The Secret Service agent on the little landing reacted not at all. Had Reeder’s hands not been up, Parker’s response would have been otherwise, and almost certainly deadly. For now, the agent’s ice blue eyes gave away nothing, his face as blank as Reeder’s usually was, while Reeder was sending his old friend a small, somewhat apologetic smile.
Then Parker let out air and glanced behind him at the house, before slowly walking down the handful of steps and meeting Reeder at the edge of the patio. It was hardly noticeable when the agent’s eyes skimmed past his unexpected guest to slowly scan the woods behind the houses.
“Peep,” he said. “Been a while.”
They might have met accidentally on a street corner.
“A while,” Reeder admitted.
“Did you figure to do your old pal a solid,” Parker said, his smile as small and faint as Reeder’s, “and give yourself up? Who can’t use a gold star in their file?”
“Consider it a white flag,” Reeder said, “not a surrender. So what have you heard?”
“That you and the Special Situations bunch are off the reservation, you mean?”
“Not off the reservation at all, Ron. I’m working for the President. Again.”
“Really. Can you prove that?”
“Is that something I’d lie about?”
Both men just looked at each other with their patented blank expressions.
Glancing across the yard again, past the beech and the thicket beyond, Parker took a long drag on his cigarette, then let the smoke stream out. “You’re not alone, are you?”
“What do you think?”
“Probably Rogers. She’s head of Special Situations, and you two cracked the Supreme Court case a couple years back. Congratulations, by the way.”
“Appreciate it.”
“So, then — why don’t you tell me why you’re here before my partner comes out to see whether I set myself on fire or something?” He stubbed the cigarette under the toe of his shoe.
“I need to have a word with Nicholas Blount.”
Parker barked a laugh. “I don’t care how far back we go, Peep, that ain’t happening.”
Reeder’s reply would have been much the same had their roles been reversed. “Ron, I’m standing here talking to you, and not barging in with a gun in my hand, because I trust you.”
That appreciably threw Parker. “Yeah, well, that’s good to hear. The part where you trust me. The gun part, though? Not so much. Let’s say you walk away and I never saw you. That’s the most I can give you.”
“Do you trust your guy Holmberg?”
Parker’s eyes narrowed. “You know my partner’s name? What the hell—”
“Never mind that. Have you worked with him long enough to trust him? Because not everybody in government right now can be. Trusted.”
Just barely, Parker glanced back at the house. “I trust him. He’s young and he’s new but he’s straight.”
Parker meant what he said, or did if Reeder could trust his kinesics training.
Reeder asked, “Trust him with your life, though?”
“That’s the job, isn’t it?”
“What I’m saying, Ron, is — if you trust him, I do, too.”
“I said I trusted him.”
Not a single micro-expression of doubt.
“Okay,” Reeder said. “Go tell your trustworthy partner that a former agent, who’s wanted for questioning by the FBI, is in the backyard. And that you want him to look the other way just long enough for you to tell Nicky Blount that I want to talk to him about the American Patriots Alliance. Got that? The American—”
“I’ve heard of it. One of those Illuminati nonsense deals.”
“If you say so. But tell him. If Nicky doesn’t want to speak to me, I’m gone. Vapor. My word on it. But if Nicky does come outside to talk to me, you let him do so. You can watch from the porch, but out of earshot.”
Parker had started shaking his head already. “No deal, Peep. Look, man, we stood post together and I trusted you with my life and you did the same with me. I’ll even take your damn message in to Nicky... but if he does want to talk, you come inside to do it. No way I’m letting him come out here in the open.”
Reeder understood that. A lot harder to protect Nicky outdoors, especially when Reeder had brought backup. “Fair enough, Ron... and thanks.”
A smirk cut the otherwise blank face. “Don’t thank me yet. First I have to sell Holmberg. He may think it wasn’t tobacco I been smoking out here.”
Parker went back inside, and Reeder waited. If this didn’t go as he hoped it would, he’d have a choice between battling two of his brother SS men or just holding his fists behind him for the cuffs. He hoped, when she saw him go inside, that Rogers wouldn’t overreact; she might do something rash. He’d take that risk to talk to Nicky Blount.
A distant siren was just giving him second thoughts when the back door opened and Parker waved him to the steps. Parker held up a hand to freeze Reeder at the bottom, then said, “Guns stay outside.”
Very professional now, coolly so.
Parker nodded toward the grill and Reeder got the point, opening its lid and putting both his handguns in, and the expandable baton.
“Cell, too.”
Reeder did so, then lowered the lid.
From the top of the steps, Parker said, “You have ten minutes, Peep, and only because Blount wants to grant you that. Then you’re gone. An hour after that, I report spotting you in the yard. Got it?”
“Got it. Thanks.”
Inside the good-size enclosed porch, Reeder stood for a frisk without having to be asked. Parker, of course, found nothing. Then the SS agent led Reeder into a spacious, gleaming-white, ultramodern kitchen, with a center island that might have come with its own zip code.
Waiting in the kitchen on either side of that island were two men: tall, blond, blandly handsome Nicholas Blount in a button-down blue shirt, jeans, and running shoes; and — in a pristine gray suit Reeder might have worn back in the day — a sharp-eyed, trimly athletic-looking man of thirty or so who had to be agent Chad Holmberg.
“Secretary Blount,” Reeder said with a nod.
“Mr. Reeder,” Nicky said.
Then the piercing hazel eyes of Senator Blount’s youngest son went first to Holmberg then to Parker, at Reeder’s side.
“Gentlemen,” he said, with a hint of Southern drawl, “if you’ll excuse us?”
Parker said, “Sir, I wouldn’t advise that.”
“I must insist.”
Holmberg and Parker exchanged glances that seemed to say nothing but spoke volumes to Reeder.
The younger agent said, “I’ll just step into the living room, Mr. Secretary.”
Holmberg left, but Reeder had no doubt he’d just stepped outside the room, and would stay nearby. But at least a closed door would separate their conversation from the agent.
Parker gave Reeder a hard sideways look, then said, “I’ll be just outside, if I’m needed.”
Where you can catch another smoke, Reeder thought, almost letting a smile slip, though blocking the exit did make sense.
The two men faced each other across the island.
“We know each other well enough, I think,” Nicky said, the drawl still lightly in evidence, “for first names... don’t we, Joe? You did me a favor once, being discreet when you could have embarrassed me.”
Nicky Blount had been in the Verdict Bar when Justice Venter was shot and killed; at the time Venter’s law clerk, Nicky had (to put it bluntly) pissed himself.
“And you were very helpful in the investigation,” Reeder said. “So we aren’t adversaries... unless you’re part of the sub-rosa organization we’re about to discuss.”
“I’m not,” Nicky said with a single head shake. “I’m aware of the Alliance, of course, though the vast majority of Americans either haven’t heard of it, or write it off as an urban legend... Coffee? Or iced tea maybe? I have a pitcher, if—”