The Chaos Kind (John Rain #11)(69)

But that was defense. Were there any other offensive plays left to him?

Rispel had been a step ahead of him so far. That much was clear. He had been a fool to take her gratitude, her loyalty, for granted. He should have foreseen the possibility that, confronted with the potential power of those videos, she would seek to acquire them for her own purposes.

Fine. But how had she been outplaying him?

She was closer to the action, of course. She reported to him, yes, but he knew from experience that being nearer the nuts and bolts of fieldwork had its advantages. A mayor was better positioned to address potholes than a governor.

But that didn’t mean the governor was powerless. Far from it.

Devereaux had been DCI before Rispel. He’d been elevated, but his network was still there. The biggest change, really, was that his ability to reward and punish had been enhanced.

Rispel couldn’t make big moves on her own. Whether for intel or for ops, she’d be moving pieces on the board. Asking for favors. And calling in some, too.

It wasn’t so difficult to imagine who she’d be relying on. And in a game of threats and favors, it would be no contest. Rispel reported to him. He reported to the president of the United States. All it would take would be a reminder to certain key people—people who were already in his network, after all—of how grateful he would be to know if Rispel seemed to be up to anything unusual. And how displeased he would be to learn he had been kept in the dark.

He thought of the way she’d told him to sit, like she was talking to a dog. And threatened to have him escorted out—from what she called her building, no less.

Well, she’d had her fun. He hoped she’d enjoyed her little games. Because now she was going to find out exactly who she was playing with.





chapter

fifty-two





MANUS


Manus watched from the lobby of the Shenandoah University Health & Life Sciences Building as the cab turned around. He waited until it had left the parking lot and disappeared down the street. Then he headed out and started walking west. The morning sky was gray, the air cold and humid. It felt good to be outside after the long, sleepless flight.

Before Manus had left, Dox had said to him, “You saved my ass at the hotel. Don’t think I don’t know it, and don’t think I’ll forget. And if I’m ever in a position to return the favor, I hope you believe I will.”

The strange thing was, Manus did believe him.

His cellphone was too risky to even turn on, let alone use, and Dox had given him the credentials to a secure site. After landing and clearing security at Dulles Airport, he’d borrowed a phone from a sympathetic barista—I’m deaf, I lost my speech-to-text device, could I use your phone to access my account—and had found a message. Evie and Dash were safe. They were with Rain, the man Dox had sent to protect them. They were in a room at the Winchester Hilton. Rain would be waiting in the hotel restaurant. Manus should use the same bona fides he had given Rain to use with Evie and Dash.

As worried as Manus still was, and as eager as he was to get to them, it would have been a mistake to have the driver take him to his actual destination. So he’d asked the man to drop him off at the university instead, and was now walking the half mile to the hotel, navigating with a paper map he’d bought at the airport. Route 50 was already thick with early rush-hour traffic, and he doubted another cab would even have saved time.

He reached the grounds of the hotel in a little over ten minutes and circled the parking lot. He didn’t see any problems and went in through the restaurant entrance, head swiveling, alert to danger.

A young woman was standing by the door. She picked up a menu and said something, but Manus didn’t catch it—he was too intent on the room. About half the tables were filled, mostly by solitary people absorbed in their electronic devices, obviously business travelers. In a corner table, back to the wall, sat an Asian man, a coffee mug before him but no electronic device. Manus’s gaze almost skipped over the man because there was something so still about his presence. To someone else, the man might have seemed lost in thought. But Manus sensed something else: a person exceptionally attuned to his surroundings, his transmission dial set to bland, the reception dial wide open. A long-ago instructor had told Manus of a Zen concept called mushin—literally meaning “no-mind,” but in fact a description of a relaxed mind, a mind open to everything and therefore able to instantly react to anything. He hadn’t thought of the concept in years, but something about the man made him remember it now.

He glanced at the receptionist. She said, “Just one?”

Manus shook his head and looked at the Asian man again. “Meeting someone.”

He walked forward, keeping his hands where the man could see them. The man kept his hands in plain sight, too, his fingertips resting on the table.

Manus stopped a couple of feet before he reached the man’s position and stood off to the side. They’d been reassuring each other so far, and this was another way of doing so—not blocking the man’s view of the room, leaving him space to maneuver. “The Orioles should never have traded Machado to Los Angeles,” Manus said.

The man laughed. Manus was confused by the reaction. Then he saw why—a woman at the adjacent table had overheard, and had looked up at the incongruous greeting.

“I’ve been saying that forever,” the man said. “Do we have time for a coffee? Or should we get going?”