“Let’s go see him now,” I said. I flipped off the saw, brushed the sawdust off my clothes and put my wedges in a paper bag. There was a nice hammer lying there, so I added it to the bag.
“Busy now.” He waved at all the projects on the bench.
“Now,” I insisted. “Get your coat.”
He was subdued and well behaved by the time we rode the elevator up to Grafton’s condo. In the elevator he spotted the bulge under my coat. “You packin’?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, man, no guns you said. Push the down button, you lyin’ sack…”
I didn’t, of course. The admiral was glad to see us. He took us into the study and closed the door. When we were seated, he asked Willie, “Did Tommy tell you why we need you?”
Willie gave me an evil look. “Just gave me some shit about an easy job, no guns or knives, no violence of any kind. I knew he was lyin’, of course. He ain’t told the truth for one whole day in his whole miserable life. He’s the only man I know who tells more lies than I do.”
“I’m taking our houseguests to Connecticut,” Grafton said, ignoring Willie’s bullshit, as I habitually did. With Willie, it becomes second nature. “But Callie, my daughter, Amy, and Tommy will be here alone. It’s possible that someone may try to kill Callie or Amy. If the hitter is a professional, he’s probably going to case the place, try to establish who is here, figure out the women’s routine, all of that, before he decides how to make the hit. I need someone in the street to find and identify the watcher. You, I hope, will be my someone. The job will last about a week — no more. If and when you spot a watcher, you’ll call Tommy on his cell phone. He’ll take over from there.”
“Man, they’ll probably just burn the whole place down with everyone in it. You oughta get your wife outta here.”
“Callie, Amy and Tommy will be here,” Grafton said in a tone that ended the discussion.
“Just watch and call Tommy?” Willie said, eyeing Grafton.
“That’s it,” Grafton reiterated. “I’ll get you a lapel mike and earphone. He’ll hear everything you say. You’ll also need some props, some reason to hang out on the street. You need to be out there wandering around, watching but not appearing to be watching.”
Willie nodded. “I can do that.”
“What props do you need?”
“Just a brown bag and a bottle. Watched winos all my life. I can do that for a few days.”
“You’re on the payroll. Contract wages. Stop by in the morning and I’ll give you the radio.”
“I need some old clothes. Go to the Salvation Army this afternoon and get myself an outfit.”
“You need to be out there pretty much around the clock.”
“Gonna be tough money,” Willie said. “Tough money, this time of year, sleepin’ on the street.”
“Just don’t drink too much of that poison,” I warned.
“Sort of a government-paid toot,” Willie said philosophically. “Might be a nice little vacation, after all.”
After he met Callie and shook her hand, and she thanked him for agreeing to help, he left to make his arrangements. Grafton went over to Langley for a few hours, and I did some general hanging out in his den.
He was leaving in the morning for Winchester’s estate in Connecticut, and taking Isolde and Marisa with him. Callie and Amy and I were staying here, with Willie watching on the street. Although that sounded like a half-baked, desperate plan to me, I couldn’t come up with a better one.
The problem was that Qasim and his helper — make that helpers, because I had no idea how many he had or could recruit here in the good ol’ U.S. of A. — could attack in dozens of different ways. Qasim and company certainly weren’t stuck on a particular MO. Already they had used poison — chemical and nuclear — bullets, a knife, an icicle and a car bomb. About the only methods they hadn’t used were fire and a nuclear explosion, and I suspected that with Qasim’s help they could arrange those things if they put their heads to it. Which was, of course, precisely why Jake Grafton, Sal Molina and the president wanted Abu Qasim dead and in hell.
Hell, I had to agree, would certainly be the place for him.
Marisa agreed, too. That conversation in the wee hours last night had been a revelation for me. She hated the bastard. Had he been just a figure from her childhood, she might have gotten over it in the hustle and bustle of life, but he came back … and she obeyed his orders in a terrorist attempt on the G-8 leaders. So now she hated him. And feared him.
Or so she said. Of course, he also sliced up her face.
I got up from Grafton’s little leather couch and examined the titles on his bookshelf and fingered his mementos while I went over that conversation again, trying to decide if Marisa had told the truth. The possibility that she was a world-class actress couldn’t be eliminated or excluded. Traitors have marched through the human drama since the dawn of time lying to everyone around them while they were committing treason. Such people are the lifeblood of intelligence agencies, including mine, and our most precious assets.
Isolde came in about that time. We chitchatted for a bit about America and her previous visits, then I asked her point-blank: “Does Marisa really hate Abu Qasim, or is she lying?”
The Frenchwoman looked me squarely in the eyes as she said, “Never have I seen someone hate another so much. It is a poison, and if she doesn’t somehow neutralize it, it will destroy her.”
She thought about that for a moment, then added, “I, too, have hated, but not like that. Not with the entire total of my being, not to the absolute depth and length and breadth of my soul.” She got up from her chair, looked around the room once more, then said, “Hatred has mutilated and twisted Abu Qasim. I don’t want Marisa to end up as he is, disfigured, foul, obsessed to the brink of insanity, evil. That would be a horrible fate.”
“Good to see you again, Admiral,” Robin Cloyd said when Jake Grafton walked into the foyer of his Langley office and the security door closed behind him.
“Good morning,” he said and walked on through to his private office. His desk was orderly, with the items demanding his attention carefully arranged in a pile. The urgent stuff that needed his immediate attention was on top, and the routine stuff on the bottom. Cloyd did the arranging, and her judgment was impeccable.
She also had his telephone call slips in a pile. Right on top was one from the director of MI-5. Jake sat down and dialed the number on the encrypted telephone that was on his desk. Three minutes later the British officer was on the line.
After a few social pleasantries, the director said, “Little development I thought you should know about. We got into Alexander Surkov’s security box at his bank. Found a wad of currency and four passports for four different people. None of them had Surkov’s photo on them. Two were American, one British and one from the Ukraine.”
“Real passports?”
“Our boffins think not. They look good, very good, good enough to fool any immigration officer who has only a minute or so to look at them, but our experts think they might be products of the SVR.” The Sluzhba Vneshnei Razvedski, Russian foreign intelligence, was Janos Ilin’s outfit.
“You don’t say,” Grafton murmured.
“No way to know for certain,” the British officer continued, “but one suspects Mr. Surkov had a lucrative little sideline supplying documents to unfortunates who found themselves inconveniently without.”
“He knew people in Russia,” Jake said thoughtfully. “That was what he had to sell.”
“The names on the passports don’t seem to be in our database, so we’re seeing what we can do with the photographs and addresses. In the meantime, we’re keeping this discovery under our hats. It won’t be released to the press or shared with law enforcement.”
Grafton thanked him and said good-bye.
Robin stuck her head in. “It’s almost time for your appointment, Admiral.”
Grafton glanced at his watch, then headed for the door. “See you in a bit,” he said.
The room beside director William Wilkins’ office was a multimedia theater cleverly disguised to look like a conference room. When buttons were pushed, walls retracted and displays popped up, rather like the cockpit of the starship Enterprise. Today the gadgets were hidden.
Grafton made small talk with the head of the Secret Service, Abe Goldman, while they waited for Wilkins and the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, who were in Wilkins’ office behind closed doors. An aide stuck his head in, saw that Grafton and Goldman were there and disappeared, presumably to relay the news to Wilkins, who came in a few minutes later with the secretary in tow. Grafton and Goldman popped to their feet.
