9
Parrish was let into Grant’s house by a housekeeper who told him that Taryn Grant was in her “study”: the SCIF in the basement.
Grant was standing behind her desk, talking into a hardwired phone. She used a yellow pencil to point him at a chair.
He sat, and while she talked to somebody about developing a new line of Samsung cell phone apps—it sounded crooked to Parrish, but what did he know?—he considered lying to her about the attempt to mug Davenport.
And decided against it.
Grant was saying, to someone, “Look: I don’t want you to copy the code. I want you to look at what the code produces and I want you to produce the identical fuckin’ app with a different batch of code and I want you to translate it into fucking Zulu. Are the fuckin’ Zulus writing their own apps? Then find out. Call me back tomorrow. I want numbers.”
Grant was wearing a white blouse and an ankle-length white skirt, both with cutouts that looked like lace and offered peeks at what lay beneath. What lay beneath, Parrish thought, was either nothing at all or a body stocking that precisely matched her complexion.
Either way, it wouldn’t affect him much. Like Grant, he found power more compelling than sex. A quiet deal meeting at the Pentagon or the Senate Office Building, with serious people, was far more compelling than a piece of ass. Anybody’s ass.
Grant put the phone on the hook, and said to Parrish, “I mean, Jesus, how hard can it be?”
“What are you trying to do?”
She inspected him, rolling the yellow pencil between her fingers like a baton, and decided to take ten seconds for the answer. “There are about a billion apps for the Samsung phone and the iPhone. The apps are mostly in the major languages. So you take the best ones and you redo the code so nobody can sue you for plagiarism, or whatever that would be, and put it into a non-English language that doesn’t have that app. Like Zulu. There are ten million Zulu speakers, and I suspect about eighty percent of them have cell phones. Eight million phones times two bucks for an app is worth doing—especially if you can translate the same app into a whole bunch of other non-major languages that add up to a billion people or so, and if developing the app costs you ten grand.”
Parrish considered this, and finally said, “You know, I might have some people who’d be interested in talking to you about that. About specialized apps. I wonder if there are military apps? Tactical apps? I wonder . . .”
Grant waved him off. “No, no, no. The problem with that is, you have to do research. Research costs money. The way we’re doing it: we pay some nerd five grand to rewrite the app with different code and pay some college language professor another two grand to translate the language. No research. If it’s already a popular app in fifteen major languages, the market research is done, too.”
“I’ll stick to guns,” Parrish said.
“Good idea.” She’d been rocking from one foot to the other behind the desk and now she stopped: “Speaking of which?”
“We missed him. We spotted him leaving the Watergate, but he grabbed a cab and took it all the way to a tailor shop, where he stayed for almost an hour and a half,” Parrish said. “We set up to take him, but when he came out he spotted us . . . and he ran. He was screaming for help. Jim told me it kinda freaked them out—he was supposed to be a fighter. We were all set for that.”
“He ran?”
“Yes. Hauled ass. Moore was coming up from one side, took a swing at him, but he blocked it and punched Moore in the face, and then he ran down the street, screaming for help.”
The story made Grant smile—for a moment anyway—but then the smile vanished, and she said, “That’s two fuckups. Are you sure you’ve got the right people? Do I have the right people?”
“Yes, you do. Delta, SEALs—you couldn’t get anybody better. They can take a guy down. But this . . .”
“I told you he was smart. You need to spend some time looking him up on the Internet,” Grant said. “He’s also violent, and somebody’s going to get killed if you miss him again. I think it’s time to reconsider.”
“Reconsider how?” Parrish asked.
“Maybe we lay low. Ignore him. If we see him following me around, we file a stalking complaint with the D.C. police and the Marshals Service, based on his investigation back in Minnesota. Let him die on the vine.”
“Well, we could try that,” Parrish said. “Still might be a good idea to keep an eye on him.”
“You can do that—but don’t fuck it up. Stay back. If you lose him, let it go, don’t go running around like a bunch of idiots, where he’ll see you.”
THEY SAT LOOKING AT EACH OTHER across Grant’s desk, and Parrish said, “Of course, there is the other problem.”
She nodded. “Smalls.”
