“I don’t think the President wants to chat with me,” Grant said, laughing. “We do have our small differences.”
She stepped out in the hall, walking toward the elevators, and said, “Yes?”
“On my way. Ten minutes.”
“How about the other guy? Where is he?”
“He’s closer. He aims to get there right at nine-thirty.”
In the allotted ten minutes, she transformed herself in her room. She pinned her hair up, got into her jeans, sweater, sneakers, and hooded nylon jacket. She pulled on a pair of thin leather gloves, took the Beretta out of the shoulder bag, jacked a shell into the chamber, made sure the safety was on, and put it back in the bag, under her purse, the grip up where her hand could fall on it easily.
She left her regular phone on the dressing table. That done, she checked the hall, hung a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door, took the elevator down to four, and, from there, the stairs down to the street level. Several people were in the lobby as she hurried through, her head covered by the hood, her face turned away as best she could manage.
Parrish was waiting. He popped the door of an anonymous Toyota sedan, she climbed in, and they were off. “This isn’t your car,” she said.
“It’s a Hertz. I don’t want my car seen at Charlie’s house.”
“Which could be traced...”
“Yeah, if I’d rented it under my own name, which I didn’t. I’ll take it back, they’ll rent it again, and by the time anybody could trace it, there’ll have been five more people inside.”
“Paranoid, are we?”
“You’re not paranoid when people are out to get you. And people are definitely out to get us.”
—
CHARLIE DOUGLAS,Heracles’s principal attorney, lived in the town of Great Falls, a tedious drive at rush hour, but only a half hour at nine o’clock. They drove most of the way in silence, Grant with what felt like a hand squeezing her heart. Douglas lived in a white pillared house on Chesapeake Drive, two stories high in a center section, with lower wings to either side. An American flag hung vertically from a rack on the second floor, with an overhead light to shine on it at night. The house itself was set above the road in a dark forest of scattered pines and looming deciduous trees—oaks, Grant thought.
“George said to look for the flag,” Parrish said, as he turned into the driveway.
“Anybody here besides us four?” Grant said. “I don’t want anyone else seeing my face.”
“Nobody. I don’t want anyone to see me, either. Charlie’s a widower; he said his housekeeper is gone at six o’clock.” Looking at the black SUV parked in the driveway, Parrish added, “George is here. He told me he rented a Land Rover, which is a George thing to do.”
He parked, and Grant said, “What I’m mostly worried about is blackmail. If they record us, if there are cameras...”
Parrish was shaking his head. “There won’t be. Nobody could afford to have this on the record, any kind of record, anytime.”
Grant let Parrish lead the way to the front door, which opened as they walked up. Douglas stood there, a glass of whiskey in his hand. He was an older man, slightly stooped, with thick whitehair and heavy eyebrows, each as long and as wide as Grant’s little finger. “Come in,” he said.
They stepped inside, Douglas sticking his head out and looking both ways as if he expected a busful of FBI agents to land on his doorstep. He stepped back inside, locked the door.
“When George was turned loose, one of the conditions was that he wear an ankle monitor,” Douglas said. “They’ll know he’s here, but why shouldn’t he be? And we really do need to talk business.”
Grant: “There’s no chance that it can monitor the conversation, is there?”
“No, that would be illegal,” Douglas said. “It would threaten their whole case.”
Grant nodded, and Douglas led the way to the living room, where Claxson was sitting in a leather chair, another glass of whiskey by his hand. Grant doubted that she’d be offered one. Douglas asked, “Would you like a drink? I have a split of champagne, unless you like a nice snort of Jack Daniel’s.”
So she’d been wrong about that. She was still behind Parrish, ten feet from Claxson, with Douglas off to her right, walking toward the liquor cabinet.
Grant didn’t bother to reply. She had her hand on the pistol; the pistol felt electrified, as the checkering on the grip bit into her hand. She’d flicked off the safety as they walked down the hallway from the front door. Now she pulled it out and, with no hesitation, shot Parrish in the back between the shoulder blades.
The muzzle blast was like a slap on the head, though slightly muffled by the carpets, drapes, and soft furniture. Parrish pitched forward onto his face. Claxson shouted something she didn’t comprehend and tried to get out of the leather chair, rolledslightly to his left, eyes wide, and she shot him in the chest and side—two quick taps—from five feet.
Douglas had the crystal whiskey glass in his hand, and he pitched it at her head. She pulled her head back, got splashed with the whiskey. Douglas blurted, “Please don’t,” and she thrust the pistol at him and shot him twice in the chest.
