MIKE LAWSON
The Payback

Dedication

For Tracy Howell

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

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Epilogue

Keep Reading

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Author’s Note

Praise

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

DeMarco looked down at the dead man lying at his feet.

He should have been the one lying there. He should never have made it this far.

He picked up the man’s weapon. An Uzi, he thought, but he wasn’t sure. He’d never fired a machine gun in his life.

Across the Potomac River he could see lights burning in the Pentagon. He was less than a mile from one of the most secure buildings in the world, a building filled with people who actually knew how to shoot the weapon he was now holding, but none of those people, as close as they were, would be of help to him or Emma now. This would all be over before anyone could help.

He fumbled for the safety on the Uzi, flipped the mechanism, then looked to see if Emma was still in the same position.

He could see her clearly in the lights of the marina parking lot. And he could see the Asian woman, the automatic in her hand, the gun pointed at Emma’s heart. The Asian was the most lethal person that DeMarco had ever known. If he didn’t do something in the next few minutes, Emma was going to die.

DeMarco began running through trees. He had to get closer; there was no way he could kill the woman from where he was.

And then the sound of a weapon firing, another machine gun. Who the hell had fired? Goddamnit, how many of them were there? How many were still alive?

After that, it all happened so fast, too fast: a man running down one of the piers, the green and black camouflage paint streaked on his face making him look like something that had escaped from hell; the Asian woman spinning toward the man and firing; the camouflaged man falling; Emma leaping at the Asian woman and wrestling her to the ground.

Emma was trying to get the gun away, but DeMarco could see that she was losing. The other woman was younger and stronger – and insane.

DeMarco burst through the trees. Only fifty more yards. Just hold her, Emma, just hold her. Just hold her five more seconds.

But then the camouflaged man rose up from the boards of the pier. Even beneath the face-paint DeMarco knew who he was – and he wasn’t surprised that the man hadn’t been killed. He wasn’t sure anything could kill this man.

DeMarco raised the Uzi in his hands and swung it toward the camouflaged man but he knew immediately that he was moving too slowly. He knew the man would beat him.

He knew the Asian woman would beat Emma.

And he was right.

1

From his office window Norton could see a Los Angeles class attack submarine moored at one of the piers. He was too far away to read the sub’s hull number but he thought it was the USS Asheville, SSN 758. He had worked on the Asheville last year, spent a lot of time drinking with some of the chiefs. He stared at the sub a minute longer, then realizing he was just stalling, turned the rod and closed the venetian blinds. It was unlikely that anyone would be able to see what he was doing through a fourth-floor window but he couldn’t take that chance.

Norton turned away from the window and peered over the partitions that enclosed his cubicle. It was lunchtime. There were four guys playing cribbage two cubicles over, and near the door, a secretary buffing her nails. There wasn’t anybody else in the office that he could see. He had sent Mulherin up to bullshit with the secretary. Mulherin was good at bullshit. If anyone started to come down the aisle in Norton’s direction, Mulherin would slow the person down and say something to warn him.

Having no further reason to delay, Norton pulled the chessboard out of his backpack. The board was thirteen inches square and an inch and a quarter thick, a little thicker than most chessboards. He pressed down on one side of the chessboard and a thin door popped open and a dozen chess pieces spilled out onto his desk. He then tipped the chessboard downward and a slim laptop computer slid out of the hollow space between the top and bottom of the chessboard.

The chessboard had been Carmody’s idea.

After he used the laptop, Norton would slide it back into the hidden compartment in the chessboard, put the chessboard on top of his file cabinet, and arrange some pieces on the board to make it look as if he was playing a game with Mulherin. What a joke that was: Mulherin playing chess.

Getting the laptop into the shipyard was the riskiest part of the whole operation. Norton only needed to use it a few minutes a day, and when he did, he’d do like he was doing now – use it at lunchtime with Mulherin standing guard. But he’d been worried about bringing it in. In fact he’d been sweating so hard he was surprised one of the jarheads at the gate hadn’t noticed.

Personal computers were prohibited inside the facility – only government-issue equipment was allowed – and if the marines guarding the gates had picked him that morning for one of their random security checks, and if by some chance they had discovered the laptop hidden in the chessboard, he’d have been screwed. Absolutely screwed.

But the likelihood of that happening had been small. If the terrorist threat level was high, the marines searched everything coming through the gates. Cars, knapsacks, purses, lunch boxes. Everything. But Norton had brought the laptop in when the threat level was normal and he had waited until there was a backup at the gate, a lot of people bitching that they needed to get to work, which tended to make the marines rush their searches. That had been Carmody’s idea too, going in when the line was long. Carmody was a smart bastard.

Norton realized at that moment that it wasn’t the marines that he’d been worried about. It was Carmody. Carmody scared the hell out of him.

2

DeMarco pulled his car into a parking space at the Goose Creek Golf Club in Leesburg, Virginia. He got out of the car, shut the door, and had walked twenty yards before he remembered that he hadn’t locked the car. He went back to the car, jammed down the knob to lock the door, then slammed the door harder than necessary. It bugged him, particularly this morning, that his Volvo was so damn old that it didn’t have one of those cool little beeper things to lock the doors.

On his way into work DeMarco had taken a detour to a used car dealership in Arlington. He’d passed by the place a couple of days ago and had seen a silver BMW Z3 sitting on the corner of the lot, posed like a work of art. The car had sixty-four thousand miles on the odometer, the leather seats were sun-faded, and DeMarco wasn’t sure he could afford it – but he wanted a convertible and he was sick to death of his Swedish box on wheels. He had just started to dicker with the salesman when Mahoney’s secretary called and told him that Mahoney wanted him down at Goose Creek before he teed off at nine.

He found Mahoney on the practice green, about to attempt an eight-foot putt. DeMarco watched in silence as Mahoney squared his big body over the ball, took in a breath, and stroked the ball. He hit it straight but too hard, and the ball rimmed the cup and shot off perpendicular to its original vector.

‘Son of a bitch,’ Mahoney muttered. ‘Greens’re fast today.’

Yeah right, DeMarco thought, like they waxed the grass just before you got here.

Mahoney was almost six feet tall and broad across the chest and back and butt. A substantial, hard gut gave balance to his body. He was in his sixties; his hair was white and full; his features all large and well formed; and his eyes were the watery, red-veined blue of a heavy drinker. He dropped another ball onto the grass.

‘The guy I want you to meet,’ Mahoney said, looking down at the ball, ‘will be here in a minute. He just went up to the clubhouse to get us some beer.’ Mahoney stroked the ball smoothly and this one dropped in. ‘Now that’s better,’ he said.

DeMarco knew Mahoney had been a fair athlete in high school – football, basketball, and baseball. He hadn’t competed in college because he went into the marines at seventeen, and when he was discharged, his right knee shredded by shrapnel, the only sports he played had involved beer steins and coeds. But even in his sixties he exhibited the hand-eye coordination of an athlete, and in spite of his size, moved lightly on his feet.

‘Here he comes now,’ Mahoney said, dropping a third ball onto the practice green, this one about ten feet from the cup.

Walking toward the green, carrying a small cooler designed to fit in the basket behind the seat of a golf cart, was a man about Mahoney’s age. He was five eight, stocky, and had a round head with a flat nose and short gray hair. As he got closer, DeMarco could see his eyes: bright blue and surrounded by a million crow’s feet from squinting into the sun. He had the eyes of a fighter pilot – which he’d once been. The man was the Secretary of the Navy, Frank Hathaway.

Hathaway, in turn, studied DeMarco, probably wondering what a hard-looking guy in a suit was doing standing on the practice green. DeMarco was five eleven and had broad shoulders, big arms, and a heavy chest. He was a good-looking man – full dark hair, a strong nose, a dimple in a big chin, and blue eyes – but he looked tough, tougher than he really was. A friend had once said that DeMarco looked like a guy you’d see on The Sopranos, a guy standing behind Tony while Tony hit someone with a bat. DeMarco hadn’t thought that funny.

Hathaway acknowledged DeMarco with a nod then said to Mahoney, ‘Al’s in the parking lot, talking on his cell phone. He’ll meet us on the first tee. Andy won’t be able to make it though. His secretary called and said there’s a fire drill in progress, two Saudis they caught trying to cross in from Canada, up near Buffalo.’ Hathaway put the cooler on the ground near the golf cart and added, ‘I wouldn’t have Andy’s job for all the tea in China.’

Andy, DeMarco knew, was General Andrew Banks, Secretary of Homeland Security.

Mahoney stroked the ball toward the hole. It dropped in. ‘Oh, yeah,’ Mahoney said. Gesturing with his putter at DeMarco, Mahoney said, ‘Frank, this is Joe DeMarco, the guy I was telling you about.’

Hathaway stuck out a small, hard hand and DeMarco shook it.

‘John says you do odd jobs for Congress,’ Hathaway said to DeMarco.

‘Yes, sir,’ DeMarco said.

John was John Fitzpatrick Mahoney, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, and DeMarco worked for him – although no organizational chart showed this to be the case. DeMarco had a small office in the subbasement of the Capitol and he performed for Mahoney those tasks the Speaker preferred not to dole out to his legitimate staff. DeMarco liked to think of himself as Mahoney’s personal troubleshooter – but odd-jobs guy was accurate enough.

‘There’s Al,’ Mahoney said, pointing his blunt chin at a golf cart driven by a man so tall that his head almost touched the canvas roof of the cart. DeMarco recognized him too: Albert Farris, a onetime forward for the Portland Trail Blazers and currently the senior senator from Oregon.

Just four guys playing a round of golf: a United States senator, the Speaker of the House, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and the Secretary of the Navy. The fact that it was a weekday morning could mean that something more was going on than a game of golf – or it could mean they all just felt like playing. You never knew.

‘Joe, do you golf?’ Hathaway said.

‘Uh, well …,’ DeMarco said.

‘Yeah, he plays,’ Mahoney said as he pulled a can of beer from the cooler and popped the top.

‘Well since Andy can’t make it, why don’t you play the front nine with us?’ Hathaway said. ‘You ride with me and I’ll tell you what I need while we’re playing.’

Meaning Hathaway didn’t want to delay his game talking to DeMarco about whatever this odd job was.

‘I’m not exactly dressed for it,’ DeMarco said, gesturing at his clothes. DeMarco was wearing a freshly dry-cleaned suit, a white shirt, and his favorite tie. ‘And I don’t have any clubs,’ he added, already knowing that the only excuse that would work was polio.

‘Aw, just take off your jacket,’ Mahoney said. ‘It’s fuckin’ golf, not football. And you can share Frank’s clubs. Let’s get goin’.’

Shit. And he was wearing brand-new loafers and they’d cost him a hundred and fifty bucks on sale.

‘Yeah, sounds great,’ DeMarco said. He removed his tie, folded it carefully, and put it in the inside pocket of his suit jacket. He then took off his suit jacket and placed it neatly in the little basket on the golf cart. Immediately after he did so, Mahoney put the beer cooler in the basket, squashing down his jacket.

At the first tee he was introduced to Senator Farris. Farris was six foot seven. He had no excess fat on his body and his arms still looked strong enough to rip a rebound out of an opponent’s hands. During his playing days he’d been the team enforcer, the guy they sent into the game to cripple the opposition’s star. Farris’s best shot had been an elbow to the ribs. He had short dark hair with a small bald spot on the top of his head, big ears, a beaky nose, and an expression on his face that seemed far too serious for someone about to play a friendly game of golf.

Hathaway told Farris that Banks wouldn’t be coming and that DeMarco would be riding with him. ‘That’s good,’ Farris said, ‘because I want Mahoney with me so I can keep an eye on him.’

‘Who’s up?’ Mahoney said, ignoring Farris’s comment.

‘I mean it, Mahoney,’ Farris said. ‘We’re playing by the rules today. No mulligans, no gimme putts, and no, I repeat no, free kicks outta the rough.’

‘Aw,’ Mahoney said, ‘you’re just sore ’cause I kicked your ass last time.’

‘You didn’t kick my ass!’ Farris yelled, then immediately looked around to make sure no one had heard him. Lowering his voice he said, ‘You won by one friggin’ stroke and I still think you moved your ball on the tenth hole.’

‘Pure bullshit,’ Mahoney said. ‘Now get your skinny butt up there and tee off.’

Jesus, DeMarco was thinking. And these guys actually run the damn country.

Farris’s drive found the left side of the fairway two hundred and forty yards from the tee. Mahoney’s tee shot was slightly longer, also ending up on the left edge of the fairway. Hathaway, who didn’t have the bulk of the other two men, hit his shot a respectable two ten and it landed square in the middle of the fairway, as if the Titleist was a wire-guided missile.

This wasn’t good.

DeMarco took a couple of practice swings with the driver he’d selected from Hathaway’s bag. The grip on the club didn’t feel right; it was too small for his hand, or something. ‘Uh, you know, I haven’t played in a couple of months,’ DeMarco said.

‘Yeah, yeah, come on, come on, take your shot,’ Mahoney said.

Mahoney was rushing the game and DeMarco suspected that this was a tactic to defeat Farris. Mahoney was never in a hurry. Ever. He did whatever he was doing at a pace that suited him. At his level, the next meeting didn’t start until he got there.

DeMarco swung. He made good contact. It felt good. It sounded good. And the ball sliced so far to the right that it ended up on the adjacent fairway.

‘Christ, Joe,’ Mahoney said. ‘You play that way, we’ll be here all day.’

As Hathaway drove the golf cart over to find DeMarco’s ball, he said, ‘It’s my nephew, my sister’s kid. He’s an engineer and he works at this navy shipyard. The thing is, he thinks some guys out there are committing fraud.’

‘What kind of fraud?’

‘I’m not too clear on that,’ Hathaway said. ‘Something to do with some kind of bogus study and the people doing it overcharging the government. Dave, my nephew, he tried to tell his bosses what was going on, but according to my sister, they blew him off. Which is why she called me, all pissed, demanding I do something. Where the hell’d your ball go, Joe? I know it’s in these trees somewhere.’

DeMarco topped the ball on his next shot and it went about twenty yards. It was Hathaway’s midget-sized irons, that’s what the problem was. He hit a third shot and he was finally on the fairway – the right fairway.

‘So anyway,’ Hathaway said, when they were back in the cart, ‘I’d just like you to check the kid’s story out and tell me if he’s really onto something. John says you’ve done stuff like this before and I wouldn’t think this would be all that hard.’

‘I’ve been involved with whistle-blowers before but, well …’

‘Yes, Joe?’

‘Well, why don’t you just call up somebody who works for you and ask them to look into it?’

Before Hathaway could respond there was a commotion across the fairway. Farris was yelling at Mahoney, pointing a long finger at something on the ground at Mahoney’s feet. Mahoney had probably claimed that his ball was on the concrete cart path and the rules allowed him to move it. Whether his ball had actually been on the cart path was most likely Farris’s issue.

