I gave him an acquiescing smile, now absolutely positive I wasn’t going to play ball with him. “Sort of amazing, isn’t it, you getting me all the way down here just to tell me not to waste taxpayer money? This kind of thing happen often?”
Snowden became very still. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“That you make such an effort to tell a local cop to lay off. I mean, let’s face it, you people aren’t the only ones who’re overly suspicious by nature. I’m a little that way myself. Why didn’t you just let us charge around till we ran out of gas?”
He let out a small sigh. “I can see my homework about you was pretty accurate. Look, I won’t go into details-there are some national security angles I can’t divulge-but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that your fading away quietly would be a big help to us. I meant what I said about doing what you want, though. Despite what the media says, we don’t mess with the Constitution. But what you found is a tiny fragment of something we’ve been working on for years. Kicking up a lot of dust won’t do you any good, and it could make things harder for us, so I guess I’m asking you to look at the big picture, and ask yourself if searching for something that isn’t there is in anyone’s best interest.”
“And I’m to do this totally on faith, even though you won’t tell me anything because of national security?”
He laid his hands flat on the table, his smile erased by the tone of my voice. “Well, apparently not.” He rose to his feet. “Lieutenant, I guess you’ll just have to do what you have to do, for whatever reasons. I was hoping for a little interagency cooperation, but maybe those days are gone. It’s becoming that kind of world-everybody covering his ass, and to hell with what’s good for the nation. Too bad.”
He crossed the small room and pulled open the door. The same woman who’d escorted me here was standing in the hallway, apparently summoned by mysterious means.
Snowden nodded to me as I passed him, but didn’t offer his hand, which was just as well. I might’ve been tempted to tear it off. “Sorry to have wasted your time, Lieutenant. Have a safe trip back.”
It was dark. The rain outside hammered on the skylight over our bed with a comforting futility. I was lying face down on the bed, a large towel beneath me, and Gail was straddling my hips, alternately oiling and massaging my back, which was sore from hours of driving in lousy weather, not to mention the odd knife fight.
“So what do you think you’ve stepped into?” she asked, bearing down.
“No ghost of a notion. I ran it by Tony, but he’s as confused as I am. We can’t tell if they know everything and are being cute, or know almost nothing and want to know more. Snowden basically told me to lay off the investigation, but there again, that could’ve been just to fire me up. One thing is for sure-he lied about Boris Malik, or whatever his name is. Told me he’d been dumped here out of convenience-a foreigner killed by other foreigners now out of the country-and that finding any evidence, or linking the case to anyone or any place local would be impossible. We know that’s bullshit, since whoever did the dumping knew about the quarry and how to approach it.”
Gail paused to apply more oil. “Which leaves you back where you started?”
“Not quite,” I admitted reluctantly.
She resumed her handiwork along the tender back of my neck, forcing me to reach back and stop her.
“Ease up a bit. Something else happened down there,” I continued. “You probably would’ve heard about it soon anyhow, the way news travels. I was mugged by a guy with a knife. Nothing much happened,” I added quickly to her quiet intake of breath. “He came at me, I threw him off, and then he disappeared, right after he chopped me in the neck. But I’m having trouble believing it was as random as the cops’re claiming.”
She stretched out next to me to look into my face. “You sure that was all of it? Just a near thing?”
I kissed her forehead. “Promise. I kicked him in the balls, and he took off. The neck’s a little sore is all.”
She laid her head on the towel and closed her eyes briefly, one hand still stroking my back. I understood her concern. I’d almost been killed by a knife a few years back, and when she’d been raped, her attacker had used a knife to torment her. Such symbols had become evil icons to her, as had sharp noises in the night, the need for locked doors, and a wariness of things implied but perhaps not meant. They represented a skittish undercurrent beneath an otherwise hard-driving, intelligent, utterly self-possessed exterior.
I kissed her again. “Thanks for the back rub.”
Her eyes reopened. “Want more?”
“No. That did the trick.”
There was a long pause before she asked, “So what made this not a random mugging?”
“I don’t know. For one thing, it happened at the Korean War Memorial. If I were a mugger, I wouldn’t’ve been skulking around a totally empty area, probably famous for its police coverage. For another, I never heard him coming. I just happened to turn around to look at an airplane flying over. And finally, Snowden knew all about it early the next morning-at least he seemed to.”
Gail raised up to prop her head in her hand. “He knew about it? How?”
“That’s what I asked him. He pulled the all-seeing-eye routine, implying he even knew who the mugger was.”
“Why would he tell you that?”
“To impress me, to hoodwink me, to scare me. You name it. Whatever it is, it worked. I left his office so full of theories I had no idea which one might be right. We’ve practiced disinformation at the department now and then, either to flush someone out or to get the press to cut us some slack, but this took the cake.”
“But why go to all the trouble?” Gail asked.
“Specifically? I have no idea,” I answered. “But it keeps boiling down to a single common denominator. Regardless of whether the CIA is hoping we’ll drop it or pursue it, we’ve obviously stepped into something pretty interesting, and I would love to find out what the hell it is-and why the FBI is apparently also being kept in the dark.”
I waited for Ron and J.P. to squeeze themselves into my two office chairs, one wedged between a couple of filing cabinets, the other shoved under a tiny side table loaded down with files. Each man knew to move slowly and cautiously, having suffered paper landslides in the past.
“You both get the memo on my trip to DC?” I asked.
J.P. nodded. Ron asked, “How real is the CIA connection?”
“Real enough, not that we can do anything about it right now. For the moment, I’m pretending they don’t even exist. What did you two dig up while I was gone?”
Ron started off, cradling a thick folder in his lap, which he patted apologetically. “Not much on the paper trail. All the inquiries we sent out are still dangling, including the ones to Canada. INS and DEA have nothing on their books. I drove to Boston to look over the airline passenger lists personally, but Boris Malik doesn’t show up anywhere, meaning he either used another name, or he picked up the car at the airport as a decoy. In the three hours before he rented the car, planes came in from all over the place, including Moscow, but without a name, I don’t guess it matters. I kept the lists just in case another alias crops up, but otherwise, it’s a dead end.”
“You talk to the rental people?” I asked.
“Yeah, but there again… The girl who did the paperwork recognized him, but she couldn’t remember if he had luggage or not, or if he said where he was headed. She wasn’t even sure if he was alone. She did say he had an accent. It was the only reason she remembered him at all-’cause they had such a hard time communicating.”
“What about the credit card?”
“Counterfeit. The charge went through to some poor bastard in Illinois. The name on the card was Malik’s.”
“He didn’t ask for any maps or directions?”