The President's Henchman (9 page)

Then Deke looked around, suspecting that the woman might have been a diversion for other malefactors. But none was to be found. And now people were looking at the man with the automatic weapon in his hands. He tucked it back under his coat before anyone got too alarmed.

“You had enough excitement?” he asked McGill.

“You think she’ll do an encore?”

“I can’t believe she did it at all.”

Both men looked to the west. As the rider reached Seventh Street, she brought her mount smartly about and rode it into a waiting horse trailer. A man wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses closed the doors behind the woman and the horse and quickly drove off.

“You don’t know her, do you?” McGill asked Deke.

He nodded. “Yeah, I do. Never saw her like that, but she used to date a guy I know.”

“What does she do? Some kind of exotic entertainment?”

Deke looked at McGill. “She’s the chief legislative aide to the Minority Leader of the House of Representatives.”

“Oh,” McGill said. Then he added, “Glad she’s not a member of the president’s party.”

Damon Todd was drawing stares. Not that there was anything special about his size: five-foot-ten, 180. His dark brown hair was cut short and brushed forward. His eyes were gray-blue and restless. His nose was strong and straight. His lips were full but masculine. A good-looking guy, but no more compelling than the new faces found on magazine covers every week.

What set Todd apart was his muscular definition. It started at his hairline. Every muscle in his body stood out in sharp relief. His body-fat composition was 1.75 percent, and he was thinking the .75 might be more than he needed. His skin was a canvas stretched tight over every sinew. Veins and arteries stood out in sharp relief. Great vascularity as muscleheads liked to say. The complete package was almost overwhelming.

Which was why people just had to look at him.

Then look away quickly before he caught them.

Because you wouldn’t want a guy like him mad at you.

Todd’s attention was on the man seated across the table from him at the Potbelly’s Sandwich Works shop on L Street. He was wondering if the CIA hired Indians. Not Hindus, Native Americans. The guy had a coppery cast to his skin, straight black hair, and an aquiline nose. Pretty distinctive-looking for a profession where you were supposed to blend in. But maybe all that stuff about being able to lose yourself in a crowd was just TV crap. Get a guy who made people look twice, play against expectations, and maybe nobody would ever suspect him.

Or the fucking guy could be a cop. But then Todd had never heard of an Indian cop either. Not outside of someplace like Arizona or New Mexico.

“Something wrong?” the guy asked. He’d shown Todd an ID in his car. It said he was a CIA field officer, and his name was Daryl Cheveyo.

“Never met anyone in your line of work before,” Todd said. “Just trying to match reality with preconception.”

That seemed to satisfy him. But Todd started to wonder if Cheveyo had backup. He might not be a cop, but the Agency could have called the cops.

Todd looked around, trying not to be obvious about it. The shop was packed. All the tightly spaced tables around them were full. A line of people going out the door was waiting to place orders. There was even a black man with gray hair playing blues guitar on a tiny elevated stage — had to reach it with a ladder — opposite the cashier.

It wasn’t the kind of place Todd would’ve picked for their meeting.

“Why’d we meet here?” he asked.

Cheveyo swallowed the bite of his tuna sandwich and chased it with a drink of orange soda. “Lunch was the only time I had to meet you today. Your sandwich okay?”

Todd hadn’t touched his turkey breast with sprouts on wheat. Not that he wasn’t hungry. He could have polished off a dozen sandwiches. But he had a midday workout scheduled before he could eat, and discipline was everything.

“I’m saving it for later.”

“Okay.”

Todd began to drum his fingers on the table. What he felt like doing was hurling it through the window. And the Indian spook right with it. But he didn’t think that kind of volatility would help his cause. He saw that Cheveyo was looking at him and stilled his fingers.

“Your people are studying my data?” Todd asked.

He’d made a cold call to the CIA and sent copies of all his research papers to Langley. Trusting that the Company would see the value in what he was proposing, he hoped they would overlook the liberties he’d taken with his test subjects and not turn him in to the cops.

