Moy jogged over to them. “Larry says there’s a car coming down the street, moving slow.”
He was carrying a radio but listening through earphones. He listened for a few more seconds, and said, “It turned into the driveway... Okay, two people are getting out... Looks like a man and a woman...”
Lucas felt sudden apprehension. “What’s the woman look like?”
Moy repeated the question, said, “Can’t tell, it’s too dark. And Larry’s not positive it’s a woman but thinks it is. She’s wearing a hooded black rain jacket...”
“Aw, Jesus,” Lucas said.
He looked at Bob, who said, “Suzie?”
“I think so.”
“We gotta get down closer,” he said. To Chase: “I think it might be the woman who shot us up at the hotel. I don’t like the idea that she’s here with Claxson because—”
“Larry says they’re inside,” Moy said.
Seconds later—three or four, no more, Lucas thought—they heard a series of whumps, like you might hear if somebody fell down the stairs in your house.
Lucas pulled his gun, and Chase said, “What?” and Bob said, “That was gunfire,” and Rae yanked open the back hatch of the Evoque, and as Lucas and Bob ran toward the opening of the driveway, she pulled out an M4 and a thirty-round mag and slammed the mag into place as she ran after them.
28
Taryn Grant stood in the bay window at the back of her Georgetown mansion, watching the drizzle deflect off the multicolored foliage and the red-brick walkways of the sprawling garden she never thought to sit in. In the middle of a densely built world capital, she felt alone: not only was she alone in the house, and would be for the rest of the day, she couldn’t even see the city. She could see a few windows in the gabled roof of her next-door neighbor, but that was it. Other than that, she might be out in the Minnesota countryside.
The temperatures were in the low seventies, low enough that she shivered in the cool air, after the long string of stultifying hot and humid days. But the rain—she liked the idea of the rain. The rain was like a sign.
Time to roll the bones, she thought. Everything would ride on this night.
The idea was... arousing. In a sexual sense. She took a deep breath, feeling the heat between her thighs, turned away from the window, and walked through the kitchen to the basement door, to the SCIF, walked down the stairs, got her pistol from the desk.
The gun was a Beretta 92F, once owned by a security man who’d killed for her and was now dead himself. He’d picked thegun up after a firefight in Iraq, had taken it off the body of a dead intelligence officer who’d made the mistake of popping up from behind a wall at the wrong split second. In movie cop terms, the piece was cold as ice.
She carried the Beretta up the stairs, stopped in the kitchen to pick up a plastic mixing bowl and a bottle of dishwashing liquid, which she took back to the laundry room. There, she popped the magazine and thumbed the fifteen rounds out on the top of the dryer. She poured the dishwashing liquid in the bowl, dropped the rounds in. Using a dishrag, she scrubbed each round clean until the brass shone like a new gold coin, eliminating any possible fingerprints. That done, she rolled the rounds out on the dryer again and washed the bowl in the utility sink.
Next step: she took a bottle of bleach from the cupboard, poured it in the bowl until it was two-thirds full, and dropped the rounds in. She let them sit for a minute, then gingerly picked each one out with a paper towel, dried it, and lined them all up on a paper towel on the dryer top. The magazine went into the bleach for a minute. She took it out, again handling it with a paper towel, patted and waved it dry. No more DNA.
When the fifteen rounds and the magazine were thoroughly dry, and yet again with paper towels, she pushed the cartridges into the magazine and loaded the mag back into the pistol. She finally put the gun in a new garbage bag.
None of that technique came from the CIA or the Intelligence Committee. It was all hot off the Internet.
—
SHE CARRIED THE PISTOLback to her bedroom, where she lay on the bed for five minutes, working out the exact sequence of events,while getting her courage up and fixing it steadfastly in her heart. What did the Buddha say?Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.
When the moment was clear to her, she packed an overnight case with jeans, a black cashmere sweater, a hooded black nylon rain jacket, sneakers, and a leather shoulder bag with the gun inside. Her murder gear. On top would go a travel kit, fashion blouse, jacket, slacks, and shoes for the following day.
She showered, did her makeup, dabbed a bit of Tom Ford Black Orchid on her earlobes, the inside of her wrists, and at the top of her spine. She dressed in a notable emerald Versace summer gown, which subtly displayed her long legs through a shifting slit, and by seven o’clock was in a taxi headed to the Park Hyatt, where the U.S. Public Hospital Association was holding its annual summer soirée. And where she’d reserved a suite for the night.
By seven forty-five, right on time, she was in the room. She retouched her makeup, shook out her hair, got her jeweled clutch purse with the plain black burner phone in it, and, at eight, walked into the ballroom. Almost the first person she saw, off to her right, dressed in a black tuxedo, was Porter Smalls.
And Smalls saw her, displayed a white flash of teeth—not a smile, a grimace—and turned away. She headed left and began working the crowd.
—
PARRISH CALLEDat ten minutes to nine. Grant glanced at the phone, and said to the doctor she was talking with, “I’m sorry—I have to take this.”
“The President?”
