Heat Lightning

27

THE CANOE was an old red Peter Pond, rolled upside down with two plastic-and-aluminum paddles and moldy orange kapok life jackets stowed under the thwarts. Virgil twisted it upright, frantic with haste, chanting, “C’mon, c’mon,” and they threw it in the river, and clambered aboard with their weapons and Virgil’s backpack.

Whiting had backed the truck down to McDonald and was helping the wounded man into the truck; McDonald had a scalp gash that must’ve come from a wood splinter. Queenen saw them manhandling the canoe to the river and shouted, “Virgil, that’s Canada,” and Virgil saw Raines spinning out of the driveway in the other truck, running to the hospital with Bunch, and Virgil ignored Queenen and said to Jarlait, “If we roll, that armor will pull you under. Grab one of those life jackets,” and Jarlait grunted, “Ain’t gonna roll,” and they were off…

They slanted upstream, paddling hard, Virgil aiming to land a couple of hundred yards north of where he’d seen the jon boat disappear. If they were caught on the open river, they were dead.

They crossed in two minutes or so. Jarlait jumped out of the front of the boat, splashed across a muddy margin, and pulled the canoe in. Virgil stepped out into the shallow water and lifted the stern with a grab loop as Jarlait lifted the bow, and they dropped it fully on shore. A muddy game trail led back into the trees, and they took it for thirty feet, and somebody said in Virgil’s ear, “Virgil, the local cops are coming in.”

Virgil lifted the radio to his face and said, “Keep them off the place until we get back… Don’t be impolite, but tell them that the crime scene is all over the place and we need to get a crime-scene crew in there.”

Jarlait said into his radio, “You guys shut up unless you see these people and then tell us. But shut up.” To Virgil, he said off-radio, “Let’s go.”

THE CANADIAN SIDE was a snarling mass of brush, and they walked away from the river to get out of it. Virgil said quietly, “That topo map showed a road straight west of here-they’ve probably got a car back in the trees. Gotta hurry.”

They ran due west, quietly as they could, but with some inevitable breaking of sticks and rustling of leaves, and after two hundred yards or so, saw the road ahead. With Virgil now leading, they turned south, parallel to the road, inside the tree line, and ran another hundred and fifty yards, where a field opened out in front of them. They could see nothing across the field, and Jarlait asked, “Are you sure they’re this far down?”

“Yeah, a little further yet. There might be farm tracks between those fields right down to the trees.”

He started off again, back toward the river now, running in the trees, off the edge of the field. They spooked an owl out of a tree, and it lifted out in absolute silence and flew ahead of them for fifty yards, like a gray football, then sailed left through the trees.

At the end of the field, they turned south again, and Jarlait, breathing heavily, said, “I gotta slow down a minute. I can taste my guts.”

“Gotta slow down anyway-we’re close now.”

They moved slowly after that, stopping every few feet to listen, moving tree to tree, one at a time, covering each other, back toward the water.

If he’d missed them completely, Virgil thought, and if the car had been right down at the water, it was possible that they were gone. On the other hand, if he’d hit them, it was possible that they were lying dead or dying down at the waterline.

When they got to the river, they squatted ten yards apart and listened, and then began moving along the waterline, both crouched, stopping to kneel, to look, one of them always behind a tree. A hundred yards farther along the bank, Virgil saw the tail end of the jon boat. They’d dragged the bow out of the water, but there was no sign of anyone.

Virgil clicked once on the radio to get Jarlait’s attention, mouthed, “Boat,” and jabbed his finger at it, and Jarlait nodded and moved forward and farther away from the water, giving Virgil room to wedge up next to the boat.

They were in a block of trees, Virgil realized-trees that might run out to the road. The field they’d seen was now actually behind them. No sign of a truck or a car track.

They moved a step at a time, until Virgil was right on top of the boat. When he was sure it was clear, he duckwalked down to it and saw the blood right away. He risked the radio and said, quietly, “Blood trail.”

