Liberty

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The days passed swiftly as spring brought more rain and warm weather to the Washington area. The cherry blossoms came and went, the crowds filled the tourist attractions, the trees leafed out, and the grass grew mightily. The sight and sound of lawn mowers became part and parcel of the Washington scene.

Jake Grafton saw little of it. It seemed he only got home to sleep. Eating was a breakfast sandwich or burrito at a fast-food joint on the way to work or a sandwich at his desk. Occasionally he made his way to the CIA cafeteria, only to bolt his food and run when his cell phone or pager summoned him.

A lot seemed to be happening, but it was difficult to make sense of it.

Toad Tarkington called from New York on a secure telephone located in the offices of the joint terrorism task force. “You ain’t gonna believe this, boss, but we found another of the goddamn things.”

“Where?”

“Seems to be under a new apartment building in midtown Manhattan.” He gave Jake the address. “There are not many new buildings in this section, but the old one on this site was condemned by the city about ten years ago when the landlord didn’t do repairs after a fire. From what I can learn, a developer acquired the property, tore the old building down, and built a new, taller one in its place. Four floors of parking under the thing. We drove the rig to the lowest level. No shit, we’ve got a hot spot under the floor.”

“Same indications as you found at Hains Point?”

“Yep. Harley is pretty sure. He can talk your leg off about various kinds of radiation, which particles can penetrate dirt and which can’t, but the bottom line is it looks about the same to me.”

“When did they erect this building?”

“I talked to the super, visiting in a low-key, bullshit way, trying to get info without sending the guy to general quarters. Told him we were an independent contractor looking for leaking sewer gas. He bought it, I think. Says the city issued the occupancy permit for the building six years ago. The thing filled up immediately even though the apartments are pricey. You know how living space is in this town.”

Jake played with the telephone cord while Toad talked. The damn thing was knotting up again. “How long do you think it will take to cover the major avenues in the city, up and down the rivers, both sides of the harbor?”

“A week to do it right, I think.”

“Do it right.”

“Yes, sir.”

He passed this info on to General Alt and Sal Molina, who would, Jake knew, pass it on to the president and the National Security Council.

“So what do you think we should do about this one, Admiral?” Molina said when Jake had finished his recitation.

“My recommendation is do nothing right now. Whatever is down there has been there for six years. A few more weeks or months isn’t going to make any difference.”

“I’ll pass that along. Needless to say, the National Security Council is tied up in knots over the first one. Everyone has a different opinion. We’re trying to keep the circle of knowledge small, but you know how these things are. If we are sitting on bombs, it’s eventually going to leak. When it does, oh boy!”

“If you don’t mind my asking, sir, how are you and Butch Lanham getting along?”

Sal Molina sighed. “You know, he’s the epitome of the Washington type, an educated idiot, amoral, with no scruples that anyone has ever noticed. He goes through life with a wet finger permanently aloft to catch any change in the breeze. His only god is Ambition. Talks a good line, too.”

“I got the picture.”

“Where next?”

“I thought I’d send the van to Boston since it’s just up the road. We need a week to do New York first, though.”

“The Council is arguing about that, too. Lanham wants to take charge, pull the strings.”

“He’s welcome to it, for all I care. I’m not getting much sleep and my stomach’s a wreck.”

“Tell me about it. But the president isn’t buying Lanham’s spiel just now. He says you found the first one, let’s see what else you turn up. That could change.”

Like the weather, Jake thought. “Uh-huh.”

“Talk to you later.”

Coast Guard Captain Joe Zogby made a multimedia presentation to Jake and Gil Pascal. The view was side-looking radar shots of the Mediterranean in the hours after the staff suspected that Olympic Voyager left Port Said. What it all boiled down to was a disappearing blip. Moving, then stationary, then gone.

“Sunk,” Zogby said. “We have no way of verifying that that blip was Olympic Voyager, but as you see, she disappeared quickly. She hasn’t been seen or heard from since.”

“Someone sank her,” Jake said bitterly.

“That means the weapons were no longer aboard,” Pascal added.

“Is there any way we can get a list of the ships in Port Said from the moment it arrived until, say, a week later?” Jake asked. “Names and destinations?”

