again, or I’ll arrest your ass so fast it’ll make your head spin.”
Damn. He wasn’t going to cooperate. She’d been afraid of that. She stepped forward aggressively, shoving her hand forward, still cloaked inside her coat pocket. She jammed the barrel of her Beretta into his ribs. “Don’t do anything sudden, eh, Ronald?” she purred.
His eyes widened in shock then quickly narrowed in calculation.
“Ever heard of a combat system called Krav Maga?” she asked casually. “Don’t try what you were just contemplating. At this point, I really don’t give a flip if I blow your head off or not.”
Apparently he heard the menace in her voice of someone who wasn’t lying and who could, in fact, follow through on that threat to kill him. The fight flickered out of his eyes.
“I respect your wish to protect your family. So why don’t you step outside onto the porch with me?” she suggested quietly. She stepped back a pace to give him room to join her. His gaze dropped to the front doorknob.
She smiled coldly. “I’m telling you. Don’t try it, my friend. I only want to ask you a question, and then I’ll leave.”
Flaherty stepped outside and pulled the front door closed behind him.
She gestured toward the porch swing off to her left. “Have a seat.”
Flaherty did as she directed. She moved around to his right side, partially behind him, in the best position to subdue him if he pulled any stunts. The way his eyes widened as his gaze followed her, he apparently recognized what she’d done. It was the move of a pro. Now that she’d established her seriousness with this guy, maybe they’d get somewhere.
“Who are you?” he asked.
It was undoubtedly a delaying tactic to stall her and distract her. But she was willing to give the guy that information on the assumption that he’d report her visit to the very superiors who’d set him on her. She wanted them to get the message that she was closing in on them.
“I work for Army Intelligence, and I’ve been investigating the terrorists who’ve been trying to kill Gabriel Monihan for the last several months. After they showed themselves today, I’m inches away from nabbing them. I’ve got names already, but I’m going to nail everyone in this conspiracy and put them all away for good. And I need your help.” There. That should put the fear of God in whoever it was she was chasing.
Flaherty snorted. “That’s nuts. If there was a conspiracy to assassinate Monihan, we’d have heard about it and investigated it ourselves.”
She retorted, “Since when do all the branches of the government, particularly the intelligence agencies, share their toys and play nicely with the other children? Even with the Department of Homeland Security in place, you know as well as I do that interdepartment rivalries are alive and well within the government.”
Flaherty made a derisive sound of agreement.
“Are you getting cold, Agent Flaherty? I figure in another ten minutes or so, frostbite’s going to hit and your fingers are going to start to freeze. You know, you could lose your field qualification if you lose the tip of your shooting finger.”
He didn’t show any reaction to that one. Not that she’d expected him to. She spent a couple of seemingly endless minutes just standing there beside him in silence, letting him soak up the cold without distractions from her. She had a coat on. She could be patient. And silence was a hundred times more unnerving than a steady stream of conversation.
Finally, when he was shivering violently, he broke the stalemate. His teeth chattered when he snarled, “What question is so goddamned important that you’d drag me out here at gunpoint to ask it?”
“Who called you this morning and gave you instructions to detain me and interrogate me?”
His lips, black in the scant light out here, curled into a sneer. “Why the hell do you want to know that?”
He was delaying again. “Like I said, Agent Flaherty. It’s a matter of national security.”
“Bullshit,” he spit out.
“I’m not particularly interested in your opinion on the subject. I want that name. Now.”
“Go to hell.”
She sighed. And leaped forward lightning fast, wrapping her right forearm around his throat and half lifting him
