“How would you know?”
She nodded first at his champagne glass and then at her purse. “When he stood to shake your hand,” she said. “It’s like liquid Ex-Lax, only a hell of a lot stronger and quicker.”
“Why?” I asked. Why would she spike his drink?
“Technically, it’s our third date,” she said. “In Shahid’s mind, it doesn’t end with us playing Boggle. This way, he won’t even want a peck on the cheek.”
“I was wondering about that,” I said. “You know …”
Up shot one of her eyebrows. “Whether I’d ever have sex with a mark?”
“Do you guys really call them marks?”
“Yeah, strange, right? Targets of an undercover sting operation never caught on.”
“So you really haven’t—”
“Is that really only your second whiskey?”
“Sorry, I was just curious.”
“For the record, the answer’s no,” she said. “Not to say he didn’t try on dates one and two. But love of my country only goes so far.”
The cocktail waitress returned to pour some more champagne. Valerie quickly placed her hand over Al Dossari’s glass. “I think he’s done for the night,” she said politely.
I glanced toward the back of the bar as the waitress walked away. “What happens now?” I asked. The plan she and Crespin had concocted only got me to the table.
“What happens now is that you tell me who your silent partner is,” she said.
“I meant—”
“I know what you meant. I also know that whoever this guy is, he’s CIA, or perhaps ex-CIA at this point. There’s no other way you could have those recordings.”
“No other way?”
“Prove me wrong.”
“If you know he’s CIA, what difference does his name make right now?”
Valerie eyed me for a moment. We’d known each other for less than a day, but it was hard to ignore a certain foxhole mentality. Like it or not, we were in this together.
“You want trust? I’ll give you trust,” she said. “Remember when Crespin and I looked at each other during one of your recordings?”
“Yes. You tried to pretend it was nothing—”
“But it was obviously something, you’re right,” she said. “Thing is, it was Karcher who initially tipped us off about our man on the toilet right now, that he was funding a known terrorist. So I became Beverly Sands to cozy up to Shahid Al Dossari, and—lo and behold—we just confirmed it. Shahid’s money has been moving in and out of an Al Qaeda operative’s account as recently as last week. Bingo, right? Except for one problem. According to one of your videos and the date stamped on the bottom of the screen, that operative has been dead for over a year.”
Sometimes you just say the first words that come to your mind no matter how trite. “Holy shit.”
“That’s right, holy shit,” she said. “Pretty goddamn brilliant, too. Developing that truth serum takes big bucks, and it’s not like the CIA can go to Congress for it. So what does Karcher do? He uses the hotshot lawyer, Brennan, to make it look like one of his clients is funding a terrorist with Saudi money. Instead, what Karcher’s really doing is funding himself.”
“But Al Dossari would have to know, right?”
“It would seem that way.”
“That’s the part I don’t get, then,” I said. “Wouldn’t Karcher be throwing Al Dossari under the bus? Without the recordings from the black site, you guys would still have Al Dossari on funding terrorism.”
“Yeah, that’s the brilliant part. All the NSA does is provide the proof. Then we hand everything—including Al Dossari—back over to Karcher,” she said. “The CIA will take it from here, he’ll tell us, and then it’s out of our hands.”
“Then what, though?” I asked. “It’s not like Karcher can’t drop the ball.”
“No, of course not. A few months from now we’d probably hear that Al Dossari has flipped and is now Karcher’s newest mole in the Middle East, or something like that. And we’d believe it, too, because we’d have no reason not to.”
“But now you do.”
“Which brings me back to your friend,” she said. “As much as you need to trust me, I need to trust him. And I can’t do that if I don’t meet him. So tonight, literally … I need you to bring me back to your friend.”
“What about your date?” I asked. “We just can’t leave him.”
“Oh, no?” Already she was halfway out the booth. “When he’s finally able to leave the bathroom, the last thing he’ll want to do is explain what took him so long. Trust me,” she said. “We’re doing him a favor.”
CHAPTER 95
IN TWO minutes flat, we were in the backseat of a DC cab heading off the Beltway past Dulles Airport and out to Arcola. I really should’ve gotten a to-go cup for that Johnnie Walker Blue.
The driver, whose disposition most closely resembled an ingrown toenail, initially told us that Arcola was out of his territory, especially after midnight. A crisp Ben Franklin later, he suddenly had a brand-new territory. Money is the biggest button of them all.
“Inside or outside doors?” asked Valerie.
I turned to her. “Inside or outside?”
“My mother was afraid to fly when I was a kid, so we drove everywhere for vacation. She had this thing, though. We could never stay in a hotel with doors that faced outside,” she said. “Too dangerous.”
“By any chance, does your mother know what you currently do for a living?” I asked.
“If she were still alive, she wouldn’t like it.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize.”
“Cervical cancer. When I was in high school,” she explained. “And since we’re in the sympathy card aisle, my father then died of lung cancer during my senior year in college.”
“Jesus.”
“Tell me about it. Of course, if they were both still alive, it’s not like I could actually tell them what I do.”