“The FBI is working on it, sir,” Zogby replied. “They’ve sprinkled money all over that corner of Egypt, we’ve gotten the Egyptian government involved, and we have names of ships to show for it. But if one ship was left off the list …”

Jake studied his toes, then turned to Gil. “When is the next Corrigan unit being delivered?”

“This weekend if everything goes well. Monday or Tuesday if it doesn’t.”

“We’re running out of time,” Jake muttered to no one in particular.

The Delta Force augmented Customs offices up and down the East Coast. Armed with every conventional Geiger counter that could be purchased, borrowed, or scrounged, the soldiers were helping Customs officers search every ship before it entered port. The operation was huge. Jake and two flag officers from the Pentagon met daily, going over deployment options, looking at the percentage of ships searched, reviewing efforts to find more Geiger counters — generally solving problems and making policy decisions. This effort took several hours out of Jake’s day, every day.

More time was spent reviewing material provided by Zelda Hudson. The cells in Florida seemed to be static. It was infuriating — the more Jake read about the cells, the more convinced he became that some or all of them were waiting for the bombs to arrive. The navy, Coast Guard, and Customs Service were using Geiger counters and dogs to search every ship coming into Florida. They were finding a lot of drugs and aliens being smuggled in, but no bombs.

There weren’t enough assets to search every ship coming to America, or even the East Coast. Was he fixated upon Florida because of the presence of the suspected cells? Were the cells red herrings? Hell, were these little knots of Middle Eastern men even cells?

Doyle’s death or disappearance — how did that fit? Was that event even part of this puzzle, or totally unrelated?

The bombs buried in the cities — terrorists, or … who?

The harder Jake pressed the more information Zelda’s staff produced. Yet there was no structure; the data came as piles of printouts.

“All we’re doing is killing trees,” he complained as he leafed through a huge file on Coke Twilley. “I can’t make sense of this. There might be a gold nugget in all this treacle, but how would anyone know?”

“We need people to analyze the data,” was Zelda’s reply. “Get me some more people, competent ones for a change.”

“Wrong answer,” Jake said curtly. “There aren’t any more people for me to get, competent or incompetent. You get this unscrewed. There must be a way to correlate disparate facts and figures to construct a picture. Find the facts that don’t fit.”

“I’m up to my eyeballs in this shit, Admiral. There are only so many hours in the damn day.”

“Don’t cuss at me, goddammit!” Jake roared. “I do the fucking cussing around here. You know what the stakes are. For the love of Christ, you’re sitting smack-dab on the center of the bull’s-eye at ground zero! What will it take to make you jerk your head out of your ass?”

Zelda wasn’t intimidated. There wasn’t a man on earth who could accomplish that. “You have us wasting time on these five men. I don’t think there’s anything to find.”

“That’s my call,” Jake snarled. When he got angry the bullet scar on his temple turned red. Right now it was livid. “One of these guys is dirty.” He picked up Twilley’s file and tossed it onto the desk in front of her. “All this drivel won’t change my mind. Get back in your hole and find the guilty son of a bitch.”

On her way out of the office Zelda passed by a secretary’s desk. “I heard him shouting through the closed door,” the woman said, glancing at the admiral’s door to see if the monster was going to come charging out breathing fire. “What was that all about?”

“He fanged the shit outta me,” Zelda said as she went by. She was in no mood for a wet-hankie session with a horrified civil servant.

Alas, Grafton was right. Some way had to be found to separate the one gold nugget from all this mud.

If there was one.

Tommy Carmellini had been in Quantico two days when he finally got his pistol — a Browning Hi-Power — a shoulder holster, and ten rounds of nine-millimeter ammunition. The FBI agent who delivered it to him in Anna Modin’s room wanted him to sign a receipt.

“We took it off a drug dealer we arrested in Washington last week,” he said. “It isn’t listed in the computer as hot. So far we haven’t been able to trace it.”

“Man in that line of work needs a good gun,” Carmellini remarked as he popped the empty magazine into his hand, pulled the slide back, and checked the chamber. “He going to want it back?”

“Not unless he beats the rap,” the agent said dryly.

