Then we’d be dead meat.
Once we were clear of the area I switched on the cell phone and dialled Lindsay.
‘Hey, big eyes, are you listening?’
She must have been alert and watching her screens because she barely missed a beat. ‘I’m here. Are you mobile?’
‘That we are. What’s the situation on the ground?’
‘No local activity anywhere close on the last camera pass. The next one is due in ten minutes. What’s your situation?’
‘We’re bugging out from the current location. We had company.’
‘Hostile?’
‘Definitely. If not then, certainly now. Can we get past the convoy?’
‘That’s a yes. We last picked up their signature moving due east from that position on what we believe is a military access road. Your route now looks clear but be aware.’
‘Copy that.’
I switched off and focussed on driving and watching the road for signs of life. Running into a patrol was a possibility, but I was hoping we’d get some warning before we hit trouble.
The road was clear and easy to follow once I could use the lights, and it was almost easy to forget that we were in hostile territory and making our way out.
‘Do you have family?’ Travis asked after we’d been travelling a while.
Jesus. More questions. And it was stuff I didn’t want to discuss. I debated ignoring him, but that wouldn’t help either of us. And I needed him to be with me whatever I did, one hundred per cent. The best way to do that was to play along for a while.
‘A sister. Why?’
‘I’m trying to understand you, that’s all. I’ve got two sisters and a brother. All accounting professionals, would you believe that?’
Somehow I would, but I didn’t want to offend him. ‘Not really. What made you join the State Department?’
He deflected the question by saying, ‘Actually, I’d rather talk about you.’
‘Of course you would. But I’m a closed book. You first.’
He nodded. ‘OK. I guess I took the easy route all along; through school, then college, then the military, and when I’d had enough of that, I applied to the State Department. I figured four accountants in the family was way too many.’
‘What about your family?’
‘I told you about them.’
‘I mean your own family — your wife and kids. You have two, right?’
It was a brutal reminder, but I figured he couldn’t not think about them for long. And talking about them might help, too.
He was quiet for a while, then started talking. It was slow going at first, but he picked up enthusiasm and speed, and even started to smile a lot more. After a while he stopped and looked at me and said, ‘You’re a sneaky bastard, you know that? But thank you. It was good using their names out loud. Kind of made a connection, you know?’
‘I know.’
A little later he said, ‘Do you have a girlfriend? I’m guessing you aren’t married.’
‘No, I don’t have a girlfriend, and no, I’m not married. Never found the time or the right person.’
‘Don’t you have aspirations for something different?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like marriage, kids — that kind of thing.’
‘No. Maybe one day I’ll hit the wall and do it, but not yet.’
‘The wall?’
‘The point at which I find that there’s something else I want to do, that life will throw me a random card and use up whatever chances I might have been given.’
‘Random? Is that another way of saying fate?’
‘You can call it that if you wish. Life is random; it’s not predictable like a lot of people think. If it was, the biggest growth industry on the planet wouldn’t be technology or social media or alternative energy; it would be soothsayers and palm readers. Look at Denys: he thought he was out of it and clear. Then random came along in the shape of Voloshyn.’
‘I guess. I hadn’t really thought of it that way before.’ He was silent for a while and I let him be, allowing the rumble of the engine and the tyres on the road do their stuff. It was soothing, being out there in the middle of the dark, especially after what we’d been through. There was no intrusion from outside, no phones, no traffic, no lights.
‘That helicopter back there,’ he said eventually. ‘That was pretty random, wasn’t it?’
‘Actually, that was fairly predictable because we knew it was coming. But the helicopter crew, now they’d have said the fighter was random.’
He chuckled, which was a good sign. ‘You think you’ll hit your wall one day, Portman?’
‘I guess I will. Until then I’m doing a job. Like you.’
‘You’re nothing like me.’ He stopped. ‘Sorry. I don’t mean that to be offensive. We’re just very different people, you and I.’
‘You’re right. And that’s a good thing.’
He didn’t say anything after that, but his words left me thinking about my own life and how long it could go on. We all make choices and I’d never seen mine as any different to a thousand others. I knew other guys in the same line of work, most of them on the surface no different to Travis; they had family and hobbies and ambitions, they played ball with their kids and to everyone else they looked normal on the outside. Then one day they hit the wall. It could be brought on by seeing too much bad stuff happen and having too many near misses. Who knows? Some deliberately shrugged it off, but others decided to do something else with the time they had left.
I wasn’t shrugging off anything; I just hadn’t yet reached that point.
Two hours later, as a thin dawn began to push back the night, I discovered we had a more immediate problem than fate to deal with. A vehicle was coming up fast from the rear. It was the first one I’d seen since last night. It approached to within half a mile or so behind us, then held station for a while before dropping back and disappearing. The light wasn’t good enough to make out the type of car, but it looked to me like the profile of a sedan. It might have been a fellow traveller looking for some morale-boosting company on a lonely road, before having a change of heart.
But I had my doubts.
FORTY-NINE
After a lifetime of almost unqualified success and achievement, where the tang of anything approaching disappointment had been limited to political ups and downs, Senator Howard Benson was undergoing an emotion he had not experienced before: a feeling of dread. Twenty minutes ago he’d had a call from the number calling himself Two-One. The news was about as bad as it could get.
Walter Conkley had turned into considerably more than just a minor irritant.
‘The subject has had two meetings with a white female identified as Marcella Cready,’ Two-One informed him, his voice flat with the tone of a minor news briefing. ‘She’s a well-known investigative hack around town.’
‘I know damn well who she is,’ Benson growled. He’d crossed swords with Cready on more than one occasion. She had twice tried to tie his name to unauthorized payments made to opposition campaign staff in what was effectively vote-rigging, and had mentioned him in connection with the suppression of secret transcripts related to extraordinary rendition flights out of Iraq and Afghanistan. ‘You said two meetings?’
‘I did.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me after the first one? This is disastrous.’
‘Because the first one was a sniffing exercise; each was seeing what the other had before they committed. I knew pretty quickly that they were lining up for another so I figured it would be better to wait until I had something more concrete to tell you.’
Benson bit down on his anger, knowing the other man would see it as fear. He took a deep breath to calm his voice. ‘What were they talking about?’
‘You. And the Dupont Circle Group. Names, dates and details — and some digital media. Cell phone recordings.’