Silken Prey

really, really calm. Sit around eating crackers and checking their weapons. Contained. The army cuts them a lot of slack, because they’re very good at what they do . . . which, basically, is killing and kidnapping people.”
    “An uncommon skill set,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah. I didn’t have a lot of contact with them,” Flowers said. “They had their own compounds. They’re secretive, a lot of them get killed—they have an unbelievable mortality rate. Even with that, they stay in the military. Some of them call the army ‘Mother.’ I think they get hooked on the stress and the camaraderie. Or maybe the sense that they’re doing something really important, which they are. If they leave the military, they tend to get in trouble as civilians. Some of them, after they leave, wind up as military contractors, or working for military contractors, right back where they started. Roaming around the world, with a gun in their back pocket.”
    Lucas said, “Bob Tubbs, if he was working for the Grant campaign, might have posed some kind of danger to them. Maybe he wanted more money. Maybe he couldn’t keep his mouth shut, maybe he wanted credit for taking down a senator. Who knows?—but he may have represented some kind of danger. And you’ve got these guys right there—”
    “You don’t have a fuckin’ thing on them, do you?” Flowers asked.
    “Not a fuckin’ thing,” Lucas said. “Which is why I brought you in. I want you to tell me: if a guy disappears without a trace, and you have these two guys hanging around . . . what are the chances?”
    “You don’t need me to figure that out. You already have,” Flowers said, kicking his feet off the desk. “You just want me to say you’re right.”
    “Am I right?”
    “Probably. What are you going to do about it?”
    “Will I ever get any evidence against them?”
    “Not unless something weird happens,” Flowers said. “Listen, let me tell you. Strange things happen in combat areas. Unpleasant things have to be done . . . and somebody has to do them. But those things can’t be pulled out in the open. The do-gooders would be screaming to high heaven and careers would be wrecked. You know, ‘That’s not how we do things in America.’ Well, you know, sometimes it is. Look at bin Laden: he was executed, not killed in a gunfight. Everybody knows that, but he was so big, there’s a national collective agreement not to mention it. When something like that happens, people like Carver are holding the gun. There was no way to hide the bin Laden thing, but in other cases . . . they have to hide what they did. The army
knows
, but it doesn’t know. Even the do-gooders in the Congress
know
, but they don’t want to hear it. It’s like the guys in Vice, or Narcotics. They’re like
you
, really. Sometimes, strange things need to get done.”
    “Okay.”
    “Now, I don’t know what Carver did that got him kicked out, but it was serious, and he was lucky,” Flowers said. “I’d say it’s about ninety–ten that if he’d done the same thing as a cop, whatever it was, he’d have gone to prison. Whatever he did, he had to go—but at the same time, the army took care of him.”
    “What if I subpoenaed some colonel in here to get specific about what he did?”
    Flowers snorted. “Never happen.”
    Lucas said, “We go to federal court—”
    “It would take you ten years before you saw the guy’s face, and then he wouldn’t be able to remember anything specific,” Flowers said. “I’m not kidding you, Lucas. It wouldn’t happen.”
    “So what do I do?” Lucas asked.
    Flowers stood up and yawned and stretched. “I don’t know. Sneak around. Plot. Manipulate. Lie, cheat, and steal. Do what the army did—settle it off the record. Or, forget it.”
    “I got one senator, one governor, and one would-be senator pointing guns at my head.”
    “If they take you down, can I have your job?” Flowers asked.
    Lucas didn’t smile. He said, “Careful what you wish for, Virg.”
    Virgil: “Hey. I wasn’t serious.”
    “I am,” Lucas said.
    Lucas took Flowers to lunch, and they talked about it some more, and about life in general. Flowers had recently come off a case where he’d run down four out of five murderers. Three of them had been killed—none of them by Flowers—one was in Stillwater for thirty years, and one was walking around free. Flowers had been unhappy about the one who walked—and Lucas had argued that he’d done as