Carmellini checked the safety — these old automatics only had one, a thumb safety that locked the hammer in the cocked position. He tried the trigger, then flipped the safety off and pulled the trigger again. The hammer fell with a crisp sound. “Nice shooter,” he said. “Let’s hope they convict him.”

With the signed receipt in his pocket, the agent left. Carmellini inspected each of the shiny brass cylinders and carefully loaded them into the magazine, then snapped it into the handle of the pistol and chambered a round. Using both hands, he lowered the hammer to the safety notch and pushed on it with a thumb to make sure. Since the pistol lacked a grip safety, he felt uncomfortable carrying it cocked and locked. He would just have to remember to ear the hammer back for the first shot.

A pistol wouldn’t make him or Anna bulletproof, but it would let him worry them some. Assuming he saw them in time.

He had talked to Harry Estep earlier that morning. The FBI had been unable to identify the bodies.

When he got off the telephone with Harry, he called Jake Grafton. Didn’t get him, but an hour later, after he got his pistol, Grafton returned the call.

“I feel like a wart on an elephant’s ass sitting here in Quantico.”

“How’s Anna?”

“She’s fine. My feet are fine, and so’s the rest of me.”

“Your job is to guard her,” Jake said. “You two don’t have to stay in Quantico, but I want you with her or in earshot twenty-four hours a day. The FBI will get her into the Federal Witness Protection Program in a couple weeks. The paper is going from desk to desk. Until then, you’re her life ring.”

“Okay, boss.” Tarkington called the admiral “boss,” and Tommy had picked up on it.

“And, use your cell phone to help Zelda. The CIA has a couple of specialty teams wiring up outside databases and whatnot, yet we still need your friends the independent contractors for sensitive jobs.” The CIA teams were nominally working for the FBI, so as to avoid the prohibition against domestic operations by that agency.

“Scout and Earlene?”

“That’s right. Coordinate all that by phone. Make it happen. Stop in and see Scout and Earlene if you have to. What I don’t want you to do is take Anna to Langley, the Hoover Building, or my apartment. Someone may be watching.” Carmellini couldn’t get Anna in either of the government facilities, but he understood what Grafton meant: don’t leave her in a car in the parking lot while he went inside.

“I talked to Harry a while ago,” Tommy said. “He said they can’t identify those two Baltimore dudes.”

“John Doe One and Two. They use Roman numerals for the numbers.”

“I saw a newspaper this morning. Sounds like I am in deep and serious shit in Baltimore.” The first remark had been a warm-up for this unstated question. Carmellini pressed the telephone against his ear.

“The assistant D.A. in charge of the case is an ambitious young woman with an agenda,” Jake Grafton told him. “She’s a little peeved that you reloaded and shot those guys again. They were each dead after the first bullet hit them. An inappropriate use of force, she says. ‘Grotesque’ was her word.”

“Uh-huh.”

“There was a comment or two about you being out of control.”

“Uh-huh.”

“How much more of this do you want?”

“That’s enough, I guess.”

“You might as well wallow in it. You’re a savage beast, she said, turned loose by the federal government to rend and mutilate the corpses of your victims.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s a racial thing, according to her. You kept shooting them after they were dead because they weren’t white.”

“I kept shooting them because I wanted to be damn sure they were dead.”

“That’s what I told her. She didn’t buy it.”

“And because they shot the waiter and scared the living shit outta me and I was really pissed. Tell the D.A. bitch I enjoyed it.”

“I’ll call her as soon as we get off the phone. They take racial politics seriously in Baltimore. She’s having her day in the newspapers and thumping the gun control drum. The reality is these goons were armed killers who had just gunned an innocent Baltimore native — a black one, by the way — in an attempt to get Anna. This D.A. will sober up when she realizes no one is saluting the bloody rag she ran up the pole.”

“What’s the penalty in Maryland for mutilating two corpses?”

“We’re still researching that. Maximum looks like a thousand bucks’ fine and ten days in jail or castration for each count.’Course they only do the castration once.”

“That’s comforting.”

“Don’t wander too far,” Jake Grafton said. “I may need you back here.”