‘Jesus,’ Hathaway said, shaking his head. ‘Those guys are so damn competitive they take the fun out of the game. And Mahoney, well, I think he does bend the rules a bit.’

No shit, DeMarco thought.

‘You were asking why I didn’t have somebody in my chain of command investigate this thing,’ Hathaway said. ‘The problem is, I’m the Secretary of the Navy, Joe. If I told my people to look into it, even if I told them to be discreet, in two hours there’d be twenty NCIS agents running around that shipyard questioning every swinging dick who works there. I don’t want to cause that kind of ruckus based on a phone call from my sister. And, well, to tell you the truth, there’s something else.’ Hathaway turned and looked away for a moment as if telling the truth bothered him. ‘You see, both my sister and her kid – it must be genetic – they both tend to be a little, ah, dramatic.’

Now this was starting to make sense. Hathaway didn’t trust his nephew and if he launched an official investigation based on a tip from a relative and the relative turned out to be wrong, Hathaway would be doubly embarrassed.

‘I see,’ DeMarco said.

‘So just check this out quietly. Okay?’ Hathaway said. ‘Go talk to my nephew and see what he says. Interview these guys he’s complaining about. If it turns out that there’s something to what he’s saying, I’ll have facts from an independent source – Congress – and then I’ll have it officially investigated.’

‘Okay,’ DeMarco said, not that he really had a choice.

On the sixth hole, Mahoney’s and DeMarco’s balls were both in the rough, approximately twenty yards apart. Farris was on the other side of the fairway looking for his ball and Hathaway, as usual, was in the center of the fairway.

Mahoney looked down at his ball – it was behind a small tree – then he looked over to where Farris was standing. ‘C’mere a minute,’ Mahoney said to DeMarco. DeMarco figured Mahoney wanted to know what he and Hathaway had been talking about.

As DeMarco approached Mahoney, he heard Farris yell, ‘Hey, Mahoney! What the hell are you doing over there, Mahoney?’

DeMarco looked over at Farris, and when he turned back toward Mahoney, Mahoney’s ball was no longer behind the tree. Mahoney had used DeMarco to block Farris’s view.

On the putting green, Farris said, ‘DeMarco, what did Mahoney do back there? Did he kick his ball out?’

‘No, sir,’ DeMarco said.

‘Don’t you dare lie to me, DeMarco. I’m a United States senator and that fat son of a bitch is only a congressman. Now tell me the truth, son. Did he move his ball?’

‘Come on, come on, let’s get goin’ here,’ Mahoney said. ‘And as usual, you’re away, Farris.’

Farris’s ball was about six feet from the cup. As Farris took his putter from his bag, Mahoney said to Hathaway, ‘Frank, I’ll betcha a beer Farris two-putts this hole. Just like when he choked on that free throw in the playoffs in Chicago.’

DeMarco saw the senator’s face flush crimson but he didn’t say anything. Farris took his position over his ball, adjusted his feet, took in a breath, and stroked the ball. He hit the ball on line, but too hard, and it hit the back of the cup, popped up, and came to rest two feet from the hole. Farris’s lips moved in a silent curse and he glared at Mahoney. Mahoney smiled and cleaned off the head of his putter with a grass-stained towel.

When they arrived at the clubhouse after the ninth hole, DeMarco took his rumpled suit jacket out of the golf cart basket. His shirt was soaked through with sweat, there were grass stains on the cuffs of his pants, and his new shoes were scuffed and filled with sand.

‘I’ll give you a call as soon as I know something, Mr Secretary,’ DeMarco said to Hathaway as he tried to smooth the wrinkles out of his jacket.

‘Yeah, sure,’ Hathaway said. He wasn’t listening; he was adding up his score. DeMarco could tell that Hathaway wasn’t really all that concerned about fraudulent activities taking place at some shipyard. What he had wanted was a way to get his sister off his back, and now, thanks to Mahoney, he had one: Joe DeMarco, hotshot investigator from Congress.

Mahoney, his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth, was also adding up his and Farris’s score on the front nine. ‘You shot a forty-one, Farris,’ Mahoney said. He paused a minute then said, ‘I got forty.’

‘You lemme see that damn card, Mahoney,’ Farris said.

3

Emma and Christine were sitting in white wicker chairs on Emma’s patio drinking mimosas and reading the morning papers. They were a portrait of domestic contentment. Beyond the patio was Emma’s English garden. DeMarco knew it was an English garden because Emma had told him so, and an English garden, as far as he could tell, was one in which the gardener planted a thousand long-stemmed flowers in no discernible pattern, all clustered together.

Emma was wearing white linen pants and a blouse that DeMarco thought of as Mexican – an off-the-shoulder number embroidered with small red-and-orange flowers. Christine, a thirty-something blonde who played cello for the National Symphony, wore a tank top and shorts. Christine had the most beautiful legs that DeMarco had ever seen, but since Christine was Emma’s lover he made a point of not staring at them. In fact, his eyeballs were getting cramps from the strain of not staring.

Emma was tall and slim. She had regal features and short hair that was either gray or blond, depending on the light. She was at least ten years older than DeMarco but in much better condition. She looked over the top of her newspaper as DeMarco approached. Her eyes were the color of the water in a Norwegian fjord – and usually just as warm. ‘Well, you’re a mess, Joseph,’ she said when she saw the condition of his clothes. ‘What on earth have you been doing?’

‘Golfing with the leaders of the free world,’ DeMarco said.

‘Yes, that makes sense,’ Emma said. ‘Would you like something to drink? Mimosa, perhaps?’

‘Orange juice would be great. No bubbly.’

DeMarco took a seat next to Emma at the patio table, a seat where Emma blocked his view of Christine’s legs. He thought this seating arrangement most prudent. He and Christine exchanged how-are-yous, then Christine went back to reading her paper, ignoring DeMarco as she usually did. Maybe if he played an oboe she’d find him more interesting.

‘What do you know about the navy, Emma?’ DeMarco asked.

‘A lot, most of which I’d just as soon forget,’ Emma said.

DeMarco had known this before he asked the question. Although she never discussed it, Emma had worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency and she had worked at a level where the word ‘classified’ didn’t come close to defining the degree of secrecy that had applied to her activities. She claimed to have retired from the agency a few years ago, but DeMarco wasn’t certain that this was really the case. Emma was the most enigmatic person he’d ever encountered – and she delighted in being so.

‘How ’bout navy shipyards?’ DeMarco asked.

‘A little,’ Emma said. ‘Now would you like to tell me why you’re asking silly questions?’

DeMarco told her about Frank Hathaway’s problem and asked her a few questions about shipyards and the people who worked in them.

‘I didn’t know the navy had its own shipyards,’ DeMarco said.

‘The navy operates four major shipyards in this country,’ Emma said in her most pedantic tone. ‘Most of the employees are civil service and their primary function is to overhaul and refuel nuclear-powered warships.’

‘Well I’ll be damned,’ DeMarco said.

‘Most assuredly,’ Emma muttered and poured another mimosa for herself and Christine. These girls were going to have a pretty good buzz on by lunchtime, DeMarco was thinking.

‘Why’s Mahoney loaning you to Hathaway for this thing anyway?’ Emma asked as she handed Christine a glass.

‘I dunno,’ DeMarco said. ‘He plays golf with the guy; maybe they’re pals. But more than likely he wants something out of the navy for his district and figures doing Hathaway a favor can’t hurt. With Mahoney, you never know. A man who drinks beer at nine in the morning is hard to predict.’

‘Humph,’ Emma said, the sound reflecting her opinion of Mahoney. ‘What shipyard does this engineer work at, by the way? The one in Norfolk?’

‘No,’ DeMarco said. ‘One out in someplace called Bremerton, near Seattle.’

When DeMarco said ‘Seattle,’ Christine’s pretty blond head popped up from behind the newspaper she’d been reading. ‘Seattle,’ she said to Emma. There was a twinkle in her eyes and DeMarco could imagine what she had looked like at the age of twelve, tormenting her younger brother.

Emma smiled at her lover then said to DeMarco, ‘Joe, considering my vast knowledge of all things military and your limited knowledge of all things in general, I believe I should go to Bremerton with you.’

DeMarco met Emma a few years ago by saving her life. Luck and timing had more to do with the outcome of the event than any heroics on DeMarco’s part, but since that day she occasionally helped DeMarco with his assignments. She would provide advice, and if needed, access to various illicit experts – hackers, electronic eavesdroppers, and, once, a safe-cracker – all people connected in some way to the shadow world of the DIA. On rare occasions she’d personally assist him, but DeMarco usually had to grovel a bit before she’d help – and yet here she was volunteering.

‘What’s going on?’ DeMarco said.

‘It just so happens that Christine’s symphony is playing in Seattle for a couple of days, starting the day after tomorrow,’ Emma said, patting one of Christine’s perfect thighs.

‘Ah,’ DeMarco said, understanding immediately. If Emma helped DeMarco, the Speaker’s budget would pick up the tab for her trip to Seattle. Emma was fairly wealthy but she was also a bit of a cheapskate. Maybe that’s why she was wealthy.

4

Carmody was at the rendezvous point at exactly eight p.m. This time the woman had picked a little-used lakeside picnic area fifteen miles from Bremerton. She picked a different place every time they met.

He knew he’d have to wait at least twenty minutes, maybe longer. She was already here, somewhere, but she’d be watching to make sure Carmody hadn’t been followed. Half an hour later he saw her. She materialized out of a small stand of trees on his right-hand side and began to walk toward him. She was dressed in black – black jeans, a long-sleeved black T-shirt, black Nikes – and carried a shoulder bag. She was tall and lithe and she moved quickly but gracefully. When she entered his car, she didn’t greet Carmody. She unzipped the shoulder bag, took out a laptop computer, and turned it on.

The woman’s hair was dark, cut short and spiky, the style as edgy as her personality. Carmody figured she was about forty, though it was hard to be certain. She didn’t have a single wrinkle on her face and the reason for this, Carmody believed, was because she was the most unemotional person he had ever encountered. Her face never changed expression. He had never, ever seen her smile.

The laptop ready, she finally spoke to Carmody. ‘Give them to me,’ she said.

Carmody reached beneath the driver’s seat and took out a flat plastic case holding an unlabeled compact disc. He handed it to her.

‘Just one?’ she said.

‘Yeah.’

She started to say something but checked herself. She put the CD into the laptop’s drive. When the document opened, she scrolled down a few pages, stopped and read the words on the screen, then scrolled down a few more pages. She did this for about ten minutes, never speaking. She didn’t examine the entire document, that would have taken too long, but she looked at enough of it to satisfy herself. She finally shut down the laptop and returned it to her shoulder bag.

‘You have to do better than this, Carmody,’ she said. ‘In a month, you’ve only delivered seven items.’

‘We have to be careful,’ Carmody said. ‘And sometimes the material you want just isn’t available, somebody else is using it, so we have to wait.’

The woman’s eyes locked on to Carmody’s. Her eyes were black and they were the coldest, most lifeless eyes that Carmody had ever seen in either a man or a woman, eyes completely devoid of warmth and humor and humanity. Carmody doubted that she had been born with eyes like that; something in her life had caused them to be that way.

‘Carmody, do you understand what’s at stake here?’ she said.

That wasn’t really a question – it was a threat.

‘Yeah, I understand,’ Carmody said. His big hands were gripping the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles were white. And she noticed.

Carmody watched as she walked across the grass and disappeared once again into the trees, back into the night she had come from.

5

Emma caught her flight to Seattle out of Dulles International Airport. She chose this airport not only so she could fly with Christine and the orchestra but also because from Dulles you could get a nonstop flight to Seattle. DeMarco didn’t like flying out of Dulles because the airport was thirty miles from his house. Reagan National, on the other hand, was just a ten-minute cab ride away. He would have to change planes in Chicago and his flight would take an hour longer than Emma’s, but if you added up total travel time, door-to-door travel time, his arithmetic said he was making the wiser choice.

He didn’t.

His flight boarded right on schedule at nine a.m. then sat on the runway for two hours awaiting the installation of some malfunctioning part. DeMarco didn’t know anything about airplanes but when the pilot explained the purpose of the part, it didn’t sound terribly significant – like it was the redundant backup gizmo to the backup gizmo, the aeronautical equivalent of the seat belt indicator in your car not working.

Naturally, since his flight left Washington two hours behind schedule, he missed his connecting flight in Chicago and arrived in Seattle at three a.m. instead of five that evening as originally planned. He then had to drive another hour to reach Bremerton. Consequently he was tired and not in the best of moods the next day as he and Emma waited for Dave Whitfield, Frank Hathaway’s nephew.

Whitfield had agreed to meet them in the bar of the motel where DeMarco was staying, a place that overlooked a quiet, tree-lined inlet called Oyster Bay. Emma was staying in a much more expensive establishment in Seattle with Christine. While they waited for Whitfield, Emma informed DeMarco that her trip from the East Coast had been delightful: an upgrade to first class, a good movie, and nothing but tailwinds all the way. Emma annoyed him.

Dave Whitfield entered the bar as Emma was talking. Frank Hathaway had referred to his nephew as a ‘kid’ but Whitfield appeared to be in his late thirties, a kid only from Hathaway’s perspective. He was a tall, loose-jointed man; his hair was wispy blond and already fleeing his head; and he wore wire-rim glasses with square frames over intense brown eyes.

Whitfield was impressed with DeMarco’s congressional identification. He was impressed – but he wasn’t happy. ‘Man, I can’t believe you’re talking to me,’ he said. ‘I mean I didn’t want this to happen. I just thought my uncle would, you know, call a few people.’

‘Your uncle is the Secretary of the Navy,’ DeMarco said.

‘Yeah, I know, but sheesh. I could get in trouble for this. You guys should be talking to shipyard management, not me.’

‘Relax, Dave,’ Emma said. ‘We just want a little background information from you so that when we do talk to management we’ll have something specific to ask. We won’t even mention your name.’ Before Whitfield could say anything else, Emma said, ‘Would you like a beer?’

‘Yeah, sure, I guess,’ Whitfield said, surprised that a government investigator would offer him a drink.

After Whitfield had gotten his beer, Emma eased him along by saying, ‘Why don’t you tell us what you do. Let’s start there.’

‘I’m an instructor,’ Whitfield said. ‘I—’

‘Your uncle said you were an engineer,’ DeMarco said.

‘I am. I’m a nuclear engineer. And I’m an instructor. Basically what I do is teach the new engineers how the reactor plants in the ships work.’

‘That’s good,’ Emma said. ‘So now why don’t you tell us about these concerns you have.’ Emma kept speaking to Whitfield in this low, soothing voice, as if he was some skittish, balding horse. DeMarco found her talking this way unnatural; Emma rarely tried to soothe.

‘Okay,’ Whitfield said, ‘because somebody needs to look into this thing. Nobody at the shipyard believes me.’

