style="font-size:15px;"> ‘On what pretext?’ Keller asked.
‘I’d have a better chance,’ Rebecca said. ‘A social worker. Census-taker. I look less like FBI than any of you.’
‘The Patriarch hates social workers,’ Griff said.
‘She might try for the harem,’ Sprockett said. No one seemed to think that was a good idea.
‘Can you make me look like an aging yardbird?’ Griff said. ‘I already have a few tats.’
Sprockett and Keller stared at him.
‘Time’s short,’ Griff said.
‘Shit,’ Sprockett said.
Keller got on his cell phone to issue instructions. Sprockett and Rebecca, working different phones, told the agents in town to let them know when the bus arrived.
Griff took a deep breath. He hated wearing body armor—especially the new reactive stuff. It was thin but it wriggled whenever you walked. Made him feel like he was in a living straitjacket.
‘You are what you eat,’ Rebecca told him as she followed Griff down the steps to the first landing. ‘What’d you have for breakfast this morning?’
‘Flakes,’ Griff said, grinning back at her. He then paused to look through the trees. His eyes were wide and he had difficulty taking a cleansing breath. What would it be like after they suited him up?
Over the next few hours, they procured a beat-up Ford pickup, a pair of denim dungarees, a T-shirt, and three quick forearm tattoos, on top of the two he already had, courtesy of one of Cap Benson’s backup team who moonlighted as a makeup artist. Benson called up Monroe to find out the latest trends in jailhouse art. Ten minutes later, they sent him some scans. Skulls, ripped hearts, Jesus on the cross, scorpions, and chains were still big. For some reason, fat seated Buddhas were having a good run—wearing berets and cradling Tommy guns in their ample laps.
As a last touch, Rebecca shaved Griff’s head down to a stubble.
‘You look like someone I’d boot out of town,’ Benson said.
Rebecca was less sanguine. ‘Twenty to one he’ll still peg you as FBI.’
‘All right,’ Griff said. ‘Tell me what I should look for.’
Rebecca pulled a lab catalog from her travel bag.
The mile down the dirt road in the noonday sun was long and bumpy. The trip would have been pleasant, but there was no way he could know what waited at the end.
Fresh to the FBI, he had carried a folded file card he would read whenever he ventured into a dangerous situation. On that card he had printed his own little set of mantras:
You can relax and trust your training. You know you’re good.
You can count on coming out of anything alive, you’re so damned good.
Say it to yourself: I will live and prosper, and the bad guys will rue the day.
He had lost that card on the day his team had encountered the Israeli gunbot, but he knew the mantras by heart. They still had juju.
Griff steered a slow curve around a big cedar stump, found the less bouncy part of the road, slowed, then glanced down at a black lapel button, a small camera that would feed video to the team forming at the main road and the smaller team working their way through the woods from the fire tower.
Hidden in the bagginess of the dungarees was his SIG, strapped to his waist and available through a large side pocket. Someone hadn’t positioned the Velcro fasteners properly. One of them was chafing.
‘SIG’s nothing,’ he reminded himself. ‘SIG’s a peashooter.’
The gunbot…
A team of fifty agents from the FBI and the Secret Service had stormed the Muncrow Building in downtown Portland two years before, preparing to arrest ten Serbian counterfeiters. They had been met by seven guys and two women in body armor, expecting no mercy and wielding a savage array of automatic weapons—but what lay hidden in the corrugated steel shed that blocked their only exit route—what had brought down nearly all of the team within twenty seconds, cutting them into bloody gobbets—had been an Israeli Sholem-Schmidt D-7, a self-directed, insect-carriage automated cannon. None of them had never seen one outside of Popular Science magazine.
Before it had run into a brick wall, jammed, and blown its super-heated barrels into shrapnel, the D-7 had all by itself killed forty-three agents. Griff had come out of the Muncrow Building alive, not a scratch. He had had nightmares for weeks.
Still did.
And in the mess, he had lost his file card.
The last U.S. President had privately threatened to bomb the Sholem-Schmidt factory outside Haifa. That had put a strain on relations for a few months, until Israeli intelligence had discovered D-7s being exported to Iran. Mossad had finally done the job themselves, arresting the owners and workers and dismantling the factory.
Wicked old world.
The barn came into view and then the farmhouse. The farmhouse was unpainted. Griff guessed that both had been assembled from the local trees. The exterior boards had warped slightly under the weather and the cedar roof shingles were rough along their windward edges like the scales on an old lizard. The trees that had once covered the farm had been probably been downed with cross-cut handsaws. He tried to picture the long old trailer-mounted sawmill hauled in by a stoop-shouldered truck and smell the freshcut wood and hear the wik-wik-wik of the boards being planed by hand and fastened together with mortise and tenon and square blacksmithed nails.
Rustic, independent, living off the land.
He drove by one end of the apple orchard, peering under the windshield visor at the thin forest of two-by-four studs arranged through the dead-looking trees and around the barn and house. The studs were newer than other wood around the property. Between the studs, someone—presumably the Patriarch and his sons—had strung a high checkerboard of wires at a uniform height of about six feet, sometimes in parallel, sometimes wrapped around each other, like someone’s crazy idea of a network of clothes lines.
Through his side window, he saw the spring leaves on a few of the apple trees. They were streaked with pale dust. There hadn’t been more than a drizzle of rain in a couple of weeks—perhaps the leaves had been coated with fine dirt from the road. The pines around the barn and the trees all around the old farmstead had all been lightly and uniformly powdered.
Griffin pulled out his handkerchief and blew his nose. The dust might be tree pollen. He kept an eye out for any sign of surveillance within the house. The truck made a few last bumps, and then he pulled up in the middle of a dirt parking area marked by a line of four creosoted railroad ties. Griff glanced at his watch. It was eleven. The truck’s noise hadn’t brought anyone to the front door or the porch but he saw a shade flicker in a window.
The old man had structured his life to a fare-thee-well, and no doubt he had prepared for a moment like this. But for a few minutes, at least, Griff was pretty certain he could convince Chambers he was just a wayward visitor.
It
