22
Washington, D.C.
Somebody was following Carruth.
He hadn’t gotten a good look at the guy, only the car he was driving, and while it might be paranoia, Carruth didn’t think it was. There was a late-model American something-or-other back there, one of those boxy little sedans that looked like everything else produced in the U.S. in the last ten years, with some stupid, made-up name—a Springa or Freemele, something like that. Chevy, Ford, Dodge? It didn’t matter.
Carruth was on his way back from the Safeway, where he’d picked up staples. He wasn’t much of a cook, but there were times when he didn’t feel like going out to eat, so he kept the freezer stocked with stuff he could microwave—burritos and pocket sandwiches and chicken strips, like that. Low-fat, most of it. Plus cereal and milk and coffee and beer. And fruit, lots of apples and bananas and oranges and pears and grapes. Too much junk food, you got fat, and you needed fresh produce to oil the works. Fruit was good.
So, every couple of weeks he’d make a run, fill a basket up with stuff, and he’d be good for a while.
As he’d left his home and walked out to his car, heading to the supermarket, he’d seen the little gray nothingmobile, one of four or five cars that went by as he cheeped his car’s locks. He hadn’t paid any real attention to it, no reason to do so. It was on the radar, but low priority.
The market was six blocks away from his house, and halfway there, he caught a glimpse of the same car in his rearview mirror.
Still no alarms—there were a million automobiles like it on the road. But when you were in a business where what you were doing was either iffy or outright illegal, you had to pay more attention to things. He couldn’t ever forget those two cops, what a screwup that had been.
He’d hit the grocery store, loaded his purchases into the car, and cranked it up. And as he left the lot, he saw the gray car pull out behind him. Couldn’t read the plates, but they were local, he could see that much.
Third time was the charm.
Could be it was just his imagination, but he couldn’t take that chance. He turned at the first intersection he came to. Not going home just yet . . .
After he had gotten out of the Navy, Carruth had figured he would be a merc, a soldier of fortune, working for whoever had the money to pay him. He’d done a little of that, in a couple places—North Africa, South America. He’d drifted into civilian security for a company in Iraq and Iran—that paid real well—which is where he’d hooked up with some of the team he was running now. On one of the civilian gigs, he’d worked with an ex-spook by the name of Dormer. Or maybe he wasn’t ex. You never could tell with those guys, they’d climb a tree to tell a lie rather than stand on the ground and tell the truth. But Dormer was an old guy who knew his stuff, and when things were slack, which was most of the time, he’d teach Carruth little bits and pieces of spycraft.
Dormer was about sixty, and as average-looking as you could get—medium height and weight, and in-country he wore a moustache and dyed it and his hair black so that with his tan he could pretty much pass for a local. He spoke the language, dressed like most men on the street, and Carruth had once watched him walk into a crowd and just vanish, as if he had turned invisible.
Dormer showed him the ropes, including drops, how to tail somebody without being seen—and how to spot a tail without letting him know you’d made him.
“Thing about being followed,” Dormer had said, “is that it’s easy to check if all you want to do is know if you’re being tailed. The trick is to do it so the guy on your ass doesn’t know you’ve spotted him.”
“Why is that?”
“Because, my large ex-SEAL friend, if the guy thinks he’s burned, he’ll drop off and they will replace him with somebody else. Better the tail you know than the tail you don’t.”
Carruth had nodded. Yeah, he could see that.
“So you think the guy half a block back is on you, doesn’t matter if he’s on foot or in a car, you don’t turn around and stare at him. You’re driving, you don’t slam on your brakes and pull over, making him pass. You don’t run a red light and wait to see if he runs it after you. You don’t do anything that makes it look as if you have a clue. You want him to think you are blind, deaf, and stupid.”
“What do you do?”
The older man had grinned. “Listen and learn, son. . . .”
Dormer had disappeared for real a couple months after that conversation. Gone into the desert in a van with some guys heading south to haul something illegal to an Iraqi port city, and far as Carruth could tell, nobody had ever seen any of them again. Probably he was bleached bones in the desert sands, though Carruth kinda liked to think the old spook was still out there somewhere, wheeling and dealing.
Driving through the streets of the District, Carruth remembered the lesson. He wasn’t going to go directly home. He had a little stop to make first, and it had to be in the right location.
He drove for a few blocks, turned left, went another half mile, then turned right. He didn’t hurry, and while he made enough turns so that it would have to be an unbelievably big coincidence for anybody to accidentally stay with him, he was heading for a particular place and making reasonable efforts to get there via a reasonable route.
There was a cutlery shop Carruth went to sometimes to check out the knives, those being basic tools of his trade. He usually carried a tactical folder, and sometimes a little push-dagger disguised as a belt buckle, or even a neck-knife that hung on a thong around his neck and was hidden under his shirt. In the field, he always had a good-sized sheath knife—he was partial to the tanto design, though he also liked a basic Finnish pukka.
