Still, some crimes were so egregious that all the old rules needed to be disposed of. Could this be one of those?
“Sometimes, I really hate my job,” he said.
“I’ve got a question for you,” Boxers said. “If FLOTUS is planning the destruction of mankind as we know it, where does that put POTUS? More to the point, if we’ve really stumbled upon the truth here, where does that put us? We know a bunch of shit that they’re not going to want us to know.”
“We’ve made a living knowing shit that Uncle didn’t want us to know,” Jonathan said.
“Not at this level,” Boxers said. “A president willing to kill his own wife is a guy prone to scorching the earth.”
“You’re assuming he’s an accomplice,” Venice said. “That might not be the case.”
“I’m assuming nothing of the kind,” Jonathan said. “Stipulating that all of this impossible shit is true in the first place, I think that we could call President Darmond an ally. We all want to stop her.”
“It’s a little different, Dig,” Boxers said with an eye roll. “He killed innocents at the Wild Times. We’re not talking about a stable man.”
“We’re talking about a panicking man,” Venice said. “There’s a difference between killing in a panic and being a murderer.”
Jonathan smiled. “Tell that to the mourning families,” he said. Venice had campaigned damned hard to get Darmond elected. She would be the last constituent to abandon him.
After a brief silence, Boxers said, “Holy shit, Boss. What have we gotten into?”
Jonathan shook his head. “Scary, huh? Even scarier when you think that Mr. Chief of Staff Winters invited us to the party. I’ve got lots of alarm bells sounding right now. Think of the damage we’ve done to this administration,” Jonathan said. “We kicked his SecDef in the balls and we stirred the Agency pretty good.”
Venice’s jaw dropped. “You don’t think they know about Trevor Munro, do you?”
Jonathan wished he’d never told her about the way he’d settled that score. “The absence of handcuffs would say no,” he said.
“Maybe that’s because you saved Darmond’s sorry-ass life,” Boxers said.
“He shouldn’t know about that, either,” Jonathan said. “But facts are facts. From this point on, we double down on OpSec. We need to assume that we’re under siege.”
Boxers cocked his head. “Don’t we still have a PC to find?”
Jonathan shrugged. “I’m beginning to look at that cargo as less and less precious.”
“But we made a deal, Dig. The official version is that FLOTUS is in danger, and we have to snatch her away from it. If I were you, I wouldn’t want to have to call the White House and tell them that you’re walking away.”
Another bell rang in Jonathan’s head. It was a church bell, actually. A gong. “Back up,” he said. “Why did they bring us in?”
The question stopped conversation. Drew stares from both of them.
“Don’t look at me that way. Think about the order of events. There’s a shoot-out at the Wild Times bar and a bunch of people are killed, mostly Secret Service. We hear rumors of a cleanup operation, where a homeless guy only one guy saw is carted off. No official record of that. There’s a lot right there to make me uncomfortable. Can we agree on that?”
“I don’t remember the last time I was comfortable,” Venice said.
Boxers made an undefinable noise that Jonathan interpreted as agreement.
“If this was a hit on the First Lady to shut down her terror operations, why would Douglas Winters contact Irene Rivers to have us brought into the case? Why wouldn’t they just let it run its course?”
As soon as the question had left his lips, he saw the answer. “Oh my God,” he said. “We’re pawns. We’re being used. They don’t want us to find her and bring her back. They want us to find her so they can finish the job of killing her.”
Boxers saw it too. “They turned to us because legitimate law enforcement would leave a paper trail,” Boxers said.
“And what happens when we do find her?” Venice asked.
Jonathan let the question hang in the air. He hoped that the answer was obvious.
“They’re going to kill her?” Venice gasped. Realization hit her hard.
“I don’t know,” Jonathan said. “Hell, we don’t know anything. We’re just trying to feel our way through this mess. But a commitment to kill is a commitment to kill, isn’t it?”
“Sweet system,” Boxers said. “We hand over the victim and then we all get popped. I seriously cannot wait until I see Doug Winters again. I’ll pull his brain through his nose.”
“We’re missing something,” Jonathan said. “The stuff that makes sense only makes sense till it doesn’t. That always means we’re missing something.”
“But the basics are solid,” Boxers said. “Can we agree that FLOTUS was up to no good?”
Jonathan’s cell phone rang, displaying the name J. Edgar, his little joke to himself. It was Irene Rivers’s phone number. He pressed the connect button. “This is Scorpion.”
He was startled to hear a male voice say, “Arc Flash is ready.”
Jonathan recognized the voice as that of Paul Boersky, Irene’s longtime confidant and body man. Her Clyde Tolson, but without the sexual overtones.
“Good to know,” Jonathan said. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because we thought you’d want to ask some questions.”
“You mean because you don’t want to be the one asking them,” Jonathan corrected, but the line went dead.
He looked to Boxers. “We’ve got to go.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
It had been a long time since Griffin Horne had been enough of an insider to warrant a code name, but as soon as Jonathan heard the phrase “Arc Flash,” he knew exactly who it referred to. He also knew the origin of the name, and took no pleasure from the memories. Horne’s corner of the covert world involved the extraction of information from people who were intent on remaining silent. All too often, his tactics involved the application of electricity to the most sensitive parts of his subjects’ bodies.
Jonathan abhorred torture. On the occasions when he’d employed it, he’d had great success inflicting pain just once or twice at the beginning of the session, and then developing the source through the mere threat of additional unpleasantness. Hurting people was never a legitimate goal for a professional, but he’d known far too many operators and spooks who found genuine pleasure in hurting people.
Griffin Horne was one such man, and Jonathan always felt as if he needed a shower after being in a room with the man. That said, there was no denying that Horne’s methods were effective. Jonathan knew of at least two post-9/11 terrorist plots that died in their planning stages thanks to information that was extracted by Arc Flash.
The drive to Horne’s farm took about forty minutes. “I hate this son of a bitch,” Boxers said as they closed in on the place. “Every time I see him, I want to pop his head like a zit.”
Jonathan agreed. “Thing that scares me is, I imagine he has equipment at his fingertips that could do exactly that.”
The call from Paul Boersky — not Irene, yet from Irene’s number — told Jonathan that the Secret Service agents from Becky’s apartment — or whoever they were who pretended to be Secret Service agents — had been prepped for questioning. He didn’t know what that meant, exactly, but he was confident that the next hour or two were going to be unpleasant for everyone.
“Pull to the side,” Jonathan said when they were still half a mile from the farm.
Boxers followed instructions and waited till they were stopped before he asked why.
Jonathan pointed to the barely recognizable silhouette of a dilapidated old house that looked like it hadn’t seen an occupant in decades. “Pull up behind there,” he said. “We’ll walk into Horne’s place.”