The Third Coincidence Read online

  It wasn’t her appearance, heaven knows. She didn’t think of herself as vain, but certainly there was no shame in being conscious, even proud of one’s appearance. More frequent high reps with low weights would tone a few spots and keep her breasts firm and high, but all in all the curves were still in the right places.

  Not bad for forty-three.

  Ten minutes later she stepped out of the shower. After toweling the loose water out of her hair and patting the moisture off her face, she responded to the chimes of her cell phone.

  Speak of the devil, Jack McCall.

  “I believe you know why I’m calling,” he said.

  She knew that for him, becoming an intelligence operative had not been a random choice made during some overwhelming campus career day. The job possessed him. He lived it. She wondered if the years had worn the edge off that intensity, and how his well-muscled six-two frame and boyish face had changed. She also remembered that he believed in the chain of command, so she opened with the needle.

  “Hi, Spook. Do you remember me?”

  “Of course,” he told her. “Seven years ago. The Persian Gulf. We worked together for two weeks.”

  Cradling the phone with her shoulder, she sat on the bed, drew her knees up against her still wet, bare breasts and wrapped her arms around her legs. Jingles jumped up and began dragging his body across her damp calves.

  “Is spook okay?” she persisted, determined to get under his skin, “or do you prefer Agent McCall?”

  “Listen,” he said patiently, “I know you wanted to head this task force, but you’re not. When no one else is around you can call me whatever you wish. My concern is whether or not I can count on you to follow orders and be a team player.”

  She used the side of her foot to push Jingles off her bed.

  “I’ve been given my assignment. I’ll do my job.”

  “How do I know you mean that?”

  “Trust me. I work for the FBI.”

  “Now that’s the funniest thing I’ve heard today.”

  “I do work for the FBI.”

  “You know about Monroe?”

  She scooted back and leaned against the headboard. “Poison. His death was assigned to me the day he died. We all saw it as waiting for the autopsy to confirm heart attack. So the toxicology report brought us up short. Today, the director also put me in charge of the murder of Justice Montgomery and the death of Santee. You figure he was murdered too?”

  “Probably. It could be an oddly timed accidental death, but I doubt it.”

  “That’s how Monroe looked at the beginning,” Rachel said, “like an accident, well, like a heart attack. I’m not sure what we’re going to be chasing here, but we’re holding the loose end of a big ball of something.”

  “Listen. I’d like us to talk in person,” he said. “Tonight. In the morning we need to hit the ground running. Shall I come to you or do you prefer to come here?”

  “You didn’t ask if I already had plans.”

  “If you do, cancel them.”

  “And which charm school did you attend, Spook?”

  She heard him take a deep breath. “I’m sorry if you had other plans.”

  “Give me directions.”

  She jotted down what she needed and said, “I’ll be there in twenty to thirty minutes.”

  “Have you eaten yet?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “I’ll throw a couple of burgers on the grill. They’ll be ready when you get here.”

  She knew that McCall had made a gesture with his offer of a casual meal and she appreciated it. And she knew the two of them meeting before his entire team met was a good idea.

  After trying on several outfits, she hooked a pushup bra, slipped on a scoop-necked blue jersey and white shorts. Her outfit, didn’t say FBI professional, but she didn’t wish to convey FBI professional.

  Eat your heart out, Spook, she thought. Next time I’m turning you down.

  “Except for those very busy two weeks seven years ago,” Jack said to Rachel, “I know nothing about you. Tell me about yourself.”

  “What do you want to know?” Rachel asked.

  “Oh, just start somewhere and end somewhere else.”

  As he listened, he noticed she was wearing her dark hair a little longer than he remembered. Shoulder length with a softer look along her forehead. A thin nose above a mouth a little wide, and at times a little too smarty, an intelligent face with a gentleness that avoided the hard cynical look that all too often leeched in from their work.

  While eating, his glances caught her studying his face. Line by line like Sherlock Holmes with a microscope. Jack considered his face to be ordinary, but found himself hoping she thought it was a good face.

  After dinner they discussed the case over a bowl of Jack’s homemade vanilla ice cream studded with Maraschino cherries. Their only clear decision: they should, at least at the start, include the two D.C. homicide detectives Jack had been with at the Justice Montgomery murder scene. Lieutenant Wade and Sergeant Burke would provide a local element to further the president’s desire for a multiagency face.

  She ran her tongue across the end of her ice cream spoon before clanking it into the melted white pond at the bottom of the bowl.

  “So, Spook—I’m sorry, I need to stop calling you that.”

  Strangely enough, Jack found that he didn’t care whether she did or didn’t. He had come to terms with the quirks in their relationship, if he could yet think of it as a relationship.

  “What were you going to say?” he asked.

  “How do you think you’ll like working out in the open in the real world?”

  “The real world?” Jack said, his eyebrows raised. “Just what do you think I’ve been working in all these years?”

  “Some parallel universe where madmen and patriots engage in large and small evils justified by some definition of the greater good.”

  “That sounds like something you read on the editorial page of the New York Times,” he told her. “I expected better from you.”

