The End Game

32

Federal Plaza, Lower Manhattan

Seated at the conference table, Deutsch didn’t think it was possible to feel angrier, sadder, more tired or more frustrated that she did at that precise moment. It was twenty-hours since she’d last sat in that same chair, twenty-four hours since her boss had chewed her out publicly in front of the same collection of grim faces. Déjà vu all over again, except for the fact that Lendowski wasn’t at the table-or anywhere to be found, for that matter.

They’d found his car parked by a gas station a few yards away from the thruway’s overpass. There was no sign of foul play. His work cell phone was missing and turned off, its battery pulled-meaning there was no way to track him. There was no one at his home, either.

Gallo had driven into town again and was chairing the emergency proceedings for the second day running, and on a Sunday morning at that. The two CIA liaisons, Henriksson and his silent partner, were also back in the room, as were four other agents from the New York field office that Deutsch barely knew.

“We know Reilly left the city in a car he stole from a parking lot on Fulton Street shortly after he escaped custody,” one of the agents said. “A 1994 Caprice Classic. We’ve got the car heading north on the I-95 at around two thirty in the afternoon yesterday, so around twelve hours after his escape. We don’t know what he did in the meantime.”

Deutsch noticed Henriksson studying her impassively and knew her face must have looked like thunder at the renewed mention of Reilly’s escape. She tried to shrink into herself in a vain attempt to disappear from the room.

“We have another couple of street camera sightings in and around Mamaroneck last night. Nothing after that. So either he dumped the car or-”

Henriksson seemed to lose patience and interrupted. “We’re wasting time. We all know what happened. Reilly drove up there to see Chaykin. They met somewhere, Lendowski stepped in and Reilly got the jump on him. Whether Agent Lendowski is still alive or not is the only question here, although given we haven’t heard from him yet, my guess is he’s no longer around to tell his side of the story.”

Deutsch jolted to life. “Hang on a second-that’s a pretty big assumption to make with no evidence.”

“Oh?” the CIA agent asked, his tone chillingly calm. “You have a more likely scenario about where your missing partner is?” His sardonic emphasis on “missing partner” was hard to miss.

Deutsch tried her best not to look like a jackrabbit trying to stare down an eighteen-wheeler. “No, but-why didn’t he call in his position or ask for backup?”

The robotic Scandinavian wasn’t going to be deterred that easily. “Maybe he didn’t get the chance. Maybe Reilly jumped him before he had a chance to call it in.”

“But why didn’t he-”

“What?” He cut her off firmly. “Reilly already assaulted you and Lendowski once. It’s not like he has an aversion to using force. And if I may offer some advice here, Agent Deutsch-I wouldn’t go out of my way to defend an agent who escaped while under your expert custody. It might make people wonder.” Without giving her a chance for an indignant rebuttal, the CIA agent turned to Gallo. “We need to bring in Chaykin. She knows what happened. We need to question her.”

Gallo glanced at Deutsch, frowning, then swung his gaze back on Henriksson. “I agree, Chaykin’s lying to us. I mean, that whole story she gave Agent Deutsch about her feeling trapped and needed to clear her head-it’s total bullshit. No question. But we can’t prove otherwise and we can’t just wheel her in here based on conjecture. Her lawyer would have a field day.”

“Then don’t give her a chance to lawyer up. In case you’ve forgotten, this is a national security matter. In fact, we wouldn’t be sitting here today if you’d handed Reilly over when we asked you to instead of giving in to his Fifth Amendment bullshit.”

Gallo adjusted his position in his seat, visibly uneasy with where this was going.

“Reilly’s history here might be checkered, but it’s only checkered in terms of his unswerving commitment to getting the job done. And I don’t appreciate your coming in here and-”

Deutsch slammed her hand down on the table, harder than she had meant. The noise succeeded in gaining her the attention of everyone present. “He’s not a killer,” she said.

Henriksson looked at her like she’d sprouted a second pair of eyes. “You do realize he’s wanted for murder?”

“This isn’t some crazy psycho we’re talking about, OK?” She glanced around the table. “You know this guy. You’ve worked with him for years. I mean, Christ. Doesn’t that count for anything around here?”

She looked around the table. She seemed to have struck a nerve.

“Look, I agree,” she continued. “Tess Chaykin probably did give us the slip to see him. I can’t see any other reason for it. But I don’t think Reilly is a cold-blooded murderer. There’s more going on here. You must know that.”

She hazarded a glance at Henriksson and felt like slapping that narrow-eyed, immutable expression off his face.

He ignored her outburst and turned to Gallo. “I don’t think it’s advisable to keep Agent Deutsch on this case. I think her perspective is, at the very least, skewed by her-”

It was Gallo’s turn to interrupt. “You know what? It’s not your decision, is it? The last time I checked, the FBI wasn’t a wholly-owned subsidiary of the CIA. So how about you rendition your ass out of my bureau and leave this case to us, given that this is a domestic situation which, I think, just happens to be outside your agency’s remit?”

Deutsch sat back and breathed out, zoning out of the tail end of the confrontation.

33

Richmond, Virginia

Roos guided his Cessna Skyhawk through the low-lying clouds and landed at Chesterfield County Airport without difficulty. The bad weather that currently had the East Coast in its grip was giving Virginia a break, and his time in the air was only marginally longer than the two-hour flight to which he had become accustomed.

Ten minutes later he was in a rental car on his way up the Richmond Beltway toward Midlothian.

He and his old partner had felt the need to discuss the current crisis face to face. They’d met at the golf club many times; it was a convenient midway point for them both, as far by plane for Roos as it was for Tomblin to drive to from his home further north in Virginia and his day job at CIA headquarters in Langley.

While in the air, Roos had exiled the call, the one that had awakened him well before he had planned to get up, from his mind. Instead, he allowed himself to savor skimming the frothy blanket of clouds below him, totally cut off from the complications of the world below.

Now that he was back on the ground, the facts as he was aware of them had rushed back into sharp focus, and they required his urgent attention.

He took the Midlothian Turnpike into an area to the west of Richmond which had morphed from having originally produced the very first commercially mined coal in what would become the United States to becoming home to several golf clubs. In the decades that he had known the area, the last remaining forests had almost entirely given way to suburban sprawl, leaving a couple of small parks and the lush, undulating hills and managed woodland of the clubs as the only reminder of how the land had looked. This continuing spread of subdivisions-and the highways that serviced them-was one of the prime motivating forces in his move to the Outer Banks and then later to Ocracoke, the simple fact being that the island had extremely limited capacity for development along with a community that understood the raw beauty of their environment.

