“He tells me he is innocent,” she said, her voice unsure now. Then she said, “Why would he send me all the way over here to prove he was innocent if he wasn’t?”
Alvey seemed to think this over for a moment. Finally he nodded. Said, “The reason is obvious. He has no idea what he has done.”
“Will you tell me?”
“Why should I talk to a reporter?”
“Because I have information, too, Mr. Alvey. Perhaps you are curious. And perhaps . . . the both of us can piece some things together that might be interesting.”
Alvey looked away. “I’m not curious at all.”
King persisted. “You have seen the news from Washington. Our mutual friend is the one at the center of this. The one being blamed for everything. Perhaps you think he’s done something wrong, and that’s why you would wring his neck if you got the chance, but can you really say you believe he is crisscrossing D.C. on a mass murder spree?”
Alvey looked back to the woman from the Post. “No. I don’t believe he would do that.”
“Then the CIA is after the wrong man. If you can help them with your information, wouldn’t you? Together maybe we can figure this out.”
Slowly Alvey stood from the table. Catherine thought he was going to walk away without another word, but instead he surprised her. “We can take my car. We will talk while we drive. A running meet, we call it. A café like this is not safe for such stories. Not even stories from long ago.”
Catherine stood and followed.
—
Andy Shoal had spent all of Saturday afternoon in his apartment in Arlington, sitting on his couch with his notebook computer on his lap.
He’d begun working on a new story without telling anyone what he had, for one simple reason. He needed to know what he had, and he was confused by how today’s evidence fit in with everything else he and Catherine had learned in the past week.
On his notebook computer in front of him he had a hundred or so data points—all the reporting that had been done in the past full week. Beginning with his first conversation with Detective Rauch, just after midnight on Sunday morning in Washington Highlands, and ending with the discovery that a group of armed men dressed as cops and riding around in fake squad cars had been wounded in the shoot-out in the Metro that killed former CIA chief council Max Ohlhauser.
He thought back to all the blood on the ground in Bethesda. He and Catherine had decided it couldn’t have come from someone who had already been bleeding for hours. He also thought about the vigilante nature of the shooting on Rhode Island Avenue, and about how much it contrasted with the other attacks of the past week.
It was as if there were different groups operating at the same time, in the same places, and now he had evidence that proved this to be true. These ten men in the video from Dupont Circle—Andy counted four wounded and six others—were some sort of hit team.
He was so worried that these men might be American spies that he didn’t want to contact the CIA to ask for a statement, and he was too early in this even to contact Catherine. If he was going to make it into the ranks of King’s investigative team, he would need to show he could do more than pound pavement and get people to talk. He needed to put puzzles together himself.
He closed his laptop and rubbed his bloodshot eyes. Leaning his head back against the back of his sofa for a moment, he realized he needed some caffeine to keep going.
At six p.m. he went downstairs to the tiny convenience store in his building, planning on buying some protein and a Red Bull to help him power through for just a few hours more.
He was the only customer in the shop; the nice Indian lady who nearly always worked the two p.m. to ten p.m. shift was the only other person in sight. He gave her a tired smile as he passed her stacking cartons of yogurt in the front cooler.
In the back he snatched up a cold Red Bull, then he grabbed a roast beef sandwich nearly the size of a football that was wrapped in microwave-safe plastic. Heading back to the front he heard a noise and looked up. Three men in black raincoats filed into the market, moving purposefully.
The Indian clerk said, “Can I help—”
And then she stopped talking. She backed up into the stacked crates of yogurt, knocking them all to the floor, and then she tumbled over on top of them.
Andy thought she had just been clumsy, so he rushed to help her up, but only for a few steps, because now he saw the guns. Two of the three men in raincoats had pulled silenced pistols, and they raised them out in front of their bodies.
Andy dropped his sandwich and his can of Red Bull and he stood there. A deer in the headlights as he stared down the barrel of a long black gun.
—