The Archimedes Effect (17 page)

He’d turned the van back in, sans the magnetic sign, buried his gloves in a garbage bin, and gone to catch his flight, with two hours to spare. Slick as a spray of Break Free on a glass tabletop.

With the Winchester at the bottom of the pond, Carruth was more or less unarmed. He hadn’t wanted to risk shipping his BMF revolver anywhere, so it was locked in his gun safe at his house.

He sipped the liquor. Well, he wasn’t totally unarmed. He had a briefcase—one of those big, heavy, aluminum jobs, and it held two hardback books so thick he could barely close the case. He was fairly sure that the case and books would be enough to stop or at least slow down a common pistol round, enough so it wouldn’t kill him if it did get through. So if some would-be hijacker tried to take over the plane, that would give him some protection when he rushed the guy. If all the guy had was a knife? Then that wasn’t gonna be enough against a trained Navy SEAL swinging five kilos of metal briefcase. Carruth would pound that fool like a man driving railroad spikes.

There hadn’t been a successful hijacking of a U.S. commercial jet in a while—those maniacs who’d attacked the Towers had made hijacking a dangerous business. Before, people would sit still and wait for the authorities to deal with it; now, somebody stood up and announced that he was taking over the plane? Everybody and his old granny would jump the guy—he’d be hit with everything that wasn’t nailed down. If you figured you were going to get plowed into a building, then a guy with a box cutter didn’t seem so scary. People survived being stabbed all the time—hitting a skyscraper at a couple hundred miles an hour and being turned into a jet-fuel fireball didn’t leave any survivors.

Carruth finished his drink. He thought about getting a second one, and decided against it. He needed to stay sober, just in case. Terrible, that you had to worry about such things in the United States of America.

Well, Carruth was prepared. Nobody was taking this jet anywhere it wasn’t supposed to go, not on his watch.

There were days when Abe Kent felt like he had at nineteen. He’d get out of bed rested, no aches and pains anywhere, and if it weren’t for the bathroom mirror, he could almost forget for a minute that nineteen was more than forty years behind him.

This wasn’t one of those days. Normally, as part of his warm-up before he ran the obstacle course, he’d do ten or twelve chins, fifty push-ups, some crunches and stretches, to get the blood flowing and his joints limber. But a front was moving in, there was a cold and nasty drizzle falling, a little snow and a few ice pellets in the mix, and after eight chins, he knew he wasn’t going to get another rep without pulling something.

He managed forty push-ups before he ran out of steam, and one set of crunches where he normally did two. After which, he was tired enough so that actually going through the course seemed to be a lot more trouble than it was worth.

The devil on his shoulder said,
Hell, Abe, you’re a general now, you can delegate things. Nobody expects you to be out in the cold rain running the obstacle course like some raw recruit! You don’t need to be able to beat men young enough to be your grandchildren! Bag this! Go home, take a hot shower, catch a few more winks—you earned it!

Kent smiled. Yeah, that’s how it started. Listen to that voice and pretty soon, you’re sitting in front of the television most of the time, drinking beer and thinking about how tough you were in the good old days. He might fall over dead from a heart attack, but if he did, at least it was better to do it here than sitting on his butt at home.

He headed for the course.

Only a few people out here this early, in the cold and wet. One of them looked familiar, just ahead of him. . . .

“John?”

“Morning, Abe.”

The two men shook hands. “I didn’t know you still came out here.”

“Got to,” Howard said. “Too easy to turn into a couch potato, now that I’m a civilian.”

“You could join a nice warm gym.”

Howard laughed. “When I can come here for free? Nah. Besides, there are too many sweet young things in tight spandex at the gym my wife doesn’t want me staring at. Gets hard to keep your mind on your workout. Not a problem out here with old jarheads in dirty sweats.”

Kent laughed.

“I thought for a minute there you were going to turn around and leave,” Howard said.

“For a minute there, I was. There are days when inertia is really hard to overcome.”

“I hear that. You want me to give you a head start?”

“Oh, I don’t think so. I expect an old jarhead can keep up with a fat and out-of-shape ex-Army civilian, even if I have twenty years on him.”

Both men laughed.

“Trust me, Tommy, it couldn’t have gone any better. Compared to Ruth and Amos, my parents—if they ever get back from their Canadian vacation—will be a walk in the park.”

Thorn nodded. “I liked them.”

“Good thing.”

“So, when are we going to do this wedding?”

She shrugged. “We could do it Friday, if it was just me, but my mother will want a big church to-do. Even though I am getting long in the tooth for a white dress. I don’t think she ever really expected it would happen, so that’s the least I can do.”

“So, you figure it’ll take a couple months to set up?”

She laughed. “A couple months? Lord, even a shotgun wedding would take that long. A regular wedding takes at least a year to plan.”

“You’re kidding.”

“You keep saying that when you know I’m not.”

“What’s to plan? Get a church, buy a dress, print some invitations, hire a preacher.”

She laughed again. “So much to learn, so little time . . .”

As she drove to the meeting where she was to talk to Carruth, Lewis considered her new problem. She had started this knowing that there were some risks when dealing with people who wanted the ability to raid U.S. Army bases. Like Aziz, such men would not be above killing anybody they needed to in order to get what they wanted. She had thought to mitigate this risk going in. She had first strained possible buyers for her information through a series of blind e-drops and cutouts strung out around the world. She used a server in North Africa, piggybacked on a military communications satellite in geosynch over the Virgin Islands, and a wireless plexus in Argentina, all of these, and others, feeding their sigs back and forth among themselves before forwarding it to a generic server she kept in a rented apartment in Delaware. The server put things into a file that she could access anonymously and only via a password, and in theory nobody knew it existed save her and the domain-namers. This was a weave complex enough so that nobody was going to thread their way through it to show up on her doorstep. And if they opened the apartment door in Delaware without deactivating it, there was a block of C4 wired to a detonator that was going to reduce the server and anybody standing too close to it to little pieces, so even if they got that far, there wasn’t going to be any
there
there. . . .

