Seven Grams of Lead (13 page)

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Thornton said. “Beryl Mallery in the flesh, as it were.”

Apparently reminded of their audience, she gritted
her teeth before rolling across the bed and planting a loud kiss on his stubbly cheek. “Russ Thornton,” she said enthusiastically, without a trace of corresponding emotion on her face. “I thought I’d dreamed it, but here we are in bed together, and with a nice long time until checkout.”

“Unfortunately, I need to run.”

“Hangover?”

“No, I need to get back to New York.”

“For the usual reasons men need to skedaddle at seven on a Sunday morning?”

“For work, actually.”

“
Work?
I would have expected something more creative from you.”

“At around three thirty this morning, two men were seen trying to steal a two-hundred-foot-long section of eight-foot-high chain-link fence in White Plains.”

“And there has been a dramatic surge in the value of fences?”

“If you’re a couple of two-bit crooks with nothing but a used pickup truck, that much stainless steel is gold, practically. They could get twenty grand for it.”

She yawned. “Stop the presses.”

“That part of the story should put you off. Good cover does that. The real story is that the fence is part of Westchester County Airport’s perimeter. Terrorists have been focusing on secondary targets, and Westchester Airport’s high on the list. The police caught
the thieves red-handed, but what if the theft was just a diversionary tactic? What if, sometime between when the two guys began cutting the wire and the arrival of the police, a third guy slipped into the grass alongside a runway and readied a surface-to-air missile?” Thornton didn’t add that if there had been even a remote possibility that the thieves were anything more than bozos who, in the dark, failed to notice that the fence bordered a runway, Westchester Airport would have been locked down within seconds.

“Wow,” Mallery said. “You need an assistant?”

“Depends on what the assistant brings to the party.”

“A newfound lust for journalism. And a jet.” As if nudged by humility, she added. “Fuel-efficient, as jets go.”

“Is it a Sino Swearingen SJ-30-2?”

“How did you know?”

“I have a whole fleet of them. But I have to get my car out of the parking lot on the Cape; I’m going to need it in New York.” Thornton would rather take Mallery’s jet, but he was concerned about her people, at least one of whom had been protecting her while a subminiature electronic eavesdropping device was injected into her head. “For what it’s worth, the drive down the coast is spectacular this time of year.”

“The truth is, I want to be with you,” she said, bringing their scene to a close, “even if we just circle a block all day.”

The engineering supplies distributor South Atlantic Resources, LLC, was a front for an off-the-books joint enterprise of several government agencies, including the CIA and the National Reconnaissance Office. Or so the office manager, Lieutenant Mickey Rapada, had been told. Rapada knew for certain only that deception was the rule in the intelligence community and that he didn’t need to know the full details in order to do his part for national security. He suspected the real operational objective was not, as he’d been told, the development of a “portable petroleum hydrocarbon detector prototype.” A quick look online had taught him that such detectors were a fraction of the size of the machine the kid physicist had spent five days and nights banging together in the back office. Rapada had been told plenty, however, about the players who posed a threat to the op. Accordingly, at 0800 on a Sunday morning, he phoned the chief, who answered, “Goodwyn.” It sounded like he’d been sleeping. Also his name was not really Goodwyn, but Canning—
Goodwyn
signified that Canning was under no duress and able to communicate freely.

“Sorry if I woke you, Norm,” Rapada said.
Norm
meant a status of exactly that on this end.

“I’m already awake, getting some work done. What’s up?”

“Action from subject one-forty-two.”

Canning grumbled. “I don’t have the scorecard on me, junior.”

“Sorry, sir, I mean the blogger.”

“What now?”

“He’s on Muskeget Island at the same charity ball as the ex-candidate.”

“I’m guessing they did some talking.”

“Some sleeping together too.”

“Not for the usual reasons, hence your call?”

“It was a little suspicious. Then, this morning, she got her things and, over the protest of her bodyguard, she left her jet and her pilot behind—and the bodyguard. She’s planning to drive with one-forty-two to New York.”

“How’s his physical condition?”

“Not quite good enough yet for him to be island-hopping. In fact, earlier this week, he told the charity ball hosts he wouldn’t be able to attend for that reason.”