Lately, though, he’d begun to worry that the CIA would simply steal his work. No way
he
could complain to the cops. Of course, if they wanted to rob him, they’d better kill him, too.

“They’re looking at it in great detail.”

“And great interest?”

“That’s not for me to say.” Cheveyo returned his attention to his sandwich.

Summoning all his self-control, Todd said in an even tone, “I hope you can understand why I’m on edge here. You people are my last chance for validation.”

“We appreciate that, Doctor. Try to be patient a little longer.”

Todd wasn’t sure Cheveyo should have used his professional title. Felt like the spook was giving away his secrets. But hearing it also reminded him who he was, calmed him down.

Didn’t make him any less hungry, though. He was always hungry these days. Holding off on the sandwich until later was pure torture. Thing was, he’d gotten to the point of
liking
the pain. He said, “You don’t mind me asking, are you Native American?”

Cheveyo looked at him. “Half. My dad’s Hopi; my mom’s Anglo.”

“Your family name, does it have any special meaning?”

The CIA man nodded. “Cheveyo means spirit warrior.”

Todd liked that. “You bring any special talents to your job?”

“I’m just a nose-to-the-grindstone guy … but I speak Navajo.”

A Wind Talker?

Would Cheveyo have shared that with him if things weren’t looking up? Or if the CIA hadn’t already decided to kill him. Hard to say which it was.

If they gave him a chance, though, they’d invite him to join up.

The landlord was a lawyer named Putnam Shady. He owned a two-story brick town house on Florida Avenue and said it was worth $950,000. There was no mortgage; he owned it outright. He wanted $850 per month for the one-and-a-half-room-plus-bath apartment in his basement. He’d set the rent at the amount necessary to pay for one-half of his monthly business lunches. As long as restaurant prices held stable, he said, the rent would be, too.

He was trying to be funny, but Sweetie didn’t laugh. She went into the bathroom, found it small — shower stall, no tub — but clean. The appliances in the kitchenette were also small but new and a good brand. The main room was reasonably big, maybe fifteen-by-fifteen, and the closet was more than adequate to hold all the clothes she owned. The whole place was painted white, the floor was polished hardwood, a decent amount of light came in through the front windows, and there was no smell of water seepage or sewer gas.

For a woman who’d felt comfortable in a cubbyhole at a convent, it was great.

“Any problem if I put a floor safe in the closet?” Sweetie asked.

“For ma’amselle’s jewelry?”

Sweetie pulled back her sport coat and revealed her gun.

Some people saw a lethal weapon and got scared. Others were immediately fascinated. Putnam Shady was the first guy Sweetie ever saw who got hot. He’d given her the eye as soon as he’d seen her and had been taking discreet peeks ever since, but seeing the hip-holstered Beretta put his inhibitions down for the count. Now he stared and didn’t care if she noticed.

“Problem about the gun?” Sweetie asked.

“You’re a police officer?” he inquired in return.

The notion seemed to excite him further.

“Used to be. I retired. I work private investigations now.”

Sweetie’s age and occupation were entered into whatever fantasy matrix the lawyer was constructing. He was about ten years younger than she was, Sweetie figured, and not a bad-looking guy, but if he got too flaky, she’d look elsewhere.

As it was, she looked at her watch. She had to get to the airport. The McGill kids needed her. She didn’t have any more time to —

Putnam Shady interpreted her gesture and expression correctly. He put his eyes back in his head and cleared his throat.

“A safe is actually a very good idea. For your, um, weapon and any other valuables you might have. I’ll have it put in at my expense so the work will be up to my standards. Think I’ll get one for myself while I’m at it. A safe, that is.”

He straightened his lapels and extended his hand to Sweetie. The perfect gentleman now.

“The place is yours if you want it.”

Sweetie’s doubts lingered, but she had a plane to catch, and she didn’t like having to say her rosary every night in a room where the TV and the paintings were bolted down. She took Shady’s hand. Being a lawyer, he thought to add, “You do have references, of course.”

“One or two,” Sweetie answered.

