28
Taryn Grant stood in the bay window at the back of her Georgetown mansion, watching the drizzle deflect off the multicolored foliage and the red-brick walkways of the sprawling garden she never thought to sit in. In the middle of a densely built world capital, she felt alone: not only was she alone in the house, and would be for the rest of the day, she couldn’t even see the city. She could see a few windows in the gabled roof of her next-door neighbor, but that was it. Other than that, she might be out in the Minnesota countryside.
The temperatures were in the low seventies, low enough that she shivered in the cool air, after the long string of stultifying hot and humid days. But the rain—she liked the idea of the rain. The rain was like a sign.
Time to roll the bones, she thought. Everything would ride on this night.
The idea was . . . arousing. In a sexual sense. She took a deep breath, feeling the heat between her thighs, turned away from the window, and walked through the kitchen to the basement door, to the SCIF, walked down the stairs, got her pistol from the desk.
The gun was a Beretta 92F, once owned by a security man who’d killed for her and was now dead himself. He’d picked the gun up after a firefight in Iraq, had taken it off the body of a dead intelligence officer who’d made the mistake of popping up from behind a wall at the wrong split second. In movie cop terms, the piece was cold as ice.
She carried the Beretta up the stairs, stopped in the kitchen to pick up a plastic mixing bowl and a bottle of dishwashing liquid, which she took back to the laundry room. There, she popped the magazine and thumbed the fifteen rounds out on the top of the dryer. She poured the dishwashing liquid in the bowl, dropped the rounds in. Using a dishrag, she scrubbed each round clean until the brass shone like a new gold coin, eliminating any possible fingerprints. That done, she rolled the rounds out on the dryer again and washed the bowl in the utility sink.
Next step: she took a bottle of bleach from the cupboard, poured it in the bowl until it was two-thirds full, and dropped the rounds in. She let them sit for a minute, then gingerly picked each one out with a paper towel, dried it, and lined them all up on a paper towel on the dryer top. The magazine went into the bleach for a minute. She took it out, again handling it with a paper towel, patted and waved it dry. No more DNA.
When the fifteen rounds and the magazine were thoroughly dry, and yet again with paper towels, she pushed the cartridges into the magazine and loaded the mag back into the pistol. She finally put the gun in a new garbage bag.
None of that technique came from the CIA or the Intelligence Committee. It was all hot off the Internet.
SHE CARRIED THE PISTOL back to her bedroom, where she lay on the bed for five minutes, working out the exact sequence of events, while getting her courage up and fixing it steadfastly in her heart. What did the Buddha say? Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.
When the moment was clear to her, she packed an overnight case with jeans, a black cashmere sweater, a hooded black nylon rain jacket, sneakers, and a leather shoulder bag with the gun inside. Her murder gear. On top would go a travel kit, fashion blouse, jacket, slacks, and shoes for the following day.
She showered, did her makeup, dabbed a bit of Tom Ford Black Orchid on her earlobes, the inside of her wrists, and at the top of her spine. She dressed in a notable emerald Versace summer gown, which subtly displayed her long legs through a shifting slit, and by seven o’clock was in a taxi headed to the Park Hyatt, where the U.S. Public Hospital Association was holding its annual summer soirée. And where she’d reserved a suite for the night.
By seven forty-five, right on time, she was in the room. She retouched her makeup, shook out her hair, got her jeweled clutch purse with the plain black burner phone in it, and, at eight, walked into the ballroom. Almost the first person she saw, off to her right, dressed in a black tuxedo, was Porter Smalls.
And Smalls saw her, displayed a white flash of teeth—not a smile, a grimace—and turned away. She headed left and began working the crowd.
PARRISH CALLED at ten minutes to nine. Grant glanced at the phone, and said to the doctor she was talking with, “I’m sorry—I have to take this.”
“The President?”
“I don’t think the President wants to chat with me,” Grant said, laughing. “We do have our small differences.”
She stepped out in the hall, walking toward the elevators, and said, “Yes?”
“On my way. Ten minutes.”
“How about the other guy? Where is he?”
“He’s closer. He aims to get there right at nine-thirty.”
