The Assassin

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I awoke on the descent into Dulles. The sky was dark, full of clouds. Soon the glow of Washington’s lights lit the clouds from underneath; then, as we continued to descend, the sea of lights became visible from horizon to horizon. Marisa woke up and busied herself getting put together while I got glimpses out the window.

As the wheels squeaked on the runway, the flight attendant, a woman, came on the PA: “Let me be the first to welcome you to the United States.” As a cheer erupted from the tourist section, Marisa smiled at me.

A man from the Company met us when we came out of customs/ immigration and drove us straight to Jake Grafton’s condo in Rosslyn. While Isolde and Marisa were nibbling snacks in the kitchen with Callie Grafton, the admiral motioned me into his den. He sat and listened while I went through everything that had happened, in minute detail, since we had last seen each other.

When I finished my litany of stupidity and death, he didn’t say anything, so I added, “I’m sorry, Admiral.”

“You don’t owe anyone an apology, Tommy. Not me, the dead people or the gods. You did the best you could. That’s all any of us can do.”

“Well, we have them here in the States now. With all those gun-toters at Langley to help us, a mouse couldn’t get through to them.”

He took a deep breath and his eyebrows rose, then fell. “Unfortunately I can’t get all those gun-toters. I can’t get any of them. Wilkins and his deputies nixed that. They have zero confidence in me, and they say that if indeed we do have a squad of dedicated terrorists heading this way, the Company needs all its security personnel in place and on the job to prevent a terrorist event at Langley. Hard to argue with that.”

I was incredulous. “Can’t you get anybody?”

“I brought back some of the guys that have been hunting in the Middle East, the ones I could pull out without blowing their covers. The FBI has loaned me a couple of people, and I have you. If you can get your pal Willie Varner to help, we can add one more to the list. That’s about the crop.”

I felt nauseous. “Why don’t you get Sal Molina to tell Wilkins to cooperate or ship out?”

“If I did that, I’d be finished in the Company. It was Wilkins’ call and he made it. Period.”

“So we salute and soldier on.”

“Something like that.”

I lost it then.

Grafton waited until I ran down, then said, “The women are sleeping in the guest bedroom tonight. You’re on the couch. Tomorrow morning, go see Willie.”

He opened a drawer and took out a pistol, a 1911 Colt automatic in.45 ACP, which he passed across the desk. I popped the magazine out, then pulled back the slide and checked for brass. It was loaded, all right. I snapped the magazine back in and looked it over.

“It was my father’s,” the admiral said. “He carried it during World War II. I want it back.”

“He ever have to shoot anybody with it?” I asked as I tucked it into my belt.

“He once told me he did, then refused to answer questions about it.”

“Marisa said Qasim wants you dead, too.”

“By God, I hope so,” Grafton said fiercely. “I hope he attends to it personally instead of sending his mechanic’s assistant, Khadr.”

“He might also decide that Callie will do in a pinch. Or your daughter, Amy.”

Jake Grafton nodded once. His lips were compresse’d into a straight, thin line. “I’ve been thinking about that, too,” he murmured. “Come on, let’s do the tour.”

He led me into the hall and told me about his neighbors’ condos. There were actually four on each floor. The usual elevator shaft had two elevators, and beside it a stairwell. Anyone could get into the stairwell on any floor, but only the lobby and basement doors could be opened from the inside without an access code, the admiral told me. We were on the eighth floor. First we climbed the stairs to the top floor— actually the fourteenth floor, although it was marked ‘roof’—Grafton keyed his secret code into the keypad that unlocked the door, and we stepped out onto the roof.

The surrounding buildings were a couple of stories lower, so this one stuck up out of the skyline a little. The flat roof was surrounded by a chest-high rail. About half the area was covered by a wooden deck that stood up maybe six inches above the asphalt goo that made the roof waterproof. Vents and pipes stuck up everywhere, a metal forest. Three barbecue grills were chained to pipes so they wouldn’t blow away. Someone had put a few flowerpots up here, and now, in the dead of winter, the plant carcasses they contained looked forlorn. It didn’t take us long to see all there was to see.

