Grant was standing behind her desk, talking into a hardwired phone. She used a yellow pencil to point him at a chair.
He sat, and while she talked to somebody about developing a new line of Samsung cell phone apps—it sounded crooked to Parrish, but what did he know?—he considered lying to her about the attempt to mug Davenport.
And decided against it.
Grant was saying, to someone, “Look: I don’t want you to copy the code. I want you to look at what the code produces and I want you to produce the identical fuckin’ app with a different batch of code and I want you to translate it into fucking Zulu. Are the fuckin’ Zulus writing their own apps? Then find out. Call me back tomorrow. I want numbers.”
Grant was wearing a white blouse and an ankle-length white skirt, both with cutouts that looked like lace and offered peeks at what lay beneath. What lay beneath, Parrish thought, was either nothing at all or a body stocking that precisely matched her complexion.
Either way, it wouldn’t affect him much. Like Grant, he foundpower more compelling than sex. A quiet deal meeting at the Pentagon or the Senate Office Building, with serious people, was far more compelling than a piece of ass. Anybody’s ass.
Grant put the phone on the hook, and said to Parrish, “I mean, Jesus, how hard can it be?”
“What are you trying to do?”
She inspected him, rolling the yellow pencil between her fingers like a baton, and decided to take ten seconds for the answer. “There are about a billion apps for the Samsung phone and the iPhone. The apps are mostly in the major languages. So you take the best ones and you redo the code so nobody can sue you for plagiarism, or whatever that would be, and put it into a non-English language that doesn’t have that app. Like Zulu. There are ten million Zulu speakers, and I suspect about eighty percent of them have cell phones. Eight million phones times two bucks for an app is worth doing—especially if you can translate the same app into a whole bunch of other non-major languages that add up to a billion people or so, and if developing the app costs you ten grand.”
Parrish considered this, and finally said, “You know, I might have some people who’d be interested in talking to you about that. About specialized apps. I wonder if there are military apps? Tactical apps? I wonder...”
Grant waved him off. “No, no, no. The problem with that is, you have to do research. Research costs money. The way we’re doing it: we pay some nerd five grand to rewrite the app with different code and pay some college language professor another two grand to translate the language. No research. If it’s already a popular app in fifteen major languages, the market research is done, too.”
“I’ll stick to guns,” Parrish said.
“Good idea.” She’d been rocking from one foot to the other behind the desk and now she stopped: “Speaking of which?”
“We missed him. We spotted him leaving the Watergate, but he grabbed a cab and took it all the way to a tailor shop, where he stayed for almost an hour and a half,” Parrish said. “We set up to take him, but when he came out he spotted us... and he ran. He was screaming for help. Jim told me it kinda freaked them out—he was supposed to be a fighter. We were all set for that.”
“He ran?”
“Yes. Hauled ass. Moore was coming up from one side, took a swing at him, but he blocked it and punched Moore in the face, and then he ran down the street, screaming for help.”
The story made Grant smile—for a moment anyway—but then the smile vanished, and she said, “That’s two fuckups. Are you sure you’ve got the right people? Do I have the right people?”
“Yes, you do. Delta, SEALs—you couldn’t get anybody better. They can take a guy down. But this...”
“I told you he was smart. You need to spend some time looking him up on the Internet,” Grant said. “He’s also violent, and somebody’s going to get killed if you miss him again. I think it’s time to reconsider.”
“Reconsider how?” Parrish asked.
“Maybe we lay low. Ignore him. If we see him following me around, we file a stalking complaint with the D.C. police and the Marshals Service, based on his investigation back in Minnesota. Let him die on the vine.”
“Well, we could try that,” Parrish said. “Still might be a good idea to keep an eye on him.”
“You can do that—but don’t fuck it up. Stay back. If you losehim, let it go, don’t go running around like a bunch of idiots, where he’ll see you.”
—
THEY SAT LOOKING AT EACH OTHERacross Grant’s desk, and Parrish said, “Of course, there is the other problem.”
She nodded. “Smalls.”
“Smalls and Whitehead. If Davenport develops anything on that—we’re talking about murder—the only way he could develop anything is to find the truck, which would get him to Jim, and Jim would get him to Flamma and Heracles, and from there to me, and then to you. If Smalls prepares the ground by going up to the Senate and tells people you tried to kill him... and murdered his friend...”
“He’d have no proof,” Grant said. “Not a goddamn thing.”
“He doesn’t need proof: he’s not taking you to federal court; he’s trying to undercut your possibilities. How many people have figured out that if you lie enough, and loud enough, people will start to believe?”
Grant twiddled the pencil, muttered, “Goddamn that Davenport. I’ll tell you something: he’s not a bad-looking guy, and he’s rich. I would have gone out with him, if he’d asked, before all the trouble.”
