The Enemy Inside by Steve Martini Read Free Book Online Page B

intersection? And don’t tell me they did it remotely because if they did, there would be evidence of hardware left behind no matter how small it was. The cops would have found it.” Harry looks at me across the table, tapping the page of the accident report with his finger.
    It is a good question, and one for which I have no answer.

SIX
    T he phone on her desk buzzed. Maya Grimes reached for the receiver.
    “Senator, you have a call. The man refuses to identify himself but says you know him.”
    She thought for a moment. “OK, put him through. And hold my other calls and appointments.” She put the receiver down and a few seconds later it buzzed again. Grimes picked it up. “Hello.”
    “Sorry to bother you at your office.”
    “I told you never to call me here. You’re not calling from a cell phone, are you?”
    “I’m at a pay phone. It was unavoidable. We’ve got a problem. We have to talk.”
    “Not here,” said Grimes. She glanced at her watch and thought for a moment. “The bench on the north side by the reflecting pool. You know the one.”
    “Where we met last time?”
    “Give me fifteen minutes.” Grimes hung up the phone.
    Early spring, and the Mall outside the Capitol was already bustling with early tourists and busloads of children on school field trips. Senator Maya Grimes walked quickly, trying to melt into the crowd, as unobtrusive as possible. Still, her face was recognizable to some of the passersby who stared at her and others who stole second glances as she clicked along quickly in her high heels down the path.
    Usually, if she had a private meeting, she would do it at some offbeat restaurant in the suburbs, take a car from the congressional fleet with darkened windows and a driver to deliver her to the door. But she wanted no record of this meeting popping up in the computer in the motor pool.
    Grimes had been twenty-two years in the US Senate, chairperson of the Committee on Banking, vice chair of Senate Finance, and a senior member of several subcommittees on financial affairs. She came from California, where the cost of an election to the Senate was approaching thirty million dollars. This, coupled with her political gravitas around the Capitol, gave her more hours on television than most seasoned pilots have in the cockpit. Hers was one of those faces that people tended to recognize. She lost count of the number of times some idiot had stopped her on the street wondering what film it was they had seen her in. Usually she didn’t mind, but today she had a terminal case of bad temper. She nearly ran down a couple of third graders who aimlessly bolted into her path in a misguided game of tag.
    A grandmother and seasoned politician, Grimes could usually turn on the charm for kids. Today she gave them a look from the Wicked Witch and kept moving quickly toward a small clump of trees along the north side of the reflecting pool. The walkway curved a little to the right. As she made the turn she saw him sitting there alone on the bench.
    Grimes slowed down and looked around to make sure no one was watching, there were no idle picture-takers with their backs to the pool glancing at the bench and the bushes behind it. Of course they could be a mile away with powerful optics listening through an electronic bug the size of an aspirin glued to a man’s chest.
    She walked slowly toward the bench, passed him by, and stopped. She stood there for a couple of seconds with her back to him, a few feet away. There was no one in earshot. “What do you want?”
    “You want to walk and talk?” he asked.
    “No!”
    “Suit yourself. I’m just trying to help. You wanted to be kept informed. That’s what I’m doing.”
    “So what is it?”
    “She’s dead.”
    “I know that!” It had been in the early-morning paper, identification of the woman killed in a car crash in Southern California. The Washington Post had played it up, page three with a two-column headline. Serna was a local political