The dimly lit bar was called Mongo, and at this hour it was beginning to fill up, but a table for four in one corner was empty, and Dammerman steered them over. As soon as they were seated, a beetle-browed bartender came over with a double scotch-rocks, which Dammerman drank down immediately, and the bartender took the glass.
“For you, sir?” he asked Hardy.
“A Diet Coke.”
“Why don’t you get a real drink?” Dammerman demanded.
“I’m still an on-duty cop at heart,” Hardy said, after the bartender left. “And we’ve got a big day tomorrow. I’ll drink later.”
”Suit yourself,” Dammerman said. “Did you have Reid and the Rockingham broad followed like I asked?”
“They left the restaurant early and went to the apartment about thirty minutes ago. Looked chummy, my man said.”
“Okay. What about Levin?”
“O’Connell is waiting for her to deliver the flash drive. Soon as that happens she’s almost certainly going to leave the building for lunch somewhere. It’s what she usually does. And as soon as she clears the building, my Brighton Beach people are going to grab her.”
“She never has lunch at our cafeteria?”
“I’m told not,” Hardy said. “Anyway, why do we need to make her disappear? Just asking.”
“She knows something she shouldn’t,” Dammerman said. “And I don’t want her shooting off her mouth to the wrong people.”
“She’ll disappear.”
The bartender returned with their drinks, and when he left, Dammerman leaned forward.”Permanently.”
“The Brighton Beach guys are ex–Russian Special Forces. They’ll get the job done.”
“I don’t trust fucking Russians. They’ve got no respect for us.”
Hardy almost laughed out loud, but he thought better of it. “Trust me, these guys are the best. Highly trained, good with explosives, weapons, hand-to-hand combat, and no conscience. They do what the money tells them to do.”
“And afterward? What’s to keep them from opening their mouths and fucking us?”
“When they’re done, they’ll walk away until another job comes up. They won’t want to screw up their own reputations. I’m telling you, these guys are pros.”
This time Dammerman sipped at his drink, obviously weighing all the angles. “Any of these guys ever fuck up, go down?”
“We busted a few now and then when I worked anti-terrorism.”
“You’re not filling me with a lot of confidence here, Butch.”
“The guys who went down were stupid. They made mistakes. Somebody ratted them out for chump change. Some babe they were fucking and slapped around because she pissed them off called the cops. Shit like that. But I’m telling you the people I hired are the best.”
“I don’t want any problems coming back at us, that’s all.”
“They won’t,” Hardy said.
Dammerman was silent for a long beat or two, working at his drink. He was worried, and it was a rare sight to Hardy, who was thinking that he liked it.
“What about the Levin broad, do you think she believes something is going on?” Dammerman asked.
Something big was going on, Hardy was sure of it. But he shook his head. “She’s as clueless as all the other geeks down in the DCSS,” he said. “But I’ll tell you the one who really worries me.”
“Yeah?”
“Julia O’Connell. I don’t think that she sees the real world for what it is. She’s another geek, and if there’s a weak link it might be her. Just saying.”