Outside, he led the way past the pool to the end of the backyard. “I’m probably overcooking things a little, but I worry about surveillance. Especially since I know what can be done, if they want to do it,” he said. “I doubt anyone’s actually watching me... If they are, they wouldn’t be bugging us out here.”
Lucas said, “Okay...”
“Anyway, what I don’t understand is, why did Senator Grantjump into this with both feet? Stick a bullshit investigation on me and on my boss? She didn’t have to do that. What would she get out of it?”
Lucas had an answer to that question, but he didn’t say what he thought: that Grant was buying Parrish’s loyalty. Instead, he said, “I need to know the dimension of this... disaster. I won’t talk about it to anyone, but I need to know. I will tell you that the matter I’m investigating is extremely serious... more so than you can probably imagine.”
Rose looked around the yard, took a hit on his Pepsi, and said, “I don’t even know if you’re really a marshal. You could be spoofing me.”
“You could look me up on the Internet. There’s a lot of stuff there, going back years.”
“I’ll do that,” Rose said. “In the meantime... I’m not going to say anything more. We’re talking about federal prison.”
“I don’t think so,” Lucas said. “If all this works out the way I suspect it will, they’d be afraid to go after you.”
“You don’t know,” Rose said. “I don’t believe that they’re afraid of anybody.”
“You’d be wrong about that,” Lucas said.
“Give me your email,” Rose said. “Maybe I’ll get back to you.”
“Tell me one more thing—I’m sure it isn’t classified, but it’s something you’d know,” Lucas said. “Parrish was an active duty military officer, stayed in the Reserve, and is now a major, and he’s moving up to lieutenant colonel sometime soon. Would his service with the Army and the CIA, and now with the Senate, give him access to, you know, people with an ability to do violence?”
Rose squinted at him, licked his lips: “Who’d he get shot?”
“Nobody. But if he wanted to get somebody shot, would he have the connections? I’m not talking about a military shooting, a terrorist shooting, but a civilian shooting here in the U.S. Could he get a couple of names?”
Another hit on the bottle, and a quick nod. “Oh, yeah. In about five minutes. And now I am done.”
Rose refused to say anything more. Lucas left him standing by the pool and walked around the house and out to the street.
—
THE SECOND,third, and fourth entries on Carter’s list all lived in Virginia, on the other side of the District. He’d get them later in the afternoon, he thought, and could stop at the hotel on the way.
The first time Lucas had encountered Grant, she’d worked through two ex-military security men, whom she’d paid to kill for her—and one of them she’d bound to herself with the pretense of loving him. Grant would do what was necessary to recruit people she thought she needed—political favors, money, sex—whatever she thought it would take.
If she needed Parrish’s particular kind of expertise, she’d probably bought his loyalty by protecting him from criticism; maybe even saved his job. There was also the prospect of the White House...
—
BACK AT THE HOTEL,Lucas washed his face and went to the laptop, clicked on his email, expecting a note from Weather, and maybe from his daughter Letty, who was in her third year at Stanford. There was nothing from Letty, but he did have a brief note from Weather, with school news, and another email from Rose, hidingbehind the name Donald R. Ligny, with a subject line that identified him: “Looked you up on the Internet.”
Scrolling down, Lucas found aWashington Poststory about the bombing of a Syrian nerve gas warehouse that turned out to be asouk, or marketplace, instead, with a small school for girls at one end. The Syrians claimed that ninety-four people had been killed, most of them women or children, a claim verified by a religious charity and with photographs. The school had been wiped out.
Under the story, there were six added words:
“We told them. They didn’t listen.”
—
YEARS BEFORE,Lucas had seen a Tom Clancy movie—he couldn’t remember the name of it, but Harrison Ford was in it. He remembered one scene in particular, in which a British SAS team had wiped out a terrorist training camp someplace in North Africa. The scene had stuck in Lucas’s head because he’d spent his life working murders, murders which had often horrified him. In the Clancy movie, the SAS attack had been monitored by satellite, and a group of CIA suits had casually watched the attack and conducted a running commentary. “There’s a kill,” one had said while leisurely drinking a cup of coffee.
The scene was chilling, as it was intended to be. There were people down there, dead, executed while they slept. They were terrorists, probably deserved what they got, but they were still people, snuffed out in an instant.
ThePoststory, combined with what Lucas had been told by Rose, reflected the same kind of bureaucratic attitude as the Clancy scene: people more interested in taking care of their operationallives, their political lives, than the fact that a whole lot of people died at their hands.
Parrish and Grant hustling around to shift the blame... Forget about the women and children blown to bloody rags in a split second.
