“Some taco shop. The FBI went looking for him at the Agency’s request. No luck, but Bickell thinks they weren’t trying too hard, and maybe that’s the way the Agency wanted it. Or that they found him but agreed to keep it under wraps.”
“The Bureau’s in on this, too?” Steve grinned, and shook his head in appreciation. “Good stuff. Really good. You did well.”
“Thanks. It was mostly him doing the talking.”
“You ask about any other ops?”
“I, uh, didn’t get to some of the stuff on the list.”
“What about Castle’s job description, the Agency’s chain of command over there?”
“No. Sorry. He was off and running with this beacon stuff. I never got back to some of the other things.”
“It’s okay. You’re new to this. You did well.”
But Steve couldn’t mask a note of disappointment. It was clear that he felt Cole could have gotten more, and maybe he was right. Probably was.
Steve sat up straighter behind the wheel.
“Whoa. What’s that up ahead?”
A black SUV had just crested the horizon, barreling toward them in the oncoming lane. Smoked windows made a head count impossible. They tensed as it approached, and exhaled as it whizzed by with a huge snatching sound.
“Not hitting their brake lights, thank God,” Steve said, checking the mirror. “Massachusetts tags.”
“Better than government tags. The Agency or the Bureau would be looking for a car with one guy. Bickell thinks I’m traveling alone. Besides, it’s only been fifteen minutes.”
“You actually believed that shit about a twenty-minute head start? Jesus, listen to me. I’m as paranoid as you.”
“Good. Stay that way.”
From force of habit, Cole craned his neck to check the skies overhead. This time Steve was too busy checking the mirrors to notice.
They drove on in silence.
CHAPTER TEN
Any worries that the journalists would abandon him disappeared when he saw Keira waiting at the downtown bus station. A bottle clanked as he put his bag on the backseat of her Datsun. He winced in embarrassment, but Keira either didn’t notice or had the tact to pretend not to. He’d limited himself to only two swallows in the past three hours. Getting there.
From all he’d heard about Barb’s place, Cole had assumed it was a cramped row house in the heart of the city, a bohemian roach trap with on-street parking and a nightly din of sirens and car alarms. Then Keira told him to strap in for a half-hour ride.
“Barb’s way out in Middle River,” she explained.
“On the Bay?” Now he envisioned a yuppified community of waterfront condos, with docked sailboats and European sedans.
“Kinda sorta.” Keira laughed. “Wilson Point Road is sort of a Redneck Riviera. Just down the street from Martin State Airport, so you should feel right at home.”
“Seriously? Do you know what unit’s based there?”
“Some Air National Guard outfit. Mostly it’s a bunch of old planes.”
That certainly ruled out the prospect of gentrification. In Cole’s experience, neighborhoods next to air bases were always a little rough around the edges.
They passed the airstrip shortly after turning off Eastern Boulevard. A chain-link fence topped by barbed wire offered a view of a tarmac with tubby C-130 transports parked wing to wing next to a column of aging A-10 Warthogs, slow and ugly fighter-bombers. Ungainly, but right then Cole would have given anything to take one up for a spin, especially in the coppery light of dusk.
He missed flying. He’d missed it even more when he was piloting Predators. It was one reason he took his kids out in the Cessna, to give them a taste. A few hours in the sky always worked wonders on his state of mind. By taking off from here you could make a long, low run along the jagged shoreline of the Chesapeake, heading south toward the city center or east across the main channel toward the farmlands and marshes of the Eastern Shore. You’d be right up there with the V formations of geese, the setting sun at your back. Turn south and in less than an hour you’d reach the sawgrass flats of his boyhood in Tidewater Virginia. No one down there worth seeing anymore, not since his parents died. But he could buzz his old high school, or the rooftops of his friends’ old houses. He saw it all in his head now, the bird’s-eye view: duck blinds and fishing holes peeping from between bare trees, reflected sunlight flashing up from the rippled water.
Barb’s street had a similar feel, a jumble of modest frame houses on compact lots. Boat trailers sat in driveways with massive pickups, clunky American sedans, the occasional Harley. It was only the first week of December, but most houses were decorated for Christmas, which made Cole think of his kids, already putting together their lists for Santa. Although not Karen, who’d be too old for that by now. He wondered if either of them ever asked to see Daddy. Maybe not.
It was chilly out, but Cole rolled down his window to inhale the familiar bouquet of brine, boat fuel, and wet leaves. Not at all like the lay of the land at Bickell’s place, where the lake was hemmed in by hills. This was tidewater country, with an open horizon and a lunar cycle. Mudflats at low tide, shallows at high tide, with the baitfish jumping. A long way from the desert.
He spotted Barb’s place from a block away, pegging it by the lack of decorations and the make of the cars in the drive — a Toyota Prius and a Honda Civic. The house was a funky little cottage with whitewashed cedar shakes and a single gabled window on the second floor. The lot, out toward the end of the point, backed up to Stansbury Creek, with a view of a grassy marsh, a stand of pines, and a marina with bobbing boats.
Steve was waiting for them just inside the front door.
“Good timing,” he said. “Five minutes later and you would’ve missed me. I’m headed off to an interview, but I’ll help you get squared away. Let me take your bag.”
He turned and called toward the back.
“They’re here!”
A petite redhead in jeans and a white peasant blouse emerged from the kitchen with a wooden spoon in her right hand.
“So you’re Darwin Cole.” She held aloft the spoon, coated with red sauce. “My night to make dinner, so I hope you’re not too hungry.”
“You must be Barb.”
“Holtzman. Couch or cot?”
“Excuse me?”
“Your choice of sleeping accommodations. Crash on a cot in Steve’s room, or take the couch down here.”
She was certainly direct.
“Couch, I guess.”
Steve nodded, looking relieved. Cole surveyed the room, barely decorated apart from a threadbare oriental rug and a brass Middle Eastern coffee set on an end table. The furniture looked straight out of an IKEA showroom, lending the place a faintly nomadic air, as if to convey that she could pick up and go at a moment’s notice.
Barb, brandishing the spoon like a bloodied swagger stick, pointed toward an alcove in the back.
“The dining room is where we work.” Three laptops were open on a small table.
“The nerve center,” Steve said, sounding a bit self-conscious. For all his initial reluctance about Cole at the beginning, he now seemed determined to make the arrangement work smoothly, the obliging host who only wanted everyone to get along. Barb led Cole to the couch, where she cleared away a pile of newspapers and shooed a fat orange cat from the cushions.
“Scoot, Cheryl, you’ve got company.”
The cat bared its teeth, but jumped to the floor and trotted off toward the kitchen.
“Sorry, Kitty,” Cole said.
“It’s all right. Cheryl’s the neighborhood slut. I just happen to be her pimp for the week.”
Cole wondered if that’s how everything was in Barb’s life — stray animals and sublet friends, coming and going like the tide but not nearly as reliable.