Exit Interview, page 9
“As for who is after us, my former employer is an anonymous part of the United States government. Things got…weird and complicated last week, and I’m still trying to figure that out. There’s whoever the Item sends looking for you, and that’ll probably involve even more feds, some of whom don’t know about that other, more discreet branch. None of them would have any compunction about shooting me first and asking questions later.” She paused. “It’s going to be kind of a circus for a while. We’re in this together, so you’d best get used to the idea.”
She said it so breezily that it might have been agreeing to a blind double date rather than international intrigue with an increasingly high probability of me ending up dead. “So, why don’t you start, then?” I crossed my arms. “You said discreet. Tell me about your boss.”
She said nothing. If her face hadn’t been so perfectly blank, I would have thought she was uncomfortable. Then she startled, peering at me. “Why aren’t you fidgeting?”
“What?”
“I thought you smoked. Did you quit? You should be going up the walls by now.”
“No, I don’t…I never smoked. I just…”
“Just have cigarettes to get people to talk to you.” She nodded, satisfied. “They smoke, you smoke, they relate and open up. Nice technique. I’ve used it myself.”
There was no way this was going to be easy: Not only was she not used to giving information out, she was pretty good at reading other people’s intentions. Here I was, trying to elicit from someone trained in elicitation. Worse, someone schooled in maintaining secrecy at all costs.
I chose my words carefully. Trying to warm her up, getting her used to answering questions, was time-honored interviewing technique. “When did you become an…agent?”
“Agents are who we recruit,” she said automatically. “I’m an officer. An operative.”
Good, she was correcting me. If she hadn’t, I would assume that she wasn’t really interested. “Okay, sorry. It’s a fine distinction, I guess.”
“It just means that that I’m not openly acknowledged as an employee of the government. I don’t ‘represent’ them.”
“So…are you CIA?”
“Kinda.”
I glanced at her sideways and she grinned. Cheeky.
“The Department is umbrellaed under the CIA, NIA, NSA, DOD, and State. State doesn’t know about it, though. It’s a budget thing. We’ve got lots of covers under State.”
“Uh huh. Look, I’ve been in this town forever. I’ve spent my professional life crawling around, looking for stories on the Hill, the Pentagon, Langley. I’ve never heard of the Department.”
“Well, then, it’s working.” She stopped grinning. “For us, a bad day is when you see our work splashed all over The Washington Item.”
“Seriously, I can’t believe I’ve never heard of it.”
“Seriously,” she mimicked. “No one’s supposed to have heard of it.”
Was she making this all up? “Okay, so when did you start working for the—what was it again?”
“We usually just say ‘the Department.’ It’s nicely anonymous.”
The name was such a cliché, I barely restrained an eyeroll. “How’d you get involved with them?”
“Army.”
“You were in the Army?” I said. The car was slowing. That gave me an idea. Maybe it was too late, but her hand was off the gun, and I was more collected than when she first grabbed me, and we were far enough away that it would be difficult to get to Lucy and M’e before I warned them…
“I couldn’t join the Navy because my parents were married.” She waved her hand, dismissing it. “Sorry. Old joke.”
“When were you in the Army?” I prompted after a moment. I couldn’t afford to let her see my mind wasn’t entirely on the conversation.
“Right after I dropped out of college.”
“Where’d you go? To college, I mean.”
“Wellesley.”
“Bullshit, you went to Wellesley.”
“It’s true—”
Much as I wanted to know more, it was now or never—
I clicked off my safety belt as I pulled on the door handle. Making myself jump was harder than I imagined. I hit the dirt road in a near belly flop, the wind knocked out of me.
I scrambled from a crawl into a stagger, back to the paved road. If there was nothing behind us, there was bound to be something ahead of us.
Maybe fifteen steps before I stopped gasping and found a stride. Another five, and the damned slide-on sneaker twisted under my foot. I stumbled. I should have taken them off, I should have—
Without warning, Marie stepped out of the woods in front of me. The gun was in her hand, looking even bigger than it did in the park.
I screamed.
She furrowed her brow, raised the pistol, and fired.
I flinched and raised my arms. “What the—?”
“There’s no one to hear you. No one to be surprised by gunfire out here. Even if there were, they’d assume it was hunters. And—for the record—you’re a bona fide pain in the ass. Get up.”
She frog-marched me back down the dirt road.
About a quarter mile down I saw a shack. The wind brought the definite smell of a river, though I could tell no more about my location than that. I was unnerved by how quiet the woods were, and how unfamiliar the noises.
The shack was spartan, the exterior weathered clapboards covered with pine needles and caterpillar nests. It wasn’t rundown inside; the unfinished pine walls reminded me of a fishing camp, a refuge from modern life. There was electricity, but few windows, small and awkwardly placed. The furniture wasn’t new but I couldn’t smell mildew and there were none of the stains one might expect from long use. The kitchen was modest but functional and an open door led to a bathroom.
“Sit. You move, I’ll put one in your kneecap. Better yet, I’ll leave you for the others to find. We’re going to talk.”
She was truly angry now. I believed her. I sat.