“Glad to hear it. It will be plausible for him to have another accident.”

The ferry’s engines
beat Nantucket Bay into a lather, precluding conversation—fortunately. The playful morning-after banter had denigrated to a stilted discussion of current events. Mallery took advantage of the respite now to read e-mails. But soon, Thornton thought, to maintain the fiction of their affair, they would have to talk.

He thought of questions he might ask her. When you’ve excelled at everything from selling a record number of Girl Scout cookies to becoming one of the wealthiest women on the planet before your thirtieth birthday, can you sit back and enjoy life, or do you feel pressure to keep up the pace? Or is there no pressure at all because success comes as naturally to you as breathing? When you spend $10 million on a jet, do you find the expenditure easier than a person with
a thousandth of your net worth does when parting with the funds for a car? How do you know whether new friendships are genuine or a function of the fact that you probably don’t blink at parting with $10 million for a jet?

When Nantucket was reduced to a bump on the horizon, the engines dipped to a throaty hum. Questions ready, Thornton turned to Mallery, who continued to fire e-mails from her iPad. On Sunday at ten
A
.
M
.—seven
A
.
M
. in her colleagues’ time zone—the tablet’s incoming e-mail notification chimed like a slot machine.

“I take it you like e-mail,” Thornton said.

She didn’t look up. “What I get for skipping work yesterday.”

Not everyone who takes Saturday off wakes up Sunday to 143 work-related e-mails, he thought. In trying to conceive a better tack, he recalled a CIA source once telling him that experience teaches spies to shun artifice whenever possible.
The closer to your base of experience you can play it, the less you need to fabricate
, the veteran spook had said.
The less you need to fabricate, the more convincing you can be. The more convincing you are, the greater the likelihood you don’t get killed.

Maybe all Thornton needed to do was let Mallery continue tending to her correspondence. Then the transcript from the ferry ride would read like that of any other Sunday morning for her.

He checked his own e-mail. The usual PR flak, and one message from his source at Homeland:
2 guys=just lousy fence thieves.

Good, he thought. He and Mallery were no longer required to go through the motions of stopping at Westchester Airport. Instead he made a plan to take her to the Abbey Pub, the landmark tavern near the Columbia campus. He texted O’Clair, inviting him along.
Abbey Pub
was code for success in finding a second implantee. Thornton had no interest in actually going to the Abbey.
Sounds graet
, O’Clair replied, the intentional misspelling signifying all systems go on his end. He would set up the Faraday tent in a lab at Columbia. Once he’d extracted the devices and tracked the signals, he would alert the director of the NSA New York office of the development. If need be, the director could dispatch security officers to take Thornton and Mallery into protective custody.

Mallery was still volleying messages with Palo Alto when the ferry reached Hyannis Port. The engines died down, replaced by knocks of the pilings against the hull.

“I think we’re here,” Thornton said.

She took in the whitewashed pier with surprise. “Oh.”

Although sunny, it was the sort of day that delineated winter from autumn. Passengers doubled their pace through the lot from the ferry to their cars, eager to get their heaters cranking. Chattering in spite of a
parka fit for a Sherpa, Mallery was among the swiftest down the gangway. Thornton hastened to keep at her side. From the moment he stepped onto land, he had the odd sensation, whichever way he turned, that someone was sneaking up from behind him.

He crossed the parking lot to his car. Unpocketing his keys, he headed for the passenger door, where the red-orange was attributable to rust peeking through the paint. Mallery turned to the neighboring car, a late-model Lexus, apparently assuming that that was his ride. Hit with a wave of self-consciousness, he pried open the old ’02’s passenger door, the harsh squeak of the hinges scaring a seagull into flight. He hurried to sweep a pair of sweatpants from the passenger seat. Lucky thing, he thought, that the cold salty air had neutralized the interior’s usual bouquet of motor oil and Doritos.

“Cool car,” she said, sliding into the passenger seat.

Literally, he thought, recalling its heater-motor issue. “Thanks.”

He rounded the car, unlocked the door, which merely squealed as he opened it, and dropped into the leather driver’s seat.