Salisbury Country Club had genuine history, something he always looked for when selecting a location where he would regularly spend even the smallest amount of time. The clubhouse, built along Colonial lines in the 60s, had replaced the original eighteenth century hunting lodge which had burned to the ground in 1920.

Roos waved to the valet as he pulled up to the clubhouse. Although he came here fewer times with each passing year, he was still well known by the staff, and they kept the formalities to the barest minimum whenever he was here. The club was civilized enough to have no need for security cameras, except at the perimeter, the member vetting process alone being enough to ensure this would suffice. None of them would be signing in or out. If anyone asked, none of them had been here.

The door swung shut softly behind him as Roos walked into the largest of the wood-paneled private rooms. A large oil painting of Thomas Jefferson-who had saved the property from being confiscated by the British when its owner was captured coming back from Scotland on revolutionary business-hung over a massive stone fireplace, which took up most of one wall.

Edward J. Tomblin was sitting in a burgundy leather armchair drinking tea. He wore a dark brown tailored corduroy suit, handmade loafers and a forest-green V-neck sweater over a cotton shirt that appeared to be at least ten years old. Along with his Yale University tie, his attire made him more like a college professor than one of the most powerful men in the intelligence community-a position few people who met him would suspect, as he exuded the kind of easygoing authority that had always perfectly complemented Roos’s more intense manner. As befitted his position, though, Tomblin was a very shrewd operator. He had the influence and inside knowledge to move between the agency’s often warring factions and always come out on the side that appeared to have won, even if it hadn’t. Running the National Clandestine Service was the culmination of his career management skills. The only step up from there would be running the whole agency, which was a remote but not an inconceivable possibility.

Tomblin looked up from his tea. “I’m not sure I approve of what they’ve done to the back nine.”

Roos sat down on the floral-patterned couch to the right of his friend. “I’m not sure someone with a handicap that’s almost as high as his age is entitled to an opinion on that matter, Eddy.”

Tomblin snorted. “Maybe, but I still have to look at it every time you drag me down here. Are you going to join us for Christmas this year? Mary was asking.”

“As she has done every year since my divorce,” Roos replied. “It’s still no. Regretfully, of course.”

“Of course. I’ll pass it on.”

A waiter brought Roos the coffee he had ordered, then left again. Roos glanced around the room as he took his first sip. There was no one seated within earshot. The large room was silent except for the crackle of logs in the huge fireplace.

“This is a total clusterfuck,” Tomblin said. “How the hell did Reilly get out?”

“We don’t know. They said he got sick so they were taking him to a hospital when he made the break.”

“What about your inside man? Is he still missing?”

Roos nodded. “Last time we spoke, he was trailing Reilly’s woman. He thought she was going to meet with him.”

“So Reilly took him out.”

“Looks that way.”

“That’s what happens when you use a non-vetted asset.” Tomblin thought about it. “We need to find his body. It only makes Reilly look worse. In case.”

“Screw the body. We need to take Reilly out. That’s all.”

“Does Sandman have any leads?”

“Nothing at the moment. But Reilly’ll resurface. He has to.”

Tomblin said, “At least the Feds are taking our lead on this and keeping it shuttered. But we need to shut him down before we lose that window.”

“I’m down with that, as the kids say. What about the penetration attempts? Have they stopped?”

Tomblin didn’t seem alarmed at all. “No. Someone’s still trying to break into our servers. Looking for you. This guy’s got a real hard-on for you.”

“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?” Roos cursed the day he’d accepted to help out an old friend at the DEA with his offbeat plan to bait a major Mexican drug baron-a favor that had first put Reilly on his trail.

“Reilly’s got someone helping him. Whoever it is, they’re very good. Not many people out there with that much talent. If we can backtrace their location, it’ll lead us to him. We can’t let this get any further, Gordo. No more screwups. Any of this comes out and… you want to spend the rest of your years behind bars?”

“It’s not going to happen.” Roos struck the arm of his plush chair with each word.

“We need to put Reilly down. Fast.”

“Have you put the Fort on him?” he asked, using his preferred nickname for the NSA.

“As of this morning,” Tomblin said. “I got one of our guys there to set it up quietly. Full spectrum, priority one. We’ve got a lot of videos and recordings for the cameras and voice taps to work off, which helps. He’s bound to turn up soon.”

This pleased Roos. He knew how pervasive the NSA’s reach into surveillance camera networks was and how effective their face recognition software-to say nothing of voice-match monitoring of phone lines and keyword tracking. “Who gets the alert?”

“Just you, me and Sandman. We’re keeping it in the family.”

“Good.”

“Speaking of family…”

Roos set his mug down. He sensed there was more at play here.

“I’m worried about contagion and our favorite brainiacs.”

Roos knew where this was going. He just shrugged. “They were always going to be a weak link. That’s why we’ve have them on such a tight leash.”

Tomblin leaned in. “They’re civilians, Gordo. They’re old. And they’re not like us; they didn’t join up for the cause. They’re scientists who more or less stumbled into this. They gave us their expertise out of, I don’t know, a sense of duty, an intellectual curiosity, maybe for the thrill of it… but at the end of the day, they’re still civilians. With all the vulnerabilities and failings that entails.”

“And we can’t risk that any more.”

“Padley had his Road to Damascus moment and decided to clear his conscience. The three of them-they talk to each other. Especially Padley and Orford. They were close back in the day. How do we know it’s not a feeling they all share? How do we know one of the others won’t do what Padley did?”

“Won’t try to do, you mean,” Roos corrected him.

Tomblin brushed the comment away. “I think we should clean house.”

Roos let the notion sink in. He’d already considered it himself, but thinking about it and doing it were two different things. He knew these people. He’d worked with them for years. They’d done everything asked of them, without fail.

And now they’d have to die. Simply because they were a security risk.

Roos let out a small chortle. “You want the Janitors cleaned up? Not all of them, I hope. I’m kind of partial to sticking around a bit longer so we can enjoy these little chats before I embarrass you out on the course yet again.”

“You know what I mean,” Tomblin told him.

Roos nodded. “OK. We should start with Siddle. He’s the more clued-in of the two.”

“Sandman’s going to have his hands full.”

“It’s what he does. Let’s finish our tea and head out. I’ll send him instructions from the first tee while you go through your mulligans.”

Roos studied his old partner. “Did you tell Viking what’s going on?”

“No need,” Tomblin said. “We can take care of it.”

Roos nodded and leaned back into the couch. He could see two problems. One was that Sandman was indeed going to be a busy man. The other was not so much a problem as a subtle alarm going off deep in the folds of his experienced brain: he needed to make sure any blowback from this whole mess didn’t end up catching him in its blaze.