Welborn Yates sat in his White House office transcribing his audiotaped interview with Colonel Carina Linberg into a cryptic shorthand a rocket-scientist friend at the Air Force Academy had taught him. Later, he’d enter it into a password-protected file on his personal laptop. Only when the president asked to see it would he decrypt and print out the file.

He wasn’t sure that he would include the fact that he was trying very hard not to fall for Colonel Linberg. Honesty on that point might call his objectivity into question.

The colonel hadn’t come on to him, not in any obvious way. That would have raised his suspicions immediately. It was just that she’d been decent enough to talk to him like he was a human being and not just a wet-behind-the-ears junior officer. Or an antagonist who was out to get her.

“At first, I just liked Dex’s looks,” she told Welborn over coffee and a raspberry croissant. “He’s a handsome man, gorgeous, really, in his Navy blues.”

Welborn sipped his own coffee without interrupting. He’d asked her how she came to be other than professionally involved with Captain Dexter Cowan.

“I’ve felt that way a time or two before,” she said. “I guess it’s only natural for a woman in my profession to like men in uniform. Some of them are so damn handsome.”

She paused to look at Welborn, as if really seeing him for the first time. Her eyes seemed to say, “You should know, you’re one of them.”

The conversational opening was there, but Welborn declined to take it.

Colonel Linberg continued. “But nobody ever sent me head over heels before until Dex. All the more so as I came to learn he was more than just a pretty face. He’s knowing, funny, considerate … and, sorry to say, a damn liar.”

“He told you he was single?” Welborn asked.

“He did.”

“And by his own admission he didn’t wear a wedding ring.”

“No, he didn’t. And not for a very long time, if ever. Women know what to look for: skin that’s pale because a ring has shielded it from the sun. Or simply an indentation where the flesh has been compressed as it continues to expand elsewhere.”

She glanced at Welborn’s left hand as it held his coffee cup.

“You don’t wear a ring, probably never have.”

“No, ma’am.”

“Dex’s hand is just like yours.”

Welborn tried not to read anything into that.

“At some point,” he said, “you and the captain began to see each other outside of work.”

“Six weeks after we began working together. Physical tension had been present from the start, and by that point it was pretty unbearable for both of us. We both had to be careful at work, of course. Our jobs call for a high degree of focus and sober judgment.”

The colonel laughed again.

“That was the rationalization we used for going out the first time. We needed to dispel the tension so we could do our jobs better. We’d learned by then that we’re both very ambitious people, and our joke was that if he was going to make admiral, and I was going to make general, we’d have to get all this unspoken personal stuff sorted out pretty soon.”

Colonel Linberg sipped her coffee.

“Dex said we wouldn’t have to worry about talking out of turn because we both knew all the same secrets. So I said why didn’t we go out for a drink?”

“You extended the first invitation?”

“Yes … Hasn’t any young woman ever asked you out, Lieutenant?”

There was an undertone of challenge in her voice.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Then you know there’s nothing improper about it.”

“No, ma’am. Nothing at all.”

“Dex told me that first night that he was divorced. Not separated, divorced. He told me before we left the bar where we’d had drinks, before we went to the hotel.”

“Do you remember how many drinks you had that night?”

“Two,” Colonel Linberg said with certainty. “I never have more than two. I learned long ago that if I do, I’m not good for anything. And that night I wanted to be very, very good.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Welborn said as dispassionately as he could. “At any other time during your relationship with Captain Cowan, did he inform you, or did you hear from anyone else, that he was married?”

“No.” Carina Linberg started to say something else but she stopped.

“Ma’am?”

The colonel began to strangle her napkin. “During the time we were … sexually involved, I noticed some male officers glancing at me, snickering in an adolescent way. They tried not to be obvious about it, and they always looked away when I looked at them. I thought maybe my body language and Dex’s had given us away, even though we tried to be very proper while at work.”

“You never thought Captain Cowan might have —”

“Boasted of his conquest? Not then. But now I wonder if they not only knew about us but also knew that Dex was still married.”

“Can you give me these officers’ names, ma’am?”