Black Rain

Sven didn’t seem to object and the two continued walking—Moore in his heavy boots, orange scarf and bulky layers of cotton and wool; Sven in his cashmere and expensive Italian shoes, now getting ruined in the snow.

“You’re the guy on the phone the other night,” Moore guessed.

“Very observant,” Sven replied.

“Are you also a dry cleaner?”

“What?”

“I’m wondering how you got that note in my pocket,” Moore said. “I never felt it placed there, so I thought it might have come back from the dry cleaners like that.”

Sven kept walking.

Moore read his face. “Not your doing.”

“I just took the call.”

“Somehow it figures,” Moore said, the tone of a disgusted veteran in his voice.

With that, he picked up the pace, heading out onto the bridge deck, out over the river, where it would be colder and Sven’s thin clothes would be less adequate than they already appeared to be.

Sven seemed aware of that fact. “Where the hell are we going?” he whined.

“We’re not going anywhere,”

Moore said, looking down at the Potomac, dark and ominous against the white snowbanks. “We’re just walking. Staying out in the open, out in public, where I’m less likely to perceive you as a threat and have to kill you because of it.”

Sven laughed. “Am I supposed to take that seriously?”

“Take it however you want,” Moore said, continuing the walk. “Not like they would miss you anyway.”

Sven seemed to clench his jaw, and Moore guessed the remark had hit the target.

“I don’t think you understand the situation,” Sven told him. “You’re the one who needs us. I’m just here to find out if you’re worth the time.”

“Really?” Moore said. “Important errand they’ve sent you on. You must be so proud.”

Moore turned away from him, but Sven grabbed his shoulder to spin him back around. “Listen to me, old man—”

Moore knocked the hand away and bore into Sven with fury in his eyes. “No, you listen to me, you worthless little fuck. I don’t deal with pawns or messengers. Forty years in this business—that’s what I’ve got. So if the people who sent you have anything to say, they’d better have the balls to come see me themselves. Or at least send someone who matters.”

Sven began to say something but Moore cut him off.

“You’re a fucking nobody and you don’t know jack shit about this operation. You don’t even know how your people contacted me.”

Sven’s face was red with anger.

Moore’s eyebrows went up in mockery of his opponent. “Come on, then. Let’s hear it. Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me how important you are and just what it is that you know.”

“I know enough,” Sven said finally. “I know they pulled you off an important job and you don’t like that. I know that your career is pretty much done and you don’t like that either. Forty years you’ve got. I say forty years they used you, now you’re getting kicked to the curb, and that must burn you up pretty bad or you wouldn’t be here in the first place, would you?”

Moore stared at Sven and the anger, both real and pretend, seeped away. When he spoke again his voice was like gravel. “As a matter of fact, it does,” he said truthfully. “But coming here was a mistake.”

He looked at Sven with a trace of pity in his eyes. “Go home,” he said. “Go home before you get yourself killed. You think this is going to happen? You really think so? If people switched sides every time they got pissed off, then where the hell would we be?”

Sven didn’t answer and Moore shook his head in disgust. “Go home and tell your people that I’m not interested. You tell them that money is not enough to get me. And the next time they want to offer me something, they better not send some punk kid who’s wet behind the ears and worried about his lips chafing in the cold.” Moore shook his head even more dejectedly than before. “I’ve got files older than you.”

With that he turned his back on Sven and looked out over the stone railing of the bridge. With a gloved hand, he brushed the snow from the section in front of him and rested his forearms on it, gazing out at the black water rippling gently beneath the gray-white sky. “Forty years,” he mumbled, “and this is how it ends. What a joke. What a fucking joke.”

In a heated room far from the bridge, Gibbs listened to every word, and for the first time he began to understand why Moore was held in such high regard. He’d played it masterfully. Sven was furious, angry enough to tell Moore volumes just to prove that he mattered, or to run back to his superiors and insist that Moore had balked and would need more prodding to come aboard. A sure sign that Moore was legit as opposed to being bait for a trap.

It was almost enough to make Gibbs wish the drama were real. But the situation was not as Moore had been led to believe, and despite his work, Moore was involved in a game he couldn’t win.

Back at the bridge Sven smiled for the first time. “Why don’t you come with me?” he said. “You can tell them yourself.”