The thing about the knife store was, it was on a street that looped around and had but one way in or out from the main road. If it was a letter P, the shop would be on the right just before you got to the top of the loop.
When Dormer had first shown him the trick, Carruth thought he had it nailed. Take the tail down a dead-end street, and when he followed you, you had him, right?
“No,” Dormer had said. “Most dead-end streets are marked these days. They have signs that say, ‘Dead End,’ or, ‘No Outlet.’ Guy following you knows what he’s doing, he won’t pull in after you, he’ll set up where he can see the only way in or out and wait for you to come back.”
“Ah.”>
“If he absolutely needs to know where you went on that road and who you saw or talked to? He can park and hoof it, or risk pulling in a ways. A good tail won’t try it if he thinks you might see him. He’ll have binoculars and a camera, he can probably spot you if you get out of your car, and he can go back later and figure out who you went to visit. He knows you have to come back out the way you went in, so all he has to do is wait where he can see that intersection, since he’ll know you can’t drive out the other end.”
“Right.”
“So, you lead him into a district that isn’t a dead end, but has only one way out, and you make sure when you leave, you can see the intersection.”
Dormer had paused, then added, “Now, this still might be a coincidence—guy happened to have business in that same neighborhood. But if you take a long and roundabout way getting there, that’s not likely.”
Carruth smiled, remembering the old man’s lessons.
The visit to the knife shop was short—he didn’t really need a new knife, though he did look at a couple titanium-scaled folders from Cutter’s Knife and Tool—the Bengal Karambit was really nice and not too spendy. Had a frame-lock and a nice heft. Some knife gurus didn’t have much use for the little hook-blade shape, but they didn’t know how well it could be made to work in the hands of an expert. Use the thing right, the guy giving you grief wouldn’t know you even had the sucker until you bit him with it. He could bleed out on the way to the hospital, if you cut the right spot, and Carruth had practiced cutting the right spots more than a little.
He thought about it, but decided to wait until next time.
When he got back into his car, he didn’t see the gray sedan. He pulled around the loop and sped up a little, not much, and back to the straight line to the intersection. He pulled out, turned right, and drove somewhat slower.
It was maybe fifteen seconds later that the guy following him reached the intersection. Same gray car.
Carruth felt a cold rush in his belly as he saw the tail.
So. Somebody was following him. That didn’t make any sense.
Who?
And—why?
He slowed down enough to be able to read the license plate on the tail. He pulled a pen from his shirt pocket and wrote the plate number down on the back of his hand.
He needed to tell Lewis about this. Might be it was her having him shadowed. He couldn’t imagine why, but stranger things had happened. And if it wasn’t her, she needed to know about it. Other than their business, and those two dead cops, there wasn’t any reason anybody should be following him.
He didn’t think it was the cops. If they suspected he was the guy who had killed two of their own, they’d have come down on him like an imploded casino. And it wouldn’t be just one guy tailing him. They’d have his toilet wired for sound and they’d be on him like ugly on an ape. Lewis had access to computer stuff; she could maybe do something with the license plate.
He pulled the throwaway phone from his belt and thumbed in the number for Lewis’s one-time cell.
Pentagon Annex
Washington, D.C.
As Lewis sifted through the mounds of information—here in her VR scenario represented as dirt and crushed ore from a gold mine, being washed through a huge strainer—she came across a fist-sized nugget. She looked at it.
The “nugget” popped open and a voice started talking from inside it. She listened for thirty seconds or so. . . .
Oh, crap!
“End scenario,” she said.
In her office, she took several deep breaths, to calm her racing heart. The information was ugly—and in more ways than one.
Carruth’s call about the shadow had been bad enough when she hadn’t known anything about who it might be. Now it was a real can of worms.
Her new op had run the plates on the car. Fortunately, the driver had been dumb enough or confident enough not to swipe a clean plate or use a rental car. Her op figured out who he was, and then a connection that was surprising—and dangerous.
It had been a surprise. Even if she’d suspected, and if she’d had to guess between the two trying to talk to her, she’d have picked Ali bin Rahman bin Fahad Al-Saud. She’d have been dead wrong, too. No, it was Brian Stuart, the “Australian.”
She shook her head at the stupidity of her mistake. Could have been worse, but fortunately, Carruth had spotted the tail, and she had checked it out.
They were also getting into dangerous territory with her new hired op—information that she didn’t want him to have might come up, and if it did, then eventually he was going to have to go to that great detective agency in the sky. At this point, one more death wouldn’t make things any worse, and they had to start covering their asses now. She hadn’t set out on this path with the intention of killing people, but that’s how things went. Then you had to deal with it.