We clumped down a flight, then rode the elevator to the lobby level, where we went out the main entrance. The lobby door was locked. People could key in their access code to unlock it or could buzz someone in the building; the front door could be unlocked from any condo. Once in the lobby, one could enter the stairwell or summon an elevator.

“The Homeowners Association has talked for years about putting a keypad system in the elevators, but they haven’t gotten around to it,” Grafton said. “The elevators will take you to any floor.”

A security camera looked at the lobby, which contained a listing of the building’s tenants and a bank of mailboxes, nothing else.

We went outside and walked down the alley to the back of the building, which faced east, as did Grafton’s condo high above. On the back of the building at ground level, the basement level, was a loading dock, which allowed furniture to be moved into the basement and elevators via a sliding overhead metal door, now padlocked shut. Beside the big door was a personnel door with the lock in the doorknob. I examined it. It was a run-of-the-mill commercial lock, easy to pick or, if you lacked the talent for that, to break with a pipe wrench on the knob.

The building on the north side butted right up to this one, so to complete our circumnavigation we had to go around both buildings.

When we were back at the front entrance to Grafton’s tower, the admiral asked, “What do you think?”

“Without a squad of armed people on duty around the clock, it’s indefensible,” I replied. “They can post a sniper to shoot into your place, break into an adjoining condo and plant a bomb, bomb your front door and come in shooting, or just burn the damn building down with you and all your neighbors in it. If they don’t want to bother with bombs or fire, they can stay outside and gun you and yours on the street when you come out.”

“That about covers it, I guess,” the admiral said thoughtfully.

“If I were you, I’d get the authorities to evacuate everybody until we get Qasim. Tell people there’s a sewer leak or rabid rats or infected cockroaches. Whatever.”

“That won’t work,” Grafton said. “We can’t evacuate America until we win the war on terror.”

I knew he’d say that. “Your best bet is to post some guys outside to spot them coming in.”

“That’s my assessment, too. Would you go to see Willie in the morning?” “Okay.”

Stretched out on Grafton’s couch with a pillow and blanket, I couldn’t sleep. Between the nap I had on the plane, the time zone changes, and a mild case of constipation from all that sitting, there was no way the sandman was going to find me. I lay there tossing for a while, then sat up in the darkness for a while, then went to the window and looked out. Amazingly, snow was falling. Wasn’t sticking, just falling. If this kept up, they would cancel the government tomorrow.

I was standing there in my underwear when Marisa came padding out wrapped in an old robe she had borrowed from Mrs. Grafton.

“Can’t sleep, either?” I asked.

“No.”

She stood beside me for a few minutes watching the snow fall into the lights. “When I was a girl I loved to watch snow come down,” she said. “I seem to have gotten out of the habit.”

“Was that in Switzerland?”

“Yes. I spent my childhood at a boarding school. They must have taken me there when I was still in diapers. Adults came and visited me occasionally, and took me out for dinner and movies, but I lived there, in that little world, behind walls.”

“Did Abu Qasim ever visit?” I asked.

“Oh, yes.”

“Tell me about him.”

She remained silent for so long I thought I had crossed an invisible line; then she began to speak. Slowly at first, then faster and with more assurance. She literally began with the first visit of Qasim that she could remember and went through it almost hour by hour. Then the next, and the next, and so on. She remembered his every word, every gesture, every grimace, where they went, what they did, where they sat, what they ate — all of it. Two hours later she finally ran down. I gave her a drink from a bottle in Grafton’s kitchen cupboard and sent her off to bed.

The snow had turned to rain, and the wind had kicked up.

One thing’s for sure, Tommy, I told myself. She really hates that son of a bitch.

After breakfast, I borrowed Grafton’s car and went off to visit my business associate, Willie Varner, who was better known in some quarters as Willie the Wire. You met him earlier on one of his bad days, at our lock shop. We’re partners, although my name is on the shop lease and the contractor’s and fidelity bonds since Willie is a convicted felon.

