by Tim Green
“Can I sit down?” Kurt asked.
“What if she said no?” the man interjected rudely.
Kurt eyed him critically. He was probably in his mid- twenties, but the beard and the long black hair that was pulled into a ponytail made him look older. His eyes had the sarcastic twinkle of a brazen smartass.
Kurt sat without waiting for Carol to answer.
“Mr. Ford,” she said uneasily, “this is Henry Minter. He was the bartender on Friday night and he remembers Collin.”
“Who’s Collin?” Minter demanded. “I didn’t say anything about any Collin. You asked me if I remembered a dark-haired chick, a looker. That, I told you about, not any Collin.”
“He was the man with her,” Dipper explained, blinking with uncertainty at the bartender.
“The sap?” Minter said with a chuckle.
Kurt felt his stomach curdle. Blood surged hot through the veins in his head and neck.
“The woman who was with Collin came into the bar earlier in the night and asked him,” Dipper quickly explained, nodding toward Minter, “to fill her glass with water every time she ordered a double shot of vodka for her date.”
“Hey!” Minter exclaimed as he pushed his chair back from the table. “I don’t like the way this guy is looking at me. If I’m not under arrest, I gotta get back to work.”
“Sit down,” Kurt commanded in a low, seething voice.
“Excuse me, mister?” Minter said, leaning his face across the table with the hint of a smile on his face. “The last guy that told me to do that was my father when I was twelve, but on my thirteenth birthday I flattened the side of his head with a brick.”
Kurt looked into the young man’s dark eyes. They were unafraid and challenging, the eyes of a man who was used to other people backing down.
Like lightning, Kurt reached across the table with both hands and grabbed him by the back of the head, slamming his face down onto the hard surface. Minter’s nose popped on the first blow, but Kurt slammed his face down three more times before heaving him up by the throat and pinning him to the brick wall behind the table with his toes dancing wildly on the dirty floor.
Carol Dipper emitted a shrill cry and fumbled with her badge, which she proceeded to stick into Kurt’s face. “I’m a police officer, damn it!” she cried.
So absurd were her words that Kurt might have laughed aloud if he weren’t focused so intently on the bartender.
“That was my boy you’re talking about,” he hissed, tightening his grip. Blood from Minter’s nose ran freely down Kurt’s arm, tickling his elbow where it dripped to the floor. “Now you tell me who that black-haired bitch was and you tell me quick.”
Minter shook his head from side to side as earnestly as he could and croaked pitifully that he didn’t know.
Kurt dropped him to his feet and brought his free hand up with a twisting vise-grip on Minter’s groin. “You tell me what you know about her or I’ll ruin you for life,” he said through clenched teeth.
“She never said her name,” Minter whined, his face scrunching up in pain. “She asked me to do it. She said it was a joke and she gave me a hundred dollars. I never saw her before. I don’t know anything else!”
Kurt looked hard into his eyes. He wasn’t lying. He was shaken and humiliated, but he wasn’t lying.
“Mr. Ford!” Dipper shrieked. “Let him go!”
Kurt did and turned to go. Dipper stomped along beside him through the small crowd of gaping patrons and Minter’s coworker behind the bar.
“I’ll sue your ass, man!” a recovered Minter howled as they reached the door.
Kurt turned and stared hard at him before allowing the young detective to pull him by the arm out through the open door. “A real tough guy,” he muttered.
“Mr. Ford,” Carol Dipper exclaimed when they were on the sidewalk. “You cannot do that! I am trying to help you and you . . . you . . . you just can’t do that! My authority as an officer will be . . . I could get into trouble when this gets reported.”
“This isn’t going to get reported,” Kurt said, absently flicking his arm and spattering the brick paving stones with Minter’s blood. He looked at his trembling hand with disgust. There was a day when a nose-to-nose, knockdown confrontation in a bar wouldn’t have unsettled him quite so much.