Jarlait, now fifteen yards farther in, looked over at him and nodded.

THE BLOOD looked like rust stains on the summer weeds and brush. There wasn’t much, but enough that whoever was shot had a problem. The blood was clean and dark red, which meant the injured man was probably bleeding from a limb but hadn’t been gut- or lung-shot. Still, they’d need a hospital, or at least a doctor-something to tell the Canadians if Mai and the second man were already gone.

Virgil went to his hands and knees and crawled along the blood trail, grateful for the gloves; Jarlait worked parallel to him. They were a hundred and fifty or two hundred yards from the road again, Virgil thought, but he didn’t know how far from wherever the Viets had left a vehicle. He could see no openings in the treetops, so it must be some distance out.

He picked up a little speed, risked going to his feet, while Jarlait ghosted along to his right. The trees thinned a little, the underbrush got thicker. There were still occasionally drops and smears of blood, but as the plant life got softer, less woody, Mai’s trail became clearer.

“Man, we sound like elephants in a cornfield,” Virgil said. “We gotta slow down.”

From up ahead-a hundred yards, fifty yards?-Virgil heard a clank and both he and Jarlait paused, and Jarlait asked, “What do you think?” and Virgil said, “It sounded like somebody dropped a trailer.”

They both listened and then they heard an engine start, and Virgil started running, Jarlait trying to keep up. At the end of the trail, they found a vehicle track through shoulder-high brush, an abandoned trailer sitting there, and then the end of a pasture, or fallow field, and on the other end of the pasture, a silver minivan bumped over the last few ruts and pulled onto the road a hundred yards away.

Not a hard shot.

Virgil lifted the rifle and put the sights more or less on the moving van and tracked it and picked up the house in the background, said, “Shit,” and took the rifle down.

They were gone.

And though Virgil didn’t know which one of the Viets was hurt, who had been bleeding, he believed that he’d caught something of Mai in the driver’s-side window, at the wheel.

VIRGIL GOT on the radio and called a description of the van back to Queenen, who was holding the fort on the other side of the river. When they walked back past the trailer, they saw, sticking out between a spare wheel and the trailer frame, a manila envelope. Virgil looked at it and found “Virgil” scrawled across it.

Inside were ten color photographs-crime-scene photos, in effect, of the house at Da Nang, apparently taken a day or so after the killings. Flies everywhere, all over the corpses. Two little kids, one facedown, one faceup, twisted and bloated in death. A woman, half nude, flat on her back, her face covered in blood. Another woman lying in a courtyard, apparently shot in the back. An old man, out in front of the house…

Jarlait kept going back to the picture of the kids. “Little teeny kids, man. Little peanuts,” he said.

“Bunton knew about it. So did all the others,” Virgil said. “They couldn’t have stopped it, the way they tell it-Warren did all the killing. But they all kept their mouths shut.”

They thought about that for a few seconds. “Little kids,” Jarlait said. “I can see them coming over, to get the killer. But they killed Oren. Oren didn’t do shit… Oren was a nice guy.”

“The guy you shot on the other side. He’s the guy who shot Oren,” Virgil said.

“All right,” Jarlait said. “So we’re all square with him… Wonder how they happened to have the pictures with them?”

“They were going to leave them on Knox’s body, to make their point.”

NOT YET DONE, not by along way.

As they crossed back over the river, Jarlait said, “Now we’ve broken two laws-illegal entry into Canada, then illegal entry into the States.”

“Probably best not to emphasize that when we’re talking to people,” Virgil said.

VIRGIL CLIMBED OUT of the canoe and helped Jarlait drag it on shore, then Jarlait said, “I gotta find out about Rudy.” Queenen had been standing at the end of the driveway, talking on a cell phone, when he saw them land, and came jogging down the slope toward them.

He took the phone down as he came up and asked, “Anything new?”

“Just what I told you on the radio. We hit one of them, though. There’s blood in their boat and there’s a blood trail up through the trees.” He held up the manila envelope with the pictures. “They left this for us.”