Tommy Carmellini promptly forgot about the bitch in Baltimore. He was one of those rare people who didn’t fret about things they couldn’t do anything about. This quirk was a gift or curse, depending on your belief in the beneficial efficacy of guilt, but whichever, through the years it allowed him to be free from the burdens of worry that made the lives of most transgressors miserable. It wasn’t as if he had no conscience — because he did — it was just that he didn’t ponder his karma or the fate of the universe. As he explained one day to Toad Tarkington, “Shit happens, and when it does you deal with it. If it doesn’t, go on down the road.”

After that conversation with Jake Grafton, Tommy Carmellini put in a call to his buddy Scout. Left a message on the answering machine. Scout and Earlene were out doing something nefarious for the CIA, apparently.

Carmellini stood in the doorway of the bathroom watching a totally nude Anna Modin brush her hair. The sight stirred him to his toenails. He did some mental calculations concerning the state of his finances — bank balances, room on his credit cards, and time remaining before payday — and came to a quick decision.

“What say we go to the Homestead for a few days? I hear it’s gorgeous this time of year.”

“The Homestead? What is that?”

“It’s a resort in the mountains. West of here, not too far … four or five hours’ drive. Golf, hot springs, gourmet meals, big beds to romp in …”

“I do not have many clothes.”

FBI agents had brought her clothes from Grafton’s and packed a suitcase at Carmellini’s apartment. One of them had also driven Carmellini’s old red Mercedes from Baltimore. Tommy Carmellini had a willing woman, wheels, a pistol, and plastic on his hip. What more do you need in America?

“We’ll rough it,” he declared bravely.

“Do you want to make love before we leave or save it until we arrive?”

“Never wait,” he answered. “Life is short.”

On Monday afternoon Jake Grafton visited the basement at Zelda’s request. She had a telephone conversation to play for him. Without explanation from her, she handed him a set of earphones and worked on her keyboard as he put them on. In seconds he heard voices.

“ … friend at the White House.” Butch Lanham’s voice.

“How’re things going over there?” Jake Grafton recognized that voice too. Jack Yocke.

“There have been some developments that I’d like to share.”

“Izzaright?”

“Can’t do it over the telephone, of course. Perhaps a meet?”

They discussed it. Decided on a little restaurant Yocke knew about. Jake had never heard of it.

When the two men ended the conversation, Jake took off the headphones. “When did this conversation occur?”

“An hour ago.”

“May I have a tape of it, please?”

Zelda nodded and stroked the keyboard. In three minutes she handed him a cassette.

“What are you going to do with it?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he answered truthfully. The president might not look kindly on his national security adviser doing some leaking — unless, of course, he put him up to it. And just what was he going to leak about? Afghanistan, the Middle East, our trade relationship with Lower Slobbovia? Or nuclear weapons buried in Washington and New York?

Jake held the cassette in his hand, then pocketed it. He sat back in the chair and crossed his legs. “Sunday a week ago I gave you and the FBI two disks that contained copies of the computer records of Walney’s Bank in Cairo, Egypt. The FBI wizards say the disks show who is contributing money to finance terrorism and how the money is shuffled around. And loaned or doled out to terrorists.”

Zelda nodded. Her eyes were bright, alert.

“The head guy at the bank is named Abdul Abn Saad. He’s a pillar of Egyptian society and a secret Islamic militant. I want you to make him a lot richer than he is.”

“Explain that.”

Jake Grafton stood and stretched. He walked around a little — the place was packed with people, computers, monitors, servers, power packs, and whatnot, and had wires running everywhere — so he soon gave up on walking. He made sure there was no one in earshot, then came back to Zelda. He perched with one hip on the corner of her desk and looked down at her. “The National Security Council is tied in a knot. Egypt is a valuable ally. Saad has seriously powerful friends in very high places in Cairo and throughout the Arab world. And our people don’t want to diddle with foreign banks on the theory that if we don’t diddle with theirs, they won’t diddle with ours. In the age of terrorism this attitude makes no sense, but there it is.

“So we are going to go where the authorities fear to tread. I want you to hack into Walney’s Bank and embezzle a lot of money and give it to Abdul Abn Saad. I want you to cover your tracks so it looks like an inside job.”

