'I don't know. That might be nice.'
She went to take a sip of coffee. Halfway to her mouth, she snapped the cup toward him. Hot coffee hit him in the face. He shot to his feet, spluttering and wiping his eyes.
'What the fuck?' he said.
He looked around. A few patrons were staring, but quickly glanced away.
'Oh, what, did I not smack you the way you were hoping?' she said.
He wiped his face and flung coffee droplets from his palms. 'You've got nerve, sweetie, I'll give you that.'
'Sit your ass down and recover your pride. Unless you want me to school you again.'
He sat down, his ego smarting much worse than his face. 'I like when you get all ghetto-talk on me. Really, it's sexy.'
'Oh, a little racist patter to go with the sexist. You trying to bore me to death now? You think I haven't heard it all before, mostly from people a lot more clever than you?'
Goddamn it, she was right. She'd won the round. Now he was just being an asshole.
'Well,' he said, 'you were right. That's twice I didn't see you coming.'
She smiled, and despite her evident amusement there was something gentle and even forgiving in her eyes. 'I told you. Now listen. I like your dimples but I don't have time to flirt with you. I'm not here to play games.'
'Yeah? What do you have in mind instead?'
'A little word association exercise to start with, to establish our bona fides. You ready?'
'Sure,' he said, not knowing where she was going.
'Detainees.'
Ah. Now he understood.
'Interrogations,' he said.
She nodded. 'Now we're making progress. Videotapes.'
'Missing.'
'Diamonds.'
'A hundred million U.S.'
'Bingo.'
They were quiet for a moment. 'All right,' he said. 'We're both looking for the same thing.'
'Exactly. And the brick wall your people are throwing up is going to make it impossible for either side to find it.'
'Then tell me what you need,' Ben said, hoping to learn more from the questions than he was willing to provide with answers.
'I need Larison.'
'Larison's dead.'
'He's supposed to be dead, yes.'
'What makes you think he's not?'
'Look, the only thing we could get from CIA were some records, probably incomplete, on who had access to what we're looking for. I was up for two nights straight cross-referencing the data. A black ops guy named Larison, deceased, had the access. I asked the Agency and they stonewalled me. That told me I was on to something. I told my superiors we needed to look into it. How sure are we this guy is dead? And even if he is, maybe he had an accomplice who got the tapes before Larison died. They all blew me off. They're all looking for an analyst, trying to adapt their serial killer profiling tools to predict the kind of personality that would do something like this. And let me tell you, once an orthodoxy takes hold at the Bureau? It's like religion, nothing's going to shake it. So they told me fine, you want to stake out a dead guy's widow's house? Go right ahead. They gave me Bob and Drew, who you might have noticed aren't the sharpest tools in the shed, and shooed me away. They were just glad to get me out of their hair.'
Well, Hort had been wrong about another agency not getting curious about Larison. He'd read the Bureau right, it seemed, he just hadn't known about this tenacious woman.
'Why didn't you interview her yourself, then?' he said.
'I was going to. But first I wanted to watch her. See if someone like you happened to show up.'
'Might have cost you time. Pretty big gamble.'
'Not so big, really. Because here you are. So what did she tell you?'
'Not much.'
'You're lying.'
Well, it felt like he was lying, but technically he was afraid he might be telling the truth. 'She might have told me one thing that was useful. I'm going to check it out now. Leave me alone for a while and I'll let you know what I turn up.'
'That's your idea of interagency cooperation? I knew you were CIA.'
'Look, I'm under a lot of pressure. It's the best I can do right now.'
'Fine. You can explain while I'm booking you in the Orlando field office.'
'You want to know something, Paula? I like you. You're smart and you've got balls. But if you make a move to arrest me, you're going to wind up like your buddies Bob and Drew. The only difference might be that with you, I could feel bad about it after.'
She watched him for a moment, amused or seething he couldn't tell.
'You're right,' she said, with that sweet, soothing tone that to him was beginning to sound like a rattlesnake's tail. 'You're a hard man. Even if I arrested you, I bet I couldn't get you to cooperate. Guess I'll just have to interview Wheeler myself. When she mentions someone has already been to see her, I'll say, 'Really? That's awful. Who was he? Did he tell you he was FBI?' 'Cause I know you didn't just waltz into her house and tell her you were CIA. 'He did? No, ma'am, he wasn't FBI. I don't know who he was, we've never heard of him. But impersonating an FBI agent is a crime punishable by no less than ten years in a federal penitentiary. I'd like to assist you in registering a complaint with the Bureau so we can conduct a formal investigation into who this man could be. We'll need to release a description to the media, too.' That kind of thing.'
'You're bluffing.'
'Then call.'
He watched her. She didn't blink.
He asked himself why she wouldn't do it. And couldn't think of a single good reason.
'All right,' he said, 'we need to visit a private investigator in Orlando. But your pals Bob and Drew stay behind, got that? They need medical attention, for one thing. For another, I don't want to have to worry about one of them stewing over what happened, and doing something stupid to get his mojo back. They don't strike me as the bygones-be-bygones type.'
'No, they're not. So, yes, we'll make it just the two of us. But give me their guns first.'
Ben looked around. 'Hand me your purse.'
She did. He held it under the table and slipped Drew's and Bob's weapons inside it, then put it on the table. She went to take it back, but he didn't let it go.
'I'm still armed, Paula,' he said, looking into her eyes. 'And I'd hate to have to shoot you just as we're getting to know each other. I really would feel bad about it.'
She smiled and patted his hand. 'I'll bet you would, sugar. I'll bet you would.'
9
Some Kind of Military Spook Harry McGlade's office was located in Orlando's Parramore district, home of the Amway Arena, a U.S. federal courthouse, police headquarters, and a number of other state buildings. The area was awake and bustling when Ben and Paula arrived. At nightfall, Ben knew, the daytime population would roll away like drops of mercury, revealing a sad substratum of winos, whores, and madmen beneath.
Paula had called McGlade from the road and told him she had a case, that he was highly recommended though she couldn't say by whom, that she needed to see him right away. McGlade was amenable.
The building was a ramshackle second-floor walk-up with a stairway that smelled like someone had been
