Cold Frame (14 page)

Dangerous, he thought. Definitely dangerous. He sat down without answering her.

“Okay,” she said. “Again, I apologize for breaking and entering.”

“Who are you,” he asked.

“Call me Ellen Whiting.”

“Really?” he said. “
The
Ellen Whiting? Francis X. McGavin's lunch partner right up to the moment he did the big jump at the Bistro? That Ellen Whiting? You're right—I don't have a gun. On me. But I can get to one pretty quick.”

“Relax, Detective Sergeant. I'm no threat to you. If I were, you'd never have made it out of that bed back there. It's not like you knew I was here.”

“Shit.” He sighed, acknowledging her point. “I gotta get me a dog.”

“Not a bad idea,” she said. “First, let me explain something. I'm from the wonderful world of federal counterterrorism, which we all know and love as CT.”

“And you're here to help, right?” he said. “Like all government agencies.”

She smiled. “Of course,” she said. “We're always here to help and local LE is always glad to see us. But, actually, I
am
here to help—you. This suspension bullshit? That's gonna go away. That was initiated by a mistake on our part, amplified by some cowboying on the part of four support personnel. Contractors, actually.”

“Yeah,” he said. “What
was
up with all that? Those guys scared one of my tenants.”

“The skinny blond number? She'll survive. Those guys were supposed to provoke you, get you to do something so they could apprehend you. Then we could have had our little talk in private. They failed to anticipate you'd involve the inmates of the Briar Patch.”

“You in one of those cars stopped up on Canal Street?” Av asked, wondering how she knew about the Briar Patch.

“It's possible,” she said.

“And those runners were not FPS, were they.”

“Like I said, contractors.”

“Whose contractors?”

“Contractors,” she said. “Town's full of 'em, as you certainly must know. Anyway, there's no suspension paper, you haven't called your rep, IA hasn't been called, so I believe you can go back to work this morning as if nothing happened, because, officially, nothing did happen.”

“Just like that,” he said.

“Yep, just like that.”

“And you know this—how?”

“Because my boss called Happy's boss, the chief, herself, and shared his thinking with her. Cooled the whole deal.”

He thought about that for a moment. Was she DHS? Bureau? Spooking around like this, she might even be someone in Agency clandestine ops. In this town, you never knew. “The McGavin deal,” he asked. “What's the story on that?”

“Who's McGavin?”

“Oh, c'mon.” He snorted. “All my problems started with the McGavin deal.”

She leaned forward. “Look,” she said. “McGavin's death doesn't involve you, or MPD, for that matter. That's the whole point of my visit, actually. McGavin's demise was something that slipped out from under the federal invisibility cloak momentarily, and, trust me, that will
not
happen again.”

“You know he didn't just die of natural causes in that restaurant, right?”

She blinked. “Meaning?”

“OCME's leaning toward poison.”

This time she definitely reacted. Then she changed the subject. “Do you know how many federal counterterrorism offices there are here in D.C.?”

“I'm guessing more than one?”

“Eighty-five in the public domain, by which I mean the ones funded and authorized by the best Congress money can buy. There are some others that are neither funded nor authorized by any agency that'll admit to it. Ever since nine-eleven, counterterrorism has come a long way from just a few offices in the Bureau, the Agency, and the Pentagon. Now every federal agency in town has a CT office. The Social Security Administration, Health and Human Services, Labor, Agriculture, the Treasury, the fucking Post Office—you name it, they're all into the CT game, and, all of a sudden, even the meter maids are carrying.”

“You guys must be tripping over each other,” he said.

“Hourly,” she said.

“Is the country that much safer?”

“Depends on what you think the threat is,” she said. “I work for people who think the real threat has morphed.”

“What's that mean?”