“How can you say that?” Dipper asked, still aghast.
“Because a guy like that doesn’t want to have to tell anyone what happened again and again. He won’t call the police.”
“I am the police!” she protested.
“I know. I didn’t mean it like that. I meant that he won’t call anyone else,” Kurt said. He sounded calmer than he felt. “Now listen, what that guy said proves something was going on. This woman got Collin drunk, brought him back to his place, and, either alone or with someone else’s help, she shot him with his own gun and made it look like a suicide. Even Olander has to see that now.”
Dipper looked skeptical at the mention of Olander, but Kurt continued emphatically: “This is what we need to do. We need to get a composite drawing of this woman and find out who she is. Collin’s two friends are right around the corner and between them we should be able to get a decent idea of what this woman looked like.
“How’d you get to that guy before me anyway?” he asked, stopping to stare at the flustered detective.
Dipper’s cheeks flushed and she avoided Kurt’s stare. “I started at noon asking at every place up and down King Street if anyone saw a man and a woman that fit their description. I am a detective, Mr. Ford,” she said, looking up at him defiantly with her owlish eyes. “And I know we’ll need a lot more than a composite drawing to find out who this woman is.”
“No,” Kurt said. “We won’t. You get me the artist to do the drawing. That’s all I want. If you get that for me, I won’t ask you for anything else. Not now, anyway. In fact, I don’t want you to say anything to Olander or your captain. I may not need their help.”
Dipper looked at him and blinked. They had reached Harpoon Alley now, and after glancing in through the window to make sure Collin’s friends were still there, Kurt had stopped to talk.
“Why is that?” Carol Dipper asked.
“Because I have a friend who might be able to find this woman with nothing more than an accurate sketch.”
Dipper looked at him quizzically, but Kurt wasn’t going to say anything. He wasn’t going to tell her that a man in David Claiborne’s position could access the National Security Agency’s comprehensive computer files for women who looked like the one who had been with Collin. He wasn’t going to tell Carol Dipper that he’d start with the ID badges of the operatives in the CIA and the other intelligence agencies and work his way through the military and then to the public in general and their driver’s licenses if he had to. But if what Claiborne had suggested were true, then most likely the woman would have some connection with the government that would make her accessible to the president and his people. And if she did, then Kurt would not only find her, he’d find her fast.
CHAPTER 6
Carol Dipper knew a competent police artist in D.C. But when Dipper contacted her she said she had no intention of coming in to work on a Sunday evening to do a sketch based on the recollections of two half-drunk young men. Kurt overcame her reluctance when he told Dipper to offer the artist a thousand dollars in cash to meet them at her precinct station. Two hours later, both of Collin’s friends were nodding with admiration at the composite the artist had come up with.
With a computer disk of the sketch in hand, and Dipper’s agreement not to report their activities to Olander or the captain, Kurt said good-bye to his son’s friends and went to his Suburban, which was parked on a dark street adjacent to the police station. It was a short walk, but the night had cooled off with a breeze. Kurt took his blazer off the passenger seat and pulled it on before hopping in and dialing David Claiborne’s cell phone.
“Hello.” Claiborne’s voice was flat and hard like slate.
“Call me at two-o-two, five five five, seven eight two three,” Claiborne said and promptly hung up.
Kurt dialed the number.
“Kurt?” Claiborne said after one ring.
“Yes.”
“Are you calling me from a digital phone or an analog?”
“Digital.” Kurt knew as well as anyone that an analog phone could be overheard by any ordinary person with an emergency scanner. Digital, however, was relatively safe.
“Good. Do you need to talk?”
“Yes,” Kurt said.
Claiborne gave him directions to a seafood restaurant in Georgetown that overlooked the river. “I’ll be there in thirty minutes. Watch your back,” he said and hung up.
