“I’ll be in the garden,” he said to Otto. “Bring them to me there.”
Otto bowed and watched him go.
Chapter Eighteen
Paris’s cell rang as their plane was rolling to a stop on the tarmac.
“Yes?” he answered in a musical voice.
“It’s me,” said J. P. Sunderland.
“And—”
“It’s a wash. We hit all of the DMS bases likely to have a Mind-Reader substation, but without an Executive Order to shoot, the best we could manage was a standoff. Actually, kiddo,” Sunderland said, “we have several agents in the hospital and ears are up in local and regional law coast to coast. The Vice President is probably going to get his ass dragged before a subcommittee for this.”
“So,” Paris said with ice, “basically you fucked it up.”
“Basically, yes.”
“You could at least sound contrite.”
“Blow me, snowball,” said Sunderland. There was no heat in his voice; there never was. He was too practiced a game player to let any bad hand of cards, or even a bad run of cards, fracture his cool. “This was a fifty-fifty at best and we all knew that going in. You and your sister called this play. I was against it from the start as you well know. It’s a waste of resources that could have been better used further down the road.”
“We need that system. Without MindReader the money train’s going to slow to a halt, J.P.”
“I’ll practice singing the blues later. Right now it looks like the NSA will be stalled long enough for the power to shift back to the President. And, like I said, we may lose the Vice President over this.”
“What a pity,” drawled Paris. “That would bring the free world to its knees.”
“Okay, fair enough, who cares if he sinks? Point is, the NSA ploy would have had more pop to it if we’d used it when the big man was dead.”
“Who?”
“Who do you think?”
Paris laughed. “What are you saying? That you plan to have Church whacked?” He liked saying the word “whacked.”
“Me? Hell no… but there’s a rumor in the wind that there’s a contract out on him. Church and a few other troublemakers. If I didn’t know your dad was on a leash I’d say it was his kind of play. Doesn’t really matter, though. With any luck whoever has the contract will close it out before all the dust from today’s cluster fuck settles down. Otherwise Church might start looking around to see what’s in the wind, which is exactly what none of us wanted.”
Hecate had been leaning close to Paris in order to hear the conversation. Their eyes met and they shared a “he has a point” look.
“So now what?” Paris asked.
“Now we let the NSA thing play out. It’ll still take a while for the President to take back the reins, so we’ve still effectively hobbled the DMS for the rest of today. Maybe into tomorrow, but that’s starting to look like wishful thinking. After that we let the Vice President play the rest of his cards. Throw some scapegoats to the congressional wolves, yada yada… and then go to the next phase.”
Paris looked at Hecate, who nodded.
“Okay, J.P. You have any other ideas for how to get hold of Mind-Reader?”
“A few,” Sunderland said. “But nothing we can try until after Church is out of the mix.”
“Shit.”
Sunderland chuckled. It was the deep, throaty, hungry laugh of a bear who had a salmon gasping on the riverbank.
“Now,” he said, “let’s talk about Denver.”
Chapter Nineteen
I was waiting by the exit for my ride when my phone rang. I looked at the screen. Grace. Normally that would make me smile, but I had a flash of panic wondering if something bad had happened to her.
“Hello?”
“Joe…,” she said, sounding on edge.
“Hey,” I said. “Eggs?” A coded query about scramblers.
“Of course, you sodding twit.”
“Nice language. You kiss the Prime Minister with that mouth?”
She told me to sod off, but she said it with a laugh. I breathed a sigh of relief.
Grace Courtland, an agent for the British government and now head of the Baltimore Regional Office of the DMS, was one-third my local boss, one-third a comrade in arms who had stood with me in several of the weirdest and most terrible battles since I’d started working for the G, and one-third my girlfriend — and if anyone has ever had a more interesting, complex, and smoking-hot girlfriend, I never heard about it. The relationship was not a public thing; we were trying to keep it off the public record, though we were both realistic enough to accept that we were working with about a hundred class-A trained observers, so our little clandestine fling was probably old news in the pipeline.
“I’m glad to hear your voice,” I said.
“Glad to hear you, too,” she said. “I had images of you in the back of an NSA car with a sodding black bag over your head.”
“It’s not for a lack of them trying. I hope you’re not calling with more bad news. I’m going to stop answering my phone.”
“Yes. I heard about your man Faraday,” she said. “Bloody awful, Joe. I’m so sorry.”
I knew she meant it. Grace had lost a lot of people in the years she’d been one of Church’s field commanders.
“Thanks.”
Grace was on semi-permanent loan to the DMS from Barrier, a group in the U.K. that was a model for rapid-response science-based threat groups like ours. Church had asked for her personally, and he usually got what he wanted.
“I have some updated info for you, though,” she said. “Jerry Spencer is at the crime scene now. Some of Mr. Church’s friends in Wilmington were able to float false credentials for him. He’s at Gilpin’s apartment and will call in as soon as the smoke clears.”
“That’s something.” I felt a flicker of relief. Jerry Spencer was a former D.C. cop who’d put in twenty-plus as a homicide dick before acting as DCPD’s contribution to the same Homeland Security task force I’d worked. He could work a crime scene like no one else I ever met, and there had been some talk about the FBI recruiting him away to teach at Quantico once Jerry finished his twenty-five with D.C., but the DMS got to him first and now he runs our crime lab.
“Grace, it’s nice to know that the DMS hasn’t been forced to completely close up shop today. I guess you already know about Denver?”
“Yes. I tried to get the go-ahead to take Alpha Team out there, but we’re buttoned up too tightly here. Church tells me that Top and Bunny are on their way out there and that you’ll be joining them.”
“Did he tell you about the friends of his who have been killed?”
“He mentioned it, but he hasn’t gone into details yet. He also said something about a video I’m supposed to watch when I get a moment. No idea what’s on it, but Church seemed pretty upset.”
I smiled at the thought. “Church? Upset? How can you tell?”
“His tie was ever so slightly askew. With him that’s a sign of the apocalypse. He’s the only bloke I know who would probably show up to his own autopsy in a freshly pressed suit and talk the doctor through the postmortem.”
“No joke. But, listen, do you have any idea what’s brewing? Church is being even more cryptic than usual.”
“He’s that way when he’s caught off-guard. He plays it close until he knows the shape of it and then he drops it all on us. If he’s stalling us that means he’s digging for information himself.” She paused. “I suspect, my dear, that your cynical mind is traveling on the same routes as mine.”