‘So what’s the problem?’ DeMarco said impatiently.

‘It’s these two guys I used to work with. They worked at the shipyard about twenty-five years and then took an early out – meaning they retired when they were fifty-two or fifty-three instead of fifty-five. People don’t normally do that because they lose a percentage of their retirement pay. Anyway, as soon as they retired, they were hired by this company to do a study on how we train our engineers. For some jobs, the training takes about two years.’

‘Two years!’ DeMarco said.

‘We’re talking about reactor plants,’ Whitfield said, glaring at DeMarco. ‘We don’t let some kid right out of college run around a nuclear submarine unless he knows what he’s doing. Anyway, the company these guys went to work for told the navy – I don’t know who – that they could figure out a way to complete the training in half the time for half the cost. Sounds like total bullshit to me, but somebody bought their story.’

In other words, DeMarco was thinking, this company had been hired to figure out a way to do Whitfield’s job better than he was doing it, meaning Whitfield was probably more than a little biased.

‘But the thing is,’ Whitfield said, ‘these two guys are a couple of losers.’

‘Are you saying they’re not qualified to do this study, and you think this is fraudulent?’ Emma said.

‘No,’ Whitfield said. ‘They’re qualified, I guess. They’re ex-navy, they were reactor operators on subs, and like I said they worked in the shipyard for more than twenty years. So on paper, they’re qualified. But they’re just … I don’t know. Incompetent. Before they retired they were always in trouble for something, not paying attention to details, doing sloppy work, not showing up on time. Like I said, losers. It’s hard to believe somebody would hire them.’

‘I’m confused, Dave,’ Emma said. ‘What exactly is it that you think they’re doing that’s illegal.’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘What!’ DeMarco said.

‘Go on, Dave,’ Emma said, giving DeMarco a settle-down look.

‘You see,’ Whitfield said, ‘all of a sudden these guys have got gobs of money. One of them just bought a new fishing boat and the other guy, I heard him talking about getting a home-entertainment system that’s worth ten grand. And one day I asked one of them how much he was getting paid working for this company. He beats around the bush for a while, but he finally tells me he’s getting about twice what he used to make working for the government.’

‘So that’s it?’ DeMarco said. ‘You don’t think these two guys oughta be doing this study and they’re making more money than you.’

‘No, damn it, that’s not what I’m saying,’ Whitfield snapped. ‘I’m saying there’s something funny going on here. These guys just shouldn’t be getting all this money for what they’re doing. Something’s wrong. And that’s not all.’

‘Yeah?’ DeMarco said. ‘What else is there?’

‘They don’t act like they’re reviewing our training program. They ought to be gathering data on class sizes and training costs and reviewing curriculums, that kinda thing. But they don’t seem to be doing that. They just seem to sit around a lot, bullshitting, and looking at the reactor plant manuals.’

‘What are those?’ DeMarco said.

‘They’re manuals that tell you how navy reactor plants work. You understand?’

By now DeMarco thought he had a pretty good sense of Whitfield. He was the type who was always outraged by something; he probably called up the mayor’s office and wrote passionate letters to the editor every time something got his goat.

‘So,’ DeMarco said, ‘let me see if I got all this straight. You got a couple of guys you don’t think are very good, who have come into some money recently that you can’t explain, and they’re going about this study all wrong. Is that it?’

‘Yeah,’ Whitfield said. ‘Something stinks.’

‘Can you believe that guy?’ DeMarco said to Emma after Whitfield had left. ‘No wonder Hathaway didn’t want NCIS talking to him. I mean, did you hear one damn thing that sounded like fraud to you? Anything?’

‘Take it easy, Joe,’ Emma said. ‘You’re in a beautiful part of the country. Take a walk. Go for a drive. Tomorrow we’ll meet these two people, talk to the company they work for, and get their side of the story. And we’ll talk to somebody in shipyard management who’s more objective than Whitfield.’

Christine was going to be in Seattle for another day with the symphony and DeMarco could tell that Emma – the new, laid-back, take-it-easy Emma – had decided that torturing consultants and shipyard managers would be more fun than sitting around doing nothing.

Emma rose from her chair and said, ‘I have to get going. I need to catch the next ferry to Seattle to meet Christine in time for dinner.’

‘And after we question these guys tomorrow and don’t find anything illegal going on, then what?’ DeMarco said.

‘Then you tell Hathaway to tell his sister to tell her son to quit being such a damn crybaby.’

After Emma left, DeMarco sat sipping his beer, thinking a little more about Whitfield. He still thought the guy was a whiny flake but Emma was right: he’d worry about Whitfield tomorrow. He looked around the bar. Other than the bartender, he was the only one there. On the television set, a baseball game was playing: the Seattle Mariners versus the Toronto Blue Jays, both teams at the bottom of their respective divisions. Professional bowling was more exciting.

He walked to a supermarket two blocks from the motel, bought half a dozen car magazines, and returned to the motel bar. He’d research the auto market, become an informed consumer. He’d probably still get screwed if he bought the Beemer convertible but he could console himself with the thought that he’d done his homework. He ordered another beer – it must have been his fourth and he was starting to feel like a bloated sumo wrestler – and began to read his magazines.

He concluded that the smart thing to do – the practical thing – would be to buy a Honda or a Toyota. Last year’s model. These cars were rated top of the line in terms of quality and gas mileage and resale value, and if he could find last year’s model with less than thirty thousand miles on it, he’d be getting a practically brand-new car and shave four or five thousand off the price of a really brand-new car. Yeah, that made sense. That would be smart.

The problem was he couldn’t tell the difference between a Honda and a Toyota. They looked like they’d been designed by a computer based solely on data from wind-tunnel tests. They were about as sexy as an old lady’s bloomers. Beemer Z3. Jaguar. Mercedes coupe. Porsche. Those cars had va-voom. They had sex appeal. They were created by artists, not some pencil-necked engineer trying to squeeze one more mile per gallon out of a friggin’ four-cylinder engine.

‘Well, hello there,’ a very sultry voice said.

Thank you, Jesus, DeMarco thought, and looked up from his magazine. The lady who had spoken looked hard. The expression ‘forty miles of bad road’ came immediately to mind. She had crammed a size fourteen body into a size eight dress, wore a blond wig that didn’t match the dark mustache over her upper lip, and her makeup looked as if it had been applied with a trowel.

DeMarco mumbled something inarticulate, scooped up his magazines, and headed back to his room. Why did he always have such bad luck with women? Why couldn’t the old hooker have been a Swedish stewardess or foxy young businesswoman looking for some fun? Why didn’t those sorts of fantasies ever come true for him?

Because he drove a Volvo, that’s why.

6

The offices of Carmody and Associates were in Bremerton on the corner of Pacific and Burwell, on the ground floor of a building that housed three other small enterprises: an independent insurance agent, a tax consultant, and a beauty shop with no customers. Emma knocked once on the door, then immediately opened it without waiting for an answer. Two men – sitting at a card table, drinking beer and playing gin – looked up in surprise.

Both men were in their early fifties, and both wore blue jeans and short-sleeved shirts. Pretty casual attire for consultants, DeMarco thought. One of the men was tall, had gray-brown hair in need of a trim, a scraggly mustache, skinny arms, skinny legs, and a small potbelly. The other man was short, almost bald, and had a much larger potbelly. The bald guy also had an anchor tattoo on his right forearm.

Maybe it was the tattoo, but DeMarco had the immediate impression that if these two had been born two hundred years earlier they would have been pirates.

‘You need something?’ the tall one said.

‘Yes,’ Emma said. ‘We’re doing a review for Congress. We called earlier to set up an appointment but no one returned our phone call. I guess you were just too busy,’ she said, looking down at the card table.

The tall man looked over at the short man. The short man made eye contact with Emma, a touch of insolence in his eyes, then turned his head toward a partially open door behind him and yelled, ‘Hey, boss!’

The man who came through the door was big and good-looking: six three, broad shouldered, maybe two hundred and twenty pounds. He wore gray slacks and a blue polo shirt, and his chest and biceps strained against the material of the shirt. The guy worked out. His dark hair was cut short and he had a small scar on his chin. He struck DeMarco as being tough and competent, but more like a cop or a soldier than someone you’d hire to study a navy training program.

‘It’s that lady who called this morning,’ the bald man said.

The big guy was silent for a moment as he sized up DeMarco and Emma, then he relaxed and smiled. He had an engaging smile. ‘I’m Phil Carmody,’ he said, and shook hands with them. ‘I’m in charge of this little zoo. That’s Bill Norton,’ he said pointing at the short, bald guy. ‘And that’s Ned Mulherin.’ Mulherin nodded like a friendly puppy; Norton glared.

Carmody didn’t invite DeMarco and Emma into his office, which DeMarco found odd. Instead he told Norton to grab a couple of chairs from the office and directed Mulherin to clear the cards and bottles off the card table. DeMarco noticed the way he spoke to his employees, giving curt orders, not bothering to say ‘please’ or ‘thank you,’ having no doubt he’d be obeyed immediately. DeMarco had the impression that if Carmody had told his two guys to eat their playing cards, they’d start chewing.

‘And in case you’re wondering,’ Carmody said as Mulherin removed the beer bottles from the table, ‘we only bill the government for the hours we work, and these two were not on the clock.’

‘Right,’ Emma said, not bothering to hide her disbelief. DeMarco expected Carmody to protest but he didn’t. He just shrugged, obviously not overly concerned about her perception of his billing practices.

When the extra chairs were in place, Carmody said, ‘You want anything to drink? Coke? Bottled water? Coffee?’

‘No,’ Emma said.

‘Okay, then,’ Carmody said. ‘So how ’bout showing me some ID.’

DeMarco passed Carmody his congressional identification. Emma stared into Carmody’s eyes for a moment, then pulled a library card from her wallet and held it up for Carmody to see. She didn’t hand him the card. Emma was screwing with Carmody and DeMarco waited for his reaction, but all Carmody did was smile, his lips twitching in amusement. Unlike most people, Carmody wasn’t intimidated by Emma; he seemed tickled by her attitude.

‘So what can I do for you?’ Carmody said.

Before DeMarco could say anything, Emma responded to Carmody’s question. Emma had a tendency to assume command whenever she and DeMarco worked together. ‘A congressman,’ Emma said, ‘received a complaint from one of his constituents regarding how much you’re charging the navy for the work you’re doing.’

‘You flew out here because of one complaint?’ Carmody said. He seemed to find that both astounding and amusing.

Emma ignored the question. ‘We’d like to understand what you’re doing, how much you’re billing, how long it will take, that sort of thing.’

‘That fuckin’ Whitfield,’ Mulherin muttered.

‘What did you say?’ Carmody said sharply to Mulherin.

‘Oh, there’s this guy I used to work with and he keeps bitching about how much I’m making. I’ll betcha he caused this. I mean, I explained to him—’

‘That’s enough,’ Carmody said. DeMarco knew that after they left Carmody was going to have a pointed discussion with Mr Mulherin. To DeMarco and Emma, Carmody said, ‘As you probably already know, we’re doing a review to streamline a shipyard training program. The current program is expensive and I have, we have, some ideas for how to improve it. Get the book, Norton.’

Norton dashed into Carmody’s office and returned with a three-ring binder. Carmody spent the next fifteen minutes going over the existing training program, what it cost, the curriculum, class sizes, class hours, that sort of thing. DeMarco didn’t understand everything Carmody said but based on the questions she asked, Emma seemed to. The one thing DeMarco did understand was that as opposed to what Dave Whitfield had led them to believe, Carmody seemed to have acquired exactly the sort of information you’d expect him to have to do his review, and he seemed to know what he was talking about.

‘We understand that your guys here,’ DeMarco said, gesturing toward Mulherin and Norton, ‘are making a lot more money than they made when they worked in the shipyard.’

Carmody shrugged. ‘So what?’ he said. Before DeMarco could respond, he said, ‘Look, I submitted a bid to get this job, the navy accepted my bid, and I’m paying these guys the going rate. It’s not my problem that some yardbird thinks they should be paid less.’

‘Who awarded you the contract?’ Emma asked.

Carmody hesitated, but just for a second. ‘NAVSEA,’ he said.

‘Who?’ DeMarco said.

‘It’s not a person,’ Emma said. ‘NAVSEA is the Naval Sea Systems Command. A navy headquarters outfit back in D.C.’

‘Right,’ Carmody said. ‘You people could have saved yourself the trip out here. Somebody at NAVSEA could have given you the same information I just did.’

DeMarco wished he had known that before he flew out to Bremerton.

‘But who specifically at NAVSEA?’ Emma said. ‘Who’s the individual that awarded you the contract?’

‘I don’t know,’ Carmody said. ‘Whoever handles this sort of thing back in Washington, I guess.’

Carmody’s response had been casual but DeMarco had been looking at his arms when he spoke. Carmody was holding a coffee cup in both hands and when he answered the last question, he squeezed the cup hard enough that the muscles in his forearms jumped. DeMarco would hate to have to arm wrestle this guy.

Emma stared at Carmody for a moment but before she could say anything else, Carmody stood up. ‘Hey, it’s been great talking to you but I have a meeting I have to get to. All I can tell you is that the review we’re doing is needed, our billing rates are not out of line, and I was low bidder on the job. If you have any more questions you need to talk to the people back in D.C. who awarded me the contract.’

As they walked back toward Emma’s rental car, she said, ‘What do you think?’

DeMarco shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Norton and Mulherin didn’t exactly strike me as rocket scientists but the study sounds legit, and as for Carmody, he seems pretty sharp.’

‘Yes, he does,’ Emma said. She paused before she added, ‘He reminds me of mercenaries I’ve known.’

7

Carmody watched through the window as DeMarco and Emma walked away, then turned and stared at Mulherin. Mulherin looked like a dog waiting to be kicked, and Carmody definitely felt like kicking him. Goddamnit, what an idiot. But he’d deal with Mulherin later.

He went into his office and closed the door and took a seat at his desk. He put his right hand on the phone but he didn’t pick it up. He wasn’t worried about the questions they had asked. There was nothing wrong with his contract or what he was charging the government or anything else. No, it wasn’t the questions that worried him – it was the people asking the questions.

First, if somebody had really written their congressman to complain about his contract, the congressman would have handed off the complaint to the GAO or the Naval Inspector General. He wouldn’t have sent congressional staffers out here to deal with it.

And then there was DeMarco. There was something about him, a toughness to him, that didn’t match his mission. Carmody had been exposed to House staff people in the past and they were usually eager young kids, not some hard case like DeMarco. DeMarco’s ID had looked legit so he might be some kind of political operator – but he sure as hell wasn’t a guy you sent out to check on a nickel-and-dime navy contract.

