3
When U.S. senator Taryn Grant heard that Smalls had survived, she got Jack Parrish in her basement SCIF and screamed at him for a while. SCIF, short for Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, was where you went to discuss classified information, which this sure as hell was.
“You said it was a done deal,” she shouted. “You said it was a perfect setup.”
“It was,” Parrish said, settling on a sofa. “I didn’t tell you it was a done deal—I told you it was ninety-nine percent. Even a hundred-to-one shot comes in every once in a while, and that’s what happened.”
“Now we’ve got a murder on our hands,” she shrieked. She was trembling with rage. “Instead of an accident, we’ve got a murder. You’ll have the FBI on me. Smalls will tell the FBI that I was behind it, and he’ll be right, won’t he? You silly shithead . . .”
She went on for a while, and Parrish, still sitting on the sofa, looked at his watch. He had a meeting with the three guys who’d screwed this particular pooch and couldn’t be more than fifteen minutes late. More than fifteen minutes and they’d be gone, as a routine precaution.
“Don’t look at your fuckin’ watch,” Grant shouted, saliva flying across the room. “Don’t look at your fuckin’ watch!”
“Can’t be late for a meeting,” Parrish said. He yawned, then asked, “Are you done yet?”
“Am I done yet? No, but you might be.”
“I don’t think so,” Parrish said, staying cool. He’d been screamed at before, and by senators with a lot more seniority than Grant. “We have way too many reasons to hang together, because, like the man said, if we don’t, we’ll hang separately. The fact is, the accident should have worked. If it had, we’d have taken a load off our backs and gotten rid of a major roadblock between you and the White House. Sometimes, things just don’t work—but you wouldn’t have gotten better odds—anywhere, anytime—on this one. And there’s no evidence that it was a hit. There’s nothing. The West Virginia cops think Smalls is a head case.”
Grant’s face was purple, but she struggled to calm herself. Parrish was right: even the best-laid plans failed sometimes. But he was wrong about the odds. She was extremely good at figuring odds, and there would have been a better way to do this. Example number one: find out where Smalls was going out for dinner and then shoot him in the back and take his money. That was simple enough, and nobody would be able to prove that it wasn’t a robbery. Parrish’s plan had had too many moving parts, and neither one of them had recognized that.
And she said so.
Parrish shrugged. “You could be right. On the other hand, if we’d shot him, the FBI would be all over the place and they’d never let go. The Senate wouldn’t let them. They’d have had the director up on the Hill every goddamn week until he came up with the perp.”
“You supply the perpetrator, dumbass,” Grant shouted. “You don’t have to supply a mountain of evidence! All you have to do is find some broken-ass Negro and put the gun in his backpack. That’s all anybody wants.”
“All right, I’ll talk to the guys about what happened and get them thinking about some other possibilities. Smalls is a real problem. You saw what the Republicans did with Obama and that birth certificate. No evidence of anything, but they kept talking, and that bullshit stuck with some people. If Smalls keeps talking about what happened during your election campaign, I don’t think you’ll go all the way. He’s got to be shut up,” Parrish said. And, “By the way, if you ever use the word ‘Negro’ outside this room, you can kiss the White House good-bye.”
SHE THOUGHT ABOUT IT for a couple of seconds—couldn’t argue with that, Parrish was right. She had a stack of magazines on her desk. After she squared them, she picked up the top one, a Vanity Fair, and dropped it in the wastebasket. “All right. We went off half-cocked on this. You came up with an idea, you had the guys, and I bought it. If we try again, it’s going to have to be something a little more subtle. Can’t shoot him; not now. I need ideas.”
“We’ll work on it,” Parrish said. Now that she’d calmed down, he realized that he could smell her, a smoky perfume that hung in the air like a Valentine’s invitation. “Maybe . . . I don’t know. Another scandal? I like that whole child porn thing that came up in your election run: that was cool. We’ll think about it.”