In the allotted ten minutes, she transformed herself in her room. She pinned her hair up, got into her jeans, sweater, sneakers, and hooded nylon jacket. She pulled on a pair of thin leather gloves, took the Beretta out of the shoulder bag, jacked a shell into the chamber, made sure the safety was on, and put it back in the bag, under her purse, the grip up where her hand could fall on it easily.
She left her regular phone on the dressing table. That done, she checked the hall, hung a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door, took the elevator down to four, and, from there, the stairs down to the street level. Several people were in the lobby as she hurried through, her head covered by the hood, her face turned away as best she could manage.
Parrish was waiting. He popped the door of an anonymous Toyota sedan, she climbed in, and they were off. “This isn’t your car,” she said.
“It’s a Hertz. I don’t want my car seen at Charlie’s house.”
“Which could be traced . . .”
“Yeah, if I’d rented it under my own name, which I didn’t. I’ll take it back, they’ll rent it again, and by the time anybody could trace it, there’ll have been five more people inside.”
“Paranoid, are we?”
“You’re not paranoid when people are out to get you. And people are definitely out to get us.”
CHARLIE DOUGLAS, Heracles’s principal attorney, lived in the town of Great Falls, a tedious drive at rush hour, but only a half hour at nine o’clock. They drove most of the way in silence, Grant with what felt like a hand squeezing her heart. Douglas lived in a white pillared house on Chesapeake Drive, two stories high in a center section, with lower wings to either side. An American flag hung vertically from a rack on the second floor, with an overhead light to shine on it at night. The house itself was set above the road in a dark forest of scattered pines and looming deciduous trees—oaks, Grant thought.
“George said to look for the flag,” Parrish said, as he turned into the driveway.
“Anybody here besides us four?” Grant said. “I don’t want anyone else seeing my face.”
“Nobody. I don’t want anyone to see me, either. Charlie’s a widower; he said his housekeeper is gone at six o’clock.” Looking at the black SUV parked in the driveway, Parrish added, “George is here. He told me he rented a Land Rover, which is a George thing to do.”
He parked, and Grant said, “What I’m mostly worried about is blackmail. If they record us, if there are cameras . . .”
Parrish was shaking his head. “There won’t be. Nobody could afford to have this on the record, any kind of record, anytime.”
Grant let Parrish lead the way to the front door, which opened as they walked up. Douglas stood there, a glass of whiskey in his hand. He was an older man, slightly stooped, with thick white hair and heavy eyebrows, each as long and as wide as Grant’s little finger. “Come in,” he said.
They stepped inside, Douglas sticking his head out and looking both ways as if he expected a busful of FBI agents to land on his doorstep. He stepped back inside, locked the door.
“When George was turned loose, one of the conditions was that he wear an ankle monitor,” Douglas said. “They’ll know he’s here, but why shouldn’t he be? And we really do need to talk business.”
Grant: “There’s no chance that it can monitor the conversation, is there?”
“No, that would be illegal,” Douglas said. “It would threaten their whole case.”
Grant nodded, and Douglas led the way to the living room, where Claxson was sitting in a leather chair, another glass of whiskey by his hand. Grant doubted that she’d be offered one. Douglas asked, “Would you like a drink? I have a split of champagne, unless you like a nice snort of Jack Daniel’s.”
So she’d been wrong about that. She was still behind Parrish, ten feet from Claxson, with Douglas off to her right, walking toward the liquor cabinet.
Grant didn’t bother to reply. She had her hand on the pistol; the pistol felt electrified, as the checkering on the grip bit into her hand. She’d flicked off the safety as they walked down the hallway from the front door. Now she pulled it out and, with no hesitation, shot Parrish in the back between the shoulder blades.
The muzzle blast was like a slap on the head, though slightly muffled by the carpets, drapes, and soft furniture. Parrish pitched forward onto his face. Claxson shouted something she didn’t comprehend and tried to get out of the leather chair, rolled slightly to his left, eyes wide, and she shot him in the chest and side—two quick taps—from five feet.
Douglas had the crystal whiskey glass in his hand, and he pitched it at her head. She pulled her head back, got splashed with the whiskey. Douglas blurted, “Please don’t,” and she thrust the pistol at him and shot him twice in the chest.
