Claxson stood, picked up the autopsy report, and said, “Think of something. And I’ll try to come up with something. Worse comes to worse, we give you a jar of malaria pills and you go on up that river.”
Claxson headed for the door, but before he got there, McCoy said, “Hey. Jim’s got a twin brother. Heavy hitter, right? He’s like a major or a lieutenant colonel, did some work with Delta? I think they were tight, the brothers...”
“Lieutenant colonel,” Claxson said.
“What if we sicced him on Davenport? He gets caught... no skin off our asses.”
Claxson raked his lower lip with his upper teeth, thinking, and said, “That could be it. He wouldn’t even have to kill him, if he beat the shit out of him or something. Anything that’d slow things down, take the heat off, get people to move on.”
“How do we find out when he gets here? The colonel?”
Claxson shrugged. “We’ll check and see if Jim’s parents were notified. I’m sure they were, so we’ll call them up and offer to fly them here. Jim’s will says he wanted cremation, and burial at Arlington, and it’ll take some time to set that up. We’ll offer to take care of the Arlington paperwork, but the cremation can take place as soon as the medical examiner releases the body. Anyway, his folks should know when the colonel gets here and where he’ll be. We’ll brief him... point him at Davenport. If nothing happens, nothing happens.”
“Hard to believe that nothing would,” McCoy said.
“He’s not one of us,” Moore said. “He doesn’t think like us. You can’t predict.”
“What if one of us... did something, but made it look like the colonel?” Claxson asked.
McCoy shook his head. “Wouldn’t do that. If he takes out Davenport, he takes his chances. But I won’t frame some innocent guy who spent years over in the sand.”
Moore held up a hand, and McCoy slapped it.
Claxson shook his head and left—from the hallway beyond the door, he called back, “I’ll talk to the colonel.”
—
WHEN HE WAS GONE,Moore stood up and went to the door, looked down the hall to make sure Claxson was gone, closed the door and sat down again. He leaned across the table to McCoy, and said, “Man, we gotta get out of here. This ain’t gonna work out, no way, no how.”
“I think we got some time...”
Moore shook his head. “No we don’t. If we kill that cop, everything is gonna get worse. If the colonel kills the cop, we’ll still get blamed. We’re tied up in the biggest clusterfuck in the world.”
“If we can make it through, though, the reward—the White House...” McCoy began.
Moore interrupted: “If we disappear, and she makes president, we can come back for the reward. With what we know—”
“You’d try blackmailing the fuckin’ President, and fuckin’ Heracles, and the fuckin’ guy who was Army and CIA and would have an office in the White House? Are you fuckin’ nuts?” McCoy asked.
“We could. We’d have time to figure out how to make it work.” Moore leaned forward across the table, got right in McCoy’s face, dropped his voice to a barely discernible whisper, and asked, “You want to know the worst of it? What I think I figured out?”
“Do I want to know?” McCoy asked quietly.
Moore stayed with the whisper. “I don’t think that marshal killed Jim. I think somebody here did. Maybe Claxson. Maybe Parrish. You know how they’re always talking about guns, how they did something here, did something there? When they don’t have any more use for us...”
“Ah, man.”
“I’ll tell you something else. I spent the morning packing up,” Moore whispered. “I got couple of good passports and bought a ticket to Bogotá. From there, I’m flying to Rio, and from there to South Africa, and I’m gonna grow a beard along the way, and then I’m going north. Niger, Nigeria, Libya—there’s a couple of mining companies up in the Congo would take us on... there’s a shipping company outta Perth that hires security guys to ride their ships up the east coast of Africa, to protect them from pirates. The money’s okay, you don’t spend a nickel aboard the ships, and you don’t walk through any passport controls with facial recog.”
“Ricky did that, the ship thing. He said it bored his brains out,” McCoy said.
“Ricky didn’t have our problem,” Moore said.
McCoy tilted his head back, looked at the ceiling. “Let me think about it.”
“I’m leaving tonight,” Moore said. “I’m inviting you to go along. There are some empty seats on the plane; I looked. Wecould get your ticket on the way. I got a long drive, and you could help out on that.”
“Where you driving to?”
