“How the hell we going to do that?” Banacek demanded.
“Perhaps I can help,” Hunter said.
They all looked at him. He drew a slim black recorder from his sports jacket.
“If you tell me your personal stories, I’ll give them the attention they deserve. I’ll tell everybody how the early-release programs in this bill will lead to more crimes like those that you’ve experienced. Together, we can make that bill so radioactive that no politician will dare touch it.”
Everyone broke into smiles and excited chatter. Kate Higgins rose unsteadily and shuffled toward him. He stood to receive her. He took in her white hair, her ravaged face. She reached out and grasped his hands; in his, hers felt tiny, delicate, and lost.
“God bless you, Mr. Hunter,” she said, smiling through her tears.
He couldn’t say anything.
He felt another set of eyes on him. He looked past her and saw Annie Woods watching him intently from across the room.
*
After the meeting broke up two hours later, he shook hands all around. It wasn’t a coincidence that he found himself leaving at the same time she did. They said their goodbyes to Susanne at the door.
They strolled casually, side by side, toward their cars. The bright moon cast tree shadows across the pavement of the cul-de-sac. Deep in the wealthy residential neighborhood, only the sounds of their footfalls broke the eloquent silence. He felt an electric tension rising between them with each step.
She broke it first. “It’s wonderful. What you’re doing.”
He looked at her. She wouldn’t meet his eyes; hers remained focused straight ahead as she walked.
He said, “Susanne is fortunate to have someone as loyal as you in her life.”
Her expression seemed to change, but she didn’t reply. As she reached her car, she pulled out her keys and unlocked it remotely.
You can’t get involved.
“I was wondering,” he heard himself say, “if you’d like to have dinner this Friday evening.”
She stopped. Didn’t speak for a moment. Then turned to face him. The moonlight bared what he thought was a hint of fear in her eyes.
“Dylan, I like you. But I hardly know you. And-”
“-and when you get to know me better over dinner, maybe you won’t like me.” He knew he should stop. He couldn’t. “But at least you’ll have had a great dinner.”
The fear was obvious now. “I really shouldn’t.”
Let her go.
“I really shouldn’t either. But I don’t seem to care.”
“Tell me you’re not married. Or involved with somebody.”
He couldn’t help but laugh. “No, Annie. I’m not married. And I’m not involved with anyone.”
“Then why do you say you shouldn’t?”
“For the same reason you do.”
“You’re scared?”
“Terrified.”
“Terrified? Of what?”
“Why don’t we reveal our respective fears over dinner?”
She laughed. He did, too. It broke the tension. He asked for her number and address. She told him. She asked why he didn’t write them down. He told her he never had trouble remembering truly important things. She laughed again.
He loved her laugh.
He followed her around to the driver’s side. It was a physical effort not to touch her as she slid into the seat. Then to refrain from touching the window when she looked up at him and smiled.
She started the car and pulled away into the night.
He stood there in the middle of the empty street, watching until the car rounded a curve and its red tail lights winked out.
On the way to his own car, he found himself humming a Cole Porter tune. In his head, he could hear Frank singing it in his iconic style.
Then Frank got to the part about the warning voice in the night, repeating in his ear.
He sat motionless behind the wheel. The voice, suppressed during the previous hours, was loud now.
Yes, you damned fool. Use your head. Face reality.
Cold logic always served him well. Cold logic now told him this couldn’t end well.
But he had been alone such a long time.
He turned over the key, gunned the engine, wiped out the nagging voice.
Tonight, for once, he didn’t give a damn what cold logic said.
FIFTEEN
CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia
Thursday, September 11, 9:40 a.m.
“Annie.”
She was arrested by the familiar growl of Grant Garrett behind her, and she turned to face him. He stood in the hallway, feet planted apart, hands jammed in his trouser pockets, just outside the exit doors of the auditorium. His tall, lean, unmoving figure forced the crowd emerging from this year’s 9-11 memorial ceremony to separate and flow around him. Like Moses parting the Red Sea, she thought.
She approached him, wading against the tide of people. “What’s up?”
“Let’s get some fresh air.”
They wound up in the central courtyard, right outside the main cafeteria. No sooner had he left the building than he pulled out a pack of Luckies and lit up. He coughed with his first drag.
“I thought you wanted some fresh air.”
He made a face at her. She kept pace as he strolled without speaking. Just as his medium gray suit matched the sky, his chilly expression seem to reflect the fall temperature.
They wandered over to the Kryptos sculpture. The iconic piece stood in the northwest corner of the courtyard. Twelve feet high, made of copper, petrified wood, and granite, James Sanborn’s famous art work looked like an S-shaped scroll, lying on edge. Its blue-green copper surface was perforated, top to bottom, with dozens of rows of alphabetical text, which contained four encrypted messages. Since its installation in 1990, only three of the messages had been cracked by top code experts; the fourth remained unsolved.
Garrett took a seat on a red stone bench, facing the cryptic wall. He patted the bench and she sat beside him. At their feet, and driven by a hidden pump, water swirled in a bowl-shaped pool. For a while, he smoked and gazed absently at the puzzle looming before him.
“We need to rethink this thing,” he said finally.
“I know. We’ve spent six months, and we’re still going around in circles.”
“There’s a solution to this. But I think one or more of our basic assumptions has to be wrong.”
“What are we assuming?”
“All kinds of things. First, motive: that somebody wanted to silence Muller before he talked. That would imply the Russians. But how would they find out where he was taken? That implies opportunity: another mole at Langley, probably high-ranking, who could direct Muller’s assassin to the safe house. But we assume the shooter is also almost certainly American, not Russian, because of the Barrett rifle and the hotel signature. Which implies that the shooter is probably somebody from inside the Agency-either SAD or the Office of Security-because those are the only people with the training and willingness to follow extreme orders issued by a CIA boss. Which also implies that he has to be an active-duty person. And that he could be an ex-Marine sniper, also because of that hotel signature.”
“Well, I did what you asked,” she said. “I went through the personnel records of SAD with a fine-toothed comb. Even if one of them had some reason to act on his own, only a handful of those guys were in this area at the time of the shooting. None with Marine sniper backgrounds. Then I discreetly checked out everybody in the Office of Security, too. Some knew about the site, of course, even though they didn’t know what it was for. But Grant, the bottom line is, none of that matters. All the SAD and OS staff have air-tight alibis for that morning.”
He nodded. “While you tackled it from the bottom, trying to find the shooter, I approached it from the top, trying to find the mole. And I’m dead-ending, too. To sign off on something as extreme as a hit-let alone a hit on U.S. soil, which is illegal as hell-you’d need a presidential finding. That White House order would be sent directly to the people down the hall from me, then go through me for implementation. Nobody beneath me could initiate or pull off a full-black op like that on his own, because nobody below him would follow orders that drastic without double-checking right back up the chain of command. There are just too many procedural sign-offs along the way.”