Old Boys by Charles McCarry

Author:Charles McCarry [McCarry, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Crime, Espionage, Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Thriller
ISBN: 9781468300307
Google: t-yDDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B07MVCHHMY
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2004-06-02T23:00:00+00:00

7

By now it was rush hour. The automobiles on Massachusetts Avenue alone, bumper to bumper from Union Station to the Maryland line, were probably worth more, collectively, than the gross national product of most of the countries that owned embassies on Embassy Row. I have never in my life commuted. Like Harley, shank’s mare has been my transport and I’ve been lucky enough, thanks to taxpayers like these idle folks in their idling Fords and Toyotas, to live most of my life in cities where walking is a pleasure.

Washington is one of those towns, if only in the cool weeks between mid-October and mid-March when open-air exercise is possible without drowning in your own sweat. Right now I was walking past the vice president’s fortified residence, on my way to the Wisconsin Avenue Whole Foods store to buy some groceries and be snubbed by the politically fastidious regular clientele, who could tell at a glance if one’s shopping cart contained vegetables contaminated by chemicals and pesticides or chickens that had not ranged free before their heads were chopped off.

I felt oxygen-deprived after breathing exhaust fumes during nearly an hour of uphill walking. No wonder the drivers looked so dazed, so overcome. Someone had fallen into step beside me. I looked over my shoulder and saw two more pedestrians, one about ten meters to the rear, the other across the street. Our old friends A, B, and C again. This time they weren’t Russians or Chinese or clean-cut Ohio boys with Glocks in their jeans, but fellows in matching dark raincoats and polyester tweed hats.

As I turned into the cross street that led to Wisconsin Avenue, the one beside me, a stocky broad-shouldered man with Nixonian five o’clock shadow, looked up at me and smiled.

“Hi,” he said.

Let’s call him “A.”

I said, “Good evening.”

A said, “My friends and I would like it if you can join us in for a drink. Our place is just around the corner.”

“Very kind of you,” I said. “But I have some shopping to do.”

“This won’t take long. For old times’ sake.”

“Maybe some other time.”

“Right now would be better for us.”

A was showing me something. It was one of those flip-open leather cases you see on television when federal agents flash their ID and everyone either becomes cooperative or starts shooting. Plainly A regarded it as a talisman. I took it out of his hand—no tug of war; he let me have it. A picture, unmistakably A, a fictitious name, Robert F. Gordon, and the official name of the Outfit embossed above its official seal. What, no badge?

I handed it back to him and said, “I thought that secret agents never carried credentials.”

“Times have changed, Horace,” A said. “This way, please.”

Squat and muscular and sure of his strength, he reminded me of the man on the stairway in Moscow.

We were standing next to the iron fence that marks the boundary of the vice president’s grounds, not the best place for a clandestine conversation. This perimeter bristled with

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