“They have women working with them? Combat types?”
“My understanding is, they do. I know Suzie spoke fluent Arabic. You know how cool that would be, a small woman speaking perfect Arabic, dressed in a niqab, with a gun in her underpants? She could go anywhere, and nobody would pay any attention to her. I suspect that’s what she did, and maybe still does.”
“Tried hard to kill me,” Lucas said.
“Then you are a lucky man,” Ritter said. “Those folks don’t miss much.”
“She had some bad intelligence,” Lucas said, “but it was goddamn close.”
* * *
—
WHEN RITTER WAS GONE, Lucas got out his laptop and wrote a long report to Russell Forte about the interview, saved it but didn’t send it. Forte might be worried about possible illegalities being sheltered by the Marshals Service, and Lucas didn’t want to get involved in that argument.
Not yet.
* * *
—
WITH THE REPORT SAVED, he settled back on the bed, dimmed the lights, and closed his eyes. There were several tangled thoughts stalking around his mind, and he needed to get straight with them.
Tom Ritter had emphasized how dangerous the Heracles operators could be. He’d also talked about how loyal they were to each other—not so much to the managers but to fellow operators.
Yet, something was going on—Jim Ritter had been killed, and Kerry Moore had disappeared. Either Claxson—the guy with two loaded pistols on his desk—or Parrish could have killed them. Or—a new thought—so could have Taryn Grant.
Grant might be unlikely, he thought after some consideration. Whoever killed Ritter picked him up and threw him in a dumpster, and Ritter, a muscular man, had probably weighed a hundred and eighty pounds. Grant would have wanted to move him quickly, out of a car and into the dumpster, but he was too heavy for one woman alone. Lucas doubted Grant would have exposed herself legally to direct involvement in a murder. And even if she had commissioned the killing, somebody else had probably carried it out.
If you bought Tom Ritter’s feelings about personal loyalty, the killer wouldn’t have been McCoy or Moore. If it were neither of them, it would have been Parrish or Claxson, or perhaps some third party Lucas didn’t know about yet.
And here was the big problem: whoever it had been, Lucas could see no clear route to implicate Taryn Grant. None of the major actors would see any benefit in selling her out. To do so, they would have to admit they had been conspirators in murder. Even that might not be enough to get her.
Further, Grant’s money would be available to fund the best possible legal defenses for her associates. If she had a real shot at the presidency, there was a possible pardon downstream for those associates, if worse came to worse.
If what he feared came to pass, getting Taryn Grant might not be possible.
Not in the ordinary way.
24
Jane Chase called the next morning as Lucas was shaving.
“We’re going to arrest Claxson this morning. Between the documents and what we’ll get from McCoy, we can arrest him on several counts of illegal trading of restricted weaponry. That will take care of the statute of limitations problem. We’ve got search warrants for both his businesses and his home.”
Lucas: “What’d you give McCoy?”
“Nothing, at this point. Bunch showed up early this morning—”
“It’s early this morning right now,” Lucas objected.
Chase said, “Lucas, it’s ten o’clock. I’ve been here since six. Anyway, Bunch spent an hour talking with McCoy. When he was done, Bunch suggested to one of our attorneys, a DOJ guy, that McCoy could provide detailed information about various weapons shipments and that he got specific, and possibly illegal, delivery instructions from Claxson himself.”
“Then what are you going to give him?”
Chase hesitated, said, “Bunch is looking for immunity for any possible crimes deriving from involvement with employment with Heracles, Flamma, or Inter-Core Ballistics.”
“Well, Jesus, Jane, that could mean involvement in the attack on Senator Smalls and all the subsequent murders,” Lucas said. “You know how Smalls is going to take that? He’ll go on the Senate floor, and he’ll have a crucifix and nails with him, and you’ll be the one nailed to the cross.”
“Well, McCoy denies any involvement with the murders. Bunch says those can be attributed to Ritter and persons unknown. Frankly, Lucas, with what you’ve developed so far, no prosecutor I know would try McCoy for murder. Claxson won’t admit to knowing anything about the murders; Ritter’s dead; and Moore—we don’t know, he may be dead as well.”
“So McCoy walks?”
“He won’t walk. We’ve got him on the weapons stuff with or without any additional testimony. He’ll do time—we’re going to tell Bunch that we want between ten and fifteen years on the weapons charges. He won’t take that, but he’ll take five. McCoy’ll only get that if he hangs Claxson. Otherwise, we take him to trial and ask for fifteen.”
Lucas said, “Then you’ve got to go after Claxson hard. You’ve got to talk about a deal to implicate Parrish and Grant.”
“He won’t take a deal,” Chase said. “He’ll go to trial and hope to beat it. If he doesn’t, and can’t win on appeal, he’ll try to deal on the sentence. You’ve said it yourself—the only way he could implicate Grant would be to admit that he set up at least two murders, and maybe three. He won’t do that. It will be hard enough to get him on the weapons. He’ll try to drag in CIA and military operators for the defense, and they’ll resist on grounds of national security.”
“Ah, shit,” Lucas said. Chase waited him out, and Lucas finally asked, “What are you doing today? Other than arresting him.”
“The searches. You and your team are welcome to observe,” Chase said. “We’ll be at McCoy’s town house, and Heracles and Claxson’s office, grabbing files, and Claxson’s house. The warrants are in hand; we’ve got teams on the way. I’ll probably go to Claxson’s house to get a feel for what he’s like.”
“I’ll tell you what he’s like: he keeps two loaded automatic pistols on his office desk.”
“Doesn’t surprise me.”
“Remember what I said about Smalls and the crucifix.”
“It won’t be me that he goes after—it’s the attorney general who’ll be fronting this, and I doubt that Smalls would take her on.”
Lucas said, “Give me Claxson’s address.”
* * *
—
CLAXSON LIVED off the heavily wooded Kurtz Road in McLean, Virginia. The house was a stark, red-brick three-story structure that sat back on a large lot, ten or fifteen feet above street level. There was a two-door double-car garage at the end of the blacktopped driveway, and two stone pillars at the front door. Four SUVs crowded the driveway, and a man with the air of a junior FBI agent leaned against one of them, smoking a cigarette.
“‘Mistah Kurtz, he dead,’” Lucas quoted as he rolled by, looking for a place to park.
“I know that,” Rae said. “Heart of Darkness. I’m surprised you know it, being, you know, a hockey puck.”
“Actually, it’s from ‘The Hollow Men’ by T. S. Eliot,” Lucas said. “‘This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.’”
“Bullshit,” said Rae. “Heart of Darkness.”
“Nope, ‘Hollow Men.’”
“Jesus, now I got to look it up,” Bob said. He took his phone out and started typing with his thumbs. There wasn’t enough space to park in the driveway, so Lucas found a place a couple of hundred feet down the street where he could pull all four wheels off the pavement. As they got out of the truck, Bob said, “Ah, got it.”
“Who wins?” Rae asked.
“I do,” Lucas said. “I know the whole poem.”
“And I know the whole Joseph Conrad novel practically by heart,” Rae said.
Bob said, “You’re both right. Conrad wrote it, Eliot quoted it as the first line of his poem.”
“I was right first,” Rae said.