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“What if I was assigned to you by the very people you’re hiding from? What if I report all this?”
“Are you spying on me?”
“No.”
“Then stop trying to pick a fight with me. How’s your Farsi?”
“Rusty. I didn’t work with Farsi speakers in Afghanistan.”
“Well, start thinking in Farsi, because that’s what we use to converse when we get together in public places.”
“Right now I’m barely thinking in English.”
“Pardon me while I strip some cash out of my accounts.”
They walked around Arlington, pulling max amounts out of five different accounts. “How paranoid are you, exactly?” asked Cole.
Malich handed him two hundred dollars. “You forget the line of work I was in and the kind of assignments I had. Always a chance I’d have to go to ground.”
“So do you have a car with false registration hidden here in Arlington?”
“No such luck. I wasn’t expecting to be on foot after the assassination of the President.”
“Are we really walking all the way to your house?”
“I’d be surprised if I ever see that house again,” said Malich. He sounded quite calm about it. He looked at his watch. “It stopped being my home about a minute ago, when Cessy and the kids left it.”
“So where are we going?”
“Back to the Pentagon,” said Malich. “On the Metro, if it’s running again on this side of the river.”
“Isn’t that one of the places they’ll look for you?”
“I have to debrief,” said Malich. “So do you. They’ve got to know, on the record, exactly what happened. Most people in the Pentagon aren’t in on the conspiracy. The good guys need to be able to fight, so they need information. Besides, if we go to the Pentagon and choose who to talk to, then some good people will know we’re there. We won’t just disappear.”
Cole was suddenly aware of how uncomfortable his feet were. “Sure wish I’d known to wear different shoes today.”
“And be out of uniform?” asked Malich. “Shame on you, soldier.”
“I want to be in boots and camo,” said Cole. “I want some bad guys to shoot at.”
“So far today, we’re the only ones who got to do that,” said Malich.
“Ten seconds too late,” said Cole.
“I try not to think of every shot that missed,” said Malich. “Every step I might have been able to run a little faster.”
“And if I’d driven faster—”
“Then we might have had to stop and explain things to some District cop and then we’d have gotten there even later,” said Malich. “What happened, happened.”
“And who we shoot at next, other people get to decide.”
“Thank God for that,” said Malich. “Thank God we live in a country where the soldiers don’t have that burden, too.”
SIX
WONK