Jarlait asked, “How’s Rudy?”

Queenen said, “He’s at the hospital. Raines said they’re gonna do some surgery, but it’s basically to clean out a hole. Shot went under the skin by his armpit, and then back out. My guy’s getting his scalp sewn up, but he won’t need surgery.”

Virgil: “The three Viets…”

“Yeah. They’re all dead,” Queenen said. “All with multiple wounds. Rudy shot one of them when the grenade went off, and then he and the other guy shot each other, and I shot the second guy. The third guy, I guess you guys…”

“Louis,” Virgil said. “Phem threw a flash-bang and tried to come in behind it. It hit a tree and bounced off and I was right there. Almost knocked me on my ass… If Louis hadn’t been ready, they’d of had me.”

“Well-what are you gonna do?” Queenen asked. He looked away, across the river. “I wish we’d gotten the other two assholes.”

“I gotta get up to see Rudy,” Jarlait said. “His mom is gonna kill me.”

Queenen said, “Virgil, you gotta come up and talk to these deputies. They’re getting antsy as hell. The sheriff’s on his way in.”

Virgil nodded and said, “Let’s go.” To Jarlait: “Get your truck, head on out, but stay in touch.”

BEFORE THEY TALKED to the deputies, they took a quick detour through the woods so Virgil could look at the bodies: Phem, Tai, and another Asian man he didn’t know. Had there been some other way to do this? Or had he really wanted to do it after being used around by the Viets? He’d think about it some other time.

“Lotta blood,” he said to Queenen.

ON THE WAY up the driveway, Virgil got on the cell phone and called Davenport. “What happened?” Davenport asked as soon as he picked up the phone.

“We had a hell of a gunfight,” Virgil said. “We got three dead Vietnamese, and two got away, into Canada. We need to call the Mounties… hang on.” He turned to Queenen. “Did you call the Canadians?”

Queenen said, “I called the office, they’re gonna get in touch.”

Virgil went back to the phone. “I guess Bemidji’s getting in touch. There might be a little dustup coming there.”

“Virgil, tell me you didn’t cross the river,” Davenport said.

“I didn’t cross it by very much,” Virgil said. “I was in hot pursuit.”

Davenport pondered for a moment, then said, “You thought that if these desperate killers encountered any Canadians, they’d ruthlessly gun them down to cover their escape, and so, throwing legal nit-picking to the wind, you decided to put your own body between the murderers and any innocent Canucks. ”

“Yeah-that’s what I thought,” Virgil said.

Davenport said, “We had a good talk with Mead Sinclair. We put him in Ramsey County overnight until we decide what to do. I don’t think he’d run. But-we’ve got a couple of guys coming in from Washington to speak to us.”

“Who’s us?” Virgil asked.

“Rose Marie, me, you, Mitford, hell, maybe the governor,” Davenport said. “They’ll be here this afternoon. You gotta get down here. I’m going to call around, see if I can get you a plane out of International Falls. You got somebody you can give the scene to?”

“We’ve got a crew coming up from Bemidji, and there are two Bemidji guys here. There were three, but one got a scalp cut… One of our guys from Red Lake got dinged up…”

Virgil told him the whole story, a blow-by-blow. When he was done, Davenport asked, “Where’s this Raines guy?”

“Still at the hospital, I think. There were gunshot wounds, so he might be talking to the International Falls cops.”

Davenport said, “Okay… listen. Go talk to the deputies. Tell them to secure the scene. Keep them out of the house. Keep everybody out of the house. Then go in there and take a little look around. You were invited in… are there any file cabinets?”

Virgil said, “You’re an evil fuck.”

Davenport said, “Call me when you can move. I’ll find a plane.”

VIRGIL DID ALL THAT: brought the deputies in, made them feel like they were on top of things. Let them look at the bodies; kept them out of the house. Got Queenen to talk to the sheriff when he arrived.