She stared at me for a long while then got up, went through her bag, and handed me a thick file.
It was my life. I leafed through the file quickly. Copies of my birth certificate and vaccination records, the reports from the speech therapist who cured me of my stutter at age twelve. Transcripts from every school I attended—hell, there were copies of my high school report cards. My journalism school project, a fat pile of clippings from the Item.
The stuff I recognized wasn’t the problem. It was the stuff I’d never seen before that worried the hell out of me.
There were also reports on all my family, which I hadn’t expected. There was speculation, nearly correct, about how I’d met Tommy at UVA and my switch in majors from creative writing to journalism. The very next item was a report on my grandfather’s role in the county legislature and his death by gunshot less than a year after I met Tommy. There were speculations about my visit to him shortly before his death.
I closed it before I could read more. I was drenched in cold sweat; vertigo made the room swim. It took me several deep breaths to regain my composure and stop the spinning.
“Okay. You are what you say you are. Tell me about Kola. Tell me about your boss, and why he wants to kill you,” I said, as neutrally as I could. Asking questions helped, professional distance helped. My hand itched for a pen and notebook. No chance of that. The best quotes came once you put your phone or notebook away, anyhow.
“My boss took me off the Kola case, then tried to kill me. He told the guy he sent to do the job that I was rotten. I came back to find out what was going on. Kola contacted me privately, not through Department means. I was at the party at Kola’s request. He’d had Mrs. Bolton mention me to Jean-Yves du Plessis—you know him?”
I nodded again.
“Marie Tremblay works for Jean-Yves—as a cover, off and on.” She looked around the room, and sighed. “I slide a mean tray of canapés. I can pour wine with the best of them.”
So much for Jason Bourne, I thought. But it made sense. Who ever noticed a waiter or bartender? They were omnipresent in elite circles—wallpaper. Anyone could speak to them and never be noticed. “So what should I call you?”
“Stick with Marie, for now. The less you know, the better.”
I digested that, a ridiculous thing to say to a reporter. “Okay. So how did Kola know how to find you—the Department?”
“We’d done business with him before.”
“What do you mean—?” Oh, of course. A clandestine organization needed to stay off the Federal books. They had to get their gear from someone. “Ah.”
“Yes. But now…Kola wanted out of the game. Out of the arms trade.”
I stared. I couldn’t imagine Kola ever relinquishing that kind of power, not once he’d broken international laws, been a partner to genocide, and fueled both sides of every gang battle, political skirmish, and full-out war in recent memory. Was the birth of a grandson, so soon on the heels of his son’s death, enough to change his mind? I know that my niece Lucy’s birth had changed me, but Kola and I were two very different people.
Maybe he was just…tired.
Marie continued. “He wanted the Department’s help to do it safely, without upsetting the balance of power too much. I was put on the job. Bringing him and his stockpile of weapons in, safely, to our side, was the idea. I’d worked with him before. Then suddenly I was pulled off the job, told he wanted to work with someone else. It didn’t make sense. Kola trusted me. Something was wrong.”
I digested that. If he didn’t want to upset the “balance of power” among arms dealers, Kola couldn’t have had entirely altruistic reasons. And could one retire from the arms business? Why not? He was a technically a ‘legitimate businessman,’ wasn’t he, always had the right paperwork, never ran afoul of the authorities? Or rather, never got caught, never missed a bribe, never stepped on the wrong toes, I thought bitterly. Only… “Why? Why would he leave? And why would he want to go to you?”
“You know his background?”
I nodded.
“So you know he’s always kept a very low profile, and has been picky about who he sold to. It caused him trouble a number of times. It’s easier when you’re willing to sell to both sides of a conflict,” she continued. “Oddly, people don’t get their feelings hurt if you sell to everyone, including their enemies.”
She got a box from under the sink, then moved her chair back from mine, ten feet or so. She set the gun she’d held on me on the armrest of her chair, then she took another, smaller one from an ankle rig. After unloading it—she checked the chamber twice—she broke the weapon down and cleaned it with the materials from the box. The weird orangey smell of the lube mixed with the musty, piney smell of the room, and the brush rasped against the hard metal of the barrel.
She continued. “I believed—everyone believed—that his son would follow in his footsteps. Then he died in a skiing accident last year, and I heard Kola started to talk about retiring. However, he also decided he wasn’t going to leave his business to anyone. He had everything: contacts, inventory, information on his competitors.”
The way she said Kola had stock and files made it sound like any other businessman. It was cheaper for a Hollywood movie company to buy ten thousand real rifles and pistols than it was to make fakes. Someone at Kola’s level would also have access to airplanes, attack helicopters, drones, missiles, robotics, land mines, tanks, and hundreds of thousands of small arms and ammunition. They had the power to move all this around the world, almost at will. The scale at which someone could acquire these materials and exploit them, expand the business, was mind-boggling. If Kola had wanted to retire, there would be no limit to what someone might do to gain his empire.
“Why? Why leave it behind, why hand it over to you?”
“He was going to sell his stock to our people, but then he lost faith in Heath. I think he was going to tell me why at the Bolton party but couldn’t because he was being watched.”
