The Red Horseman

3

June in Washington is very similar to early summer in any other large city in the northeastern part of the United States. The days of clouds and rain come regularly, interspersed with periods of sunshine and balmy breezes, perfect days when it seems the whole world is ripe, flourishing, vibrantly alive. Weekends are for shopping expeditions, yard work, an occasional party.

Workdays in the nation’s capital begin here like everywhere else. Most people turn on one of the television morning shows as they dress and drink a cup of hot chocolate or coffee. While they take a quick squint at the morning newspaper and gobble a fat pill, Willard Scott tells them about the weather and a lady having her hundredth birthday. Why supposedly sane people choose to spend the worst moments of the day with Willard Scott, Bryant Gumbel and their colleagues on the other networks is a phenomenon that will probably intrigue archeologists of a future age.

With the kids shoved out the door to swimming lessons or other summer activities, working people fire up their horseless chariots and join the commuting throng. Tooling out of the subdivision they tune in another set of fools on their car radios. On each of the morning “drive shows” one or two jaded disk jockeys and one syrupy sweet, eternally cheerful female crank out some combination of pop music, weather and crude humor interspersed with reports from a helicopter pilot about the traffic jams that form every morning around stalls, wrecks and road construction projects. This mix is occasionally enlivened with a blow-by-blow account of a spectacular police chase of a freeway speeder who suddenly remembered his thirty-two unpaid parking tickets when he saw the cop’s flashing light.

And “news,” lots of it. Usually “news” is presented in short snippets, “sound bites,” some of them worth the ten seconds of air time they get, most not. To prevent the working citizen creeping through traffic from getting too down from an overdose of reality, the producers of these shows leaven the mix with the inane doings of show business celebrities and the latest risqué tidbits from the court trials of current cretins. Nothing heavy, nothing in depth, just a once-over-lightly on items that would only interest a heavy metal groupie or a social scientist from planet Zork.

Jake Grafton never listened. Callie had the television going every morning while she fixed Amy’s breakfast, but Jake read the newspaper. If the Washington Post thought an international story was worth the front page, the American intelligence community was going to be wrestling with it before lunch.

In the car Jake turned off the radio the instant it babbled to life. Amy and Callie always left the squawk box on, he always turned it off.

Today he drove in the usual blessed silence while he reviewed the crises of yesterday and the likely flaps on today’s agenda. The Middle East was boiling again: another assassination, more riots protesting ongoing Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank, more terrorism and murder. Chaos in the Balkans, another wave of Haitians heading for Florida, the usual anarchy in the new Commonwealth of Independent States, or as the bureaucrats had labeled it, the CIS — all in all, this was just another day in the 1990s.

Normally there was little the Americans could do to improve any international situation. Nor, as the optimists noted, was there much they could do that would make things worse. Still everything had to go through the gristmill and be forwarded on to the policymakers for their information. And in the case of the DIA, to the appropriate units of the military to ensure they weren’t luxuriating in blissful ignorance.

Besides the usual international crises, the top echelons of the military and civilian policymakers were still trying to formulate America’s response to the shape of the post-Communist world. The world had changed almost overnight, yet change was the bureaucracy’s worst enemy, the crisis to which it had the most difficulty responding.

This morning Jake Grafton thought about change. The knee-jerk reaction had been to reorganize, to draw more lines on the organization chart. That had been easy, though it hadn’t been enough. The brave new world had to be faced whether the policymakers were comfortable or not.

They were uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable. Men and women who had spent their adult lives as warriors of the cold war now had to face the unknown without experience or perspective. Mistakes were inevitable, grievous mistakes that were going to cost people their reputations, their careers. This sense of dangerous uncertainty collided with the extraordinary dynamics of the evolving geopolitical landscape to produce a stress-filled crisis atmosphere in which tension was almost tangible.

This situation is like war, Jake Grafton decided. Every change in the international scene reveals a new opportunity to the bold few and a new pitfall to the cautious many.

