MELVIN MARS WAS WAITING out front for them when they got back to their apartment that night.
“Why didn’t you just go up, Melvin?” asked Jamison. “You have a key and the passcode.”
“It’s your place, not mine,” said Mars, smiling. “I’m not looking to intrude on your space.”
“We haven’t had dinner yet. We could go out.”
“That sounds great.”
They all turned to see Harper Brown striding over from her car.
“I’d been waiting for you to get back too,” said Brown. She looked up at Mars. “I didn’t know you were doing the same.”
“Melvin Mars, this is Agent Harper Brown with the DIA.”
Brown looked intrigued. “Melvin Mars, the former football player?”
Mars smiled. “That’s not how most people would describe me. Usually it starts with ‘You mean Mars, Melvin, that dude on Texas’s death row?’”
“And Decker got you off,” noted Brown.
“We all got him off,” said Decker. “Including Melvin. He was there at the very end when we nearly got blown up. And he’s already saved my butt up here.”
“Impressive,” said Brown. “I also read that you got a very sweet payoff from the government.”
“No more than he deserved,” said Jamison. “In fact, money doesn’t come close to compensating him for twenty years of his life.”
“I’m not arguing with that. So let’s go to dinner and I can get to know your friend better.”
“Why?” asked Decker.
“In my off hours I’m actually a very social person, Decker,” said Brown.
* * *
They were seated at a table in the middle of a Vietnamese restaurant in D.C. Brown had suggested it.
Decker looked at the menu and said, “I don’t recognize one thing on here.”
“I can order for you, Decker,” said Brown.
Decker dropped his menu. “Sounds good to me. Do they have fries?”
Mars handed her his menu. “I’m in the same boat as Decker, so you can order for me too.”
Brown looked at Jamison. “You good, or you want me to do the honors for you too?”
“I love Vietnamese food,” replied Jamison in an irritated voice.
When the waitress came, Brown ordered for the three of them, in Vietnamese.
“Impressive,” said Mars as the waitress walked off. “I can barely make my way around English.”
“Come on, Melvin, you graduated from UT early with a business degree,” pointed out Jamison.
“Prison doesn’t improve one’s brainpower. At least not mine. Not after twenty years.”
“Did you find anything in the files at Dabney’s office?” Decker asked Brown.
She shot Mars a glance. “I doubt he’s cleared to hear this.”
“Neither are we,” pointed out Decker. “You can trust Melvin,” he added.
“Okay, no, we found nothing in the files, but we’re still looking. We were hoping for a smoking gun but didn’t find one. How about you?”
“We haven’t found a gun, much less a smoking one. But we have questions, like if Dabney was working with Berkshire, why meet near the Hoover Building? He already had a meeting scheduled that morning. And if she was a spy I doubt she would be attending.”
“That’s true.”
“And as Jamison pointed out, if they weren’t working together it’s a helluva coincidence to have one spy kill another unrelated spy.”
Brown glanced at Jamison. “Another good observation, Jamison. You’re showing a real talent for this area.”
Jamison didn’t respond to this remark.
Decker added, “And if Berkshire wasn’t spying anymore, she had a weird retirement. Million-dollar condo and six-figure ride paired with a crappy farmhouse and an old, dented Honda.”
“I don’t disagree,” said Brown. “It’s all weird.”
“And we still haven’t accounted for the person who nearly killed me and stole the flash drive. Berkshire was dead and Dabney was on his deathbed at the time. So there’s a third party out there.”
“Who wanted that flash drive,” observed Brown.
“And I wonder what was on there?” said Decker.
“What else? More stolen secrets,” replied Brown.
“You think?” he said.
“What else could it be?”
“If I knew the answer to that I wouldn’t be asking the question. But if Dabney and Berkshire were working together, we should be able to find some connection.”
“All I can tell you, Decker, is that the first inkling we had that Dabney had gone bad was recently. He’s worked on other DIA projects before and we had no problems. And he also had no incentives to steal. The guy was in great shape financially. It was only this gambling debt problem that pushed him over the edge.” She glanced at Mars. “You carry this to your grave, okay?”
He put up his hands in mock surrender, smiled, and said, “Hey, I’m on your side, okay? I’m going to forget everything you guys say tonight.”
Brown smiled and said, “I knew I liked you.” She turned back to Decker. “And Dabney had to routinely take polygraphs to keep his security clearance status up to date. He never failed one.”
“So you’re convinced that this was just a one-off?”
“Unless you can show me something to the contrary.”
Jamison interjected, “But he was able to sell the secrets very quickly.”
“I know. You said that before and it’s a valid point. But it’s a leap of logic to go from that to the conclusion that the guy’s been stealing secrets for a long time.”
“Well, we’ll see if we can get your logic to match up with ours at some point,” said Jamison tersely.
The two women did a bit of a stare-down.
Fortunately, their food came right then and they started eating.
Brown eyed Mars. “So how do you spend your time now?”
“Doing a little coaching at the high school level. Basically trying to figure the rest of my life out.”
“You two have something in common,” said Decker.
“What’s that?” asked Mars.
“You’re both rich.”
When Mars eyed Brown she said, “Nothing to do with me. I inherited. Just luck of birth.”
“Yeah, that’s just great,” Jamison muttered under her breath.
“I don’t think of myself as rich,” said Mars. “Maybe I would if I had earned the money playing ball.”
“You earned the money, Melvin,” said Decker. “With twenty years of your life.”
* * *
After they finished their meal and left the restaurant, Brown walked ahead talking to Mars, while Jamison and Decker were paired up about ten feet behind them.
“Brown has quite the family lineage,” said Jamison.
“Well, at least she’s not resting on all her dough and spending her time attending galas and soirees and shit like that. She’s out there in uniform fighting the good fight.”
“Yeah, she’s absolutely perfect.”
Decker glanced at her. “You’re sounding jealous again, Alex. It’s not a good look on you.”
Jamison let out a long breath. “Yeah, I know. But that woman has something about her that just rubs me raw just by looking at her. You ever have anyone like that in your life?”
“Yeah, my fifth-grade teacher, but I got over it.”
They watched as something Mars said made Brown laugh out loud. She bumped him lightly with her hip and then tucked her arm through his as they walked along.
Jamison quickly eyed Decker. “Okay, what’s that about?”
“What’s what about?” said Decker, who’d been lost in his own thoughts. He wasn’t even looking at the pair up ahead.
Jamison sighed. “Never mind.”