into their India Gate suite, which takes up about a fourth of the fifth floor and has a master bedroom and three smaller bedrooms—smaller only in the sense that each bedroom comes in at just under three hundred square feet with two queen-size beds and a private bath. Crutchfield’s party filled the India Gate suite with only one bed left empty. Do you want me to do the math for you?”
“A six-man team.”
“Actually, Crutchfield’s a lawyer, so he’s useless for any mano a mano, and the guy in the master bedroom is older than dirt and has a reputation for hiring all his muscle.”
“Randolph Lancaster.”
“Bueno,” Zach said, nice work. “Must have been a helluva party you had with Sam Walls. Sorry I missed it.”
“It was pretty low-key, no food, no booze, though I did serve a couple of cocktails.”
Zach laughed again. “Sodium Pentothal?”
“Walls’s luck wasn’t running that good,” Dylan said. “Give me the worst news.”
“Lancaster isn’t CIA. We tracked him from the agency a few times, but he’s a lot bigger than spookville. He comes up all over the place, one of those guys in the shadows of places like the State Department and the Pentagon who wield way more power than the folks making the headlines. He’s slick, very smooth, nobody can lay a hand on him, but a few people here and there are starting to think somebody should, like the Justice Department and a few of the guys and girls over at my old stomping grounds.”
“I’m not sure he can be touched through the Justice Department.”
“Yeah, that seems to be a real concern down on the Farm, too. The guy makes Teflon look like Velcro. He’s a real slippery bastard.”
Zach sure as hell had that right, Dylan thought.
“Where are you now?”
“Well, just to be on the safe side, and given what we’re dealing with here tonight, I’m five floors up in the building directly across the street from the India Gate suite in a not-nearly-as-nice hotel called the Mission Inn, room 514. I’ve got some glass but could use better, maybe something in a Schmidt and Bender 4-16 × 50mm PMIIK attached to something with a .308 bore.”
“I’ll send Kid.”
“Have him bring a pizza.”
“Anything else?”
“Yeah. Tell me what you aren’t telling me, Dylan,” Zach said. “You just authorized a Level One SOTIC sniper to come over here and set up on a guy who eats lunch with the president of the United States.”
“You made the request. What are you thinking?”
“That maybe I know something I’m not sure I really know.”
“Like?”
“I know Walls was in Coveñas when Creed and J.T. were there, and I know he and his team were blacker than black, running so far under the radar I can guarantee they didn’t know who they were working for and didn’t care. And other than Walls, I’m not sure any of them made it out of South America alive. What I am sure of is that they had a contact who had a contact who had a contact—you know the routine.”
Yes, he’d been there and done that more times than he could remember. They all had.
“And?”
“Well, when I looked, the Coveñas deal dead-ended at a guy with a code name that slid around the outside of Lancaster’s world. We could never pin anything on him. All we could do was guess at the connection between Lancaster and this code name.”
“White Rook.” That’s what Skeeter had pulled out of the decrypted LeedTech files, that all of them, the whole SDF crew, had been made, especially Dylan.
“Yeah, that’s it,” Zach said after a brief pause. “So are you just a better guesser than me, or is this why you’re the boss?”
“A better guesser with a gigabyte of data taken off of a computer owned by a company called LeedTech, which is a subsidiary to World Resources—”
“Otherwise known as Wars R Us,” Zach interrupted. “The go-to guys in a dozen sub-Saharan countries whose idea of government begins and ends with armed conflict.”
“What did you hear about LeedTech?”
“Not much,” Zach said. “Years ago, there was some strange stuff in Bangkok with their name attached, but I was working heroin, straight Golden Triangle, not synthetics, and whatever they were up to, nobody was really talking. What do you have?”
“Hamzah Negara, Erich Warner, Dr. Souk, Tony Royce, Randolph Lancaster, and John Thomas Chronopolous, not to mention myself, and, probably by tomorrow morning, you and everybody else who works here.”
“Qué carajo.” Zach breathed the words out in a harsh whisper. “You can tie Lancaster