He greeted me like a long-lost brother. “Where the hell you been?”

“Europe.”

“That’s a big place.”

“France, England and a little slice of Germany called Rastatt.”

“Sounds bad. That a city or jail or what?”

“Town.”

“Well, you got back to civilization just in time. We got a contract to install the locks and burglar and fire alarms in a whole subdivision they’re buildin’ over in Virginia — three hundred town houses, some-thin’ called Sherwood Forest Hills, although it’s in an old cow pasture, flatter’n Florida, and there ain’t a tree in sight.”

Willie rubbed his hands together. “Big money in contracting boy, and we’re gonna get a chunk. Can’t believe this fell in our lap, but fall it did. Got Scout and Earlene signed up to help do the work. With you helpin’, it’ll go a little faster.” I knew Scout and Earlene, a couple who did some electrical contracting in the city. Earlene was a former WNBA player, and Scout had done a stretch in the pen.

“When we’re done,” Willie added, “I’m goin’ to Vegas for a week or two.”

Willie had been up the river a couple of times for burglary. After he got out the second time, we opened this lock shop. He was a wizard with a hairpin, a natural talent, who could open about any lock around. Me, I used picks, and since I didn’t have natural talent, made up for it with old-fashioned grit and persistence.

“Man, we’ll have to find someone to do it for us,” I said, using the imperial “we.” After all, I owned half the business. “I need you on a little job I’m working across town.”

He couldn’t believe it. He told me how much we stood to earn doing the subdivision. “Tommy, this is major money, a real score. Honest money, too! We only got this job because the original sub got busted for drugs and, on top of that, the damn fool had a pistol in his pocket. He’s sittin’ in jail. Needless to say, his contractor’s bond went up in smoke. We got called at the last minute. I demanded twice what the man offered, and he was over a barrel and said yes. Maybe I oughta feel a little ashamed at takin’ advantage, but I don’t. His fuckin’ problem! Big opportunity for us. We get that stuff in right and workin’, make these dudes happy, and we got a shot at biddin’ major subdivisions all over. Jesus, Tommy, they’re buildin’ out the whole northern half of Virginia, houses sproutin’ outta those old farms like toadstools after a, rain.”

I waited until he ran down. “Let Scout and Earlene do the work. We have a contractor’s bond and they don’t. They’ll make some serious money and we’ll pocket some and get the call on the next subdivision.” Willie sat down on a stool and eyed me suspiciously while I fired up a table saw and began making wedges out of a two-by-four. “You still workin’ for that sailor, Grafton?”

“Yeah. I’m sitting on his family for a week or so. It’s possible some bad dudes want them dead.”

“Man, you went to the hospital twice for that man. How much of his shit you gonna shovel?”

“It’s three times, and the answer is, It’s Uncle Sam we’re working for, not Jake Grafton.”

“Yeah. Right! Next thing you’ll be tellin’ me that it’s raghead suiciders who want to do them.”

I couldn’t help it. My face must have been a study.

Willie took one look at my puss and groaned. “Oh, Jesus, Tommy, tell me it isn’t true!”

It was true, though, so I twisted his arm and he cussed me out and argued. “I been to the hospital twice myself on your adventures, Tommy. Don’t want to go again. I’m too damn old, man.”

“There’s no risk involved. I just need your eyes and street smarts.”

“No guns. I don’t do guns or knives. Tried that last year and it didn’t work. Denzel Washington I ain’t.”

I appealed to his patriotism and greed. We were on the side of the angels. He would make money on the subdivision contract and he would collect some government money, too. Finally greed won out and he agreed to help. “Only to keep Mrs. Grafton alive, you understand.” We called Scout and Earlene and made a deal. Willie said he would be ready to go to work tomorrow.

“Let’s go see him now,” I said. I flipped off the saw, brushed the sawdust off my clothes and put my wedges in a paper bag. There was a nice hammer lying there, so I added it to the bag.

“Busy now.” He waved at all the projects on the bench.