“Instead of bearded hajjis wearing bedsheet bombs, think American Muslim converts scheming on Twitter. Think a whole generation of kids who've been diagnosed as ADD, ADHD, OCD, LD, and chugging down Ritalin and other mind-altering substances since they were five. Kids who've spent more time staring at an electronic device than they have sleeping and eating. Or, on the other side of the spectrum, think strong, extremely fit and aggressive young men who have spent three tours on the moon called Afghanistan, killing men, women, and children, with robots as accomplices. Now they're back, can't find a job, and they're a little twitchy. Or, try pizza-faced, gated-community nerds who stay up all night hacking into nuclear power stations and turning off the reactor-cooling water pumps—for fun, giggles, and bragging rights.”

“I didn't hear Al Qaeda in all that.”

“Oh, they're still out there and they're still blowing shit up, but they've dispersed their cells to make themselves smaller targets. Makes them even more dangerous, in some people's opinion, kind of like a cancer that's metastasizing. They are absolutely
not
defeated, as some of our more disingenuous politicians would have you believe. But: they are at least being engaged by the folks at JSOC and other unconventional agencies. This new breed, the homegrown breed? We're still circling that problem, and what we're seeing is not comforting. Not to mention the bleeding open sore that we call our border with Mexico.”

“Okay,” he said. “Gotta ask: who's ‘we'?”

She didn't answer.

“R-i-i-ght,” he said. “And you're telling
me
all this, why, again?”

“Basically, so that you'll forget all about the past week. Go back to being a Weird Harold down in the Briar Patch. Do what the computer geeks call a system-restore to, oh, I don't know, ten days ago? Resume your workouts and your dedication to not getting involved with women because they are so very dangerous.”

“Your being in my house at two in the morning kinda proves my point, don't you think?”

“Your life must be very boring, Detective Sergeant, although the deeper I get into the world of CT, I can see where boring could have its appeal.”

“Somehow I doubt that,” Av said. “Ellen Whiting. I think you're either Bureau or Agency.”

She gave him a speculative smile. “I'll be going now,” she said. “We won't meet again.”

“Fine by me,” he said. “Leave the key, would you?”

She fished in her pocket and put a key down on the coffee table. Then she got up and headed for the front door.

“Hey?” he said. “What do I do with the autopsy report that OCME's gonna send us?”

“Nothing, because they'll be sending it to me,” she said, as she went out the door and closed it behind her.

He waited for a minute, then picked up the key and went to the door. He opened it and tried the key. It didn't work. It didn't even go into the lock.

*   *   *

On Monday he got up, put on his running gear, and went out front. He'd decided to walk today. Maybe jog a little, but mostly just get some fresh air into his system and squeeze the residual alcohol out.

The platinum blonde wasn't in evidence. Can't imagine why, he thought, although he was already missing her stretching routine. He warmed up as usual and then just started walking. Bored in fifteen minutes he took it up into route pace. Much better. The serious runners still went by him with sympathetic expressions. He must be leaving an alcohol vapor trail, he thought. He kept a wary eye out for cowboy contractors in sunglasses. At one point he passed Rue Waltham, who waved delicate fingers at him as she ran by in the company of two military guys, who seemed to be competing for her attention.

He got back an hour later. The most exciting thing he'd seen was a sideswipe collision between a marine runner and a cycling Nazi, which had resulted in the trash-talking cyclist being thrown into the canal, along with his bike. Av, who'd had his own share of near misses with tunnel-visioned cyclists coming up behind him like they owned the towpath, had thought that only fair. He showered and shaved, and then made coffee. He took it up to the roof to enjoy late sunrise and to look down with sympathy at all the commuters. At nine-thirty his cell went off. It was Precious.

“Where are you, Detective Sergeant?”

“Suspended, last I heard,” he said.

“Not anymore. Right now you're late for work. Make my day: get your average ass back in here.”

His badge and creds were waiting for him when he got to MPD headquarters. The officers gave him a funny look when he scooped them up and then presented them so he could then go through the X-ray machine. Up in the office, Howie greeted him with undisguised glee and handed over Av's Glock and the spare mags.

“Welcome back, partner,” he said. “All us snuffies want to know: how'd you manage this?”

