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“Do you need a solicitor?”
“Probably, but I can’t afford one”
“Want me to see what Sir James can do?”
“I think Sir James is pretty much done with me”
“I think he’s prettyhere somewhere?”
“We have to start fro”
“Well, I’ve got extensive notes and the video of the park on ent Ashburn provided me with electronic files for a lot of the other video feeds”
“Let’s go”
They drove to her hotel and set up a mini command center For the next several hours they pored over the notes of the case and the video feeds from Chapman’s laptop
“Well, one thing’s figured out,” said Stone as he stared at the screen
Chapman joined him “What?”
“The homeless woman who poured the bottle of water on the tree and killed it?” He pointed at the screen showing the ie
“What about it? That’s one of the few things we can be reasonably sure about”
Stone hit soe of the woman “I was puzzled that they’d b
ring someone in for such a minimal task”
“It wasn’t minimal,” Chap else in motion”
“I wasn’t talking about poisoning the tree Iher in just to lie about Sykes and increase our suspicion of him? They could’ve come at it some other way Now I know”
“I’”
“Look at the back of the woman’s hand”
Chape even more
“Her hand is pretty dirty, but if you look at the bottoht”
Chapasped “That’s a bird’s foot The tattoo Donohue had on her hand What was it? The western uise”
“They used her for that and then got her to try and implicate Sykes I don’t think her bosses cared whether she succeeded or not Sykes was a dead man, and they always intended to kill her too”
Chapman sat back down and went over some notes “You know, Garchik said that bombers like to do trial runs toproperly”
“But usually they’ll do it in someplace inconspicuous At least to the extent you can be inconspicuous when you’re setting off a bomb”
“And Lafayette Park is hardly inconspicuous Which means it wasn’t a trial run It was the er one”
Stone looked thoughtful “Right The bo at Lafayette had to take place in order for some other event to occur”
“We have that list of upco events at the park”
“I don’t think the answer lies there”
“I agree,” said Chap to be, or if the event will even be held”
“Right”
She said, “The nanobot thing that has everyone’s knickers in a knot They occur at the ”
“And they apparently can be ion Synthetic plague or anthrax or ricin e quantities”
“But again, you load all that into a root ball in a tree across from the bloody White House with a boue or another deadly microbe on it? Makes no sense”