Free Support and Defend by Tom Clancy, Mark Greaney Page A

garage.
    He stopped, clutching his keys in his hand as if they might be some sort of adequate protection against a mugging.
    The figure came closer, but remained out of the light. He faced Banfield but said nothing.
    “Hello?”
    The man stepped into the light now. He wore a trench coat with the collar up and a knit cap on his head, pulled just above his eyes. He looked instantly familiar to Banfield, but it took him several seconds to identify him.
    “Ethan? Is that you?”
    “We need to talk.”
    “ Christ , son! You scared the living shit out of me.”
    “Where can we go?”
    “Why the dramatics? You could have just e-mailed me. Come upstairs. We’ll go to my office.”
    “No!” Ethan Ross said, lurching forward as he spoke. Banfield recoiled a little, but it was in surprise, not fear.
    “What the hell is going on?”
    “Your office might be bugged. Your phone, too.”
    “Why would it be bugged?”
    “Let’s take your car. I know a place we can talk.”
    A T R OSS’S DIRECTION, they drove west through Georgetown and crossed the Francis Scott Key Bridge into Virginia. Here they merged into the northbound lanes of the George Washington Memorial Parkway, which ran northwest away from the D.C. metro area.
    “Shall I cancel my lunch meeting?” Banfield asked. Ross did not answer.
    “Do I need to stop for gas? How far are we going?”
    “Not much farther.”
    Banfield pressed his luck, doing his best to engage Ross in conversation, but the younger man just stared out the window of the car and did not reply.
    The rain was light but steady, and the only sound inside the Volkswagen was the soft whine of wet tires and the slow cycle of the wiper blades.
    After only a few minutes on the winding, hilly road, Ross told Banfield to take the next right, and immediately the sixty-six-year-old reporter realized they must be heading to Fort Marcy Park.
    The park was a wooded and secluded location, across the river and northwest of downtown D.C. It had been a real fort back in the Civil War, on a hill with sweeping views of both the Potomac and open farmland, and thoroughly fortified with earthen walls, dugouts, and trenches, many of which could still be discerned as unnatural-looking undulations in the landscape.
    Now it was mostly overgrown, there were no buildings of any kind, but a couple cannons stood on the earthen berms above trenches filled with tall bare trees.
    Banfield parked in the small lot and immediately turned to Ross for answers, but the younger man opened his door and began walking away from the car, up the hill and into the woods. Banfield grabbed an umbrella out of the backseat and followed him.
    They walked for several minutes, until Ross sat on a wet wooden bench next to a lone cannon out of view of the parking lot behind them. Banfield sat next to him; they faced the Potomac but couldn’t see the river through the foliage on the hillside in front of them. Banfield winced as a wet, cold breeze stung his face. He had been deferential to Ross over the past fifteen minutes, but his patience diminished quickly while they sat there, staring off into the woods. “Ethan, I am an aging city dweller with bursitis in his hips and an allergy to almost everything, and you’ve brought me out into thirty-eight-degree rain and walked me into the woods. What the hell is going on?”
    Ross ignored the rain. He stood from the bench and began pacing back and forth on the berm next to the cannon. “It’s fucking India, Harlan, that’s what is going on.”
    “India?”
    “The attack yesterday. You heard about it, right?”
    “Well, yes. Sure. It was on the news. But I don’t know why—”
    “It was a Palestinian assassination of an ex–Israeli commando.”
    The blank look on Banfield’s face showed he had no idea what Ross’s point was. “I didn’t see that on the news,” he said, “but . . . sorry . . . why do I care?”
    “The guy killed in India was the on-scene commander of the Turkish peace