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“I’ve eaten their shitty food, I’ve had to put up with their anti-Semitic remarks, their bigotry, the way they treat their wives and daughters…and now when I’ve finally earned their trust…you pull the plug.”
“It wasn’t me. It came down from the top.”
“Well, fuck that.”
Nash turned and looked his man in the eye. “Lower your voice, and that’s an order.”
The man sat back and took a frustrated breath. After a moment he said, “I’m going to kill someone.”
Everybody is losing their mind, Nash thought. “No you’re not,” he said to the man. “You’re going to casually tell one of them that your mom is sick and you have to go back to Atlanta. Then you are going to pack up and lie low until I say different.”
“I can’t believe this is happening.”
“Believe it. Shut it down, and I mean yesterday.”
“I can’t.”
Nash looked at the young former Army Ranger and said, “You can and you will.”
“I’m too close,” the man said, shaking his head.
Nash was getting mad. There wasn’t a single one of them in the Clandestine Service who didn’t have a healthy streak of insubordination in them, but this was pushing it.
Lowering his newspaper, Nash gave up the pretense of a clandestine meeting and in a very clear voice said, “I am giving you a direct order to shut it down. Do you understand me?”
The man thought about it for a second. Someone entered the coffee shop and his eyes darted to the motion at the front door. He flipped his newspaper back up and said, “Something started happening a few days ago.”
“Don’t do this.”
“Do what?”
“Start making shit up.”
“I’m not. Some boxes arrived.”
“Big deal,” Nash said, suddenly bored. He needed to end this thing and get his ass into the office. “The place must get three or four deliveries a day.”
“True, but this delivery didn’t come during normal hours.”
“Come on,” Nash said in a tired voice. “You’re clutching at straws.”
“Just hear me out for a second. The boxes arrived during evening prayer two days ago. They never do shit during evening prayer except pray. Six of the younger more radical guys weren’t around, so I snuck out to see what they were up to.”
“And?”
“I saw them carrying these boxes down to the basement.”
“What’s in the boxes?”
“I don’t know. They put them in a storage room and put a couple new padlocks on the door.”
“That’s awfully thin.”
“Just give me forty-eight hours. I’ve given you a year of my life. You can give me forty-eight hours.”
Nash grabbed his coffee and took a sip while he thought about it. The truth was that only two people other than himself knew the real identity of the man sitting next to him and they weren’t about to run to the FBI.
While Nash was thinking about it the man asked, “Did you ever get a photo of the guy I told you about?”