Ex-partners and old friends counted for a lot, but every relationship had its breaking point, and he knew things were getting stretched unbearably thin. Beyond the fact that they would all end up in prison if this thing ever blew up, some of his old partners had even more to lose if that ever happened.

He’d need to watch his back from here on.

34

Chelsea, New York City

I woke to the sound of Gigi busying herself at a kitchen range which occupied the center of the large loft. The sofa bed in one corner of the huge open-plan space was surprisingly comfortable and the low partition walls around it, though far from reaching the high ceiling, made the contained area feel like a separate room. The main bedroom had proper walls and a suspended ceiling, though I was still pretty sure I’d heard Gigi’s muffled wails of ecstasy during the night.

We’d taxied back to her place well after midnight, after I’d retrieved the holdall. Gigi had insisted we stop for some Thai food on the way back and, seeing as I was her guest, I could hardly tell her otherwise. I also needed the nourishment.

Without turning on the main lights she’d gestured to the corner, told me to make myself at home, then pulled Kurt toward the bedroom. I unfolded the bed, opened a couple of the screens, took off my boots and jeans, fell onto the bed and was asleep in under a minute.

“Hey, you want bacon with your pancakes?”

By the sounds of it, breakfast was definitely going to be better than a motel muffin loaded with enough preservatives to survive into the next millennium.

Gigi’s head peered around one of the screens. “Wanna keep me company? I gave Kurt a major workout last night, so I doubt he’ll be up for a while.”

The wink only made it worse and I shuddered. “Gigi, seriously. Way too much information.”

She gave me a curious look, the mischief never buried too deep. “But you’re happy for him, right? I mean, I can tell you like him. When he told me about you, I thought you must be using him, but he was adamant that you were a team.”

“I’ll deny it if he asks me, but yes, I am fond of Cid. Or Snake. Or whatever avatar he’s using today.”

“Good. Because I’m kind of fond of him too. And I wouldn’t want anyone messing with him. He’s a doll. And a surprisingly generous lover-not many of those around, let me tell you.”

I gave her the look.

“OK, OK, sorry.” Her expression shifted, her eyes now probing me. “Tell me something. You promised my big boy a get-out-of-jail-free card in exchange for helping you out. Which, let me tell you, while he’s with me-he ain’t gonna need, I’ll make damn sure of that. But regardless-you’re not in any position to help anyone out now that you’ve joined the dark side, are you?”

She was right. But I wasn’t going to encourage it. I needed her and Kurt in my corner. I just looked at her, and said, deadpan, “And your point is?”

She just stared at me, not moving a single facial muscle, just expressionless. Then she burst into a big grin. “I’m just messing with you. Hell, I’m happy to do it just for the fun of it.” She pulled her face back and headed back toward the kitchen area. “Come on, Squidward. Your feast awaits.”

The loft took up the top floor of a six-story, early twentieth-century building a couple of blocks east of the highline. From what I saw when we arrived late last night, it looked pretty iconic with its elaborate brickwork and beaux arts touches. The living space was huge and bright, even on a cloud-dampened day like today, enhanced by the light from the full-height windows at the front and the glass doors that lead to a small, private garden-like terrace at the back that was further enhanced by a commanding view of the Empire State Building. I glanced down from the window of my enclave. The street was lined with high-end furniture stores and quirky fashion showrooms, all with big logo-bearing flags outside marking their territory. Directly across from the building was a restaurant whose name I recognized, one of those big, trendy brasseries that are always packed. Gigi was clearly doing very well for herself, which I was curious about.

I pulled on my jeans and ambled out into the open space. It was dominated by a massive steel table at its center that was covered in stacks of every flavor of personal computer, server and router imaginable but only a single Mac. I guess that was yet another thing Kurt and Gigi had in common-a hatred of all things Apple.

A high-tech, glass-fronted cabinet stood along the sidewall, lights blinking asynchronously across the faces of the shiny new kit bolted within. I had no idea what any of it did, but I assumed that some of it was what enabled Gigi to roam the Internet undetected.

“Careful,” she said as she appeared from the kitchen. “That’s some highly tuned machinery you’re looking at.”

She explained that it was her gateway to the digital world, and I quote, “running across multiple fiber connections and defended by myriad firewalls, each and every IP packet bouncing both internally through spoofed IP subnets then externally through POPs at random and constantly changing locations around the globe and back again before reaching their destination.”

I just nodded like I even understood ten percent of it. I glanced around, took in the space and the technology, and told her, “Nice.”

She gave me a curious glance. “I know, right? And I bet you’re wondering who’s paying for it all?”

“I wouldn’t presume,” I said with a smile.

“Just another classic tale of a black-hat hacker turned corporate security consultant. I tell banks how not to get compromised. In return, they pay me considerably less than if I were hacking their firewalls and moving funds into my own account, but it’s still some serious green and at least I don’t have your cyber-crime buddies on my tail. And yes, I’ve done that, though I never kept a cent. It was just a thrill, but the whole thing’s got a bit boring, which is why I’m enjoying all this black ops stuff Kurt and you are into.”

I was happy to hear it was all legal. I was rapidly becoming a fan of Kurt’s gal and, although she was still breaking into all kinds of secret databases-a lot of it for me-I was glad she wasn’t involved in anything else that could land her behind bars.

I followed her to the gleaming white island around which the rest of the kitchen was arranged. An industrial-strength laptop was open at one end, so I sat at the other. Gigi was wearing an oversize Metallica T-shirt and track-pants, her hair scrunched up pineapple-style. Without makeup or a costume, she still looked pretty damn good. Maybe even more so. Kurt’s toast had definitely landed jam side up.

Gigi set down two plates piled with pancakes, bacon and fruit, then brought over a cafetière and two white china mugs.

She pushed the plunger down and poured us some coffee. She took a sip from her mug and started tapping away at her laptop keyboard.

I asked, “Anything overnight?”

“You’re extremely hot right now.” She realized what she’d just said and blushed, something I wouldn’t have guessed she was capable of. “I’m talking about the chatter. You’re not my type, though.”

“Duly noted.” I steered the conversation back on track as I dug into the pancakes. “FBI? CIA? Any others?”

She smiled. “All of them. The NSA has been particularly animated. Everyone’s asking how a killer got himself invited to dinner at the White House. Somewhere, I suspect, heads are about to roll.”

I shook my head sadly. “I never did get Angus Beef with the truffle-scented Merlot sauce.”

“All served on official White House china,” Gigi added.

“Of course.”

“Wow. That sucks.” She pointed at my plate. “Try the bacon. I fry it in maple syrup. It’ll run rings around that Angus Beef any day.”

“I don’t doubt that for a second.” I took another sip of coffee and bit into a strip of bacon. I was impressed. She saw the look on my face, and it clearly pleased her.