Kurt couldn’t help feeling slightly annoyed at his old friend’s mysterious behavior. It had been so long since he himself had to think in terms of security protocols. Even in the world of computer security, where industrial spies and hackers weren’t unknown, he’d grown used to talking freely on the telephone. And despite what he knew, he was having a hard time altering his behavior to match the magnitude of the situation. The notion that the chief executive of the United States was embroiled in a conspiracy like this was almost unthinkable. But when he considered the possibilities, he knew that Claiborne’s conduct was exactly correct. If the president and the people around him had plotted the deaths of three Secret Service agents, then they would be at the height of vigilance, especially when it came to Claiborne, the only man left alive who could possibly put all the pieces together.
Kurt took one hand off the wheel and felt instinctively under his arm where an agent’s gun would be; for the first time in a long while he felt naked without it. Maybe David could help him with that. If things got dicey, he didn’t want to be the only guy at the party without a weapon. The momentum of the entire situation seemed to be carrying him along like a riptide. He was perfectly willing to go with it, but he didn’t want to flounder like a novice.
He knew how to play this game. He’d played it well, in theory, anyway. The truth was, for all the training of his body and mind—and that was twenty years ago—his experiences with live fire had been limited to one incident when they had run a counterfeiting ring to ground in Seattle. But the countless hours of training had served him then, reinforcing his reactions so that they became instinctual under fire. The question now was how much of those instincts had remained with him. He hoped most of them, because something told him he was going to need them.
It was after ten when Kurt walked through the large glass doors and into the spacious dining room, where the few remaining patrons were mostly having their dessert. Claiborne was already there, sitting at a lonesome table by one of the many broad windows overlooking the water. A tired-looking young waitress with white hair brought Claiborne a club soda with lemon and glanced nervously between the two to see if they wanted to eat. The kitchen was about to close.
Kurt suddenly realized he was ravenous. He ordered a New York strip and a glass of merlot.
“Steak in a seafood place,” Claiborne said blandly. “You always were different.” It was his first allusion to their past fraternity, and it somehow comforted Kurt.
“And you don’t eat anything but”—Kurt hesitated, remembering his old friend’s crude mantra with a constrained smile—“anything but food after nine at night, right?”
Claiborne smirked and nodded. Kurt looked at his hand to see if he wore a wedding band. In the last days before he’d left Dallas, he remembered David getting engaged to a blonde bombshell, a young finance major and cheerleader from SMU. He searched his mind for her name but came up empty.
“Did you ever marry . . .” he began.
“Sheila?” Claiborne said. “Nope. She’s still around, but I dodged that bullet.”
“Still around?”
Claiborne grinned smugly. “Still engaged as a matter of fact.”
“All this time?” Kurt exclaimed, searching his friend’s face to see if he was teasing.
Claiborne nodded. “I kept putting it off. Then about ten years ago, we set a date, invitations out, place booked, honeymoon, everything set. But the night before I just figured, why? I had everything I wanted and the way I wanted it.”
“How did that go over with her?”
“Not great, but she got over it. She gets over things . . . What about you? You ever get married again?”
“No,” Kurt said solemnly.
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Claiborne said with a hint of what might have been sarcasm.
Kurt said nothing, but smiled. The two of them then talked about the old days in Dallas, the good things they remembered. After a while, their conversation turned to the Service. At first, the discussion was amiable enough, but it soon took a disastrous turn that left them face-to-face with Claiborne’s disappointments and Kurt’s unparalleled success.
Kurt couldn’t help feeling uncomfortable again at the thought of how different things could have been if only he’d given his old friend the job that he asked for. While Kurt didn’t care about the clothes he wore or the car he drove for that matter, he knew such things meant something to David. He surreptitiously examined the Presidential Rolex on his old friend’s wrist. By the way the second hand moved, he knew it was a fake, and he wondered what would prompt a man David’s age to wear a fake Rolex.
But then Claiborne completely diffused his apprehension by suddenly saying, “I’m proud of you, Kurt. You did real well for yourself and I’m damn proud of you.”
