“I don’t know. Maybe this thing doesn’t reach as high as we feared.”
“Meaning up to the DNI, General Johnson?”
McGee nodded. “But the flip side could be that, thanks to the Jordanians and you asking questions about your old team, you’ve surprised them and now they’re scrambling to pull their act together.”
“In order to do what?”
“If they’re willing to try to kill you, then they’d be willing to do anything, including framing you.”
“Framing me for what?”
McGee shrugged. “Depending on how high up this thing goes, you could wind up as the shooter on the grassy knoll.”
“Except for the fact that I wasn’t even born.”
“They’d find away around it, believe me. They think of everything.”
“But what about you and me? What were they going to do, kill us and just dump our bodies out there in the woods?”
He sucked the milk off his spoon and set it down on the table. “I patted down all the hitters I splashed at my place. One of them had a key fob. After I tossed my go-bag and a couple of other items in my truck, I went outside to make sure there wasn’t another team waiting for me. As soon as I felt it was safe, I kept pressing the unlock button on the fob. I finally found their vehicle parked not far from my place.”
“Was there anything inside?”
“Anything that could ID them? No. Just some picnic crap.”
Lydia looked at him. “What do you mean, picnic crap?”
“A blanket and a basket with a couple of glasses and a bottle of wine.”
“So no ID, but tons of firepower and a picnic basket? Doesn’t that seem odd?”
“All of this seems odd to me. Why? What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking that could be part of a cover story. Maybe they were going to make it look like you and I were having a picnic out in the middle of the woods and got shot.”
He thought about that for a moment. “Or better yet,” he replied, “how about a murder-suicide? You kill me and then turn the gun on yourself. Not only would Phil Durkin’s problems be solved, but he’d be able to play the I-told-you-Lydia-Ryan-was-crazy card all the way to the Agency bank.”
She shook her head. “I wouldn’t put it past that son of a bitch.”
“I’m just speculating, of course.”
“No,” Ryan replied. “You’re right on the money. That’s exactly what he would do.”
“I don’t think either of us can be sure. Maybe the stupid picnic basket was some part of their cover.”
Her eyes narrowed as a question came to her mind. “You said there was a blanket and two wineglasses. What else was there?”
“I don’t know. I was in a bit of a hurry to get out of there, but I guess there was some food and a couple of bottles of wine.”
“What about an opener?”
“Yeah,” McGee recalled. “It wasn’t the type with the arms, though. It was a fancy, pocketknife style. Expensive-looking, you know, with that brass bee on there from that French knife-making company.”
“Laguiole.”
“That’s it.”
“Did it have a wooden handle?” she asked.
He nodded. “It did. Why?”
“Because that was my corkscrew. That son of a bitch took it, or had someone take it out of my apartment. That way, even if the police did a half-assed investigation, they’d find the empty box I normally keep it in back in a drawer in my kitchen.”
“That would make it look a lot less like the picnic was staged.”
“And more like we had undertaken it willingly,” she said, finishing his statement for him. “What kind of wine was it?”
“Give me a break, Lydia. I don’t know the first thing about wine. That’s always been your thing. I’m a bourbon guy. You think I stood there and read the labels?”
“Keep it simple. Was it red? Was it white?”
“It was dark,” McGee responded. “All I saw was black bottles with black frickin’ labels.”
She didn’t need to ask him anything more about the wine. She knew what it was. “OneHope red,” she stated. “It’s the same wine I drink at home.”
“There you go. Killing, framing or both, they’re not above anything.”
“Which means we’re racing against two clocks—whatever plot the Jordanians have uncovered, as well as whatever Phil Durkin has planned for us.”
“All the more reason for us to figure out what he’s up to and put his balls in a nice little box with a big pink bow.”
“The question, though, is going to be who do we deliver the box to?”
“It all depends on what he’s doing and what we can make stick,” McGee replied as he picked up the remote and turned back to Animal Planet.
There was a new program on. It was showing home videos of people who got too close to animal enclosures at foreign zoos. Suddenly, Ryan got an idea.
“How much cash do you have?” she asked.
“I have five grand in my go-bag. Why?”
“Because we can’t use credit cards and you need a new suit.”
McGee looked at her. “I do?”
Ryan nodded. “We’re going to go rattle a very big cage, but before we do, I want to see who’s throwing the meat into it.”
CHAPTER 33
The only thing McGee disliked more than having to cut his hair was being forced to shave his mustache. Ryan, though, had insisted. And in order to set the example, she had cut her hair first.
They stood in Brenda Durkin’s master bath with their feet in plastic lawn and leaf bags to help catch as much of the hair as possible. Ryan did a halfway decent job cutting her hair into a short, spiky cut. McGee’s spin as a coiffeur was horrible and Ryan had to step in to rescue him and clean it up.
McGee did his mustache on his own and when he was finished, they both looked in the mirror together. The transformation was remarkable.
With the Colonel’s blessing, Ryan selected clothes and a pair of shoes from her closet. She was fortunate they were so similar in size. McGee had changed into some of the extra clothes he had fled his home with.
The operatives were well aware of the amount of domestic surveillance technology that could be arrayed against them and had already ditched their cell phones. That one move would go a long way toward blinding the monster that would be tracking them. The other move that would keep them hidden was abandoning their credit cards. From this point forward, everything would be paid for in cash.
The last thing they agreed upon was very selective use of the Internet. Social media platforms were a godsend to the intelligence community. They recorded in stark detail almost everyone, everywhere, and everything you were connected to. Along with cell phone and credit card activity, social media and email accounts were one of the first places Phil Durkin would be looking for them.
Because people’s digital exhaust gave so many clues about them, they had to break with all of their old habits. They also needed to break with any friends, family, or colleagues they normally communicated with. That was another pond Durkin would be skimming as he tried to determine their whereabouts.
In essence, they were dropping completely off the grid. For her part, Ryan considered them blessed that the Colonel had made her home available to them. If not, they would have been forced to break into a vacant house or leapfrog from cheap hotel to cheap hotel, and both strategies were fraught with a myriad of problems.
The other thing Brenda Durkin had graciously made available to them was use of her 1990 Ford Mustang LX. Not only was it a nondescript vehicle, it also was built before the explosion in GPS technology. It was perfect for their new, under-the-radar personas.
Leaving Fort Belvoir, their first stop was an office supply store. While Ryan purchased what they needed inside, McGee walked around back. After making sure there were no security cameras or personnel present, he checked all three dumpsters until he found what he was looking for. By the time he returned to the Mustang, Ryan was already waiting for him.