“And what is that, exactly? I mean, of all the NSA secrets that Edward Snowden leaked, I didn’t hear anything about agents like you.”
“Yeah, little Eddie really complicated things, didn’t he?”
I waited for Valerie to keep talking and perhaps answer my question. She did neither.
“You’re not going to tell me, are you?”
She smiled. “We have to keep some mystery between us, don’t we?”
I practically froze. That was exactly what Claire had said to me the night she was killed.
“What?” asked Valerie. “What did I say?”
“Nothing,” I finally answered.
But she, too, knew the sound of that nothing. The look she gave me. Still, she let it go. A touch of woman’s intuition, perhaps.
Regardless, the next few minutes for me were inevitable. Memories of Claire came like clicks on the meter in the taxi, one after another, especially from our last moments together.
It’s often asked, if you knew this was your last night on earth, what would you do? Had that night with Claire been my last night, though, there was nothing I would’ve changed. Well, almost nothing. I would’ve never let Claire go.
“Front or back?” asked the driver.
The question snapped me out of it as I looked up to see him pulling into the Comforter Motel. Staring at the nearly empty parking lot, it was easy to wonder if the NO in the NO VACANCY sign had ever been illuminated.
“The back,” I said.
As he pulled around, I went over the ground rules with Valerie again regarding Owen. We’d gotten pretty good at cutting deals on the fly.
“I go up and explain the situation, tell him you’re here waiting in the taxi,” I said. “Then I wave you up, okay?”
“Whoa, excuse me?” blurted out the driver.
I’d forgotten about the other deal maker among us. He wasn’t liking the way his end was shaking out. “Is there a problem?” I asked.
“You’re only paying me to drive you here,” he said. “Tha
t’s the problem.”
I reached into my pocket again for more cash, but Valerie stopped me, reaching into her own pocket. She’d had enough of this guy. Money may talk, but a badge shuts them up every time.
“Let’s try this again,” she said. “Is there a problem?”
She was holding her badge so close to his eyes she was practically slapping his face with it.
With a slow shake of his head, he got with the program. No problem.
“You can park over at the end there,” I said, pointing to an area near a set of stairs.
There was no other sound beyond the engine idling as I stepped out to the back lot and made my way up to the second floor, or the penthouse, as Owen jokingly called it. We had the first room off the stairs, as well as the one next to it with a connecting door. Once again, the two room strategy. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Key card in hand, I eyed the lipstick camera Owen had taped above the sign for the vending machines about twenty feet away.
Then came the last safeguard—the knocking sequence to ensure we were truly alone. I suppose I was fudging that one a bit.
Two knocks followed by one followed by two. The area code of Manhattan. There’s no place like home.
Less than a minute later, though, I was back down at the taxi. From the look on my face alone, Valerie knew we had problem. It was the kind no badge could solve.
“What is it?” she asked.
That was part of the problem.
I wasn’t sure.
CHAPTER 96
OWEN WAS GONE.
That was the only thing I knew for sure. Both our rooms were empty. Empty of him, at least. Gone, too, was his backpack, his bag of tricks.
But my duffel was right where I’d left it in one of the closets, everything still inside. My guns, the extra cash. In fact, everything else in the room looked normal.
“Did they kidnap the maid, too?” asked Valerie, standing in the doorway.
Okay, I said normal, not clean. You put two guys in a hotel on the lam for a few days and it isn’t going to be pretty.
But that was the question, wasn’t it? Had Owen been taken or had he left on his own? There was a Mobil station with a convenience mart a half mile down the road where we’d been picking up some snacks, but the chances of his taking the walk at one o’clock in the morning seemed remote.
“Where are you going?” I asked Valerie. She was headed back out the door, her gun drawn.
“We start with the perimeter,” she said.
I understood. Standard police procedure. Start from the outside—in this case, literally—and work your way in.
“His name’s Owen,” I said.
“What about a last name?”
I must have looked like a stumped contestant on a game show. All this time together and I’d never found out his last name. “Huh” was all I managed.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said, turning again to leave.
“Wait, don’t you want to know what he looks like?”
She stopped just long enough to make me realize that while trust was one thing, the whole truth was another.
“He’s tall, slender, with brown hair, shaggy. Does this with his hands from time to time,” she said, doing a perfect imitation of his dry wash routine. “Oh, and for the record, his last name is Lewis.”
She walked out.
I stood there in shock, wondering how Valerie knew all that, and equally confounding, why she hadn’t just told me in the first place. There were no quick answers. What there was, though, was something in my eye line. Owen’s laptop.
He had it linked to the lipstick camera outside, our makeshift surveillance system. Since the moment he’d first hooked it up, it had been sitting atop the crappy-looking credenza featuring the TV, plastic ice bucket, and the Yellow Pages.
Now the laptop was in the middle of the queen bed closer to the bathroom. I mean, right in the middle. As if the bed were its pedestal. The only thing missing was the neon sign over it that was blinking, Look at me, Trevor!