A little over an hour later, Virgil was climbing into a Beaver float-plane that taxied right up to Knox’s dock. The plane felt like an old friend: Virgil had flown over most of western Canada in Beavers and Otters, and he settled down, strapped in. The pilot said her name was Kate, and they were gone.

Virgil hadn’t found much in Knox’s house. The big computer was used, apparently, for photography and games. There’d been another small desk in the main bedroom, with a satellite plug and a keyboard, and Virgil decided that Knox must travel with a laptop. In a leather jacket tossed on the bed, he had found a small black book full of addresses and phone numbers. There was no Xerox machine in the place, but he went and got his bag, took out his camera, and shot a hundred JPEGs of the contents, to be printed later. When he was done, he put the address book back in the jacket and tossed it back on the bed.

When Davenport had called about the plane, he’d asked, “How things go? You know?”

“Not much, but, um, I found like three hundred names and addresses in a private little book.”

“Not bad,” Davenport said. “For Christ’s sakes, don’t tell anybody about it.”

“Get me a plane?”

“Yup. Got you a bush pilot,” Davenport said.

VIRGIL TRIED TO chat with Kate, who was decent-looking and athletic and outdoorsy and had a long brown braid that reminded Virgil of all the women in his college writers’ workshop; but Kate, probably shell-shocked by being hit on by every fly-in fisherman in southwest Ontario, didn’t have much to say.

So Virgil settled into his seat and went to sleep.

KATE PUT him on the Mississippi across the bridge from downtown St. Paul. Davenport was waiting; Virgil threw him the backpack, thanked Kate, climbed up on the dock, and pushed the plane off: Kate was heading back north.

Davenport asked, “You okay?”

“Tired,” Virgil said. “Still alive. Anybody talking to the Canadians? Anybody seen Mai and the other guy?”

“We’re talking to them, they went down and recovered the boat, they’ve got some guys working the other side. But not too much.”

“Goddamnit,” Virgil said. “We were too goddamn slow getting across.”

“Nothing works all the time,” Davenport said. “On the whole, you did pretty damn good. Knocked it all down, settled it. Now, if we can get the Republicans in and out of town without anybody getting killed, we can all go back to our afternoon naps.”

Virgil handed him the manila envelope.

“What’s this?”

“Something to think about,” Virgil said.

DAVENPORT LOOKED AT the photos as they walked out to his car. When they got there, he put them back in the envelope and passed them across the car roof. “Hang on to these until I can figure something out.”

They were meeting the two guys from Washington in a conference room off Rose Marie’s office at the Capitol. “They want to talk about Sinclair-that’s all we know,” Davenport said.

“Is Sinclair still in jail?” Virgil asked.

“No. We let him out this morning. Put a leg bracelet on him, told him not to go more than six blocks from his house. He’s at his apartment now,” Davenport said. “There are some very strange things going on there-I’m not quite sure what. Some kind of inter-intelligence-agency pie fight, the old guys from the CIA against the new guys in all the other alphabet agencies.”

“Who’s Sinclair with?”

“The old guys, I think, but I’m just guessing,” Davenport said. “The thing is, he hasn’t asked for an attorney. He’s actually turned down an attorney, though he says he might ask for one later. He thinks the fix is in.”

“Is it?”

“Well, we’re having this meeting-”

“You can’t just throw dirt on the whole thing.”

“Maybe you can’t-but maybe you can. Who knows? Not my call.”

“We got bodies all over the place.”

“And we got three dead Vietnamese. There’s your answer for the dead bodies. If nobody mentions the CIA, why, then, should anybody get all excited about mentioning them?”

Virgil looked at Davenport and asked, “Where do you stand on this?”

Davenport said, “Basically, at the bottom of my heart: if you do the crime, you do the time. And I don’t like feds.”

ON THE WAY across the Mississippi, Davenport said, “You need to get over to Sinclair’s place. If you look behind the seat, you’ll see that laptop that Mickey carried into the meeting with Warren.”