But the woman was the real problem. Carmody had met her once before, ten or twelve years ago. She was someone you didn’t forget. He didn’t remember her name though – and that little game she’d played with the library card had kept him from finding it out – but he knew what she was even if he didn’t know who she was. Fortunately, she hadn’t recognized him, which wasn’t surprising considering the conditions under which they’d met. But whether she recognized him or not, the fact that she was here could mean real trouble.

His hand was still resting on the phone. He knew he should make the call. The problem was that he could never predict how she was going to react. Or overreact. He finally took his hand off the phone. He’d wait. If they came back again and if they asked different questions, then he’d call her.

Goddamnit. He felt like killing Mulherin.

8

DeMarco and Emma were having lunch, Emma picking at a tuna salad while DeMarco consumed a cheeseburger the size of a catcher’s mitt.

The navy dominated the city of Bremerton and the county in which it was located. In addition to the shipyard in Bremerton, which employed about ten thousand people, there was the Naval Submarine Base located in Bangor, Washington, and the Undersea Warfare Center in Keyport, Washington. The place where they were dining reflected the community’s support – and financial dependence – on the navy. The walls were covered with photographs of submarines bursting from the water and fighters taking off from the decks of aircraft carriers. Two tables away from Emma and DeMarco sat a gentleman who wore a dark blue baseball cap emblazoned with the words U.S. NAVY RETIRED – a totally redundant statement as the man looked old enough to have sailed with John Paul Jones.

‘Why would Carmody lie about not knowing the person who had awarded his contract?’ DeMarco said.

‘So you thought so too,’ Emma said.

‘Yeah. But why’s he lying?’

‘I’m not sure.’

They sat there chewing in silence for a minute before DeMarco said, ‘Maybe he wasn’t really the low bidder and he gave a kickback to the guy who awarded him the contract. So maybe Whitfield’s right.’

‘I don’t know,’ Emma said. ‘I suppose that’s possible, but the bidding process is usually pretty transparent.’

‘Or maybe Carmody’s just being a prick,’ DeMarco said. ‘Since he didn’t give us a name, he knows that’s going to cause us to waste time tracking down the contract guy, and that’ll be time we don’t spend looking at him.’

‘Yeah, but he could be doing that,’ Emma said, ‘even if everything’s on the up-and-up, just to get us out of his hair.’ Emma pushed aside her salad, only half of it gone. No wonder the woman never gained an ounce. ‘At any rate,’ she said, ‘we – meaning you – need to find out who awarded Carmody’s contract. I’d suggest you start by—’

Emma was interrupted by the ringing of DeMarco’s cell phone.

‘Hello,’ DeMarco said.

‘Hey,’ Mahoney said, sounding abnormally cheerful. ‘I’m flyin’ out there. In fact I’m on the plane right now.’

Thanks to space-age technology, Mahoney could now jerk DeMarco’s chain from thirty thousand feet.

‘Why are you coming here?’ DeMarco said.

‘Ah, there’s a guy out there we’re runnin’ against the Republican in the fourth district. The Republican’s been there forever so Norm and I are gonna give a couple speeches tonight, pry open some wallets, give our guy a boost. But after that …’

‘Norm?’ DeMarco said.

‘Norm Dicks, Joe. The congressman from the Sixth. You’re right there in his backyard.’

DeMarco knew Norm Dicks; he liked the guy. Unlike Mahoney, he was a straight shooter.

‘Anyway,’ Mahoney was saying, ‘tonight I’ll make a speech, but in the morning, I’m gonna go catch a salmon.’

‘What?’

‘There’s a guy out there, a contributor, and he’s gonna take me out on his boat. We’ll do a little business …’

But not much.

‘… and then I’ll catch me a great big fish. He said he hooked into a fifty-pound king last week.’

‘Really,’ DeMarco said.

‘Yeah,’ Mahoney said. ‘So you need to pick me up tomorrow morning at my hotel. Get the details from Mavis. A fifty-pound king, Joe, can you believe it!’ Mahoney hung up.

‘Great,’ DeMarco muttered as he clipped his cell phone back onto his belt.

‘What?’ Emma said.

‘That was Mahoney. He’s coming out here to go fishing and I have to play chauffeur tomorrow.’

Emma shrugged, the gesture meaning: that’s what you get for working for Mahoney.

‘Maybe, uh, you could start looking for this contract guy while I’m taking care of Mahoney.’

Emma arched an eyebrow. This time the silent message was that she was more likely to marry Burt Reynolds.

‘I think tomorrow, while you’re drivin’ Mr Daisy,’ Emma said, ‘Christine and I will pay a visit to a spa near Snoqualmie Falls. They do seaweed facials and give hot rock massages. This thing with Dave Whitfield can definitely wait a day.’

DeMarco didn’t know what a hot rock massage was, but he had an immediate, vivid image of Christine lying bare-assed on a massage table, her legs and butt glistening with baby oil.

9

DeMarco was a walking corpse.

Mahoney’s secretary had told him to pick up Mahoney at six a.m. at the Sheraton in downtown Seattle, which meant that DeMarco had to leave Bremerton at four thirty to get there on time. When DeMarco said that he couldn’t believe that the Speaker would be up at that hour, Mavis had responded: ‘I know. He just works too hard sometimes.’ Mahoney had everybody fooled.

But at six on the nose, Mahoney walked into the lobby with a big grin on his Irish face. He looked like a husky ten-year-old going on his first fishing trip. He wore Bermuda shorts that reached his dimpled knees, a sun-faded polo shirt stretched tight over his gut, and scuffed tennis shoes with baggy white socks. On his big head sat a Boston Red Sox baseball cap and he was carrying a nylon bag that DeMarco assumed contained whatever else he needed for the trip: sunblock, a jacket – and a fifth of bourbon in case they didn’t have his brand on board.

The boat taking Mahoney fishing was moored at a marina on Shilshoe Bay. It was sixty feet long and had more antennae on the bridge than a navy destroyer. The owner of the boat was a very rich guy, Alex somebody, who had invented cell phones or cell-phone towers or maybe it was cell-phone cases. DeMarco hadn’t been listening when Mahoney told him. In addition to the rich guy there was a man who skippered the boat and a deckhand whose only function was to cater to Mahoney’s every need.

DeMarco turned to leave after he had handed Mahoney’s bag up to the deckhand, but Mahoney said, ‘Where you going? You’re coming too. You need to tell me what you found out on this thing with Hathaway’s nephew.’

Not again, DeMarco thought. This was just like the golf game. He wasn’t wearing a suit today – he was dressed casually in a short-sleeved shirt, khaki pants, and Top-Siders – but they weren’t clothes he wanted to get fish guts all over. Plus he didn’t have a hat to keep the sun off his head or a windbreaker in case it got chilly out on the water. He told Mahoney this.

‘Ah, don’t worry about it. They probably got stuff here on the boat you can use. Don’t you, Alex?’ Mahoney said to the rich guy.

‘Oh, I’m sure we do,’ Alex said.

DeMarco could tell that Alex didn’t have a clue.

It took an hour to transit from the marina to the area where the fish supposedly were. DeMarco was enjoying the ride, looking at the Olympic Mountains to the west, when his cell phone rang.

‘Mr DeMarco, it’s Dave Whit …’

The cell-phone signal was weak and DeMarco couldn’t hear half of what Whitfield was saying.

‘What?’ DeMarco shouted.

‘It’s Dave Whit … those two guys … I was …’

‘Dave, I can’t hear you,’ DeMarco yelled into his phone.

‘I said, I think …’

‘Dave! I can’t hear you!’ DeMarco shouted.

Then DeMarco could hear nothing but dead air and he hung up.

The deckhand said to DeMarco, ‘If you need to talk to that guy you can go up to the bridge and use one of Alex’s phones. He’s got stuff up there that can reach the moon.’

‘Nah, that’s okay,’ DeMarco said. ‘I’ll just call him after we get back to the marina.’ He doubted if Whitfield had anything new to tell him, and at any rate, there wasn’t much he could do while stuck on a boat in the middle of Puget Sound.

DeMarco would spend a lot of time in the days to come regretting that decision.

The deckhand had set up three poles in three downriggers and the downriggers were set for three different depths to triple Mahoney’s chances of catching a salmon.

‘Now if one of them hits,’ the deckhand said to Mahoney, ‘you gotta set the hook. We’re using barbless hooks, and if you don’t set it right, the hook’s gonna come right outta the fish’s mouth.’ He showed Mahoney the motion he was looking for.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Mahoney said. ‘I’ve fished before. And why are we usin’ barbless hooks, anyway?’

‘It’s the law,’ the deckhand said.

‘Well, shit, who’s gonna know?’ Mahoney said.

After half an hour of trolling, Mahoney said, ‘Where the hell are the damn salmon? I thought you said there were fish out here, Alex.’

Alex, the rich guy, didn’t hear him; he was on a phone, making more money.

‘We’ll get one, sir, don’t worry,’ the deckhand said. ‘The fish-finder’s showing all kinds of fish down there. We just gotta figure out what they’re hittin’ on.’ Before Mahoney could complain further, the deckhand said, ‘Would you like another beer?’

As Mahoney waited impatiently to catch a fish, DeMarco briefed him on what he and Emma had learned in Bremerton. Mahoney’s only response had been a disinterested shrug and the comment: ‘The whole thing sounds pretty chickenshit to me.’

Five minutes later a salmon hit and the dialogue between Mahoney and the deckhand went something like this:

Mahoney: ‘Holy shit! I got the bastard.’

Deckhand: ‘Keep your tip up. Keep the tip up!’

Mahoney: ‘Son of a bitch! It’s a big one. Son of a bitch!’

Deckhand: ‘Loosen your drag. Loosen your drag! You’re gonna lose him.’

Mahoney: ‘Aw, fuck! Did I lose him? Did I lose him?’

Deckhand: ‘No, he’s running toward us. Reel, reel! Reel faster!’

Mahoney fought the fish for twenty minutes. His face turned an unhealthy shade of purple as he reeled, and DeMarco could see the tendons popping out on his big freckled forearms. He finally got the fish up to the side of the boat. It was big and still had a lot of fight left in it. Mahoney was so excited that he was cursing incoherently at this point, and just as the deckhand was netting the fish, he gave a jerk on the line – and the fish came off the hook. Fortunately, the deckhand was good and already had the net under the fish. As the hook popped out of the salmon’s mouth, the deckhand swung the net upward, enveloping the fish in nylon mesh. The salmon hit the deck of the boat with a wet flop and thrashed around until the deckhand smacked it several times with a billy club – splattering blood all over DeMarco’s khaki pants.

A really ugly ending to the life of a beautiful fish, DeMarco thought.

‘I got him!’ Mahoney screamed, two arms in the air like he’d just scored a touchdown.

The deckhand looked over at Mahoney like he wanted to kill him. He had almost gone overboard netting the fish, and the way he was holding his back it looked as if he’d strained something getting the salmon into the boat.

While Mahoney celebrated his victory with his fifth beer of the day – it was ten a.m. – DeMarco watched the deckhand weigh the fish. The scale read forty-two pounds.

‘Fifty-two pounds!’ the deckhand called out to Mahoney and winked at DeMarco.

Alex asked Mahoney if he’d like to catch another one.

‘Nah,’ Mahoney said. ‘One’s enough.’

Now this surprised DeMarco. Mahoney, he always figured, came from the same stock as those who had almost made the buffalo extinct.

‘What about you, Mr DeMarco?’ Alex said. ‘Would you like to catch one?’ DeMarco figured Alex wasn’t being nice, he just wanted to spend more time bending Mahoney’s ear. And since DeMarco’s pants were already a mess, why not?

‘Sure,’ DeMarco said at the same time Mahoney said, ‘We don’t have time. I gotta plane to catch. I’m meetin’ with the president tonight.’

Even the rich guy seemed impressed by that.

On the way back to the marina, Mahoney and Alex sat in the cabin, Alex looking serious as they talked. Mahoney kept nodding his head, an equally serious expression on his face. Alex didn’t know it, but Mahoney wasn’t listening to a word he said. Mahoney had the ability to pretend to be intently engaged in a conversation with a potential contributor while his mind played back the fish – or the woman – he’d just landed.

Mahoney made arrangements with the deckhand to ship his fifty-five pound salmon back to D.C. The fish had miraculously gained three pounds in the last hour; God knows what size it would be by the time Mahoney reached the East Coast. As DeMarco was driving Mahoney to the airport, DeMarco’s cell phone rang again. He wondered if it was Dave Whitfield calling back. It wasn’t, it was Emma.

‘Joe,’ she said, ‘Dave Whitfield’s been killed.’

‘Oh, Christ,’ DeMarco said.

‘What?’ Mahoney said, hearing DeMarco’s tone of voice.

‘He had a four-year-old son, Joe,’ Emma said.

DeMarco said good-bye to Emma and turned to tell Mahoney the news but at that moment Mahoney’s cell phone rang. It was the Secretary of the Navy, Frank Hathaway.

10

‘Sir,’ the marine said, ‘I need to check that bag.’

Norton couldn’t believe it. Tonight, of all nights. They didn’t usually check things going out the gates, and if he had left at the same time all the other day-shift workers had, they never would have stopped him. But he was going out late because of what Carmody had told him to do – and because of what had happened today – and now the damn marine at the gate, a nineteen-year-old kid bored out of his skull, had decided to fuck with him.

‘Uh, yeah sure,’ Norton said. There was no point arguing with the marine; you can’t argue with marines. He put his backpack on the little table near the gate and unconsciously hitched up his pants. When he realized what he was doing, he stopped immediately. He had to get a grip on himself.

‘Would you please open the bag, sir,’ the marine said.

Norton opened the backpack and the marine peered inside. Inside the backpack was a paperback book, a pair of sunglasses, a brown bag containing the remains of Norton’s lunch, and a chessboard. The marine removed the lunch bag from the backpack, peered inside, then set it aside. Then he reached for the chessboard.

Oh please, God, Norton thought.

The marine hefted the chessboard in his hand. ‘This thing’s pretty heavy,’ he said. ‘What’s it made out of?’

Before Norton could answer, a voice behind him said, ‘You search that bastard good, Corporal. He works for me and I want to make sure he’s not stealing me blind.’

Carmody placed a big hand on the back of Norton’s neck and gave it a squeeze like he was being friendly. The squeeze wasn’t friendly.

To the marine, Carmody said, ‘In fact, you oughta put on some gloves, son, and probe this boy’s orifices. The only problem is, he might enjoy it.’

The young marine smiled – he couldn’t stop himself – then quickly rearranged his face back into a serious expression.

‘Sir,’ he said to Carmody, ‘if you could please step …’

Carmody glanced at the marine’s name tag. ‘Heesacker,’ he said. ‘Did you have an older brother, flew choppers in Iraq in ’92?’

‘Uh, no, sir,’ the marine said.

‘Well, you’re the spittin’ image of a guy named Heesacker I knew over there.’

‘You were in the corps, sir?’ the marine said.