“You’ll be glad to know that the cops have been told to back off,” she added. “There’s no BOLO. No all-ports. No all-agency alerts.”

“Nothing about a missing FBI agent?”

“Not that I saw.” She set her mug down and fixed me squarely. “So… what do we do now?”

I finished my mouthful. “There was something else. This guy called me. Like with a proper, ‘Deep Throat’ vibe. Not the movie,” I added. “I mean, not that movie.”

She grinned. “I kind of got that.”

“He told me he had information for me. Stuff he wanted me to put out there. A record of something he was involved in. He said that the last person he reached out to got burned to death. Said he told the guy not to look into it before they’d met, but he did. Said it was in his blood and that he couldn’t help himself.”

That seemed to get some wheels turning. “You have any idea who your source was?”

“He never showed. The way things are going, he might be dead too. But the guy he talked about, I’m thinking he could be an ex-cop, maybe a private investigator.”

She put down her fork and started tapping away at her laptop’s keyboard.

“Let’s see… died, fire, news, in the last-what, month maybe?”

I nodded.

She went back to work. “Limit results to US news sites… OK.” Her eyes were scrolling down the screen, totally fixated. “Greensboro woman dies saving her three kids in a house fire, guy dies jumping into a fire at Burning Man…”

This went on for about a minute, then her face lit up. “OK, try this one on for size. Kyle Rossetti. Writes these big investigative pieces for The New York Times, HuffPo, Vanity Fair-quite the action man. Embedded with the troops in Afghanistan, did a big piece on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that earned him a Polk award. Hot, too. The good kind, I mean. Check him out.” She flipped the screen around so I could see his head shot. Yes, I had to concur: the man had a rugged face and a gaze that pretty much conveyed the extremes of human behavior he must have witnessed.

“And?”

She flipped the screen back, and the edges of her lips turned south. “Electrical fire in his apartment, a condo at 113th and Adam Clayton Powell Jr Boulevard. He burnt to death. About two weeks ago. Wife’s a nurse. She was on night shift.” She stabbed a strawberry half with her fork and looked over at me. “These guys really don’t like reporters.”

“Can you find the coroner’s report?”

She chortled. “Please.” A few clicks later, she was there, her eyes scrutinizing the screen like laser scanners. “‘Accidental Death.’” Her fingers were soon away again, rapid fire, stopping only long enough for her to fast-read something, then she was off again. I was awed by the coordination between her fingers, eyes and mind, her ability to assimilate and filter through information at warp speed. “Of course there’s several blogs claiming he was murdered for something he was writing about. CIA, Mossad, Putin. The usual suspects.”

I gulped down some coffee, thinking about what to do next. “Who was the fire investigator?”

“Dan Walsh. A fire marshal out of Battalion Twelve. That’s with Engine Thirty-five on Third Avenue.”

“Can you get me his home address?”

Gigi gave me a mocking stare. “You really need to get with the program, G-boy.”

I smiled. “Duly noted. Again.” I finished my last mouthful of pancake and set my fork down. “OK. Will you see what else you can dig up about Rossetti? I need to shower. I have a fire marshal to visit.”

“On a Sunday? Is nothing sacred to a rogue FBI agent?”

I had to smile at that. Then I remembered Lendowski’s phone. “Can you get into a locked BlackBerry?” Before she gave me a look that could wipe the data off a terabyte array, I added, “An FBI BlackBerry.”

A beatific expression lit up her face. Clearly I was about to make this a Sunday worth remembering.

35

Mamaroneck, New York

The scene outside Tess’s house was markedly busier. Two local patrol cars had joined a second FBI sedan now parked along her street. The Stingray van was still close by, of course, but they’d moved it an extra block away to try and attract less attention. Gallo and Henriksson had at least managed to agree on that single point: the need to keep the story quiet and avoid letting the press and the blogs get hold of it. Because of the controversy over the rampant eavesdropping and the failures in recent foreign policy, the intelligence community was already trying to live down a constant barrage of criticism. The negative publicity of an FBI agent murdering a CIA agent was something they were both keen to avoid.

Annie Deutsch was back outside the house, leant against her car, oblivious to the cold. After the big meeting earlier that morning she’d had a private sit-down with Gallo in his office and, after thanking him for his support, she’d lobbied hard to be reassigned to keep tabs on Tess, despite the fact that she and Lendowski had already failed at that task once. Gallo had initially resisted but he’d ended up relenting, willing to accord her a chance to redeem herself and find out what happened to her missing partner.

Four agents, assisted by members of the local police force, were canvassing the area around where Lendowski’s car was found. They’d yet to yield anything useful.

Deutsch had yet to confront Tess. Even though she knew Tess had lied to her after she’d come home last night, she needed to get through to her. She needed Tess to feel Deutsch could be trusted. She didn’t know what was going on, but she was sure that Reilly would need help, and she had to do everything she could to make sure she was there to offer it if-or rather, when-that time came.

She was thinking about how best to approach Tess when a number she didn’t recognize lit up the screen on her phone. It had a Virginia area code.

She took the call with her customary, “Annie Deutsch.”

“Agent Deutsch? Alejandro Fernandez. Virginia DFS, Manassas. I was told you’re taking Agent Aparo’s calls?”

It took her a couple of seconds to process what he was referring to: Virginia’s Department of Forensic Science. Aparo’s work cell had been rerouted to the switchboard at Federal Plaza, as had Reilly’s. She didn’t know where Manassas was.

“Yes, that’s right.”

“I’m calling with the lab results on the second bullet. Agent Aparo had asked me to keep him in the loop.”

“I’m sorry-the second bullet?”

“From the shooting in Arlington?”

Deutsch straightened up. “I wasn’t aware of this.”

“The bullet from the body, that one’s conclusive. It matches up to the Glock we found at the scene, the one registered to Sean Reilly. We recovered a second bullet, though. It was embedded in the wall of the garage. You weren’t told?”

“No.”

“OK. I assumed you’d want to know.”

Deutsch felt her pulse race. “Of course. What did you find out?”

“It’s fresh. Recent. Could easily have been fired around the time the shooting took place.”

“What else?”

“Not much. We don’t have a casing, and the bullet was too badly damaged by its impact to give us anything we can run through the database. One thing, though. It wasn’t from the same gun.”

A burst of adrenaline flooded through her. “You’re sure?”

“Absolutely. Reilly’s gun was a Glock. This slug's a forty-five. I’ve sent it over to the CFL in DC, but I doubt they’ll find anything we couldn’t.”

Deutsch thanked him and told him to keep her appraised of any further developments. She hung up and was still thinking about how much a second bullet could help Reilly’s case when a passing car distracted her momentarily.