“Now,” I insisted. “Get your coat.”

He was subdued and well behaved by the time we rode the elevator up to Grafton’s condo. In the elevator he spotted the bulge under my coat. “You packin’?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, man, no guns you said. Push the down button, you lyin’ sack…”

I didn’t, of course. The admiral was glad to see us. He took us into the study and closed the door. When we were seated, he asked Willie, “Did Tommy tell you why we need you?”

Willie gave me an evil look. “Just gave me some shit about an easy job, no guns or knives, no violence of any kind. I knew he was lyin’, of course. He ain’t told the truth for one whole day in his whole miserable life. He’s the only man I know who tells more lies than I do.”

“I’m taking our houseguests to Connecticut,” Grafton said, ignoring Willie’s bullshit, as I habitually did. With Willie, it becomes second nature. “But Callie, my daughter, Amy, and Tommy will be here alone. It’s possible that someone may try to kill Callie or Amy. If the hitter is a professional, he’s probably going to case the place, try to establish who is here, figure out the women’s routine, all of that, before he decides how to make the hit. I need someone in the street to find and identify the watcher. You, I hope, will be my someone. The job will last about a week — no more. If and when you spot a watcher, you’ll call Tommy on his cell phone. He’ll take over from there.”

“Man, they’ll probably just burn the whole place down with everyone in it. You oughta get your wife outta here.”

“Callie, Amy and Tommy will be here,” Grafton said in a tone that ended the discussion.

“Just watch and call Tommy?” Willie said, eyeing Grafton.

“That’s it,” Grafton reiterated. “I’ll get you a lapel mike and earphone. He’ll hear everything you say. You’ll also need some props, some reason to hang out on the street. You need to be out there wandering around, watching but not appearing to be watching.”

Willie nodded. “I can do that.”

“What props do you need?”

“Just a brown bag and a bottle. Watched winos all my life. I can do that for a few days.”

“You’re on the payroll. Contract wages. Stop by in the morning and I’ll give you the radio.”

“I need some old clothes. Go to the Salvation Army this afternoon and get myself an outfit.”

“You need to be out there pretty much around the clock.”

“Gonna be tough money,” Willie said. “Tough money, this time of year, sleepin’ on the street.”

“Just don’t drink too much of that poison,” I warned.

“Sort of a government-paid toot,” Willie said philosophically. “Might be a nice little vacation, after all.”

After he met Callie and shook her hand, and she thanked him for agreeing to help, he left to make his arrangements. Grafton went over to Langley for a few hours, and I did some general hanging out in his den.

He was leaving in the morning for Winchester’s estate in Connecticut, and taking Isolde and Marisa with him. Callie and Amy and I were staying here, with Willie watching on the street. Although that sounded like a half-baked, desperate plan to me, I couldn’t come up with a better one.

The problem was that Qasim and his helper — make that helpers, because I had no idea how many he had or could recruit here in the good ol’ U.S. of A. — could attack in dozens of different ways. Qasim and company certainly weren’t stuck on a particular MO. Already they had used poison — chemical and nuclear — bullets, a knife, an icicle and a car bomb. About the only methods they hadn’t used were fire and a nuclear explosion, and I suspected that with Qasim’s help they could arrange those things if they put their heads to it. Which was, of course, precisely why Jake Grafton, Sal Molina and the president wanted Abu Qasim dead and in hell.

Hell, I had to agree, would certainly be the place for him.

Marisa agreed, too. That conversation in the wee hours last night had been a revelation for me. She hated the bastard. Had he been just a figure from her childhood, she might have gotten over it in the hustle and bustle of life, but he came back … and she obeyed his orders in a terrorist attempt on the G-8 leaders. So now she hated him. And feared him.

Or so she said. Of course, he also sliced up her face.

I got up from Grafton’s little leather couch and examined the titles on his bookshelf and fingered his mementos while I went over that conversation again, trying to decide if Marisa had told the truth. The possibility that she was a world-class actress couldn’t be eliminated or excluded. Traitors have marched through the human drama since the dawn of time lying to everyone around them while they were committing treason. Such people are the lifeblood of intelligence agencies, including mine, and our most precious assets.

