AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Letty had gotten luckyand had been adopted by the Minnesota cop who’d investigated her mother’s murder, during a particularly brutal winter in the Red River Valley. The cop was rich, and she’d lived a privileged life as a teenager, before going to Stanford.
Cartwright had had no such help. She’d managed to get a high school equivalency degree, enlisted in the Army, done well, used her Army benefits to enroll at the University of Texas, returned tothe Army as an intelligence officer, and from there migrated to the Unspecified Agency.
“I know of another woman, same kind of Texas background, became a domestic terrorist. I’ll kill her sooner or later, if I can find her,” Letty said.
“I know who you’re talking about—that Jael woman who led the attack on Pershing,” Cartwright said. She held out her glass for Letty to clink: “Good hunting.”
They were finishingtheir third margaritas when Letty’s phone buzzed in her non-gun pocket. She pulled it out, looked at the screen.
“It’s the boss,” she told Cartwright. Senator Christopher Colles (R-Fla), was chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
She answered: “Chris?”
“Letty? How early can you get to my office?”
“Early as you.”
“I’ll see you at eight o’clock,” Colles said. “Jeans and sneakers are fine, no need to get dressed up. Actually, I don’t want you dressed up. I want you to look... road-weary. A beat-up traveler.”
“I can do that,” she said. “Am I going out of town?”
“That depends on the people we’ll be talking with. They know all about Pershing and they know about your background and they think you might fit their program. Things could get a little rough.”
“Did you invite Kaiser?”
“No. He won’t be going. We’ve got a problem that I can’t talk about on a radio, which these cell phones are. I’ll see you tomorrow. Eight o’clock sharp.”
Letty rang offand Cartwright asked, “Taking your gun with you?”
“I always take it. From the way he was talking, he thinks I might need it.” She trailed a fingernail through a wet spot on the table. “The way he was talking... you guys don’t do stuff inside the U.S., do you?”
Cartwright neither confirmed nor denied that she was with the CIA, and it had become a joke between them. “If I were in the agency you’re talking about, no, we’d generally not be allowed to do that, not on our own. If we were officially working in a consulting capacity with another law enforcement agency, like you guys, or the FBI, then we’re okay. If I were in that agency.”
“Consulting capacity? After quickly checking my federal government guide to dodges, circumventions, and evasions, that means you can do anything you fuckin’ well please,” Letty said.
“That would be correct. You up for a fourth?”
“I’ll be totally loaded, but what the heck,” Letty said. “Let’s go for it.”
“Attagirl,” Cartwright said, raising a finger to the waiter. “Nothing quite as exciting as getting drunk on your ass while angry and in possession of a dangerous weapon. Says so right in the Second Amendment, I think.”
“I’m not that angry,” Letty said.
“Yes, you are. You have been since birth. All us Ladies are angry.”
When Letty’s alarmwent off at six the next morning, it rang in her head like the bells of Notre Dame: five margaritas, not four. She stumbled through the shower, brushed her teeth, and did nothingmore to clean up. She forced herself to go for her morning run, splashing along the rain-soaked Arlington streets, before heading across the river to the District.
Senator Colles had an office suite in the old Senate Office Building, a stained lump of what Letty thought looked like an eroded limestone cliff, but with windows. She got to Colles’s office five minutes early, a hangover lurking at the back of her skull, and found Colles’s brutally efficient executive assistant, Claudia Welp, already at her desk outside the door of Colles’s inner office.
Welp was not only a bulldog, she resembled the real thing, especially with her small, suspicious eyes and the slight outward set of her lower teeth. She and Letty didn’t like each other, but under Colles’s critical eye, they had worked out a relationship that they both could live with.
When Letty walked through the door, Welp said, “Senator Colles is inside with two persons from somewhere secret. I see you took the senator’s advice on your appearance.”
Letty was wearing black jeans, fuzzy white threads at the heels; a red-and-black plaid flannel shirt, much-washed and untucked; and scuffed black cross-training shoes. Her dark hair was ruffled, unkempt, her eyes hidden behind cheap sunglasses. No makeup. “He said ‘road-weary,’ and that’s what I went for,” Letty said. To say nothing of hungover.
“You got there,” Welp said. “You’re supposed to go in.”
Letty pushed through the doorinto Colles’s private office. He was rich, and looked it: tall, tanning-bed toned, wavy gray hair, bright white teeth, as though he’d been designed for television. He’d had the office professionally painted and decorated, in tints ofartichoke green and cream, at his own expense, though it still, somehow, looked exactly like a government office.
