Carruth felt cold as he collapsed to his knees. He tried to cock his gun, but he didn’t have the strength to pull the hammer back.
Lewis was walking away from him, not looking back.
The bitch! The fucking bitch! She had shot him! And from so far away . . .
His vision grayed out; all he could see was the green grass next to his knees. He felt his consciousness ebbing. Must have hit the heart, no blood getting to the brain.
He looked at the big revolver in his hand. It fell from his grip. Hit the grass.
That was his last sight as he fell forward onto his face. That gun. That goddamn gun . . .
Inside the museum, past the huge marble columns, Lewis smiled at the guard who was heading for the door to see what the commotion was about outside.
“Somebody shooting off firecrackers,” she said to him when he looked at her.
She headed for the bathroom.
Inside, she stepped into a stall and stripped off her gloves, jacket, cap, sweats, and shoes. She put on the skirt and blouse, the flats, and finally the sweater. She pulled a comb from her purse and peeled the Band-Aid off her nose. She turned the shopping bag inside out and put the old clothes in it. She would burn them when she got home.
She combed her hair in front of the mirror, smiled at her reflection, and left the bathroom, a different woman altogether.
People searching for a slightly built man or a woman dressed as she had been wouldn’t look at her twice. She was a citizen, an Army officer, and if anybody stopped her—which they wouldn’t—she would smile and talk her way past them.
She left the gallery through an east entrance.
She walked briskly north, away from the Mall, to where she had parked her car. Her biggest problem had just been solved. The rest of it, she’d figure out as necessary.
36
Jay was blurry from all the input. He had run down every fact and factoid on Rachel that he could find. He was sure he knew more about her than anybody alive did—if anybody had put data into a system that was linked to the web anywhere, he was pretty sure he had seen it, from her grades in primary school to her date for the junior high school prom, to every posting she had ever made to Usenet under her own name.
It had been like wading through a heavy surf. It would surge, roll in, and just about knock him down. He would regain his footing, and in would come another wave. Even skimming, it was a lot to see. And the little things kept piling up.
Item: Rachel had been in school when the Troy game had been posted on that server, and she’d had both the access and the skill to have done it.
Item: There was no translation on any fan website of the bug language that supposedly was Max Waite’s signature, zip, so that splotch of hieroglyphs could say anything—or nothing.
Item: It needed somebody with very good access to the Army computers to have gotten the information about the bases. And there was still no sign of an external hack.
Item: Jay’s version of the bug game, saved from an old site, was slightly different than the new version in which Rachel had supposedly found that old desert-scenario web page. That bit was missing from the older version, indicating it had been put in later. Somebody with a hidden door could do that, and backdate their input. It was easy if you knew how—and if you had a back door into the program.
She had never been pregnant, much less had a baby. She had no reason to love the Army, which had convicted her father of murder.
She had been actively trying to seduce Jay, and, let’s face it, he knew he wasn’t God’s gift to women.
She was the bad guy. That sucked, but he was sure.
None of it was solid proof. Yeah, she was a liar, but that wasn’t enough to put her away. Jay was sure—he
He shut down the library. He was tired. He would go home, get some rest. Talk to Saji, much as he wasn’t looking forward to that, and hit it again as soon as he could. If it was there, he’d eventually find it. If it wasn’t there, he was screwed.
His com beeped.
“Yeah?”
“Jay? Can you come to my office?” Thorn.
“On my way. Good news?”
“Yes and no.”
At Thorn’s office, the boss waved him in and at the couch.
“There was a shooting today on the Mall. Park rangers and local police found a dead guy on lawn,” Thorn said. “Shot four times with a .38 Special revolver by a tall-short-fat-thin-black-white-man-woman-teenage-boy-or- girl, depending on which tourist you believe.”
He paused, his gaze steady on Jay. “The good news is, the corpse is Carruth, and he’s all paid up for his crimes. The bad news is, he won’t be helping us with our investigation.”
“Aw, crap,” Jay said. “What time?”
Thorn looked at his holoproj’s clock. “A couple hours ago. It took a while to ID him. They found a gun lying next to him they are pretty sure was the one used to kill the Metro cops and Army guy, but they’re waiting on FBI ballistics to get back to them.”
“Where was Captain Lewis when this happened? Can we get the Pentagon Annex logs?”
Thorn frowned. “Captain Lewis?”
“Yeah. She’s the one behind this.”
“Really?” Thorn sat up straighter in his chair. “You have something we can take to the Army and FBI?”
“Not enough.”
“But you have good reasons to believe it?”
“Yeah.”
Thorn waited.
“She . . . came on to me,” Jay said.
“Well, yeah, I guess that’s reason to hang her for treason.” He smiled. He started tapping his keyboard.
“I’m serious, Boss. I started doing some backtracking. Every time I hit a dead end, she was behind it. She’s been leading me around by my . . . nose. When I was about to out Carruth, she was with me when my scenario mysteriously crashed. She lied to me about all kinds of things. She had the skill to build the game, she had access to the information that was supposedly grabbed by a hacker. She has a reason to hate the Army. I don’t have a direct link between her and Carruth, but I know she did it.”
Thorn looked at his holoproj screen. “I just got the logs from the Annex. Captain Lewis checked out shortly after you did. She’s not back yet.”
“She went to meet Carruth and she iced him,” Jay said. “I’d bet every computer I’ll ever own on that. But I don’t know if there’s any way to nail her on it. I’ve been reading stuff for hours, and so far all I’ve got is a bunch of circumstantial stuff. She didn’t leave anything obvious lying around.”
Thorn said, “Maybe that’s all we need.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I have to call this in. Now that you’ve brought this to me—which is exactly what you should have done, of course—I can’t sit on this. But if I call General Hadden and tell him we are sure that Captain Lewis is
