Empire (11 page)

Reuben was being followed—but that's exactly what he expected. By the time he was through a long debriefing—three different interrogation teams—it was nearly dark.

The real question was
which
group was following him—the FBI, the Army, or the CIA. Maybe all three. Or—always possible—some other agency within Homeland Security. How many parking places should he look for when he got to Reagan National? He wouldn't want to inconvenience them.

Reuben could hardly blame them for expending resources on following him. What else did they have to go on? The bodies of the terrorists would undoubtedly have no information on them; it might be days before anyone came forward with information about rooms they occupied. And in all likelihood they would be far more disciplined than the 9/11 terrorists had been—there would be no notes, no letters, no convenient ID that might lead to an easier trace.

The only thing they had was Reuben himself—with poor Captain Coleman being interrogated just as thoroughly in another room, by his own teams of debriefers. He had told Cole to answer everything, thoroughly and fully. Including as much as he wanted to
of Reuben's conversation and actions afterward, and all their speculations about why things might have fallen out as they did.

“Tell the truth,” said Reuben. “We want these guys to get the terrorists. Of course they'll suspect me, and if we pretend we don't know that I'll be suspected, the more they'll think I have something to hide. We'll answer this weird conspiracy with pure truth, so that they never have a moment where they can say, Here's what you said, but here's what we know you actually did. They'll never catch us in a lie. Clear?”

Reuben had followed his own advice. While he didn't tell them anything about his activities for Steven Phillips, that was because they were highly classified and his interrogators did not have clearance for it. “If Phillips tells me to go ahead, then I'll happily tell you everything.” They understood and accepted this—the fact that he told them Phillips's name was in itself a sign of extraordinary cooperation on his part, since he really shouldn't have told them even that much. “But we're all on the same side, here, and I'm not going to let foolish red tape keep you from finding out what you want to know.” Holding back Phillips's name would have been foolish red tape, with the President and Vice President dead; but keeping his actual activities secret until he was cleared to divulge them was not foolish—it was essential. These guys interrogating him were just as faithful about sticking to protocols, or they wouldn't be in their positions.

After they decided to call it a night, Reuben went to his office, which he assumed had been searched, and then to the little coffee room, where, inside a brown lunchsack labeled “Keep your hands off my food you greedy bastards—DeeNee,” he reached under a sandwich and took out his newly acquired cellphones. If they had been thorough enough to find these, they must already be convinced of his guilt and he wasn't going to accomplish anything anyway.

Now Reuben was heading from the Pentagon to the airport—not much of a drive, and probably the one that would make his followers the most worried. He could imagine cellphone speed-dial buttons getting pressed and teams being mobilized. “Stop him before
he can board a plane, but otherwise just keep him in sight,” they told each other.

But the followers could take care of themselves. It was the men he wanted to meet with whose response he wanted to see. They hadn't foreseen anything like what was happening, or even that he would try to assemble them. But he
had
once told them, jokingly, that if they ever had to save the world, he'd give them a call and meet them at the Delta ticket counter at Reagan National. Just a joke.

But guys in Special Ops didn't forget things—they were trained to memorize things so they could debrief accurately later. They would remember.

Remember, but . . . do what? Would he really find a miniconvention of extraordinarily fit men in civilian clothes standing around waiting for him?

No. They would have recognized him on the TV news. They would know that his call to them had something to do with the assassination, and the cryptic nature of his message, along with the context of the old joke—saving the world—would prompt them to call each other. Maybe one of them would meet him there. Maybe none.

He didn't even get to the Delta ticket counter before they made contact. Lloyd Arnsbrach stepped onto the escalator just in front of him. “South of the border restaurant in town center,” he said—in Farsi. If he had said “Rio Grande Café in Reston Town Center, the words “Rio Grande” and “Reston” would have been easy enough to understand for any English speaker.

And since there was nobody within earshot, that must mean that Lloyd—“Load,” they had always called him—believed that they were being overheard—either a big-ear listening device or a bug planted on Reuben's clothes.

“You're being followed,” continued Load in Farsi. “Get on the toll road on the hill of spring”—which meant Spring Hill. “We'll make sure you have a clear mile, so get off the toll road immediately.”

When they got to the top of the escalator, Load headed off in another direction from the Delta ticket counter.

So all that was left for Reuben to do was go and buy a ticket on the DC-New York shuttle for tomorrow. If asked—and he would certainly be asked—it was his intention to fly up to join his family tomorrow on their spur-of-the-moment visit to Aunt Margaret.

It was late enough in the evening that there weren't many ticket buyers, which would make it harder for his followers to remain unobtrusive. But they were apparently pretty good at what they did—he didn't see anybody with that agentish look of studied nondescriptness. It would be surprising if they didn't have somebody near enough to hear what he said. But then, they could count on being able to ask the ticket agent what he had said—those federal badges were so helpful.

Or . . . and this is something he should have thought of before . . . they might very well have planted a bug in his clothing. So they were just sitting in a van somewhere, listening. Or everything was getting piped into somebody's iPod earphone.

And it wouldn't have made any difference if he had stopped in his office and changed clothes. They would have bugged the uniforms he kept there. Or if they didn't they were idiots and he preferred to think the assassination of the President was not being investigated by idiots.

He got back to his car and practically had to force himself not to glance around to see if he could spot any of the tails. Of course they knew he was Special Ops and had been doing clandestine work for the NSA, so of course he'd guess that someone was following him. But looking around would make him seem, not curious, but furtive, as if he had something to hide. And since he did have something to hide, and was about to make it obvious that he did, the last thing he wanted to do was signal them that he was watching out for watchers.

