“Well, no foreign countries, but anywhere in the U.S. and territories, with the exception of certain high-security facilities where you would have to check it. And you can’t fly with it on your person; you’ll have to check it to take it on an airplane,” the assistant IG said.
Letty didn’t say so, but she was pleased. When they left the office, walking down the hall, Kaiser gave her a cell phone–sized package covered with Christmas wrap: “A gift,” he said.
Puzzled, she opened it, and found a black alligator leather ID case, sized for her new cards.
She said, “I just... I mean... John!”
She tipped her head back and laughed: she could carry a gun.
Anywhere.
Oklahoma City wasthe home of Hughes-Wright Petroleum, run by a billionaire named Vermilion Wright, his business housed in the thirty-seven-story Hughes-Wright Petroleum Center.
During the trip out from Washington, Letty and Kaiser had been talking about the range of employment opportunities she might be interested in, if the DHS well came up dry. On the way into town from the airport, in a rented Ford Explorer, Kaiser said, “The thing you’d hate about the military is the sheer fuckin’ boredom and the paperwork. Orders. Every time you go outside...”
Letty was driving, Kaiser was picking his teeth with a peppermint-flavored toothpick. “Even if you got picked up by Special Ops, you’d spend ninety percent of your time either sitting around or training. While you’re doing that you’ve got some Ivy League asshole who’s never left D.C. yapping in your ear aboutcombat ethics...”
He was about to go on when Letty asked, “Is that where we’re going?” She pointed up through the windshield. “The second building behind the first one? The gold-glass one?”
“They told us the second-tallest building in town and that one is, so it must be it,” Kaiser said.
And it was. They found an open space in the underground parking garage and took the elevator to the lobby level, where a security guard checked their appointment status, gave them adhesive paper name tags to stick on their shirts, and sent them to the top floor.
Letty had checked a directory behind the reception desk and noticed that while Hughes-Wright occupied the top four floors of the building and apparently had naming rights, the rest of the place wasoccupied by a variety of investment and real estate firms, and smaller oil- and gas-related companies. Nevertheless, the place smelled of oil—not crude, which stank, but like the odor of hot motor oil on a car’s dipstick.
That struck her as odd, since so little of the building seemed to have anything to do with oil. Maybe some kind of aerosol spray, an oil-industry version of Febreze?
As they rode up in the elevator, Kaiser said, “While I’m a much better shot than you are, or can ever hope to be, I’ll let you do the talking here.”
“I let my guns do the talking on the range, but I do think it’d be wise to let me talk here,” Letty agreed. “Do you smell oil?”
“Yeah, I do. I was thinking something was wrong with my nose. Maybe they oiled the elevator this morning?”
After the shooting contests at the Virginia range and the DHS briefings, it seemed to Letty that she and Kaiser might fall into a prickly friendship, which was about right, since they were both distinctly prickly. During the briefings, and afterward, and on the trip to OKC, Kaiser had begun playing the part of a surrogate uncle, giving her advice that she didn’t need, though he never missed a chance to check her ass.
Which she knew, of course.
He was currently unattached, he’d told her, but the DHS briefing officer, Greet, “kinda liked my whole package,” and had mentioned in passing that she, too, was currently unattached. “Gonna call that girl up, when I get back to D.C.,” he said.
“If you need any advice about how to talk to women, I’m always here,” Letty said. “Believe me, youdoneed that advice.”
“Au contraire, as we say down in Terrebonne Parish. With the right woman, I speak in poetry.”
The elevator doors openedand a woman in a dark green dress was standing there, holding a leather portfolio. “Ms. Davenport? Mr. Kaiser? Mr. Wright is waiting.”
Vermilion Wright occupied an expansive wood-and-glass office that overlooked Oklahoma City. He was a tall man, white-haired, angular, deep-set eyes under thick white eyebrows, strong for eighty-five. A recent newspaper story that Letty found on the Net said that he had bad knees from a life of crawling around oil rigs; a bamboo cane lay on one side of his desk.
He stood up when Letty led Kaiser into his office, and stuck out a bony hand to shake with each of them.
“Nice to meet you. Sit down,” Wright said. “The last DHS guy in here was about as useful as tits on a bull. I hope you can do something to help us out.”
“We’re not so much anxious to help you out as we are to find out where the money is going,” Letty said, as she took one of the leather visitor chairs and crossed her ankles. “Of course, if we figure that out, we’ll probably know who’s stealing your oil.”
He contemplated her, then asked, “You smart?”
Letty nodded. “Yes.”
“Where’d you go to school? What’d you study?”
