The market was six blocks away from his house, and halfway there, he caught a glimpse of the same car in his rearview mirror.
Still no alarms—there were a million automobiles like it on the road. But when you were in a business where what you were doing was either iffy or outright illegal, you had to pay more attention to things. He couldn’t ever forget those two cops, what a screwup that had been.
He’d hit the grocery store, loaded his purchases into the car, and cranked it up. And as he left the lot, he saw the gray car pull out behind him. Couldn’t read the plates, but they were local, he could see that much.
Third time was the charm.
Could be it was just his imagination, but he couldn’t take that chance. He turned at the first intersection he came to. Not going home just yet . . .
After he had gotten out of the Navy, Carruth had figured he would be a merc, a soldier of fortune, working for whoever had the money to pay him. He’d done a little of that, in a couple places—North Africa, South America. He’d drifted into civilian security for a company in Iraq and Iran—that paid real well—which is where he’d hooked up with some of the team he was running now. On one of the civilian gigs, he’d worked with an ex-spook by the name of Dormer. Or maybe he wasn’t ex. You never could tell with those guys, they’d climb a tree to tell a lie rather than stand on the ground and tell the truth. But Dormer was an old guy who knew his stuff, and when things were slack, which was most of the time, he’d teach Carruth little bits and pieces of spycraft.
Dormer was about sixty, and as average-looking as you could get—medium height and weight, and in-country he wore a moustache and dyed it and his hair black so that with his tan he could pretty much pass for a local. He spoke the language, dressed like most men on the street, and Carruth had once watched him walk into a crowd and just vanish, as if he had turned invisible.
Dormer showed him the ropes, including drops, how to tail somebody without being seen—and how to spot a tail without letting him know you’d made him.
“Thing about being followed,” Dormer had said, “is that it’s easy to check if all you want to do is know if you’re being tailed. The trick is to do it so the guy on your ass doesn’t know you’ve spotted him.”
“Why is that?”
“Because, my large ex-SEAL friend, if the guy thinks he’s burned, he’ll drop off and they will replace him with somebody else. Better the tail you know than the tail you don’t.”
Carruth had nodded. Yeah, he could see that.
“So you think the guy half a block back is on you, doesn’t matter if he’s on foot or in a car, you don’t turn around and stare at him. You’re driving, you don’t slam on your brakes and pull over, making him pass. You don’t run a red light and wait to see if he runs it after you. You don’t do anything that makes it look as if you have a clue. You want him to think you are blind, deaf, and stupid.”
“What do you do?”
The older man had grinned. “Listen and learn, son. . . .”
Dormer had disappeared for real a couple months after that conversation. Gone into the desert in a van with some guys heading south to haul something illegal to an Iraqi port city, and far as Carruth could tell, nobody had ever seen any of them again. Probably he was bleached bones in the desert sands, though Carruth kinda liked to think the old spook was still out there somewhere, wheeling and dealing.
Driving through the streets of the District, Carruth remembered the lesson. He wasn’t going to go directly home. He had a little stop to make first, and it had to be in the right location.
He drove for a few blocks, turned left, went another half mile, then turned right. He didn’t hurry, and while he made enough turns so that it would have to be an unbelievably big coincidence for anybody to accidentally stay with him, he was heading for a particular place and making reasonable efforts to get there via a reasonable route.
There was a cutlery shop Carruth went to sometimes to check out the knives, those being basic tools of his trade. He usually carried a tactical folder, and sometimes a little push-dagger disguised as a belt buckle, or even a neck-knife that hung on a thong around his neck and was hidden under his shirt. In the field, he always had a good-sized sheath knife—he was partial to the tanto design, though he also liked a basic Finnish pukka.
The thing about the knife store was, it was on a street that looped around and had but one way in or out from the main road. If it was a letter P, the shop would be on the right just before you got to the top of the loop.
When Dormer had first shown him the trick, Carruth thought he had it nailed. Take the tail down a dead-end street, and when he followed you, you had him, right?
“No,” Dormer had said. “Most dead-end streets are marked these days. They have signs that say, ‘Dead End,’ or, ‘No Outlet.’ Guy following you knows what he’s doing, he won’t pull in after you, he’ll set up where he can see the only way in or out and wait for you to come back.”
“Ah.”>
“If he absolutely needs to know where you went on that road and who you saw or talked to? He can park and hoof it, or risk pulling in a ways. A good tail won’t try it if he thinks you might see him. He’ll have binoculars and a camera, he can probably spot you if you get out of your car, and he can go back later and figure out who you went to visit. He knows you have to come back out the way you went in, so all he has to do is wait where he can see that intersection, since he’ll know you can’t drive out the other end.”
“Right.”
“So, you lead him into a district that isn’t a dead end, but has only one way out, and you make sure when you leave, you can see the intersection.”
Dormer had paused, then added, “Now, this still might be a coincidence—guy happened to have business in that same neighborhood. But if you take a long and roundabout way getting there, that’s not likely.”
Carruth smiled, remembering the old man’s lessons.
The visit to the knife shop was short—he didn’t really need a new knife, though he did look at a couple titanium-scaled folders from Cutter’s Knife and Tool—the Bengal Karambit was really nice and not too spendy. Had a frame-lock and a nice heft. Some knife gurus didn’t have much use for the little hook-blade shape, but they didn’t know how well it could be made to work in the hands of an expert. Use the thing right, the guy giving you grief wouldn’t know you even had the sucker until you bit him with it. He could bleed out on the way to the hospital, if you cut the right spot, and Carruth had practiced cutting the right spots more than a little.
He thought about it, but decided to wait until next time.
When he got back into his car, he didn’t see the gray sedan. He pulled around the loop and sped up a little, not much, and back to the straight line to the intersection. He pulled out, turned right, and drove somewhat slower.
It was maybe fifteen seconds later that the guy following him reached the intersection. Same gray car.
Carruth felt a cold rush in his belly as he saw the tail.
So. Somebody was following him. That didn’t make any sense.
Who?
And—why?
He slowed down enough to be able to read the license plate on the tail. He pulled a pen from his shirt pocket and wrote the plate number down on the back of his hand.
He needed to tell Lewis about this. Might be it was her having him shadowed. He couldn’t imagine why, but stranger things had happened. And if it wasn’t her, she needed to know about it. Other than their business, and those two dead cops, there wasn’t any reason anybody should be following him.