Page 70 of Holmes, Margaret and Poe

“Where’s the garden?” he asked.

She gestured across the living area to two curtained French doors. “A lot of work, but I love it.”

The booze was hitting him. The teacher’s face had flushed, her pupils were slightly dilated, and she had this happy-go-lucky air about her.This could work out after all.“Show me your garden,” he said.

“Tomorrow.”

“C’mon,” Davis said in a kidding tone. “I just …”

“What?” she asked.

“I loved the way you looked just then, talking about your garden. I want to see what you look like out in your garden.”

Plum grinned at him. “But it’s cold and dark out there.”

“No lights?” he said.

“No, there are lights.”

“Then it’s just a matter of the right jackets, hats, and a little more of your daddy’s favorite to take with us.” He poured himself more bourbon and gazed at Plum with arched eyebrows.

She laughed and looked wildly happy. “Yes, please. I’ll get my jacket.” She hurried from the room.

“Perfect,” Davis said, and poured two more fingers of bourbon in her glass.

CHAPTER 62

MARION DAVIS WAITED FORthe dose he’d slipped into Fiona’s third drink to take full effect, then left her sprawled on her belly across the bed, face over a bucket in case she vomited. With the drug in her, she wouldn’t crack an eye open for another twelve hours easy.

Davis had seen the drug work time and again. It was what he used at critical moments when he needed to silence someone close and get work done without any possibility of interruption.

He went out to his car and retrieved two rectangular hard-sided cases that could have held rifles or guitars, though they held neither. He went straight to the basement door off the kitchen and opened it. He flipped on the lights, climbed down the stairs, passed the laundry room, and went through a man cave of sorts to a door on the far side of it.

He opened it and entered a long, narrow space with an equally long bench against the left wall. He found a pull cord and switched on a bank of overhead lights.

Davis gave the extensive tool collection a sweeping glance. Satisfied, he opened the first case. The shoulder-mounted stock, shooting mechanism, and sight of the Stinger were all snuggled in cavities in the foam he’d cut with an electric knife.

He opened the second case, brought out the two warheads, and began to methodically take them apart according to diagrams he’d brought with him.

Davis had always taken things apart. Some of his earliest and fondest memories were of dismantling devices and then putting them back together or modifying them.

Indeed, everything in Davis’s recent life had followed from that first love of all things mechanical and technical as well as the deep and secret hatred he felt toward the United States and Americans in general.

He’d seen up close what their corruption had done to Afghanistan.

To Iraq.

To Syria.

Their unrelenting sleaze had turned Davis radical eventually, made him willing to speak and act one way, while believing the exact opposite in his heart. The clerics had a term for it —taqiyya— a special dispensation for acting in secrecy, for taking on false identities, and for engaging in deceptions and destruction in the name of a greater good.

Davis had been cloaking his true aims for more than a decade by then, first with the US military, and then stateside with all the people who mattered, the people in power. Never slipping. Never letting on who he really was deep inside.

And planning,he thought as he got the rocket casing off the missile, exposing the primitive electronics and crude circuit boards.Always planning.

Davis accepted the fact that it had been his old friend Leslie Parks who first taught him the importance of working out contingencies before entering questionable legal terrain and therefore possible law enforcement scrutiny.

Planning and story,Davis thought as he retrieved a sensor and meter from the other end of the bench.Just like old Les Parks always said, you know your story going in and you stick to it.Once you’ve put the story together, you never waver.

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