HE WOKE UP the next morning feeling less confident, having slept on what Carter had said. If Smalls and Whitehead had been attacked by professionals—and it certainly seemed that way—then there was a real danger. The killers were unlikely to go after a marshal because that would attract too much notice. They could go after Smalls, though, and if they gave up on subtlety . . .
It wasn’t that hard to shoot somebody in the back, he thought, as he shaved. Gangbangers did it all the time and walked away. Former SEALs, Delta, Rangers: all were thoroughly trained and inured to killing. America had somehow gotten itself in the position of creating thousands of efficient professional killers and, at the same time, had provided them with easy access to the weapons needed for the job: you could get a perfectly adequate Savage .30-06 at your local Walmart for less than four hundred dollars. His neighbor at the lake cabin had done that, and the rifle could make a minute-of-angle shot all day and all night.
* * *
—
HE’D GOTTEN OUT of the shower and was trying to decide between a pair of bright red Jockey shorts and a more subdued pair with horizontal green stripes when his phone rang. He picked it up, looked at the screen, clicked on, and said, “Hey, Rae.”
“Lucas, what are you doing?”
“I’m on a highly secret mission in Washington,” Lucas said. “If you were here, I’d tell you all about it. How’s Bob?”
Rae Givens laughed. “You know what the Stump is doing? Wind sprints. Honest to God, it’s like watching a tractor-trailer trying to drag race. But he’s good. Good to go.”
Rae and Bob Matees were marshals assigned to the Special Operations Group located in Louisiana. They’d been with Lucas as they chased a hard-core holdup man and multiple murderer across the face of Texas. Lucas had killed him in the town of Marfa, but not before Bob had been shot through both legs by an accomplice.
Lucas asked, “Good to go, but where’s he going?”
“Well, I called up the Minneapolis Office to see what you were up to, and they told me you were in Washington, but they couldn’t say why. I thought I’d call you up and see if we could help.”
Lucas walked over to his window and pulled back the curtains as he said, “Tell you what, Rae, right now I’m looking at files. Not even quite doing that yet. I’ll be looking at them later today. This could get tense, and it could get political, and it might not do your careers a lot of good to get involved.”
“C’mon, man, this is Rae you’re talking to . . .”
“Okay, Rae, let me ask you this: what if our targets turn out to be CIA? Or military guys?”
“Oh-oh.”
“Yeah.”
There was a moment of silence, then she said, “You know what? I’d still be up for it. Bob would be, too. Right now I’m trying to find this dude who walked out of a federal lockup in an ID mix-up, but he’s about as dangerous as a head of lettuce. I’ll get him, maybe, but I’ve got to pretend like I care. C’mon, tell me what you’re doing. Give me some specifics.”
“This is going to sound a little paranoid, but I’m not going to tell you on the phone,” Lucas said. He was looking out at the Potomac, a nice view to the west, a forest on the far bank; if you didn’t already know it, you’d never guess that a major city was at your back. “Let me look at these files, talk to a few people. If I need help, you’re the one I’ll call.”
“All right. Well, shit. Back to tracking Warren Beasley, who, if he has any brains at all, ditched a couple million bucks where we can’t find it and has already crossed the border and is now drinking pink cocktails with umbrellas in them.”
“That kind of guy.”
“Yeah, pharmaceuticals,” Rae said. “Sold about a ton more hydrocodone to doctors than the doctors actually got . . . Skimmed maybe eight mil. Got five years at Club Fed, skipped on a pre-sentencing bond.”
“Good luck.”
“Call me, damnit.”
* * *
—
HE HAD ORDERED BREAKFAST, and was drinking the first Diet Coke of the day, when Carter called. “I’ve got several files for you. Are you carrying a laptop?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve had everything reduced to pdfs, so you should be good. I’ll come to you, if you’re still at the hotel.”
“I am, eating breakfast. Same table.”
“Fifteen minutes.”
Lucas was working his way through a Washington Post when Carter arrived. She was wearing an upscale tan business dress and heels, oversized Prada sunglasses, and carried a burgundy leather satchel over her shoulder. She waved at a waiter, ordered coffee, sat across from Lucas, dug into her bag, and slid a thumb drive across the table to him.
“The man you want is named Jack Parrish. I got a serious file on him, but I had to hint to the guy who gave it to me that we might have a romantic future together, which we don’t. Read it fast so you can tell me if I have to go back to the guy before I turn him down.”
“Not even going to give him a shot?” Lucas asked. “You ever hear about working a source?”
“You haven’t met the guy,” Carter said. “Does Brylcreem addiction suggest anything good to you?”
“Ouch. On the other hand, we may need as much help as we can get. Where’d the guy get the files?”
“Background checks for the Intelligence Committee,” Carter said. “The committee has its own set of files on its personnel. I wouldn’t have access to these myself, except for my Brylcreem buddy who works in the file room. So, speed-read and get back to me.”
Lucas told her that his self-confidence had waned over the evening, but that he was more worried about Smalls than about himself. “While she might hate me, she can figure the odds. Killing me might feel good, but eventually it’d come back to bite her in the ass.”
“When do you think you’ll know something? Anything?”
“I don’t know. I’ll call when I do . . . In another case, a year ago, I had some strange experiences with cell phones.” He reached in his pocket, took out a burner phone, and handed it to her. “I bought a couple of burners before I left St. Paul. I’ll call you from mine before you leave here so you’ll have my number. Only use the burner to call my burner . . . never call my burner from your regular phone, and don’t call any other number from your burner. This is strictly for you and me.”
“You think they’re monitoring us?”
“I don’t think anything in particular. Like I said, my last case had some weird turns because of cell phones. I don’t trust them as far as I could spit a rat,” Lucas said.
* * *
—
WHEN CARTER HAD GONE, with Lucas’s secret cell number in her new burner phone, Lucas went back up to his room. There, he traded his jacket and slacks for a pair of soft cotton athletic pants and a T-shirt, jacked up the air-conditioning, plugged the thumb drive into his laptop, and opened Carter’s files.
Jack Parrish was a thin, coffin-pale man with close-set eyes who used too much gel in his dark hair, enough that you could see the tracks left by his comb; he wore suits that were too dark and too sharp, like he’d picked them out of the pages of GQ. The photos in the file were all head and shoulders only, the type used for passports and security cards. He’d always faced the various cameras with the same hard glare.
Parrish was thirty-eight. He’d graduated from Ohio State when he was twenty-two with a B.S. in economic geography, served four years as an Army intelligence officer, and joined the Central Intelligence Agency when he finished his active military service. He spent four years with the CIA, worked for a private company called Heracles Personnel for three more years, then took a job as a researcher for the Senate Intelligence Committee and later became an aide to Taryn Grant. He was still in the military Reserve, currently with the rank of major.
That would, Lucas thought, give him a broad range of contacts both in the Pentagon and in the wider intelligence community. The file included a list of publications, some of which were marked as classified, although the level of classification wasn’t specified.