“You want to make him richer?”

“That’s right. Eventually someone there will figure it out and Mr. Saad will be in trouble up to his eyeballs. If his bank also fails, that would be the icing on the cake.”

Zelda caressed the keyboard of her computer, then used a hand to brush her hair back from her eyes. Then she looked up at Grafton. “Up to now I haven’t touched anybody’s money. Looking at files I am not authorized to see is one thing, but money is something else. This could put me back in prison.”

“I’ve asked you to do it. I’ll take the responsibility. You’re just doing what you are told.”

“With nothing in writing, nothing to prove it went down that way. You drop dead of a heart attack or get cold feet and leave me hanging, I’m screwed. Regardless, I’m probably going back to prison when this is over. Isn’t that true, Admiral?”

“I don’t run the universe, Zelda. If the people at the White House want you back in the can, you’re going. That’s always been the case.”

She looked at her hands, then put them in her lap. “You’re putting me in an impossible position,” she said.

“Horseshit!” said Jake Grafton. “Don’t haggle with me! I’m asking you to do something for your country. If you do it right, no one but you and I will ever know you did it. There will be no medals, no money, no ceremonies, no pardons, none of that happy crap. For once in your life you’ll have taken a big risk with nothing in it for you. For what it’s worth, there’s a name for people who do things like that — we call them patriots.”

He stood, patted the computer monitor, and headed for the door.

After he was gone Zelda sat staring at the monitor.

Naguib went out every evening to meet the blond woman at the Oasis. Ali, Yousef, and Mohammed knew he was going. He made no secret of it. As they watched television and showered, he would nod and leave. If one or two or all of them stood in the seashell parking lot, they could watch him walk through parking lots the entire two hundred yards to the Oasis Bar and Grill.

Mohammed didn’t know what to do. If he killed Naguib, Ali and Yousef might freak and desert him. On the other hand, if Naguib didn’t want to do his part, Mohammed would be a fool to try to force him into it. And of course he could be telling everything he knew to an American undercover policewoman. Yes, Mohammed knew that the American police used women to trap criminals.

This evening after Naguib left, Mohammed asked his colleagues, “What if Naguib’s woman is an American spy?”

They thought about it.

“We wage jihad,” Mohammed pointed out. “We are on a holy mission. Naguib volunteered, as did the three of us. We knew the mission, what was required of us, what we would have to do. We swore on the beard of the prophet that we would do what must be done to strike this glorious blow. And now Naguib drinks beer and talks to this woman late at night.”

“Naguib is a good man,” Yousef said stoutly. “He is weak, yes, as all men are weak, and if the slut gives him her body, he will take it. But he will not betray God. He will not betray us.”

“FBI Agents are very clever,” Ali said thoughtfully. He glanced at Mohammed and Yousef, trying to read their faces. Mohammed was also clever, he thought, but not Yousef. Nor Naguib.

“He doesn’t know when the weapons will arrive, or where,” Yousef pointed out. “Only Mohammed knows.”

“He knows us,” Ali replied. “He knows our names, our histories, who sent us, where we get our money, what we intend to do.”

And so they argued while Mohammed listened, saying nothing. The drift was plain. Yousef wanted to kick Naguib out of the group, rely on him to maintain his silence. Ali saw the dangers of that approach but could not bring himself to say what he thought should be done. Finally they talked themselves out. They turned to him.

“He must not be allowed to endanger our mission,” Mohammed said slowly. “It is bigger and more important than we are.”

Their faces were stony.

“We are going to die as martyrs for the glory of Allah. We will slay the infidels as it has never been done before in the history of the world. The entire earth will tremble at the mention of Allah’s name when it sees our determination. Everyone on earth will convert to Islam, just as the prophet wished. And for this great service, we will be in Paradise.”

Yes, they understood all this. The mission was fantastic, glorious beyond description, a service to the prophet that would change the history of the world.

“We must kill Naguib,” Mohammed said. “We cannot take the chance that he might betray us, endanger our holy mission.”

