Catherine tried to appear as nonchalant as possible. “Your name isn’t really Jeff Duncan, is it?”
“What do you think?”
“No. What should I call you?”
“Call me Six.”
Her breath quickened. This confirmed him as the man in Washington Highlands. She said, “The house on Brandywine Street. There was a number six left there.” That had not been reported. The man said nothing. “Was that so the CIA would know you were here?”
“They already knew I was here. It was to show them I wasn’t running.” A pause. “Not anymore.”
They approached a four-way stop. He said, “If you try to bail, I’ll just stop you. Understood?”
Her thumb flipped up the security cap over the stun gun’s actuator. Thinking quickly, she said, “Bail? I’m fifty-four. I’m not sure I ever knew how to bail. But even if I did, those days are firmly behind me.”
Out of the corner of her eye she saw the man chuckle at this, as if he was completely comfortable snatching an innocent woman off the street.
A large black work truck rolled up to the intersection on the left of the old Civic.
Catherine squeezed the handle of the stun gun so hard it hurt. Her thumb hovered over the red actuator.
Six started to pull forward, but the work truck on the left began rolling out of turn, so he was forced to brake abruptly.
Catherine took her opportunity. In one motion she lifted the device up, spun towards the man behind the wheel, and plunged the metal tips into the right side of his throat, which, due to the black hoodie, was the only exposed skin showing around her kidnapper’s neck.
She pressed the button and an electric clicking sound filled the air. It seemed impossibly loud and violent here in the small cabin of the Honda Civic.
The man behind the wheel cried out as six million volts coursed through his body.
55
Owwww!” His right arm swung up in a blur, and his forearm connected with the stun gun and knocked it hard, sending it flying into the backseat. It banged against the rear window and skittered to the floor.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” the man shouted now, his face a mask of pain.
But he did not go down. He did not collapse, faint, or appear, in any way, incapacitated.
Instead, he just seemed furious.
Catherine covered her face in her hands, cowered into a ball by her car door, and she readied herself for the killer’s retaliation.
“Jesus, lady! That hurt like hell!” The car began rolling forward. She heard him moving in his seat, and thought he was checking his neck in the rearview mirror.
When she realized he wasn’t about to hit her, she spoke. Almost to herself she said, “That was supposed to disable you for a full minute.”
The man behind the wheel yelled back at her. “Well, it didn’t!” he shouted, irritation strong in his voice. Then he said, “Those gadgets are overrated. Listen, lady, I’ve had a really shitty week. If you have any more dirty tricks I’d appreciate it if you’d just let me know.”
“No, sir. Nothing else. I’m sorry. I’m just very frightened.”
“You don’t need to be scared. Hell, I’m the one who just got zapped.” He seemed to take a moment to get control of his emotions, although he continued to cuss under his breath and feel at the spot on his throat where she’d shocked him. Finally he looked at her. “Sit up, please. I can’t talk to you like that.”
Slowly she did so, straightening her outfit and returning to her fixed stare through the windshield. They drove in silence for another block, and then she said, “This isn’t my first time.”
“First time for what?”
“I’ve been kidnapped before. 2004. Quetta, Pakistan.”
“I’m not kidnapping you.”
“I’m free to go, then?”
“In a little while.”
“Not now?”
“Not yet.”
“I don’t want to get pedantic, but I think that means you are kidnapping me.”
“I’m not. I’m offering you an exclusive interview. In exchange for me answering your questions, I’ll need you to answer some of mine. Deal?”
Catherine said, “I must respectfully decline. Can I go now?”
The man who called himself Six just exhaled slowly. “All right. You win. It’s a kidnapping.”
“Glad we agree,” she said. Then, “I guess I’ll interview you then.”
They arrived at Glenwood Cemetery and Six pulled through an entrance that led him to a series of winding roads through rolling hills dotted with trees and tombstones. They passed a mausoleum on the left. There were a few cars parked here and several people dressed in formal attire, some carrying flowers. Catherine wondered if she could just open her car door and roll out. This would alert the dozen or so by the mausoleum, but she didn’t know if the man driving the car would just hurt them along with her if she tried this.
She stayed still, and soon they were driving around a quieter part of the cemetery grounds.
Six said, “I can’t say I’ve ever given an interview. How do I start?”
“I need you to prove you are who you say you are. How do I know you didn’t just read my article and snatch me like this as part of some delusional fantasy? You could be pretending to be involved in all this.”
To Catherine’s surprise, the man reached to his waist and hefted both his hoodie and a long-sleeve thermal he wore under it. Lifting both up high enough to first expose the butt of a pistol on his right hip, and then a heavily bandaged area on the right side of his rib cage. Dried black and dark red stains covered the beige compression bandages.
“What is that?”
“It’s a gunshot wound. I can unwrap it if you really want to see it.”
“I’ll take your word for it. What happened?”
“I got shot the other night. Up in Bethesda.”
“Is it… serious?”
“It’s not much fun.”
Catherine nodded slowly. “That’s one way to prove your involvement.”
“Are you satisfied?”
“Yes.” She looked back at her purse behind her. “Is there any chance I can take notes for the interview?”
“None whatsoever.”
Catherine did not push it. “You said you have been running from someone. Who? The CIA?”
“Yes. Among others.”
“For how long?”
“Five years.”
“And before that?”
“I was an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency for over a decade.”
Catherine asked, “In what capacity?”
“SAD. Deniable special missions.”
“That’s a unit name?”
“A job description. My group didn’t have an official name.”
“It’s the government, Six. Everything gets a name.”
A pause. “They called us Golf Sierra. It was a call sign. But that wasn’t exactly on the phone extension list at Langley.”
“You were SAD black operators?”
“There are black units, and then there are the guys who walk in the shadows cast by the black units. That was us, I guess.”
Catherine wondered if this could all still be just what Denny Carmichael had asserted in his interview. A figment of the imagination of an insane person.
“Do you have some proof?”
“Proof of?”
“What you did while working for the Agency.”
“You think I walk around with a stack of Polaroids? I don’t have any proof. You’ll just have to determine for yourself if I’m a crackpot.”
“That’s fair. Why are you doing this? Why now?”
Six turned up a long, hilly road that undulated through hundreds of tombstones and crypts. He drove incredibly slow. He said, “I have been out of the country for five years. I found a way in, so I came back to end this.”