First Daughter - Eric van Lustbader [60]
Armitage shivered. "Until they torture him again."
"He won't be tortured again."
"Damn straight he won't." Armitage was huddled against the passenger's-side window, as far away from Jack as he could get. "I'm filing a complaint with the Attorney General's office."
"I'd advise against it." Jack got on the George Washington Memorial Parkway, heading toward the District. "If you do, Garner will haul you in again. I also guarantee the Attorney General won't ever see the complaint."
"Then I'll take it public—any one of the news outlets would jump at this story."
"Garner would love that. In the blink of an eye, he and his people will prove you're a crank, and whatever credibility you're trying to build for your movement will be shot to hell."
Armitage regarded him for a moment. "What are you? The good cop?"
"I'm the good guy," Jack said. "The only one you're likely to meet in the next few weeks."
Armitage appeared to chew this over for some time. "If you're such a good guy, tell me what the hell is going on."
Jack maneuvered around a lumbering semi. "I can't do that."
Armitage's voice was intensely bitter. "This is a nightmare."
Every twenty seconds, Jack's eyes flicked to the rearview mirror. "Tell me about your organization."
Armitage grunted. "For a start, we're not E-Two. Nothing like it, in fact."
A gray BMW 5 Series had taken up station two cars behind theirs.
"But you know about E-Two." Jack was careful to keep whatever tension he was feeling out of his voice.
"Of course I do." Armitage pointed. "Can we get some more heat? I'm freezing."
Jack turned up the heater. "It's the fear draining out of you."
"Who says it's going? I feel like it'll be a part of me for the rest of my life."
Jack switched to the center lane. The gray BMW waited several minutes, then followed.
"Every movement has its radical element," Armitage was saying, "but to tar us with the same brush—well, it's like saying all Muslims are terrorists."
There was an exit coming up. Jack switched to the left lane. "You'd be surprised at how many Americans believe that."
"Fifty years ago, most Americans believed that Jews had horns," Armitage said. "That's part of what's wrong with this country, what we're fighting against."
Here came the gray BMW, nosing into the left lane.
"I can imagine Garner and his people still believing that," Jack said tartly.
"Why do you say 'Garner and his people'? Aren't you one of them?"
"I was brought in to keep them honest." That was one way to look at it, Jack thought. "Their philosophy isn't mine."
"Anyway, thank you. You probably saved Peter's life."
Jack was aware of Armitage studying his face.
"Unless it was all an act. Was it?"
"No, it wasn't."
"How do I know you're not lying?" Armitage said.
Jack laughed. "You don't."
"I don't see what's funny," Armitage said in a wounded voice.
"I was going to say, you have to take it on faith that I'm telling the truth."
Armitage managed a smile. "Oh, I have faith—faith in mankind, faith in science, faith that reason will win out over the engines of reinforcement built up by religion. Reason doesn't require a priest or a rabbi or an imam to exist."
"You sound very sure of yourself."
"I ought to," Armitage said. "I used to be a priest."
This interested Jack almost as much as the gray BMW did. "You fall out of bed?"
"I know what you're thinking—but, no, it wasn't a girl. It was more simple than that, really, and that made the revelation ever more profound. I woke up one day and realized that the world of religion was totally out of sync with the world I was living in, the world all around me, the world I was administering to. The bishops and archbishops I knew—my spiritual leaders—didn't have a clue about what was happening in the real world, and furthermore, they didn't care."
Armitage put his head back; his eyes turned inward. "One day, I made the mistake of voicing my concerns to them. They dismissed them out of hand, but from that moment on, I could tell that I was a danger to them. I was shut out of