Chapter 9

It took Wilder eight minutes to make it to the diner, and when he entered, he saw Crawford in the same booth. Predictable, which was not good in covert operations. Hell, nobody was doing anything right.

"Move," he ordered.

Crawford looked up, startled. "Why?"

Better than "what," but not by much. Wilder pointed at the other side of the table, and Crawford reluctantly vacated the seat that had its back to the wall and took the one across from it. Wilder figured he'd get the why in about four or five years.

Wilder sat down. "Who have you got in the swamp?"

"What swamp?" Crawford said, looking genuinely confused.

"The swamp by the Talmadge Bridge, near the movie base camp. Who's in there?"

"Nobody," Crawford said. "Why would we have anybody in there?"

Wilder sat back as the waitress approached.

"Beer," Wilder said.

"Same," Crawford said without looking over his shoulder at the waitress. When she was gone he said, "We've got nobody in the swamp, but I have some intelligence for you," as if he was eager to please. "Lucy Armstrong. She's worked in film for over fourteen years, the last twelve on her own as a director of commercials. She specializes in animals, does pretty good, but this project is her first feature as director. The previous director, Matthew Lawton, died Friday. We checked: heart attack, no foul play. Neither one of them had a file."

Wilder understood that. Most normal, red-blooded, apple-pie-eating, tax-paying Americans did not have an FBI or a CIA file. You had to get on the radar to get a file. So Armstrong wasn't on the government's radar. And that jived for Wilder, except that she was on his damn radar. He shook that off. "If she didn't have a file, how'd you find out this stuff?"

Crawford blinked. "I googled for it."

Jesus. "Finnegan called Armstrong this morning and threatened to sue her if she didn't follow the schedule."

"Could you get the number off her cell phone?" Crawford asked.

"You think Finnegan would be stupid enough to call her on a traceable line? Or leave caller ID?" That would save everyone a lot of trouble, Wilder thought. But the odds of that were the same as Finnegan showing up on the set.

"You're right. Neither Armstrong or Lawton had any apparent contact with Finnegan before this movie-financing thing. We don't know if they've ever met face to face, and we still don't think Finnegan is even in the States. We've got no reason to believe that Lawton knew about Finnegan's background. We think he just took the money to finish the movie, keep some of it for himself."

The waitress came back with their beers, and Wilder waited until she was gone to ask, "And Connor Nash?"

Crawford frowned for a second as he searched his mind. "Nash- he's a foreign national, right?"

"Speaks Australian, which is just like English but different."

"What?"

Wilder took a deep breath, and waited.

Crawford pulled out a PDA. Wilder wondered where that had been at their first meeting. "Let me see. We did run a check for non-U.S. citizens on the set. I mean the FBI did. After 9/11 it's been standard-"

Wilder didn't need a speech on protocol and how 9/11 fucked the country up in more ways than people realized. "What do you have on Nash?"

"Here it is. Not much. Australian, like you said. Been in the States on and off for the past eight years."

"Where is he when he's off?"

"Urn, we got three trips back to Australia. One to Germany." Crawford squinted at the PDA. "Hmm, this is odd. He's been in Iraq four times. Sixty-day stints working for a company called Blue River, whatever that is."

Wilder sat straighter. "Blue River is a security contractor." Wilder knew plenty of guys who'd worked for the security contractors in that true clusterfuck of a country. It was the one place that made the movie set look like a well-oiled machine. "Nash was gunslinging for them. What else?"

"Gunslinging?" Crawford asked, and Wilder thought, He's never been out of the country if he doesn't know that. A real cherry.

"A lot of new companies sprang up after the Second Gulf War, making easy money off all the contracts being let by the U.S. Most of the security work was done by private firms, guns for hire. Gunslingers."

"Oh." Crawford looked like he was carefully filing that away for later, and Wilder began to feel as if he were teaching CIA 101. Crawford continued tapping the screen with the stylus. "Nash was in the Australian army. Did seven years as an NCO."

That also made sense. Wilder had had no doubt from their first meeting that Nash had been military. "What was his specialty?"

"Something called SAS."

Wilder went cold. "Special Air Service. Who Dares Wins."

"What?"

"Who Dares Wins. That's the motto of the SAS. They're the Australian equivalent of U.S. Special Forces. They were rounded as the Australian version of the British SAS. Bad guys to go up against, good guys to have on your side." He'd been glad to be on their side during the early days of the Second Gulf War. Not so glad now that he might be going up against one on the set. Fuck, he thought. Connor Nash.

"Does it list his specialty?"

"Weapons. Secondary of demolitions."

Damn. Figured. They didn't have dishwashers in the SAS. "Anything else?"

Crawford took a cautious sip of his beer, as if the liquid were going to attack him. "Nash has worked on fourteen movies in the past twelve years. This is his second one with Armstrong. Which means she could be in on something with him now."

"No." Wilder processed it. So Nash worked for Blue River in between movie gigs. That made sense. With his SAS background he'd earn top dollar. Enough in sixty days to live on for a year if he was reasonably frugal. Then he had his movie income, although Wilder had no idea what a stunt coordinator pulled in. They didn't seem to be living in the lap of luxury on this movie. "Did Nash do any time in Ireland where he might have run into Finnegan?'

"No record of it."

"How about Mexico? Was Nash down there when Finnegan got nabbed?"

"No."

There was a long silence while Wilder tried to figure out the connection between Nash and Finnegan, and then Crawford cleared his throat nervously. "Finnegan did some things in Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam. Smuggling."

Bingo, Wilder thought. "You should have told me that up front, damn it. What are we playing, hide the intelligence here?"

"I didn't put it together until right now," Crawford said. "I mean, I

read the files, but there was so much information I didn't see the possibility of Finnegan and Nash meeting there."

Wilder shook his head. "Anything could have happened after Baghdad fell. The Army had planned on using six divisions, but the politicians screwed up the assault from the north and there were only two and a half. The place was wide open. A lot of vultures just like Finnegan flew in to pick over the leavings." He picked up his beer. "You have a picture of Finnegan?"

"Taken eighteen years ago." Crawford pulled it out of his coat pocket, flashing his revolver again, and handed it to Wilder, who checked his nemesis out: a burly, handsome man with white hair and piercing blue eyes in a truly bad Hawaiian shirt.

Wilder was impressed. The kid had done okay boiling it down and following up on the old director. Of course, he had to be smart; the CIA had probably recruited him out of some Ivy League school that would never have allowed Wilder to look at their catalog, never mind enroll.

Crawford leaned back so that his jacket fell open, again exposing his revolver. "You're probably wondering about my gun."

Nope.

"It's my dad's."

Oh, crap. Wilder ran his hand along the side of his empty mug and gestured for the waitress with two fingers. There was silence until she came and left.