The Archimedes Effect (31 page)

So she drove slowly and carefully, and got to Partin’s Country Market four minutes before the appointed time. The sun was shining and it was cool, maybe forty degrees or so. Bracing . . .

Carruth arrived three minutes later.

She had been breathing slowly and deeply, but even so, her belly was roiling and her heart pumping faster than normal. It wasn’t every day you cold-bloodedly shot somebody to death. That thing in New Orleans hadn’t been planned, it had just happened, and yeah, she had been prepared, but she had not really expected, nor wanted, it to go down that way.

This was different. She was gonna smile at Carruth, a guy she had worked with for months, and knew, and then punch holes in his skull,
bam-bam.
Yeah, it had to be done, but still, it made for a dry mouth and fluttery bowels. She took a deep breath.
Get to it, sister
.

As she stepped out of her rented car, she looked up to see a state police patrol cruiser coming along the country road. And slowing down.

She went cold, but let none of her reactions show.

Unless she was willing to kill a state cop, Carruth was going to live to see another day.

She considered it.

Carruth was armed and he was good with a gun. She didn’t know how good the trooper might be. If she pulled her piece and blasted Carruth, the cop might be a danger before she could do him. Carruth certainly would be if she shot the cop first, though he would hesitate, trying to figure what she was doing, and she could nail him while he was trying to work it out. . . .

No. She didn’t need any complications—somebody might spot the dead police officer before she was out of range, and they would certainly throw up roadblocks every which way. Maybe he had already called in their license plates. Dead police officers were a major glitch, to be avoided if at all possible. She could screw up Jay Gridley’s search for a little while longer, and take care of Carruth later.

“Follow my lead,” she said to Carruth as the trooper pulled into the lot. “We’re thinking about buying this place,” she said.

The gravel crunched under the trooper’s tires. The cop eased closer and rolled his window down. “You folks okay?”

Carruth stepped of his car with a notepad. He looked at the for-sale sign and began writing on the pad. He smiled at the trooper and raised a hand in greeting.

“Yes, sir,” Lewis said. “My friend and I came out to look at the store. We heard it was for sale.”

“You live around here?”

“No, in the District. But we’re tired of the city,” she said. “And we’re thinking maybe about getting married and starting a business away from all the noise and traffic.”

The cop, who was maybe twenty-five, smiled. “Really nice country.”

“It is. We figured we’d get the Realtor’s number and see if we can set up a meeting.”

She smiled at the trooper, who grinned back. “Shame you had to come in two cars.”

Cops never just took anything at face value, the good ones. She leaned down closer to the cop. “My friend and I, we’re, uh, married to . . . other people right now. We’re going to, uh, take care of that, but we kind of don’t want to be seen together just yet.”

“Ah. I understand.”

She nodded. Give them a story they like, they’ll buy it.

“Well, you all have a nice day.”

Carruth turned and ambled over to where Lewis stood. He put his arm around her and smiled at the trooper. Pressed the tips of his fingers against her breast so the cop could see that.

The trooper pulled out of the lot and drove slowly away.

“Bet he turns into a driveway a mile down the road and waits to see what we are going to do,” Carruth said.

“If you don’t get your hand off my boob, he’s going to see me kick you in the balls.”

Carruth laughed. He moved his hand away. “I had to help sell it, didn’t I?”

“We need to leave,” she said.

“Why? We can talk for a couple minutes, walk around the place. Even if the cop can see us, it’s not like we’re trying to break into the place. We can hold hands, make out, give him something to tell the boys back at the station.” He grinned.

“Forget it.”

She hadn’t planned on having to lay out another base incursion, since she’d expected he’d be dead by now. She didn’t have anything to tell him. A mistake. “No, we’ll do it later. I’ll call and set it up.”

“Why’d you want to meet way the hell out here anyway?”

“I wanted a quiet drive in the country. What do you care?”

He shrugged. “I don’t.
My
last trip to the country involved shooting down a helicopter full of armed dweebos—not a real peaceful memory.”

“Go. I’ll call.”

He shrugged again and ambled to his car.

