The Chaos Kind (John Rain #11)(3)

But no, the danger of the vice president exiting too soon was moot, because there was Devereaux, the director of National Intelligence, coming around the north end of the table, half a head taller than the people he was passing, a factotum on his heels. Perfect. Hobbs slipped past the small queue lining up behind the Interior guy and pulled abreast of Devereaux as he passed through one of the exits. Devereaux wasn’t walking particularly quickly, but the man had a long stride, and Hobbs struggled to match his pace.

“Pierce,” Hobbs said, keeping his voice low. “Have you got a few minutes? There’s something I think might interest you.” It wasn’t so much that Hobbs was worried about someone overhearing; more that he wanted to signal the delicacy of the topic he needed to broach. And of course, a conspiratorial tone was engaging in its own right—engaging to anyone, and especially to America’s top spy.

Devereaux stopped and glanced at his watch. Hobbs knew the reflex was theater. Information came with a price tag, and the shrewd players were careful to conceal their eagerness to buy.

Devereaux tilted his head lower and looked at Hobbs through a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. “What’s on your mind, Uriah?”

Hobbs, the shortest male cabinet member, was used to people towering over him. He’d hated it when he was young. But now he was the country’s top lawyer, and that was the view that mattered.

He paused while the chief of staff, another favored target of the sycophants because his office was in the White House and he was the president’s gatekeeper, passed by, the secretaries of Commerce and Labor attached to him like suckerfish. The pause was another small signal that Hobbs’s information was valuable. Besides which, Devereaux’s glance at his watch deserved to be answered with a gesture equally nonchalant.

“Not here,” Hobbs said, when the chief of staff and the hangers-on were out of earshot. “I think you’ll want to be sitting down for this.”





chapter

two





LIVIA


Now underhook the ankle,” Livia said, circling around and leaning forward. “No, not your hand, catch it in the crook of your elbow! Tighter! It’s not his ankle anymore, it’s yours!”

Jorge, a muscular former gangbanger and one of Livia’s brown belts, had nearly fifty pounds on Diaz, but the ankle hook instantly stopped him from lifting her more than a few inches off the mat. He strained for a moment, Diaz’s legs crossed behind his waist, then settled back into her.

“Again!” Livia said. Jorge crowded in, spread his feet, took hold of Diaz’s gi collar, and started to arch toward the ceiling. But before he could get anywhere, Diaz hooked the ankle and stopped him cold.

Livia patted Jorge on the shoulder. “Okay.”

Jorge disengaged and scooted back. Diaz sat up.

“You see?” Livia said.

Diaz nodded, but she looked more worried than pleased. Livia, who had worked with dozens of victims as a Seattle PD sex-crimes detective and who lived with her own childhood wounds, recognized what Diaz was trying to work through. Especially for trauma victims, it could take years of familiarity before the mind began to accept that a weapon would actually work. Even Livia, who had begun training in jiu-jitsu as a teenager and who in college had been an alternate on the US Olympic judo team, sometimes had dreams where an attacker would laugh off her arm bars and strangles and spine locks, or where bullets would plop uselessly from the muzzle of her duty weapon and the knife she carried would turn to rubber. When she had those dreams, she would hit the mat extra hard the next day, or spend hours at the range, or hang a cut of meat from a tree branch and slash and stab it to pieces.

“And remember,” Livia said, “you can also just open your guard. Because what does Jorge need to slam you?”

“He needs to lift me.”

“Right. And what does he need to lift you?”

“My closed guard.”

“Yes. You decide whether someone can slam you.”

Diaz looked at Jorge as though she wasn’t buying it. “Were you really trying?”

Jorge laughed. “órale jefita, I almost gave myself a hernia.” He stood and started heading toward the door, shrugging off his gi top along the way. “Okay, ladies, gotta run. Promised the little one a bedtime story.”

“Thanks for being a good attacker,” Livia called after him. “And for sticking around after class.”

Jorge stuffed the gi top into a gym bag and smiled. “Anything for you, Livia.” He pulled on a tee-shirt, stepped into a pair of flip-flops, and slipped through the door, pulling it closed with a loud thud behind him.

The room was suddenly silent. A half hour earlier, the mats had been crowded, the small space reverberating with the shouts of twenty women students and of the three men who’d stuck around after their MMA class to serve as attackers. But now it was just Livia and Diaz.

Livia sat. “You’re getting the hang of it. But if you want it to mean anything, you have to train with men.”

“I just trained with Jorge.”

“You spent the whole class avoiding him. I had to inflict him on you as he was trying to leave.”

Diaz chuckled. “Someone should write a story about the power of jiu-jitsu to bridge human divides. Look at you and Jorge. Woman and man. Thai and Mexican. Detective Livia Lone and Jorge, former criminal gang enforcer.”