Dead Eye

PROLOGUE

Leland Babbitt shot through the doors of the Hay-Adams Hotel and ran down the steps to the street like he had someplace to be.

The White House was just across Lafayette Square, awash in lights and radiant in the cold rainy evening, but Babbitt ignored the view, looked to his right, and began racing toward the limo waiting for him there.

The chauffeur hadn’t been expecting his passenger for another hour and a half, but he was a pro; he quickly extracted himself from the warm Town Car and opened the back door. He noticed that the man seemed to have forgotten his overcoat in his haste — to say nothing of his wife.

The thickly built passenger folded quickly into the limo; the driver climbed back behind the wheel and looked into the rearview mirror for instructions.

In a voice commanding yet hurried, Babbitt said, “Sixteen twenty-six Crescent Place. Break every law you need to break, but get me there now!”

The chauffeur didn’t know his passenger; he’d only been hired for the night to ferry Mr. Babbitt and his wife from their home in Chevy Chase to a black-tie gala here at the Hay-Adams, and then back home again. But the driver knew this town. He’d been shuffling VIPs around D.C. for a quarter century; this wasn’t the first time some suit had told him to blow through the lights to get to a destination on the double.

He started the engine. “You got a badge?” he asked, still making eye contact with the man in the backseat via the rearview mirror.

“Play like I said yes.”

The chauffeur’s eyebrows rose now. He’d danced this dance before. “National security?” he asked.

“You bet your ass.”

With a shrug the driver said, “That’ll work,” and he shoved the transmission into gear and squealed the tires. Behind him, his passenger lifted his cell phone to his ear.

“En route.”

The chauffeur couldn’t imagine what was so important on Crescent Place, a two-lane road of majestic Georgians and neo-Colonials, and he was certain he would never know. This was D.C., after all. Shit went down behind the gates of tony residences all over the city that was far above the driver’s pay grade.

His job began at the front door of one building, and it ended at the front door of another, and whatever went on inside was not his problem.

Babbitt had his phone clutched to his ear now, and even at speed the driver could hear the man’s voice clearly over the engine of the whisper-quiet Lincoln — short, soft blasts of interrogatives and shorter bleats that sounded like commands. The man behind the wheel did his best to tune the words out, standard operating procedure for a limo driver in Washington. Twenty-five years hauling dips, pols, spooks, K Street douchebags, and foreign dignitaries around the nation’s capital had taught the driver discretion, to ignore his passenger’s voice unless he himself was being addressed.

He could have listened in; surely the fate of nations had been decided in the backseat of his limo more than once in his career.

But the driver, quite frankly, didn’t give a damn.

And tonight, even if he had tried to pick up any of his passenger’s side of the conversation, he would have heard only generic phrases, cryptic-speak, and alphanumeric references. The man in back had himself spent a lot of time in limos, and he had his own standard operating procedure when being chauffeured around — if he did not know good and well that the guy behind the wheel had Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information clearance with a full-scope polygraph and codeword access to the relevant program, then it was cryptic-speak or nothing at all.

Leland Babbitt had been in this game too damn long to rely on the professional discretion of a fucking limo driver.