Page 16 of Nobody's Hero
‘The one where the scorpion promises not to sting the frog if it carries him across the river? The scorpion says if he did, the frog would die, but he’d drown. The frog agrees. Halfway across, the scorpion stings the frog anyway. He couldn’t change his nature.’ She took a silent moment. ‘I guess in this story I’m the scorpion?’
‘Once a spook, always a spook. You lie by default.’
‘That’s enough,’ the grey man said. He held up his hand. A car drove towards them. It was big and black and looked like the Beast, the armoured Cadillac the president was transported in. The car pulled up beside them. The driver got out and took up a defensive position.
‘Ooh, scary,’ Koenig said.
‘Inside, please,’ the grey man said.
Koenig did as he was asked. The interior of the car smelled fresh and clean. Much more pleasant than the interview room. There were two bench seats. One forwards-facing, the other rear-facing. Like a diner booth. Koenig chose to face forwards. The grey man sat opposite him. There was a minifridge in the centre console. Koenig opened a bottle of sparkling mineral water and took a swig. Draper tried to get in beside him, but the grey man stopped her. ‘Sorry, Miss Draper, you don’t have the clearance for this.’
Draper didn’t seem to mind. Koenig imagined that in the intelligence game, you got used to being excluded from things that didn’t concern you. That sometimes it wasn’t your turn on the merry-go-round.
‘What’s this about?’ Koenig said. ‘Jen has higher clearance than me. And I know this because I don’t have any.’
The grey man turned to Koenig. He said, ‘I need you to tell me everything you know about the Acacia Avenue Protocol.’
Chapter 14
‘Tell me who you are first,’ Koenig said.
‘Who I am is not important,’ the grey man said.
‘You’ll have no problem telling me then.’
The grey man frowned. ‘Why do you need to know?’
‘I don’t need to know, Iwantto know.’
The grey man looked at him shrewdly. Koenig wondered what it was he saw. Did he see a drifter, a man who spent his days Forrest Gumping across the towns and cities of America, never staying in the same place twice? Or did he see someone else? Did he see another grey man?
‘My name’s Andrew Smerconish,’ he said. ‘I work for the Department of Defense.’
‘The DoD is our biggest government agency. Would you care to narrow it down?’
‘No.’
‘And if I were to insist, you’d quote all sorts of national security reasons why you can’t tell me?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Did you work with Jen?’
‘I met her for the first time today.’
‘Not what I asked.’
Smerconish smiled. ‘I knewofher.’
‘And did she know of you?’
‘I make it my business that people don’t know of me.’
‘Why are you here?’
‘To ask you about the Acacia Avenue Protocol.’
‘No. Anyone could have done that. I want to know why a high-ranking DoD official, almost certainly Defense Intelligence Agency, has just escorted me out of a police interview room. In other words, why areyouhere?’