“Well, we can’t do child porn, that’s for sure. And this isn’t the Middle East; we can’t cut him down on some trumped-up bullshit that people will believe because they belong to some religious cult,” she said. “Next time, it better work or you and I are going to have a major problem. A real serious major problem.”
He may have sneered at her when he responded, “You know, you have to realize your limitations, Senator. Exactly what are you going to do? Report me to the police? You’ll go right down with me. We’re welded together. You go to the White House, I go with you. Get used to it.”
GRANT MOVED BEHIND HER DESK and gave it a kick. Parrish thought for a second that she’d done it out of anger, or had stumbled, but she stooped, and when she came up, she had a gun in her hand. Parrish knew all about guns and recognized it: a Beretta. A big one, a military-style 92. Loaded with 9mm man-killers, it’d produce internal cavitation that you could fit a football in.
She was moving toward him, and he was pressing back in the couch. He heard the safety click off, and if he tried to get up, she might pull the trigger.
“Don’t do that,” he blurted. “I don’t . . .”
“What am I gonna do? Who will I get to do it? Is that what you want to know?” She was shouting again, and there was a fleck of saliva at the corner of her mouth. “What if I get me? How’d that work?”
The muzzle was three feet from his nose, and he muttered, “That’d work fine, I guess. That’d be . . . Don’t do this . . .”
Grant’s finger was white on the trigger, and Parrish could plainly see that from thirty-six inches away, and he could hear her labored breathing . . . and then she stepped back, dropped her voice, and snarled, “Don’t ever fuck with me. I know your background. I know you’re a little crazy. Keep this in mind: I’m way, way crazier than you are.”
He hadn’t started to sweat until she backed away, but he was sweating now. “I see that,” he said. The gun was still pointed at his nose, her finger was still white on the trigger. She looked like she wanted to pull it, he could see it in her glittering blue eyes. “I’m okay with it. I won’t make a single fucking move without talking to you about it.”
“Better,” Grant said. She pointed the muzzle at the ceiling. “Now, is there anything we have to do about Smalls? I mean, right now?”
“Probably best to lay back in the weeds and not do anything,” Parrish said, his voice trembling. He tried to smooth it out. “If we decide to take another run at him, we have time. I’ll tell you what, though: he’s got his oppo people digging around through your investments back in Minnesota. If you want to be president, there better not be much back there.”
“There’s not. Nothing illegal. Not that he could get at anyway.” She stooped and dropped the gun in a desk drawer. Parrish noted which one it was in case he needed that information in the future. He would not be back down in this basement without a gun in his belt.
Though he probably wouldn’t need one. Before this confrontation, he’d thought of Grant as a Minnesota blonde, with everything that might suggest: nice, sweet, maybe a little above average. But not too much above average. And certainly not dumb.
That had changed in the last two minutes.
Two minutes later, when he went out the door, still alive, he realized that he’d suddenly come to respect her, as much as any sociopath could.
She’s crazier than I am . . .
WHEN HE WAS GONE, Grant remained in the basement, brooding about the mistake with Smalls and the possible consequences.
Would the cops figure out what had happened? Was there any way she could interfere without being tagged as responsible? Could Smalls somehow be blamed for the “accident”? If she got rid of Parrish—permanently, with a bullet—would that seal her off from any investigation? One other man knew about her arrangement with Parrish and had supplied the operators who went after Smalls. If she killed Parrish, he’d still be out there.
WHEN SHE’D BEEN ELECTED to the Senate, Taryn Grant had bought the mansion in Georgetown, which backed up to Dumbarton Park. The house was supposedly seventy years old, but if there were more than a few molecules left from the original structure, she hadn’t been able to find them. Built of red brick, with a terrific garden behind eight-foot brick walls, everything had been “updated” to the point where the house might as well have been built a year earlier.