Wong and Miz Brown were having coffee at the conference table, so Av grabbed his usual three-paper-cup rig and sat down with the rest of the crew. He told them about his midnight visitor.

“Golly gee,” Howie declared. “Your own personal fairy godmother, complete with a happy ending.”

“Nice and neat, isn't it,” Av agreed. “Yesterday I was as good as fired. Today, everything's cool; welcome back, Kotter. No hard feelings, we hope.”

“All this from some B & E artist claiming to be a fed?” Wong said. “She good-looking?”

They all laughed.

“Detective Sergeant Smith?” Precious called from the doorway. “It seems we have an appointment with Assistant Chief Taylor.”

“
We
do?” Av said.

“Now would be nice,” she said. “Do
not
bring that coffee.”

They went upstairs to the assistant chief's office. Three civilian aides and one uniform occupied desks in the outer office. None of the aides would even look at them. Happy Taylor made them wait for fifteen minutes before admitting them into his presence, where he proceeded to ignore Precious and tell Av that he remained firmly on the assistant chief's notorious list, and that no matter how he had managed to evade suspension, it was only a matter of time, et cetera, et cetera. Av took the opportunity to remain silent, especially after a gentle kick in the ankle from Precious.

As they were leaving, Taylor put two fingers to his eyes and then pointed them at Av, which he assumed was Hollywood for: I'm watching you. Once in the outer office, with Precious walking ahead, one of the aides actually did make eye contact with Av, who put two fingers to his eyes and then pointed one of them at his own temple and made a circular motion. The aide seemed to be having trouble keeping his composure as they left the office.

Back downstairs, Precious told him that Wong and Miz Brown had a homicide-related interview over at the Sixth and suggested that Av go along to watch. Av figured this had more to do with getting him out of the building for a few hours than furthering his professional education. He was curious, though.

*   *   *

Carl Mandeville was fuming at his desk in the EEOB. On Saturday morning he'd been tipped off by a committee staffer friend in the Senate that three members of the DMX had gone to a meeting with Senator Harris, the chairman of the select committee on intelligence and counterterrorism. Subject unknown, principals only, no horse-holders in the room. Mandeville could guess the subject, but the surprise had been that there were more traitors on the committee than he had suspected. McGavin, Logan, and Wheatley were the three weaklings he'd known about. He'd taken care of McGavin, so why had
three
members of the DMX shown up to meet with his nemesis? The third man was Howard West, deputy undersecretary for counterterrorism at the Energy Department. Why the hell was Energy even on the DMX? he wondered, then remembered: DOE was responsible for the safe operation of all the nuclear power plants. The target's rep, Mandeville thought caustically. One would think that, of anybody on the committee, the guy responsible for protecting
the
prime terrorist targets in the country would be in support of DMX, and yet here he was, consorting with the enemy.

He'd always assumed he had three bad apples on the DMX, senior government officials who went through the motions and then scurried around, behind his back, trying to take down the program. Now he wondered how many more two-faced bastards there were, and, more importantly, was Senator Harris about to make a move? There were twelve statutory members of the DMX. They could not vote themselves out of existence, so a procedural mutiny wasn't his problem. But if a third of them, or more, appeared before Harris's committee in some prestaged hearing and declared a vote of no confidence in the entire concept, that would be fatal.

This latest betrayal posed another problem: he had already planned out something for Hilary Logan that would be even more unconventional than McGavin. His strategy had been to take out two of them and then let the others seize upon the notion that people who screwed with the DMX could face grave consequences. He'd take care of Wheatley, too, if necessary, although knowing the man, he was pretty sure it would not be necessary. But four of them? That would be too much. That was serial-killer territory.

He swiveled around in his chair and looked out the large window at his view down Independence Avenue. There was only one other alternative: take them
all
out, and then start over. He felt a rush of excitement. It could be done. Whenever the DMX met the entire floor was almost hermetically sealed for security purposes to keep everything and everybody out. Those same arrangements could be made to hold everybody in, too.