He was musing along these lines when the Pentagon came into view. It was a low, sprawling building much larger than it looked.

As he parked the car he was wondering if there was any place at all for nuclear weapons in this changing world. Were they obsolete, like horse cavalry and battleships? He also wondered if he was the only person in the Pentagon asking that question.

“Everyone would have been better off if Russia had had another revolution and shot all the Communists.”

General Albert Sidney Brown delivered himself of this opinion and stopped the strategy conference dead. Which was perhaps what he intended. The subject was the growth of virulent anti-Semitism in the former Soviet states.

“General,” CIA deputy director Harvey Schenler said wearily, “I don’t believe fantasies of that type contribute much to our deliberations.”

Brown snorted. “Most of the problems the new regimes in eastern Europe and the old Soviet Union are now facing were caused by the Communists’ grotesque mismanagement, incompetent central planning, believing their own propaganda, lying to everybody, including themselves, cheating, bribery, favoritism — the list goes on for a couple dozen pages. Now that the Commies have become the political opposition, they’re preaching hatred of the Jews, trying to blame them for the collapse of the whole rotten system. It’s 1932 in Germany all over again. Now you people in the CIA seem to think that if the Communists get back in power, in some magical way this nuclear weapons control problem will just disappear. Bullshit!”

Schenler’s tone sharpened. “I think you owe me and my staff an apology, General. We have said no such thing here.”

“You’ve implied it. You just stated that we have to keep our lines of communication open to the Commies, treat them as legitimate contenders for power.”

“We’re not suggesting the United States should aid their return to power.”

Brown cleared his throat explosively. “Then I apologize. I’ve become so used to double-talk and new age quack-speak from you people, I’m easily confused. Perhaps today we can dispense with the bureaucratic mumbo jumbo and get down to brass tacks.”

Schenler paused for several seconds as he looked at the page before him. He had an apology and a challenge. He decided to accept the apology and return to the agenda items.

Brown’s outburst was the only bright spot in the meeting, Jake Grafton found to his sorrow. These weekly strategy sessions, “strategizing” the civilian intelligence professionals called it, were usually exercises in tedium. Today was no exception. No facts were briefed that hadn’t already circulated through the upper echelons. Most of what ended up on the table were policy options from CIA analysts, career researchers who were theoretically politically neutral. Jake Grafton didn’t believe it — the only politically neutral people he had ever met were dead.

So the items discussed here were really policy alternatives that had made their long, tortuous way through the intestines of the Central Intelligence Agency, perhaps the most monolithic bureaucracy left on the planet. Like General Brown, Jake Grafton looked at these nuggets without enthusiasm. Larded with dubious predictions and carefully chosen facts, these policy alternatives were really the choices the upper echelons of the CIA wanted the policymakers to adopt. The researchers gave their bosses what they thought the bosses wanted to hear, or so Brown and Grafton believed.

Alas, these two uniformed officers well knew they couldn’t change the system. So they listened and recorded their objections.

Schenler sometimes argued. Most of the time he just took notes. Grafton never saw the notes. About fifty, with salt-and-pepper hair and an ivy league education, Schenler was an organization man to his fingertips. “I’ll bet the bastard hasn’t farted in twenty-five years,” General Brown once grumbled to Jake.

Jake also took occasional notes at these soirees, doodled and watched Schenler and his lieutenants perform the usual rituals.

Today, when he finally concluded that General Brown had given up, he went back to doodling. He used his pencil to doctor up his copy of a reproduction of a current Russian anti-Semitic poster that had been handed around before Brown fired his salvo. The crude drawing depicted two rich Jews — they had to be Jews: guys with hooked noses wearing yarmulkes — counting their money while starving women and children watched. In one corner a man with a red star on his cap observed the scene. Jake penciled a swastika on his chest.

“What is this?” Jake held up a piece of paper and waved it at Toad Tarkington.

“Ah, Admiral, if you could give me a little hint…”

“You put this here, didn’t you?”

