“Yeah, sounds reasonable to me,” Roos said without missing a beat. “I mean, Eddy’s a high-ranking intelligence officer. Hell, he could be running the whole Agency before long. People would believe what he says.”
“I think they would,” Reilly said. “He’s a respectable pillar of the community. And even if there happened to be a few cuts and bruises on him, which I would hope we could avoid-he’d give us a pretty compelling testimony. There’s only one problem with that.”
“And what’s that?”
“I’m not in a reasonable mood.”
Roos smiled. He hadn’t expected anything less from Reilly. Not after everything the agent had gone through to find him. “No?”
“Not really,” Reilly said. “Besides, to be frank with you, I don’t really trust the system anymore.”
“You should,” Roos said. “You’ve fought for it all your life. It’s a sad day when an agent of justice loses his faith in it. It’s almost like you’re saying you’ve devoted your whole life to something worthless.”
“I wouldn’t go so far, Gordo. But it’s true that lately, it’s been letting me down. And I’m not fully convinced that you and Eddy here wouldn’t manage to pull a few strings or do a dirty and use some kind of leverage to make that tape disappear and ride back into town on your high horses. With all the nasty implications for my friends and me. We could put it on the Internet, but that wouldn’t work either. You’d just spin it off as another hoax from some conspiracy nut jobs.”
“I know what you mean,” Roos said. “It’s tough to beat the system sometimes.”
“So you see my dilemma.”
“I empathize. I do. But you said you had a decision to make. What’s option two?”
“Option two is: justice can wait.”
Roos wasn’t sure what Reilly meant. “I’m not sure I follow.”
“It means, let someone else deal with the big picture and the crimes of the past. Me, I’m a simple guy. I’ve got more focus.”
“And that focus is?”
“Beating the truth out of you with my bare hands.”
Ross chortled. He’d read a lot about Reilly-surveillance reports, case files-but he’d never spoken to him until now. He was actually starting to like Reilly, though it wouldn’t have any effect on what he had in store for the agent.
“Well, you know,” Roos said, “focus is good. And you and I-we’ve had this coming for a long time. From way back, in fact. Around the time you were ten, right?” He paused, knowing the words would have the intended effect on Reilly. “Why involve anyone else?”
Roos heard the slight pause, the one the agent would have loved to snuff out entirely, before Reilly said, “Exactly.”
“So what do you propose? I’d invite you up here for a chat and an Irish coffee, but something tells me you have something else in mind.”
“No, that sounds great. A sandwich would be nice too-I haven’t had lunch yet. But you did say we shouldn’t involve anyone else.”
“That, I did.”
“Then I need you to send those boys away.”
“What boys?”
“I need to see at least six guys leave your place before I come up.”
Roos snorted. “All six of them?”
“Actually, make that eight.”
“Eight? I think you overestimate my importance here. Or maybe you’re overestimating yourself.”
“Eight guys, Gordo. I want to see eight of them leave your cabin or I’m going to work on Eddy.”
Roos was curious. He wanted to see them leave?
Reilly was nearby. Had to be.
“Ah, well. Let’s say I could rustle up eight of my boys. How am I going to prove to you that they’re gone?”
“Have them drive down to the bottom of the mountain. Tell them to get out of their cars once they get to the main road, then get back in their cars and head back where they came from.”
Roos needed more information about where Reilly was. “And you’ll be watching?”
“I’ll see them, don’t worry. I’ve also got a spotter some ways up on Route Twenty-nine, on the way to Charlottesville. When he calls to say your boys have passed him, I’ll come to you. Just to make sure they don’t decide to double back ’cause they forgot something.”
“How do I know you’ll come alone?”
“It was my idea, wasn’t it?”
“What about Eddy?”
“I cut him loose.”
Roos thought about it. “OK,” he said. “I’ll need proof that you really have him.”
“Hang on.”
Roos heard some buffeting from the wind, then Tomblin’s voice came on. “Gordo?”
“You OK, Eddy?”
“I’m fine. Listen-”
More abrupt buffeting, like a phone being snatched, then Reilly’s voice came back. “We good to go?
“Sure. When are we doing this?”
“No time like the present,” Reilly said. “We’ve waited long enough, right? Ten minutes enough for them to hit the road?”
“Make it fifteen.”
“OK. I’ll see you soon,” Reilly said.
He clicked off before Roos could reply.
64
We had lift off.
On several levels.
The most literal, however, concerned the drone Kurt had brought with him.
I’d never seen one of these, but apparently they were all the rage, a brilliant piece of playful technology that was as much as a game changer as the original iPhone and the Oculus Rift.
I hadn’t been entirely facetious with Roos. Yes, I had Tomblin. Yes, he was Roos’s partner back in the day, which meant he probably knew a lot of what I wanted to know, maybe even about my dad. Yes, I could have made him talk and got the whole thing on video. But I really did think they would find a way to bury it. And I wasn’t sure we’d survive long enough to suffer that disappointment. I was holding the head of the National Clandestine Service, the CIA’s most secret department. You don’t just walk away from that. No, it really was about Roos and me. Any answers I wanted had to come from him and nobody else. What I’d do once I got them-well, I’d figure that out if I made it that far.
I was stunned by how easy it was to get the drone airborne. Kurt had brought a DJI Phantom, the Vision 2+ model, he explained, which had a built-in full HD camera hanging underneath it. It had only taken him a couple minutes to get it prepped, which involved taking it out of the box, manually screwing in the four plastic propellers, snapping the battery in place, doing a quick compass calibration and getting a GPS lock on our position by spinning it around itself on both axes, and syncing up the drone to the remote control unit he’d use to fly it. Easy enough, although we were lucky he’d done it before and knew how to pilot it with ease-he had one back at his place, but since that was a no-go zone, he had to buy a new one. It was small, a sleek white X-shape made out of plastic, with each of its arms not even a foot long. It was also light, weighing less than three pounds. It still managed to pack enough clever technology in that compact package to justify its thirteen-hundred-dollar price tag.
Our present location had been chosen to allow three things: we needed it to be close enough to Roos’s cabin so that it was within the flight range of the Phantom, which was about a mile; we needed it to also allow the drone to monitor the departure of his goon squad, follow them until they were well on their way out of here, and make sure they didn’t double back; and we needed it to give us the privacy to get on with our work.
We sent the drone up a first time before my call to Roos to get a closer, real-time picture of the situation. The weather was borderline-not so much the snow as the temperature, but the Phantom didn’t seem fazed by it. Kurt sent it up to around five hundred feet. It was so small that we stopped seeing it long before that, and its buzz was so discreet anyway that we stopped hearing it even longer before that. I was confident that Roos and his entourage wouldn’t know it was there.