Isolde came in about that time. We chitchatted for a bit about America and her previous visits, then I asked her point-blank: “Does Marisa really hate Abu Qasim, or is she lying?”

The Frenchwoman looked me squarely in the eyes as she said, “Never have I seen someone hate another so much. It is a poison, and if she doesn’t somehow neutralize it, it will destroy her.”

She thought about that for a moment, then added, “I, too, have hated, but not like that. Not with the entire total of my being, not to the absolute depth and length and breadth of my soul.” She got up from her chair, looked around the room once more, then said, “Hatred has mutilated and twisted Abu Qasim. I don’t want Marisa to end up as he is, disfigured, foul, obsessed to the brink of insanity, evil. That would be a horrible fate.”

“Good to see you again, Admiral,” Robin Cloyd said when Jake Grafton walked into the foyer of his Langley office and the security door closed behind him.

“Good morning,” he said and walked on through to his private office. His desk was orderly, with the items demanding his attention carefully arranged in a pile. The urgent stuff that needed his immediate attention was on top, and the routine stuff on the bottom. Cloyd did the arranging, and her judgment was impeccable.

She also had his telephone call slips in a pile. Right on top was one from the director of MI-5. Jake sat down and dialed the number on the encrypted telephone that was on his desk. Three minutes later the British officer was on the line.

After a few social pleasantries, the director said, “Little development I thought you should know about. We got into Alexander Surkov’s security box at his bank. Found a wad of currency and four passports for four different people. None of them had Surkov’s photo on them. Two were American, one British and one from the Ukraine.”

“Real passports?”

“Our boffins think not. They look good, very good, good enough to fool any immigration officer who has only a minute or so to look at them, but our experts think they might be products of the SVR.” The Sluzhba Vneshnei Razvedski, Russian foreign intelligence, was Janos Ilin’s outfit.

“You don’t say,” Grafton murmured.

“No way to know for certain,” the British officer continued, “but one suspects Mr. Surkov had a lucrative little sideline supplying documents to unfortunates who found themselves inconveniently without.”

“He knew people in Russia,” Jake said thoughtfully. “That was what he had to sell.”

“The names on the passports don’t seem to be in our database, so we’re seeing what we can do with the photographs and addresses. In the meantime, we’re keeping this discovery under our hats. It won’t be released to the press or shared with law enforcement.”

Grafton thanked him and said good-bye.

Robin stuck her head in. “It’s almost time for your appointment, Admiral.”

Grafton glanced at his watch, then headed for the door. “See you in a bit,” he said.

The room beside director William Wilkins’ office was a multimedia theater cleverly disguised to look like a conference room. When buttons were pushed, walls retracted and displays popped up, rather like the cockpit of the starship Enterprise. Today the gadgets were hidden.

Grafton made small talk with the head of the Secret Service, Abe Goldman, while they waited for Wilkins and the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, who were in Wilkins’ office behind closed doors. An aide stuck his head in, saw that Grafton and Goldman were there and disappeared, presumably to relay the news to Wilkins, who came in a few minutes later with the secretary in tow. Grafton and Goldman popped to their feet.

“Stay seated, gentlemen.” Wilkins had no regular chair, but parked his bottom wherever the mood struck him, a habit that led to small side bets among the department heads who regularly attended meetings here. Today he took a seat directly across the table from Grafton. The secretary, who was Goldman’s boss, seated himself with an empty chair between him and Wilkins. In the bureaucratic shuffle that followed 9/11, the Secret Service had been removed from the Treasury Department and put in the new Department of Homeland Security.

“So, Jake, tell us this fairy tale you sold the president,” Wilkins began.

Grafton stated that he believed Abu Qasim was going to attempt to assassinate the president, and gave his reasons, including the history of his attempts to bring Qasim to bay. He discussed the murders of Zetsche, Tchernychenko and Gnadinger, and devoted several minutes to discussing the break-in and murders at the Petrou chateau in France.