Jake Grafton had been going through his morning mail pile when he ran across Toad’s masterpiece, a summary of everything in the computer about the demise of Nigel Keren. It was short, only one page, but pithy, full of facts. Toad knew the admiral was partial to facts.

“Oh,” Toad said when Jake held the paper out so he could see it, “that’s just a little thing I put together for your information.”

The admiral stared at him with humor. “I know everything I want to know about Nigel Keren.”

Toad had rehearsed this, but looking at Jake Grafton, his little speech went out the window. “I’m sorry,” he said contritely.

“I know how he was killed,” the admiral said.

Toad gawked.

The admiral put the paper on the desk in front of him and toyed with it. “A publishing mogul alone on a large yacht, no one aboard but him and twelve crew members, all male. The ship is three days out of the Canaries when he eats dinner alone — the same food that all the crew was served — and spends the rest of the evening walking the deck, then goes to his stateroom. The next morning the crew can’t find him aboard. Two days later his nude body is found floating in the sea. A Spanish pathologist found no evidence of violence, no water in the lungs, no heart disease, no burst blood vessels in the brain, no evidence of suffocation. In short, the man died a natural death and his corpse somehow went into the sea. None of the crew members knows anything. All deny that they killed him.”

When Jake fell silent Toad added, “Then his media empire broke up. Apparently large sums of money, hundreds of millions, may have been taken. If anyone knows, they aren’t saying. Keren’s son says the deceased father just made too many leveraged deals and the worldwide recession caught them short.”

The admiral merely grunted.

“Perhaps there was a stowaway aboard the yacht,” Toad suggested. “Or a small vessel rendezvoused with the yacht and an assassin team came aboard.”

“No. The British checked with every ship in the vicinity and interrogated the crew thoroughly. And if he was assassinated, how was it done?”

“You tell me,” Tarkington muttered.

“Remember that top secret CIA progress report that went through here a couple of months ago on the development of binary chemicals?”

Toad nodded once.

“When I saw it then, I thought of the Keren case,” Jake Grafton continued, “but I forgot all about it until the other day when I was staring at that photo Judith Farrell donated to the cause. And I confess, I used the computer yesterday after you left to reread the Keren file.” He smiled at Toad. “It would have occurred to you sooner or later.”

“Binary chemicals.”

“That’s right. The poisons of the past — arsenic, strychnine, that kind of thing — all had a couple of major drawbacks. If given in sufficient quantity to do the job they killed very quickly, before the killer had a chance to leave the scene of the crime. And there was always the problem of killing too many people, anyone who ingested the poisoned food or drink. Binary chemicals remove those drawbacks. You give your victim one chemical, harmless in itself, perhaps serve it in the punch at a party. Everyone drinks it and no one is the wiser. It’s absorbed by the tissues and so remains in the body for a lengthy period, at least several weeks. But it’s benign, produces no ill effect. Then at a later date the assassin serves the other half of the poison, also quite benign by itself. And the second half of the brew combines with the first half in the body of the victim and becomes a deadly poison. The victim goes home and goes to bed and the chemical reaction takes place and his heart stops. No one will suspect poison. Even if they do, investigation will reveal that everything the victim ate and drank was also ingested by other people.”

Jake Grafton turned his hand over.

“So Keren could have been given the first drink of the chemical at any time in the preceding few weeks,” Toad said.

“Correct. At a party, a luncheon, a dinner, whatever. It could have been in anything he ate or drank. And that everyone else ate or drank.”

“Then aboard ship…”

“The second chemical could have been in the food when it came aboard, maybe in the ship’s water tank. Probably the food, which would be consumed or thrown away. When Keren had ingested a sufficient dosage and chemical reaction was complete, his heart stopped. And no one aboard the ship knew anything about it. They were all innocent.”

“Wouldn’t this stuff still be in his body?” Toad asked.

“Probably. If the pathologist had known what to look for. Zero chance of that.”

“But why did the body go into the water?”

