the destitute was forever on display. Inside, bare bulbs hung from lengths of wire, though at any given moment the electricity might or might not work. In one corner, the ceiling plaster was distended like a pregnant woman’s nine- month belly, sopping with moisture, as if she had just broken her water. In the tiny, airless bathroom, there was a plastic bucket of water beside the toilet to ensure flushing. The apartment smelled of old pizza and pot. Forget dust; soot was everywhere, greasily ingrained on every horizontal surface. Occasionally, small sounds came from inside the walls, as if creatures were scuttling through the tenement’s arteries and veins.
As for Thate, he seemed perfectly at home in a place that had the impermanence of an army tent or an Alaskan house. He was one of those people who wore grime like a tattoo or a piercing, a rebel yell that very deliberately gave the finger to society.
Jack got him to listen to Howlin’ Wolf from a playlist on Emma’s iPod. His eyes lost their focus as he sank deeper and deeper into the music. Thate might be a teenager, but he had the eyes of an adult who had already been witness to too many despicable acts. It was likely he had committed some of those acts himself.
At length, the playlist came to an end and Thate pulled off the earbuds. His face seemed transformed.
“Shit,” he said.
“Yeah.” Jack gestured to the refrigerator. “Beer?”
The kid nodded, still half in a trance.
Jack rose and opened the refrigerator, which wheezed like an asthmatic. Beer, Coke, a couple of half-eaten slices of congealed pizza, and not much else. At least the beer was imported.
“That girl’s too young for you,” Thate observed.
Jack handed him a bottle, then twisted off the cap of his own bottle and took a slug. “She’s my daughter.”
Thate looked away and picked at a scab on the point of his elbow.
“Where are your parents?”
Thate took a swig of beer. “Don’t have parents.”
“You mean you don’t talk to them.”
“I mean I never met ’em.” The kid rolled the bottle around on the table, making a pattern of wet circles. “Good thing, too. I’d probably kill them.”
“Maybe they’re already dead.”
“Christ, I hope so.”
“No school for you, I see.”
“I’m in school. I don’t want trouble with the law.”
“So who’s subbing for you?”
“Fuck if I know,” Thate said with a sly grin. “Twenty bucks a day does it.”
“I doubt that,” Jack said.
“Okay, an eighth a week.”
There was an upside-down cross and a skull with an arrow through it on the kid’s right biceps.
“Where’d you get the tats?” Jack said.
Thate shrugged. “Here and there.”
“Not in this country.” When Thate made no reply, Jack added: “Albania.”
“Shit, no,” the kid said rather defensively. “Russia.”
That told Jack a lot. “Which family?”
The kid was still picking at his scab. “What?” His fingertip was bright red.
“Which family of the
Thate jumped as if Jack had jabbed him with a burning needle.
“I know about the Russian mob,” Jack said. “I’ve had dealings with them.”
“No shit?”
The kid stared down at the Monster earbuds. He handed them back with no little reluctance. His body shifted subtly. By the alert way he sat, Jack could tell that his disinterest was feigned.
Jack leaned over to take a closer look. “Initiation, right? So which family became your parents?” He had seen these same tattoos on Ivan Gurov in Moscow last year. “No, wait, let me guess.”
The kid laughed, but he shifted again and Jack knew he was uneasy. “Izmaylovskaya. Am I right?”
“Jesus Christ!” Thate stared at Jack as if he were a demon from hell. “Who the fuck are you?”
Jack finished off his beer and set the bottle down. He had nowhere to go until after dark. “I’ll tell my story,” he said, “if you’ll tell me yours.”
“I THINK we should split up,” Naomi said.
McKinsey regarded her with no little skepticism. “Are we really gonna do this?”
“I am.”
“What the fuck’s in it for us?”
She contemplated him in the same way someone would a slice of moldy meat. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”
“I just don’t like taking orders from some entitled prick.” He shrugged. “I’m just a working stiff.”
“Yeah, in a Giorgio Armani suit.”
“What? I like to look good on the job. You think I’d be caught dead in one of those Simm’s specials the other guys wear?”
Naomi shook her head as they headed toward their car. “No matter. I think you should follow up with the state police chief who’s taken over this case.”
McKinsey raised an eyebrow. “And you?”
“I’m going to check out the guards’ background.”
“A complete waste of time, if you ask me.”
Naomi hauled open the car’s door and got behind the wheel. “Then it’s a good thing I didn’t ask.”
AFTER DROPPING McKinsey off at his own car, Naomi drove to G Street NW, where Fortress Securities had their offices in one of those gigantic stone-faced buildings, fraught with dentils and Doric columns that dwarf any human who walks up the glittery white steps.
Fortress was on the seventh floor. Walking into its lobby, you could imagine yourself in the waiting room of a medium-sized advertising firm. The space was formed almost completely from horizontal planes of veined white marble, cut glass, bronze tubing, and glittering black granite. The only clue as to Fortress’s actual purpose was the bas-relief of an ancient Greek helmet, sculpted out of bronze, that rode over the receptionist’s head like the cloud of combat.
When Naomi produced her ID and asked to see Fortress’s president, she was politely but firmly told to wait while the receptionist—a young man in a sleek dark suit—spoke quietly into the mike of the headpiece encircling his head like a halo.
A short time later, another young man in a sleek dark suit escorted Naomi down a softly lit, carpeted hallway, lined with paintings of famous battles throughout history. Naomi recognized Alexander the Great, the great Spartan stand against Xerxes’s Persian army, Ajax and Achilles outside the walls of Troy, Napoleon at Waterloo, George Patton rolling over Europe, and so on and on, a seemingly endless display of man’s propensity for bloodlust and warfare. It was no surprise to Naomi that not one woman appeared in any of the paintings.
Andrew Gunn, the president of Fortress, rose from behind his desk as she was ushered into the room. Her guide immediately withdrew, closing the door behind him. Gunn seemed to unfold like a praying mantis. He was tall and thin with prematurely white hair and a nose like the prow of a ship. His steel blue eyes regarded her out of a rugged face, as scarred and pitted as the curve of the moon.
He came around, extended his hand, and smiled. His teeth seemed to shine in the muted afternoon light. Naomi had dealt with the top echelons of the private security firms. They all seemed to fall into two groups. Either they were ex-Marines, hard, angry, and bloodthirsty, or they were ex-CIA assets, anonymous, slippery, and bloodthirsty. She found it interesting that Gunn fell into neither of these camps. Rather, he seemed like a good old American cowboy, the way he had been played by Gary Cooper or depicted in the iconic Marlboro Man ads. He smelled good, as well, like the woods at night.
Instead of returning behind his desk, he led her to the far more informal seating area, which was comprised