Wilkins let him talk without interruption.

When Jake finished, the secretary spoke right up. He was a veteran of the Washington bureaucratic maze and was fairly good at reading between the lines. “There’s a whole lot here you haven’t told us.”

“He can’t and won’t reveal ongoing covert operations,” Wilkins said heavily.

“But what’s the logical thread between these murders and an assassination attempt?”

“Abu Qasim tried it last year, and he may try again.”

“That’s a logical fallacy. Does the president know more than you’re telling us?”

“Yes.”

“So you’re selling us another pig in a poke,” the secretary grumped to Wilkins, who didn’t smile. “Another fucking hunch.”

After the moment of silence that followed that remark, Grafton continued, “I had a telephone conversation this morning with the head of MI-5. He says Alexander Surkov, the Russian emigre assassinated with polonium in London, had four passports in his safe deposit box at his bank that may have been made in Russia. The working assumption in London is that he was a dealer in fake paper, which he got from a contact in the SVR.”

“And that tidbit leads us where?” the secretary said heavily.

“Tchernychenko, Surkov’s boss, was killed by a car bomb Saturday. Perhaps by Islamic extremists. Perhaps at the urging of Abu Qasim, who may have been a Surkov client.”

“This is a house of cards,” Goldman observed. “Surkov’s murder could have been ordered in Moscow, and so could Tchernychenko’s. I’ve heard about Janos Ilin’s little disclaimer and request to Grafton, and it was a farce. All you people are doing is reading tea leaves.”

“You want sworn testimony, go to the federal courthouse,” Wilkins shot back. “This is a spy agency. This is about as good as it gets, guys.”

Goldman took a deep breath, then exhaled. “Okay,” he said heavily. He turned to Grafton. “When and where, do you guesstimate?”

Jake told him. Twenty minutes later the secretary and Goldman departed, leaving Wilkins and Grafton alone in the conference room.

“How confident are you that it will go down the way you told those two?” Wilkins asked the admiral.

“This isn’t just my guess as to his intentions. Marisa Petrou also thinks this is the scenario.” He paused, then decided that the time had arrived to show all the cards to his boss. “I think she might have killed her husband, who was probably selling information to Qasim. I think she has made some kind of deal with Abu Qasim to keep him from killing her mother-in-law, Isolde. He may have told her to tell me this tale, but I doubt it. I think she is telling the truth as she believes it to be about his intentions. The bottom line is that she wants Abu Qasim dead. So do we.”

“Is she or is she not his daughter?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t believe she does. Sometimes she thinks she is, sometimes she is sure she isn’t.”

Wilkins rubbed his forehead with his fingertips as he digested that remark.

“You know,” he said conversationally, “I’ve been in this business for twenty-five years. Without a doubt, this is the goddamnest tangle I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen them all.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And letting the president get these amateurs involved … Damn that Molina, with his fingers in every pie!”

Wilkins took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, then said, “Tell you what — if Homeland doesn’t snag our buddy Abu in the interim, or if he doesn’t make his try on the president next Thursday night as you have so persuasively predicted, I want your resignation on my desk on Friday morning.”

“Yes, sir.”

Grafton’s condo was on the eighth floor of his building, and it occupied the entire eastern end of the floor. Looking out the living room window, I could see over the buildings on the east side. See the roofs and the apartments they contained. Could see the spire of the Washington Monument in the distance, a white phallic symbol poking up above the trees.

The main bedroom where the Graftons slept was on the northeast corner. Marisa was asleep in the adjacent guest room when I tiptoed in. Looking out the window, I could see more of the same. I drew the curtains and tiptoed out.

When I wandered into the kitchen, Callie was there with Isolde, gabbling in French. I knew that Callie, a language professor at Georgetown University, loved opportunities to gas with native speakers of one of her languages. She and Isolde, a smart, dynamic, experienced executive with a wealth of life experience almost as broad as Callie’s, would soon be fast friends, I suspected.