“That’s a side issue,” Jake Grafton said. “Nothing in life is ever neat and tidy. Someone panicked when they found him dead. You can make your own list of reasons. Maybe the British found out who threw him overboard and kept quiet to protect the dead man’s reputation. Extraordinarily wealthy man, pillar of the community, why smear him after he’s dead? The British think like that.”

“But later they said Keren committed suicide. That’s certainly frowned on by the upper crust.”

“If you have a corpse floating in the ocean and no proof of murder, what would you call it?”

“He was a Jew from the Levant,” Toad said carefully.

“Emigrated to Britain as a young man. Poor as a church mouse.”

“Then he made hundreds of millions and the Mossad was right there when he died to snap a photo of a CIA agent. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” Toad said, eyeing the admiral.

“Not me,” Jake Grafton said with finality. “I have no reason to go prying into someone else’s dirty little business. And no levers to pry with even if I were foolish enough to try.” He tossed Toad’s summary at him. “Put this into the burn bag and let’s get back to work.”

On Friday evening Jake took Callie and Amy to a movie. Afterward they stopped for ice cream. It was a little after eleven before Amy wheeled the car into the driveway and killed the engine. Jake got out of the passenger seat and held the rear door open for Callie.

“Well, Mom, what’d’ya think?” Amy asked.

“You drive too fast.”

“I do not! Do I, Dad?”

“Wasn’t that a great movie?” said Jake Grafton.

“Dad!” Amy exclaimed in anguish. “Don’t avoid the issue. Oooh, I just hate it when you do that!”

From the porch — this rambling three-story brick built in the 1920s still had its porch — Jake waved to the federal protective service guard standing on the corner under the light, then opened the door with his key.

“You two are just so narrow bandwidth,” Amy continued, “so totally random.” Still talking in a conversational tone of voice, she made for the stairs and started up. “It’s like I’m stuck in an uncool fossil movie, some black-and-white Ronald Reagan time warp with all the girls in letter sweaters and white socks and the boys in duck’s ass greasecuts—”

“Amy Carol,” Callie called up the stairs. “I’ll have none of that kind of language in my house.”

Her voice came floating down. “I’m the last kid in America growing up with Ozzie and Harriet…”

“You’re very narrow bandwidth, Harriet,” Jake told his wife, who grinned.

“What does that mean?” she asked softly.

“I don’t know,” her husband confessed. He kissed her on the forehead and led the way to the kitchen. After Callie made coffee and poured him a cup, he took it upstairs to the study.

He flipped on the light and started. A man was sitting behind the desk. Another sat on the couch.

Automatically Jake’s eye went to the door of the safe. It was still closed.

The men were in suits and ties. The man on the couch had blond hair and spoke first. “Come in and close the door, Admiral.”

Jake stood where he was. “How’d you two get in here?”

“Come in and close the door. Unless you want your wife and daughter to hear this.”

Jake obeyed.

“Want to tell me who you are?” he said.

Now the man behind the desk spoke. “You haven’t hit the right question yet, Admiral. Ask us why we’re here.”

Jake remembered the coffee in his hand and sipped it as he examined the visitors. Both under forty, but not by much. Short hair, clean-shaven, reasonably fit.

“Get out of my chair,” he said to the man behind the desk.

“Admiral, that confrontational tone is not going to get us anywhere. Why don’t you sit down and we’ll—”

Jake tossed the remainder of the coffee at the man’s face.

The liquid hit the target, then some of it splashed on the desk. The man grunted, then wiped his face with his left hand. He stood up slowly. As he got fully erect the blond man on the couch uncoiled explosively in Jake’s direction.

Jake had been expecting this. He smashed the coffee cup into the side of the blond man’s face with his right hand — the cup shattered — and followed it up with a hard left that connected with the man’s skull and jolted Jake clear to the elbow. But then the man had his shoulder into Jake’s chest and slammed him back against the bookcase. The other man was coming around the desk.

Jake tried to use a knee on his assailant’s body. No. He tried to chop with both hands at the back of the man’s neck. He succeeded only in getting himself off balance, so his blows lacked power.