She had an eye for good houses, and as stately as this house was, and as well located, the major attraction was that it had been previously occupied by the outgoing secretary of defense. The basement had been reworked at taxpayer expense to be absolutely secure and was known as a SCIF space, she’d learned when she got to Washington. She’d had her own security firm go over it inch by inch and they’d found no faults. Sitting down in the basement, she might as well have been in a bank vault.
If she’d actually shot Parrish, her biggest problem would have been cleanup and disposal, because nobody outside the place would have seen or heard anything. And, she thought, it might still come to that.
GRANT WAS RICH.
She was also tall, blond, and physically fit. She controlled most of a billion dollars, her share of her family’s agricultural commodities business, the fifth-largest privately held company in the United States, now run by an older brother. In addition, she owned two small but profitable Internet companies, run by remote control through CEOs as ruthless as she was, but with less money.
As a tall, blond, physically fit woman, there were rumors about her supposedly voracious sexuality, though nobody had the photos. The fact was, she was okay with occasional sex, if performed discreetly, with attractive men, but she was hardly voracious.
Power, not sex, was the drug she mainlined. She wasn’t much interested in policy, or the Senate, or being on television: she wanted the hammer, the biggest one she could find. Barack Obama was her hero for one reason and one reason alone: he’d served a single term in the U.S. Senate before he became president.
“Madam President” had a nice round sound to it.
If everything went just right, Grant was two years out.
But not everything was going just right because Parrish’s goons had failed on what had seemed a straightforward mission: kill Smalls and make it look like an accident. Parrish had stood in the SCIF and laid it out like a commando mission: “That’s all these guys have done, for most of their adult lives. The people they took out . . . not all of them were from enemy countries. Sometimes, you need to remove a particular guy in a friendly country.”
She’d asked, “Like Pakistan?”
“Yeah. And like Germany.”
FOUR DAYS AFTER she’d pulled the gun on Parrish, Grant had him back in the SCIF. A blinking red light on her desk told her that he was armed. She opened the desk drawer where she kept the Beretta so it would be handy, but she didn’t take it out.
She was angry all over again, though this time better controlled.
“You know that there was some controversy around my election . . . that people died,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes, I know,” Parrish said.
“Then you know the name Lucas Davenport?”
“I read all the clips. He was the cop who led the investigation,” Parrish said.
“A year or so after the investigation, he was appointed to be a U.S. Marshal,” Grant said. “He got the job because Smalls and the former Minnesota governor . . .”
“Henderson, the guy who ran for vice president.”
“Yes. They pulled some strings in Washington, got him the new job,” Grant said. “I don’t know what his position is, except that he was involved in a major shoot-out down in Texas last year. Anyway, guess what? Smalls has him on your accident case.”
“He won’t find anything,” Parrish said. “There’s nothing to find. I’ve read the West Virginia State Police files now—I had a guy get copies off their computers—and they’ve officially determined that it was a one-car accident resulting in minor injuries to one person and death to the other. No alcohol involved, no charges pending. Routine. Case closed.”
“Happy to hear it. But I need to know what Davenport’s doing,” Grant said. “He is intelligent and he is dangerous. When I say dangerous, I mean a killer. You think your superspies can handle that?”
Parrish didn’t like the sarcasm, but he said, “Sure. I’ll need some money.”
“We have a family office in Minneapolis,” Grant said. “There’s a man there named Frank Reese. I will send him a message, telling him to expect you or one of your associates. He will give you whatever amount you need, in cash, but I expect it to be accounted for. I’m not cheap, but I won’t tolerate being chumped.”
“I understand,” Parrish said. “When you say send a message . . .”
“Thoroughly encrypted, to a site that only Reese and I know about,” Grant said.
“Good. I’m impressed,” Parrish said. “Look, if this gets complicated, would it be better to ask Reese for a big chunk all at once or better to go back to him several times?”
“How much do you need?” she asked.
“I don’t know. If every time we go back, it could be tied to a particular . . . event . . . that could be a problem. We may need several events over the next couple of years.”
She nodded. “I’ll tell Reese to give you a half,” she said. “How soon can you look at Davenport?”