Norton saw the marine was still holding the damn chessboard.

‘Nah,’ Carmody said. ‘SEALs.’

The young marine almost saluted. SEALs were his gods; a SEAL was what he wanted to be.

The marine shoved the chessboard back into Norton’s backpack and replaced the lunch bag he’d removed. To Norton, he said, ‘You have a good evening, sir.’ Looking directly into Carmody’s eyes, he added, ‘Both of you.’

Carmody and Norton walked together for a block, neither man speaking. Norton was afraid to speak. When they reached the lot where Norton’s car was parked, Carmody said, ‘Did you get them?’

‘Yeah,’ Norton said, and he reached into the back of his baggy pants and pulled out two square plastic cases containing unlabeled CDs.

‘Give me the laptop, too,’ Carmody said.

Norton quickly unzipped his backpack and handed the chessboard to Carmody.

Carmody stared at Norton for a second, and then he put his face close to Norton’s and said very softly, ‘Somebody died today because you fucked up. The next time you fuck up, guess who’s gonna die?’

Carmody stood in the center of an old steel bridge called the Manette Bridge. From where he was standing he could see the shipyard less than a mile away. The drydocks were lit by banks of lights – like those used for night games in old ballparks – so work could proceed around the clock.

Carmody looked around, made sure there were no cars coming from either direction, and dropped the chessboard into the water below him. He had thought about just hiding the laptop but had decided not to take the risk. He’d get another when they needed one, which probably wouldn’t be for quite a while.

He placed his forearms on the bridge rail and looked down into the water.

This whole thing was coming apart; it was time to shut it down. But he knew she wouldn’t do that. He looked at his watch. He had to get going. The rendezvous was in less than two hours.

She made him drive a long way from Bremerton for the meeting, past Green Mountain, up a winding road that changed from pavement to gravel and ended at a clear-cut section of forest surrounded by a lonely ring of still-standing trees. She also kept him waiting longer than normal before she approached his car, taking twice as much time to make sure he hadn’t been followed.

She entered the car and he was surprised at the way she was dressed. She normally wore the sort of clothes a cat burglar would wear, dark jeans and a long-sleeved dark T-shirt. But tonight she was wearing a low-cut black cocktail dress, a dress which showed off very good legs. On her feet were sexy, impractical high heels that must have been tough to walk in in the area where they were parked. She even had on perfume. The rendezvous must have caused her to interrupt or cancel whatever plans she’d had for the evening, but Carmody couldn’t imagine her having a social life. He had no idea what she did when they were apart; he had always thought of her as a beautiful vampire lying in a coffin waiting until the sun disappeared.

As usual she began without any sort of greeting. ‘What will you do now?’ she said.

‘Wait. Just lay back and wait.’

She stared at him a moment then nodded.

‘Did he talk to anyone before he left the shipyard?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You have to control those fools,’ she said.

‘Hey! I didn’t recruit them,’ Carmody said.

‘They’re your responsibility,’ she snapped.

She was right about that.

‘How long do you think we’ll have to wait?’

Carmody shrugged. ‘Maybe a month.’

She paused a beat then nodded. One thing Carmody liked about her – maybe the only thing – was that she didn’t waste time nagging at him, telling him that she wasn’t happy with the delay.

Apparently having nothing more to ask him, or further instructions to give him, she opened the door and started to leave the car.

‘There’s something else you need to know,’ Carmody said.

11

Dave Whitfield had been stabbed to death.

He had called DeMarco’s cell phone at exactly 8:10 a.m. and had left the shipyard twenty-eight minutes later. No one knew for sure why he had left when he did or where he was going, but DeMarco had an idea. DeMarco figured that when Whitfield had not been able to communicate with him by cell phone when he was on the fishing boat, Whitfield had left the shipyard to go to DeMarco’s motel, thinking that at that hour DeMarco might still be there, if not in his room, then maybe having breakfast.

Whitfield’s car had been parked in a small lot three blocks from the shipyard. The lot had space for six or seven cars, and to reach the lot, Whitfield had to walk down an alley. The parking lot itself was the backyard of a private home; the home owner had concluded long ago that charging shipyard workers eight bucks a day for parking was more enjoyable than mowing a lawn. The parking lot was visible only to people walking down the alley and to the owner of the lot if he happened to be looking out one of his back windows.

Whitfield had been killed in the parking lot, and based on the temperature of his liver and other factors that came to light later, the time of death was established at approximately nine a.m. He had been stabbed once and the weapon used, presumably a long-bladed knife, had entered his rib cage, slid between his ribs, and severed his aorta. After he was killed, his wallet and watch were taken and his body was shoved under his car. The body wasn’t discovered until noon when another shipyard worker went to the parking lot during his lunch break.

In the two days following the killing, Frank Hathaway showed exactly how much muscle an angry Secretary of the Navy could flex. A squad of investigators from NCIS descended on the shipyard like winged furies and a large navy poker was jammed up the local police chief’s ass to prod him into action. Two FBI agents were also diverted from the Bureau’s Seattle office to Bremerton. The FBI’s jurisdiction was questionable as the killing had occurred on city – vice federal – property, but since Hathaway was the one demanding action they had decided to engage.

DeMarco and Emma were interviewed several times. As they had no reason not to cooperate they told the assorted groups of cops what they knew. The last phone call DeMarco had received from Whitfield was naturally of particular interest but the only thing DeMarco could tell them was that he thought Whitfield had been talking about Norton and Mulherin, but nothing Whitfield had said, or that DeMarco had heard over the poor connection, had led him to conclude that Whitfield had discovered anything that would be a motive for murder.

‘Look,’ DeMarco told the investigators, ‘this whole thing with Whitfield was him thinking these two guys were doing a shitty job and making more money than they should have. I don’t know why he called me, but we didn’t find any evidence that anything illegal was going on, and we sure as hell didn’t find anything worth killing somebody over.’

Norton, Mulherin, and Carmody were interrogated by navy and federal investigators and by city detectives. Alibis were asked for and verified. Whitfield’s coworkers and neighbors were questioned, evidence was collected from the scene of the crime, and the neighborhood where Whitfield had been killed was canvassed by teams of cynical cops.

Norton and Mulherin were cleared almost immediately. At the time of Whitfield’s death, they had been inside the shipyard and were seen by approximately twenty people. On top of alibis provided by multiple eyewitnesses, the two men also had an electronic alibi: to enter or exit the shipyard, employees had to swipe their badges through bar-code readers installed at all the shipyard gates. The bar-code readers provided the exact time Whitfield had left the shipyard and verified that Mulherin and Norton had entered the shipyard at 7:00 a.m. and remained there all day, Mulherin leaving at 3:59 p.m. and Norton at 5:30 p.m.

Phil Carmody was also eliminated as a murder suspect, although his alibi was not as airtight as that of his employees. He had been having breakfast at the time of the killing and the restaurant where he had eaten was only five minutes by car from the parking lot where Dave Whitfield had died. But for Carmody to have killed Whitfield, he would have to have been missing from the restaurant for almost fifteen minutes – five minutes to get to the parking lot, two or three minutes to kill Whitfield and hide his body, and five minutes to get back to the restaurant. The waitress who had waited on Carmody didn’t think there was any fifteen-minute period when he was out of her sight, and she remembered refilling his coffee cup at least twice while he was eating. The waitress did say that Carmody had been seated near the rear exit of the restaurant.

Mahoney, as DeMarco had expected, irrationally blamed him for Whitfield’s death.

‘What the fuck did you do, Joe?’ Mahoney had screamed. ‘Goddamnit, all Hathaway wanted was for you to check out some pissant navy contract thing, and the next thing you know, his nephew’s dead. You musta done something.’

DeMarco wasn’t sure that he’d done anything to cause Whitfield’s death, but not returning Whitfield’s phone call that morning had been a mistake. As he had told the cops, he had no facts to connect Whitfield’s death with Norton’s and Mulherin’s activities, but the timing of the phone call was disturbing. DeMarco couldn’t leave Bremerton until he could explain why Dave Whitfield had been killed.

Emma, who could have left had she wanted to, also decided to stay. Something was bothering her – something other than the fact that Dave Whitfield had been killed – but she wouldn’t tell DeMarco what it was.

Forty-eight hours after Dave Whitfield died, the Bremerton cops arrested a man for his murder.

12

Jerry Brunstad, Bremerton’s chief of police, was a paunchy man with a sunburned face, too much dyed-black hair, and long sideburns; DeMarco thought he looked like an Elvis impersonator with a badge. Brunstad’s blue uniform shirt was snug across his belly and when he raised his right arm to use the pointer, a shirttail came out the back of his pants. He was using the pointer to direct attention to a white board that listed the evidence his men had acquired on Dave Whitfield’s killer. His audience consisted of seven people: Richard Miller, who was in charge of security at the shipyard; two FBI agents; two NCIS agents; and Emma and DeMarco. It had taken a phone call from the Speaker’s office for Emma and DeMarco to be allowed to attend the briefing.

According to Chief Brunstad, Whitfield had been murdered by a man named Thomas ‘Cowboy’ Conran. Conran was an easily recognizable, thirty-nine-year-old street person. He was six foot four, scarecrow thin, and always wore a battered black cowboy hat pulled down low on his forehead, making him look like a demented, undernourished Tim McGraw. Conran had been diagnosed as a schizophrenic in his teens and when he was off his meds – which was almost all the time – was known to act in an irrational, often violent manner.

‘Shipyard badge readers,’ Brunstad said, ‘recorded Whitfield going out the State Street gate at 8:38 and it takes about ten minutes to walk from the gate to where his car was parked. We walked the route. A witness saw Cowboy walking down the alley at 8:55. The witness said he was sure of the time because he was waiting for a buddy to pick him up and his buddy was late. From the window of his house, the witness couldn’t see the parking lot where Whitfield was killed, but he could see Cowboy leaving the alley.’

‘Who was the witness?’ an FBI agent asked. The agent was a woman with short dark hair, warm brown eyes, and a trim figure. She was as cute as a button, DeMarco thought, and she had outstanding ankles. And the lady agent had noticed DeMarco, too. When she first came into the conference room she’d glanced at everybody, the way a person does when entering a room filled with strangers, but it had seemed to DeMarco that her gaze had lingered longer on him. DeMarco wondered if the lingering look was because she found him devilishly handsome.

‘A guy named Mark Berg,’ Brunstad said, answering the FBI lady’s question. ‘He’s an out-of-work carpenter.’

The agent wrote this down. ‘Why did Mr Berg wait until now to tell you about Conran?’ she asked.

‘He was over in Spokane visiting a cousin. Like I said, he was waiting for his ride the day he saw Cowboy and he left for Spokane right after he saw him. He didn’t hear about Whitfield’s murder until he got back last night.’

The FBI agent also included this information in her notebook. She had written down virtually every word that Brunstad had uttered, making DeMarco conclude: great ankles but maybe just a little anal.

‘Anyway,’ Brunstad said, ‘after we interviewed the witness, we went looking for Cowboy and in his backpack we found Whitfield’s wallet and watch. We also found a knife with a six-inch blade. There was blood on the blade and the ME says the shape of the blade matches Whitfield’s wound. We’ve sent the knife to a lab to see if the blood matches Whitfield’s DNA. We’ll know in a couple of days.’

‘Whitfield was stabbed from the front,’ Emma said. ‘Why would he let this street person get so close to him?’

‘I don’t know,’ Brunstad said. ‘Maybe Cowboy was asking Whitfield for a handout. He’s a big guy, he backs Whitfield up against his car, and when Whitfield doesn’t give him any money, he gets mad and stabs him.’ One of Brunstad’s cops nodded in approval of his boss’s reasoning.

‘Had Mr Conran spent any of Whitfield’s money or used his credit cards?’ Emma asked.

‘He definitely didn’t use the credit cards,’ the chief said. ‘We checked. As for the money that was in Whitfield’s wallet, we don’t know how much he had to begin with, but there was still cash in the wallet when we arrested Cowboy.’

‘Humph,’ Emma said.

‘So what does this Cowboy character say?’ one of the NCIS agents asked.

‘He says gibberish,’ Brunstad said. ‘We’ve questioned him but he just prattles on about weird stuff. You can’t get a direct answer to anything. We’re trying to get his lawyer to let us force-feed Cowboy his meds but his lawyer’s playin’ games with us. But right now, even without a confession, Cowboy looks pretty good for this thing.’

Brunstad’s presentation ended a few minutes later. Emma told DeMarco she needed to make a phone call and left him sitting there in the briefing room. DeMarco wondered who she was calling. He noticed the cute FBI agent had walked up to look at the crime scene photos taped on the wall near the white board. DeMarco decided he, too, was interested in the evidence.

‘Gotta pretty good case against Mr Cowboy,’ DeMarco said to the agent.

‘Yeah, almost too good,’ the agent said.

It was the way she said ‘yeah.’ Pure New York. ‘Brooklyn?’ DeMarco said.

‘No, smart guy. Queens. You don’t remember me, do you?’

‘I know you?’ DeMarco said.

‘Sorta. My brother was Nick Carlucci.’

‘You’re kidding!’ DeMarco said. Nick Carlucci had been an acquaintance of DeMarco’s in high school. He’d never been a close friend because DeMarco’s mother wouldn’t allow DeMarco to pal around with him after Nick was arrested for stealing a car. DeMarco’s father may have worked for a mobster but that didn’t mean that Mrs DeMarco would permit her son to associate with criminals.

‘So how’s Nick doing?’ DeMarco said.

‘Never mind,’ the agent said. DeMarco guessed that meant that ol’ Nick hadn’t gone on to Yale and become a doctor.

DeMarco vaguely remembered her now, recalling that Nick had a younger sister, a skinny little kid with a sharp mouth. What the hell was her name?

‘My name’s Diane,’ Diane said, apparently having the same ability all women had – which was to read DeMarco’s mind as if there was an electronic reader-board on his forehead.

‘So what agency are you with?’ she asked. ‘NCIS?’

‘No. Congress.’

‘Congress? What’s Congress got to do with this?’

Emma returned to the conference room before DeMarco could answer. She stood in the doorway and made an impatient come-on-let’s-go motion.

‘It’s complicated,’ DeMarco said to Diane Carlucci.

‘Oh, yeah?’ Diane said. Again, the New York ‘yeah,’ this time communicating: like anything you had to say could be complicated.

Emma waved at DeMarco again; he could tell she was getting pissed.

‘Yeah,’ DeMarco said, ‘it’s so complicated it would take me a whole dinner to explain it to you.’

Diane Carlucci smiled. He liked that smile. She took a card out of the pocket of her suit jacket and said, ‘Why don’t you call me later today. If this thing’s under control, dinner tonight might be okay, you being from Congress and all.’

There was nothing like a girl from the old neighborhood.

DeMarco started over toward Emma, who was still standing in the doorway. He was halfway there when she said, ‘Hurry up!’ then turned and walked away.

