The Archimedes Effect

neck-knife that hung on a thong around his neck and was hidden under his shirt. In the field, he always had a good-sized sheath knife—he was partial to the tanto design, though he also liked a basic Finnish pukka.

The thing about the knife store was, it was on a street that looped around and had but one way in or out from the main road. If it was a letter P, the shop would be on the right just before you got to the top of the loop.

When Dormer had first shown him the trick, Carruth thought he had it nailed. Take the tail down a dead-end street, and when he followed you, you had him, right?

“No,” Dormer had said. “Most dead-end streets are marked these days. They have signs that say, ‘Dead End,’ or, ‘No Outlet.’ Guy following you knows what he’s doing, he won’t pull in after you, he’ll set up where he can see the only way in or out and wait for you to come back.”

“Ah.”>

“If he absolutely needs to know where you went on that road and who you saw or talked to? He can park and hoof it, or risk pulling in a ways. A good tail won’t try it if he thinks you might see him. He’ll have binoculars and a camera, he can probably spot you if you get out of your car, and he can go back later and figure out who you went to visit. He knows you have to come back out the way you went in, so all he has to do is wait where he can see that intersection, since he’ll know you can’t drive out the other end.”

“Right.”

“So, you lead him into a district that isn’t a dead end, but has only one way out, and you make sure when you leave, you can see the intersection.”

Dormer had paused, then added, “Now, this still might be a coincidence—guy happened to have business in that same neighborhood. But if you take a long and roundabout way getting there, that’s not likely.”

Carruth smiled, remembering the old man’s lessons.

The visit to the knife shop was short—he didn’t really need a new knife, though he did look at a couple titanium-scaled folders from Cutter’s Knife and Tool—the Bengal Karambit was really nice and not too spendy. Had a frame-lock and a nice heft. Some knife gurus didn’t have much use for the little hook-blade shape, but they didn’t know how well it could be made to work in the hands of an expert. Use the thing right, the guy giving you grief wouldn’t know you even had the sucker until you bit him with it. He could bleed out on the way to the hospital, if you cut the right spot, and Carruth had practiced cutting the right spots more than a little.

He thought about it, but decided to wait until next time.

When he got back into his car, he didn’t see the gray sedan. He pulled around the loop and sped up a little, not much, and back to the straight line to the intersection. He pulled out, turned right, and drove somewhat slower.

It was maybe fifteen seconds later that the guy following him reached the intersection. Same gray car.

Carruth felt a cold rush in his belly as he saw the tail.

So. Somebody was following him. That didn’t make any sense.

Who?

And—why?

He slowed down enough to be able to read the license plate on the tail. He pulled a pen from his shirt pocket and wrote the plate number down on the back of his hand.

He needed to tell Lewis about this. Might be it was her having him shadowed. He couldn’t imagine why, but stranger things had happened. And if it wasn’t her, she needed to know about it. Other than their business, and those two dead cops, there wasn’t any reason anybody should be following him.

He didn’t think it was the cops. If they suspected he was the guy who had killed two of their own, they’d have come down on him like an imploded casino. And it wouldn’t be just one guy tailing him. They’d have his toilet wired for sound and they’d be on him like ugly on an ape. Lewis had access to computer stuff; she could maybe do something with the license plate.

He pulled the throwaway phone from his belt and thumbed in the number for Lewis’s one-time cell.

Pentagon Annex

Washington, D.C.

As Lewis sifted through the mounds of information—here in her VR scenario represented as dirt and crushed ore from a gold mine, being washed through a huge strainer—she came across a fist-sized nugget. She looked at it.

The “nugget” popped open and a voice started talking from inside it. She listened for thirty seconds or so. . . .

Oh, crap!

“End scenario,” she said.

In her office, she took several deep breaths, to calm her racing heart. The information was ugly—and in more ways than one.

Carruth’s call about the shadow had been bad enough when she hadn’t known anything about who it might be. Now it was a real can of worms.

Her new op had run the plates on the car. Fortunately, the driver had been dumb enough or confident enough not to swipe a clean plate or use a rental car. Her op figured out who he was, and then a connection that was surprising—and dangerous.

It had been a surprise. Even if she’d suspected, and if she’d had to guess between the two trying to talk to her, she’d have picked Ali bin Rahman bin Fahad Al-Saud. She’d have been dead wrong, too. No, it was Brian Stuart, the “Australian.”

She shook her head at the stupidity of her mistake. Could have been worse, but fortunately, Carruth had spotted the tail, and she had checked it out.

They were also getting into dangerous territory with her new hired op—information that she didn’t want him to have might come up, and if it did, then eventually he was going to have to go to that great detective agency in the sky. At this point, one more death wouldn’t make things any worse, and they had to start covering their asses now. She hadn’t set out on this path with the intention of killing people, but that’s how things went. Then you had to deal with it.

Next to the surprise about the “Australian” was the general crappiness of the situation itself. “Brian Stuart” was not a viable buyer for her data. His real name was Yusuf bin Abdulla Al-Thani, a Qatarian? Qatarite?— whatever, he was from Qatar—and, if her investigator could be believed, was the older brother of a man named Mohammed bin Abdulla Al-Thani. Which hadn’t meant anything to her, until her op had passed along that Mohammed, who had recently left the land of the living to join Allah in Paradise, had used the alias “Mishari Aziz.” Like his brother, Aziz/Al-Thani had been a terrorist of some note.

Him she knew, because she had shot him dead in a park in New Orleans when he had gone for a gun in his pocket.

Shit, shit, shit—!

The Al-Thani brothers were Tamim Arabs, and distantly related to the rulers of Qatar, if no longer included in polite family company because of their most radical beliefs. Not the most reliable of customers, terrorists.

It was pretty obvious why Yusuf/Brian was looking for her. She’d killed his brother and he was understandably pissed off about it. But that he had gotten as far as he had bothered her no end. How far was that? She was pretty sure that Yusuf and a friend or two had somehow backtracked their way to Simmons, her former sub-rosa investigator, and killed him, trying to find her. Unless Simmons had an old enemy who’d happened to find him, that was the only thing that made sense.

How?

It didn’t really matter how the tiger got into your house until after you got rid of it, but she was curious nonetheless.

She didn’t know how much they had gotten out of Simmons, but they probably would have determined that she was a woman. If the two men killed with Aziz/Al-Thani down on the river in New Orleans hadn’t been the same two who’d followed her to a mall in Florida after their first meeting, then it was likely that big brother Yusuf had a better description of her than that she was just a young, blond woman.