Each of them was working on a glass of white wine. Callie offered me a glass, but I refused. A door off the kitchen led to a tiny balcony which jutted out from the building on the east side. The kitchen windows on the south side of the room faced apartments in the buildings across the way, each with its private balcony and its windows.

This condo was a sniper’s wet dream. I lowered the blinds and drew the curtains.

“Surely they won’t be here so soon, Tommy,” Mrs. Grafton said.

I didn’t think so, either, but I said, “Can’t be too careful.”

She and Isolde went back to their cookbook, which was open on the butcher-block island in the middle of the room, and switched to English, in deference to my presence. Apparently dinner was going to be a production.

I watched them until Callie looked my way again. “Hanging out here with Abu Qasim on the loose is going to be very dangerous,” I said.

She smiled tightly. “I know.”

“And lately I haven’t been doing very well at the bodyguard gig. Actually, I’ve been doing terribly.”

“Isolde and Marisa are still alive,” Callie pointed out.

“They’re alive because Abu Qasim didn’t want to kill them. Then. If and when he gets around to it, they’re going to have a serious problem. As you and I do.”

“Marisa told me that he’ll probably send a colleague named Khadr,” Callie said. She got busy removing food from the refrigerator.

Isolde was standing beside the cookbook watching us and listening. Now she said, “She thought Khadr was the gunman who attacked my chateau.”

Here it was again: Ol’ Marisa knew a lot, to hear her tell it, and one suspected she knew a lot more that she wasn’t telling. That sure put a damper on the conversation.

I watched the two of them dice vegetables and cut up a chicken for a casserole.

“I’ll say it one more time,” I said to Callie. “I think you should go with your husband to Connecticut, or at least slip off to visit friends in the wilds of California or wherever.”

“I know you and Willie will do your best.”

“My best hasn’t been very good. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Besides, even if I were Superman, I’m only one guy. Who knows how many of them will come after us? Hasn’t it occurred to you that they want me, too? Kill me, then the coast is clear to wax you, and every other person in this building. Every move I make leaves other options open for them. Surely you can see that.”

“Amy will be joining us for dinner,” Callie said, glancing at me, “and she’ll be staying with us for the next week or so. Jake thought that wise.”

End of conversation.

So Grafton was betting the farm on Willie and me. I silently cursed him for a damn fool, then went back to the den and sacked out on the couch for a nap. It took a while, but I finally drifted off. Got to dreaming about killers setting off bombs against the door and rushing into the room with guns blazing. Started thrashing. Woke up suddenly covered with sweat.

In addition to Amy Carol Grafton, there were two other guests for dinner, a journalist named Jack Yocke and a lady friend he brought along. I had read Yocke’s stuff for years in the Post and recognized the name. He was a tall, gangly guy, articulate and full of opinions. Apparently Grafton and Yocke had known each other for years. When Grafton introduced us, he pronounced Yocke’s name as Yock-key: I had seen it in print a hundred times but never heard it pronounced before.

“We talked about having dinner together, what? Three months ago?”

“Four, I think,” Grafton said apologetically. “Hard to fit you in between golf and bowling.”

“You retired guys,” Yocke said wryly, glancing at me. I could see that he knew Grafton was about as retired as I was.

“After the murder of Jean Petrou,” Yocke said as he scrutinized Grafton’s face, “I am amazed that the French authorities allowed them to leave the country.”

Grafton shrugged.

“I suppose you don’t want their presence in the States to make the papers?”

“Publish if you wish, but don’t use my name. And don’t question them.”

At the dinner table Yocke entertained us with unprintable inside dope on the goings-on among the politicos around town. I pretended I cared.

Yocke’s girlfriend or significant other, as the case might have been, seemed nice enough. Her name was Anna-Lynn Something — I didn’t pay much attention to her last name. If she had any idea of the tensions swirling around the table, she ignored them. She seemed happy and laughed with Callie and Amy and told political jokes.

