Chapter Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Seven
La Bonne Vache served casual French fare on Prospect Street, on the corner of a quiet residential strip of row homes just a block north of M Street, the bustling main drag of Georgetown.
This morning at eleven thirty a.m. the air was several degrees warmer than usual, just north of forty-five, and the sun shone through the bare trees lining both sides of the quaint street.
Café tables in December in Georgetown weren’t common, but the staff had set a half dozen bistro tables and chairs on the brick sidewalk out in front of La Bonne Vache, along with a few gas patio heaters, and already before the real lunch hour had begun a few patrons sat at two-tops and four-tops outside.
Fifty-nine-year-old Catherine King snagged the deuce closest to the corner of the street so she could see both up and down Prospect and Potomac Streets.
She sat alone. Her Patagonia coat, knit cap, and two layers of Lululemon pants were slight overkill for the occasion because of the heat coming from the propane flame tower heater right next to her.
An iPad sat in front of her; her oversized purse was hooked under her metal chair, a habit she’d learned living and working both in D.C.
and in dense and developing cities around the world for much of her career.
As a large white tow truck with a “Big Cheeze Wrecker Service” decal on the side passed by slowly, she ordered a latte from a friendly waitress, then logged in to the restaurant’s Wi-Fi to peruse X while she waited for her lunch date.
She saw that no new killings directly associated with the intelligence community had been announced this morning, and some in the media were already pontificating that the immediate danger had passed, but Catherine wondered if the slowdown in incidents had more to do with members of the IC watching their backs and less to do with whatever bad actor was out there either running out of targets or dealing with a sudden bout of morality after the dozen or so assassinations in the last day and a half.
The low-hanging fruit had been picked over the last thirty-six hours, and she imagined that those still threatened were taking all necessary precautions.
No one in the media had been endangered, so far, and even though she worked with the IC every day and wrote exclusively about American national security, she didn’t think for a moment she was in any danger herself.
Her latte came, and she checked her watch and saw that the man she was meeting was running a few minutes late.
She opened up the Washington Post website.
She’d been laid off back in the summer; she was still pissed about that, but she didn’t take it out on the other writers, and therefore continued to read their work.
She perused a new piece about the massive shoot-out in Washington Circle, including the death of a Belarusian assassin named Kravchuk who had been known to work with the Russians, along with the killing of five members of Gauntlet Group.
The official word from the U.S. government was that the Gauntlet men had been working on an unrelated surveillance mission for Homeland Security; they happened to be in the area, just a mile or so from the White House, and they had tried to thwart the attack but were instead ambushed by confederates of the dead Belarusian.
The story was already moving down in priority on the Washington Post’s website, mainly because of all the other killings that had happened since then, and the consensus across the media that this was a Russian irregular warfare operation running in D.C.
, and not some sort of abuse of power by a private American security company.
The Russians themselves were denying they had anything to do with what was going on, but they also denied they knew anyone named Alexi Kravchuk, a provable lie, so they weren’t to be believed.
Still, the woman sitting alone at the two-top on the sidewalk in Georgetown had her own reason to doubt the official U.S. government line.
Thinking of her doubts about the government and Gauntlet Group’s story caused her to check the time on her phone again, and since the man she’d come to meet was almost twenty minutes late, she started to send him a text via Signal.
She’d just opened the app when someone appeared from nowhere and stood over her table, his back to the road, momentarily blotting out the meager but welcome sun.
She looked up with a smile, expecting she knew who this would be, but quickly her smile faded. Before she spoke, her eyes flitted left and right.
She swallowed hard. “It’s you.”
The man she only knew as Six sat down in front of her, facing the bistro.
He’d arrived on foot with a small blue canvas backpack that looked like a student’s bookbag, and he positioned it under the table between his knees.
He wore a black canvas coat, jeans, and brown boots.
A dark gray watch cap covered his hair; his beard was dark, with just a few flecks of gray.
He also wore a single AirPod in his right ear.
