Steve Martini - The Enemy Inside

“For now that’s just what we’re gonna do, go,” said Herman. He wanted to put distance between them and the police back in Ixtapa, who he knew would be looking for them by now, taking descriptions of the van and the men in it. If they were lucky, none of the neighbors milling in the parking lot would have thought to take down the van’s license plate number. Hopefully too scared to think about it.

Herman changed, then went to open Alex’s suitcase. As he did he noticed that one of the rounds from the machine guns had ripped a hole into the ballistic fiber of the luggage. He zipped it open and starting sorting through it to find a change of clothes for Ives. Between a pair of shorts and some denim jeans he found a spent bullet perfectly formed, as if it had been fired into a baffle by a ballistics expert trying to match up the lands and grooves. It was a.45-caliber ACP round. Not many people used them, not in silenced fully automatic pistols.

“Coming up on the airport,” said the driver. “Let’s get rid of it.” He was talking about the van. “I’ll drop you off, close as I can to one of the rental agencies.” The guy with the canteen worked his way up and back into the passenger seat. “You may have to walk a bit. I don’t want to have to do the circle through the airport. Security’s too tight. Pick up a four-by-four if you can. Something big and we’ll meet up on the road, head out to the highway, and go south. Find a place, some quiet dirt road, where we can dump this thing into the ocean.”

“No,” said Herman. “Better idea.” Herman was looking skyward through the back window of the van as he talked. “There’s a resort a few miles back on the highway. They got a parking garage, free parking, big sign on the road.”

“Saw it,” said the driver.

“Then you get the rental, let him drive.” Herman gestured toward the man in the passenger seat. “The two cars will meet up inside the garage under cover, not out on the road. We go in separately,” said Herman.

“Got it.”

She saw him leave on foot and wondered where he was going. It was the middle of the afternoon. They had already gone to lunch and returned. So Ana followed him.

Harry Hinds crossed over Orange Avenue and walked south along the front of the old hotel with its cone-shaped red roof and white siding. She wondered what her young niece and nephew would think if they saw this glittering place at night. When it was lit up, Ana thought it resembled an old-fashioned carousel.

Hinds took the curving cement walkway toward the hotel’s main entrance. Ana followed, far enough behind so that he wouldn’t notice. He might have been going to a meeting, except he wasn’t carrying a briefcase or wearing a coat.

He walked under the portico leading to the entrance and disappeared inside. Ana followed.

As she entered the lobby she lifted her sunglasses in order to see. Hinds was approaching an alcove off the main area, across from the reception counter. Under the alcove were two desks. One was empty, its plate-glass surface shimmering, not a scrap of paper on it. A woman sat at the other.

The moment she saw Hinds she stood, smiled broadly, and greeted him, not formally, but by his first name. “Harry! How have you been?” Ana couldn’t hear her, but she could read the woman’s lips.

She couldn’t make out what Hinds said. His back was to her. They chatted for a couple of seconds and the woman said, “How can I help you?”

“Oh, sure. Have a seat.”

They sat down at the desk.

Ana had her book. She plunked herself down in one of the striped club chairs against the wall in the lobby. She opened her novel and peered over the top, sharpening her listening eye.

Hinds handed the woman a folded piece of paper and they talked. “I see. I see.” The woman looked at the paper. “I see that. I can try. It’s short notice. But I’m sure we can find something. Let me take a. .” The woman swiveled around toward the computer at the side of her desk. Ana lost the half of the conversation she was able to pick up. The screen was too far away to make out anything.

The woman worked at the keyboard for two or three minutes as Hinds settled back into the chair. When she finally swung around toward him again she said, “Two coach seats. Last minute, they’re expensive.” She pulled a piece of paper from a printer under the desk, lined on it with a marker, and slid it across to him.

He looked, said something. She shook her head. And finally Hinds nodded. “Hotel’s no problem.” She said something about reservations this afternoon.

He said something else.

“Oh, sure, no problem. Feel free.” She pointed to something across the lobby. “They ask you for a room number, just tell them you talked with me,” she said.

Hinds got up and headed across the lobby, past the carpeted oak staircase, and through a door on the other side. The sign overhead read: FEDEX OFFICE CENTER. As soon as he left, the woman got up from behind the desk. For a moment Ana thought she was going to follow him, then the woman turned and disappeared under a sign that said LADIES.

Ana got up and made a beeline for the desk in the alcove, with Hinds’s note and the printout spread out on top of it. When she got there she hesitated only briefly, looked around, then down at the desk.

The note said “Lucerne,” what looked like the name of a hotel and some dates. Ana lifted her cell phone from her pocket, made sure the flash was off, and with one eye on the reception desk and the other on the ladies’ room, snapped three or four quick pictures of the note and the single page computer printout.

Satisfied that no one had seen her, she drifted away across the lobby and toward the business center where Hinds had disappeared. Through the glass door she could see inside. He was seated at one of the computer workstations chipping away at the keyboard. Why would he come over here to use the computer? she wondered. Then she thought about the man going through their trash behind the office. The lawyers knew they were being monitored. Ana made a mental note to be more cautious.

The gleaming black Town Car with Senate plates pulled up in front of the low metal building at Reagan National Airport. They were only three miles from the Capitol. The driver and another staffer, each wearing stiff dark suits, opened the doors and quickly stepped out of the front of the car.

The driver ran to the back to get her luggage from the trunk. The other young man opened the back right passenger door. Grimes set one foot onto the sidewalk, a forty-five-hundred-dollar Christian Louboutin Croc pump, took the young man’s hand, and exited the car.

She took a couple of seconds to assemble herself on the sidewalk, fluffed up her hair and straightened the long cardigan scarf so that it draped properly down the front of her dress, a one-of-a-kind Dior casual fashioned exclusively for travel.

The driver hustled her luggage up the ramp and into the building. The two men had been to this place enough times by now, almost every Thursday afternoon, to know the drill. They would pick her up at the same location Tuesday morning.

Grimes’s Gulfstream, the one she and her husband owned, was parked in a hangar on the other side of the building. She walked up the steps while her assistant carried her briefcase and computer and held the door open for her.

There was no TSA screening here, nobody sticking a hand up your crotch or x-raying your body, and no lines, no screaming children or bumping up against the unwashed. Though today Grimes had to suffer the inconvenience of a late takeoff.

She was waiting for two House members whose session was running a few minutes late, people from her own party who were hitching a ride home with her. She had hoped they would be here by now. They would, of course, have to pay for the privilege, or at least the taxpayers would, this to keep the seam on their ethics straight.