  “I probably expressed that view more profoundly than I hold it.” She shrugged. “Let’s change the subject. You’ve got a nice place here. You needn’t have straightened up on my account.”

  “I pick up after myself as I go along and have a housekeeper in once a week. Next time I can make a mess here and there, if it’ll make you feel more at home.”

  “I can handle neat.” She stood, turned, and bent down to lift her purse off the couch.

  He watched the white material tighten across her butt, then the trim muscular curves of her calves as she moved toward the door. Rachel was obviously a strong woman, yet very shapely and feminine. He got up and followed.

  “We made some progress tonight. Thanks for coming over.”

  At the door, she stood close. Jack felt the warmth in her breath.

  “Maybe we can work together.” She looked up at him without tilting her head back. “But don’t underestimate me.”

  He grinned lopsidedly, willing his eyes to avoid her cleavage. “I will never do that.”

  “Yes, you will,” she told him. “To quote V. I. Warshawski, ‘Never underestimate a man’s ability to underestimate a woman.’”

  “V.I. who?”

  “You don’t know V. I. Warshawski? She’s only the world’s greatest fictional female private detective.”

  Rachel’s lips turned up at the corners, her teeth filling the crescent of her smile. She opened the door, spilling a corridor of light into the night, and stepped out onto the porch. He held the screen door open, half hoping she would boldly change her mind and stay. But she turned her back and walked down the hall of light that widened as it reached for the curb.

  After she had shut her car door, the headlights sent two piercing beams into the night, spreading until they illuminated the leaves of the trees along the edge of the Potomac river.

  Jack stood there looking into the darkness, wondering what waited out there in the abyss.
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br />   Rachel drove home knowing more about Jack McCall than she had known before, and wondering if perhaps that had been his purpose for the invitation. He liked sea kayaking, Zinfandel wine, stage plays, and in films, mostly film noir, but his favorite movie was True Lies, particularly the scene in which Jamie Lee Curtis did a sexy dance for a man in a hotel room without knowing that man was her husband.

  She had told him her favorite movie was The Sting, but they had both liked Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie. She dug light jazz while he favored traditional pop and show tunes. They had challenged each other to a game of golf, after the case of course. He carried a nine handicap, she carried a ten.

  Rachel parked behind her condo building in the Kalorama Heights area of D.C., north of Sheridan Circle, and sat in her car to take a personal call before going inside.

  For the first time she could remember, Jingles was not on the entry table meowing when she slid the key into the lock, thrusting his nose into the crack when it opened. Tonight, her furry friend sat quietly on the entryway floor, his tail wrapped neatly around its own legs.

  “What’s wrong, Jingles?” she said, bending down to stroke the cat’s ears. “Yes, I know. Every time I come home I need to fill your crunchies.”

  Jingles ignored his freshly filled bowl. Instead, following her into her bedroom, hopping up on the bed and caterwauling while she disrobed.

  “My gosh, you’re certainly a chatterbox tonight.” She sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed the cat’s head between her cupped hands. “Let me shower and put in a load of clothes. Then we’ll play. Okay? Now settle down.”

  As the shower spray worked its way through her hair, cascading down over her breasts, she relaxed and imagined the water washing away the stress of her day—the stress of again seeing the mysterious Jack McCall.

  She had never forgotten the afternoon the two of them stood together on the forward part of the weather deck on a naval vessel off the coast of Egypt. When he had paid her a compliment, she took it as a comment from a man on the make. But he hadn’t been because he later turned away her advances. In a strange way that had made the compliment seem even more special.

  Fifteen minutes later, wearing a cotton nightie, she dumped the hamper on her bed and began sorting out her underwear for the washer only to discover that her bra, the one she had just taken off and dropped onto the bed, had disappeared.

  Maybe I put it in the hamper.

  Suddenly she had a sense that someone had been there. Which was absurd, of course, and yet that would explain Jingles’s unusual behavior when she first came home. Had he been there while she sat naked on the edge of the bed petting Jingles? While she showered? Was he still here? Her heart slammed back and forth inside her chest like a clapper pounding a bell.

  After tearing the room apart looking for the bra, without finding it, she got her 9-mm Beretta, checked the closet, and the locks on the front door and the windows. Then she slid the gun under her pillow, turned out the light, and went to bed.

  CHAPTER 7

  CIA Special Assistant McCall will handpick his own squad and report directly to the president, without interference from the other intelligence agencies.

  —CNN Headline News, 6:30 a.m., June 6

  The skin on his cheeks and neck had been chewed by teen acne in the way aphids disfigured a young rose leaf. He had purchased a ticket to San Francisco using the name John Kimble and dressed as an ordinary traveler with a carry-on bag, just another passenger reading a newspaper while awaiting his flight.

  He recalled his father repeatedly fulminating at the breakfast table about the Supreme Court justices and Federal Reserve governors constituting the unelected government that was really the man, strangling the representative government put in place by our forefathers.

  His father would have gone ballistic if he had lived long enough to see the Supreme Court set aside the people’s election and anoint their own choice for president of the United States.