DeMarco hustled to catch up with her. ‘So you don’t think the bum did it,’ DeMarco said to Emma.

‘I think Mr Conran’s only crime is being mentally ill,’ Emma said.

‘Who’d you call?’ DeMarco asked.

‘I noticed you talking to that young lady from the FBI,’ Emma said. ‘Comparing case notes?’

‘Funny thing,’ DeMarco said. ‘She was raised in my old neighborhood. I knew her brother.’

‘Yeah, funny thing,’ Emma said. ‘Another funny thing is how she looks like your ex-wife.’

DeMarco’s wife had divorced him a few years ago. She’d had an affair with his cousin, and then stripped him of most of his assets. In spite of what she’d done, he still wasn’t completely over her and he had a tendency to be attracted to women who looked just like her. And Emma knew it.

‘Aw, she does not,’ DeMarco said.

13

Emma had decided that she wanted to see the facility where Mulherin and Norton worked when they were inside the shipyard – the area where Whitfield had been just before his death. Richard Miller, the shipyard’s head of security who had been at the briefing, had already left the police chief’s office and was just getting into his car when Emma stopped him.

Miller had a head like a stubby cinder block: a square-shaped face topped by brush-cut gray hair. He had probably been a burly guy in his youth but at age fifty all the muscles had collapsed into a tire of fat around his waist. When Emma told Miller what she wanted, he told her that he had better things to do than walk her around the shipyard, at which point Emma took a card out of her purse and handed it to him.

‘Call that number, Mr Miller,’ she said. ‘A phone will ring in the Pentagon and someone with stars on his shoulders will explain to you why you want to be nice to me. Now I’m going to get a cup of coffee but I’ll be back in five minutes.’

Fifteen minutes later, Emma, DeMarco, and Miller were inside the shipyard, walking toward the training facility. As they walked, Miller kept glancing over at Emma; whatever he’d been told by the man in the Pentagon had made an impression.

To reach the training facility they had to traverse almost the entire length of the shipyard. The place was enormous and everything in it – the buildings, the equipment, the drydocks – was enormous. Miller said the shipyard’s machine shop was the biggest such facility west of the Mississippi River, and DeMarco believed him.

Four of the shipyard’s drydocks held submarines being overhauled and one drydock held two submarines that were being dismantled. The sixth drydock, the largest one, was empty, but big wooden blocks were laid out in a pattern for a ship to set down on. A big ship – a Nimitz class aircraft carrier.

Miller allowed them to look into a drydock holding a Trident submarine. A Trident submarine is five hundred and sixty feet long – almost the length of two football fields – and carries more weapons of mass destruction than most countries have in their entire arsenal. A Trident is a sleek, sinister-looking killing machine, and it wasn’t hard for DeMarco to imagine it sitting motionless beneath the waves, a missile hatch silently opening – and then the entire world being set on fire. But ‘Gee that thing’s big’ was the only thing he said out loud and Emma just looked at him – like he was the first idiot to master understatement.

Miller introduced them to Dave Whitfield’s boss, the person in charge of training the shipyard’s nuclear engineers. She was a handsome, dark-haired woman in her forties named Jane Shipley and she was even taller than Emma. Shipley showed them her domain, which consisted of several classrooms, study areas for the trainees, and the ubiquitous corporate cubicles where instructors and other personnel pounded away on computers.

Shipley pointed out the cubicle where Mulherin and Norton worked. It was located on the front wall of the building and looked just like all the other cubicles: two desks, two chairs, two phones, two computers, one filing cabinet. DeMarco could tell that Emma wanted to yank open all the drawers, but she restrained herself.

There was also a large walk-in vault at the rear of the training area, the type of vault you would find in a bank. DeMarco could see blueprints and big books – books the size of Bibles or phone books – on shelves inside the vault. A woman – half guard, half librarian – was posted at a desk near the vault.

‘What do you keep in there?’ DeMarco asked Shipley.

‘Drawings of ships’ systems and components. The big books are reactor and steam plant manuals.’

DeMarco remembered what Dave Whitfield had said: the reactor plant manuals told you how the ships’ reactors worked.

Emma looked at the vault, then did a slow turn to take in the rest of the training complex. To Shipley, she said, ‘You have a lot of classified information in this facility, don’t you?’

‘Well, sure,’ Shipley said. ‘Our engineers are trained primarily on three different classes of ships: Nimitz class aircraft carriers, Trident submarines, and Los Angeles class attack submarines. We can’t go running all around the shipyard every time we have to prepare a class or teach a course.’

‘I know,’ Emma said. ‘But there’s so much information here, all in one place.’ Before Shipley could respond, Emma said, ‘Are the manuals, those reactor plant manuals, are they on CDs?’

Miller hesitated. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘It’s the most efficient way to update them when they’re revised.’

‘CREM,’ Emma said.

It had sounded to DeMarco like Emma was either clearing her throat or uttering a heretofore unknown curse word.

‘What did you say?’ DeMarco said.

‘CREM. They have CREM,’ Emma said. Now the word sounded like a sexually transmitted disease. ‘Controlled removable electronic media. In other words, CDs and floppy discs that contain classified information. CDs that can be stolen and copied and e-mailed. CREM is a security officer’s nightmare, isn’t it, Mr Miller?’

Miller’s mouth took a hard set, bristling at Emma’s comment. ‘We control our classified material tighter than anybody in the business, lady,’ he said. ‘Particularly since Los Alamos.’

In July 2004, Emma explained to DeMarco later, two classified CDs were reported missing at the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Weapons Physics Directorate – a place that designs and experiments with nuclear bombs. This was the same facility that the Chinese had supposedly infiltrated in the 1990s, making off with design information related to thermonuclear warheads. The CDs lost at Los Alamos in 2004 may simply have been misplaced – stuck in the wrong file drawer or safe – or accidentally destroyed. Subsequent investigations showed that the people at the laboratory, most of them egghead scientists with skyscraper IQs, were incredibly absentminded when it came to controlling classified material. Or maybe the CDs weren’t lost or destroyed – maybe they were mailed to North Korea or Iran or some other equally unfriendly party.

Because of what had happened at Los Alamos, the shipyard was ultracareful when it came to removable media. Miller explained that when an individual checked out a classified CD from the vault, the number of the CD was recorded – just like when you checked out a book from the library – and at the end of the day, the CD had to be returned to the vault. An inventory was done every day to make sure all the CDs had been returned – and if one was found missing, Miller’s security force went to high alert. The problem was CDs could be copied and their contents e-mailed. When Emma said this, both Miller and Shipley responded immediately.

‘No way,’ they said, simultaneously. They explained that the shipyard’s computers were designed to prevent copying classified CDs and the shipyard’s firewall prevented classified material from being e-mailed out of the yard.

‘Humph,’ was Emma’s response. ‘And Mulherin and Norton, I suppose they have access to these classified CDs?’

‘Yes,’ Shipley said.

‘And do they use your computers or their own?’

‘You can’t bring personal computers into the yard,’ Shipley said. ‘So their contract specified that they be given a work space here in the training facility and computers and phones. You saw their office. They needed the computers because a lot of the training materials – class outlines, course materials, exams – are on CDs or a secure network. But like I said, you can’t burn copies of classified CDs on our computers.’

‘I see,’ Emma said.

Shipley shook her head and said, ‘Mulherin and Norton are a couple of eight balls. I wouldn’t hire them to clean my blackboards. Why anybody would pay these guys to review my training program is beyond me.’

‘You know Dave Whitfield thought there was something, ah, funny about the work Mulherin and Norton were doing,’ DeMarco said. He didn’t want to use the word ‘fraudulent.’

‘Yeah, I know,’ Shipley said. ‘He complained to me about it.’ She hesitated, then added, ‘Look, I think this review Carmody’s doing is a waste of time, and I’ve already told you what I think of Mulherin and Norton, but there isn’t anything illegal going on like Dave seemed to think. He was upset because these guys were making more money than he was, but … well, that’s just the way Dave was.’

‘What about Carmody?’ Emma asked. ‘Does he spend much time here?’

‘No,’ Shipley said. ‘He comes up here once in a while – to check on Norton and Mulherin, I guess – but he spends most of his time on the subs.’

‘Doing what?’ Emma said.

‘Part of the training is the book stuff,’ Shipley said, ‘which we do here, and part is shipboard. Carmody is supposedly watching the shipboard training, but my guys say that he seems to spend most of his time just bullshitting with the sailors.’

‘But he’s on board the submarines a lot,’ Emma said. ‘On his own.’

‘Yeah,’ Shipley said. ‘Is there a problem with that?’

14

Emma led DeMarco to a café on Bremerton’s waterfront. The place smelled of incense and flowers and served fifty varieties of herbal tea. The cheerful lady who ran the café sported John Lennon-style wire-rim glasses and had straight, gray hair that reached the small of her back. She wore what DeMarco thought of as a granny dress, a long shapeless thing as glamorous as a flour sack that touched the tops of her Birkenstock sandals. DeMarco had thought that hippies were extinct, but apparently not.

Emma ordered an exotic tea, something with ginseng in it. DeMarco asked for coffee, then a Coke, then a plain old Lipton’s and each time was informed by the woman – not only a hippie but a health Nazi – that she didn’t stock such beverages. He settled for a glass of water; the happy Nazi put a slice of lemon in it.

They took seats near a window where they could see the ferry terminal and watch the jumbo ferries from Seattle dock at the terminal in Bremerton.

‘I think Whitfield may have been right about Mulherin and Norton,’ Emma said.

‘That they’re committing some kind of fraud?’

‘Not fraud,’ Emma said. ‘Something else.’

‘What else? What are you talking about?’

‘Let’s look at everything Dave Whitfield said from a different perspective. He said Mulherin and Norton, two guys in debt, suddenly retire early and come into a lot of money and start buying things. Then you consider where they’ve been working, in a training facility loaded with classified materials. And then right after Whitfield calls you about them, he’s killed. So maybe Whitfield saw Mulherin or Norton doing something or overheard something and—’

‘Espionage? Is that what you’re saying, Emma?’

Emma nodded her head slowly.

DeMarco had never been near a spy in his life, at least not that he knew of. His normal assignments involved wayward politicians and greedy bureaucrats and being the middleman for deals that Mahoney didn’t want his fingerprints on. ‘You might be right,’ he said to Emma, ‘but you saw the security in that place.’

The shipyard’s perimeter was protected by tall fences topped with barbed wire; boats armed with machine guns patrolled the waterfront to keep watercraft – watercraft potentially filled with explosives – from approaching the drydocks or ships that were moored at the piers; armed guards manned entry gates and patrolled the grounds, and cameras were located in strategic spots. And these were just the security measures that were visible.

People entering the shipyard were carefully controlled. The employees, the ones who worked on the nuclear ships, had to have a security clearance and they wore badges that had their pictures on the front and a magnetic strip on the back, like the strip on the back of a credit card. To enter the shipyard, workers had to show their badges to guards stationed at the gates and swipe the badges through bar-code readers to further confirm they were allowed to enter. Miller, the shipyard security chief, had said that random searches of backpacks and lunch boxes and vehicles were performed at all times, and if the national or regional threat level increased, everybody was searched, from the shipyard commander’s wife on down to the guy who mopped the cafeteria floor.

‘Let me tell you something about security systems,’ Emma said to DeMarco. ‘Most systems – including the one at this shipyard – are primarily designed to keep the bad guys out. But once a worker has been vetted for a security clearance and given a badge, he’s in. And once he’s in, he’s trusted, and he has access to classified information, and most important, he knows how such information is protected.’ Emma paused to sip her tea, then added, ‘And espionage isn’t the only possibility.’

‘What else is there?’

‘Sabotage. There are currently four nuclear-powered submarines being overhauled at the shipyard. Sabotaging one of these ships would have significant repercussions. Not only the cost to repair whatever was damaged, but fleet operations would be disrupted if a vessel had to be taken out of service for a significant amount of time, and work on all the other ships being overhauled would be delayed.’

‘It’s kinda hard to picture Mulherin and Norton as spies. I mean these guys, they’re just—’

‘Remember Aldrich Ames?’ Emma asked.

‘The CIA guy?’ DeMarco said.

‘Right,’ Emma said. ‘Ames was probably the most damaging mole ever to penetrate a U.S. intelligence service. He was an alcoholic and poorly thought of by his coworkers. He was turned down for promotions, not all that bright, and openly flaunted the money he received from the Russians. In spite of all that, he fed CIA information to the KGB for almost ten years, and ten native Russians providing intelligence to the CIA died because of him. When you think about it, Mulherin and Norton bear a rather large resemblance to Aldrich Ames.’

‘What about Carmody?’

‘We don’t know anything about Phil Carmody,’ Emma said and her lips compressed into a stubborn line that said they soon would.

‘Hell, even if they are spies, according to that tall gal up in the training area, what’s-her-name, Shipley, it’d be pretty hard to sneak anything classified out of that place. You sure as hell can’t sneak one of those big damn books out of that vault.’

‘I know,’ Emma said.

They sat in silence a moment until DeMarco said, ‘If all those security systems don’t keep the spies out, how do they get ’em?’

‘The first opportunity,’ Emma said, ‘is the background checks performed when they issue a man or a woman a security clearance. That’s the time to see if they’re in financial trouble or susceptible to blackmail. But that’s not how spies are usually caught.’ Emma gestured toward the shipyard, the eastern end of which was visible from the teahouse. ‘All that security – the fences, the cameras, the safes, the cyber locks – that’s the physical perimeter that protects the facility and its secrets. But there’s a second perimeter that’s just as visible but not as apparent – a human perimeter. The employees. Employees like Dave Whitfield watching their coworkers, looking for odd behavior, looking for something that stinks, as poor Dave put it. It’s the second perimeter that catches the spies.’

Emma tipped her cup back and swallowed the remainder of her horrible, healthy tea. ‘There’s somebody I need to talk to,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you later.’

15

‘I need some help here, Bill,’ Emma said.

Bill Smith – his real name – worked for Emma’s old outfit. He was five foot nine, slim, had curly dark hair, and wore glasses with heavy black frames. He didn’t look like an international spy; he looked, to his great dismay, very much like the older brother of a guy who did a national TV commercial, one that had been running for more than three years. He and Emma were sitting in a Denny’s restaurant and Emma winced as Smith poured half a pint of raspberry syrup over his waffles.

‘I can’t do it, Emma,’ Smith said. ‘We’re more shorthanded right now than we were during the cold war.’ Before Emma could object, he held out a forkful of waffle, red syrup running down the handle of the fork. ‘Wanna bite?’ he said.

‘God, no,’ Emma said. ‘I’m telling you, Bill, these guys are up to something. I can feel it.’

‘Have you talked to the Feebies about this feeling of yours?’

