and the front-end loader the gravediggers had used to open up the plot on the other side of Porter Drive headed away around one, a pair of groundsmen covering the mound of dirt with a tarp and setting up the electric device that would lower the coffin. A few minutes later a small flatbed truck showed up and four workmen set up several rows of chairs on the opposite side of the grave from where an Army chaplain would conduct the service.
A number of people came to visit the Tomb of the Unknowns, some of them taking a few pictures and then heading off, while others lingered. A few glanced down at the funeral preparations, but then turned away. The reminders of death were everywhere here, of course, but no one wanted to be reminded of any sense of immediacy. Whoever was going into the ground down there had died very recently. It was difficult to think about.
For a while after the chairs had been set up, and the workmen had driven away, only the occasional visitor passed on the road in front of the open grave, until fifteen minutes before the hearse with Van Buren’s body was due to arrive. At two, a plain blue Chevy pulled up and the chaplain, in uniform, showed up and walked down the hill to the grave site.
Others started arriving in singles and pairs, at least a dozen and a half cars, most of them civilian, until a Lincoln limousine showed up, and Kangas and Mustapha sharpened up. A pair of large men dressed in dark business suits, obviously bodyguards, got out of the limo, and looked around for several long seconds before one of them opened the rear door, and a slightly built man with thinning hair, also dressed in a dark business suit, got out, and the three of them joined the others waiting at the side of the road.
“All the big dogs will be here,” Kangas said. The man from the limo was Dick Adkins, director of the CIA, and supposedly close with McGarvey.
“Maybe we should take them all down.”
“What’re you crazy?” Kangas said. “Christ, what the fuck’s the matter with you, man?”
“I’m steady, so just take it easy.”
“What the fuck are you talking about, then?”
“Just a thought, don’t have a fit,” Mustapha said. “The Company screwed us. Payback works for me. I mean, if we’re here and we’ve got the hardware, why not do a little something extra for ourselves?”
“Then what?”
Mustapha was gazing at the people gathered down the hill from them, a crazy look in his eyes that worried Kangas, who’d seen the same shit-faced expression on a kid in Baghdad a couple of years ago, just before the bomb went off, killing twenty Iraqi police recruits. Like the kid, and now Ronni, was seeing the face of Allah, or something. Paradise. It was all nuts.
“I don’t know,” Mustapha said, and he relaxed a little. “Maybe I’m just yanking your chain.”
“You’re a crazy son of a bitch.”
Mustapha laughed. “And you aren’t?”
For a second Kangas wanted to say something, thought he should say something, but then he turned away and shook his head. Just then the funeral procession, led by the long black hearse, came past on Memorial Drive. A few people turned to stare, but most turned away.
“Okay, here we go,” he said.
Following the hearse, a black Lincoln limousine pulled up above the grave site, a pair of bodyguards got out and helped two women out of the backseat. From photographs Kangas recognized them as McGarvey’s wife and their daughter—the wife of the CIA officer they’d taken out.
Four other cars pulled up, and people got out and joined the two women, and Kangas felt a brief pang that the funeral party was so small. But then he figured that his own wouldn’t be any larger, because besides Ronni there weren’t a whole hell of a lot of people who gave a damn. He hadn’t spoken with his ex-wife in nearly five years, they’d had no children, his mother was dead, his stepfather didn’t give a shit, he had no siblings and only a handful of aunts, uncles, and cousins, none of whom he’d spoken to for a long time.
“No McGarvey,” Mustapha said.
“Not yet,” Kangas said, and a Cadillac Escalade with government plates came down the hill and pulled up at the end of the line. The windows were so heavily tinted that Kangas couldn’t make out who was inside, but then a woman got out from behind the