“Please excuse the stem. It originally came, I believe, filled with yogurt and decorated with a picture of Mickey Mouse.”
“Thank you,” Sandra said. A smile flickered across her lips.
“As a prisoner, of course, I am told nothing,” Kocian said. “So I am therefore quite curious about your obvious distress. What have these terrible people done to you?”
“You sound like a Viennese,” Sandra said.
“How perceptive of you, dear lady. I was born and spent many years in that city.”
“I’m a semanticist—I teach at the University of Pennsylvania. Or I was teaching at the university before I was hustled into the backseat of a Secret Service SUV and hauled off before my neighbors.” She paused. “You’re familiar with Franz Kafka?”
“Indeed.”
“He would have had a ball with this,” she said.
“You are implying bureaucracy run amok?”
“Am I ever.”
“Tell me all, my dear.”
Sandra sipped appreciatively at her champagne, pursed her lips, and then drained the glass.
“Was the offer of something stronger bona fide?”
Kocian nodded.
“In that case, Colonel, I will have one of your famous McNab martinis, thank you ever so much.”
“My pleasure,” Castillo said, and went to a sideboard loaded with spirits and drinking paraphernalia.
“So, what happened, Sandra?” David W. Yung asked.
“Cutting to the chase, Two-Gun,” Sandra said, “ten minutes after my better half here assured me that all was well as the Secret Service was on its way to our bullet-shattered cottage by the side of the road—before which sat our bullet-shattered new car—they did in fact arrive, sirens screaming, lights flashing. I expected Bruce Willis to leap out and wrap me in his masterly arms. By then, of course, the AALs who had turned tranquil Churchill Lane into the OK Corral were in Atlantic City. But what the hell, I thought, naïve little ol’ me, I shouldn’t fault them for trying.”
“Then what happened?” Davidson asked.
“The first thing they did was tell the Philly cops to get lost,” Sandra said. “My living room was now a federal crime scene. And they hustled Jack and me into the back of one of their SUVs and drove off with sirens screaming. I thought they had word the AALs were coming back.”
“The what, my dear?” Doña Alicia asked.
“African-American Lunatics, make-believe Muslims who don’t like Jack very much.”
“Why not?” Doña Alicia asked.
“I kept an eye on them for the police department,” Britton said.
“What he did, Abuela,” Castillo said, “was live with them for long years. He wore sandals, a dark blue robe, had his hair braided with beads. They thought his name was Ali Abid ar-Raziq.”
“And for that they tried to kill him?”
“Actually, they came pretty close to killing both of us,” Britton said.
“Sandra,” Yung said reasonably, “an attack on Jack, a federal officer, made it a federal case.”
“Is that why they took Jack downtown and took his gun and badge away? The way that looked to me was that Jack was the villain for getting shot at.”
“They took your credentials and weapon, Jack?” McGuire asked.
“And it was my pistol, not the Secret Service’s.”
“Had you fired it at the bad guys?”
Britton shook his head.
McGuire looked at the four Secret Service agents who had brought the Brittons to the house.
“Who’s in charge?”
“I am, sir,” the shortest one, who held a briefcase, said.
“Where’s his credentials and weapon?”
“I have them, sir,” the agent said, holding up the briefcase. “Mr. Isaacson said I was to turn them over to you.”
“Give Special Agent Britton his credentials and his pistol.”
“Sir, I don’t—”
“That was an order, not a suggestion,” McGuire said. “And then you guys can wait in the kitchen.”
They did.
“Just to keep all the ducks in a row, Tom,” Britton said as he carefully examined the revolver, reloaded it, and put it in his lap, “Joel didn’t take them. The clown in Philadelphia did.”
“ ‘The clown’?” McGuire asked. “Supervisory Special Agent in Charge Morrell? That clown, Special Agent Britton?”
“Right. Just before he told me I was being transferred to Kansas or someplace just as soon as the, quote, interview, close quote, was over.”
“And was that the clown you told what he could do with the Secret Service, Jack?” Delchamps asked.
“You’re not being helpful, Edgar,” McGuire said.
“No. I told that to the clown here in D.C.,” Britton said thoughtfully. “But I think he was a supervisory special agent in charge, too.”
Castillo, Delchamps, and Davidson laughed.
Britton picked up his Secret Service credentials, examined them, and held them up. “Does this mean, as they say in the movies, that I’m ‘free to go’?”
“Not back to Philly to shoot up a mosque, Jack,” McGuire said. “Think that through.”
“Where the hell did you get that? From the clown in Philly?”
“I got that from Joel,” Castillo said. “I think he got it from the clown in Philly. You apparently said something about knowing, quote, how to get the bastards, unquote.”
“By which I meant I was going to go to Counterterrorism—I used to work there, remember?—and see if we couldn’t send several of the bastards away on a federal firearms rap. In the commission of a felony—and shooting up Sandra and my house and car is a felony—everybody participating is chargeable. Use of a weapon in the commission of a felony is another five years, mandatory. Not to mention just having a fully auto AK is worth ten years in the slam and a ten-thousand-dollar fine.” He paused and exhaled audibly. “Did that ass . . . Sorry. Did that supervisory special agent in charge really think I was going to walk into the mosque and open fire? For Christ’s sake, I’m a cop.”
“I don’t think you left him with that good-cop impression, Jack,” Davidson said, chuckling. “I think he saw you as Rambo in a rage.”
“The Philly cops could have gotten a judge to give us a probable-cause warrant to search both the mosque and the place in Philadelphia because of the attack on Sandra, and the Secret Service wouldn’t have been involved,” Britton went on.
“Sandra, do you happen to speak Spanish?” Castillo asked.
“Why? Is that also some sort of Secret Service no-no?”
“Yes or no?”
“Now, why in the world would you suspect that a semanticist might speak Spanish?”
Castillo switched to Spanish: “Fiery Spanish temper, maybe?”
She flashed her eyes at him, then laughed.
“Yeah,” she replied in Spanish. “Classical, Mexican, and Puerto Rican Harlem. What’s that you’re speaking?”
“I was hoping it would sound Porteño.”
It took her a moment to make the connection.
“Yeah,” she said. “You could pass.”
“So how do you think you’re going to like Buenos Aires?”
“I don’t know. I seem to recall another ex-Philly cop got herself shot there.”
“I would say it’s Jack’s call, but that wouldn’t be true, would it? Your call, Sandra: You two go to Buenos Aires, or stay here and Jack continues his war with the Secret Service. And he’s going to lose that war. They are not going to put him back on the Protection Detail. . . .”
“It’s not fair, Sandra,” McGuire said. “But that’s the way it is. They just don’t take chances with the President and the Vice President. As a matter of fact, there’s an old pal of mine . . . ” He stopped.
“Go on, Tom,” Castillo said. “They’ll find out anyhow.”