The man from the desk drew back a right and delivered a haymaker to Jake’s chin.

The admiral saw stars and lost his balance completely.

When his vision cleared he was on the floor, the blond standing and the other man kneeling beside him. Blondie was using a handkerchief on the side of his face. When he withdrew it Jake could see blood.

“You’ve had your nose in a matter that doesn’t concern you, Admiral. You’re not Batman or Jesus H. Christ. This visit was just a friendly warning. You’ve got a wife and kid and it would be a hell of a shame if anything happened to them. Do you understand me?”

“Jake?” It was Callie’s voice. She was outside the door. She rattled the knob. The men had locked it. “What’s going on in there, Jake?”

“What matter?” Jake asked.

“The same thing that happened to Nigel Keren could happen to you. It could happen to your wife. It could happen to your daughter.”

Outside the door Callie’s voice was up an octave. “Jake, are you all right? Jake, speak to me!”

“Be a hell of a shame,” Blondie said, “if your fifteen-year-old daughter died of heart failure, wouldn’t it? A hell of a shame. And you’d have only yourself to blame.”

“Jake!”

“Think about it,” the first man said, then stood up. He unlocked the door and pulled it open.

“Excuse us, please,” he said to Callie and walked by her for the stairs, the blond man at his heels.

Stunned, Callie stared after them, then rushed to Jake, who was getting up.

He was still dizzy. He leaned on the bookcase. “Make sure they leave,” he told his wife and pushed her gently toward the door.

He sagged down onto the couch and lowered his head onto the arm. His jaw ached badly. He felt his teeth. One seemed loose.

When Callie came back he was sitting at his desk. “Jake, who were those men?”

“I dunno.”

She started to speak and he held up his hand. She cocked her head quizzically. He held a finger to his lips. Then he reached for paper and wrote:

She read it and looked puzzled.

“I’ll explain later,” he said. “Please, go do it.”

She went.

Jake Grafton sat looking out his window for about fifteen seconds, then he knelt by the safe and opened it. His gun was still there, an old Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum that he had carried when he flew in Vietnam. All the classified documents seemed to be as he had left them. After he closed and locked the safe, he rooted through his bottom desk drawer for the box of shells. He loaded the pistol and stuck it in the small of his back, under the belt.

Downstairs in the kitchen he kissed his wife. “Where are the car keys?”

“In my purse.”

Jake helped himself, then snagged his coat from the hall rack. “I’ll be back in a little while,” he said.

“Where are you going?”

“Tarkington’s. There’s a chance those guys stopped here first. They’re delivering messages tonight.”

“Why don’t you call Toad?”

“I want to see these guys again.”

“Jake, be careful.”

“You know me, Callie. I’m always careful.” He kissed her again and let her close the door behind him.

The uniformed guard was walking the beat on the sidewalk. Jake stopped beside him and rolled down his window. “Did you see two men come out of my house?”

“Yessir. They got into a car parked across the street.”

“What kind of car?”

“I don’t know, sir. It was a sedan with government plates. Is there a problem, Admiral?”

“No. No problem. They forgot something, that’s all. Thanks.” He took his foot off the brake and got the car in motion before the man could ask any more questions.

The pistol was a hard lump where his back pressed against the seat.

A white Ford sedan with government plates sat in Tarkington’s driveway behind Rita’s car, which was in the carport. Toad’s Honda Accord was parked at the curb. A light in the living room window made the drapes glow. Jake drove past and parked on the next block.

As he walked back he kept looking in parked cars. He saw no one.

These guys were sloppy. No lookouts, no driver waiting behind the wheel, a government sedan, for Christ’s sake! They were just out putting the fear of God in a few people tonight and not bothering to do it right.

Jake tried the door of the sedan. It was unlocked. He popped the hood latch and eased the door shut. Feeling in the darkness he jerked the leads off the spark plugs, then let the hood down gently. Then he got behind the front of Rita’s car, got the pistol out, and waited.