“Allah is watching,” Yousef declared with simple faith. “If Allah wishes us to succeed, we will succeed. Killing Naguib would be a murder of the faithful, which is forbidden by the holy Koran. Certainly you don’t intend to ask Allah to aid us with the blood of the faithful on your hands?”

“Sometimes the faithful must die. The faithful died to destroy the trade towers in New York. The three of us will die when the weapon explodes. Naguib has already pledged his life to our jihad. The truth of it is that he must give his life now to protect us.”

The logic was irrefutable. They chewed at the problem for another twenty minutes, then Ali and Yousef came around. They went to the car and watched Mohammed open the trunk with the key. Four pistols and ammunition were hidden under the spare tire.

With loaded pistols in their pockets, they waited in the darkness outside the motel for Naguib. No one seemed to be watching. The last car had come in hours before, and the office lights were now off. An occasional car or pickup went past on the highway. Only two cars were left in the parking lot of the beer joint next door when Naguib came walking across the parking lots smelling of beer, humming to himself.

“Into the car,” Mohammed said.

“I am tired. I want to sleep.”

“Things are happening,” Mohammed said. “Now is the hour.”

Yousef and Ali climbed in the backseat of the sedan and Mohammed got behind the wheel. Naguib had no choice but to get in the right-front passenger seat.

He was half-drunk. He hummed as he rode, thinking of Suzanne.

The silence of the other three finally soaked through the beer haze. They were usually very talkative with each other; their fellow countrymen and coconspirators were their only social outlet.

“Where are we going?” Naguib asked.

“You’ll see.”

“Has the weapon arrived?”

“Soon,” Mohammed said. “Very soon. We must be ready.”

“Yes,” Naguib agreed sleepily. “Yes.”

Mohammed turned off the paved county road he was on and steered the car down a dirt road alongside a deep drainage ditch. The ditch and the dirt road beside it ran straight ahead into the darkness, seemed to go on forever. In the rearview mirror Mohammed could see the lights of the highway and the houses growing smaller.

Well away from the county road, he brought the car to a stop. “This is the place, I think.” He looked at a tiny sign illuminated by the headlights and scanned the darkness in all directions, as if he were trying to identify something. “This is it,” he said, and turned off the headlights and engine and opened his door.

Everyone got out.

“What is out here?” Naguib asked, looking around himself and seeing nothing at all in the darkness.

He felt something press against his side, then Ali shot him.

There was no pain, just a numbing shock. The report was muffled and he barely heard it.

“No,” Naguib shouted, trying to push at Ali, who pulled the trigger again three more times as fast as he could.

Yousef fired once.

With Naguib on the ground, Mohammed turned on a small pocket flashlight. He was still alive, so Mohammed put his pistol against the side of Naguib’s head and shot him once more.

“Take everything from his pockets,” Mohammed told Ali and Yousef. “If they find him, they will not know who he is.”

It was a distasteful task, but they did it.

“Good-bye, Naguib,” Mohammed said, and pushed his body over the edge of the road into the ditch. They had to go down into the ditch to throw the corpse into the water, a task that covered the three of them with dirt and mud.

Satisfied at last, Mohammed led the way up the bank to the car. They climbed in and drove away.

An illegal Mexican farmworker found Naguib’s body the following day. He saw the tracks along the dirt road and assumed someone had driven there during the night. When he stopped the tractor to pee and eat his lunch, he wandered to the place with the tracks to see if perhaps the people had left anything, like a few inches of whiskey or beer in the bottom of a bottle. That’s when he saw Naguib’s body in the ditch.

It was late in the afternoon when FBI Agent Suzanne Ostrowski saw the body. Local police had pulled it from the ditch; it was lying in the dirt.

Another agent lifted the sheet covering the face. The eyes were wide-open and bulged out from the pressure of the bullet in the brain, almost as if he had been horribly surprised.

Yes, it was Naguib.

The big lunk. So gentle and naive, so trusting …

So they killed him. Left him like garbage at the bottom of a drainage ditch.

She was a tough woman, but a sense of profound sadness swept over her. And resolve. If they would kill Naguib, one of their own, they would murder others with as much remorse as if they were squashing bugs.