“So how did you become a journalist?” she asked.

He’d often heard this question on the heels of talk of fancy cars or homes; usually the underlying question was
Why don’t you have a job that allows you to buy such items?

The engine turned over, to his relief. “Every season, my hometown paper used to hire a player on our high school football team to write up the away games,” he said, driving out of the lot. “It saved them from having to send a reporter. And I stuck with it.”

She shot him a sidelong glance. “That’s just a cover story, right? Really you’d been in the CIA?”

“As a matter of fact, I was in the CIA.” Intentionally leaving her hanging, he turned right at Ocean Street and followed the signs for Route 6. “On December 14, 2008, for a cocktail reception.”

She laughed. Briefly. “So what’s the reason you stuck with journalism?”

This was among his least favorite topics, but at least it was conversation. “My father was the president of the insurance agency his grandfather had founded, but effectively, he made a career of being taken advantage of. I have one brother who’s thirteen years older than me. When I was in high school, he took over the insurance agency, and he got chiseled and duped to the extent that he made my father look like a Fortune 500 CEO. It didn’t take long for him to run the agency aground.”

Regarding him, she raised a hand to block the sun. “So you developed a thing against bullies?”

“I’ve never sent them Christmas cards.” He turned onto Barnstable Road and accelerated past a crowd of seafood shacks and souvenir shops. “How about you? How did you become a Fortune 500 CEO?”

She sighed. “As it happens, my father’s a journalist.”

He smiled in spite of a bad feeling about where she was headed.

“Ever read
Love Bus Monthly
?” she asked.

“Somehow I’ve missed it.”

“He published it out of our Love Bus, which was one of about fifty Volkswagen
Kombinationskraftwagens
in our hippie-come-lately colony in New Mexico.”

“So you grew up in a Volkswagen Kombi?”

“Only until I was five and needed to be less than a hundred miles from a school. We rented a house in Phoenix, which was hard on Mom and Dad because they believed two hundred cubic feet was ample living space for a family of three, and that anything more was socially irresponsible. So, to answer your question, anything they’d done or hoped to do, I tried to do the opposite, and—”

Her phone beeped with a new text message.

“Excuse me for a second.” With the speed and dexterity of a pianist, she keyed a response on her phone’s minuscule keypad. Meanwhile the phone kept beeping.

The old BMW’s heater chose to work, not that Mallery would have noticed if it hadn’t: She parried messages for the better part of the next four hours, at which point Thornton began to wish they’d taken her
jet after all, because, he suspected, they were now being followed. A tall white Nissan van had stayed five or six cars behind them since New Haven, eight miles back.

On major commuting routes, if he recalled correctly, cars averaged 1.4 passengers, a figure that included the driver. Vans, used mainly for commercial purposes, averaged 1.1. Two people sat in the front seat of this van. Men or women, he couldn’t tell; they were too far back. By a two-to-one ratio over utility-company vans, all-white were America’s most common vans, making them the ideal hide-in-plain-sight ride, or what a surveillant might rent—at the New Haven Airport, perhaps. This was the height of leaf-peeping season, though, making it difficult to rent anything last-minute, particularly today, a Sunday. If you were lucky enough to get a van, you might get stuck with a deluxe model with eighteen extra inches of headroom nobody but an NBA player needs, at three times the price of an ordinary van. Then again, the two people in the deluxe white van might just be two tall people in a deluxe white van. Either way, Thornton heeded the fundamental guiding principle of countersurveillance—
See your pursuers but don’t let them know you see them
—and didn’t try for a better look.

“You hungry?” he asked Mallery.

She remained focused on a spreadsheet. “Not really.”

“Mind if I stop at a McDonald’s?”

She smiled. “Someone has to keep cardiologists in business.”

He crossed over from the fast lane, resetting the blinker well in advance of the exit. The van remained in the fast lane. Then, a quarter of a mile before the exit, it signaled its intent to turn right.

Taking in the road signs lining the off-ramp, with listings of gas stations, hotels, and restaurants, Thornton said, “Crap, only Taco Bell.” He turned off the blinker and sped up.