—
THE DOOR OPENED,and a man who was probably Joe Rose stood in the doorway and asked, “Do you have some ID?”
“I do,” Lucas said. He showed Rose his badge and ID card, and Rose stepped back and said, “Come on in. Uh... I can’t think of any reason that I would, but should I have a lawyer here?”
Lucas shook his head. “No. The investigation doesn’t involve you in any way, except as a possible source of information.”
Rose was Lucas’s height and build, but older, retirement age, gray-haired, large-nosed, with a pair of inexpensive computer glasses pushed up on his forehead. Close up, his voice sounded even harsher than it had on the phone—an injury of some kind; he hadn’t gotten it singing. He was pale, like an office worker, and freckled, wore tan slacks and a golf shirt, loafers but no socks.
He said, “Okay, I got the time. You know I don’t have a regular job anymore.”
“No, I didn’t know that,” Lucas said, as he followed him into the house and down a hallway. The hallway opened into what had probably been designed as a family room but now was being used as a spacious office, with three separate computer monitors on a library table.
“Yeah, I’m a contract researcher now. You know what’snoton the Internet now?”
“I thought everything was.”
“Nope. There’s tons of government stuff that isn’t—stuff that’s still important but that was recorded before 2000 or so,” Rose said. “Internet people don’t know how to do paper research, courthouse research, so I’m doing fairly well. I’m praying it keeps up, because I can use the money.”
“Cool. You invented your own job,” Lucas said.
“Yup. So... what’s up?”
Rose pointed Lucas at a leather club chair and took an identical chair facing Lucas across a fuzzy brown-and-tan rug. Not married, Lucas thought: women generally didn’t allow big fat leather chairs or brown fuzzy rugs in their family rooms.
Lucas: “I’m told you don’t much care for a man named Jack Parrish. I need to know more about Mr. Parrish. About his character.”
Rose responded with a grunt, then asked, “What does that have to do with an auto accident?”
“I don’t want to talk about that,” Lucas said. He softened things with a smile. “I know it’s horseshit, but... I can’t right now tie two things together with somebody I don’t know.”
“Got it,” Rose said. He sighed, and said, “Parrish is... I mean, calling him an asshole or a sonofabitch doesn’t do the man justice. Even in Washington, he’s something special. And, believe me, we’ve got a glut of assholes around here.”
Rose had worked for the CIA at the same time Parrish had, both as middle managers in “parallel departments,” as Rose put it. “I can’t tell you what we were doing, but it was technical.”
“I saw a file that said Parrish did something with photo interpretation.”
“He did, but... let’s just leave it there. If you got that information by seeing a list of his so-called publications, he stole most of those things from his subordinates,” Rose said. “Anyway, he was there for five or six years—I overlapped him on both ends, in terms of employment. During that time, I watched him undermine anyone he thought might someday challenge him—bad personnel reports, that kind of thing. He was an attention junkie and an ass-kisser. What I’m saying is, he stepped on a lot of good people and tried to crawl up the org chart over their bodies. Eventually, people began to catch on, it caught up with him... and he got out. Moved over to the Senate as a staff member.”
“Leaving you... where?”
“Where I was. I had an obscure job, important but not flashy. At least, I thought it was important, and I was good at it. Then, we had a situation come up... uh... that I don’t want to talk about yet. Parrish advocated one kind of response, we advocated another. My boss and I went over to SIC—the Senate Intelligence Committee—with some, mmm, documents that suggested that Parrish was bullshitting them on behalf of a faction over at the Pentagon. He and the Pentagon got their way, and what happened later was a goddamn disaster. Too big even for an effective cover-up.”
He looked up at the ceiling, both hands in the air, grinned at Lucas, but leaned forward and whispered, “People died. People who shouldn’t have. Lots of them.”
Lucas: “Who got blamed?”
Rose tapped his chest. “I did. Not for the disaster but for the fact that some of it got out to the press. One of the senatorsbrought the deputy director over for a closed-door meeting, and, the next thing I knew, I was talking to our security people about leaks. Shit, I didn’t even know a reporter. I said so. But they kept after me—this went on for a year—and I got what they called a lateral transfer to a nonsensitive position, pending resolution of the leaking case. I had thirty-three years in, and I said fuck it and retired. When I was going out the door, a pal of mine, higher up the line, took me aside and said that be believed the whole thing was a dirty trick engineered by Parrish, who’d been telling people that I’d been leaking and that me leaking might even have caused the problem—that I’d been leaking before the action, somebody overheard me, and word had been passed to the Syrians... Damn lie, every bit of it. I found out later he’d gone to work for the senator who’d been asking the questions.”
“Taryn Grant,” Lucas said.
Rose nodded, and asked, “You want a Pepsi or a beer?” After asking the question, he nodded vigorously, a pantomime nod.
Lucas said, “Yeah, I could use a Pepsi. I haven’t had anything to drink since I left the hotel...”
“C’mon, I’ll get you one,” Rose said.
In the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator, took out two Pepsis, handed one to Lucas, and said, “Let’s go out and sit by the pool. I got an umbrella out there.”