Marisa and Isolde were more subdued, yet they held up their end of the conversation. Me? I didn’t have much to say. I was a bit overwhelmed at the guard-duty assignment and pretty steamed at Grafton.

At one point I asked him, “Do you own this place or rent it?”

“We own it,” he said.

So anyone with a computer and access to the Internet could get his address from the public records. Terrific!

Marisa, who was seated on my left, put her hand atop mine for a moment and smiled at me.

Amy Carol was a schoolteacher, fourth grade this year, in her late twenties. She was dating a stockbroker who lived and worked in Baltimore. The Graftons, I gathered, had high hopes that this guy was The One. Callie asked Amy about her beau and subtly pumped her for information, which Amy supplied in little dribs and drabs, just enough to be polite. Parents!

After dinner, while we were lingering over the dessert Anna-Lynn had brought and some coffee, Grafton asked Yocke if he could have a word with him in the den. They left for a tete-a-tete.

Marisa smiled at me again, and I smiled right back. What the hey, a guy can only die once. The coffee was excellent — life was beginning to look a little better.

In the den with the door closed, Jake Grafton said, “I have a story for you.”

“Oh, happy day!” Jack Yocke shot back. He found a chair and dropped into it.

“But there are ground rules,” Grafton continued smoothly. “You have to agree to all of them or I won’t give you the story.”

Jack Yocke stared at the admiral across the desk. “There’s a quote about a gift horse that comes to mind.”

“Here are the rules. First, you can’t print the story unless and until I give you the green light. Second, you can’t quote me. Third, you have to write and print the story as I give it to you — no changing or editing or speculating.”

“Uh-huh. How much of the story will be true?”

A smile crossed Grafton’s face. “Some of it, anyway.”

“I’ve heard, simply a rumor, you understand, that you work for the CIA in a covert capacity.”

The smile stayed on Grafton’s face. His gray eyes, Yocke noted, weren’t smiling.

“I’ll look like a fool,” Yocke continued, “if the real story comes out and it looks as if I’ve been had.”

“Your story will be the real story,” Grafton replied. “No one will call you a liar.”

“Can I quote you as an unidentified source?”

“You can attribute the story to unidentified sources. Plural. No quotes.”

“Are there real people named in your story?”

“Yes.”

“May I interview them?”

“Only after you print the story I give you. They’ll substantiate every word of the printed story.”

“Well,” said Yocke, after thinking it over, “I can agree to this: I’ll listen to your tale, making no commitment to publish. I will talk this matter over with my editor. If and when you tell me I can publish, the editor and I will decide then if we’ll run it.”

“Subject to the other provisos?”

Yes.

“Don’t tell him my name.”

“I won t.”

“I can live with that.”

Jack Yocke took a notebook from an inside jacket pocket and placed it on the desk in front of him. He removed a cheap ballpoint from a shirt pocket, clicked it, checked that the point was out, then looked at the admiral, who began to talk.

When Grafton finished twenty minutes later, Yocke went over the names again to ensure he had them spelled correctly. He asked questions to clarify a few points, then reluctantly closed the book.

“So your houseguests are involved?”

“Yes.”

“May I question them now?”

“No. We went over that.”

Yocke stowed his book and pen and leaned back in his chair. He rocked it back on its two rear legs and sighed. “This story is nothing but speculative fiction. By your own admission, the climax is uncertain and may never happen.”

“Ah, but if it does…”

“What if it doesn’t?”

“Then this conversation never took place. You tear up your notes and we get on with life.”

Jack Yocke pursed his lips as he digested that remark. “You know, I’ve been a reporter in this town for eighteen years, come March. I’ve been lied to a million times, tooled around, stonewalled, cursed, cajoled, flattered, threatened, insulted, demeaned, beaten up and made a fool of. At least a dozen people have tried to bribe me. I’ve even had a gun waved in my face. But, I must admit, this takes the cake. This is a first.”

“Your memoirs are going to be a great read.”

“Got anything else to add to your tale?”

“No.”

“Let’s rejoin the party. I could do with a cup of coffee.”