She turned instinctively as her eyes were drawn to it. It was a white Toyota Prius with a single occupant, a man with a shaved head and thick, black-rimmed glasses. She couldn’t see him clearly, but the impression she got was of a rather effete man. He slowed a bit as he passed-basic human curiosity, she assumed-glancing at the house and the uniforms outside before driving on.

Sandman’s eyes registered every detail as he took in the scene outside Tess Chaykin’s house.

His mind working like a 3D scanner he mapped out the house’s relative location to its neighbors, its entrance and driveway, the positions of the law enforcement vehicles watching it. He was even sure he glimpsed Tess Chaykin at her window, looking down at her new reality.

He noted the FBI agent he’d read about in the most recent report Tomblin had sent him, Annie Deutsch. They had her phone on special watch now in case the CIA liaison’s read was correct and she had more vested in the case than she’d admitted.

He thought of ways to apply more pressure on Reilly. Chaykin was the obvious soft target, of course. So were Reilly’s son and Chaykin’s daughter. He already knew where they went to school, knew the ideal spots on the likely route they would be taking every morning. School would soon be out for the Christmas holidays, but for the time being, he had that option if he needed it.

He wondered about Deutsch. Was she a potential pressure point too? Not as powerful, to be sure. But it was a possibility.

He turned the corner and drove away, headed for the café where he’d slipped Aparo his final condiment. The omelet baguettes looked to die for, he mused, enjoying his little joke, and he was famished.

It was there that he received an email alerting him to two new assignments, there that he first started imagining how he would kill the highly talented Marcus Siddle and the slightly creepy Ralph Orford.

36

Queens, New York

I drove out to Queens in Gigi’s BMW 4 Series convertible, which she’d offered to me without even blinking.

I checked my face in the mirror-exhausted but presentable-before climbing out of the BMW and walking across the street.

The fire marshal who signed-off on the coroner’s report on Kyle Rossetti lived in a 20s Astoria semi, from where it would take no more than thirty minutes to drive across the East River to the Twelfth Battalion building on Third Avenue.

A couple of traditional wooden sleds lay on the postage-stamp front yard. The noise of joyfully shrieking children mixed with the slap of snowballs finding their target drifted from the rear of the house. They sounded happy. I hoped I wouldn’t have to apply too much pressure to get the information I needed.

The doorbell chimed as I pushed the button. I looked around the inside of the porch where several sets of ice skates were neatly arranged. From the number, colors and sizes I guessed they had three kids: two girls under ten and a teenage boy.

I was still gazing at the skates-wondering whether my entire family would ever go skating together again-when the door opened and a slim woman with freckles and warm brown eyes looked at me inquiringly. I figured she was in her mid-thirties. She was dressed in lazy-day sweats and wore her straightened mousy-blond hair in a loose ponytail.

She scrutinized me for a couple of seconds before asking, “Can I help you?”

“I hope you can. I need to find your husband. It’s important.”

“He’s at the basketball court.” She gestured. “Three blocks east.”

I must have looked skeptical.

She shook her head. “I know. In this weather. It’s nuts. But he shoots hoops every day, no exception. Says it keeps him sharp, so I’m not going to argue with him. Because in his line of work, if you’re not sharp, you’re dead.”

I nodded in recognition, which she immediately read. “You a cop?”

“FBI.”

“I hope he can help you.” She turned to go back inside but turned back again. “Wait a second…”

She reappeared a minute later with a large thermos flask and a couple of mugs. “I made him some soup. You can share it with him.”

I took them from her, thanked her, and left.

The basketball court was an unfussy concrete square boxed in by a twelve-foot wall of chicken wire. It backed up against a thicket of bare trees. Although some of the court was still under three inches of snow, the area inside the three-point line had been cleared. Dressed in baggy sweats, a tall African-American guy was playing one-on-one with an imaginary opponent, his breath misting in the freezing air.

He danced clear of the phantom defense, bounced the ball and released a shot. The ball dropped through the hoop without touching the rim.

I flashed my badge, hoping that my assured technique would preclude closer analysis of my ID. “Nat Lendowski, FBI. Just need five minutes of your time.”

“On a Sunday? Would you have pulled me out of church?”

“I don’t know.”

He gestured to the court. “Well, this is my church. Come by Third Avenue tomorrow, I’ll be happy to help.”

I held up the thermos flask. “Your wife said I should bring this.”

Taking a step toward me, he studied me for a moment, then shook his head and smiled. “OK, tell you what. If Janette wants you here, that’s good enough for me.”

He gestured to a wooden bench on a patch of snow-covered grass beside the court. The snow had been cleared from the bench; a thick winter coat slung over the back.

I passed the flask to its owner. “You investigated a fire. A condo at 113th and Adam Clayton.”

He handed me a mug of steaming soup then poured one for himself. “Sure. Journalist by the name of Kyle Rossetti. Poor guy burnt to death. What’s your interest?”

“We think he was working on a piece about Maxiplenty.”

“The crime Internet thing?”

“That’s the one. We have the founder in custody, but he’s lawyered up and locked down.” I took another sip of the soup. “It’s good.”

“Yeah, who needs more, right? A wife you still want to live with, kids you can be proud of, a job to come home from and food in your stomach.”

I nodded, agreeing with everything he said, but still knowing I’d never be able to enjoy any of that till I dealt with my white whales.

Both of them.

The next part was a gamble. I knew it would sound plausible-and I suspected Walsh had better things to do than check it out for himself.

“We know Rossetti wrote about Maxiplenty. We’re thinking maybe he uncovered more than he published. And maybe that made him a target.”

Walsh screwed the top back on the flask. “Everything burned. Files, laptop, everything. Unless he had cloud backups or documents stashed away in a safety deposit box, you’re not going to find anything.”

“You’re sure it was an accident?”

“Absolutely. No evidence of foul play.” He read my expression, cause he then said, “You seem disappointed.”

Which I was. I didn’t see the point in hiding it. “Kind of. It sends me back to square one.”

He thought about it for a second. “Look, everything about the case is consistent with an accidental death: Melted insulation and carbon build up from arcing inside the light switch-that’s a spark crossing the air from one piece of metal to another. It was only a matter of time before it got hot enough to start a fire. Stacks of books and papers close by. Flat battery in the smoke alarm. We think he was probably asleep on the sofa when it started. Maybe he got up and tried to deal with it, but his clothes caught fire. Guys from Engine Fifty-eight found him on the floor, maybe he tried to roll himself out.”

I mulled over his words, then asked, “Say you wanted to burn someone to death, make it look like an accident. How would you go about it?”

He nodded, his eyes lingering on the distance. In his line of work, this was the case far more than it should be. “Off the record?”

