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“Yeah. Soon as my guy gets a couple sandwiches from the deli.”
“Listen, we appreciate your shout-out about the grenades,” Jackson said. “Our men could have gotten dinged up pretty bad. As it was, it’s all cuts and bruises. But we, you know, appreciate it. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. About the guy I shot up there...”
“He’s a mess, but he won’t die. One of the ambulance EMTs said it looks like you hit the ball joint, so he’ll probably need a hip replacement. He won’t be running anywhere soon.”
“Shouldn’t throw grenades at people. I was kinda surprised that the grenades didn’t do more damage than they did.”
One of the agents listening to their conversation said, “Grenades are heavy. You have to throw them, so they can’t be too powerful, or they’d kill the thrower. They’re lethal out to five meters or so, maybe twenty feet, and maybe thirty feet if you’re standing there in a tee-shirt looking at it, but once you’re outside of that, especially if you can get down or behind something, or you can tuck into your armor, you’ll probably be okay.”
“Scared the heck out of me,” Jackson said. “When I heard them go off, I thought, oh boy, here we go...”
“Good to know about grenades, though,” Letty said. “Interesting.”
“Long as you’re pitching and not receiving,” Jackson said. And, “You best take off. The NSA lady said she wanted to keep your face out of sight, so...”
“I’m gone,” Letty said.
Twelve
Letty had to wait in the car for five minutes, until Baxter came out of the deli with a sack of sandwiches and a root beer. Hers was a grilled chicken on a ciabatta roll, with green pepper sauce that set her mouth on fire. “This is fuckin’ great,” she said, chewing as they drove out to the 405 freeway. “I may hire you as my culinary advisor.”
“I’d be happy to do it, and ask only a modest compensation,” Baxter said.
On the road, Letty told Baxter about her conversation with Nowak, and the restrictions on what they were allowed to disclose.
“That’s guaranteed to piss off somebody,” Baxter said. “The good thing is, the urination will be way above our pay grade.”
Baxter told Letty that while sitting in the car, waiting for something to happen, he’d checked the CDs and flash drives they’dtaken from Barron’s house, and they were all encrypted. “I doubt that anyone could crack them, but we might as well send them to Delores now, instead of later. Maybe they could do something with them back at the Fort.”
“We won’t have to send them to her—she’ll be here in a few hours, along with Colles.”
“Ah, crap. The arrival of the suits is not a good sign. For anything.”
The traffic on the 405wasn’t bad enough to slow them, and the FBI headquarters building on Wilshire Boulevard was basically right off the freeway. They were directed to a surface parking lot and escorted to a conference room where three functionaries waited, and as Letty and Baxter sat down, a court stenographer arrived with her tape recorder and a stenotype machine.
One of the bureaucrats opened with “We understand that you both are working with the Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Agency. We nevertheless need a detailed recounting of exactly how you encountered Loren Barron and Brianna Wolfe, and how you discovered they’d been murdered...”
“Are you on that scene?” Letty asked. “Barron’s house?”
“Yes. We are, along with LAPD Special Operations. Now, let’s start with how you met Loren Barron and Brianna Wolfe...”
“We can’t tell you everything,” Letty began, and she recited the restrictions imposed by Delores Nowak. The FBI bureaucrats said those restrictions were not acceptable and if necessary, they would get a subpoena to require the disclosure.
“That’s between people way above all of our pay grades,” Baxter said, repeating himself. “Why don’t you ask us about the obviouslyrelevant stuff, like how we began following Barron and then what happened? We can tell you everything right up to when you guys killed a couple of people and we didn’t.”
“And if you’re gonna take my gun, give me a new one,” Letty added.
The FBI bureaucrats—some of them experienced counterespionage agents—were stubbornly insistent about getting more information than Letty or Baxter were willing to give up.
“Weare the agency tracking Russians in the U.S., not Homeland or the NSA,” one of them said, angrily. “We need to know what the hell is going on here...”
Baxter: “We appreciate that, but I appreciate my job more and I’ll get my ass fired if I tell you more than I’m authorized to. It’s top secret and compartmented. I get you’re all cleared to top secret butnotto the compartmented information.”
When they looked at Letty, she added, “What Rod said. The people you need to talk to will be here in a few hours, and I’ll tell you—what we know won’t help you in a few hours. Without breaking out any secrets, I can tell you that we’re pretty much at the end of the line of what we know.”
After a moment, she added, “Where’s my replacement gun?”
