“Take off his restraints and please leave.”
Tire Iron looked aghast. “I would not recommend—”
“I didn’t ask for your recommendation. I gave you an order.”
The guards took off the chain, cuffs, and ankle manacles. Tire Iron left them on the floor and started to walk out.
“Take them with you,” Holmes told him. He wasn’t about to let a pissed-off guard leave hard objects next to a man whose own anger could not yet be measured. That was passive-aggressiveness on Tire Iron’s part, thought the deputy director. He would pay for it, too. In fact, if he wasn’t careful, he’d end up pulling guard duty at G-bay, widely scorned as a miserable assignment.
Holmes was hardly unprotected. Security cameras remained on, and highly trained personnel waited only steps away.
“Innocent?” Holmes said when they were alone. “Well, this may surprise you, Mr. Mancur, but I believe you.”
“What was this, then?” Ruhi shook his hands as if they were still cuffed. “Some kind of game?” But he had stopped shouting.
Anger, though, was still present in his tense features; and Holmes knew that if words were rocks, he surely would have been stoned with every syllable that had come out of Mancur’s mouth.
“No, not a game,” Holmes told him. “May I call you Ruhi?”
“May I call you whatever your name is?”
Holmes smiled, almost said touché, and nodded. “It’s Bob. And please do. Look, Ruhi, this is definitely not a game. We have a proposition we want to run by you.”
“We? I don’t even know on whose behalf you’re speaking, Bob.”
He is very angry, thought Holmes. He needs softening. The deputy director pressed a button.
“What’s that for?” Ruhi asked. “Lurch and his sidekick?” He rolled his eyes toward the door.
“Not quite.”
Agent Candace Anders entered the room through a side door that most detainees never noticed till it opened, usually to accommodate a team of security personnel. Ruhi appeared surprised, of course, for another reason, but evidently not pleased. He shook his head and looked away. Holmes watched him closely. This was critical. How angry was he at her?
“You sure had me fooled,” Ruhi said seconds later when he looked back at Anders. “But I guess that’s your job.”
“So was saving your life, but I would have done it anyway,” she replied, working the script like the pro she was.
“Really? And why is that?”
“I think you know why.”
“The fact that you’re saying that in front of him leaves plenty of room to make me wonder.”
“I get polygraphed, too,” she replied.
Oh, she’s good, Holmes thought. Very good. On a tightrope and balanced perfectly.
“Okay, I’m alive, thanks to you,” Ruhi said. “Now, are you guys going to let me go? I’m guessing not.”
“You’re going to have to earn your freedom, Ruhi,” Holmes said.
“Oh, shit. Here we go again,” Ruhi muttered. “You’re the good cop. Maybe she is, too. I don’t know,” he said directly to Candace. “But the way I figure it, Lurch out there is the bad one who’s abused me, by any human rights standard, and yet you’re telling me that I have to earn my freedom?”
“Ruhi, after what you’ve been through since your detention—”
“Try ‘abduction,’” he interrupted.
“Since your apprehension?”
Ruhi waved away the issue in disgust.
“After what we put you through, your freedom will never come easily again. But you could have it, if you listen carefully to what I have to say.”
For several seconds Holmes didn’t think the detainee would listen to him at all. He wouldn’t have been surprised, in fact, if Ruhi had covered his ears with his hands.
But the man looked him in the eye and said, “Go ahead. Tell me what I have to do to get out of here.”
Lana pulled into her driveway still thinking about Mancur’s emails. She’d left a message for Deputy Director Holmes, letting him know that she was getting very close to puzzling out those messages to Islamists. Bob had been too busy to meet with her or take her call. She wondered what he’d been up to.
She’d been plenty busy finding clear evidence of Chinese fingerprints on the emails that Ruhi allegedly sent to al-Awlaki and other Islamists. Enough data that if she had to give Holmes an answer right away, she would have to say that the detainee looked like an innocent man to her, too. His claim that the Chinese were out to get him for his outspoken opposition to tar sands pipelines was starting to look plausible.
It wasn’t as thorough an analysis as Lana would have liked to have performed — and she would go back to work on it from her home office in the next few minutes — but Chinese hackers had definitely sent out several of those awkwardly worded emails, which made them first on her list of suspects for all the others that she hadn’t confirmed. Furthermore, she had found nothing to suggest that Mancur had the technical know-how to replicate the highest levels of cyberspying.
She didn’t bother parking in the garage, because she planned to drive Irene to the Metro station. Local rail service had been restored this afternoon, a miracle that rivaled, in Lana’s view, the rapprochement between her daughter and the girl’s babysitter.
Don’t use that word. It’s “caregiver.” “Babysitter” drove Emma nuts. No sense setting her off unnecessarily.
Lana figured Irene would be overjoyed to be relieved a little early. If a florist had been open, she would have brought her flowers for returning to Emma’s side; but the flower business was not up and running yet. As national priorities went, it fell somewhere south of rodent tacky pads. The latter were in sharp demand because rats had behaved as if the power outage were the bonanza that thousand of generations of the pesky little beasts had been waiting for.
So Lana did not come bearing flowers, but she had rushed into the understocked commissary at Fort Meade to pick up chocolates for Irene.
Pleased to find her front door properly locked, Lana walked in as Irene — still in her pajamas and bathrobe, weirdly enough — careened across the room as if pushed. She stumbled into the stone hearth hard enough to chip a bone.
What’s going on? Was Emma kicking her again? Jesus Christ!
But wait a minute, Lana cautioned herself. Emma’s not doing anything. Emma’s right there, sleeping on the couch.
She looked back at Irene. The caregiver’s mouth was moving, but no words were coming out.
Lana rushed to help her, thinking she might have been suffering a stroke. “Are you all right?”
More mouthing. Still no words, though.
Lana helped her to the recliner, where the older woman collapsed. That was when Lana got a good look at Irene’s eyes. Each one appeared as dark and small as a pebble at the bottom of a deep well. So tiny, so impenetrable, that Lana looked away, searching the room for a reason that her trusted friend was so… discombobulated.
The answer came as soon as she spotted the prescription pill bottle on its side, a handful of Tylenol with codeine lying on an end table.
“Handful” felt like the right word, because it looked like Irene had taken a lot of the opiates.
Maybe Emma had, too.
“Emma!” Lana shook her sleeping daughter when it dawned on her that the girl might have overdosed.
Quickly, Lana dropped to her knees and checked Emma’s pulse.
She had a strong one. Thank God!
“Emma, wake up.” She squeezed her daughter’s cheeks. Slapped her gently.