“It’s . . . I’ve never done that.”
“We’re all in serious trouble here,” Claxson said, standing up, leaning over Parrish. “Jim is a good guy but he’s looking at life without parole if the marshals get to him. And they’re close. They want him, but they want us more. If they break him, if they make a deal with him, all of us are done. He has to go. Senator Grant needs to be in a public place when he goes away, and so do I. That leaves you.”
“I can’t fuckin’ believe this,” Parrish said. “There’s gotta be some other way.”
Grant said, “There is no better way, not for George or me. If you get caught, well, too bad. Claxson and I’ll say you’d gone rogue and we had no idea what you were up to. If you don’t get caught, we’ve sealed off an existential problem. A problem that could kill all three of us.”
“But . . .”
“No buts. It’s decided,” Claxson said. “Gotta be right away. Try not to step on your dick. Do that, and we’ll throw you, and your dick, under the bus.”
* * *
—
PARRISH ARGUED, but Grant and Claxson stonewalled him: it had to be done. Parrish left in a heavy sweat.
He’d never been an “operator,” in the military sense of the word; he’d worked in supply, in logistics, even when he was with the CIA. If you needed to get a thousand M4s to Iraq by Monday, he could do it, though a few crates might fall off the back of the truck.
He’d known lots of real operators, though, and had provided expedited supplies for special operations forces. A dozen former operators hung around Heracles, coming and going without saying much. He liked to think he could hang with them.
And Claxson had seen him at the range: Parrish liked to shoot and was good at it. He liked the whole ritual of handling the weapon, cleaning it, the signature smell of the Hoppe’s gun cleaner, the acrid odor of the brass brushes.
He left Grant’s SCIF frightened—and exhilarated. Had to be done; and now he’d find out what he was all about.
He had some thinking to do as well: if they really and truly wanted to wall off the problem, he might go next. Something to worry about.
He called Ritter. “We may have a problem in St. Paul. We need to talk.”
“Where?”
“My place.”
* * *
—
WHEN PARRISH bought his Georgetown home, he’d bought the best address he could afford, which turned out to be a late-nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century town house that was structurally sound but internally a mess. He’d taken home-improvement classes at a community college and, over three years, had cautiously upgraded the place.
The project of which he was most proud of involved a closet. It had been in a bedroom, and he’d converted it into an office. He’d stripped off the molding surrounding the original door and replaced the door itself with a heavy metal-core blank that he’d fitted flush with the wall. He’d painted the blank to match the wall and attached a bookcase as a front.
This new door had a lock, six feet up from the floor, with a heavy bolt, which ensured that the bookcase wouldn’t move no matter how hard somebody pushed or pulled on it. Because the lock was set right above one of the bookcase’s shelves, it couldn’t be seen except by somebody standing on a chair or an NBA center. Unlock the door, the bookcase swung out to reveal the closet.
Which was full of goodies. Parrish thought of himself as prepared, as an operator, as a survivor,. He loved the idea of a hidden room in his house.
He had two combat-style pump shotguns and two black rifles inside the closet, along with a dozen pistols, including two with suppressors; he also had an entire drawerful of knives, another drawerful of ammo, two compound bows with a hundred carbon fiber arrows, body armor, Delta-style helmets, a pair of night vision goggles, two tactical backpacks, three different kinds of camo uniforms, a variety of equipment bags, a gas mask, and even a straw cowboy hat. Much of it—not the cowboy hat—had been stolen during his Army tours in the Middle East. Since he was involved in logistics, he had no problem getting it back to the States.
None of the firearms were registered in Washington, so possession of them was a crime; he wasn’t too worried, because the District was awash in guns. Still, if the cops wanted him for something else and tore the house apart, possession of the guns could land him in prison.
He selected one of the silenced pistols, a Kimber .45, his favorite. He was ready.
But nervous.
* * *
—
ONCE UPON A TIME IN IRAQ, Parrish had been on a convoy out of Baghdad headed north toward Balad Air Base. They were passing through a hamlet, an hour into the trip, when an improvised explosive device—an artillery shell—took out a truck three trucks ahead of his. There was one good lookout nearby—a two-story mudbrick building that stood in the shade of a copse of palm trees—and two real operators ran toward it while two more hosed down the exposed windows.
A moment later, there was a brief burst of gunfire from behind the building as the operators cut down a running man. Parrish, exiting the truck, could see there wasn’t much more going on. Everybody was out of the trucks, and a medic was working on the injured up ahead. He saw the two operators moving around behind the building. He went that direction, where he found them standing over a downed man.
Parrish skidded to a stop, walked over, and looked at the man, who was bleeding heavily from multiple leg and stomach wounds. He asked, “He going to make it?”
One of the operators said, “Don’t think so.”
The second one asked, “You ever killed anybody, Jack?”
Parrish said, “No.”
The man handed Parrish his M4. “Here. Go ahead.”
Parrish took the gun, looked at the wounded man on the ground, who was looking up at him and rocking back and forth, his legs tight to his chest.
Parrish asked, “He’s the guy who touched off the IED?”
“Probably,” the operator said. “He tried to get rid of his cell phone, threw it over there.” He nodded toward a clump of waist-high, trashy-looking palms. “We found it.”
The first man held up the cheap cell. “No reason to do that unless he used it to trigger the bomb.”
Parrish said, “Okay.” He stepped back, turned the rifle on the wounded man. The man said, “No,” and as Parrish focused on his heart area, the operator snatched the gun back.
“Jesus Christ, Jack, it was a joke.” The operator was freaked. “Jesus.”
The medics took care of all the wounded in the convoy, but by the time they got to the man he was dead. Just as well he was out of his misery, Parrish thought, as the medivac Black Hawks dusted off the bombing scene and headed for the hospital at Balad.
The fact was, there’d been nothing sexual about the situation, but Parrish got a hard-on when he thought about it. If only he’d had a chance to pull the trigger.
* * *
—
PARRISH TOLD RITTER to park two blocks away and to walk in, and to check for surveillance on the way. “There’re always parking spaces behind the café, and you can get in and out of the lot without being seen.”
“Why your place?”
“Because I stripped the whole house down myself and it’s clean. We need to talk where nobody can hear us. With all the shit you guys have over at Heracles, I’d be surprised if there aren’t microphones hidden in the office chairs.”
“See you at nine,” Ritter said.
Ritter was an athletic guy of average height, with black eyes, tight-cut black hair, and a dark Mediterranean complexion. In Somalia, at a short distance and wearing a khamiis, he could pass for a native, and had. Parrish had been told that Ritter and his twin brother had finished first and second in a Nebraska statewide high school cross-country championship.
Ritter left his car in the lot behind the Jitterbug Coffee & Café; Parrish was right, it was dark back there. If he ever needed to mug somebody for money, Ritter thought, he’d stake out the Jitterbug. The café wasn’t cheap; it was full of prosperous-looking people with Macintosh Pros, and they all had pencil-necks.