The muzzle was three feet from his nose, and he muttered, “That’d work fine, I guess. That’d be... Don’t do this...”
Grant’s finger was white on the trigger, and Parrish could plainly see that from thirty-six inches away, and he could hear her labored breathing... and then she stepped back, dropped hervoice, and snarled, “Don’t ever fuck with me. I know your background. I know you’re a little crazy. Keep this in mind: I’m way, way crazier than you are.”
He hadn’t started to sweat until she backed away, but he was sweating now. “I see that,” he said. The gun was still pointed at his nose, her finger was still white on the trigger. She looked like she wanted to pull it, he could see it in her glittering blue eyes. “I’m okay with it. I won’t make a single fucking move without talking to you about it.”
“Better,” Grant said. She pointed the muzzle at the ceiling. “Now, is there anything we have to do about Smalls? I mean, right now?”
“Probably best to lay back in the weeds and not do anything,” Parrish said, his voice trembling. He tried to smooth it out. “If we decide to take another run at him, we have time. I’ll tell you what, though: he’s got his oppo people digging around through your investments back in Minnesota. If you want to be president, there better not be much back there.”
“There’s not. Nothing illegal. Not that he could get at anyway.” She stooped and dropped the gun in a desk drawer. Parrish noted which one it was in case he needed that information in the future. He would not be back down in this basement without a gun in his belt.
Though he probably wouldn’t need one. Before this confrontation, he’d thought of Grant as a Minnesota blonde, with everything that might suggest: nice, sweet, maybe a little above average. But not too much above average. And certainly not dumb.
That had changed in the last two minutes.
Two minutes later, when he went out the door, still alive, herealized that he’d suddenly come to respect her, as much as any sociopath could.
She’s crazier than I am...
—
WHEN HE WAS GONE,Grant remained in the basement, brooding about the mistake with Smalls and the possible consequences.
Would the cops figure out what had happened? Was there any way she could interfere without being tagged as responsible? Could Smalls somehow be blamed for the “accident”? If she got rid of Parrish—permanently, with a bullet—would that seal her off from any investigation? One other man knew about her arrangement with Parrish and had supplied the operators who went after Smalls. If she killed Parrish, he’d still be out there.
—
WHEN SHE’D BEEN ELECTEDto the Senate, Taryn Grant had bought the mansion in Georgetown, which backed up to Dumbarton Park. The house was supposedly seventy years old, but if there were more than a few molecules left from the original structure, she hadn’t been able to find them. Built of red brick, with a terrific garden behind eight-foot brick walls, everything had been “updated” to the point where the house might as well have been built a year earlier.
She had an eye for good houses, and as stately as this house was, and as well located, the major attraction was that it had been previously occupied by the outgoing secretary of defense. The basement had been reworked at taxpayer expense to be absolutely secure and was known as a SCIF space, she’d learned when she got to Washington. She’d had her own security firm go overit inch by inch and they’d found no faults. Sitting down in the basement, she might as well have been in a bank vault.
If she’d actually shot Parrish, her biggest problem would have been cleanup and disposal, because nobody outside the place would have seen or heard anything. And, she thought, it might still come to that.
—
GRANT WAS RICH.
She was also tall, blond, and physically fit. She controlled most of a billion dollars, her share of her family’s agricultural commodities business, the fifth-largest privately held company in the United States, now run by an older brother. In addition, she owned two small but profitable Internet companies, run by remote control through CEOs as ruthless as she was, but with less money.
As a tall, blond, physically fit woman, there were rumors about her supposedly voracious sexuality, though nobody had the photos. The fact was, she was okay with occasional sex, if performed discreetly, with attractive men, but she was hardly voracious.
Power, not sex, was the drug she mainlined. She wasn’t much interested in policy, or the Senate, or being on television: she wanted the hammer, the biggest one she could find. Barack Obama was her hero for one reason and one reason alone: he’d served a single term in the U.S. Senate before he became president.
“Madam President” had a nice round sound to it.
If everything went just right, Grant was two years out.
But not everything was going just right because Parrish’s goons had failed on what had seemed a straightforward mission: kill Smalls and make it look like an accident. Parrish had stood inthe SCIF and laid it out like a commando mission: “That’s all these guys have done, for most of their adult lives. The people they took out... not all of them were from enemy countries. Sometimes, you need to remove a particular guy in a friendly country.”
She’d asked, “Like Pakistan?”
“Yeah. And like Germany.”
—
FOUR DAYS AFTERshe’d pulled the gun on Parrish, Grant had him back in the SCIF. A blinking red light on her desk told her that he was armed. She opened the desk drawer where she kept the Beretta so it would be handy, but she didn’t take it out.
She was angry all over again, though this time better controlled.