Tommy Carmellini was in love. He didn’t want to get in that condition and certainly wasn’t trying, but after two days at the Homestead, he was pretty sure he had arrived. It was the first time for him, and it felt wonderful. Anna Modin was the woman.

Unfortunately he wasn’t sure she was in love with him. Oh, she looked happy enough, made love like a goddess, liked to play with the hair on his chest, and found moments when no one was apparently watching to kiss him. The experience was heavenly. Yet did she love him?

They soaked in the pool fed by the hot springs, went on short hikes — strolls, really — played several rounds of golf … Anna had never played before and was terrible. She had trouble learning to swing the club properly and sprayed the ball everywhere. And she laughed; oh, how she laughed when the ball went squirting away willy-nilly. She marched over, wiggled her fanny, mugged at him, and whacked it again, laughing all the time.

They also spent a lot of time naked in bed.

The birds sang, puffy clouds with flat gray bottoms floated along in the blue sky, and everything that grew was in bloom this spring.

Did she love him? Tommy Carmellini wondered and worried.

What if she did? She said she was leaving when Janos Ilin sent for her. Would she change her mind? Could she change her mind?

Evenings were delicious. A fine meal, wine, watching dusk settle from rocking chairs on the old porch, reviewing the day and laughing some more. And more kisses.

What if, he wondered, she had been lying about being a Russian agent? What if she really were an agent for the SVR?

Oh, Christ, his superiors at the CIA would lay eggs. Jake Grafton would come unglued. Tommy Carmellini would be an unemployed civilian so quick it would take your breath away. Alas, he only had two civilian skills, law and burglary — both equally disreputable. As he mused on it, he wondered if he could find a way to combine them.

When he first arrived at the Homestead and looked around, Carmellini concluded that brown Islamic assassins would stand out like nudes in church, so he had stopped sweating that program. He wore his pistol under his sports coat or windbreaker. When he was on the golf course he put it in his golf bag. At the pool he left it beside his chair inside a small backpack he purchased at the gift shop. Sometimes he just hung the backpack over one shoulder by a strap. Sitting on the porch holding Anna’s hand watching the light fade, he put the backpack on the floor beside his chair.

He had checked in with Jake Grafton four times the first day, three the second, found that Scout and Earlene were doing whatever Zelda asked of them, so he was soon down to one telephone call a day. Sometimes he just left a message for Grafton saying he called.

He liked her eyes. The way they crinkled when she laughed, the fact that she laughed easily and often, the fact that she seemed to find him fascinating. Yet was she in Love? Love with a capital L. Or just in lust, enjoying a relaxing vacation complete with the room-service sex package?

Like every lover since the dawn of time, he pondered these things. Fretted them. Found himself hanging on every smile, every touch, every kiss, reading things into every glance or move she made or word she spoke. Or didn’t speak. Even her silences were laden with import.

When he could stand it no longer, the evening of the fourth day, he waited until the after-dinner liqueur had been served, then he took the bull by the horns.

“I’m in love with you,” he said softly as he held her hand and looked straight into her eyes.

“I love you too,” she replied … and Tommy Carmellini felt so light that he had to grasp the arm of his chair to keep from floating.

She took his hand in both of hers and turned it over carefully and inspected it, ran a finger along the lifeline and across his palm. Never had he felt anything so exquisite.

“I never thought I would, you know,” she continued in her wonderfully accented English, which he never tired of hearing. “Oh, I tried to fall in love. I think every woman does. We all want someone to love us and to give love to. Perhaps it is the human condition. But for me, until now …”

She was looking into his eyes again, both her hands squeezing his. “I wish every person on Earth could know this feeling at least once.” She released his hand, rose from her chair, and took two steps around the table toward him. Bent and kissed him on the lips, a long, tender, gentle kiss. Then she took her seat again. Her eyes glistened.

The people at the next table applauded politely, and Tommy Carmellini nodded and smiled at them. Anna Modin kept her eyes on him.

He was going to say more, then decided against it. A little voice told him, Don’t take a chance. Savor this moment. Treasure it. Remember every nuance of it so that you can keep it in your heart forever. So he reached for her hand and grasped it and sat looking into her shining eyes.