“He eats cheese,” Lucas said.
Sherwood had been looking back and forth between Lucas, Mallard, and Chase, and now asked Lucas, “Who are these people?”
Lucas said, “Louis Mallard, deputy director of the FBI, and Jane Chase, Louis’s personal fussbudget, also a lawyer and FBI agent. Guys, meet John Sherwood, a spy.”
Sherwood shook hands with Mallard and Chase, and said to Chase, “I entirely agree with your apparent assessment of Marshal Davenport. He can be absolutely disgusting in his lack of regard for well-established rules of law. We could compare notes over steaks and red wine tonight, if you’re free.”
“I don’t drink with spies, unless you want to tell me about the ones you’ve stuck in the Justice Department,” Chase said.
“I’ll never get over the cynicism of Washington insiders. It makes me sad,” Sherwood said to Mallard.
Mallard smiled and went back to Lucas: “Where’s this hit team?”
“We’re working on that,” Lucas said.
“In case you haven’t been informed, there’s been a major break: the FBI has identified your leak, the one feeding information to the hitters,” Mallard said.
“That’s terrific!” Lucas said, overenthusiastically.
Mallard didn’t react to Lucas’s reaction, but Chase did. She said, “Oh, shit, Louis. He’s got a finger in this pie, sir. He already knows what happened. Who it is. It might even be his pie.”
“David St. Vincent isn’t aware of that,” Mallard said, peering at Lucas. “Interesting. And how’s Virgil Flowers, Lucas?”
“Working on his fifth novel,” Lucas said.
“I’ve seen him on theTimesbestseller list. Amazing, really. He projects a certain ruralje ne sais quoi.”
“Yeah. That’s because he lives in a fuckin’ haystack,” Lucas said. “Let’s get this meeting over with.”
As they continued down the hall, Sherwood, keeping pace with Chase, asked, “What’s your problem with Lucas? Am I sensing a romantic thing, or…”
“No. He’s a killer,” Chase said. “I joined the FBI to put killers in prison.”
“Oh.”
“What? Working with a killer doesn’t bother you?” Chase asked.
“Well, once in western Iraq, I targeted a big ISIS meet-up and the Navy stuck a Tomahawk missile in their window. Killed twenty people, more or less,” Sherwood said, affably enough. “We couldn’t tell exactly how many. I flew in to assess the damage and see if we could salvage any hard drives. There were heads and feet everywhere. To answer your question, I guess I’d say no. It doesn’t bother me.”
“Bothers me. We’re not in a war.”
“Well. That’s one opinion.”
Lucas, who was walking along with Mallard, chatting about nothing, overheard the last of the conversation, turned his head toSherwood and said, “You really are a charmer, dickweed. No steaks and wine for you.”
St. Vincent, Mallard said, had gone ahead to the briefing room to make sure the PowerPoint was ready, and to make sure that everybody who needed to be there was, and anybody who didn’t need to be there wasn’t. “Treating this as top secret, limited access,” he said.
“I’m surprised John and I were invited,” Lucas said.
“I suggested that including the Marshals Service and the CIA might be politic,” Mallard said.
“Ah. Being the deputy director, you get listened to.”
“Yes, I suppose. I’d attributed it to my personal charm.”
• • •
Lucas and Mallardhad worked cases going back years, to a time when Lucas was a Minneapolis homicide detective, and later, when he was with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and still later, as a marshal. Mallard was often considered the top real cop in the nation.
