The Rule Of Nine Part 8

"Would you like a menu?"

"No. I'll just have what you're having," she says. "Do you usually eat here alone, or is someone else joining us?"

"My partner," I tell her.

"That would be Mr. Hinds."

"I take it you've met Harry?"

"Not yet, but his name is next to yours on the sign by your office door. Perhaps you could introduce me." The way she says it, I can tell Harry is on her hit list to be questioned. If she looks like this when she does it, she can mount Harry's head on the wall next to the sign on her way out. Harry will spill everything he knows, and guess at the rest.

She smiles at me over the tumbler as she nibbles playfully on a chip of ice, pursed glossy lips and white teeth. "You're making this much more difficult than it has to be," she says. "All I'm asking for is a little cooperation."

"What the spider said to the fly," I tell her.

The waitress brings my drink, then looks at Joselyn and asks if she'd like another.

"I don't know, should I?" Cole looks to me for the answer.

"Depends on how long you're going to be here," I tell her.

She looks at the waitress and smiles. "I'm afraid he's a hard case. Better bring one more for each of us, and keep his tab open. We may both need more medicine before the day's done."

The waitress laughs and looks to me. I nod.

"Thanks," says Joselyn. "And I thought I was going to wait and get drunk on the plane tonight. You're a bad influence."

"You're going somewhere?"

"Home." The sliver of ice slips through her lips as she says it. She reaches up to trap it with rose-painted nails on long delicate fingers. "Excuse me." She giggles as she presses the melting sliver back between her lips. "And don't look so satisfied. I won't be gone long, and I will be back."

"Not on my account I hope."

"You don't really think I was going to let you say no and slip away just like that, do you?"

"What time's your flight?"

"Not to worry. We have plenty of time. Six o'clock shuttle to LAX, and then the red-eye to Was.h.i.+ngton. So we can drink all after noon."

"Must you leave so soon?"

"I have a hearing tomorrow. Testimony before a Senate committee." Then a twinkle in her eye as she looks at me. "Of course, you could always join me. With what you could tell them we could turn it into an extravaganza. Cuba in the age of Camelot, Excalibur gone nuclear. Of course, they already know it, but they've pulled the national security curtain down so n.o.body else does. We could do a press conference on the steps of the Capitol that would set the place on fire..."

"No thanks."

"Then I'm afraid you're condemning them to some terribly boring stuff at tomorrow's hearing."

"Go as you are, and I'm sure they'll be all ears, and eyes," I tell her.

"Yes, but the topic," she says. "The future threat of aging precision weapons. It sounds like the surgeon general's warning on the side of a box of v.i.a.g.r.a."

"It does, doesn't it?"

"Put another way," she says, "does the lack of collateral damage really matter when a h.e.l.lfire missile takes out the Oval Office?"

"Well, that should get the attention of the Secret Service," I tell her.

"The last time I looked, they didn't have a seat either in the House or the Senate," she says. "Did you ever wonder if the man who invented the stick thought for a moment what would happen when somebody else got his hands on the fabulous new weapon and beat him with it?"

"You mean Igor-the-red-a.s.s?"

She laughs and toasts me with her gla.s.s. "To Igor, whose descendants now sit in Congress," says Joselyn.

"Do you testify often?"

"Only when I have to. Just enough to keep my hand in, and let them know we're still around. We don't have money to throw into the campaign flames, so unless we're carried along on a tidal wave like 9/11 no one pays much attention. Since the war in Iraq, the press has turned WMD into a four-letter word. The topic is no longer politically chic. So until somebody ignites one over the Capitol Building n.o.body wants to pay attention. A dozen rogue regimes around the world are now making nuclear bombs and what's the att.i.tude of the West? 'If you have to do it, fine, just shut up and do it quietly.'"

I steal a glance at my watch.

"Your partner's running late. Is he in court?" she says.

"No. He's in the office. Maybe I should run over and get him."

"Oh, why do that?" She blocks me with her high-heeled foot from across the table. "We can just sit here and talk. I'm in no hurry. Have another drink," she tells me.

"Plying me with liquor will do you no good."

"And why is that?"

"I'm a cheap drunk. I'll just pa.s.s out all over you."

"Yes, but do you talk in your sleep?" she says.

I laugh. "I don't know."

"And how can that be?"

"Do you hear yourself when you talk in your sleep?"

"That lonely, is it?" she says.

"As much as I hate to admit it, it's been a while since I've had any witnesses in a position to tell me."

"I see." She stares at me from piercing blue eyes, her parted, glossed lips now finished with the ice. "Is that an invitation? Or do you just want me to drive you to a sleep clinic?" There is a kind of sensual ozone in the air. I feel as if my hair is being lifted by a static charge waiting for the bolt of lightning to strike me somewhere farther down.

I take a sip of gin to cool off before I stammer around a little the way men often do when they are frontally accosted by a beautiful woman. I don't deny the urge. Instead I say: "What difference does it make? You have a flight. And I draw the line at sleep experiments in the backseat of my car."