Parrish and Claxson were dying but alive. Claxson had a pistol and had managed to claw it out, but it had fallen from his hand, as he faded, and now lay on the floor beside him. Grant stepped over to him and shot him twice in the head, stepped back, shot Parrish twice in the head, and finally went over to Douglas, who appeared to be dead, but she shot him in the forehead anyway.
She’d heard of people who’d been terribly wounded but had survived, so she took time to check each of the bodies: they were all clearly gone. As she bent over Parrish to retrieve his car keys—she’d drive the Toyota back to Washington—there was a bright flash of car lights, coming fast, and somebody at the door, pounding.
She froze. FBI? Davenport and the marshals? No way to get to Parrish’s car. She turned, ran to the back of the house, opened a door on the far wall of the darkened kitchen, and stepped out onto a deck.
The steady drizzle continued, and she ran across the back lawn and stepped through the row of trees at the back of the house. She was nearly blind under the canopy of trees, the starless sky offering no light, the headlights from the cars in front of the house and the glow of lights from within waning dramatically as she moved deeper into the woods.
Then a spark, a light of some kind, barely visible, two hundred yards away, maybe more, blinking on and off, occluded also by individual trees as she moved past them.
She heard a splintering crash from the front of the house and realized that somebody had broken through the heavy front door. She moved deeper into the woods but, unable to help herself, stopped and looked back.
Douglas hadn’t pulled the drapes on the side window in the living room, and Davenport was there, in its brightly lighted rectangle, like a man in a painting, moving toward the bodies, a burly man next to him, as well as two women—one white, one black—and she could now see Davenport shouting something and waving to the black woman, who was carrying a rifle, and she disappeared out the front door.
An insane rush of anger flooded through Grant, seeing Davenport there like a target in a shooting gallery. Without stopping to consider, she raised the pistol and fired three shots at the window and saw Davenport and the white woman go down.
She turned back to the spark of light she’d seen just before. It was a long way away, several hundred yards at least. She dropped the gun in her bag, and with her hands in front of her face to ward off unseen tree branches, she jogged toward it, tripping once, twice, three times, but she managed to stay on her feet.
She kept her eyes on the light, and eventually it grew closer and sharper. Somebody shouted behind her, yet the voice was hushed. The steady patter of the drizzle off the forest leaves, she realized, had the effect of muffling the shouting.
She moved on toward the light, came up behind a house. A different light went on nearby—motion-activated, she thought. There was no further activity.
Had to keep moving, she thought. She ran to the front of the house and out to the street. The street curved back toward Chesapeake, where she didn’t want to go, and the other direction seemed too dark. A cul-de-sac? She wasn’t sure, but she had no choice and ran that way, only to discover that it was.
But there was another spark of light across the lawn and through more trees, a couple of hundred yards to her left and away from Douglas’s house. She crossed the lawn, entered the trees, nearly fell again, eventually worked her way out to another street. This one had more houses, and she ran down the blacktopped road. With the solid footing, she could move faster. The house with the light she saw had three cars parked in the driveway, and she went on by.
She could follow the road guided by the lights coming from the houses on either side, and now by the sky overhead, which was light gray rather than almost black when obscured by trees overhead. She stepped in a hole, stumbled, caught herself, ran on. There was more shouting behind her, now distinctly distant, and, even farther away, the wail of a siren.
She hadn’t panicked. Not yet. But she could feel it clawing at her throat, trying to choke her, but she pushed it down. The farther she could get from Douglas’s house, the safer she should be. And the woods, always lapping at the sides of the road, provided impenetrable cover if she needed to hide from a passing car.
But they would find her, sooner or later, if she didn’t get completely clear, and now. With three dead and the shooter loose and on foot, they’d be putting up roadblocks, bringing in an army of cops to walk the woods.
The sound of the siren was coming from behind her but still distant. She’d gone a half mile or more, jogging and walking fast, when a garage door began rolling up at the house that she’d just passed. She stopped at the side of the road and watched as a small car, a green-and-white Mini, backed out of the garage. The garage door rolled down, and in the light she could see only a single person inside the car, small, probably a woman.
