have to get that from Mr. Adkins.”
Pete nodded. “Will you be staying here this evening?” she asked. “I mean to say that we will have a few more questions, and in any event since Todd’s telephone was taken, we have to assume that his killers know he spoke to you last, presumably about his meeting with Mr. Givens and the disk. Makes you a prime target.”
“I’ll stay until morning.”
“And then what, sir?” Green asked, his eyes drooping as if he just heard the saddest thing in his life. “Will you give us a heads up, because frankly we’re at a loss as to what is happening, or as Mrs. Van Buren rightly demands: why and by whom and for what end purpose?”
“Of course,” McGarvey said, and everyone, including the distraught Elizabeth, knew he was lying.
ELEVEN
Remington’s Empire-style house with white Romanesque columns was on Whitehaven Street between the Danish and Italian embassies. Its furnishings were straight out of an Architectural Digest article on how the British gentry lived. The money for almost everything, including the Bentley, came from his wife, Colleen, of the New York Moons, whose fortune though slightly smaller than Donald Trump’s was of longer duration; she was the great-granddaughter of one of the turn-of-the-century robber barons.
She’d married her husband because of his British title—his father had been the ninth Earl of Paxton—and because of his accent, which she considered pure class. And he had married her because of her money; his father had squandered on gambling what little money the family had left, losing the country mansion finally to back taxes when Gordon was ten. He’d been sent to an uncle in London and had been forced to work his way through Oxford, mostly by a series of illegal but brilliant scams, including a numbers racket, the details of which he’d learned from watching old American gangster movies. If anything, he’d always been a quick study.
It was shortly before five in the afternoon when he emerged from his bedroom suite in his brocaded dressing gown to find his wife heading out the door. She came back and pecked him on the cheek.
“Don’t wait cocktails for me, I’ll be in town.”
“Kennedy Center?” he asked indifferently. Because of her family she was on several boards, including the Kennedy Center Foundation, which was the money-raising arm of the center. Tall, for a woman, slender with a narrow face but wide, chocolate eyes like Audrey Hepburn’s, she had conquered the Washington social scene within the year after she and Roland had married and moved down from New York.
She nodded with just as much indifference. “Don’t forget we’re at Senator Worley’s reception at eight and afterward we need to pop in at the Chinese embassy, their new ambassador has arrived.”
Her unspoken message was for Gordon to behave himself and stay at least reasonably sober. At fifty he was already beginning to develop one of the vices that had led to his father’s downfall; drinking every day, starting usually around noon, sometimes earlier, but normally not to such an extent that he was falling down drunk. Not yet anyway.
“Sure,” he said. “See you in a couple of hours.”
She nodded then left.
Remington stood in the vestibule for a long moment, alone as in reality he’d always been since his father’s death, listening to nothing. The cook and housekeeper did not live in the house and were off for the evening and he had two hours alone now to invent some sort of strategy for the next stage of the damage control, the tone of which would depend on what was in Givens’s computer.
He headed back to his study, hesitating for just a moment at the wet bar in the alcove between the kitchen and living room. Today, or at least this afternoon until he talked to Roland, he needed his wits about him. All his wits.
The primary parts of the problem—Josh Givens and Todd Van Buren—had been taken care of in a totally satisfactory manner, which had given him some much needed time. Today at the office his day had been consumed by the Baghdad contracts, which Roland was on site to finalize, so he’d had no chance until this moment to look at the things Kangas and Mustapha had brought him.
Sitting down at the antique Rosewood desk that his mother had liberated from the estate and from whom he’d liberated it after she’d been placed in a public dole nursing home outside London, he unlocked a bottom file drawer and took out the Washington