“I appreciate that,” Kurt said, and he did. It was comforting to know that his old friendship with David had overcome the time, distance, and circumstances that had arisen between them.
An uneasy silence ensued. Kurt had never learned to navigate the subtleties of an intimate conversation. He was more used to going straight at things, and whenever he was confounded, he simply remained quiet.
“So where are we now?” Claiborne finally said in a more serious tone before taking a sip of his drink.
Kurt finished off his glass of wine. He removed the disk from his pocket and held it in the air. “I have an artist’s sketch of what she looked like, the woman who was with Collin before he disappeared. I know her approximate height and age, and her eyes were an unusual color. They were yellow, like a cat’s.”
Claiborne eyed the disk. His face remained impassive, but Kurt could see the nervous excitement in his eyes and it puzzled him briefly.
“I was hoping,” Kurt continued, “that you could help me access the NSA files. I want to cross-check this rendering for a match.”
“That’s going to give you thousands of matches,” Claiborne pointed out, “and you can’t be certain of the accuracy of a drawing.”
“I know,” Kurt said. “But I don’t want to search for a match against all their files. I want to start narrow, with CIA operatives. Then I’ll check the other agencies and the military, special operations units first, if I can confine the search, which I think should be possible. My presumption is that whoever this woman was, she knew what she was doing. In an operation like this, even if she were a pawn, they wouldn’t use someone outside the community, I don’t think. Besides, when you see the picture of this woman, you’ll see. There aren’t going to be too many matches. She’s unusually beautiful.”
Claiborne pinched a wedge of lemon between his fingers and worked his mouth as if he could somehow taste it before letting it fall back into his drink. “I admire your work,” he said. “You’ve obviously taken what I said to heart.”
Kurt’s food came. He cut big pieces of the steak and wolfed them down with a second glass of wine, realizing that he hadn’t eaten since the morning. After savoring the blood from several mouthfuls of the hot meat, he said, “I want to find out who this girl is. I want to find out who sent her and who killed Collin.”
“You know who sent her,” Claiborne said with a scowl.
“I have to know for sure
.”
“Then what?” Claiborne looked expectantly at Kurt.
Kurt stared into his old friend’s face for a moment before answering. Certainly, Claiborne didn’t really want to know what he would do. “I just want to know,” he said evasively. “I want to know the truth.”
“I doubt you’ll find any direct link to the president,” Claiborne said. “The police won’t be able to help you, if that’s what you’re thinking. Neither will the press.”
“I know that,” Kurt said flatly. He began to work on the last half of his steak, chewing those pieces more thoroughly than he had the earlier ones.
Claiborne nodded and watched him impassively while he finished. “I’ve got a guy who can get into the NSA’s computer system,” he said quietly.
“Can you do it now?” Kurt asked.
“You want to do it right now?” Claiborne said with a raised eyebrow. “It’s after eleven on a Sunday night.”
“Yes. Now.”
“I could call him and maybe have him tell me how,” Claiborne mused. “He’s not going to meet us. He’s got a family . . .
“But I’m not going to be able to do it,” he continued. “I’m not big with computers.”
“If you have a password and the site and the name of the search program,” Kurt said, “I can get in and figure out how it works. I’d rather do it myself anyway.”
“I’ll make the call,” Claiborne said without emotion, “but we still need a computer. We can’t go back to my place. We shouldn’t.”
“They’ll have a high-speed access computer at the business center in my hotel,” Kurt said.
Claiborne shrugged. “I’ll call him.”
“Let’s go,” Kurt said. He surreptitiously took a clip full of cash from his pocket, peeled off a couple hundred-dollar bills, and slid them under the edge of his plate.
“I’ll get that,” Claiborne said, reaching into his jacket.
“Please, David,” Kurt said quietly, holding up his hand. “I can’t tell you how grateful I am for what you’re doing. At the very least, let me buy you dinner.”