“Sure.”

He shrugged. “First, you’d need an apartment building which didn’t have an AFCI-an arc fault circuit interrupter-in place of the standard circuit breaker.”

“And Rossetti’s building didn’t have that?”

“No. We advocate everyone uses them, but there’s no law to enforce their use. It’s also easier with people who think they’re too busy to stay on top of their smoke alarm.”

I shook my head. Strike two.

“Then all you’d need to do is swap a switch somewhere in the house for one you’ve already messed with. Would take no more than a couple of minutes. Then, to be one hundred percent sure the fire takes hold, you’d use an ignition agent. Someone who knows what they’re doing would know which one-maybe ethanol-where to place it and how much to use. Too little and the fire may not catch. Too much and you leave an ILR-ignitable liquid residue-then we’d know it was arson.”

At the level at which Corrigan operated, I figured all of this was perfectly possible to accomplish-and all without leaving a trace. Another thought hit me.

“Did you see the tox report?” I asked. “Anything in his body that could have slowed him down? Something to make him unaware of the fire till it was too late?”

“No. Nothing. Not even alcohol. If there was something, that didn’t leave a trace either.”

I had nothing more to ask. “Thanks for your time.”

Walsh stood. “Good luck and sorry I couldn’t be more help. I’m gonna head home. Promised the kids we’d make a snowman.”

He took my empty mug and added it to his own on top of the flask, stooped to pick up his basketball and left me sitting on the bench, feeling more and more certain that Rossetti was murdered-wondering how many more people Corrigan had killed in “accidents.”

As I stood, my burner rang. It was Gigi.

“Rossetti’s editor died two days after him.” Before I could ask, she added, “Heart attack.”

The two words just speared right through me and nailed me to the ground, right in that spot, as Nick’s face-not breathing, but lifeless, still belted into his seat, as I pictured he was when the car was finally at rest-came storming back into my consciousness.

37

Chelsea, New York City

Gigi rolled her eyes. “Come on. Not every premature death is part of a conspiracy.”

We were back in her loft, seated around the kitchen block-Gigi, he-who-must-not-be-named, and me. Gigi’s fingers were dancing flittingly across her keyboard as she talked, while Kurt’s were scrolling through pages on an Android tablet.

“Right now, I’d be more surprised if he did die naturally,” I said.

“I called up the newspaper while you were on your way back. Said I’d met him at a TED talk I saw online that he’d been to and that he’d asked me to give him a ring when I was next in town. Anyway, long story short, the guy was a heart attack waiting to happen. Not exactly slim, never did any exercise beyond walking to the office and back from his apartment in Murray Hill and taking the elevator down not once but twice an hour to have a smoke-yep, like a chimney, since he was in high school. Also, beaucoup coffee. Throw deadlines and dwindling circulation and ad numbers all newspapers are facing these days…” She let her words trail off and gave me a knowing look.

“What about my partner?” I asked. “He lived on junk food, didn’t exactly have the most stress-free of jobs?”

“Possibly indulged in erectile assistive pills,” she interjected, half-asking. To my questioning look, she hastily added, defensively, “You said his libido was running amok since his divorce, and given his age-”

“I don’t know, maybe,” I said, cutting off the rest of her analysis. “I do know he was living healthily since his divorce. Eating better, hitting the gym most nights, cutting down on the alcohol.”

“Even worse.” Gigi stood up, crossed to the wall-mounted machine and started to make coffee. “You hear these stories all the time, people changing their lifestyle so fast their body can’t keep up.”

“So he’s a likely candidate if he’s living like a slob or if he’s cleaning up his act? You can’t have it both ways. Plus he had a buddy who was a trainer and who was overseeing his workouts. I remember Nick complaining about wanting to look better-there was some girl he liked and he wanted the weight to come off overnight-but the guy wouldn’t let him.”

Gigi and Kurt exchanged a quick glance-the subject was maybe too close to the bone, given the new and improved Kurt. Then Gigi turned to me and said, “Reilly. Read my lips. No es posible.”

“How do you know that?” I countered, getting frustrated. “You’re not a doctor.”

“I’m not, but-look, if you could kill someone by triggering a heart attack at will, don’t you think we’d have read about it by now? I mean, at some point, someone somewhere would have used it and got caught doing it and it would have made a lot of noise.” She waved her hands. “We’d know about it.”

Kurt lifted his eyes from the tablet. “You’re talking about doing it by, like, slipping someone some kind of drug? That would show up in an autopsy, surely?”

“What if it doesn’t? What if these bastards have developed something that doesn’t show up? Remember, this isn’t some two-bit outfit we’re talking about. This is spook central.”

That quieted them down for a moment. “You’d have one hell of a cool murder weapon,” Kurt said.

I couldn’t get that idea out of my mind.

But it was more than that. Camacho, the Portuguese reporter, dies in a climbing accident back in 1981. Rossetti, the investigative reporter, dies when his apartment goes up in flames. His editor then dies from a heart attack, as does my partner.

How many others have died to keep secret whatever it is these people don’t want uncovered? And what is it they don’t want us to know about? Was that the reason the CIA was protecting Corrigan and shielding him from me? What was he part of? And what’s the connection to Camacho that goes back more than thirty years?

The same year my dad died.

“OK,” I said. “We need to try and figure out what Rossetti and his editor might have known. What can you do?”

Kurt glanced at Gigi. “We can look at both their digital footprints,” he said. “Have a look at their emails, see what they might have searched for online. Phone records, too. Might get a movement trail from their phones too, see where they’ve been hanging out.”

I went silent for a second. What someone with the right skills could do nowadays, the amount of information they could dig up about our lives-it still boggled my mind. I don’t know that the guys at our Cyber Division could do any better.

“Great, let’s do it. I also need to talk to a heart guy. Someone at the top of his game. I need to know if this is possible.”

As he tapped his screen, Kurt said, “I kind of figured you would. There’s a whole bunch of major cardiologists in this city, but here’s a guy I thought looked interesting.” He flipped his tablet around to show me. “Waleed Alami. He’s at NewYork-Presbyterian-its Ronald O. Perelman Heart Institute, to be exact.”

I perused his bio. Great credentials, to be sure. Looked gregarious, younger than I’d imagined, maybe in his late-forties, with a full head of swept-back hair and thin-framed spectacles. “Why him?” I asked.

“Well, he’s a top cardiothoracic surgeon but he’s also a big cheese in cardiac arrest research.”

There had to be more. “And…?”