“Smalls and Whitehead. If Davenport develops anything on that—we’re talking about murder—the only way he could develop anything is to find the truck, which would get him to Jim, and Jim would get him to Flamma and Heracles, and from there to me, and then to you. If Smalls prepares the ground by going up to the Senate and tells people you tried to kill him . . . and murdered his friend . . .”
“He’d have no proof,” Grant said. “Not a goddamn thing.”
“He doesn’t need proof: he’s not taking you to federal court; he’s trying to undercut your possibilities. How many people have figured out that if you lie enough, and loud enough, people will start to believe?”
Grant twiddled the pencil, muttered, “Goddamn that Davenport. I’ll tell you something: he’s not a bad-looking guy, and he’s rich. I would have gone out with him, if he’d asked, before all the trouble.”
“That’s wonderful. Maybe you could say that on the floor of the Senate,” Parrish said.
“Watch your mouth,” Grant snapped. She went back to twiddling. “Maybe laying low is the way to go—but if he looks like he’s getting close to anything, we need to remove him. Permanently or otherwise. Let me know before you move, I’ll want the details.”
“If we kill him . . .”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know: all the cops in the world will be after us. But not cops exactly like him. Other cops, I can handle. He’s the one I’m not sure about.”
“He’s your basic operator. He’s Jim Ritter,” Parrish said.
“But smarter. Goddamnit, Parrish, he’s got me worried, and I’ve got other things to worry about.”
“We’ll handle him. One way or another.”
WHEN PARRISH WAS GONE, Grant wandered around the SCIF. The room had unadorned polished concrete walls, floor, and ceiling, designed to make any alterations instantly visible. All the wiring for power and communications came through the ceiling in a single stainless-steel tube that ran through a safelike steel compartment on the first floor. If somebody wished to bug her, they would have to do it by first eluding one of the best security systems ever built and then getting into either the first-floor steel safe or through the steel basement door, all without making a mark. She’d been told that was, essentially, impossible with current technology.
The only way to get at her would be through a computer bug introduced into the dual computer systems by a visitor. Both computers also carried software designed to detect any attempts to do that. The secure computer accepted only encrypted messages, preceded by recognized keystrokes, and transmitted only encrypted messages. The other computer, which was isolated from the first, was considered nonsecure and was used for routine communications only.
Both computers had isolation capabilities: everything coming and going was captured in a software box, where Grant could check it before it was released to the rest of the computer. Anything not recognized would be burned.
She was still paranoid enough that she rarely used the computers and was careful to shut them down and kill the power when not in use. A minute’s delay in powering them up was worth the security that step brought.
She found the uninflected gray concrete environment of the SCIF surprisingly conducive to thought. She thought about Davenport, about Parrish, about George Claxson and the Heracles operators, and about the presidency. Parrish and Claxson assured her that the operators didn’t know her name, didn’t know who they were indirectly working for. She didn’t believe that. If they couldn’t figure it out—Parrish, after all, was her paid aide—they were too dumb to be working for her.
Knowing or suspecting was okay, though, as long as they had no proof.
DAVENPORT’S INVESTIGATION could probably be derailed by one simple action: she could fire Parrish, call it all off, wait for six or ten years to run for president.
The cable news shows loved her—she was hot, sassy, well briefed, always prepared with a few quips about whatever the subject matter was, always willing to treat the producers and the talking heads as if they were actual movers and shakers, which they loved more than anything. She could go on her pick of cable shows and let drop that her only current political interest was serving the people of Minnesota, and, no, she wouldn’t be a candidate for the presidency. Not now anyway.
Getting rid of Parrish, her connection with Claxson and Heracles, and announcing that she wouldn’t run for the presidency, removed all her motives for attacking Smalls, or anyone else.
She thought about that for a while.
Thought about how the newsies clamored after even the possibility of getting video of the President walking between the White House and his helicopter. About how they chased him around a golf course, about cameramen taking video of his friggin’ airplane taking off. Because, you know, the President is in there.
That was more than celebrity: they treated the President like Caesar. Like Stalin. Like God.
And that’s what she wanted. She could feel it, taste it.
To be the most important, looked-at person on the planet.
She was young enough, she could wait . . .
But she didn’t want to.