At the end of the driveway, the car turned toward her. She flipped down her hood to show her blond hair, and as the Mini slowly approached, she stiffened one leg to simulate limping and waved at the vehicle, which slowed some more, and Grant could see an elderly woman’s face peering out at her.
The car came up, stopped beside her, and she limped around to the passenger side. She already had the gun in her hand. When the driver’s-side window rolled down, the old lady said, “Is there something—”
Grant shot her in the face.
The car started to ease forward, the car in gear but the woman’s foot apparently still on the brake. With the street gradually inclining upward, Grant was able to reach inside the window and grab the door latch and open it. She had to struggle to stay with the car, as she unlatched the old lady’s safety belt and pulled her out on the street. Then Grant was inside.
She’d lucked out: the car had an automatic transmission. She put it in park, got out, ran back to the woman, dragged her body to the side of the road—she couldn’t have weighed a hundred pounds—and threw it under a spreading evergreen shrub. As she did, the woman’s phone fell out of her pocket. Grant crushed it underfoot and kicked it into the brush.
Back in the car, she drove slowly out to a main road, the one Parrish had driven in on, and turned back toward Washington. A mile down the road, two cops cars sped past, their lights flashing and their sirens screaming, into the murky darkness. Followed by a third, and a fourth, but no ambulances. She almost got lost twice, thinking about Davenport and the Watergate. There was a public garage at the Watergate.
SHE PARKED THE CAR at the Watergate forty-five minutes after leaving Great Falls. As she was getting out, she noticed a green bottle in the door pocket: hand cleaner. She rummaged around the inside of the car, found a packet of tissues, soaked one in the cleaner, which was mostly alcohol, and used it to wipe down the steering wheel and gearshift. She pulled her hood up, got out of the car, wiped down the seat, closed the door, locked it, and walked out to the street.
The Park Hyatt was a half mile away. She moved quickly, without running, up New Hampshire Avenue to 24th Street, north on 24th. She checked for cops, dropped the gun and magazine, separately, into sewers; it was still raining, and water bubbled over both as they disappeared through the grates and down the culverts.
At the Park Hyatt, hood still up, water trickling down the jacket, she caught an empty elevator and ten minutes later was back in her room.
Her hair was a mess, and she smelled like raw wet oak bark and the whiskey Douglas had thrown at her, and she was still sweating. She combed her hair out, hit it with a dryer, jumped into the shower, used the hotel soap to scrub herself down for a full two minutes. She had several small cuts on her hands from tree branches, but her face was clear. Out of the shower, she checked her hair and fluffed it with the dryer again, did a quick rework of her makeup, covered a scratch on the back of her hand with more makeup. The five quick dabs of Black Orchid. Her black clothing was locked in the overnight bag, to be dumped as soon as she could safely do it. She’d been gone an hour and a half, needed to mix, needed to be seen.
A lot.
She closed her eyes, took several long breaths, calmed herself. What would the Buddha do?
Her heartbeat slowed, a smile on her face, she was out of the suite.
SHE WALKED BACK into the party, heart pounding a bit more. She got a drink, swirled it around her mouth simply to saturate her breath with the odor of alcohol. She talked briefly to more hospital people—three women and two men—a couple of Minnesota congressmen, and finally, hunting around, spotted Porter Smalls, hooked into some conversations, and let herself be pushed in Smalls’s direction. She got close, blundered into him when she suddenly turned, spilling a little of her drink.
Smalls: “Whoa. Almost knocked me off the bluff. Excuse me—I meant, off my feet.”
Grant threw back her head and fake laughed, reached out and grabbed Smalls by one of his blue-green tourmaline shirt studs—chosen, she thought, to precisely match his eyes, the vain motherfucker—pulled him close, and muttered into his ear, “I knew what you meant, you piece of shit. You keep telling people I was involved in your drunken fuckfest, I’ll hand you your ass.”
Smalls tipped his head back, laughed, leaned close, muttered, “Get your hands off me, you murderous cunt.”
Grant was laughing with him, and they broke apart, both satisfied. Smalls got to call her a cunt to her face, and Grant had him as a witness to her being present at the tail end of the party, in a conversation neither one of them would forget.
Smalls was exactly what she’d wanted: the most credible witness imaginable.