Kurt gave it up with a slight grin. “He’s got this cool Frankenstein machine to revive people who get heart attacks. I figured being cutting edge, you know, having an open mind…”

I nodded. “OK. Sounds good.” I checked the big clock on the wall. It was four in the afternoon. I didn’t think Alami would be at the Hospital today. But I knew how I could get him to meet with me on a late Sunday afternoon. It was a small gamble, but I didn’t think he’d call the office to check if “Nat Lendowski” really was with the FBI-or still alive, for that matter.

Before I called him, I needed to make another call. I didn’t want to waste one of my throwaways, which I knew I’d need to discard if I used it now.

I turned to Kurt. “I need to make a call. Untraceable. Can you set me up?”

“Hai, mochiron,” he said with a little bow.

I gave him Deutsch’s number and he did his usual party trick of putting it through a VPN’d fake Skype account that was billed to the credit card of some random woman in Japan. Moments later, Deutsch picked up.

“Are you still outside the house?” I asked without an introduction.

“Reilly!” she exclaimed. “Where are you?”

“Is Tess all right?”

“Yeah, she’s-well, she’s OK right now. She’s in the house-I think. I mean, I can’t be sure any more, can I?”

I didn’t rise to the bait. “I need you to look into something. Are they doing an autopsy on Nick?”

She went quiet for a breath, then said, her tone soft, “ I don’t know, but… I’d expect so, given how he died, no? Why?”

“Tell the ME to look for anything that shouldn’t be there that might have caused it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” I told her. “Just get them to run a full tox on him. Make sure they look for anything unusual-anything that could bring on a heart attack.”

She paused again-clearly, she wasn’t expecting any of this. “You think he was murdered?”

“It’s a possibility.”

Her tone went low, muffled, like she was cupping the phone for privacy. “Shit. Who-and why?”

“I’m looking into it. In the meantime, do me a favor. Keep it to yourself. Just ask the ME yourself and get him to call you directly if he finds anything unusual. And Annie?”

“Yes?”

“Stay alert. Keep Tess and the kids safe. And keep yourself safe too. These guys don’t mess around.”

I could hear the tension reach her throat. “Reilly, we should tell Gallo. If you’re right, we need to-”

“No. If you say something, they’ll know we communicated and they’ll take you off the detail and I want you there. I want you looking after Tess. Plus I don’t want to put you at risk by having them think you might know something you don’t. OK?”

She thought for a beat, then, without sounding overly convinced, said, “OK.”

“Annie, you’re going to need to be super-vigilant. Don’t take anything for granted. Don’t trust anything-not a phone call, not a badge-without checking it through.”

“I hear you,” she said.

“We’re going to get those bastards,” I told her. “Every last one of them.”

I hung up, wondering if I believed my own words.

A thousand miles south, Sandman exited the United Airlines Airbus that had brought him down to Miami.

He picked up the waiting rental car and drove off, feeling a familiar tingle, the one that preceded the adrenaline spike of a well-executed kill. He sensed a clean, strong bite there, one that could well lead to his quarry. He’d be getting that spike before, of course, here in Miami. He wouldn’t be there for long. Then he’d fly back to New York and, with a bit of luck, he’d finally put the Reilly saga to bed.

38

NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, Manhattan

I strode across the limestone oasis that doubled as the reception area of the Perelman Heart Institute, my footsteps echoing across the vastness of its five-story atrium. A muzak-free ride up the elevator later, I was on the fourth floor and being ushered into the office of Waleed Alami, MD.

In keeping with his gregarious bio pic, he was very welcoming and didn’t scrutinize my creds, only giving them a cursory glance. In truth, only the guys who had something bad to hide ever did. I felt bad lying to him about who I was, but I didn’t have a choice. We shook hands and I thanked him for coming in to talk to me at such short notice, and on a Sunday too. I then told him I was investigating some recent deaths and asked him, straight up, if there was a way for someone to commit murder by giving someone else a heart attack besides using the old movie trope of scaring the crap out of them.

“That does really happen,” he said. He wasn’t smiling or taking it lightly in any way, which didn’t surprise me. In my experience, guys like him who were at the top of their game never did when discussing their field of expertise. “Are we talking heart attack, or cardiac arrest?” he asked. “’Cause you do know there’s a big difference, right?”

“I don’t, but-either one, if it’s fatal,” I said.

He thought about it for a moment, then decided he needed to take me through the basics.

Like most people, I guess, I had assumed both were synonymous, but he explained how they aren’t at all the same thing. A heart attack is a circulatory problem and occurs when the blood flow to part of the heart is blocked. Over time, coronary arteries that supply the heart with the oxygen and nutrients it needs to keep doing its job typically get blocked by fatty deposits-plaque-and the clogging eventually leads to heart damage. The injury can lead to electrical conduction defects in the form of blocked beats or disrupted electrical circuits. Surprisingly, he told me the heart usually didn’t stop beating during a heart attack. Some heart attacks, though, did lead to cardiac arrest.

The latter, though, is different. It, and not the proverbial “heart attack,” is the leading cause of death in our country, and it’s very prevalent-over a third of a million out-of-hospital cardiac arrests in the US alone each year. It’s an electrical problem, meaning it’s triggered by an electrical malfunction in the heart that causes an ineffective heartbeat. The heart’s pumping goes haywire, the brain, lungs and other vital organs get starved of blood and the victim stops breathing. Death occurs within minutes if CPR, or a defibrillator, aren’t used.

“It sounds to me like what you’re asking about is an SCA-a sudden cardiac arrest, when the heart just suddenly and unexpectedly stops beating.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, the heart has an electrical system of its own. It’s not like other muscles in the body that rely on nerve connections to get the electrical stimulation they need to function. The heart has its own battery, it’s called the sinus node and it’s in the upper right chamber of your heart. This is what controls the rate and rhythm of its heartbeat. If something goes wrong with the node or with the flow of electric impulses through your heart, you get an arrhythmia, which is when the heart starts beating too fast or too slowly or not at all. In the worst of these cases, your heart comes to a sudden stop-sudden cardiac arrest.”

I asked, “So is there something that can disrupt these electric signals-something someone could be given without knowing it, in one shot, one dose, not over time? Someone who’s in good health, who doesn’t have any kind of underlying heart disease?”

“Well, arrhythmias that cause cardiac arrests don’t just happen on their own, but they can happen to people who don’t have any pre-existing conditions.”

“How?”

“Stress. Strenuous exercise-you’ve read about young athletes who suddenly collapse in the middle of a game. An electric shock.”

I shook my head. “No. I’m talking about something like a drug, a pill-an injection, maybe. Some kind of toxin. One shot.”

Alami shrugged. “Well, an overdose of cocaine will do it. Or a bad reaction to any number of illegal drugs. You could also have a drug-to-drug interaction that could lead to a fatal arrhythmia. It could be a number of things.”

I shook my head again. “It needs to be something that won’t show up in an autopsy.”