Virgil twisted in the seat, saw the laptop, picked it up.

Davenport said, “Take it with you. What I want you to do is, while we’re all real hot, I want you to go into Sinclair’s place with the laptop turned on. You can stick it in your pack with those photographs-they ought to distract him from thinking too hard about you being bugged-and talk to him for a while. He seems to like you for some reason. Find out what he wants. Find out what he’d do. What he’d admit to. Might get him, you know, at home, when his guard’s down a bit.”

“Is that why you turned him loose?” Virgil asked.

“Maybe.”

“Did they take the bug out of the truck?” Virgil asked.

“Not yet, but what difference would it make? There’s nobody to listen to it.”

“Mai’s still out there,” Virgil said.

“So yank it out-but go see Sinclair first.”

“OK.”

“Did that truck thing do any good?” Davenport asked. “You know, pretending you were still with the truck?”

“I think it killed three people,” Virgil said. “They bought the whole thing.”

“You are a shifty motherfucker,” Davenport said.

“Yeah, I know. I remind you of yourself when you were younger.”

“Not much younger,” Davenport said.

Virgil made a rude noise and they rolled through St. Paul to BCA headquarters, and Davenport dropped Virgil beside his truck. “The meeting with the Washington guys is in an hour, or an hour and fifteen minutes, so you don’t have much time,” Davenport said. “Do what you can.”

AT THE TRUCK, Virgil lay down beside the front fender, looked up at the transmitter. A couple of wires led into the turn signal box, and he yanked one of them out of the transmitter. That would kill it; creeped him out to think about the thing giving up Ray Bunton.

Ten minutes to Sinclair’s. He parked in the street, turned on the laptop recorder, slid it into the pack, put the envelope on top of it, threw the pack over his shoulder, and walked to Sinclair’s place.

He pushed the doorbell, and Sinclair answered immediately, as though he’d been waiting for it: “Who is it?”

“Virgil.”

The door buzzed and he went on through, and Sinclair was waiting at the open door to his apartment.

“What happened to Hoa?” he asked.

“Made it to Canada,” Virgil said.

Relief showed in Sinclair’s face. “I couldn’t help liking her,” he said. “What about the other guys?”

“Phem and Tai, whatever their real names are, are dead,” Virgil said. He was thinking of the recorder. “So’s another guy that I never met. Another guy got out. Either he’s wounded, or Mai is. We found a blood trail, but it was in Canada, and they had an exit route all set up. We called the Canadians with a description of the vehicle, but they haven’t seen it yet.”

“Phem and Tai. Not bad guys, actually, for a killer and a torturer,” Sinclair said.

“I’ll quote you when I write my article for the Atlantic,” Virgil said.

“Yeah, right. Fur ’n’ Feather is more like it… When did you get back?”

“Ten minutes ago,” Virgil said. “I talked to my boss on the phone, and he told me you were here.”

THEY’D MOVED through the apartment, talking, out to the porch. Virgil tossed his pack on the table, undid the quick-release buckles, pulled out the envelope of photographs, left the end of the laptop hanging out, one of the tiny camera lenses facing Sinclair.

He handed the envelope to Sinclair: “They left them for us. Deliberately, I’m sure.”

Sinclair slid them out of the envelope, thumbed through them, then looked at them carefully, one at a time. He looked up and said, “That’s bad-and they’re real. I’ve had some training in this stuff. If they’re not real, they’re better than anything we could do.”

“They’re real,” Virgil said. “We got some shots from the last guy they were looking for. Carl Knox. He took some right at the time of the shootings. The bodies look the same, the way they landed. No way to fake that.”

Sinclair leaned back and said, “What are you guys planning to do?” Virgil shrugged. “It’s not up to me. There’s a big meeting, forty-five minutes from now-I’ve got to go-with some guys from Washington.

I suspect we’re about to shovel a whole bunch of dirt over the whole thing.”

“That’s one way to handle it,” Sinclair said. “What about me?”