She showed me a crumpled cocktail napkin with a scribble of ink. “He told me the location of his assets was in the files on his personal computer. He told me if anything happened to him, to find that computer and keep it from Heath. The files on the computer were encrypted, the key hidden—presumably, someplace he’d know I’d look. He didn’t dare just write the address down. I need to find the computer, the encryption key, and his files before his murderers do.”
“You don’t think of arms dealers having boundaries,” I said. “Worries.”
She shook her head. “You’re not thinking about his motivations. Remember, he always thought of himself as someone apart. In his mind, he’s bettered himself.”
“His grandson,” I said. “Or maybe his son’s death got him thinking about his own mortality?”
She nodded, intent on reassembling the small gun, then reholstered it in the ankle rig. “That meeting at the Bolton dinner wasn’t our usual way of communicating.”
“Kola didn’t trust the Department any longer?”
She nodded again. “At the time, I didn’t know why he was suddenly going off script. He wanted to pass me something. Since Heath set me up to be killed, it’s clear to me Kola may have been killed by one of ours.”
“By someone in the Department? Why? I can see why he’d want to hand it over, but why suddenly lose faith in them? Tell me about your boss—Heath is his name?”
It took Marie a long time to answer me. She automatically began cleaning up her rags and lubricant, then she stretched and rolled her neck, something I noticed she did when she was stalling. Finally, began to speak robotically, all the emotion erased.
“Mr. Richard Heath. Once upon a time, I thought he was the one person in a world of bureaucrats and liars who would always have my back. If he said something, you could take it as gospel. If he didn’t tell you something, it was for your own good. And unlike a lot of military guys—a lot of guys, period—he didn’t give a rat’s ass that I was a woman. I wasn’t just there to fill a quota. To be a lure. A piece of ass.”
She was silent for a moment. “He made me believe I could change things for the better. Covertly. Expediently. He was rock solid, unwavering—”
I didn’t want to interrupt her, but I was forcibly reminded of someone else who’d recently breaking regular habits. “Kola was seen outside of his usual haunts, recently.”
“Yeah, I know.” She seemed relieved to change the subject, but confused by me stating the obvious.
“He threatened me, last time I saw him, right before the party.” I described our meeting at the restaurant. “He said, ’stay away from my wife.’ But now I’m wondering…was that a warning? About her?”
“He was always very precise in his language,” Marie said. “It certainly seems telling. Maybe she didn’t like the idea of him retiring.” Her eyes lit up. “Maybe she’s the one who killed him!”
Holy moly. It was possible. “It was pretty risky to kill Kola at the party, wasn’t it?” I said. “I mean, the murder was so public. It had to be a spur of the moment thing. An act of desperation, before he could talk to either of us?”
“No, no! She knew she was going to kill him. She did it at the party, in the presence of at least two people known to have negative connections with him, in case anyone didn’t believe his death was natural!”
“She killed him…so you think she’s the one taking over his business?
“Yes. Maybe she’s even working with Heath. They need each other until one of them finds the computer. Then who knows what will happen.”
I nodded. “She would have had access to everything else. She might even have convinced Kola’s people that she was acting for everyone’s best interest—Kola’s hand-picked heir, a smooth transition of power.” I frowned. “But…it doesn’t make sense to me. It wasn’t for money. She has her own. As long as he was alive, she had every kind of security. If he retired, she’d be that much safer. The birth of a grandchild after the loss of a son, you’d think she’d be overjoyed her husband was getting out of the game.”
“You’re thinking about this like Amy,” Marie said. “You need to think like Philomena Kola.”
“And that means what, exactly?”
“She knew what Kola was, even behind his legitimate façade, and she stayed married to him. She got something from that. Power? A sense of control? Maybe she didn’t want to give it up, didn’t want him to give it up. If the timing of her son’s death and the arrival of her grandson decided her, just as it decided Kola, her reaction was different from his. The world is an unsafe place, and if you have power, you don’t give it up easily. She couldn’t dissuade her husband, so—”
“So she took it for herself.” I stared at her. “There is absolutely nothing so horrible I can think of that you can’t come up with something worse, is there?”
“Probably not.”
I was still shaking my head, not wanting to believe any of it.
“I didn’t see any other Department personnel at the dinner. I wonder if Mrs. Kola—” She cocked her head. “What’s that?”
“I don’t—”
But she’d already picked up the gun and grabbed me by the arm, yanking me out of the chair.
“Hey! What’s your problem?” Crazy-ass bitch—
She hit the kitchen lights and we were in darkness. “Get in the bathroom, lock the door, get down in the tub, don’t come out until I come for you,” she hissed.
She shoved me toward the bathroom.
I stumbled forward. “What’s—?”
“Someone’s here. No lights. Get in the tub.”
I locked the door behind me, for all the good that would do. There was a little window in there, no more than a slit. It wasn’t big enough to climb through, no sill to haul myself up onto, even if it had been low enough. Now I understood why the windows were so oddly configured here: No one could see in, no one could watch as you moved around in the house. I stood in the tub—lip service to my instructions—and looked out. All I could see was the Ford in the woods, twilight descending.
