Pyramid Deception Read Free Page B

I’ll drive up to Great Falls and get a feel for the area and scope out the meeting place in daylight. Then we’ll do the meet and we’ll see if I can get a trail to follow. I’ll let you know what I find out first thing in the morning. Now grab your bag and whatever you absolutely need to work on today. I’m taking you home.”
    After dropping Cindy off, Hannibal doubled back to his own place in the District. There he did a little basic research about Great Falls and Googled up the location of the town’s only Safeway. Then he moved to the kitchen and threw a steak under the broiler. While it browned he cleaned and function checked his .40 caliber Sig Sauer P229 because, well, you never know. He turned the steak, tossed a salad together, and ate in the living room watching NFL Countdown on ESPN. He didn’t really care much about the team standings, but he loved the “C’mon Man” segments.
    Four or five times he reached for the telephone to check up on Cindy, but each time decided not to. Twice he stood up to go talk to her father Ray, who lived upstairs from him. Both times he decided that she might not have told him what had happened, and might not want him to know. Even if she did, she would want to tell him herself.
    Around seven o’clock he climbed into the Volvo he secretly called Black Beauty, cranked an obscure Jimi Hendrix blues CD and pointed west across the city. He crossed into Virginia and followed the George Washington Parkway north along the Potomac until he could hop onto the Georgetown Pike, the primary road slicing through his destination.
    A pleasant forty-minute drive put him in Great Falls, which was not so much a town as a sprawling area of outsized homes and expansive wooded lots parked along the Potomac River. Named for the Great Falls National Park, the little village was a loose collection of winding roads, riding trails and country clubs. The Safeway supermarket anchored a shopping center at the intersection of Georgetown Pike and Walker Road. Across Walker sat a little village center with restaurants and shopping but, as Hannibal quickly confirmed, not one decent place to get coffee. Luckily he didn’t have to go far down Route 7, back toward Tysons Corner, before he found a Starbucks. Hannibal always found them convenient places to waste a couple of hours. As long as you keep your laptop open and keep the coffee coming, nobody bothers you.
    At 11 pm Hannibal left his car in the village center parking lot and walked across the two lane blacktop to the Safeway store. Everything was closed, as expected, leaving the area vacant. Traffic was nil, although a handful of cars had been left in the parking lot.
    The shopping center, or strip mall as Hannibal’s father would have called it, was L shaped with the Safeway store forming the short leg of the L. The space between the Safeway building and the longer building opened into a wooded area. To make things homey, someone had decided to lay a sidewalk connecting the two buildings and plant a couple of tables in the cement at the corner. Hannibal sat at one of the permanently attached chairs, working at not looking threatening. He was under one of the few streetlamps set way too far apart out there, but he doubted there was a crime problem in that area. The police always take care of the wealthy citizens, and some of the richest in the county lived in the mansions surrounding him.
    The cricket serenade from the surrounding woods was so loud it almost drowned out the sound of a car door opening. The moon highlighted a blonde woman stepping out of a black Lexus, one of the vehicles parked in the lot. The black cashmere shawl across her shoulders - Cindy would have called it apashmina - was her only practical garment, protecting her from the evening cool. Her heels not only announced her steps loudly, but would be useless if she had to run more than five steps. Like Hannibal she wore black, but her silk