Alami’s expression shifted. I felt like he was suddenly a bit wary, even suspicious, of me.

I raised my hands defensively. “Doc, please. I’m only asking because I’m trying to understand if it’s possible. ’Cause if it is, there could be a whole raft of murders that have gone unnoticed. And the people behind them need to be stopped before they can use it again.”

He studied me for a moment, his expression clouded. “Well, if someone has come up with something like this… I can’t imagine.” He thought some more. “Undetectable in an autopsy? That rules out a lot of compounds.”

“But do you think it’s possible?”

“I come from a school of thought that believes everything is possible. Whether or not we’ve discovered it yet, that’s the question.”

“Where would you look?”

He thought about it for a few seconds. “There are compounds that could trigger a bad reaction that might not be detected in an autopsy because we already have them. It’s just a question of how much is there, I suppose. Something based around calcium gluconate, maybe. At a much higher concentration than normally found in the body, it’s conceivable that it might create an electrolytic imbalance. Or potassium chloride. It’s in a lot of prescription drugs, and both potassium and chloride are present in the body. A spike of potassium could trigger ventricular fibrillation, which could lead to cardiac arrest, like they sometimes use in state executions. But again, the difficulty is in figuring out what the right dose is, being able to concentrate it into a small enough dose so it passes unnoticed when you’re administering it, I suppose… and figuring out how to not have it break down and get absorbed into the body quickly so it doesn’t show up in an autopsy. We’re talking about much, much higher concentrations than you’d normally find.”

“But if no autopsy were performed there wouldn’t be any obvious external signs anyway, right? It would just look like a cardiac arrest.”

“Yes.” He had a worried look on his face, like it had sunk in. “You really think someone’s doing this?”

“More so than before I walked in here.”

He went pensive for a moment, then said, “Is there a recent victim? Someone you suspect this might have been do to?”

“Yes.”

“And is an autopsy being done?”

“Yes.”

“Can you get me in to see the body?”

“You’re not a coroner. I don’t know.”

“Get me in. Let me have a look and run some tests of my own. The best way to figure out how it’s being done-if it’s being done-is by examining the body.”

It made sense. Of course, I couldn’t arrange it, not in my current persona non grata status. But I couldn’t tell him that. Not yet, anyway. “OK. I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime, will you think about it some more and let me know if you come up with anything?”

He let out a dry chuckle. “You think I can help it?”

I shook his hand and thanked him for his time, then I said I wasn’t carrying an extra card, you know, it being Sunday and all. It didn’t look like it worried him in the least. I gave him my burner’s number and the office line at Federal Plaza. It was a risk, but I had to give him a working number in case he did come up with something, and it would have been odd not to give him the office number too. I hoped it wouldn’t come back and bite me in the ass.

As he was showing me out, he said, “Next time you get someone you think this was done to, get the paramedics to bring them here as fast as they can. To the cardiac care unit, not the ER.”

“Why?”

“Maybe we can help where others can’t.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant, then I remembered what Kurt/Cid/Snake had mentioned. “Someone at the office said you had some kind of Frankenstein machine?”

He chortled. “Hardly. Come, I’ll show you.”

He led me to a medical ward and onto an OR that was unoccupied, and showed me a wheeled trolley that was packed with equipment-several monitoring readouts, pumps, and all kinds of tubes running between them. It looked like a robot someone put together in their garage.

He patted it. “This is it. And it doesn’t need lightning to work.” His face barely cracked into a smile, which was probably as much as I was going to get out of him today. “It’s an ECMO. An Extra Corporeal Membrane Oxygenation. Since we’ve been using it, we’ve had twice the success rate of other hospitals in bringing people back from ‘death.’” He used air quotes on that last word.

I didn’t quite understand what that meant. I mimicked his quotes. “‘Death?’ You’re dead or you’re not, no?”

“It depends on what you mean by ‘dead.’ That’s a whole other discussion… what I can tell you is, based on my research and after talking to a lot of people who we and others have brought back after their bodies were considered ‘dead,’ when any monitor you hooked them up to showed zero life in their bodies or brains-many of them had clear recollections of those lost hours. Their consciousness was still there, even if their brains didn’t exhibit any signs of life-at least, none that we can detect. We can’t explain it, neurologically. But it’s a fact.”

I would have loved to tell him about what I’d experienced over the summer in Mexico with Alex and El Brujo and how open-minded I’d become on the subject of our souls and their ability to transcend time and live beyond our physical bodies. But now was not the time for it.

“The thing is, at some point,” he continued, “you, me, all of us-we’re all going to experience cardiac arrest. That’s ultimately the cause of death for most people. Usually, it’s because something else in the body fails, maybe from an advanced cancer, and the heart is overstretched without getting what it needs to keep pumping. But if it happens when the rest of the body has the ability to keep going, which is very common, then the minutes and hours after your heart stops are critical. And right now, I’m sad to say, in most of the hospitals out there, the way they respond in that most crucial moment hasn’t really evolved since the sixties.”

“You mean with CPR and paddles?”

“Well, yes. We use them, of course-you have to, it’s key. But it’s not enough. See, most doctors out there, they’ll do CPR for fifteen, twenty minutes tops, then they’ll stop. It’s like they’ve given up before they’ve even started. But this term, ‘clinically dead’… it’s nonsense. I don’t know what that means, medically speaking. In those situations, the decision to declare someone dead is completely arbitrary. It doesn’t reflect what we know about life, and how long after such a ‘death’ someone can be brought back. If you know what you’re doing and you have the right tools to do it.”

“How long are you talking about?”

“There’s a girl in Japan who had been declared dead for three hours. Dead. Gone. They hooked her up and spent six hours resuscitating her.” He smiled. “She’s fine. In fact, she just had a baby.” He moved closer to his prized machine. “We can work miracles with this thing. Well, maybe a combination of miracles and scientific wonders.” He pointed out the various pumps, heat exchangers and oxygenators on the trolley. “We first cool down the body drastically and very quickly, in order to slow down any damage to brain cells. You need state-of-the-art machines to monitor and maintain oxygen levels to the brain, that’s key. Then we siphon out the patient’s blood, re-oxygenate it, warm it up and filter it and pump it around again. This buys us time to fix whatever caused the problem in the first place. We’re doubling survival rates and when they come back, they’re not brain damaged.”

“Sounds like they should have them in every ER in the country,” I said.

“From your lips,” he replied.

I liked him. A lot. But I left there with a seething rage. Somehow, I was sure they’d killed Nick. Which, added to everything else, made me absolutely desperate to get my hands on these scumbags.

Forget about clearing my name-right now, it was only pure, primal revenge that was on my mind.