  The nobility of his cause excited him. Once aroused he could find calm only through sex. Because he felt more alert afterward, he believed these dalliances should be work-related, tax-deductible expenses.

  His mother had left enough money to fund both the completion of his father’s work and the satisfaction of his cravings.

  During the flight he reflected on the last few days. Events were escalating just as he had expected. Years ago, as a young member of the FBI’s electronic surveillance unit, he had been a face in the crowd at a large joint CIA-FBI meeting headed by Jack McCall. When he had heard on CNN that the president would meet with McCall, he had watched the White House entrance often used for quiet meetings. He had recognized McCall when he pulled up to the security gate, and waited to follow him home. That night he had staked out McCall’s residence and saw a woman arrive. With his laptop and her license plate, he learned her identity and address. While she had been with McCall, he went to her apartment and had not gotten out by the time she returned home.

  He had fought down his desire to take her when he had seen her body in the bathroom mirror, but he could not resist the playful act of stealing her underwear. Had he killed her and McCall, the government would have been more careful about protecting the identities of their replacements. They didn’t know him, but he knew them and where they lived.

  After landing in San Francisco, he took a cab to the downtown Marriott Hotel, paid cash and checked in as John Powell, a different alias than he had used to buy his plane ticket. In the unlikely event McCall somehow picked up his trail, the ticket name could not be tracked to the hotel where they might find his fingerprints or DNA.

  From his room, he called an escort service and spoke with the manager, telling her he wanted a woman with medium-length black hair and large breasts, but not the streetwalker look.

  Momma had never looked cheap.

  After the manager’s assurance that she would send one of her best girls, the man flopped into the overstuffed chair that accepted him as a catcher’s mitt accepted a fastball. After plopping his feet onto the cushy ottoman, he took out his laptop that held more than two years of information on the habits and movements of all the current U.S. Supreme Court justices and Fed governors, and their families. He had also started putting together data on some of the leading candidates being floated in the press to replace the now departed justices. Also files on the rumored nominees to fill the vacancy he had created on the Federal Reserve Board.

  And there will be more. I promise.

  He had bestowed the honor of being the next sacrifice for America upon Supreme Court Justice Donald Quincy Breen. At first, bachelor Justice Breen had ranked poorly because his movements had been too unpredictable. All that had changed when Justice Breen and a Baltimore attorney, Ms. Judith Ashcroft, unexpectedly announced their wedding plans.

  It had not been difficult to get information on Judith Ashcroft, a thirty-six-year-old ex-beauty queen, who had grown up spoiled by her old-money family. She believed in the government’s responsibility to care for those not capable or willing to provide for themselves. Another family of rich pigs longing to practice largess using money taken from hardworking Americans. If she really felt that way, she’d use her own money. The media colored it a solid marital merger with the more liberal wife expected to take the edge off Breen’s reputation for being right of the political center.

  The killing of a U.S. Supreme Court justice and his bride on their honeymoon would guarantee coast-to-coast headlines. After using his toes to leverage off his loafers, letting them drop silently to the plushly carpeted floor, he hacked into the e-mail of Mrs. Cordelia Ashcroft, Breen’s new mother-in-law. Several days ago, in her inbox, had been an e-mail wherein Judith told her mother that she and her new husband would not, as reported by the media, honeymoon in Maui. Instead they would quietly slip away to spend June seventh, eighth, and ninth in the honeymoon cottage of a resort near Depoe Bay on the coast of Oregon.

  He glanced at his watch and saw that it was six, an hour before his e
scort companion would arrive. In the classified section of the local paper he found a private party trying to sell a used Chrysler van. He agreed to the seller’s asking price, subject to his seeing it the next morning. After that he dropped to the floor and did fifty pushups and fifty situps. Then he went into the bathroom and washed his armpits and crotch.

  At seven sharp he heard a soft knock, and opened the door to see a naked leg slide out through a slit in the woman’s floor-length coat. “Hello,” she said, before smiling. “I’m Kitt.”

  Her voice made him think of a hot fudge sundae. A perfect opening act before tomorrow’s main event.

  CHAPTER 8

  Highly placed sources report that NSA Director Quartz told President Schroeder: We don’t need McCall.

  —Washington Times, Editorial Page, June 6

  He left the downtown San Francisco Marriott feeling contempt for the beautiful people living in their high-priced, ocean-view mansions, while the disadvantaged lived in vacant buildings and drove grocery carts stuffed with their possessions through back alleys. His father believed America could no longer remain a country of opportunity. That America must become a country of obligation. The government had to care for its citizens and assure equality for all. Once he had restored representative government, America would enter an expanded age of social engineering.

  The cab he had hired outside the hotel took him to the home of the man from whom he had agreed to buy the used van. After checking to be sure the brake and taillights worked, he paid the full price in cash, telling the seller he was in a hurry and would return tomorrow to complete the transfer of the title.

  Yeah, right.

  Despite a cool ocean chill, while crossing the Bay Bridge he lowered the driver’s window to taste the salty air. From there, he moved onto Interstate 80 north toward Sacramento.