Jake was under no illusions. This was going to be dicey. He was going to have to get control of this situation quickly before these two clowns had a chance to think about it. If he pulled the trigger the cops would be here in short order, someone was going to be arrested, and someone was going to have a lot of explaining to do. And someone — Jake suspected that he might wind up as this someone — would probably find himself in more trouble than he could get himself out of.

He had waited no more than three minutes when he heard the Tarkingtons’ front door open.

He got down on his hands and knees in front of Rita’s car and looked under it. He saw their feet. They got into the sedan. A muttered oath.

The passenger door opened and a set of feet came around to the front of the car. Grafton straightened and peered through the window of Rita’s car.

The sedan’s hood was up. The blond man was looking into the engine compartment.

Jake went to his left, around Rita’s Mazda. The hood obscured the driver’s view and the blond had his back to Jake. He heard Jake coming at the last instant and started to turn just as the pistol butt thunked into his head. He went down like a sack of potatoes.

Jake grasped the butt of the revolver with his right hand and stepped around to the driver’s door. He jerked it open.

“Get out.”

The dark-haired man looked slightly stunned.

Jake reached with his left hand and got a handful of shirt and tie. He jerked hard. The man half fell out of the seat. Jake jabbed the gun barrel into his ear and kept pulling.

“Jesus, you can’t—”

“Get up and walk or I’ll blow your brains out.” He jabbed savagely with the gun barrel.

The man came along.

“Tarkington,” Jake called. “Get out here.”

The door opened and the stoop light came on.

“Toad, turn off that light and get out here.”

Tarkington came out. He was in his pajamas and they were torn half off his chest. “That one on the ground,” Jake said, nodding. “Clean out his pockets. Everything. Put him into the sedan and bring all the stuff inside.”

Rita held the door.

In the living room Jake hooked the dark-haired man’s leg and sent him sprawling.

“Search him, Rita, and tell me what happened.”

Rita Moravia was wearing a robe over a nightie. Her hair was down. She began pulling things from the man’s pockets as she talked. “They rang the doorbell and told Toad they were from the DIA and you sent them over here. He let them in. I heard a scuffle out here in the living room and came out and they had knocked him down. They made some threats.”

“How long were they here?”

“Seven or eight minutes. No more.” Rita had finished with the man’s rear trouser pockets and side coat pockets. She rolled him over without ceremony and emptied his inside jacket pockets. She turned his front trouser pockets inside out.

“Feel him all over for weapons.”

Rita did so. “Nope. Just the one wallet, and this.” She held up a card encased in plastic attached to a chain. Jake had seen ones like this before. It was a pass to the CIA’s Langley facility.

Jake picked up the wallet and examined it. He extracted the driver’s license and held it out so he could read it. “Okay, Paul Tanana of 2134 North Wood Duck Drive, Burke, Virginia. Want to tell us who sent you on this little errand?”

Rita was finished. She gathered the CIA pass and the change, keys and pens and placed them on a coffee table.

“I asked you a question,” Jake said.

Tanana glowered. “You’ll be sorry for this.”

“I’m sorry I ever laid eyes on you. Who sent you?”

Silence.

“Rita, check on Toad.”

The gun felt heavy in Jake’s hand. He kept it pointed at Tanana, who was rubbing his ear. Jake rubbed his fingers back and forth across the stiff plastic of the driver’s license.

In a moment Rita and Toad came in. “Guy didn’t have a gun,” Toad said. “Just a wallet and a CIA pass and a little pack of lock picks.”

“Who sent you to see me tonight?” Jake asked Tanana.

The man snorted. “You ain’t gonna shoot me.”

What’s wrong here?

Jake looked again at the driver’s license, at the clear plastic, the perfect edges.

He put the license into his pocket and eared back the hammer of the revolver. He approached Tanana. He bent down and placed the barrel of the weapon against the man’s temple.