“Hard to avoid the fact that you were helping out,” Virgil said. “People already know… lots of cops, probably some newspeople. Gonna be hard to make it go away. I suspect what will happen is that you’ll wind up on trial in one of those intelligence courts, the secret-testimony ones, and then… what it is, is what it is.”

Sinclair bared his teeth. “I could get really fucked, if that happens,” he said.

Virgil spread his hands. “Shouldn’t have signed up with them.”

“There was pressure. I told you about my daughter,” Sinclair said. “They were gonna fuck me over with that whole thing about the agency. I’d lose my job at the university… I’d be cooked.”

“Shit happens,” Virgil said.

Sinclair grinned and said, “You’re a lot rougher than you look, Virgil. You look like some kind of rockabilly, straw-headed, woman-chasing country punk.”

Virgil said, “Thank you.”

“But you went and broke down the program, and shot a bunch of people up, and here you are, looking me in the face and telling me that I might be going to prison.”

Virgil stood up. “I gotta go. I wanted to tell you about Mai.”

Sinclair said, “Wait a minute. Sit down for two more minutes. Let me tell you what I know about this whole thing. Maybe we can work something out… You owe me, after I gave you Phem and Tai.”

“You knew you were giving them to me?”

“You knew the Virgil quote-I thought there was a good chance that you’d be smart enough to pick up on me.”

“Weird way to do it.”

“I needed something absolutely deniable.” Sinclair grinned at him. “You got the information, I got the deniability. Deniability is the Red Queen of American intelligence.”

VIRGIL PLAYED THE TAPE for Rose Marie Roux, for Davenport, and for Neil Mitford, the governor’s aide. Roux, who’d been a cop and later a prosecutor before she went into politics, said, “He’s willing to testify that Homeland Security-some officials at Homeland Security-cut this deal knowing that a bunch of people would be murdered.”

Virgil nodded.

Rose Marie tapped a yellow number two on her desktop, then looked at Mitford and asked, “The governor’s on the way?”

“He should be in the building if traffic isn’t too bad.” Mitford was another lawyer.

“Get down there and brief him. We’ve got to go.” Two Homeland Security people were in the conference room, waiting.

THE HOMELAND SECURITY guys looked like the security people that Warren had been bringing in, but with thinner necks. They were sleek, tanned, confident, smiling, gelled, and their neckties coordinated with both their suits and their eye color; one of them checked out Virgil’s cowboy boots and backpack when he came in and frowned, as if he suspected that he might not be talking to the BCA’s upper crust.

Rose Marie sat everybody down and introduced the two, James K. Cartwright and Morris Arenson, to the BCA agents. She said, “Virgil has just come back from a firefight up north. Three of the Vietnamese were killed, and two escaped into Canada. We are asking for Canadian assistance in tracking them down.”

Arenson threw back his head and said, “Ah, damnit.”

“I thought that would be good news,” Rose Marie said.

“Anytime things go international, they become harder to control,” Cartwright said. “Was one of the dead Viets a young woman?”

“No, that was Mai,” Virgil said. “Or Hoa. She and another guy got away.”

Cartwright looked around the table and said, “Thank God for small favors. Her family is right at the top of the totem pole in Hanoi.”

Davenport asked, “Whose side are you guys on, anyway? We’ve been-”

Before he could finish, the governor pushed through the door, smiling, trailed by Mitford. The governor said, “Glad I could make it. Glad I could make it.”

When they were introduced, Arenson looked at his colleague and then at Rose Marie and the governor and said, “I’d thought that we were keeping this on an Agency level.”

The governor said, “I like to keep up.”

THE TWO Washington men, Mitford, the governor, and Rose Marie then went through a couple minutes of name-dropping and bureaucratic hand-wringing, and the governor finally said, “Look, I came all the way down the hill to hear this. I have other things to do, so let’s cut the horse hockey and get down to it.” He turned to Virgil: “Virgil, tell me what you know about all this.”