Well—damn. This certainly hadn’t gone the way she’d visualized it. A reminder that RW was messier than VR. She needed to keep that in mind. If that trooper had chosen to play it differently, maybe been in a bad mood and needing to feel powerful, if he’d wanted to see ID, maybe decided he needed to pat them down, it would have really been a bad scene. She supposed she ought to consider herself lucky it hadn’t gone that way. Carruth killing cops was why they were here—they didn’t need another dead one calling attention their way.

She climbed back into her car and started the engine.

As she did, she had a sudden inspiration. A way to get rid of Carruth without doing it herself. She smiled. It was perfect. She should have thought of it before.

Better late than never.

Thorn sat at the head of the conference table, with Jay Gridley and Abe Kent sitting across from each other to his left and right. Thorn said, “All right, Jay, if you’ll update us, please?”

Jay nodded. “Not a whole lot new. Most of what I’ve been chasing has run to dead ends. I haven’t been able to chase the game-maker down.”

He paused, taking a moment to make eye contact with General Kent as well. “There are two lines of inquiry that I can see might still pay off, though there is a possibility they lead to the same place. First, there’s the gun that killed the Army guy and the Metro cops. I’ve narrowed down the possibilities to one good one, but I haven’t been able to pin it to the wall yet. The gun was bought under a phony name and ID and I’m working on that.”

Thorn nodded. “Go on.”

“Second, there’s the dead terrorist found in the burning truck down in Kentucky. We have an ID on him, including his name and CV. He was a Special Forces guy, an Army Ranger, by the name of Dallas R. Stark. He was doing soldier-of-fortune and security work in the Middle East two years ago when State lost track of him. I am running down his old military unit, guys he worked with in the Middle East, family and childhood friends, all the usual stuff. Since we know he was using a phony passport, otherwise he couldn’t have gotten back into the U.S., it could be that he was the guy who bought the gun and shot people with it. That wouldn’t be real helpful. If I can pin the Alien Cowboy—sorry, that’s a characterization from my search-scenario—I should be able to figure it out. If he matches Stark, then that line ends. If he doesn’t, we have another player. Stark has been somewhere for the last two years, and since he wasn’t alone when the terrorists hit Braverman, if we can link him to anybody in that group, that’ll be good.”

Thorn nodded again. “Anything else?”

“Not really. I’ve been working with Captain Lewis at the Pentagon, but most of what we’ve done has been eliminating stuff, not coming up with any arrows pointing in the right direction. She’s pretty sharp, though. She spotted some things before I did.”

“General?”

Kent smiled. “I don’t know enough to ask intelligent questions. General Ellis has indicated that General Hadden is about to blow a gasket and I’m supposed to hurry things up, but since Jay is already going as fast as anybody can go, me saying, ‘Go faster!’ ain’t gonna help.” He nodded at Jay, then added, “Although, when you do catch these guys, it would be to my benefit and General Ellis’s if you allowed in a report somewhere as how our urging somehow expedited the process, even though we all know it didn’t.”

Jay grinned at that. “I can do that.”

“Thanks, Jay,” Kent said.

Thorn looked around at the small meeting. “Okay, gentlemen,” he said, “I think that’s it for now.”

Kent and Jay left.

Thorn leaned back in his chair. Working for the military had one big advantage—you weren’t running around all over the place trying to stomp out little fires. This was their priority, and it wasn’t going to be diluted by having to attend to other things until it got resolved. Nobody at Net Force was going to be hunting down Internet scam artists or porno-sellers, or people breaking into banks—those were somebody else’s problems now. On the one hand, that was good. But on the other hand . . .

Eventually, the organization of Net Force would have to change. How necessary was the staff they had if their workload was dramatically decreased? What was the need of a military unit of what was now Marines for domestic problems? As National Guard, Net Force’s military had been at least semilegal; as Marines, that got a bit more iffy, even under the relaxed antiterrorism statutes of Homeland Security. A unit of Marines charging across a mall parking lot to kick in a door? That wasn’t going to play well on the evening news—the idea of a strong military operating at home hadn’t been high on the Founding Fathers’ list of things that were good for the country. The Marines were supposed to go to foreign shores to clear the roads for the Army to follow, and, if need be, help defend the U.S. from invaders, but when was the last time the U.S. had been invaded? 1812? Or did the Alamo count, even though Texas wasn’t a state for another eight or nine years?