“You’re right. I’m not going to shoot you tonight. But if anything ever happens to my wife or kid — if you ever get within a mile of my wife or kid — if I ever see you within a mile of my house — I’ll blow your fucking brains out and I’ll take a great deal of pleasure in doing it, Paul-baby. Are you getting the message?”

“I got it.”

Jake rose and backed off. “I jerked the wires off the spark plugs on your car. Put them back on and get the hell out of here.”

Tanana got slowly to his feet. “What about our stuff? Our wallets?”

“We’ll keep them. Maybe I’ll frame the CIA passes and display them over at the DIA. They’ll be wonderful souvenirs. Now get out.”

Tanana went.

Jake watched from the doorway as Tanana worked on the car. It took a couple minutes. “Rita, get a pencil and write this down. U.S. government plate, XRC-five-four-five.”

He was wondering if he’d hit the blond man too hard when Tanana slammed the hood down. He got behind the wheel, started the engine and backed out onto the street.

“I think you cracked the other guy’s skull,” Toad said as the sedan drove slowly away. Typical Tarkington, Jake reflected. He could almost read his boss’s mind.

Jake closed the door and locked it. “I could sure use a cup of coffee.”

Callie was sitting on the stairs waiting for him when he came through the front door. After he ensured the door was locked behind him, he hung up his coat and took a seat on the step beside her.

“Who were they?”

Jake passed her the wallets. She opened them and looked at the licenses, credit cards, and other items. When she had finished he handed her the CIA passes.

“CIA,” she whispered.

Jake extracted his own wallet from his right hip pocket and took out his driver’s license. He held it out so he could see it. “I got this about a year and a half ago. Look how it’s curved from being in the wallet and how the edges have frayed. Now look at those other licenses.”

Callie did so. “They’re like new,” she said.

“They shouldn’t be. They were issued a couple years ago. And the credit cards. Notice how the black ink on the raised numbers has yet to rub off. I don’t think they’ve ever been used.”

“So?”

“These two clowns were over at Tarkington’s when I got there. I slugged one and we searched the other.”

“They let you do this?”

“That’s an interesting question.” Jake pulled the pistol out and showed it to Callie. “You wave a gun around and everyone does what you tell them, just like in the movies.” And he had had the opportunity to surprise them. A couple of klutzs, or were they?

“What if they had had guns?”

“Then I’d have cheerfully shot the bastards and called the cops.” He stood. “So they didn’t have guns. They were betting I wouldn’t panic.” The more he thought about it, the more sure he was that the whole scene was just an act. But why?

“Let’s go to bed.”

He helped her to her feet.

“I still don’t understand,” she said. “Were they CIA or not?”

“I don’t know,” Jake said slowly. “Through the years several people have accused the CIA of using agents to deliver warnings — of intimidation attempts. Yet in every case where the accusation was made public, it turned out that the CIA had no agents like the people supposedly involved. Now you tell me — were those two guys CIA agents carrying their own ID, CIA agents carrying false ID, or someone else’s hired help using false CIA ID?”

“But the message is clear. Lay off.”

“Precisely. It’s from someone very powerful, someone who cannot be reached. And that is part of the message.”

He had the toothpaste on his brush and the brush in his mouth when it hit him.

He took the brush out of his mouth and stared at it. Then he examined the toothpaste tube. Nothing could be easier than poisoning a tube of toothpaste. Merely unscrew the cap and stick a syringe in, then screw the cap back on.

But they had had no syringe on them. At Tarkington’s house, anyway. For all he knew they could have thrown it in the gutter or put it in the garbage pail out behind the Graftons’ house where it would be hauled away on Tuesday.

A knot developed in his stomach.

He started to put the toothbrush back into his mouth, but he couldn’t.

Damn!

He rinsed out his mouth, then threw the toothbrush and the toothpaste into the wastebasket under the sink.

When he and Callie were in bed with the lights out, she asked, “How do you get yourself into these messes, anyway?”

“You make it sound like I’m a juvenile delinquent.”

“I’m scared.”

“That’s what they intended.”

“They succeeded. I’m frightened.”

“Me too,” he told her.