‘Yes. The Bureau assigned two young agents to Whitfield’s murder. The one in charge is not only greener than grass, he’s handling a caseload that would break a donkey’s back. He thinks the likelihood of espionage is pretty far-fetched …’

‘Which you have to agree it is,’ Smith said.

‘… and he says he doesn’t have sufficient probable cause to get warrants to look into these guys’ finances or search their homes.’

‘Probable cause,’ Smith said and made a sound that was half snort, half laugh. In Bill Smith’s normal line of work, probable cause was rarely, if ever, an impediment.

‘And as for Whitfield’s murder, he says they’re starting to think that poor schizophrenic really did it.’

‘Well maybe he did do it.’

‘He didn’t,’ Emma said. Emma, as the old saying went, was sometimes wrong but never uncertain.

‘So what do you want?’ Smith said.

‘I want someone from research to check these people out, particularly Carmody. And I want to borrow a computer guy to tell me how they could trick the shipyard’s IT security. And I need a team, just a small one. I want these guys followed for a while and their houses searched. I particularly want Carmody’s place sniffed for explosives and spyware.’

‘Jesus Christ, Emma. Maybe you’d like a helicopter, too?’

‘I’m serious, Bill. It really makes me nervous that he spends his time on board the ships.’

Smith sighed. Emma was a force of nature. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘the research we can do. You just won’t get priority. The computer stuff, there’s an NSA guy we borrow sometimes when we’re overloaded. Maybe we can convince them to spare him for a conference call. But a team’s out of the question. I’d have to bring guys back from overseas to do what you want. You gotta believe me, Emma: communism was a piece of cake compared to this terrorism stuff.’

‘Listen to me,’ Emma said. ‘They’re inside a naval shipyard that overhauls nuclear-powered warships!’

‘I hear you, Emma, but I can’t do it. Sorry.’

Emma sat back in her chair.

‘Well in that case, Bill, I’d suggest that you kick this up the line so that when something bad happens, your ass will be covered.’

‘Now that wasn’t called for, Emma.’

16

Emma reclined on the bed in her motel room, waiting for the phone to ring. She was feeling lonely and grumpy. After Christine went back to D.C. with the symphony, Emma had moved into the same motel where DeMarco was staying in Bremerton. It was clean and functional and conveniently located – and, in Emma’s opinion, only slightly better than a cardboard box. Emma was used to five-star accommodations.

Emma had worked for the DIA for almost thirty years. She never discussed with anyone what she did while working for the agency but in her time she had slept in mountain caves without even a blanket for warmth; she had survived by eating grubs and uncooked bitter roots; she had been bitten on the ear by a scorpion and had once acquired an exotic fungus between her toes. She had suffered these hardships without complaint or self-pity – yet here she was feeling extremely peeved because the water pressure in the motel’s shower was so low it took five minutes to rinse the shampoo from her short hair.

The phone next to the bed rang.

‘Yes,’ Emma said.

‘It’s Peterson in research.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘I’ll start with Norton and Mulherin. They have a history of indebtedness. Their employment records are spotty – lots of supervisor comments about tardiness, insubordination, sloppy work, etc. Before they retired they filed grievances every other month about something: lack of promotion, age discrimination, unfair shift assignments. That sorta whiny crap. Both are divorced and both have kids they don’t support. Neither has a criminal record, unless you count the DUI Mulherin got six years ago. They’re just a couple of fuckups.’

Just a couple of fuckups. That seemed to be the consensus opinion as that was at least the third time that Emma had heard that phrase, or a variation of it, used to describe the pair. So why had Carmody hired them?

‘Is that it?’ Emma said.

‘No. I checked their bank records. Six months ago both men came into some money, a hundred thousand dollars each. This was just before they retired from the yard and started working for Carmody.’

‘What was the source of the hundred thousand?’

‘Carmody’s company. I guess it was some kind of signing bonus.’

Emma snorted. ‘Would you pay these two a signing bonus?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘And where did Carmody get the money from?’

‘He bought a house in San Diego when he was stationed there back in the nineties. He rented the place out when he wasn’t there. Seven months ago he sold the house and used the profit from the sale to start up his consulting company and to pay Norton and Mulherin. But there’s something fishy about the sale. He was paid almost three times what the house was worth. A development company bought the house and I haven’t been able to trace where they get their money from. I could do it eventually, Emma, but they told me I couldn’t spend any more time on this.’

‘Could someone be funneling money through the development company?’

‘Sure. It’s big, it’s global, and it’s got income flows from a dozen different directions. It’d be perfect for funding foreign ops.’

‘You need to find the source of Carmody’s money.’

‘I’m sorry, Emma, I can’t. Not now, and not unless you get something solid.’

Emma was silent for a moment.

‘What about Carmody?’

‘He’s a totally different breed than Mulherin and Norton. He started off as a navy nuc, trained as a reactor operator in Idaho Falls, then served on both attack boats and boomers. His record was spotless. Good fit reps, commendations, fast track for promotion. He was being considered for officer candidate school when he decided to leave the nucs.’

‘What happened?’

‘Nothing happened. He was twenty-four years old – he enlisted at eighteen – and after six years he was tired of submarines and decided he wanted to be a SEAL. The nucs weren’t happy about him leaving but he said if they didn’t transfer him, he’d quit, and he was just too good for the navy to lose. And the SEALs really wanted him, a big young guy with a technical background. He was a dream candidate.’

‘How’d he do in the SEALs?’

‘Great, until right before he quit. He’s one of those guys that has his medals stored in a government lockbox because he can’t tell anyone why he got the medals. Kinda like you, Emma.’

Emma ignored the compliment. ‘What happened before he quit?’

‘He was in … someplace, and … well … something went wrong. One SEAL was killed and Carmody got the blame.’

Emma could tell that Peterson was reading from a report and not telling her everything – or anything.

‘Come on, Peterson,’ she said. ‘What kind of op and what did Carmody do?’

‘Sorry, Emma, I can’t say. The point is, Carmody had to make a decision in the middle of a firefight and he made the wrong decision. In hindsight, that is. You know how it is; you’ve been there before. Anyway, Carmody was the NCMFIC and he took the hit.’

NCMFIC was military-speak for noncommissioned motherfucker in charge.

‘Did they bust him out of the SEALs?’

‘No. This guy was a star. They put a letter in his file and were going to make him repeat some training – basically a slap on the wrist – but he quit before they could.’

‘So when he left the navy, he was pissed.’

‘The records don’t say. His stated reason for leaving was to pursue work in the private sector. He may have been bitter, but you don’t get that impression. I mean there’s no nasty letters to his CO in his file, no demands for hearings. It looks like he was just ready to move on after six years of putting his ass on the line for minimum wage.’

‘Do you know what he did after he left the SEALs?’

‘Sort of. I don’t have a lot of detail but he was in Hong Kong for almost seven years. He got out of the navy in ’96, bummed around Europe for a year, then he took a job at a utility company outside of Toledo that operates a nuclear power plant there. But in ’98 he quit the job at the utility company – it was probably too much like being back on a sub – and goes to Hong Kong where he lands a job with an outfit that provides security for big shots and their businesses and their families over there. I don’t know if Carmody was a bodyguard or some other kind of security consultant, but being an ex-SEAL he could have been either. Then the company he worked for in Hong Kong relocated to Thailand in 2003. This was six years after Hong Kong was returned to the Chinese so I imagine by then private enterprise in Hong Kong was starting to feel the heat from the old-timers in Beijing. The problem is, we have no record of what Carmody did after the security company relocated, but he stayed in Hong Kong until he came up with the shipyard training thing last year.’

‘That’s quite a career change,’ Emma said, ‘from hired muscle in Hong Kong to training consultant in the States. I wonder why he didn’t relocate to Thailand with his old company.’

‘Beats me,’ Peterson said.

Emma thanked Peterson and started to hang up, but before she did, the researcher said, ‘Emma, this guy Carmody is smart and if he’s gone bad, he’s dangerous. I’ve heard you’re kinda on your own out there. You be careful, ya hear?’

Emma put down the phone and stared for a minute at the picture on the wall across from her bed. It was an oil painting of Mount Rainier rising above magenta-colored clouds, and it was hideous. She wondered if there was a company somewhere called Ugly Art, and if every motel in the country purchased from them.

She thought for a moment, made another phone call, then called DeMarco’s room. There was no answer. Where the hell was he?

‘So tell me,’ Diane Carlucci said, ‘how’d you land a job with Congress?’

DeMarco had asked a number of people for a nice place to take a lady to dinner and was directed to one in the little town of Winslow on Bainbridge Island. For a small-town restaurant it was pretty pricey, but DeMarco didn’t care. The view was good, the food was good, and Diane Carlucci was very comfortable to be with. There was no first-date awkwardness, no straining to find something to say – until now. DeMarco hesitated. ‘I guess you know about my old man?’

Diane Carlucci nodded.

‘Well,’ DeMarco said, ‘he made it kind of hard to get a job after law school. Firms weren’t kicking down the door to hire the son of a guy who worked for a mobster and killed people for a living.’

‘I can imagine,’ Diane said. She hesitated and said, ‘You know I met your dad once. I liked him.’

‘Yeah, he was a likable guy,’ DeMarco said. ‘He was a good father, too. He just didn’t make the best career choice.’

‘So how’d you get a job with Congress?’ Diane asked again.

‘I have a godmother, a friend of my mom’s I call Aunt Connie. She worked in D.C. when she was young and she had some pull with somebody. She talked to him and got me the job.’

What DeMarco had just said was the truth. It wasn’t the whole truth but it was the truth. ‘And you,’ DeMarco said, ‘how do you like—’

‘No, we’re not through with you yet,’ Diane said. ‘I heard you were married, that you married—’

‘Yeah, I did, and now I’m divorced.’

‘I knew that. I heard that she left you for—’

‘Yeah, my cousin.’

‘The one who works for—’

‘Right. Why haven’t you guys arrested him yet?’

Diane Carlucci laughed. She had a great laugh.

‘So now can we talk about you?’ DeMarco said.

DeMarco was the only customer in the motel bar.

He’d enjoyed dinner with Diane and had been sorry the evening had ended so early – seven thirty – but Diane was the dedicated type. She had told DeMarco that she needed to get back to her motel, review her case notes, and prepare for tomorrow. She and her partner had found out that Whitfield, who all agreed was a rather contentious fellow, was engaged in a property dispute with a neighbor, a man who had anger-management problems, which meant he tended to beat the hell out of people when he got upset. Although Diane’s partner still thought the homeless guy looked pretty good for Whitfield’s murder, Diane wanted to verify the neighbor’s alibi, which was a girlfriend with a drug habit.

DeMarco didn’t suggest that he accompany Diane back to her room for a nightcap. He wanted to, but he didn’t. He knew a nice Catholic girl from the old neighborhood wasn’t going to sleep with him on the first date. So now he sat, feeling horny and depressed, halfheartedly watching the Mariners get creamed by the Yankees. He glanced up at the television just as Jeter knocked the ball almost into the railroad yard behind Safeco Field and heard the bartender mutter, ‘Fuckin’ Yankees.’

DeMarco realized at that moment that he was no longer alone, that he was in the company of a brother. He and the bartender – a man with a severely peeling, sunburned nose – belonged to the largest, unhappiest fraternity in America: the Benevolent Order of Jealous Yankee Bashers. For the next half hour they repeated the sad litany of the brotherhood: Steinbrenner bought the World Series every year; Joe Torre looked like a dour leprechaun and was just as lucky. And so on. Members of the Order could bitch about the Yankees for hours. The bartender had just begun to decry the immorality of the Yankees acquiring Alex Rodriguez from the Texas Rangers when he looked over DeMarco’s shoulder and muttered, ‘Oh, shit.’

DeMarco followed the bartender’s line of sight and saw that he was looking at Emma. She had stopped at the entrance to the bar and was looking into her purse. She rummaged in her purse a moment – even Emma had the female tendency to overstuff her handbag – then turned and walked away as if she had forgotten something.

‘What’s the problem?’ DeMarco said.

‘That broad. She was in here last night and orders a martini to take back to her room. I had to make it three times before she was happy. Geez, what a ballbuster. Oh hell, here she comes.’

Emma walked over to the bar, nodded curtly to the bartender, and said to DeMarco, ‘I should have known this was where you’d be. Let’s go get some dinner.’

‘I just ate,’ DeMarco said.

‘Then you can watch me eat. We need to talk. Settle up your bill and meet me at my car.’ With that she turned and walked away, completely confident that DeMarco would follow. Emma could be a very irritating person.

‘Sorry,’ the bartender said to DeMarco after Emma left, ‘didn’t know she was your friend.’

‘Nothing to apologize for,’ DeMarco said. ‘She is a ballbuster. The biggest, baddest one you’ll ever meet. How much do I owe you?’

Emma, like DeMarco, had questioned the locals for the name of a decent eatery and had been directed to a place on a scenic bay called Dyes Inlet. DeMarco said it was even nicer than the spot where he’d taken Diane, but as soon as Emma stepped through the entrance she sniffed the air and said, ‘I smell cigarette smoke. I thought they’d outlawed smoking in restaurants in this state.’

Outlawed? She made it sound as if smoking was a Class A felony. DeMarco himself couldn’t smell a thing but Emma’s sensitive nose had apparently detected a solitary, illicit nicotine molecule polluting the atmosphere near the door.

‘Maybe they have a gas mask you can borrow,’ DeMarco said.

This earned him an arched eyebrow for his impertinence, but he was fortunately spared a lecture on the lethal nature of secondhand smoke. Emma did ask the hostess for an outside table on the deck of the restaurant, where a slight breeze ensured the purity of her air supply. DeMarco liked the deckside view. He’d heard that orca whales occasionally swam into the inlets of Puget Sound, and that’s what he wanted to see: a great big orca flying out of the water.

Their waiter – a gangly kid whose name tag said NATHAN – asked what they wanted to drink. Emma described the perfect vodka martini, exactly how it should be made, the exact proportion of both ingredients. The kid nodded while she talked but the only thing he wrote down on his pad was ‘V. Martini.’ Poor bastard, DeMarco thought; he was going to be schlepping martinis back and forth from the bar all night long.

‘And for you, sir?’ Nathan asked DeMarco.

‘Uh, I’ll have a martini, too. Make it just like hers.’

‘Very good, sir.’

The waiter turned to leave but DeMarco said, ‘Hey, do you ever see orcas over here?’

‘Orcas?’

‘Yeah, you know, killer whales. Those black ones with the white spots.’

‘I know what an orca is, sir, but they rarely come in this far.’ When Nathan saw the look of disappointment on DeMarco’s face he said, ‘But you might see salmon jumping, and over there,’ Nathan pointed, ‘is an eagle’s nest. That big tree, just to the left of the house with the red roof? Do you see it?’