Virgil said, “Well, from what I’m able to tell, six Minnesotans went to Vietnam just before the fall of Saigon and stole a bunch of Caterpillar tractors and other equipment that was being abandoned by the military. While they were there, one of them, Ralph Warren, killed a number of people, including a couple of toddlers, and raped a woman who was, at the time, either dying or dead.”

“Disgusting,” the governor said.

Virgil continued: “A year or so ago, the Vietnamese found out who’d done it-found a couple of names, anyway. The murdered people had family who are now high in the Vietnamese government. The family decided to get revenge.

“To do that, they contacted an American intelligence agency and offered a trade: they had information about an alleged al-Qaeda plot coming out of Indonesia. They would turn over the information to Homeland Security, if Homeland Security looked the other way-and provided some direct informational support-for a hit team.”

Virgil continued: “A deal was made, and the Viets sent a gunman, a torturer, and a coordinator over here to kill the six people involved in the ’75 murders. They’d already killed one man in Hong Kong, I believe. They only had two or three names for the people here, and had to gather the others as they went. That’s why John Wigge was tortured before they dumped his body on the Capitol lawn.

“An American, Mead Sinclair, who may have been a CIA agent but who was well-known as a political radical with contacts in Vietnam, was coerced into working as a contact between the Vietnamese and the intelligence agencies here in the U.S. The idea was, he was deniable.

If he talked, the old intelligence agencies could point to the fact that he was a longtime radical friend of the Vietnamese and had no credibility. Sinclair didn’t want to do it, but threats were made against his daughter-”

“Let’s stop there,” Cartwright said. “Most of this is just speculation. I don’t doubt that Virgil here did a bang-up job in tracking these people down”-Virgil thought he detected a modest lip-curl with the compliment-“but that American intelligence agency stuff is fantasy.”

The governor looked at him for a moment, then said, “Virgil?”

Virgil said, “Well, you all know most of the rest of it. The Viets killed Warren last night. I’d discovered that they’d bugged my car, with a bug that looks like it was designed right here in the good ol’ USA. I used the bug, which was still operating, to convince them that I didn’t know where the last man was. Then we flew to the guy’s place and set up an ambush. The Viets walked into it this morning, three of them were killed, and two escaped to Canada, one of them wounded. So here we are.”

“And that’s just about nowhere,” Arenson said.

Virgil said, “We’ve got Sinclair. We’ve got him cold. He’s willing to turn state’s evidence.”

Cartwright looked straight across the table at Virgil. “That won’t happen.”

“Already happened. I accepted his offer, and he gave me a brief statement,” Virgil said. “I recorded it.”

Arenson pushed back from the table and said in a mild voice, “I don’t think you folks understand quite what is going on here. We represent the Homeland Security Agency. We’re not asking you what we’re going to do. We’re telling you what we’re going to do. What we’re going to do is, we’re going to smooth this whole thing over. The Vietnamese provided us with a key contact-”

The governor broke in: “Wait a minute. A whole bunch of Minnesotans are dead. Two were completely innocent. Five, maybe, were involved in a crime thirty years ago, but they get a trial.”

“Governor, in the best of all possible worlds, that’s the way it would work,” Arenson said. “Post-9/11, some things have changed, and this is one of them. I’m authorized, and I’m doing it-I’m classifying this whole matter as top secret. We will help you develop an appropriate press release.”

“You can’t… this is our jurisdiction,” the governor began.

“There’s been a tragedy, but a minor one,” Cartwright said. “What was done was necessary. We may have saved hundreds of lives. If the al-Qaeda plan had gone through…”

The governor said, “I can’t accept-”

Arenson snapped: “Let me say it again, in case you didn’t get it the first time: we’re not asking you, we’re telling you. What part of telling don’t you understand?”

THERE WAS A moment of silence, then the governor cleared his throat and said, “Rose Marie, Neil, Lucas, Virgil, let me talk to you in Rose Marie’s office for a moment.” He stood up and said to the two Washington guys, “Just take a moment. I think we can come to a satisfactory resolution of this.”

