Silken Prey

ahead of me, go storming out of the place, and then try to back-shoot me, I suppose, but I don’t see that, either. He’ll want to think about it.”
    “But this army thing—it sounds impulsive, like he cracked,” Bradley said. “If he cracked then, he could crack again.”
    Lucas said, “That’s not the feeling I got. I got the feeling that the army was talking about a cold series of executions. He thought he could get away with it. Either that nobody would know, or that none of his platoon would tell, or that if somebody did, he’d be covered. He was partly right—they kicked him out but didn’t prosecute. The point is, it seems to me that he . . . thought about it. At least a bit.”
    “That’s what you
think
, but not what you
know
,” Bradley said. “I’m not so much worried about
you.
If he shoots you in the coffee shop . . . then he’d have to kill the witnesses. And he could do that. He’s essentially already done it once.”
    Lucas hadn’t considered that, and said, “Huh.”
    “You’d be better off with a couple more guns in the shop,” Bradley said. “Probably Jane and me. He doesn’t sound like the type to be looking at women as potential combatants: he’d be too macho for that.”
    Jane
was the other female agent, Jane Stack.
    Lucas said, “Let me think about it.”
    Shrake said, “Sarah’s exactly right. The rest of us look too much like cops, except Del, and he’d recognize Del. Let’s put Sarah and Jane in.”
    Lucas eventually agreed, and divided the group in two. “I don’t know when I’ll be talking to him, but I expect it’ll be late afternoon or evening. As soon as I find out, the first shift sets up. We’ll monitor the meeting—I’ll be wearing a wire—and then we’ll take him all the way through the day, until he goes to bed. This could be a very long night, with the election. As soon as we’re sure that the night’s over, Bob and his guys will pick him up, take him all day tomorrow, and then the first shift picks him up again tomorrow evening. We’re all clear on overtime. As soon as we leave here, the first shift should go on home, or wherever, get your shopping done, get something to eat . . .”
    When the bureaucratic details were handled, they broke up. Del, Shrake, and Jenkins followed him back to his office, where they talked some more about the surveillance aspects. A tech would put a tracking bug on Carver’s vehicle, and Del would try to get one on Dannon’s, if he could do it without being seen.
    “The big question is: Is he gonna talk, or is he gonna stonewall, or is he gonna shoot, or is he gonna run?” Jenkins said.
    “That’s four questions,” Shrake said. “It irritates me that you can’t count.”
    •   •   •
    T HEY WERE STILL AT IT when Flowers called from Albuquerque. Lucas put him on the speaker phone.
    “I talked to Rodriguez, and he seems like a pretty straight guy. He’s going to school here, he’s got a wife and a couple of kids. He’s willing to make a formal statement if we need it. It’s about what we thought, with a couple of other things . . .”
    “Do tell,” Jenkins said.
    Rodriguez told Flowers that military intelligence sources had pinpointed what they thought would be a meeting between two rival Taliban chieftains in a border village. How that intelligence was developed, Rodriguez didn’t know for sure, but he suspected the original tip came from a paid Afghani source in the village, and that had been backed up by electronic intelligence—the army had been monitoring the relevant Taliban cell phones.
    In any case, Carver’s unit, which included Rodriguez, and was basically made up of a couple of officers and a bunch of NCOs, had been dropped five kilometers from the meeting site. The soldiers had followed a little-used ridge path into the village. The house where the meeting was to take place had been spotted by the informant, who’d placed a tiny multi-mirrored reflector, similar to those used on golf course pins, on the roof of the place.
    When the attack team had gotten close enough, they’d illuminated the village—which was made up of forty or so houses built on the edge of an intermittent stream—with infrared light, and had spotted the sparkle of the reflector.
    They’d entered the house at three o’clock in the morning, in a raid pretty much like any police raid. They’d found the Taliban asleep on an assortment of beds and air mattresses and on the floor.
    One