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.
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