The governor led the way out the door and down the hall to Rose Marie’s office, closed the door behind Virgil, the last one in, then turned and bellowed, “Those MOTHERFUCKERS think they can come into MY state and kill MY people and they tell me that THEY’RE saying how it is? They don’t tell ANYBODY how it is in MY state… I say how it is-they don’t say a FUCKIN’ THING.”

The governor raged on and Virgil looked away, embarrassed. The tantrum lasted a full thirty seconds, then the governor, breathing hard, red-faced, looked around, looked at Rose Marie, looked at Mitford, and Mitford smiled and said, “Glad we got that cleared up.”

“What are we going to do?” the governor asked him, his voice rough from the tantrum.

Mitford shrugged. “You’re a liberal, God bless your obscenely rich little soul. How does it hurt you to go up against a bunch of fascists from Homeland Security?”

“Uh-oh. What are you thinking?” Rose Marie asked.

Mitford said to the governor, “You don’t have much political runway left here in Minnesota. What will you do when you’re not governor anymore?”

“I thought I’d just be a rich guy,” the governor said. “If somebody dies, I could run for the Senate.”

“Will that make you happy?” Mitford asked.

“Neil, skip the dime-store psychology,” the governor said. “What are you thinking?”

“We could arrest these two guys and charge them with conspiracy to commit murder in the planned execution of five Minnesotans, with two more murdered in the process. Before anybody has time to react, you have a press conference. You give an Abe Lincoln speech about protecting our precious freedoms, about how we don’t turn our laws over to a bunch of Vietnamese killers. You’d take some heat, but by this time next week, you’d be a national name. You’re on the cover of Time magazine. You’d be a hero to a lot of people in the party. Play your cards right over the next four years…”

The governor looked at him a long time, then said, “What’s the downside?”

Rose Marie said, “They arrest you for treason and you’re executed.”

The governor laughed and said, “Really.” That didn’t worry him; he was far too rich to hang.

Davenport turned to Virgil: “You did turn off that recorder, didn’t you?”

Virgil said, “Jeez, boss… I forgot.”

Davenport: “Wonder what they’re in there saying?”

“They already said enough,” Virgil said. “But… I wouldn’t be surprised if they said a few more things. Being in there by themselves.”

THEY ALL contemplated him for a few seconds, then Rose Marie shook her head, turned to the governor, and said, “Neil raises an interesting possibility. But you would take some heat. A lot of people think security is all-important-they’d absolutely throw six or eight people overboard if it might stop an al-Qaeda attack. As long as it wasn’t them getting thrown.”

“That can be handled,” Mitford said. “That’s all PR. Our PR against their PR, and we’ll have a big head start. Do it right, and they’ll be cooked before they can even decide what to do. We’re talking televised congressional hearings.”

The governor mulled it over, then cocked an eye at Mitford. “A national name by next week?”

“Guaranteed.”

Rose Marie said, “A national name isn’t the same as a national hero. Lee Harvey Oswald is a national name. Benedict Arnold-”

Mitford snarled, “You think I’m so lame with the PR that we’d wind up as Benedict Arnold? For Christ’s sakes, Rose Marie, I ran the negative side in the last campaign.”

“I’m just saying,” she said.

The governor said, “Let’s sit here and think about it for two minutes. All right? Two minutes.”

At the end of the two minutes, the governor covered Rose Marie’s hand with his own and said, “Weren’t you getting a little bit bored? How long has it been since we’ve been in a really dirty fight?”

“You got me there,” she said.

THEY TROOPED BACK into the conference room, where Arenson and Cartwright were slouched in their chairs, barely containing their impatience. The governor said, “Virgil?”

Virgil said to Cartwright and Arenson, “Well, guys, I’ve got some bad news.”

Cartwright: “What’s that?”

Virgil threw his arms wide, gave them his best Hollywood grin, and said, “You’re under arrest for murder.”