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“You were hiking, tried to jump across a creek and tore your MCL,” Kaiser said. “Pull down your pant leg and walk around.”
Letty did; and she limped. Couldn’t help herself. “That’s really annoying.”
“I imagine being a gimp is annoying,” Kaiser said. “But it gets you something you need.”
“That would be?”
“A cane,” Kaiser said. “A nonobvious weapon... and non-lethal, if you need it to be nonlethal.”
“I’m not that good with a stick yet...”
“You’re good enough. Way good enough. You won’t be stick-fighting somebody like me,” Kaiser said. He’d been giving her lessons. “You’ll be beating some IT nerd over the head.”
“I’ll think about it,” she said.
“I’ll be really disappointed if you don’t do it,” Kaiser said, settling back on his heels. “Undercover... you might not be able to keep your gun. But who’s going to take a cane away from a gimp? A girl-gimp?”
“I suppose you’ve got the perfect stick,” Letty said. Then, “Wait: you were hoping I’d ask.”
“Exactly.” He went back to his bedroom, and Letty could hear him rummaging around. A moment later, he came back with a dark brown wooden cane with knobs along its length and a right-angled steel grip that looked like an ice-climbing pick.
“Blackthorn,” he said, running his finger down its bumpy length. “Bought it in London. Hit somebody with the stick hard enough, you’ll break his arm or kneecap, crack his skull. Hit him with the grip, either the blunt end or the point, you’ll kill him. Heavy as a hammer, with a three-foot handle.”
“Killing is easier with a gun,” Letty said.
“Sure. If you don’t have to drive back to your hotel to get it.”
Three
When Letty limped into the Homeland Security briefing room the morning after the interview at Colles’s office, she found Mary Johnson talking with a fiftyish man. He was thin as a pencil, wearing rimless glasses over a dry, narrow face, and a forest-green suit that Robin Hood might have envied; a bystander might have thought him an Ivy League professor of some archaic and useless subject near the top of an ivory tower.
A younger man, thirtysomething and bulky, with dark loops under his eyes, and thick black hair so heavily gelled that it glittered under the overhead lights, was slumped in a plastic chair behind the thin man.
The younger man—Letty hoped he wasn’t her new partner but suspected that he was—looked at her with a nearsighted squint. He was in shirtsleeves, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, showingtattoos on both arms. As she walked by him to an empty chair, she picked up the musky scent of a men’s cologne.
Greet sat in a corner with her arms crossed, and when she looked at Letty, her eyes drifted upward in an unspoken “might be bullshit” signal.
Letty nodded at Greet and said “Hello” to Johnson, who was wearing either the same, or a duplicate of, the blue suit she’d been wearing the day before.
Johnson took in the cane and asked, “Letty... Oh, God, you didn’t hurt yourself?”
“I’m a temporary gimp for undercover purposes,” Letty said, and the thin man smiled. Johnson nodded and waved a finger at the two men. “Richard Taylor in the suit, and Rod Baxter, who you’ll be working with.”
From her corner, Greet said, “If we decide to go ahead with it.”
Johnson said, “That’s already been decided, Ms. Greet. We have no time to argue about it. No time.”
“Letty’s never had undercover training,” Greet said. “Yet you expect her to spend several days and maybe weeks in close contact with...”
“Yes, we do,” Johnson snapped. “She has a number of desirable characteristics that are nearly impossible to find in a government employee. For one thing, she looks far too young to be a threat to Ordinary People. And we know she’s smart and actually did spend some time undercover at Pershing.”
“Yeah, about fifteen minutes,” Greet said.
Baxter spoke up. “I’d hoped I’d have a little more cover than a girl with a limp. Like somebody said, Ordinary People could be dangerous.”
From the back of the room, Billy Greet muttered, “Makes my face hurt.”
Baxter turned his head to look back at Greet. “I’m not being sexist, if that’s what you think. She’s pretty, but not particularly...” He paused, looked at Letty, and continued, “prepossessing. If somebody gave us serious trouble...”