“Half of what?”
“Half a million,” she said. “Is that going to cover it?”
Impressed again, though Parrish didn’t say so. “I’ll fly out to Minneapolis this afternoon. I’ll want to handle Reese myself. Keep the loop tight,” Parrish said. “I’ll have somebody on Davenport right away, figure out where he’s staying.”
“He probably doesn’t have a hotel yet. I’ve been told he won’t actually get here until tomorrow or the next day.”
“Where are you getting this information?” Parrish asked.
“I have a friend in the Smalls organization.”
“Huh.” Impressed again. “If Davenport’s flying commercial, we can pick out his flight and spot him at the airport when he gets here.”
“Do that.” She waved him toward the door. “Stay in touch.”
On the way out, Parrish paused, then turned. “You want to know everything, so I have a proposition that you might be interested in. Or, you can kill it.”
“What?”
“If this Davenport guy wasn’t investigating the incident, who would be?”
She thought about it, and said, “I don’t know. Maybe nobody. Davenport has a personal problem with me. He thinks I had something to do with the murders around my election. He wants to get me. Nobody else, that I can think of, has the same incentive, except maybe Smalls himself.”
“Still, he’s a small-town cop, right?”
“Jesus, Parrish, it’s not a small town,” Grant said. “There are three million people in the Twin Cities metro area. Davenport was an agent for the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. They’ve got the technical abilities of the FBI.”
“Still . . .”
“Still, bullshit. I know a lot about Davenport. He dropped out of law enforcement for a couple of years, invented a computer software company, and sold out for something between twenty and thirty million dollars, and he’s now worth maybe forty million. He built that company and sold it in two years, starting with nothing. If you underestimate him, he’ll eat you alive.”
“All right, I get it. If we had a guy who wasn’t as smart and didn’t have the incentive, that would be better for us, right? What if Davenport got mugged and hurt? Not killed, but hurt bad enough to take him out of it. Take him out long enough that the Smalls accident is old news. Antique news.”
Grant leaned back in the office chair, pursed her lips. After a while, she said, “That has some appeal. For one thing, I’d like to see him get hurt. He does have a history as a shooter, though. It’d be dangerous.”
“My guys could pull it off. Abort at the last second, if something doesn’t smell right. They’d rob him, so it’d look just like a mugging.”
She considered for another moment, and said, “Let’s take a look at him first. See what he’s up to, whether it’ll go anywhere. Then we can consider taking him down.”
Parrish nodded. “I’ll have somebody look at his hotel room. Tell your man in Minneapolis I’m on my way.”
WHEN PARRISH HAD GONE, Grant closed down the SCIF, found the housekeeper, told her to bring a fried-egg sandwich with ketchup and onions and a glass of Chablis into the breakfast room.
She had homework to do, constituency stuff, boring but necessary. She read through notes from her chief of staff and her issues team, but when the sandwich came, she put the paper aside and ate, peering out into the backyard garden. Three huge oaks, three smaller hard maples, a Japanese maple specimen that would turn flaming red in September, a ginkgo tree, all surrounded by a rose garden.
She thought about Davenport. She’d told Parrish that she was crazy; and she’d heard that Parrish was a couple of fries short of a Happy Meal himself.
In her mind, there were all kinds of crazy, including a couple of kinds that could be useful if they didn’t take you too far out. A touch of OCD helped you focus obsessively, when you needed to do that. A bit of the sociopath was always helpful in business: you took care of yourself because nobody else would.
Grant was all of that, a little bit of OCD, a little bit of sociopathy . . . and she thought Davenport was as well. He was surely a sociopath, given his record of killings, she thought. How could he live with himself if he weren’t?
The problem was, he was also seriously intelligent. She wasn’t sure that Parrish appreciated that. Davenport had made that big wad of software cash, but instead of trying to work it, he’d gone back to hunting.
He was nuts, she thought, like she was. He was coming for her.
Something had to be done.