Burning the Apostle (The November Man Book 13) by Bill Granger

Author:Bill Granger [Granger, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2015-01-13T06:00:00+00:00

23

Jack Cavett picked up Devereaux at the corner of 14th and K streets at 1620 hours, a little late because of the traffic backed up on the bridge. Devereaux slid into the passenger seat and then removed the pistol and holster from his raincoat pocket without any comment.

“I want to use your glove compartment,” he said.

“It’s not locked.”

Devereaux put the pistol and holster in the compartment and shut it. Cavett stared at the weapon and then at the glove compartment and then released the brake and started up the street. The traffic was dense but it was moving at least. Jack Cavett went with the flow. The two men did not speak for several minutes.

Then Cavett said, “I bought a coffeemaker this morning for something to do. I found the model in a Peoples drugstore on sale. I took it back to the Pentagon and took it apart.”

Devereaux stared through the windshield at the gray afternoon descending to early evening. The morning rain had turned to an afternoon of edgy sullenness. Washington does not like the cold and it shows in the faces of the pedestrians on the street, in the impatience of the traffic, in a hundred small ways that suggest a massive municipal annoyance.

“General Lee came around finally to watch me take it apart. He asked me how it would have worked and I told him. You simply bridge the built-in fuse and create a different timer for a long-range detonation. General Lee said they’d found the remains of one of the coffeemakers and he asked me how I knew which model to buy in the drugstore. I told him I asked one of the men I’d interviewed if he remembered the model.”

Devereaux waited.

“Any of this interesting to you?”

“I don’t understand how they could get all those coffeemakers into all those offices,” Devereaux said.

“The general said the same thing.”

“Go ahead,” Devereaux said. It was a grudging voice.

“I said it was the Sherlock Holmes theory. When you’ve eliminated every other possibility, the one that remains has to be the truth, regardless of how silly it looks. This had to be a recent setup and the general said he remembered the coffeemaker had arrived at their office less than a week ago. So he went off to doodle it over and about an hour ago he asked me what I thought the accelerant was and I said it was probably solid-state rocket fuel mixed with a little gasoline and bits of Styrofoam for thickening. He gave me a funny look and went away. That’s my day. General Lee doesn’t like me.”

“That’s why he assigned you to me.”

“No. He wants to give you a free hand without appearing to give you a free hand and I’m the only officer he has right now who doesn’t know a damned thing about intelligence. So I’m a messenger. Anything you want to tell the general, you tell me, and I won’t understand the significance of it.”

Devereaux looked hard at Jack Cavett then. They were

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