Doyle and Arturo had picked up Brooklyn, and it was just Paul and me riding along with Leroux and Evrard and the driver. I didn’t know what was going to happen next. But I was dying to find out.
“Like I was saying to Paul, it seems like we’ve gotten our lines crossed here, Mike,” Evrard said smoothly, turning from his front passenger seat.
I stared at him. There was something smug about him that I couldn’t put my finger on that really drove me nuts. The strong cologne he wore reminded me of the big-bucks crowd back at the gallery.
“That’s why I wanted to finally meet up,” the slick bastard said, nodding at me. “To bring some clarity.
Lay out what we’re doing before we trip each other up. First of all, know that everything I’m going to reveal is top secret, okay? It stays in this truck.”
“Is this guy for real, Paul?” I said to Ernenwein, sitting beside me.
“I was at dinner when my boss called and told me to meet up with him,” Ernenwein said with a shrug. “He checks out, Mike. Believe it or not.”
“Top secret?” I said, still mighty pissed at Evrard, or whoever the hell he was, and his stupid spy versus spy head games. “So, I guess this means you’re not in State Department protective security, huh? Let me take a wild guess. You’re CIA?”
“Technically, I’m a retired CIA officer turned rehired contractor currently working out of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center,” Evrard said, smoothing his lapel. “But it’s all semantics these days, Mike. For example, last year I worked for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in conjunction with the Department of Defense’s National Reconnaissance Office, doing the same exact stuff. It doesn’t matter whose budget my paycheck comes out of. We’re all the good guys here. We’re all on the same team.”
“And you?” I said over at Leroux, on the other side of Paul. “You CIA, too? I mean when you’re not selling Picassos or murdering Hamilton Heights drug dealers.”
Leroux winked at me with a cold blue eye. There was an unsettling palpable stillness to him as he sat there, the tension of something fast unnaturally at rest.
“What can I say, Mike?” he said with a slight Western cowboy twang in his voice. “Murderers like me? We gotta stay busy.”
“Enough, Matt,” Evrard said as he took a folder out from somewhere up front and handed it to me. “You’re mistaken, Detective,” he continued. “That wasn’t murder up in Hamilton Heights. Rafael Arruda’s termination was an action authorized at the highest level.”
Inside the folder was a document printed on thick stationery with an embossed presidential insignia at the top.
There was some legalese gobbledygook after the heading, but at the bottom I read:
Mr. Rafael Arruda poses a current and ongoing threat to the United States and therefore meets the legal criteria for lethal action pursuant to the Presidential Finding.
It ended with the previous president’s signature in bright-blue ink.
“The president is whacking out ecstasy dealers without a trial now? On American soil, no less?” I said as Evrard took the folder back. “Does CNN know about this?”
“Ecstasy wasn’t the only thing Arruda had his hands in,” Matthew Leroux said calmly as he looked out the window. “For the last few months, after a hard day’s teach at Columbia, that slime spent his nights online lending his chemical expertise to an offshoot of ISIS in their quest to develop sarin gas. The members of his drug crew were actually trained by Islamic militants overseas.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “Just bullshit. Arruda was a jihadist?!”
“No,” said Evrard. “Just a worthless scumbag who didn’t give a shit who paid him a lot of money for his weapon-of-mass-destruction recipes.”
“Okay, fine,” I said as we rolled. “Let’s say I believe you. You’re CIA. And Arruda was an enemy combatant in the global war on terror. How does that explain you guys surveilling the president’s UN route in midtown? Is the prez staying up late Skyping with the bad guys as well? Does he, too, now somehow meet the legal criteria for lethal action pursuant to the ‘Presidential Finding’? Is it time to pull his plug, too?”
Leroux laughed at that. Hard. I’d really tickled his cowboy funny bone, apparently.
“No,” Evrard said. “Matthew was doing what’s known as countersniping surveillance. If the shooter is after the president, we need to see where he would set up in order to find him.”
“Exactly,” Leroux said. “I’m not out to snuff Buckland. My wife and I were actually doing what you’re doing: looking for the guy who actually is. We know him. Or at least of him.”
“What?” I said, completely stunned. “What the hell are you talking about? You know the shooter?”
“We think so, Mike. We think it’s this man,” Evrard said as he reached out and gave me another folder.
Chapter 57
I flipped open the folder and looked at the photograph inside.
It wasn’t a very good one. A blurry black-and-white blown-up still of a dark-haired white guy on a sidewalk, taken from a not-very-good surveillance video. It could have been anyone, I thought. It could have been a picture of me.