They nodded, murmuring assent at him.
"All right. Go."
After they had left, Michaels stood staring into infinity. It never rained but it poured. And it was his job to stop the rain.
Toni stretched her legs, dropping into the left sempok position by sliding her right foot behind and past her left, sinking until her buttocks touched the floor, then bouncing up and across to the opposite side. A good silat player could defend or attack from a seated pose, could leap to her feet, kick, sweep, punch, or move quickly to one side. It didn't always look pretty but it worked, and that was the point. In silat, the object was to get the job done, not strike attractive poses for anybody watching.
She looked up and saw Alex walk into the gym carrying his bag. She raised her eyebrows in surprise. She hadn't expected him to come in for class today, not given all the crap going on with the spy thing.
"I didn't think I'd see you here," she said.
"Me neither," he said. "But there's not much else I can do about things at lunch. Everybody I'd want to talk to will be out and I hate to interrupt somebody trying to grab a quick bite. Besides, exercise tends to clear out the cobwebs. I'll get dressed, see you in a minute."
He headed into the locker room, and Toni went back to limbering up. Poor Alex. He took all this so personally, as if everything that happened was all his fault. She fielded as much of it as she could, tried to take care of him, but she couldn't shortstop all of the crap that landed on his desk.
Of course, given her choice, she would be able to make his life a lot more relaxed away from work. He needed somebody to take care of him, to rub his back, to fix him a drink before dinner, to—
— screw his brains out?
Toni smiled. Well, yes. That too. That wasn't likely to happen. He was still faithful to his ex-wife, at least as far as Toni knew. It was both an admirable and a frustrating trait in him. Although she had certainly seen how he looked at Joanna Winthrop, with her drop-dead good looks and bedroom eyes, and that had made Toni's belly knot in cold fear. How could you compete with a woman who had a face that would launch a thousand ships, a body to match, and who was as bright as a thousand-watt bulb to boot? Hardly fair, her being beautiful and smart.
Toni blew out a sigh. She could hardly blame him if he wanted to chase the beautiful lieutenant, could she? Alex didn't feel for Toni the way Toni felt for him. She loved him, and even so, even so, she had stumbled. Of course, that one-night stand with Rusty had been a big mistake. She'd repaired it as best she could immediately after it had happened, and he was dead now, so nobody knew about it and nobody ever would. Except her. She knew. She was in love with her boss, but she had slept with another man. How could she get around that? It felt awful.
Toni threw an elbow at an imaginary opponent. Too bad she couldn't control her love life as easily as she could a physical attack. Life would be much easier. Get into a fight with a would-be partner and throw him, then he'd be yours forever.
Too bad it wasn't that easy.
Alone, Hughes drove to one of his safe houses for the meeting with Platt.
There was always business that couldn't be handled longdistance, just as in Guinea-Bissau, and one needed places to conduct such business away from curious eyes.
This hideaway was a basic third-floor single-bedroom apartment deep in the bowels of one of the new monster apartment complexes just over the District line, in Maryland. The complex was part of the extended bedroom community that had come to surround the nation's capital, accreting slowly over the years at first, then suddenly metastasizing like some architectural cancer, expanding in huge pressed-wood, ticky-tacky lumps and clots in all directions. Such places were the modern equivalent of tar-paper shacks — although probably not as sturdy.
Here was one of these cheap constructions, the River View Province. Three stories high, a thousand units strong, less than six months old, it was a perfect place to hold clandestine meetings. Nobody knew their neighbors, and it was so large nobody noticed who came and went. It was between Colmar Manor and Bladensburg, just off SR 450, and if you were on the third floor in the unit Platt had rented, and if you stood in the kitchen sink and leaned out the window, you could indeed see the north fork of the Anacostia River — for what that was worth.
Hughes drove a rental car, a small, plain gray Dodge something or the other that looked just like a million other cars on the road. He might as well have been wearing a cloak of invisibility for all he was likely to be noticed. He wasn't likely to run into anybody he knew out here, and he wasn't going to be recognized by anybody except a political junkie, none of whom would see him and Platt together in any event.
He wended his way through the vast parking lot, got lost when he took a wrong turn at one of the stupidly named and numbered lanes — Catbird 17—then finally arrived at the assigned parking slot for his apartment. He pulled the car into the space and shut the motor off. He looked around. Cold, clear, nobody around except some big guy walking a pair of brown and black German Shepherds on long wind-up leashes. The dogs snuffled the air, looking back and forth, keenly alert and searching for wolves to bark at. How could you live with two dogs that big in one of these little places? The poor guy must spend half his day walking those monsters; otherwise they'd eat all his furniture and wear holes in the carpet. Hughes liked dogs, and though he didn't have time for one now, maybe he'd get a whole pack when he got set up. He'd have the room, and the time to fool with them.
He took the elevator to the third level, headed down the hall to the unit, opened the door with a plastic keycard, and stepped quickly inside.
Platt was already there. He stood in the kitchenette, and he had what looked like a plastic bag full of ice cubes pressed against the right side of his head. The big man had scratches and a brush burn on one cheek, and the knuckles on both hands were torn and crusted with flecks of dried blood.
"What the hell happened to you?"
Platt grinned, and moved the bag of ice away from his head. "I had me a little ar-gu-ment with one of our underprivileged black brothers. He clipped me a good one on the side of the head. You want to ice something like that down pretty quick, otherwise you wind up with a cauliflower ear. I'm too pretty to let myself get to lookin' like some punch-drunk ole boxer."
Hughes stared. "You were supposed to keep a low profile. You weren't supposed to draw attention to yourself."
"Didn't get no notice to speak of. Boy lost a couple teeth, maybe got a broke rib or two, he'll be just fine in a week or three. Probably didn't even go to the hospital. Shoot, any wog dentist could put them teeth back in. I left before the po-lice showed up, if they ever did. It was just a little ole dance, nothin' much. He moved pretty good, we had us a fun time."
A man who got into fights for fun. Platt was surely crazy.
"You got somethin' for me?" Platt said.
Hughes removed a thick manila envelope from his briefcase and tossed it at Platt, who caught it one-handed.
"There's twenty thousand in there, all in used hundreds."
"That ought to keep pork chops on the table for a couple weeks," Platt said.