“I think he’s there in case Gray shows up,” said Rudd. “So CONTROL can exercise all of its options.”
“Sandy is more than capable of taking out Gray by herself,” said Jolene.
“I agree, but two exponentially increases the odds,” said Rudd. “Then again, we could use some help with Young. I have a feeling she’s the key to finding Gray.”
A few minutes later, they followed Logan Walsh’s inconspicuous Honda Accord into the Whole Foods parking lot. Walsh had pulled directly in front of them from the Hilton Garden Inn parking lot, which lay halfway between the coffee shop and the shopping center, on Broad Street.
“What the hell is he doing?” asked Rudd.
“It’s my fault,” said Jolene. “I guess I needed to explain to him that it might not be a great idea to stuff half of the team in the same place at the same time. Do you want me to send him back to the hotel?”
“No. He’s a new face to Young,” said Rudd. “We’re the ones that should probably back off.”
“It’s not like we were going to park right next to her and sit there like idiots.”
“I know. I know. Let him know we’re going to circle the lot and head across the street,” said Rudd. “We’ll wait and see where she heads next. If she goes home, he’s off the hook.”
She contacted Walsh, while he turned them around in the parking lot and crossed Broad Street. They waited several minutes in front of the Trader Joe’s until Young got back on the road, headed south. Once she passed downtown Falls Church, Rudd felt pretty confident, based on what Gentry had reported from Whole Foods, that she’d picked up lunch and was headed home. When she turned left off Broad Street onto Noland, he told Jolene to send him back to his hotel. Young’s house was one street over. She was headed home.
“Young is a dead end,” he muttered. “I can feel it.”
“This whole job is a dead end,” said Jolene, betraying a tone he hadn’t heard from her previously.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
She glanced at him. “I mean all of this feels pointless. On purpose.”
“Like we’re being set up for a fall?” asked Rudd.
“A fall from what, though?” said Jolene. “They can’t blame us for losing Gray. We’d need three to four times the number of people to adequately follow him, and even that wouldn’t guarantee full coverage. We’ve both read all the books these former American spies publish. They all managed to meet with their contacts in Moscow after conducting crafty SDRs—even under full KGB or FSB surveillance! I don’t know why they sent us here on this fool’s errand, but there’s a reason, and I suspect the story doesn’t end well for us. They could have dragged in teams from the New York tristate area. Upstate New York and Pennsylvania. New England. But for some reason they dragged the Kentucky-Tennessee crew to DC instead. To work this alone.”
“Maybe we’re not alone,” said Rudd.
“That would actually make the situation worse for us,” she said. “They don’t trust us to work with other teams?”
“I don’t think there’s another team working Gray,” said Rudd. “We would have noticed.”
“Probably,” she said.
“I see this as more of a compartmentation issue around Helen Gray,” said Rudd. “She was obviously important to CONTROL. Same with that Wilson guy. They wouldn’t have scrambled two over-the-hill teams in the middle of the night to intercept them if they weren’t critically important.”
“Helen Gray must have really caught them off guard,” said Jolene.
“Right. And things went completely sideways—through no fault of our own,” said Rudd. “Now there’s nothing left to do but chase down a few pointless leads and possibly tie up some loose ends, so why bring in a new team? Even if they didn’t back brief the new crew, the whole Tennessee fiasco would pop up during the team’s first Devin Gray Google search. They’d be sitting around wondering, Why didn’t CONTROL tell us about Helen Gray and this Donald Wilson guy? Who are they? Et cetera. Et cetera.”
“I guess,” said Jolene. “It’s just that all we’ve done for the past thirty years are grimy-ass jobs that didn’t seem connected to anything important. Planting drugs, money, or kiddie porn on people. A few hit-and-runs on high school kids and military folks. Lots of blackmail pictures. This is all different, but not in the right way. The job they sent you on was important. No doubt about that. But it didn’t work out. Same with the job I did a couple weeks ago in DC. That was the first time I actually felt like I’d done something important, until I finally put two and two together and figured out that I’d probably killed two of our own. That didn’t feel too good then, and it doesn’t feel good right now.”