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Then they waited. But not for long.
As clusterfucks went, this one was epic; bureaucrats would be telling the story to their grandchildren.
Twenty-Eight
Two months later:
A slate-colored rain slashed down sideways, obscuring the shrines of empire arrayed around her. Back down Constitution Avenue, the Washington Monument had been a humble white stump, its peak invisible in the lowering gray clouds.
The air smelled good and clean, except for the sidewalk worms: not bad for late April, a sign that spring had arrived.
The rain had been coming down, more or less steadily, for two days, and on the Virginia side of the Potomac, a sodden pro-Ukraine protest, drenched marchers with their blue-and-yellow flags, stomped resolutely toward the bridge over the river, where a platoon of wet cops waited.
Letty was wearing a red-and-white rainsuit designed for sailing, over jeans and a cable-knit sweater, and was dry from her chin to her ankles and from her eyebrows up, and warm. She’d walked across the Potomac from Arlington, which had seemed like a goodidea at the time, but now she was tired of hearing the storm beat against her hood, the spray droplets trickling across her face.
The shootouts in Californiahad created a monthlong bureaucratic bun fight, with ramifications still rattling around the intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. The essential problem was that a top secret operation, which was still top secret, had gone public. The FBI, the DHS, the CIA, the NSA, and the California Bureau of Investigation all had fingers in the pie.
The feds were trying to elbow the local authorities out of the case, and it looked as though they would succeed. With the eyes on the federal investigation going all the way to the top, Colles had suggested to Letty, Baxter, Cartwright, and the Ladies that they no longer had to worry about the outcome.
Letty wasn’t sure she believed that, because even one poorly placed bureaucrat could cause trouble. On the other hand, the people who younever,everwanted to cross seemed to be on her side.
And it was all classified top secret.
Arseny Stepashin was nowhere to be found. Listening devices both inside and outside a Russian spy center in San Diego picked up the name, and a hint that he’d flown out of Los Angeles and was now in Moscow.
The report was incorrect; he and Victoria, now with new names and passports, were relaxing in the sunshine of the Sunshine State: Miami, to be precise, where they fit right in. Step was in talks with Wesley Bunne (Bob) and Sharon Pecker (Sue) about the possibility of funding a new software enterprise. They all agreed it looked promising.
Boyadjian, Lawrence, and Martin had been turned upside down by the FBI, but there’d be no prosecution, for lack of cooperatingwitnesses, and because the government really didn’t want to deal with defense attorneys’ demands for disclosure. Besides, it was all top secret.
Longstreet, a monthafter the shooting, was still in physical therapy, but didn’t think she needed it anymore. She was sanguine about her scar and pleased with her kill-shot outside the motel. She didn’t talk about it with the Ladies, but they all knew about it, because Letty and Cartwright told them, despite the fact that her wounds, and the source of them, were classified. A little extra cachet for the Lady.
Baxter had driven his truck back to Maryland. He hadn’t flown, because they wouldn’t have let him fly with a Mini and six magazines, which he wanted to keep. Back home, he also bought a Beretta 92 and started working out at a gun range. He’d never be in a class with Letty, Cartwright, Longstreet, or Kaiser, but he wasn’t bad at it. He knew machines and geometry, and shooting was machines and geometry.
His NSA career had gotten a boost—word about the motel shooting had gotten around, and he was looked upon with the kind of respect that only gunfighters get. Although he was doing well, he was also talking to Cartwright about her security service concept. If it got off the ground, she could use a competent hacker with government connections...
So he was happy, though he hadn’t lost any weight, and occasionally, in the night, saw in his mind’s eye a blood-soaked, bullet-riddled body in a motel doorway.
George Hewitt sold his six boxes of stolen Intel chips to a dealer in Austin, Texas, for a price that was way too low, but enough to realize his dream of starting a horse motel, catering to horse transporttrailers, off I-40 near Elk City, Oklahoma. The business would thrive from the start, and he would later be welcomed into the Elk City Golf and Country Club.
Daniel Delph’s body, buried in the Mojave, would never be found.
So Letty was cruisingthrough the rain on a cool spring morning, heading for work, not thinking about much except that the rain had become increasingly annoying. Acting on impulse, she ducked into the Smithsonian Institution to get out of the downpour. No plans to go to the Smithsonian, no plans to look at anything in particular. The Smithsonian was the closest open door and that was good enough.
The metal detector at the Smithsonian’s door beeped as she went through. Letty already had her credentials case in her hand with the federal carry permit and Senate ID. She handed it to the door guard as she folded down her hood. The guard looked at both documents, then at her, and at the documents again, and asked, “Are you sure you’re old enough for this?”
“I’m sure,” Letty said.
A supervisor had come over. He looked at the docs, raised his eyebrows, took a closer look at her and said, “Letty Davenport. You’re the young woman on the bridge.”
“Yes. If we’re talking about the Pershing Bridge.”
“She’s good,” the supervisor said to the guard.
A thoroughly soaked man, folding an inadequate umbrella, was standing past the guards, looking at her, as he shook himself like a dog.
He had unkempt reddish-brown hair, a three-day beard, wore khaki-colored canvas shorts and hiking boots with the top of thesocks turned down. Steel-rimmed glasses spattered with drizzle. A long-sleeved overshirt, sleeves rolled to his elbows, was worn open to reveal a John Lee Hooker tee-shirt. Tiny beads of water clung to his forearm and lower-leg hair. He was square, rather than lanky, like SpongeBob SquarePants, and not unlike Able in form.
He sort of looked, Letty thought, like Theodore Roosevelt.
