Sarah and I trooped out, leaving Grafton facing Molina, who looked tired and angry. I don’t know what he had to be pissed about. With the ID info we had, Kerry was going to get picked up sooner or later, and Molina wasn’t in the car with the agents and consequently was still alive.
“So the men who shot down Air Force One were Russians?”
“Yes. Russian mafiosi. Four of them. Here are their names.” Grafton held out a sheet of paper from the small envelope that had been passed to Carmellini at noon.
Molina glanced at the slip of paper, then handed it back. “Anything else?” he asked.
“They spent three or four months in China. Then their trail peters out. The FBI will tell you all about their activities in America.”
“China,” Molina muttered, and rubbed his chin. “How do you know this Russian of yours is telling the truth?”
“I don’t know, Sal. Do I look like Diogenes?”
As the copy machine did its thing, Sarah said, “I’m sorry about Anna.”
I grunted.
“Want to go get some dinner?” she asked.
“I’m not hungry.” I eyed her. “I could use a drink, though. Or two.”
After I returned Grafton’s paper pile to him and Sarah locked hers up in a secure safe in her office, we left the building together. She drove her car, and I followed her. It was raining lightly again. Windy. A miserable damned night. The wipers merely smeared the windshield, and a trickle of water dripped from the roof seal above the rearview mirror.
Maybe I should have just sat in Kerry’s apartment and waited for her. Cuffed her with her own cuffs and visited until the FBI got its paperwork blessed by a judge and came for her.
Ain’t hindsight wonderful? I’m sure she could have answered many of my questions.
Of course, if I had stayed, I’d have probably killed her before the feds knocked on the door.
Now I kinda wished I had waited.
Sarah and I ended up at a chain bar/restaurant. Safely ensconced in a booth by a window, with a football highlights show on a television above the bar that I could glance at from time to time, we ordered. I decided I was a bit hungry and ordered some wings with my bourbon. Sarah ordered white wine and a salad.
After the waiter left, I told Sarah about the Asian gentleman who lived in apartment 209, right down the hall from dear ol’ Zoe. “Great setup if he’s her control,” I mused aloud.
“The vast bulk of Chinese Americans are not spies,” she said, “nor are all coincidences suspect, but it wouldn’t hurt to check this guy out.”
“You can do that?”
“It’s what I do, Tommy,” she said, slightly exasperated.
Rain smeared the window. Looked like it was setting in to rain all night.
“I’m sorry about Anna,” Sarah said again.
I just nodded.
“I thought you were never going to get married.”
“So did I,” I said, a bit more forcefully than I intended. “I should have left Anna in Switzerland. She’d still be alive if I had.”
Sarah frowned. “Don’t start that what-if crap. Pretty soon you’ll be wishing you had never been born. I know! I have a patent on what-if.”
Sarah Houston had a good face. Actually, she was lovely, with big dark eyes that seemed to see everything. She had certainly made her share of mistakes though the years, enough mistakes for a dozen people, but she seemed to be trying to get on down the road. Maybe there was a lesson there for me. Sarah was no saint, and I wasn’t either. Just two very mortal people.
Our drinks came. We didn’t have much to say to each other. Superficial things about Jake Grafton and the agency and the state of the universe. I had finished my bourbon when my wings and her salad arrived, so I ordered another drink.
We finished eating and were watching the rain, each of us lost in our own thoughts, when she asked, “Where are you sleeping these days?”
I had been thinking about Zoe Kerry, wondering where she was tonight. Wondering if the FBI had alerted every badge-toter on the East Coast to watch for her. I abandoned Zoe and saw Sarah’s reflection in the window. I turned my head to see her face clearly. Well, she wasn’t drunk. Not with only one glass of wine in her. “At Willie Varner’s,” I said.
“Think he could spare you for an evening?”
“Is that an invitation?”
“Yes.”
“Picking up men in bars is bad for your reputation.”
She smiled. “I’ll try not to make a habit of it.”
“I accept.”
I followed her home.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
War is not merely a political act, but a real political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, a carrying out of the same by other means.
Finding the watcher or watchers at Naval Base Norfolk was an impossible task without bringing in hundreds of Homeland Security agents, FBI agents and police, and even that might not be enough. Or might cause the watcher to trigger the weapon, if he could. The best option, Jake Grafton thought, was finding the weapon or weapons that Grafton suspected were there without alerting the media or public. Or the watchers.
The navy brought in four SEAL teams. Each team was given a section of the anchorage to search, starting at the carrier piers and radiating outward. Their diving boats were navy dredges, which were used periodically to pull sediment from the bottom of the anchorage to keep it deep enough for the deep-draft carriers. Barges used to hold the dredged-up muck were rigged alongside with a sponson between the barge and dredge, leaving a gap that divers could use to enter and exit the water.
If the weapon was merely lying on the bottom, the dredges would of course pull it up eventually. Since the dredging went on year-around, presumably it wasn’t there.
The SEAL officer in charge stood on the small bridge of the dredge and used binoculars to scan the pier. It had to be there, somewhere, he thought, in an area that the dredges wouldn’t normally do. So he sent his men swimming in that direction after entering the water.
The SEAL commander, Captain Joe Child, and the commanding officer of the base, Captain Butler Spiers, had been personally briefed yesterday by the chief of naval operations, Admiral Cart McKiernan, in a guarded conference room in the base administration building. Sitting beside the admiral was a civilian; he wasn’t introduced, yet Child recognized him from newspaper photographs. The man was Jake Grafton, retired rear admiral and interim director of the CIA. It was the most amazing briefing Joe Child had ever attended.
After he had explained the threat, McKiernan laid it on the line. “As you know, we already have plenty of security precautions in place, including airborne fighters, a restricted area over the base, continuous helicopter patrols. Still, in light of this threat, we are going to do more. We are starting those patrols tomorrow, a week early. All commands have been notified.”
He paused to gather his thoughts. “We have a carrier at the pier now, Harry Truman, undergoing maintenance on her catapults and other gear, and she isn’t scheduled to leave until mid-February. The Ford will be towed over from Norfolk tomorrow. The next carrier will be arriving three days from now, the eighteenth. Two more will arrive on the twentieth and the twenty-second of December. All will be here with their task forces, which means some amphibious assault ships and about eighteen destroyers. There isn’t enough pier space for all their escorts, so they will make port up and down the East Coast.
“If we can’t find a bomb — because it isn’t there or we just can’t find it — I am going to have all those ships except Harry Truman and Ford stay at sea. The drop-dead date for that decision is four days from now, December twenty-second.”