I walked over and tapped the space bar, waking up the screen. I expected to see the same running image that had been there for days, the walkway outside both our rooms. Only, now there was something in front of it. A picture.
No, make that a message. But only for me.
In a pop-up window was an illustration off Google Images, one of those goofy clip-art signs that read GONE FISHING.
Now I just had to figure out what it was supposed to mean. Fishing for what?
“What are you looking at?” came Valerie’s voice by the door. She was back.
I had a split second to make a decision. Given our track record, telling her it was nothing was off the table. It had to be something. But did it have to be the whole truth?
This trust thing was getting a bit tricky.
“Behind you,” I said. “That’s what I’m looking at.”
I spun the laptop around, but not before clicking the illustration closed. What remained was the feed from the outside camera.
“Clever,” she said, tracing the angle to the sign for the vending machines. “Owen’s doing, I assume?”
“It seems you’d know that even better than me,” I said.
That got me a smirk but nothing more. She was far more concerned with taking one more lap around both rooms to see if there was something she’d missed the first time. There wasn’t.
“All right, grab your stuff,” she said. “Let’s get going.”
“Going?”
“You didn’t still think you’d be staying here, did you?”
Actually, I hadn’t thought anything. But Valerie obviously had.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Someplace with inside doors,” she said.
CHAPTER 97
“GOOD MORNING, Mr. Mann, how did you sleep?” asked Jeffrey Crespin, my human alarm clock. He’d taken it upon himself to shake me awake at six a.m.
How did I sleep? It’s the crack of dawn.
“Sparingly,” I was tempted to answer. But it was too early and I was too tired for glibness. “Fine,” I said instead.
He was sitting on a folding metal chair at the end of my cot, wearing a blue blazer and jeans. I guess the jeans were how he unwound on a Sunday. “Would you like some coffee?” he asked.
I looked over his shoulder to see Valerie in the doorway, taking a sip from a mug, the string from a tea bag hanging over the edge. She was wearing the same Beverly Sands outfit she’d had on four hours ago, which answered the question of where she’d spent the night. It was here.
Wherever the hell that might be.
Not only didn’t I know, I was never supposed to know. Hence the Bruce Wayne and Batcave routine after leaving the motel in Arcola. Valerie’d had the taxi take us to an underground parking garage in Fort Meade, where we got into an unmarked van, but only after she put a sack over my head. For real.
Then again, I guess that’s why they call it a safe house.
“Yeah, some coffee would be good,” I said. “Cream, if you have it. No sugar.”
“I’ll see what they have,” said Valerie before disappearing into the hallway.
Crespin leaned back in his chair, crossing his legs. “I suppose there’s also tea, but I figured you more for coffee,” he said.
“You figured right.”
“Funny thing, though. Do you know who never drinks coffee?”
“I give up.”
“Frank Karcher.”
I immediately liked where this was going, and Crespin could tell. For only the second time, I saw him smile.
“Al Dossari called him?”
“Late last night,” he said. “When he was finally feeling better, I presume.”
“What did he say?”
“Everything you told him at the bar.”
“But as soon as he heard my name …”
“That was the best part. You’d think Karcher would’ve told Al Dossari he’d been played by you, but he
didn’t. He just thanked him for the heads-up.”
“It actually makes sense,” I said. “Karcher knows I don’t work for the Times. The paper doesn’t have the story.”
“And speaking of stories that aren’t real …”
Of course. “Al Dossari must have told Karcher how he first met me.”
“Exactly,” he said. “After Karcher hung up from Al Dossari, he immediately woke up Brennan. Naturally, Brennan made sure to call him right back from the secure line in his study.”
Only, thanks to Valerie’s handiwork, the NSA could listen in on that conversation, too.
“I can only imagine Brennan’s reaction,” I said.
“To tell you the truth, I think he was more upset about not actually being interviewed for the Times than he was at the prospect of spending the next ten to fifteen years folding laundry.”
“That’s a lawyer for you,” I said. “Prison is what happens to other people.”
“We’ll see. In the meantime, nice work last night. Valerie tells me you play an excellent drunk.”
“I’ve had some practice.”
“She also told me about Owen, that he’s suddenly gone missing.”
“First things first, if you don’t mind. Why didn’t you guys just tell me you knew who he was?”
Crespin didn’t hesitate. “When gauging an asset, it’s always good to know up front if what he’s telling you is true.”
“I take it I’m the so-called asset in that sentence?”
“It’s just the way we do things.”
“So you can probably guess my next question.”
“Yes,” he said. “But the answer to that one makes things a little trickier.”
CHAPTER 98
A LITTLE trickier? Did he really just say that?
I’d spent the night, what was left of it, sleeping in the NSA’s version of inside doors. I was in a safe house somewhere in DC on the heels of a road trip taken with a boy genius from the CIA who thought he was curing Alzheimer’s, only to discover he was really helping to create what would’ve been the ultimate interrogation tool if it weren’t for the fact that it happened to have a fail rate of forty percent. And by fail, I mean fatally.