What Thorn foresaw was a dismantling of Net Force as a separate unit, with the pieces being mainstreamed into other commands. Some of his people would stick around, some would not. In his case, probably not. There wasn’t a lot for him to do with all the generals around him. The DoD ground slow, but fine, and how much longer would there be a Net Force as such?

Not long, Thorn figured. He’d have to quit or be fired, and while it didn’t really make any difference on one level, he’d rather leave the party before they kicked him out. . . .

Well, he had taken on the job, and done it as best he could. He had served his country, given something back, but he didn’t need the work. Maybe it was time for him to smile and walk away. Marry Marissa, go and play for a while. Travel, see the world, get to know the woman he loved.

There were certainly worse ways to spend your time.

As Kent started to uncase his guitar, flipping latches open, he glanced at Jen. “What’s the problem?” he said.

Jen looked up at him. “How do you know I have a problem?”

“Nothing specific. It’s like there’s a . . . darkness around you.” He shrugged.

She played a series of arpeggios up the neck of the guitar, and they sounded somehow sad to him. “Minor chords,” she said. “For when your mood is low.”

Kent didn’t say anything. One thing he had learned from being married was that there were times to speak and times to keep his mouth shut. If she was going to tell him what was bothering her, she would—pushing it wouldn’t help.

She stopped playing. “An old enemy of mine died recently,” she said.

He kept silent. Enemy? Jen? That didn’t seem likely.

“When I was a girl, in junior high, I was a geek—already learning how to play classical guitar, no interest in pop music. Probably a good reason for that—this was the late seventies, when disco was still hot—‘Stayin’ Alive,’ ‘Saturday Night Fever,’ like that. The only pop song I learned was Randy Newman’s ‘Short People,’ and that’s because my best friend at the time was just pushing five feet tall.”

Kent smiled.

“People would see me sitting in a empty classroom practicing, and they’d ask me to play ‘Dust in the Wind,’ or ‘How Deep Is Your Love,’ and I had no interest in any of that. ‘Romanza’? Sure. I’d even try ‘Canon in D,’ though technically you can’t do it on one guitar by yourself. And anything by Bach I could manage. But if you wanted Barry Gibb, I was not your girl, thank you very much.”

Her hand moved lightly on the strings but didn’t make a sound. “It was kind of lonely, not being part of any of the cliques, but that’s where I was. Then I met another classical music fan one day, a girl my age, and since we were the only two people we knew at the school who even liked the stuff, much less played it—she was a cellist—there wasn’t any way we weren’t gonna be friends.”

He waited.

She looked at him. “Elizabeth Ann Braun. She wore braces, her hair in pigtails, and was a short, skinny little thing who never got any taller. We hung out, we played music, we discussed boys, with whom we had almost no experience. We did our homework together. Her mother was divorced, she’d never known her father, and she was half again as geeky as I was. Beth liked poetry—she had memorized ‘The Raven’ and used to go down the halls at school reciting it aloud, giving everybody who looked at her the evil eye.”

He smiled.

She smiled, too. “Those were good days. We gloried in our dweebness—we felt superior to all the mundane jocks and big-hair girls all trying to look like Farrah Fawcett. We thought they were all wasted space. Fourteen-year-old girls with superiority complexes, and we were our own clique, just the two of us, we lived in each other’s pockets, finished each other’s sentences, even had our periods together. Friends to our cores.”

Kent nodded but stayed silent. She was on a roll and he didn’t need to oil the machine.

“We stayed that way through junior high, high school, and the first few months of college. Then she got into a yelling match with a music professor who wouldn’t let her take an advanced class she wanted to take without a required course. Pissed her off so bad she quit school. She had a full-ride music scholarship—it was a state school—but she just . . . left. And to complete shooting herself in the foot, she joined the Army. Didn’t tell me until after she had done it.”