Persuader Part 27

I sent: Anywhere?

She sent: h.e.l.l no!!

I sent: Eliot?

There was another four-minute delay. Then she came back with: Don't think so.

I asked: Think or know?

She sent: Think.

I stared at the tiled wall in front of me. Breathed out. Eliot had killed Teresa Daniel. It was the only explanation. Then I breathed in. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe he hadn't. I sent: Are these e-mails vulnerable?

We had been e-mailing back and forth furiously for more than sixty hours. She had asked for news of her agent. I had asked for her agent's real name. And I had asked in a way that definitely wasn't gender-neutral. Maybe I had killed Teresa Daniel.

I held my breath until Duffy came back with: Our e-mail is encrypted. Technically might be visible as code but no way is it readable.

I breathed out and sent: Sure?

She sent: Totally.

I sent: Coded how?

She sent: NSA billion-dollar project.

That cheered me up, but only a little. Some of NSA's billion-dollar projects are in the Washington Post before they're even finished. And communications snafus screw more things up than any other reason in the world.

I sent: Check with Eliot immediately about computer logs.

She sent: Will do. Progress?

I typed: None.

Then I deleted it and sent: Soon. I thought it might make her feel better.

I went all the way down to the ground-floor hallway. The door to Elizabeth's parlor was standing open. She was still in the armchair. Doctor Zhivago was facedown in her lap and she was staring out the window at the rain. I opened the front door and stepped outside.

The metal detector squawked at the Beretta in my pocket. I closed the door behind me and headed straight across the carriage circle and down the driveway. The rain was hard on my back. It ran down my neck. But the wind helped me. It blew me west, straight toward the gatehouse. I felt light on my feet. Coming back again was going to be harder. I would be walking directly into the wind. a.s.suming I was still walking at all.

Paulie saw me coming. He must have spent his whole time crouched inside the tiny building, prowling from the front windows to the back windows, watching, like a restless animal in its lair. He came out, in his slicker. He had to duck his head and turn sideways to get through the door. He stood with his back against the wall of his house, where the eaves were low. But the eaves didn't help him. The rain drove horizontally under them. I could hear it lashing against the slicker, hard and loud and brittle. It drove against his face and ran down it like torrents of sweat. He had no hat. His hair was plastered against his forehead. It was dark with water.

I had both hands in my pockets with my shoulders hunched forward and my face ducked into my collar. My right hand was tight around the Beretta. The safety was off. But I didn't want to use it. Using it would require complicated explanations. And he would only be replaced. I didn't want to have him replaced until I was ready to have him replaced. So I didn't want to use the Beretta. But I was prepared to.

I stopped six feet from him. Out of his reach.

"We need to talk," I said.

"I don't want to talk," he said.

"You want to arm wrestle instead?"

His eyes were pale blue and his pupils were tiny. I guessed his breakfast had been taken entirely in the form of capsules and powder.

"Talk about what?" he said.

"New situation," I said.

He said nothing.

"What's your MOS?" I asked.

MOS is an army acronym. The army loves acronyms. It stands for Military Occupational Specialty. And I used the present tense. What is, not what was. I wanted to put him right back there. Being ex-military is like being a lapsed Catholic. Even though they're way in the back of your mind, the old rituals still exert a powerful pull. Old rituals like obeying an officer.

"Eleven bang bang," he said, and smiled.

Not a great answer. Eleven bang bang was grunt slang for 11B, which meant 11-Bravo, Infantry, which meant Combat Arms. Next time I face a four-hundred-pound giant with veins full of meth and steroids I would prefer it if his MOS had been mechanical maintenance, or typewriting. Not combat arms. Especially a four-hundred-pound giant who doesn't like officers and who had served eight years in Fort Leavenworth for beating up on one.

"Let's go inside," I said. "It's wet out here."

I said it with the kind of tone you develop when you get promoted past captain. It's a reasonable tone, almost conversational. It's not the sort of tone you use as a lieutenant.

It's a suggestion, but it's an order, too. It's heavy with inclusion. It says: Hey, we're just a couple of guys here. We don't need to let formalities like rank get in our way, do we?

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he turned and slid sideways through his door.

Ducked his chin to his chest so he could get through. Inside, the ceiling was about seven feet high. It felt low to me. His head was almost touching it. I kept my hands in my pockets. Water from his slicker was pooling on the floor.

The house stank with a sharp acrid animal smell. Like a mink. And it was filthy. There was a small living room that opened to a kitchen area. Beyond the kitchen was a short hallway with a bathroom off it and a bedroom at the end. That was all. It was smaller than a city apartment, but it was all dressed up to look like a miniature stand-alone house.

There was mess everywhere. Unwashed dishes in the sink. Used plates and cups and articles of athletic clothing all over the living room. There was an old sofa opposite a new television set. The sofa had been crushed by his bulk. There were pill bottles on shelves, on tables, everywhere. Some of them were vitamins. But not many of them.

There was a machine gun in the room. The old Soviet NSV. It belonged on a tank turret.

Paulie had it suspended from a chain in the middle of the room. It hung there like a macabre sculpture. Like the Alexander Calder thing they put in every new airport terminal. He could stand behind it and swing it through a complete circle. He could fire it through the front window or the back window, like they were gunports. Limited field of fire, but he could cover forty yards of the road to the west, and forty yards of the driveway to the east. It was fed by a belt that came up out of an open ammunition case placed on the floor. There were maybe twenty more cases stacked against the wall. The cases were dull olive, all covered with Cyrillic letters and red stars.

The gun was so big I had to back up against the wall to get around it. I saw two telephones. One was probably an outside line. The other was probably an internal phone that reached the house. There were alarm boxes on the wall. One would be for the sensors out in no-man's-land. The other would be for the motion detector on the gate itself. There was a video monitor, showing a milky monochrome picture from the gatepost camera.

