Page 99 of Cross Down
She looks at me. Nods.
She slows the car as the traffic backs up again.
I continue: “Including unmanned aerial vehicles and combat drones that can dominate a battlefield and destroy anything in their path. The serial number on that circuit board…”
“I left the board behind in the ’Stan, John, but I memorized the serial number.”
“And it matched a weapons system belonging to your ex-husband’s company.”
Elizabeth nods. “Of course it did. Why do you think I picked you up?”
“For muscle?”
“Among other things,” she says. “We’re off for a visit to his office in Crystal City, and if this goddamn traffic lightens up, we should get there before everything here in DC goes to shit.”
Chapter
113
General Wayne Grissomis in his spartan office at the Pentagon, today dressed in plain BDUs, waiting. The office is large with couches, bookcases, and photos of past JCS chairmen, but there’s not much in the way of personal possessions or souvenirs. In years past, climbing up the slippery ladder of command, he often saw officers who plastered the walls of their offices withLook at me!plaques, trophies, and photos.
Not him—not now, not ever. It seems too silly, too presumptuous.
There’s an untouched cup of coffee on his clean desk, brought in earlier by his assistant, Colonel Kendricks.
He folds his hands in his lap, looks at his one personal photo. Of his son and his wife. Nathan and Janice at West Point on the day their son graduated, both smiling widely, arms around each other’s shoulders. Beautiful blond Janice, handsome and lean Nathan.
A familiar ache starts in his chest.
Their golden boy, Nathan, who was going places, who never gave up, never stopped, and who was blown to pieces by an IED on an unnamed dirt road outside a forgotten village in Afghanistan.
His loving wife, Janice, who put up with his late hours, his tours, the many moves over his career, and who, on the one-year anniversary of Nathan’s death, when Grissom was at NATO headquarters in Brussels, drank a fifth of vodka, swallowed a fistful of Percocet, went to bed, and never woke up.
He hears loud voices in his outer office, and his phone starts ringing, and he thinks,Is it coming? Is it now?
Grissom slides open the right-hand desk drawer, revealing an army-issue SIG Sauer M17.
Chapter
114
Deacon continues herfast driving, weaving back and forth, constantly looking in the rearview and side-view mirrors.
I say, “So two years back, in Tajikistan, what were you saying to dear hubby?”
“He wasn’t my dear hubby then,” she says. “He was my soon-to-be-divorced hubby, and I was telling him that he shouldn’t be working at Global Security Services. Even though they sponsored programming on NPR, they had the blood of innocents on their hands.”
“What did he say?”
“He said, ‘Lizzie, we all have blood on our hands. The only difference is that now I’ll be making ten times as much working for Global Security Services and I won’t have to wear this goddamn uniform.’ God, I hated when he called me Lizzie.”
I say, “Any idea why that village was destroyed by his company?”
“That, my friend, is what we’re going to find out,” she says as we cross over the Francis Case Memorial Bridge, which spans the Washington Channel. To the right I can barely make out the Jefferson Memorial.
Deacon says, “My turn for questions.”
“Go for it,” I say.