Some of what came her way were half-assed offers, some she was sure were law enforcement agencies from different countries, including, probably, the U.S., and a very few seemed legit.

These latter, she had separated out.

She had a highly discreet investigator working for her, and she sent him the names. Simmons had been a military intelligence op, then a contract agent for the CIA and NSA until he had been caught dealing in the black market in Syria. He apparently knew where too many bodies were to risk any public legal action, so he had been quietly cashiered out of government service and told to keep his mouth shut and a low profile, or risk being nailed using antiterrorist laws.

Being able to dig down and uncover bodies was useful to Lewis.

This was how she had wound up with Aziz, and had he not been greedy, he might have panned out.

With that buyer dead, she had to start over again. So she had gone back to the cutouts, and come up with a couple more potentials.

One of them was supposedly another Middle Easterner, the other, of all things, an Australian. Before she met anybody else, she had to make sure that they weren’t cops, and that they had some references she could run down. So she sent the names to Simmons as she had before. This was the riskiest part of the whole operation, and she was very careful here.

She couldn’t assume that the next potential buyer would be some kind of fundamentalist terrorist who would be impressed by the gun of a dead martyr, so it looked as if Carruth might need to make another run at an Army base. And this time, best he return with something of more substantive value than a fancy handgun.

The clock was ticking. But Simmons hadn’t gotten back to her, and that was worrisome. Could be any number of valid reasons for this—but even if he didn’t have anything useful for her, he was usually quick to pass that along. Whenever she had something for him, she got herself a cheap, one-time phone, sent him the number via an encrypted file, and he would get back to her the same day, or sometimes the next day.

But it had been three days since she’d heard a word from him, and this was bothersome.

The place where she was to meet Carruth was just ahead. A ratty cafe on a street that was torn up for roadwork. You had to park a block away and walk in, and it wasn’t worth the effort. The food was crappy and, of course, the coffee was commercial brew that sat in the pot all day. . . .

She grinned. She and Carruth both were going to lose weight if they kept meeting at such places.

She parked her car and alighted.

“Simmons. Here’s the address,” Lewis said.

“Who is this guy?” Carruth asked.

“He’s a former intelligence op—worked for Army Intel, JMTS, then freelanced for the CIA and NSA—now on his own. He’s the man I’ve had running down potential buyers for our product.”

Carruth nodded. “Okay. And I’m going to see him why?”

“To find out why he’s not answering my e-mail and calls.”

“Maybe he forgot to pay his cable bill.”

“And maybe he turned into a butterfly and flew off to Central America.”

Carruth looked at the address and grinned. “What do you want me to do when I find him?”

“See why he hasn’t gotten back to me on the two names I sent him to check out.”

“Which are?”

“You don’t need to know,” she said.

He laughed. “Remember when you were standing on the walk down in New Orleans and Abdul and his Ugly Brother stepped out of the trees with pistols, ready to shoot you?”

“I recall it, yes.”

“Captain, we are together in this to our eyeballs and I demonstrated my loyalty by punching holes in those bad guys and killing ’em deader than black plastic. I’m not going to run off and start a business of my own here. Aside from which, if I ask this guy Simmons about the names, he might just, you know, blurt them out by accident.”

She considered it for a few seconds. “All right. I take your point. One of the men is an Australian, name of Brian Stuart; the other one is another Middle Easterner, using the name Ali bin Rahman bin Fahad Al-Saud.”

Carruth shook his head. “One of the princes? These guys are big on naming every man related to them, aren’t they? Bin-this and bin-that.”

“I expect the name is phony,” she said. “No more a prince than you are.”

“So I get the dope from Simmons on Brian and binwhosit, and we’re back in business, right?”

“If one of them turns out to have access to the kind of money we’re talking about, we are. But I suspect they won’t be as impressed with that PPK you lifted, so I’m thinking we need to hit another base and come back with something a little more useful.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, I have a couple ideas. We’ll meet again when you get back. Here’s the new place, and the new one-time phone number.” She handed him a yellow sticky-pad sheet with an address and telephone number written on it.

“Another hole-in-the-wall with bad coffee?” he said. He read the note, apparently memorized it, then wadded it up and put it into his pocket.

“Yes. Places with good coffee have customers, and we don’t want the attention.”

“You could always come to my apartment,” he said. “I got Seattle’s Best I can grind up and brew.”

“Yeah, and hell could freeze over, too.”

He laughed.

This guy Simmons had an office on Connecticut Avenue, not far from the old art-deco Uptown Theater. Nice enough area, mostly low-rise commercial, and still part of Cleveland Park. The office was a brick building, the address upstairs over a storefront. Must not be doing too bad.

Carruth looked around for cameras. He didn’t spot any looking right at the place he was going. If Simmons was some kind of spook, he’d probably picked a location that wouldn’t get much attention.

No name on the button over the address Lewis had given him. Carruth tapped the button and waited.

No answer.

There were four other offices upstairs, and he could have leaned on those buttons until somebody buzzed him in, but he didn’t want to leave any more memories than he had to.

The security door was a steel-framed job, made to look like wrought iron, with expanded metal grating filling the gaps, backed with glass. The lock would open via an electric pulse from upstairs, or with a key, and it wasn’t a dead bolt, but a basic latch hitting a strike plate. Meant to keep honest people out.

Carruth had a thin and flexible piece of spring-steel a little smaller than a credit card in his wallet. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his Nike wide-receiver gloves. They offered a little protection from the weather, but were still thin enough to allow you to use your hands. He could pick up a dime wearing them. No point in leaving any prints around.