"You kicked me," he said.

I said nothing.

"Then you tried to run me over," he said.

"Warning shots," I said.

"About what?"

"Duke's gone," I said.

He nodded. "I heard."

"So it's me now," I said. "You've got the gate, I've got the house."

He nodded again. Said nothing.

"I look after the Becks now," I said. "I'm responsible for their security. Mr. Beck trusts me. He trusts me so much he gave me a weapon."

I was giving him a stare the whole time I was talking. The kind of stare that feels like pressure between the eyes. This would be the moment when the meth and the steroids should kick in and make him grin like an idiot and say, Well he ain't going to trust you anymore when I tell him what I found out there on the rocks, is he? When I tell him you already had a weapon. He would shuffle and grin and use a singsong voice. But he said nothing. Did nothing. Didn't react at all, beyond a slight defocus in his eyes, like he was having trouble computing the implications.

"Understand?" I said.

"It used to be Duke and now it's you," he said neutrally.

It wasn't him who had found my stash.

"I'm looking out for their welfare," I said. "Including Mrs. Beck's. That game is over now, OK?"

He said nothing. I was getting a sore neck from looking up into his eyes. My vertebrae are much more accustomed to looking downward at people.

"OK?" I said again.

"Or?"

"Or you and I will have to go around and around."

"I'd like that."

I shook my head.

"You wouldn't like it," I said. "Not one little bit. I'd take you apart, piece by piece."

"You think?"

"You ever hit an MP?" I asked. "Back in the service?"

He didn't answer. Just looked away and stayed quiet. He was probably remembering his arrest. He probably resisted a little, and needed to be subdued. So consequently he probably tripped down some stairs somewhere and suffered a fair amount of damage.

Somewhere between the scene of the crime and the holding cell, probably. Purely by accident. That kind of thing happens, in certain circ.u.mstances. But then, the arresting officer probably sent six guys to pick him up. I would have sent eight.

"And then I'd fire you," I said.

His eyes came back, slow and lazy.

"You can't fire me," he said. "I don't work for you. Or Beck."

"So who do you work for?"

"Somebody."

"This somebody got a name?"

He shook his head.

"No dice," he said.

I kept my hands in my pockets and eased my way around the machine gun. Headed for the door.

"We straight now?" I said.

He looked at me. Said nothing. But he was calm. His morning dosages must have been well balanced.

"Mrs. Beck is off-limits, right?" I said.

"While you're here," he said. "You won't be here forever."

I hope not, I thought. His telephone rang. The outside line, I guessed. I doubted if Elizabeth or Richard would be calling him from the house. The ring was loud in the silence. He picked it up and said his name. Then he just listened. I heard a trace of a voice in the earpiece, distant and indistinct with plastic peaks and resonances that obscured what was being said. The voice spoke for less than a minute. Then the call was over. He put the phone down and moved his hand quite delicately and used the flat of his palm to set the machine gun swinging gently on its chain. I realized it was a conscious imitation of the thing I had done with the heavy bag down in the gym on our first morning together. He grinned at me.

"I'm watching you," he said. "I'll always be watching you."

I ignored him and opened the door and stepped outside. The rain hit me like a fire hose. I leaned forward and walked straight into it. Held my breath and had a very bad feeling in the small of my back until I was all the way through the forty-yard arc the back window could cover. Then I breathed out.

Not Beck, not Elizabeth, not Richard. Not Paulie.

No dice.

Dominique Kohl said no DICE to me the night we had our beer. Something unexpected had come up and I had to rain-check the first evening and then she rain-checked my makeup date, so it was about a week before we got together. Maybe eight days. Sergeants drinking with captains was difficult on-post back then because the clubs were rigorously separate, so we went out to a bar in town. It was the usual kind of place, long and low, eight pool tables, plenty of people, plenty of neon, plenty of jukebox noise, plenty of smoke. It was still very hot. The air conditioners were running flat out and getting nowhere. I was wearing fatigue pants and an old T-shirt, because I didn't own any personal clothes. Kohl arrived wearing a dress. It was a simple A-line, no sleeves, kneelength, black, with little white dots on it. Very small dots. Not like big polka dots or anything. A very subtle pattern.

"How's Frasconi working out?" I asked her.

"Tony?" she said. "He's a nice guy."

She didn't say anything more about him. We ordered Rolling Rocks, which suited me because it was my favorite drink that summer. She had to lean very close to talk, because of the noise. I enjoyed the proximity. But I wasn't fooling myself. It was the decibel level making her do it, nothing else. And I wasn't going to try anything with her. No formal reason not to. There were rules back then, I guess, but there were no regulations yet. The notion of s.e.xual hara.s.sment was slow coming to the army. But I was already aware of the potential unfairness. Not that there was any way I could help or hurt her career. Her jacket made it plain she was going to make master sergeant and then first sergeant like night follows day. It was only a matter of time. Then came the leap up to E-9 status, sergeant major. That was hers for the taking, too. After that, she would have a problem.

After sergeant major came command sergeant major, and there's only one of those in each regiment. After that came sergeant major of the army, and there's only one of those, period. So she would rise and then stop, whatever I said about it.

"We have a tactical problem," she said. "Or strategic, maybe."

"Why?"

"The pointy-head, Gorowski? We don't think it's blackmail in the sense that he's got some terrible secret or anything. Looks to us more like straightforward threats against his family. Coercion, rather than blackmail."

"How can you tell?"

"His file is clean as a whistle. He's been background-checked to h.e.l.l and back. That's why they do it. They're trying to avoid the possibility of blackmail."

"Was he a Red Sox fan?"

She shook her head. "Yankees. He's from the Bronx. Went to the High School of Science there."