ASAP.”
THREE
Lunchtime traffic west on Constitution was even heavier than normal because of a huge art show on the Mall. Todd had to pay attention to his driving until he passed the National Museum of American History and turned south toward I-395, which would take him across the river to I-95 and the two-and-a-half-hour drive to the Farm. Because of the sunny weather, tourists seemed to be everywhere, most of them without a clue where they were going.
Across the river, the Pentagon off to the right, traffic thinned out enough for him to phone his father-in-law in Florida, but after the fourth ring he got his mother-in-law’s soft West Virginia voice on the answering machine.
“Hello. We can’t take your call now, but after the beep please leave a message and number and we’ll get back to you. Have a nice day.”
“Hi, Mom, it’s Todd. Have Dad give me a call on my cell. I came up to Washington to meet an old friend for lunch and I’m on my way back to the Farm now. It’s quarter to one.”
Ten miles later, through Alexandria, traffic thinned out even more as the highway branched off to I-95. Todd took the disk out of his jacket pocket and looked at both sides, but Givens hadn’t written anything on the disk itself or on the jewel case. Whatever was really going on had no business being in the Post, especially not any sort of a connection to McCann’s death. That was one can of worms that would probably never see the light of day. Some things were much too dark even for the Freedom of Information Act.
In any event, McCann’s death was still a part of the ongoing investigation that his father-in-law had gotten involved with last year. Already plenty of people had died because of it, and before it was over more would probably go down. If anything of what Givens had told him was true, which Todd was having a hard time believing, then shit would truly hit the fan big time.
They had never figured out what McCann had been up to or who had been directing him, and now this. Todd tossed the disk on the passenger seat and concentrated on his driving.
Forty minutes later his cell phone rang. It was his father-in-law.
“Hi, Todd, what’s up?” Kirk McGarvey asked. “Is Liz with you?”
“Nope, she was busy when I left, and I didn’t have time to mention I was coming up to Washington. This has something to do with McCann.”
McGarvey hesitated for a beat, and Todd could see him standing, probably in the kitchen of the Casey Key house on Florida’s Gulf Coast south of Sarasota, looking down at the IntraCoastal Waterway.
“Okay, you have my interest.”
“Does the name Josh Givens ring any bells?”
“Vaguely. He’s a reporter with the Post?”
“An investigative reporter, and not too bad,” Todd said. “He and I went to Maryland together, and were pals for a while. He called this morning and asked me to have lunch, he had something important for me.”
“He mentioned Howard by name?”
“He did. Said Howard had been involved with a lobbyist group called the Friday Club.”
“Robert Foster.”
“The same,” Todd said. “Josh was talking all sorts of shit about a shadow government, and a lot of disconnected stuff that was all over the place. Sounded crazy.”
“Did you believe him?”
“I don’t know. But I’m sure that he believed what he was telling me, and that he was afraid. He gave me a disk, which he said had everything on it.”
McGarvey hesitated for a moment. “Give Otto a call, see what he thinks.” Otto Rencke was the CIA’s director of special operations and the resident computer genius. He was a friend of the family and the nearest thing to a son for McGarvey and an uncle for Todd and Liz.
The Interstate cut through rolling hills, some of them heavily wooded, Fredericksburg behind him to the north and Fort A. P. Hill Military Reservation, where military units were given advanced field training, was off to the east. He and Liz had both spent six weeks there in search-and-evade training with the Green Berets.
“I’ll call him when I get back to the Farm.”
“Call him now,” McGarvey said.
That got Todd’s attention. “Do you think it’s that important?”
“If it involved Howard, then yes, it could be.”
“I’ll call him right away,” Todd said, an oddly disquieted feeling rising in his gut.
He broke the connection with his father-in-law and glanced over his left shoulder as a dark blue Toyota SUV pulled up beside him.