His face showed deep intensity; his brown eyes remained locked on hers when he said, “I need you to stay very calm. Keep your voice low and make absolutely no dramatic reaction.”
A sudden fear coursed through her, but she did her best to hide it. She said, “Well, plopping down at my table with that look on your face and saying all that isn’t really the best way to get me to avoid a dramatic reaction.”
“A, it’s just my face, Cathy. Nothing I can do about that. And B, if I were a people person, I probably wouldn’t be doing what I do for a living.”
“Fair…okay. What’s going on?”
“Having said all that, you are in danger right now.”
“What?”
She said it with less stealth than the man across from her wanted, clearly, because he shushed her. Then, his voice still low, he said, “Cool as a cucumber, please.”
“What?” She said it more softly. She put her phone down and reached for her coffee with a quivering hand, trying to appear nonchalant but failing.
The female server came outside; Six ordered a cappuccino, and as the woman turned to go back inside, Catherine said, “Miss? Could I…could I have a glass of champagne?” She looked at Six now. “Unless…unless we have to…to…to run.”
Six smiled a little. “No. We’re fine for a few minutes.”
The server acknowledged the order with a smile and retreated to the warmer restaurant.
Catherine said, “Please tell me what’s going on.”
“We’ve been scanning the area for the past hour, making sure we know where the adversaries are.
We’ve detected some…activity that we find suspicious.
At the right time, you and I are going to rise from this table, stroll into the restaurant.
From there, we’ll go out the back door and into a waiting car. ”
“There’s a car waiting for us now?”
Six made an apologetic face. “At the right time, there will be. To be totally honest, we’re still kind of getting our shit together.”
“Wow,” Catherine said. “That is comforting.” She made a face of confusion. “How did you know I was here?”
“We picked up some intel.”
Despite herself, her eyes flitted around again.
This quiet little Georgetown street showed absolutely no evidence that there was some sort of surveillance mission going on.
People walked their dogs, delivery people rolled by on bikes.
The outdoor café tables were half-empty, and those patrons who were out here spoke in polite, hushed tones.
She said, “I don’t see anyone around here watching—”
“They’re pros,” Six replied. “I really have no notes for them. I just drove the neighborhood in a tow truck, looking for them.”
“Why a tow truck?”
“Tow trucks have LPRSs. License plate recognition systems. We know, in general, what we’re looking for; we have access to cameras in the area, a mini drone overhead, but I wanted to do a better scan.
I drove the neighborhood, got the ownership of most every vehicle from the tags.
There’s a duo in a car directly behind me, I won’t tell you where, because you’ll just want to look, and my team is not yet in place to get in their way.
There are two more vehicles a block away I spotted, but no one is inside either one.
We think the folks we’re worried about are on foot. ”
She couldn’t help herself now. “On foot? Meaning…they could be anyone around us?”
“Everyone around us has been checked out by my associate watching the cameras. There’s no one within a block who we’ve pegged as a threat.
We think we’ve ID’d one person on a rooftop across the street.
Can’t get a view of the face under their hat, not so far anyway, but they are acting suspicious. No gun visible, so that’s good news.”
With a tremor in her voice, she said, “I’d say so. Who…who are these people?”
Six did not answer directly. “We came across a different one of these teams the other day, and there were six people in total. Looks like, for some reason, there might be more than that around today.
“We’re still trying to get a picture of what we’re up against, so I came here to sit with you. This should slow them down. They won’t be able to identify me, not unless they start moving around to get an angle on my face, and that should buy us the time we need.”
“Well…I’m actually planning on meeting someone here in a—”
Six interrupted. “Would you mind if we held hands a moment? I’m trying to make this look as casual as possible, and I have something I need to tell you.”
“You want people to think I’m your mom, or that we’re a couple?”
“I don’t care what people think. I want to hold your hand because I am going to squeeze it very hard if you react to what I’m about to tell you.” He shrugged. “So…don’t.”
Slowly, she extended her arm across the little table. “You are quite the charmer.” She said it nervously; she knew bad news was coming.