DeMarco looked over to where the waiter was pointing but couldn’t see anything but tree branches and sky in the fading daylight. Big deal, he thought, a bird’s nest, but all he said to the waiter was, ‘Yeah. Cool.’

After their drinks were served – to DeMarco’s amazement Emma declared hers to be just right – Emma told DeMarco what she had learned from the DIA researcher.

‘So now what?’ DeMarco asked her.

‘Well,’ Emma said, ‘if Bill Smith won’t help then I guess we have to help ourselves.’

‘Yeah, that’s what I thought you were going to say,’ DeMarco said.

17

Emma was picking the lock on Phil Carmody’s back door.

Fortunately, Carmody had a big fence around his backyard. As long as nobody had seen them go through the back gate, they were probably okay. Provided Carmody didn’t come back home. Provided he didn’t have some kind of security system. Provided one of his neighbors didn’t see them through the windows walking around inside of Carmody’s house. DeMarco could just see himself: hands cuffed behind his back, a cop pushing his head down as they put him into a squad car.

And then the dog started making noise, little whimpering sounds like it was hungry or had to shit.

When DeMarco first saw the German shepherd in the backseat, he hadn’t wanted to get into Emma’s car. DeMarco wasn’t a big dog fan – too many stories about pit bulls gnawing off people’s arms – and the German shepherd was huge. He could just see it: they’d be driving down the road, and one minute the dog would be sitting there, its big snout sticking out of the window, and the next minute it’d be taking a bite out of DeMarco’s skull because his hair resembled rabbit fur.

‘Shut up,’ DeMarco hissed at the dog. The dog didn’t obey of course; it just kept making the whimpering noise. He felt like jerking on the leash, but was afraid that might piss it off. ‘Shut up,’ he hissed again at the dog. ‘And why couldn’t you get some kinda machine for this?’ DeMarco whispered to Emma. ‘They make machines for this, don’t they?’

‘There,’ Emma said, and she pushed the door open. Turning toward DeMarco she said, ‘A good dog is more reliable than most portable machines and they’re faster. Now come on. We’ll start on the second floor and work our way down.’

‘Should we close the blinds?’

‘No,’ Emma said and started up the stairs.

They knew Carmody had rented the house and DeMarco assumed it had come furnished – haphazardly furnished. The place was neat enough, but you could sense that it was just a temporary residence for its occupant. There were no personal touches, no family photographs, no memorabilia from Carmody’s time in the service. It was a place where the man slept and ate and not much more.

The second floor of the house had two small bedrooms and a bath. As Emma opened drawers and looked into closets, DeMarco walked around the rooms and let the dog poke its snout wherever it wanted. At least it wasn’t whimpering anymore; in fact it looked like it was having a pretty good time. DeMarco hoped it didn’t raise its leg and pee on something to mark its territory.

They finished searching the second floor in forty minutes then went back to the first floor. Emma was thorough, and the kitchen was particularly time-consuming as she pulled things out of the freezer and poked around inside of boxes of cereal and rice. DeMarco was surprised the dog didn’t try to eat a roast when Emma put a leftover one on the counter. He had to admit the critter was pretty well trained.

DeMarco checked his watch. They’d been inside the house an hour and a half.

‘Come on,’ Emma said, ‘let’s do the basement.’

‘Aren’t you going to put that stuff back?’ DeMarco asked, pointing his chin at the food sitting on the counter.

‘No,’ Emma said. ‘He’s going to know we’ve been here anyway.’

DeMarco was afraid the basement would take forever. Basements are where people store boxes and boxes of old crap they don’t need but are too lazy to sort through and throw away. But the basement of Phil Carmody’s rented house was small and almost barren. A hot water heater and a furnace took up half the space, and Carmody had a set of free weights and a bench-press bench in the middle of the room. DeMarco mentally tallied the weights on the bar and concluded that Carmody bench-pressed three hundred and fifty pounds.

There was an old Formica-topped kitchen table along one wall and above the table was a Peg-Board containing hand tools. Clamped to the table was a small vise, the sort fly fishermen use to tie flies, and a magnifying glass on a movable arm was mounted over the vise. On the table was a model sailing ship – a four-masted man-of-war under full sail. It appeared the model was ninety percent constructed, with only a few parts remaining to be painted. DeMarco could imagine Carmody sitting here alone at night, in the dimly lit basement of his silent house, slowly constructing the model. It was an image of a lonely man killing time – not a man passionate about a hobby.

As Emma stood in the center of the room deciding where to begin her search, DeMarco pulled the dog over to the table to take a closer look at the model. It had a zillion parts, little ropes and pulleys and cleats, and DeMarco didn’t see a smudge of glue anywhere. He was wondering if he had enough patience to build something like this when the dog went berserk. It started barking at the top of its lungs and straining against the leash to get at a shoe box underneath the table.

‘Jesus!’ DeMarco said. ‘Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up!’ he hissed at the dog. He didn’t know why he was whispering since the dog could be heard a mile away.

Emma came over and patted the dog on the head and said, ‘Good girl, that’s a good girl,’ and she pulled a doggy treat out of her pocket and fed it to the dog. DeMarco wondered how come she had the doggy treats instead of him. The dog immediately stopped barking, but it continued to push its nose against the box.

Moving the dog’s head out of the way, Emma pulled the box out from under the table and placed it on the tabletop next to the model. It was sealed in two places with clear packing tape. She studied the box for a few minutes, shrugged, and picked up an X-Acto knife that was lying near the model.

‘Hey!’ DeMarco said. ‘What are you doing? What if that’s a letter bomb or package bomb or something like that?’

‘Look at the dust,’ Emma said. ‘This box has been sitting here for quite a while.’

‘So?’ DeMarco said. ‘That just means it could be a highly unstable package bomb.’

Emma shook her head, dismissing DeMarco’s objections, and carefully sliced the packing tape and slowly opened the shoe box.

‘Shit,’ Emma said.

DeMarco looked down into the box. It contained a water pistol, a top, a couple of Matchbox cars, and a yo-yo. And a dozen bottle rockets.

It took them twice as long to search Mulherin’s place. The guy’s house wasn’t any bigger than Carmody’s but Mulherin had lived there a long time – and he was both a slob and a pack rat. His basement, unlike Carmody’s, contained so many boxes and bins and cartons that there was barely room to move. Mulherin also had a garage, and it too was filled with junk, so much junk that there wasn’t space to park a car. Even Emma, the woman who never admitted to the impossible, admitted it was going to be impossible for them to search Mulherin’s house thoroughly in less than two days – and all they had was about four hours.

The dog reacted twice to objects in the house: a case of marine flares in the garage stored next to a two-gallon can of gasoline, and a box of shotgun shells in the pocket of a moth-eaten hunting vest. The shotgun shells looked so old that DeMarco was afraid they might explode in his hand.

When they finished searching, even the dog looked tired.

‘Now what?’ DeMarco said when they were back in the car. ‘It’s too late to check Norton’s place.’

‘He lives in an apartment. It won’t take long.’

‘Emma, it’s almost four o’clock. They said these guys hardly ever work later than four and usually leave earlier to avoid the traffic.’

‘We’ve got time,’ Emma insisted, her lips set in that don’t-argue-with-me line.

Norton had a two-bedroom apartment. The living room was dominated by a television with a fifty-inch screen and there were more auxiliary components than DeMarco had ever seen connected to the set. He counted six speakers in different spots around the small room.

Unlike Mulherin, Norton was neater than DeMarco’s mother – and that was very neat. There were no unwashed dishes in the sink, no unmade bed, no clothes on the bedroom floor. All the boxes on the upper shelf of his closet were neatly labeled as to their contents. Now that, DeMarco thought, was weird.

‘If this guy isn’t arrested,’ DeMarco said, ‘I’m gonna see if he wants to be my maid.’

Emma ignored him and went directly to the kitchen and began opening drawers.

‘Let’s go, partner,’ DeMarco said to the dog and tugged on its leash and started walking the animal around the living room. For some reason the dog was panting now; its tongue was about a foot long.

When they opened the door to the second bedroom, Emma said, ‘My, my.’

Against one wall was a long table. On the table was a flat-screen monitor, a laser printer, and a state-of-the-art scanner – those were the items that DeMarco recognized. What had most likely elicited the ‘my, my’ from Emma were the half-dozen other devices that DeMarco didn’t recognize. Above the table was a bookshelf filled with computer books and computer magazines; the magazines were filed in chronological order. Beneath the table was a red Craftsman toolbox on casters and it housed small hand tools and electronic components.

Emma walked over to the table, picked up an object lying there, and said, ‘Huh.’

‘What’s that?’ DeMarco said.

‘A section of fiber-optic cable. It can be attached to a miniature camera or video recorder.’

‘Ah,’ DeMarco said. ‘One of those things that weirdos poke through a little hole in a bathroom wall so they can watch women pee.’ Norton struck him as the Peeping Tom type.

‘That’s one use for it,’ Emma said. ‘Another possibility is Carmody walking around a nuclear submarine with one of these cables up his sleeve, taking pictures of anything he wants and nobody noticing.’

Emma took a digital camera out of her jacket pocket and began to photograph the computer equipment and the books on the shelf above the table. After she finished photographing the equipment, she sat down at the table and turned on the computer.

‘Let’s see what he’s got in this thing,’ she said.

DeMarco looked at his watch. ‘Emma, we gotta get going,’ he said.

Emma ignored him and DeMarco soon heard the little tune that Microsoft Windows plays when a computer starts up.

‘Damn it,’ Emma muttered a moment later. ‘It’s password protected, and judging by all the sophisticated crap this guy has, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the programs were encrypted. I’m going to need a pro to find out what’s in this machine.’

Now Emma looked at her watch. ‘It’s getting late,’ she said.

‘No shit,’ DeMarco said. Geez, she could be annoying.

‘Take Lucy outside and stand watch. I saw an owner’s manual for a laptop, but I can’t find the laptop. I want to spend a little more time looking for it. If Norton shows up, call me.’

DeMarco thought Lucy was a really dumb name for a German shepherd, even a female one. German shepherds should have names like Bullet, Fang, or Killer. They should have rabid doggy-slobber dripping from their fangs. Lucy, DeMarco now realized after having spent the day with her, was just a big, friendly puppy with a sensitive nose. She was an embarrassment to the breed, and the name confirmed it.

DeMarco picked a spot to wait near the entrance to the apartment building and ten minutes later Norton drove into the adjacent garage. DeMarco immediately called Emma on the cell phone.

‘Stall him for five minutes,’ Emma said and hung up before DeMarco could complain.

Goddamnit, DeMarco thought, he needed to come up with some reason for being here. Maybe he could tell Norton he’d taken a job as a dog walker.

Norton exited the garage. He was holding a knapsack in one hand.

DeMarco walked up to him and said, ‘Mr Norton, I need to talk to you.’

Norton looked confused for a moment, before he recognized DeMarco. ‘I’m not talkin’ to you,’ he said.

‘It’ll only take a minute.’

‘Nope. You got any questions, you talk to Carmody.’

Norton started to move around DeMarco, but when he did, Lucy barked. It was a scary sound and Norton stopped immediately.

‘If that thing bites me, I swear to God, I’ll sue your ass,’ Norton said.

DeMarco looked down at Lucy. Now she looked like a German shepherd. Her teeth were exposed, she was straining against the leash, and her eyes were focused on Norton’s knapsack. Norton again started to walk around DeMarco but when he did the dog lunged at him and barked again, making Norton take a step back, his eyes wide with fear. ‘Jesus Christ! You call that fuckin’ thing off,’ Norton said. ‘You hear? I’m not kiddin’.’

‘What’s in the knapsack, Mr Norton?’ DeMarco said.

‘None of your business. Now call that motherfucker off.’

‘Norton, I bought this dog from a buddy of mine who works for the DEA. She’s trained to sniff out drugs.’

‘Drugs?’ Norton said. ‘I don’t have any drugs.’

‘Show me what’s in the knapsack. If you don’t, I’m calling the police and we’re all going to wait here until they arrive.’

‘I’m not showing you shit. And I’ll say it again: if that bitch bites me, I’ll sue you.’

‘You’ll be suing me with half your butt in a bandage,’ DeMarco said.

Over Norton’s shoulder, DeMarco saw the door to the apartment building open and Emma exit. She made a let’s-go-gesture at DeMarco and kept walking toward where their car was parked.

‘All right, goddamnit,’ Norton said to DeMarco. He unzipped the knapsack and held it out so DeMarco could look inside it. There were two small bags. One contained potting soil and the other fertilizer. DeMarco had seen a couple of red plants – geraniums, he thought – on the small balcony of Norton’s apartment.

‘You happy now?’ Norton said.

‘Yeah,’ DeMarco said and walked away, practically dragging Lucy with the leash. Stupid dog. It couldn’t tell the difference between chicken shit and a bomb.

‘Fertilizer can be an explosive,’ Emma said. ‘What do you think they used to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma?’

‘I know that,’ DeMarco said, ‘but McVeigh had a damn truckload of the stuff, not a one-pound bag.’

Emma wasn’t listening. She was talking baby talk to Lucy. ‘You’re a good girl. Yes you are. Yes you are,’ she said. As she spoke, Emma thumped her right hand against the mutt’s thick rib cage. It sounded like she was beating on a drum, but the dog seemed to like it. Dogs are weird, DeMarco thought.

‘So now what?’ he said. They were back on Highway 3, heading south. Emma was driving and Lucy was once again in the backseat, her head stuck happily out the window. Lucy belonged to the Transportation Security Administration at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport. Emma’s pals at the DIA had arranged for her to borrow the animal, and she and DeMarco were now returning the dog to its handler.

‘I need to get into Carmody’s office,’ she said.

‘That’s gonna be tough. It’s in the middle of downtown Bremerton and there are people walking around there all the time.’

‘Yeah,’ Emma said, already thinking about how she was going to break in.

‘We’re going to get our asses arrested for sure,’ DeMarco said.

‘You won’t,’ Emma said. ‘I want you to go back to D.C.’

18

DeMarco was getting pretty damn annoyed with the United States Navy. He was now into his second hour of looking for whomever had awarded Carmody the shipyard training contract and he seemed no closer to finding this person than when he started. If he’d owned an aircraft carrier, he would have picked a fight with the navy.

He had been told by Carmody that Carmody’s contract was administered by someone who worked at NAVSEA – the Naval Sea Systems Command. NAVSEA was located in the Washington Navy Yard in southeast D.C. The Washington Navy Yard had once been a real shipyard but the repair facilities had been closed years ago and its current function was to provide office space for navy headquarters personnel and their minions.

It took DeMarco half an hour to get past security after which he learned that NAVSEA was a gigantic bureaucracy consisting of hundreds of people working on all aspects of navy business: weapons, ship construction, overhauls, personnel, logistics, and on and on and on. The number of cogs in this bureaucratic juggernaut was endless, and the people in the various departments seemed to know nothing other than their own function.

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