and gusting higher, and driving the raindrops into my face and legs like pellets, it felt like the arctic. The wind chill must have been near zero. Tree branches writhed and whipped in the wind, and low evergreens bent over from the blasts. Why the Pilgrims and other strait-laced religious types from Merry Old England ever wanted to take this place away from the Indians, I don’t know.
The dog liked it, though. She tugged me right along on her usual walk, I suppose. We went into the grass and along the hedges as she sniffed at everything. She found a couple of old dog-poop piles and inspected those carefully, but I got tired of that and pulled her on. She then charged to the end of the leash. Considering all the times she must have done this, you’d think she would have been leash-trained, but no.
I flashed the light around, just looking, shining it everywhere, in case there was a watcher. The guy in the hole by the corner of the barn could close his eyes or duck down; he didn’t need me giving away his position. Mostly, however, I watched the dog. Having had a little canine experience myself, I knew the dog would detect an intruder before I did. Molly certainly wouldn’t smell him in this hurricane, but she would sense him. Khadr. If he was out here. Or any other holy warrior waiting for a sucker infidel.
After a few minutes of this I led Molly on around the house. Might as well check out the whole area.
As I walked, bent down to protect myself against the wind, struggling to hold on to the pooch, I thought about my recent tryst with Marisa. Now there was a woman! But was she the real deal, or only acting a part?
The unanswered questions were right there, just beneath the surface. My paranoia was so ingrained by this time that I went over every look, word, touch, gesture — even her body language and the way she held herself — trying to find a false note. Ran the scenes over and over in my memory, looking …
The problem, I decided, is really me. I find it impossible to not turn over the rock to see what’s underneath.
Oh, God, Tommy, you idiot, what a way to live!
From the barn window, Khadr watched Tommy trudge through the wind and rain with the dog lunging on her leash until he disappeared around the house. He didn’t know who the man with the dog was — the infrared didn’t allow that kind of definition. Now that Tommy was gone, he used the infrared scanner again, although he realized he was only looking at this side of the house, and the areas to his left and right were obscured by his vantage point. There must be people out here! Getting as close to the glass as possible, he used the scanner to look down to the right and left.
There he was, a man, below, almost against the corner of the barn, to Khadr’s left. One man, in a hole, perhaps.
Khadr continued to look, scanning, trying to determine if this was the only man. He was still looking when Tommy Carmellini and the dog came back around the house. They entered at the door they had come out of.
A few minutes later some of the upstairs lights went dark. The people inside were going to bed.
So how was he going to get past the man in the hole and get inside?
Khadr began turning that problem over in his mind. In truth, he had no plan. He was looking for an opportunity, and if one developed, or he saw a way to make one, well and good. If not, he could always leave the way he had come in. He had a cell phone in his pocket to call Qasim to meet him.
After all, Qasim wanted to create terror, and the discovery of two dead men in the barn would certainly create it. And another opportunity might present itself tomorrow night, or the night after.
When I got back into the house, Winchester was waiting with a towel to dry the dog, who proceeded to shower us both anyway.
“You take real good care of that dog,” I commented.
“She belonged to Owen,” he said.
When he had the dog reasonably dry, he took her upstairs. Grafton was standing in the main living room with Robin watching the Weather Channel. The nor’easter was the storm of the day in America, apparently. Three reporters were on station to bring us the latest and greatest. They posed outside, of course, getting hammered by wind and rain as they gave their breathless reports.
All three talked about snow. When the radar picture came up, we could see it coming our way.
“Six inches by morning in this area,” Grafton murmured. “Power lines are already down in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.”
When the weather gurus went to a commercial, he used the remote to kill the sound of the savage beast. He left the picture on.
The admiral glanced at me and Robin. “Tonight may be the night. If you see, hear or smell anything, anything at all out of the ordinary, call me on the radio. I’ll have it on and the earpiece in my ear.”
“Sweet dreams,” Robin said brightly. She smiled. I decided that there is nothing like the smile of a lady holding a shotgun to jar your preconceptions.
Grafton ascended the stair and we were alone. “So how do you want to do this?” Robin asked. “Why don’t you settle in here behind something solid so no one can drill you through a window, and I’ll circulate? I suggest you also turn off the downstairs lights.” “After a while we trade off.” “Okay.”
She laid her shotgun on the bar and moved a chair behind it, then sat and put the weapon on her lap. The night vision goggles were within reach on the bar. I turned off the lights in the room, then, carrying my own scattergun, wandered back to the kitchen. I hadn’t managed much dinner and decided to inspect the refrigerator, just in case. While I was in there I shoved Winchester’s flashlight into my hip pocket. It threw a lot more light than my little penlight.
Jake Grafton found his wife just finishing her shower. She dressed in a long nightie as he washed his face and brushed his teeth. “No shower?” she said.
“I’m sleeping in my clothes.”
She didn’t have any response to that. He had an M-16 lying on the chair beside the bed. When she was under the covers and he was beside her with a blanket arranged over him, she turned off the light.
“I saw you talking to Isolde,” she said.
After Marisa went upstairs, Grafton had taken the banker to a corner of the living room for a private conversation.
“She thinks Qasim is a monster and Marisa is a victim,” he said.
“So who killed Jean Petrou?”
“I don’t know. Marisa thought he was selling information to Qasim, and he might have been. She followed him and saw them together once. She told Isolde about it. Either of them could have poisoned him. Both had access to Isolde’s prescription digitalis. Isolde says she didn’t and she doesn’t think Marisa did.”
“What do you think?”
“Marisa.”
A long silence followed that remark. Finally Callie said, “Tommy is pretty taken with her.”
“He’s a big boy.”
“Oh, comeon!”
“Listen to me. Marisa called Qasim while she was here, gave him our address in Rosslyn. She told him we were here, and she told him we were going to the political dinner on Thursday.”
“Does Tommy know that?”
“Not that. He knows Marisa may have killed her husband, and he knows she knocked him down when he was set to shoot the fleeing intruders at the Zetsche estate. Heck, she may have poisoned Alexander Surkov — that’s a long shot, but it’s a possibility. Tommy’s been around the mountain a time or two, and he’s trying to figure her out, same as me.”
She thought about that for a moment. “You wanted her to make that call, didn’t you?”
“I was sorta hoping she would.”
“So Qasim intends to assassinate the president?”
“I think he wants Marisa there to see him do it. That’s my best guess. He has been playing us like chessmen, forcing us to do what he wanted. Thursday night. That’s his payoff, I think. Maybe.”
“Oh, my God,” she whispered.
Grafton lay there in the darkness listening to the rain and wind, trying to relax. After a while his wife went to sleep — he could tell by her breathing.
What if he had figured this all wrong and Marisa was an assassin? She was inside. What if she killed Winchester and Smith tonight? Or opened a door or window for Khadr?
