couldn’t get the password.”
“You couldn’t get the password,” she repeated half a second behind and you could see her relief at the thought, as his suggestion faded her actual mistake away, out of memory, out of existence. “You didn’t get it…” she murmured, fading away.
“I didn’t get it,” Max repeated softly. “Tell Pietr you did well. You have every reason to feel good about yourself,” he ended, touching her forehead and she slouched back onto the couch, snoring like a buzzsaw. He led us out the door, down the elevator and back outside.
“What now?” I asked, pulling the car out of the parking lot. “It’s Friday night. If they’ve got a big deal Sunday-”
“What are they doing with CIA?” he demanded, handing the piece of paper with Sam’s writing to Tauber in the back seat. “Does that make any sense to you?”
“Maybe if we knew who IAD is…” Tauber muttered.
“It’s the rat squad,” I said and felt all eyes on me at once. “It’s on all the cop shows-Internal Affairs, the cops that watch the cops.”
“That’s what I was supposed to do for Alan Hammond,” Max said, seeming to find the memory impossibly strange now.
“So does CIA have a rat squad?” Tauber asked. “Is L Corp watchin’ CIA?”
“How would that make everyone dance to their tune?” I asked.
“Maybe they’ve got some secret-maybe they’re blackmailin’ CIA.”
“Do they really want to cross the Government like that?”
“It would explain why they’re meetin’ on a Sunday,” Tauber held onto his point. “Keep it off the record.”
“They’ve already built themselves a position where the government can’t hurt them,” Max shook his head. “Why open Pandora’s box? Blackmail doesn’t make sense.”
“And it’s not what she said,” I added, as surprised as anyone to hear myself speaking up. “She said there was an operation, that Volkov had a group of six in training and it’s Sunday. Blackmail isn’t an operation.”
“-ya don’t need six black ops to handle it,” Tauber added. “Maybe they’re gonna steal something from CIA and blackmail ‘em with it. Maybe that’s what they’re doin’ Sunday.”
“But what’s that got to do with Dave?” I asked. “Why kill Dave?”
Silence. Several beats of silence.
“It seems,” Max said, “that the only thing we know for sure is who CIA is.” He shrugged. “We’ve got to go someplace and dope this out.”
“Someplace we can think,” Tauber added, “and this ain’t it-it’s a probe a minute around here. Where do we go?” Tauber asked and Max looked blank for a moment.
“Ruben Crowell,” I said. “Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.”
“Ruben?” Tauber exclaimed. His face got all screwed up.
“You know him?” Max asked. “Good guy?”
“One o’ the best, back in the day,” Tauber said. “Smart guy, kind of a rebel-part o’ Dave’s klatch. Now? Who knows? None of us are what we were. How about Marjorie, his wife? They were both in the program.”
“Don’t know her,” I answered. “I just have Ruben’s name.”
“What about him?” Max asked again. “How would he fit into all this?”
“Let’s put it this way,” Tauber said. “I can imagine Ruben havin’ nothing to do with any of us. I can imagine him makin’ pizzas or analyzin’ nut cases for a living. I can’t imagine him workin’ for Jim Avery.”
I could see a highway overpass ahead, the truck lights running off in both directions. Max shrugged. “Okay then,” he said, “North, Pancho.”
Eleven
We crept up on Gettysburg like Lee’s Army, coming out of the South up what is now called Confederate Avenue. The sun rose through haze on the hill by the university, dense lines of trees setting off the old town below, the long straight streets marching into the distance, columns of upright woodframe and brick houses bearing the bulletholes of the battle that made America. We’d been driving all night-East, West, Southwest, Northeast-we were on our third car since Virginia.
“Wow!” Tauber breathed out as soon as he got out of the car.
“What?” I asked.
“I don’t feel any old-time mindbenders,” he said, “but there’s sure a whole lot o’ them — L Corp-lotsa fuzzy, dim signals.” He moved around a bit, as though the signal might improve facing a slightly different direction. “But nobody like us. Nobody like Ruben.”
“I don’t know,” Max cautioned. “There’s an odd one. Not a mindbender signal but powerful. Very deep-like an 8 Hz tone.” Tauber seemed to be trying to reach for this without success.
“Can you read it?” he asked.
“Not in a way that makes any sense,” Max said. “But-if he wasn’t here, why would they be here?”
“They’re waitin’ fer us,” Tauber said. “We’ll have to be careful.”
“If you can’t be careful, you have to be quick,” Max said.
He drove through town, feinting in one direction and then another. We didn’t see any suspicious SUV’s or jumpsuits but the two of them kept watch out the windows all the same, tense and twitchy. “The signal’s very strong,” Max said, “but it’s not organized, if that makes any sense. It’s not focused at all.”
“Some kid? Practicing the remote viewing he learned on MySpace?” Tauber asked.
“No,” Max said. “This isn’t some lonely geek conquering the world. This is pain and confusion and… I don’t know, something else…”
“Where’s it coming from?” I asked, just as it became obvious. Max turned off the road under a huge brick archway into a cemetery, a vast cemetery stretched across a rolling hillside, intersected by stone walls and rows of gravestones like an old man’s ragged yellow teeth.
“This is it,” Tauber said in a hushed voice.
“What?”
“They fought here. Lincoln gave the speech here.” A note of awe and pain was in his voice.
“You’ve been here?”
“Not me,” he said. “My great-grandaddy. 26 ^ th North Carolina. Died here, Cemetery Ridge. Pickett’s Charge.” There was pain and pride in his voice.
We drove the treed lanes. Max seemed to know where he was going without being in any hurry to get there. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who noticed.
“What’s up?” Tauber asked finally.
“I’m trying to suss out what’s going on here,” Max answered, his voice really sober, almost mournful. “I’m trying to get a sense of what we’re walking into. It isn’t Ruben.”
“How do you know?”
“The signal’s female.”
“Yep, that lets Ruben out. Marjorie?”
“Maybe.” He listened a little longer. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” he shrugged finally and nosed the car around some trees until we could see the little rise ahead holding ten or fifteen people communing over an open grave. I didn’t see the priest but we could hear the blunt music of one voice prompting and a group responding. Max parked at the bottom of the rise, where the road ended. We started up the hill but we didn’t get far.
The sudden rumble made us all turn. Two familiar black SUV’s were tearing down both entry roads simultaneously. They stopped and emptied and then there were six of them to three of us, all of them wearing the LED goggles with earpieces. The leader came out last-Miriam Fine, looking even more fetching in the tight blue nylon jumpsuit than she had in her gray suit and pearls. Her eyes winked at me from inside the goggles-though I knew, when I thought about it, that I couldn’t actually see in there.
“Well, this is convenient,” she said cheerfully. “I come to wrap up one loose end and the other drops into my lap.” She motioned at the open van doors. “Take a seat-we’ll all go for a drive.”