"There's always another airplane," she says. "And I noticed a beautiful hotel just across the street."

"What about your testimony tomorrow?"

"I suppose we could talk about precision weapons if you like. But I was thinking we could do some other things."

I give her a smirk.

"There are more important things than Congressional hearings."

"Yes, but my ego isn't sufficiently inflated to think that I'm one of them."

"Don't sell yourself short," she says. "You have to remember that there is always the quality of your pillow talk."

"Ah, there you go spoiling the moment. And I thought you wanted me for my body."

"How could I possibly know when I haven't seen it yet?" She ups the ante just as Harry comes breezing through the door.

"Sorry I'm late."

"Go away," I tell him.

He looks at me and then turns behind him to see Joselyn seated in the booth. "Am I interrupting something?"

"Nothing important," she tells him. "Your partner was just having a dream. Nothing a towel can't fix. We haven't met." She reaches out and takes Harry's hand, brus.h.i.+ng her fingernails along the inside of his palm. "I'm Joselyn Cole. You must be Mr. Hinds."

Harry looks at her over the top of his reading gla.s.ses for a better appraisal before he grabs the spectacles from his face and pockets them.

"Nice to meet you." Harry looks like he's been hit by a dumdum round. Still holding her hand, he gives her the big, broad grin as she slides to the back of the curved booth to let him in.

"Joining us for lunch, that's wonderful," says Harry.

"Leave him alone. He's an old man," I tell her.

"I never discriminate on the basis of age," says Joselyn. "In fact, older is better."

"He doesn't know anything," I tell her. "Harry has only hearsay."

"So he knows what you told him," she says.

I give her a face of concession.

"That's fine, we can start with that," she says. "Besides, press conferences don't have rules of evidence."

"What's this about?" Harry slides into the booth.

"You don't want to know," I tell him.

"Let me be the judge of that." Harry is smiling at Joselyn. "Where did you two meet?"

"How about a drink?" I raise my hand and call the waitress over.

"I work undercover for the state bar. I'm a female decoy for illicit relations with clients," she tells him. "I'm wearing a wire and very little else. And you want to know how your partner and I met?"

"Sounds like entrapment to me," says Harry. "I'm game. Besides, you're not my client, and if you nailed him, I own the firm. So I'm not only old, I'm rich."

"She's pulling your leg."

"I have two of them," says Harry. "So anytime you want, just yank away." He smiles at her. Harry can be a charmer when he wants to be. Suddenly he turns a stern expression on me. "You and I have to talk. Janice told me to tell you some guy is waiting for you back at the office."

Janice is my secretary. Somebody waiting in the office catches my attention since I don't have any appointments on my calendar for this afternoon.

"Who is he?"

"I don't know who he is," says Harry, "but he's insistent. When Janice told him you might not be back for the rest of the day, he apparently planted himself in one of the chairs in the outer office and told her he'd wait."

Ever since the events in Coronado and the warning from Thorpe, I get edgy when visitors show up at the office unannounced. "What did he look like, did you see him?"

"Tall, lanky, sunny side of fifty maybe, well dressed, suit and tie, dark..." Harry's gaze rises as he talks to me. "Speak of the devil."

Before I can turn, a shadow settles across my shoulder and onto the table in front of me.

"Are you Paul Madriani?"

I look up and he is silhouetted against the bright daylight from the window behind me. The stupid things that race through your mind at a moment like this. His face has the shadowed clarity of the dark side of the moon. I find myself looking down toward his hands to see if they're packing anything.

"Who's asking?"

"My name is Bart Snyder. I think you may have known my son, James."

FOURTEEN.

Zeb Thorpe stormed into the small conference room at FBI headquarters like a man running on afterburners. "Gentlemen. Sorry to be so late." He had been racing all day through a series of meetings. This one had been dropped on his calendar at the last minute in a telephone call from his a.s.sistant, Ray Zink, with no time to talk-only a message that it was urgent.

"I take it everybody's here?" Besides Zink there were only two others present, an air force officer sporting bra.s.s birds on the epaulets of his dress jacket, and another man, a civilian Thorpe didn't recognize.

He moved at speed toward the head of the table, took his seat, and opened the file in front of him. Thorpe started to scan the file as he talked.

"Hope this won't take too long. I've got a dinner meeting with the director in a little over an hour. And somehow between here and there I have to struggle into a tux that's down in my car." He looked at a photograph in the file, a large military transport plane parked on a tarmac, its cargo ramp down and the rear bay open. "You want to do introductions or should we just get started?"

"Greg Sanchez, National Security Agency." This from the man in the suit at the other end of the table. He looked to be in his early thirties, with short dark hair and intense eyes.

NSA operated out of a set of gla.s.s towers at Fort Meade, in Maryland.

"I don't think we've met before. What division at NSA?"