Next to the surprise about the “Australian” was the general crappiness of the situation itself. “Brian Stuart” was not a viable buyer for her data. His real name was Yusuf bin Abdulla Al-Thani, a Qatarian? Qatarite?—whatever, he was from Qatar—and, if her investigator could be believed, was the older brother of a man named Mohammed bin Abdulla Al-Thani. Which hadn’t meant anything to her, until her op had passed along that Mohammed, who had recently left the land of the living to join Allah in Paradise, had used the alias “Mishari Aziz.” Like his brother, Aziz/Al-Thani had been a terrorist of some note.
Him she knew, because she had shot him dead in a park in New Orleans when he had gone for a gun in his pocket.
Shit, shit, shit—!
The Al-Thani brothers were Tamim Arabs, and distantly related to the rulers of Qatar, if no longer included in polite family company because of their most radical beliefs. Not the most reliable of customers, terrorists.
It was pretty obvious why Yusuf/Brian was looking for her. She’d killed his brother and he was understandably pissed off about it. But that he had gotten as far as he had bothered her no end. How far was that? She was pretty sure that Yusuf and a friend or two had somehow backtracked their way to Simmons, her former sub-rosa investigator, and killed him, trying to find her. Unless Simmons had an old enemy who’d happened to find him, that was the only thing that made sense.
How?
It didn’t really matter how the tiger got into your house until after you got rid of it, but she was curious nonetheless.
She didn’t know how much they had gotten out of Simmons, but they probably would have determined that she was a woman. If the two men killed with Aziz/Al-Thani down on the river in New Orleans hadn’t been the same two who’d followed her to a mall in Florida after their first meeting, then it was likely that big brother Yusuf had a better description of her than that she was just a young, blond woman.
Of course, knowing what she looked like was not the same as knowing who she was, and it was a big country. Still, it was a rock in the road and she didn’t want to hit it. . . .
How ever had they found Carruth? It didn’t seem possible. And yet, according to her op, the car belonged to a shell company that was run by Al-Thani, and what were the chances of that being a coincidence? That somebody was following her guy and that the somebody was connected to the man she’d iced in New Orleans?
Shrugging that off wasn’t going to happen.
This was bad. Having a terrorist actively looking for you to exact revenge for killing his little brother? It would certainly throw a big bag of sand into the gears if he showed up. Not to mention into her personal life.
So, what was she going to do about it?
He might not have a clue as to her identity. Simmons hadn’t, and no way to directly connect to her. But that Yusuf Al-Thani had gotten this far already meant he had damned good resources—either Simmons had screwed up, or not, and if not, how Al-Thani had wound up on his doorstep was troublesome in the extreme.
Simmons maybe stepped on somebody’s telltale while checking out Aziz? Possible.
But even so, Simmons hadn’t known who Carruth was.
And yet, there Yusuf was—him or one of his people, dogging Carruth.
She scanned the rest of the file the new op had sent. Well, at least she knew who he was now, and what he looked like. Might not do her much good if he was waiting in her bedroom with a big sidekick and weapons when she got home one dark night, but it was something.
She thought about it. Once you started down the violent road, it was hard to step off it; she had killed the man’s brother, and there wasn’t any way to downplay that if he ever did find her.
He went for his gun first! probably wasn’t going to make much difference to an enraged and murderous brother.
So. What was the best way to protect herself? She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder for some fanatic bearing the sword of retribution, looking to lop her head off.
She dug out her current one-time phone and manually tapped in the number for Carruth’s current one-time.
“Yeah?”
“I found that information you requested. Meet me at the place, tonight, seven P.M.”
“Copy.”
She discommed. Shut off the phone and stuck it into her purse. She’d lose it after she left work, and pick up a new one at home. She had a dozen of them, all identical. The guards never checked the numbers, only to see if it was a real phone, which it was.
Carruth had his uses, and this would be right up his alley.
Dark Horse Restaurant
Richardson, Maryland
“You’re shittin’ me,” Carruth said.
“Would that I were.”
He shook his head. “Damned ragheads are thicker than fleas on a camel in this deal, ain’t they? How’d they find me?”
She said, “I don’t have any idea.”
He shrugged that off. “So, what’s the plan?”
“We set up a meeting with ‘Brian.’ You and some of your men will be there and when he shows up—probably with some of his men—you erase them.”
He nodded. That was the best way. Bastard couldn’t come back to backstab you if you cut him into enough pieces. How had they found him, though? He’d like to know, but if they weren’t around, it didn’t matter. “I can do that. They’ll be looking for trouble, though.”
“Set it up somewhere they’ll have to drive to, a long way from anything. Somewhere with one way in or out. You get there and prepare before we even tell them where. If they come armed and alert—which, you’re right, they will, of course—your troops still have the advantage.”
“They could bring a whole van full of shooters. I would, if I was them. It could get real gory.”
“You didn’t throw away the rest of those Dragons, did you?”
He grinned. “No, ma’am.”
“Find a place you like, reconnoiter, figure out what you need, let me know. But we have to do this soon. I don’t want this guy and his friends showing up for supper some night at my house.”
Carruth was not exactly thrilled to know that they’d found him, either. “Me, neither. I hear you.”