What twisted thinking. Will they guess that I guessed that they'd know I'd assume they were there? But that was part of the training of Special Ops, especially if you were going to be in country on a longterm assignment. You couldn't take anything at face value. You constantly had to think: How will this action look to them? How will they interpret what I say and do? How should I interpret what their
words and actions say about what they believe about me? On and on, never achieving certainty, but getting closer. If you got close enough, you succeeded in your mission. Not so close and you failed. Way not close and you died.

The George Washington Parkway was open again, as were the bridges, and traffic from the District was still flowing out in a much-delayed rush hour. Reuben patiently stayed with the stop-and-go traffic. Getting onto the Beltway southbound took forever, but he stayed with it to the Chain Bridge Road exit, then went around Tysons II till he could get under the toll road overpass and enter the onramp at Spring Hill. There were only two tollbooths there, and sure enough, the human-manned one was being tied up by a guy who had apparently dropped his money and was out of his car looking for it.

Reuben didn't recognize him, but he didn't expect to. His team would have their own networks of friends who could be called on to fill assignments they didn't necessarily understand. “It's connected with the current national emergency, and it's a good guy we're helping.” That would be enough.

He tossed his coins into the basket and moved on through. In his rearview mirror he caught only a glimpse of the driver behind him—who also apparently threw his coins on the ground and had to get out of the car to get them.

The tollbooth operator would have a story to tell tonight. “Two idiots at the same time! It's a wonder we can even field an Olympic team, when these people can't hit a two-foot-wide basket that's a foot from their car.”

Of course, if the guys following him were any good, they already had somebody waiting on the toll road to pick up the tail, but he'd be off by then.

When he got to Reston Town Center he wasn't sure how to proceed—surely they wouldn't all be sitting at a big table eating guacamole.

He didn't get a chance to see the inside of the restaurant. As he pulled up past McCormick and Shmick he spotted Mingo—Domingo Camacho—who crossed the street in front of him, pointing
once at the parking garage across the street. Reuben made the left turns to get up into the garage and kept going up to the third level, where Mingo stepped out from the elevator area just in time to stop him. A car pulled out of a parking place as if on cue—because it
was
on cue—and Reuben pulled his car into the spot.

Mingo put his fingers to his lips and walked to the passenger door. Reuben rolled down the window and through it, Mingo handed him the shopping bag he was carrying. Chino shorts, T-shirt, flip-flops.

Reuben slid past the gearshift and changed clothes in the passenger seat. He thought of keeping his briefs on but decided against it; and that was apparently what Mingo had thought as well, because when he got the clothes out of the bag, there were briefs among them. Everything his size. These guys were good. Thank heaven he hadn't gained any weight since his Special Ops days. This was where the endless workouts paid off. Reuben was determined never to be one of those sad fat officers who no longer even pretended to live in a battle-ready state.

If he stayed in the service long enough to be a general.

If he stayed alive and out of prison.

With his clothes completely changed, he put the cellphones into his new pockets, put his keys above the visor, and locked the car. It would be easy to open the car later, with the codepad on the door.

He walked with Mingo, still wordless, to a car parked in a handicapped stall. But these guys had been so thorough that a legal-looking handicapped tag was hanging from the rearview mirror. It probably
was
legal, given how pathetically easy it was to get those tags these days.

Mingo pointed to the rear passenger seat, where Reuben lay down on the floor as Mingo closed the door behind him, then got in front and drove. Reuben didn't try to look and see where they were going—trust meant you didn't expose your face in order to second-guess the route.

That didn't mean Reuben could turn off the part of his brain that automatically counted turns and estimated distances. When he
figured they were on Route 7, heading back toward Tyson's Corner, Reuben finally spoke.

“Am I supposed to stay down here till we get where we're going?”

Mingo picked up his cellphone from the cup holder in the center console, flipped it open, and only then answered Reuben, so that if someone saw him talking they'd think it was on the phone. “Safer, don't you think? We go to all this trouble, it'd be pretty dumb to have one of your tails spot your big happy white face just by chance.”

“Destination?”

“Play along, Rube. I want you to guess.”

“Not a restaurant where we have a waiter who can overhear us. But a place where it's okay for a bunch of guys to gather around and talk in Farsi. So that means something like a Starbucks or a bookstore with a café in it. We're on Route 7 so I'm betting on the Borders across from the Marriott in Tyson's Corner.”

“Shit,” said Mingo.

“Is that a good shit or a bad shit?”

“Bad.”

“How much you lose?”

“Just a dollar, but you know Benny. ‘Never bet against the Rube.' ”

“Is that what he says?”

“I wasn't betting against
you
” said Mingo. “I was betting that Benny's plan sucked so you'd think of a better one and assume that's what we'd do.”

“Good plan so far,” said Reuben. “But I have one more man to bring to the party.” From the floor of the van he called Cole and spoke only a single sentence, in Farsi: “Borders on Route 7 in the Corners now.” Couldn't say “Tyson's Corner” because “Tyson” didn't translate.

Not that the people tailing him wouldn't already have gotten a Farsi translator after Load's words to him in the airport. So if Cole had been careless, or somebody had opened DeeNee's lunch in the break-room fridge, this would bring his tails right back on him, and
implicate everybody else in whatever conspiracy they supposed him to be part of. But you had to take some risks, or you might as well pull a Saddam and hide in a hole somewhere till you were arrested and put through a show trial.

They got to the Borders and soon had taken over two tables and eight chairs in the coffee shop.

Speaking quietly in Farsi, Reuben quickly explained how his own plan had been used to kill the President. Cole arrived—in civvies, mercifully—and Reuben introduced him around.

But Cole had to know more than just names. “Were you a team once? I mean, in-country?”

“We've all been in the same team with Rube, one time or another,” said Arty Wu. “But that was long ago and far away.”