THE FISH was pretty good. Jack tried the rockfish, the striped bass of the Chesapeake Bay. Brian opted for the salmon, and Dominic the crusted sea perch. Brian had chosen the wine, a French white from the Loire Valley.
“So, how the hell did you get here?” Dominic asked his cousin.
“I looked around, and this place interested me. So, I looked into it, and the more I found out, the less I could figure out. So, I came over and talked to Gerry, and I talked my way into a job.”
“Doing what?”
“They call it analysis. It’s more like mind reading. One guy in particular. Arabian name, plays with money in London. Mainly family money, dicks around with it, mainly trying to protect his father’s pile it’s a nice pile,” Jack assured his companions. “He trades real estate. Nice way to preserve capital. The London market isn’t going down anytime soon. The Duke of Westminster is one of the richest guys in the world. He owns most of central London. Our little friend is emulating His Grace.”
“What else?”
“What else is that he’s fed money into a certain bank account that’s the source of payment for a bunch of Visa cards, four of whose owners you guys met yesterday.” It wasn’t a completed circle yet, but that wouldn’t take the FBI much longer to close it up tight. “He also talked in his e-mails about the ‘wonderful events’ of yesterday.”
“How did you get access to his e-mails?” Dominic asked.
“I can’t say. You’ll have to get that from somebody else.”
“About ten miles that way, I bet,” Dominic said, pointing northeast. The spook community tended to work on lines that were ordinarily forbidden to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In any case, Cousin Jack just maintained a fairly blank look that would not have won him any money at a high-stakes poker table.
“So, he funds bad guys?” Brian asked.
“Correct.”
“That does not make him a good guy,” Brian developed the thought a little further.
“Probably not,” Junior agreed.
“Maybe we’ll meet him. What else can you tell us?” Brian continued.
“Expensive place, a town house on Berkeley Square—nice part of London, couple of blocks from the U.S. Embassy. Likes to use whores for his sexual recreation. He especially likes one girl named Rosalie Parker. The British Security Service keeps an eye on him, and they regularly debrief his main squeeze—the Parker girl. He pays her top dollar, in cash. Miss Parker is supposed to be popular with rich people. I suppose she slings it pretty good,” Jack added with distaste. “There’s a new photo on the computer file. He’s about our age, olive complexion, a sort of beard—the kind a guy might have to look sexy, you know? Drives an Aston Martin. Hot car. Usually goes around London in cabs, though. He doesn’t have a place in the country, but he takes country trips on weekends to getaway hotels, mostly with Miss Parker or another rent-a-broad. Works downtown in the financial district. Has an office in the Lloyd’s of London building—third floor, I think. He makes three or four trades per week. Mainly, I think he just sits there and watches the TV and stock tickers, reads the papers, stuff like that.”
“So, he’s a spoiled rich kid who wants some excitement in his life?” Dominic summarized.
“Correct. Except maybe he likes to go out and play in the traffic.”
“That’s dangerous, Jack,” Brian pointed out. “It could even get somebody Excedrin Headache number three-five-six.” Brian was wearing his game face, in anticipation of meeting the guy who had financed the death of David Prentiss.
And suddenly Jack thought that Miss Rosalie Parker of London might not be getting all that many more Louis Vuitton bags. Well, she probably had a nice retirement plan already arranged if she was as smart as the Security Service and Special Branch thought she was.
“How’s your dad doing?” Dominic asked.
“Writing his memoirs,” Jack answered. “I wonder how much he’ll be able to put in? You know, even Mom doesn’t know much about what he did at CIA, and the little bit I know—well, there’s a lot of stuff he can’t write about. Even the things that are sort of out in the public eye, he can’t confirm they really happened.”
“Like getting the head of the KGB to defect. That’s gotta be some story. That guy’s been on TV I guess he’s still pissed at your dad for keeping him from taking the Soviet Union over. Probably thinks he could have saved it.”
“Maybe so. Dad has a lot of secrets, all right. So do some of his pals from the Agency. One guy in particular, named Clark. Scary guy, but him and Dad are pretty tight. I think he’s in England now, boss of that new secret counterterrorism bunch that the press talks about every year or so, the ‘men of black,’ they call ’em.”
“They’re real,” Brian said. “Out at Hereford in Wales. They’re not that secret. The senior guys from Force Recon have been out there to train with ’em. Never been there myself, but I know two guys who have. Them and the Brit SAS. They’re serious troops.”
“How far inside were you, Aldo?” his brother asked.
“Hey, the special-operations community is pretty tight. We cross-train, share new equipment and stuff. Most important part is when we sit down with beers and share war stories. Everybody has a different way of looking at problems, and, you know, sometimes the other guy has a better idea than you have. The Rainbow team—that’s the ‘men of black’ the newsies talk about—they’re very smart, but they’ve learned a thing or two from us over the years. Thing is, they’re smart enough to listen to new ideas. The boss man, this Clark guy, he’s supposed to be very smart.”
“He is. I’ve met him. Dad thinks he’s the cat’s ass.” He paused before going on. “Hendley knows him, too. Why he isn’t here, I don’t know. I asked the first day I came here. Maybe because he’s too old.”
“He’s a shooter?”
“I asked Dad once. Dad said he couldn’t say. That’s how he says yes. I guess I caught him at a weak moment. Funny thing about Dad, he can’t lie worth a damn.”
“I guess that’s why he loved being President so much.”
“Yeah, I think that’s the main reason he quit. He figured Uncle Robby could handle it better than he did.”
“Until that cracker bastard wasted his ass,” Dominic observed. The shooter, one Duane Farmer, was currently sitting on death row in Mississippi. “The last of the Klan,” the newspapers called him, and so he was, at age sixty-eight, just a damned-by-everybody bigot who could not abide the thought of a black President, and had used his grandfather’s World War One revolver to make it so.
“That was bad,” John Patrick Ryan, Jr., agreed. “You know, except for him, I wouldn’t have been born. It’s a big family story. Uncle Robby’s version of it was pretty good. He loved telling stories. Him and Dad were pretty tight. After Robby got wasted, the political pukes were running around in circles, some of them wanted Dad to pick up the flag again, like, but he didn’t do it, and so, I guess, he helped that Kealty guy get elected. Dad can’t stand him. That’s the other thing he never learned, how to be nice to people he hates. He just didn’t like living at the White House very much.”
“He was good at it, being President,” Dominic thought.
“You tell him that. Mom didn’t mind leaving, either. That First Lady stuff wrecked her doctor work, and she really hated what it did with Kyle and Katie. You know that old saying, the most dangerous place in the world is between a mom and her kids? It’s for real, guys. Only time I ever saw her lose her temper—Dad does that a lot more than Mom does—was when somebody told her that her official duties required her not to go to Kyle’s pageant at his day care center. Jeez, she really came unglued. Anyway, the nannies helped—and the newspeople hammered her about that, how it wasn’t American and all that. You know, if anybody had ever taken a picture of Dad taking a piss, I bet someone would have said he wasn’t doing it right.”
“That’s what critics are for, to tell you how much smarter they are than the person they’re criticizing.”
“In the Bureau, Aldo, they’re called lawyers, or the Office of Professional Responsibility,” Dominic informed the table. “They have their sense of humor surgically removed before they join up.”
“The Marines have reporters, too—and I bet not one of them ever went through boot camp.” At least the guys who worked in the IG had been through the Basic School.
“I guess we should cheer up,” Dominic announced, holding up his wineglass. “Ain’t nobody going to criticize us.”