Max Collins - Executive Order

“When?”

“Now.”

“Now?”

“Well... soon as you’ve packed, and broken it to Sheila. She’s not going to mind.”

“But I... man, I got a damn bidness to run.”

“Why, do you generally pull down a hundred K in a week? You send out word to your customer base, e-mail or text or whatever, that you’ll be away for a week. Anybody comes around, we won’t answer the door.”

“Maybe... maybe I should go pack now.”

“No maybe about it.”

DeMarcus started off, then turned and said, “I don’t really wanna know any more than this?”

“That’s right, you don’t.”

DeMarcus headed for Sheila’s door at the other end of the loft, but Reeder’s voice stopped him. “Consider part of that hundred K payment for any burner phones I might need. If I take any weapons, we can settle up later.”

“You can have up to five nines,” DeMarcus called back, “on the house,” and then slipped in the bedroom.

Their host and his lady friend had flown in an hour, but the weed smell remained. Rogers found some Febreze under the kitchen sink and got rid of it as best she could.

Using a burner phone from DeMarcus’s seemingly endless supply, Reeder rented a car to be delivered to a restaurant on L Street a couple of blocks north.

“We’ll walk over there together,” he said to her.

They were each in an overstuffed black-leather chair.

Rogers shook her head. “No need. Hey, you may have forgotten, but I’m a trained FBI agent. Me with your famous face is way too conspicuous.”

He reluctantly agreed.

“When the car gets there,” he said, “you drop the driver off at the rental agency, then go to Miggie’s, pick him up, and have him bring as much gear as he can carry.”

“Mig’ll work from here?”

Reeder nodded. “No one’s going to look for him at this address. We’ll keep the rest of the task force out on the street while we get things done here.”

“Mig should bring some clothes, too, I assume.”

“Unless he’s into Redskins and Georgetown threads, ’cause probably that’s all DeMarcus has. We’ll get some of your things when we pick Kevin up. I can cover my needs from some neighborhood bodega and the tailor downstairs.”

“You can wash what you have on, too. This place has everything. It’s the damn Batcave with burner phones.”

Reeder gave her half a smile. “DeMarcus is a smart cookie, as we ancient types say. He stays under the radar, and in the ten years I’ve known him, never served a day inside.”

“Why d’you never bust him?”

“His crimes aren’t federal. Anyway, he’s a resource. Like the CIA guys say, an asset... You better get going, Patti. That rental’s due in fifteen minutes. Oh, and grab one of those nine millimeters of Marcus’s on your way out.”

“Come on, Joe — I already have my service weapon.”

“Yeah. And it can be traced.”

“The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.”

Anne Nichols, going up in her apartment building’s elevator, knew she owed her mother a phone call. Despite the fresh look of her light blue silk blouse and black flared slacks, the African American FBI agent was dead tired, and wanted nothing more than to get inside her apartment, maybe take a detour to the shower, then crawl between the sheets ASAP.

Nichols and her mother, a Chicago policewoman, usually talked at least once a week. But it had been almost two weeks now, and she was feeling guilty.

For almost a decade, she and her mom had been each other’s entire immediate family — her daddy, a CTA bus driver, came home one night and fell asleep in his recliner, never to wake up again. And her older brother, Trevon, died in Iraq. His framed Purple Heart was still on Mom’s mantle.

So Nichols felt a responsibility to keep in touch, however busy she might be, and the Special Situations Task Force had been plenty busy over this past year. Still, she knew that her mom wouldn’t shame her for not calling, and would rarely call herself, for fear of intruding.

When Anne had gone straight from law school to the FBI, after her mother had assumed her daughter would go into private practice, Mrs. Nichols had understood without need of discussion that her “baby girl” wanted to be a cop like her momma.

Nichols had the long, slender frame of her father, and a prettiness that her stocky, rather blunt-featured mother lacked. But both women knew they were more alike than not.

On the fifth floor, Nichols walked quickly to her apartment, beckoned by the thought of a hot shower and cool bed sheets. She was just getting her keys from her purse when she noticed the edge of light under her door.

Her tiredness evaporated and she was on the alert — she never left the lights on. Never.

This was a security building, with a doorman on duty much of the day and a keypad in the lobby. Not an impregnable fortress by any means, but anyone who’d been able to get in here, and into her apartment, was likely a professional criminal... or a federal agent.

And considering the rogue element in government that Rogers had warned them about, Nichols could not assume the best about another fed.

She dropped the keys back in her shoulder-strap purse, withdrawing a small automatic with one hand, and the burner phone she’d been given with the other. Tempted as she was to deal with this herself, the wiser move would be to call Rogers for backup.

The automatic trained on the door, her hearing perked for anything behind it, she had just started keying in Rogers’ new number when she sensed something behind her.

An anonymous nine millimeter snugged in his waistband, Joe Reeder stood on the fire-escape landing outside DeMarcus’s crib, pulling on a cigarette liberated from the half-pack of Benson & Hedges Menthol Ultra Lights left behind by the formerly naked Sheila in the couple’s rush to leave. The beautiful starry evening seemed at odds with the storm clouds of the situation, though a March crispness provided a reminder that a chill was coming.

That distinctive white hair of his Reeder had tucked under a Nationals cap, appropriated (like the Georgetown windbreaker) from his host’s closet. The door was propped open, a shaft of light cutting the darkness of the wrought-iron landing as he waited for Rogers and Miggie, knowing they should be back soon.

He hadn’t smoked in over a year, not even a single cigarette, but he couldn’t resist just this one as he tried to calm his jangly nerves. He’d been going over every single aspect of the Yellich assassination and the dead CIA quartet in Azbekistan, looking for possible connections — was Len Chamberlain’s murder the connective tissue? He tried to separate what he knew from what he thought, what he could prove from what he surmised.

As soon as he saw headlights swing onto Tenth, Reeder tossed the cigarette sparking into the alley and went down to greet them.

When Rogers parked the car alongside the building, Reeder stepped behind the vehicle so that when she popped the trunk, he’d be ready to grab some of Miggie’s gear. With the three of them, a single trip got all of it up and inside. Although Mig used a tablet for most of his searches, the rest of the tech wizard’s toys, which were in part to help hide his presence here, would not exactly fit neatly into a shoulder bag.