Death Echo

49

DAY FOUR

WASHINGTON, D.C.

9:10 P.M.

The front door closed behind Timothy Harrow with a weighty restraint that whispered of money. As he walked down the echoing marble foyer, he pulled off his suit coat, yanked his tie loose, looked at the muted gleam of bottles in the home bar, and sighed.

He’d rather have a woman. Unfortunately, his wife-soon to be ex-wife-had discovered that sometimes any woman would do for him. It wasn’t anything against her, certainly nothing personal. It was just the way he was.

He looked around the suburban home that had become a house with the divorce decree and decided all over again that his career was a relationship killer. He should have stuck with serial affairs. Or found a wife who understood the demands of his career. Marrying a beautiful, ambitious lawyer had been a head-banging mistake, one he’d be making payments on for the rest of his life. Unless the clever bitch remarried.

And speaking of clever bitches…

He picked his cell phone off the table and looked at his contacts, searching for the personal number of his FBI contact. Information or a hookup, either would be fine with him. Both would be better. But before he could find the number, someone knocked at the front door.

Harrow locked and set aside the phone before he pulled out the drawer in the end table by his chair, saw that his pistol was in its usual place, and picked it up. He checked the load and flicked the safety off. Holding the weapon more or less out of sight along his right leg, he went to the security screen at the end of the foyer leading to the front door.

The surveillance camera showed Duke standing at the front door, but far enough back to make ID easy. What everyone hoped would be the final heat wave of the year had left Duke’s expensive suit wrinkled and his bald head sweating in the porch light.

He was alone. Even his driver-bodyguard wasn’t in sight. Suddenly the Scotch looked more likely to Harrow than a hookup. With a subdued curse, he opened the door and let his boss into the mechanically cooled air of the house.

“You look like you could use a drink,” Harrow said.

Duke ran a palm over his head. “You alone?”

“Yes.” Harrow put the safety on his pistol and led the way to the living room.

“Nice place,” Duke said.

“It will be Pam’s in a few weeks.” The end table drawer shut with emphasis.

Duke grunted. “Yeah, she’s a shark.”

“And a bitch. You want some bourbon?”

“No time.”

“What’s up?” Meaning: What’s too hot to talk about over the phone?

“I don’t know.”

Harrow didn’t ask any more. Whether Duke didn’t, wouldn’t, or couldn’t share wasn’t the point. The point was that something had sent a jolt through intelligence networks, a shot hot enough to burn some very important butts.

“How can I help?” Harrow asked.

It was the question that had taken him very near the top of the pyramid at an age when most people were still wondering what they would do when they grew up.

“One of Shurik Temuri’s aliases entered Canada through Blaine,” Duke said. “That’s on the northern border of Washington State.”

Harrow made a sound that said he was paying attention.

“By the time we got someone on Temuri, he’d ditched the rental. We’re going through the records of nearby car rentals as fast as we can get to them, but it will take time. We don’t have time.”

The Scotch looked more like nectar with every word Harrow’s boss spoke.

“Is there anything I’ve missed in Temuri’s file?” Harrow asked carefully.

“No.”

“But we’re upset that he’s in Canada.”

“Yes. He’s on our ticket, now,” Duke said.

Says who? Harrow thought. Nobody told me about an op, especially good old Duke.

Harrow didn’t say anything out loud, just waited, hoping his boss would say something useful.

Duke was an old hand at the silence game.

Harrow gave up and asked, “What’s the op?”

“It’s an old sting that went south,” Duke said. “A few years back, a political golden-boy decided that it would be useful to catch a well-connected Russian dirty in the U.S.”

It was a time-honored way to recruit double agents. Nothing new. Certainly nothing to send Harrow’s boss roaming wealthy D.C. suburbs when he should be home having a drink.

“What was the contraband?” Harrow asked.

“A hundred million in counterfeit cash.”

Harrow didn’t bother to hide his surprise. “That’s a lot of dirty to set someone up with. A million would have been more than enough.”

Duke shrugged. “It wasn’t my op. It was political from the get-go. Politicians don’t notice a million here or there. Not anymore. To make a splash in the headlines you need a splashy amount of money, plus the threat of levering a corner of the U.S. economy off the rails, which would yank the rest of the economy down into the train wreck, one financial sector at a time. People are still goosey about 2008.”

“Old news.”

“Not to the politicians who were voted out and went back to mowing lawns for a living,” Duke said. “They won’t forget until they die. Neither will their children. Hell, the last thing my grandpa said to me was ‘Don’t trust banks or the stock market. Don’t forget the Great Depression.’ Turns out he had wads of cash buried in the rose garden.”

Harrow’s interest in Scotch turned into the stabbing of a migraine beginning behind his right eye.

“Anyway,” Duke said, “Temuri somehow made off with the really good-looking bad cash our side had used to set up the sting. Temuri is getting ready to run it into the U.S.”

This just gets better and better, Harrow thought unhappily, heading toward a grade-A cluster.

He rubbed his right eyelid and asked bluntly, “Is Emma Cross a willing or unwilling participant in all this?”

“Unknown. Personally, I suspect she’s former Agency with an ax to grind. Think how bad we’ll look if it’s revealed that we helped a foreign national get hold of a hundred million in good-looking fake cash.”

“I thought this was a political ploy, not one of our ops.”

Duke gave him a disgusted look. “It’s all politics, boy. Thought you’d figured that out by now.”

Harrow grimaced. “So do you want the bad money or Temuri or Emma Cross?”

“All three would be gravy.”

“What’s the meat?”

“Get that money any way you can,” Duke said. “Destroy it. No money, no headlines. No headlines, everyone goes back to playing in their own national sandbox.”

“Where’s the cash?”

“Hidden aboard a yacht called Blackbird, which is somewhere in British Columbia. Campbell River is what we were told. Somebody up the line has a locator on the boat and is keeping a watch.”

“How soon can you get me there with a good, quiet team?” Harrow asked.

“The team is already in place. As soon as the storm along Vancouver’s east coast dies down, we’ll fly you on recon. Once you ID the boat, you get the team and find a way to take the boat. Then you find the money, destroy it, and everybody goes home. Questions?”

“Are you worried about witnesses?”

“Go in soft,” Harrow said. “No need to worry. And if you go in hard…”

Shoot, shovel, shut up. Everybody’s favorite fallback solution when money and threats don’t work.

Harrow’s right eyeball felt like it was being gouged out of its socket. “Does Canada know?” he asked.

“No.”

“Am I using my own name?”

“She’s going to recognize you anyway, right?” Duke asked.

The headache shot through Harrow’s right eye socket and along the back of his skull. It didn’t take a bureaucratic genius to see that he’d been nominated the sacrificial goat in this game of tin gods.

“The team I got you is really good,” Duke said. “They won’t talk no matter what goes down.”

Harrow just looked at him.

“Shit.” Duke sighed. “I’m sorry. I tried to take it myself. They said no and then switched my bodyguard. I’m locked down.” He looked at his watch. “In two minutes my new ‘bodyguards’ will drag my ass out of here. I’ll do everything I can to help you. I’m sorry, Tim. Really sorry.”

So was Harrow.