“Ever since that September thing, we been out here. You know, keeping an eye out for ragheaded rascals with suitcases.”
“Oh… of course.”
“Waste of time, you ask me. In a year, I’ve caught two car thieves, a couple of punks from the District.” He patted his ample stomach and chuckled. “Given out plenty of parking citations, but seems like the terrorists were warned that big bad John’s in the lot.”
She chuckled with him, then asked, “Were you here the day it happened? When the plane hit?”
“Off duty, thank God. Saw it on TV like everybody. Hell of a thing.”
“An awful tragedy.”
“Sure was. So, should we get started?”
She smiled. “Really, I won’t need your help.” She glanced again at her watch, then looked up. “I have a friend coming to pick me up. He should be here any minute.”
He smiled back, though this surely was not what he had anticipated or desired to hear. A visitor would screw up everything, and she was proving to be mulish and uncooperative. She should already be tucked inside her own trunk, hands cuffed behind her back, shuddering with fear and imagining the dreadful things he had planned for her.
He glanced around, the painstaking security officer surveying his domain.
Nobody in any direction.
Not a soul.
He looked back at her. “Mind if I keep you company till your friend arrives? Gets boring out here, this hour.”
“I’d appreciate it. I’ll enjoy the company.”
“Me too. So what do you do in the five-sided nuthouse?”
“I’m an attorney. JAG actually.”
“No kidding.” He nonchalantly fumbled with something on his belt. “I like that show.”
She smiled. “That’s not what it’s really like.”
“No?”
“Not at all. A JAG officer flying off a carrier deck is com-”
She froze. The very big gun he was pointing at her stomach had suddenly acquired her full attention. She looked at his face. He was no longer smiling, and her expression turned to one of befuddlement.
“Don’t get excited now.” He kept his voice cool and deliberately calm. “Just a simple robbery. No more, no less.”
Her eyes darted around the parking lot, and he could sense her exasperation that they were completely alone in the vast expanse. Nothing but empty cars and the nasty man with the gun.
With his free hand he reached out and removed her shoulder bag and the briefcase she clutched with her hand. Not a spot of resistance from her. He said, “Almost done. Just open your car and your glove box.”
“I have nothing valuable in the car.”
“Maybe not… I’d prefer to judge myself.”
She studied his face and he was impressed with her coolness. Some women would be frantic by this point, on the verge of howling bloody murder and blowing the whole thing. He had scrapped his original plan, was working spontaneously, and was hugely pleased that he had pegged her correctly.
He waved the pistol. “Come on, open your door and the glove box.”
“I can’t.”
He worked up a fierce scowl. “Don’t push me, lady.”
“You’ve got my keys.”
“Oh… in the purse?”
“Exactly.”
He held it out and allowed her to dig through the insides till she found the keys. She held them in front of his face. She was playing the odds and hoping for the best. They both relaxed.
She turned her back to him and unlocked her car door. He quietly set her purse and briefcase on the ground and holstered the pistol. She bent forward and leaned inside the car to reach her glove compartment. He took a step closer to her body, reached forward with both hands, seized the front of her throat with one hand, and wrapped the other tightly around her jaw. She began straightening up, pushing back toward him, trying to fight, but the advantages of surprise, size, and brawn were his.
He gave her jaw a fierce jerk to the right and felt the distinctive snap of her neck. A choked groan exploded from her throat. Her body immediately sagged forward-if not dead, surely on the way to dead. He pulled her backward and let her drop naturally onto the tarmac.
He closed her car door, relocked it, and threw the keys back into her purse. He withdrew a vial from his pocket, bent over for a few seconds, made a few minor adjustments to her body, retrieved her purse and briefcase, then calmly walked away. He had parked his car in South Parking, and he walked completely around the gargantuan building and departed without incident.
Too bad he’d had to improvise and leave such an understated calling card that way. He’d just have to make it up with number two, and he knew just how to do it.
CHAPTER SIX
the tailor at Brooks Brothers had an avaricious smile, with seven suits and five sports coats with matching slacks slung on a back-room rack. Apparently there’s a standard array, like with military uniforms-a blue pinstripe, a gray pinstripe, a herringbone, and so on. Black and brown shoes, belts to match, twenty shirts, and three pairs of suspenders I wouldn’t be caught dead in. It began, however, with an idiot’s tutorial regarding which shirts and slacks and ties matched which coats and suits, and why did I suspect Barry had a hand in that? Twenty minutes of being pinned and chalked later, I told the tailor to hold the alterations for two days, without mentioning my wishy-washiness about the ethical propriety of taking $30, 000 in fine clothes for only a few days’ work.
But, actually, I wasn’t ambivalent.
Having a few hours to kill, I wandered back to the firm and noodled through their manuals. The Army also has manuals, but primarily to explain things like how to point a directional claymore mine so it craps death and destruction on the other guy, instead of spoiling your day, or how to frantically clear a jammed M16 automatic rifle while badasses are storming your position. The subject matter possesses a certain, shall we say, puissance, that moves you to ignore the drollness, read carefully, and remember the tiniest details. But you have to wonder about a firm that hires the best and brightest from the nation’s top law schools, and then feels the need to explain in tedious detail how to prepare a business letter, and under which conditions it’s ethical to bill a client, and under which it’s most definitely not.
There was, in fact, an espresso machine on my floor, one of those souped-up models you find in glitzy restaurants, with copper tubing, and pressurized nodules, and thingees you turn and doo-dads you push, and geez-what if I jabbed the wrong damned button and the whole f-ing building exploded? To be safe, I coaxed a passing secretary into fixing me a cup, and then wandered to the library. It was about 8:00 P.M. Some thirty associates were hunched over texts or scrounging through the stacks for some obscure ruling or other. This wasn’t the late shift. Everybody looked tired and glum. This place really sucked.
They were mostly young and attractive, late twenties, early thirties, hungry, ambitious, and what they all needed was to go out, get drunk, get laid, and get a life.
But one should always follow one’s own advice, so I departed at 8:30, affording myself a leisurely thirty minutes to get to the Pentagon. So there I am, driving happily through the streets of D. C. in my shiny Jaguar sedan, radio blaring, hopeful, horny, eager, and I guess a little too preoccupied, because suddenly there’s this swirling blue light behind me. I did not need this nonsense.
And so we had to go through the whole rigmarole-eight minutes waiting for the cop to run my plates, five minutes explaining why the car was not registered in my name, two minutes playing lawyer and trying to talk my way out of the speeding ticket, then ten more minutes completing the basic transaction. Miss Morrow, incidentally, was raised well, the type who always brings expensive wines to a dinner, never misses a thank-you note, and is punctual to a fault. I glanced at my watch-Ooops… Miss Right was about to become Miss Rightly Pissed Off.
I raced into the Pentagon’s North Parking lot at 9:26. I saw a wash of blue and red lights. I was not really in the mood to see another cop, so I parked and began strolling toward the sidewalk that leads up to the towering guardian of Western civilization. Radios were crackling. Uniformed flatfoots were copying license numbers off cars. I counted three police cars, two unmarked cars, and a gaggle of cops clustered around a gray Nissan Maxima.