Truth or Die

Chapter 30

Bretton Samuel Morris, ten months into his first term as president of the United States, shook what remained of his bourbon and rocks, the springwater ice cubes rattling against the crystal of his favorite glass. Tink-tinkity-tink.

The glass, specially commissioned from Waterford and featuring an etched American flag on one side and a bald eagle on the other, had originally been a gift to Ronald Reagan from the president of Ireland, Patrick Hillery. In total, there were four glasses in the set, but after a visit to the White House by Boris Yeltsin a few years later, only three remained. The Russian leader notoriously couldn’t hold his liquor, and since he was missing the thumb and forefinger on his left hand, he apparently couldn’t hold the glass, either.

“What time is it?” asked the president, breaking the silence of the Oval Office. He was staring out the window by the east door, which led to the Rose Garden, his back turned to the only other people in the room, his two most trusted advisors.

Clay Dobson, the chief of staff, glanced at his watch. “It’s approaching midnight, sir.”

The president drew a deep breath and then exhaled. “Yeah, that figures...”

In less than twelve hours, the Senate confirmation hearing for Lawrence Bass to become the next director of Central Intelligence was scheduled to begin. With the extensive background check long since completed, confidence in the White House had been riding high. Since the days of George Tenet, no one dared use the phrase slam dunk anymore, but everyone was certainly thinking it.

Bass, the current director of intelligence programs with the NSC, did not keep highly classified information on his unsecured home computer; he did not belong to an all-white country club; he drank socially, and sparingly at that; he paid Social Security taxes for his Guatemalan housekeeper; he did not secretly like to dress up in women’s clothing; and he did not have a thing for little girls. Or, for that matter, little boys. Lawrence Bass, the early-to-bed-early-to-rise ex-marine and Silver Star Medal recipient, had been vetted back to his diapers. Checked and rechecked. Everything had come up clean. Spic-and-span. Spotless.

The president turned from the window, facing the room. “Tell me this much, at least,” he said. “Are you absolutely sure what you’ve got is true?”

“As sure as we can be,” said Dobson, glancing down at the file in his hands. He then watched as the president nodded slowly.

“So, basically what you’re saying is... we’re screwed.”

“That’s one way to look at it, sir,” said Ian Landry, sitting cross-legged on the far sofa. The White House press secretary then shifted to his bread and butter: the spin. “On the flip side, knowing there’s a problem now sure beats the hell out of knowing it after the hearing tomorrow. At least tonight we have some options.”

“Who do you guys have in mind?” asked the president.

Dobson didn’t hesitate. “Karcher,” he said.

“Karcher? He wasn’t even on the short list.”

“That’s not what the Times, the Post, and Politico will be reporting in a couple of days,” said Landry, all but bragging.

“And what about Bass?” asked the president. “What am I telling him?”

With a quick nod, Landry deferred to Dobson. Golden parachutes were strictly the chief of staff’s domain.

“You simply tell Bass that his support collapsed in the wake of the assault-rifle ban bill, and that he’s the sacrificial lamb for the Republicans on the committee looking for payback,” said Dobson. “I’ll take care of the rest. After three months, he’ll land on K Street clearing a million five a year. Trust me, he’ll play along. He’ll have no choice.”

Tink-tinkity-tink. The president rattled his glass again, his eyes narrowing in thought. Five seconds passed. Then ten.

“Okay,” he said finally. “Wake the poor son of a bitch up.”

Dobson and Landry both quickly assured their boss that he was doing the right thing. Then, even faster, they left the Oval Office before he could change his mind.

President Morris was prone to that sometimes. Uncertainty. As a Blue Dog Democrat from Iowa, he managed a straight-shooter persona in public, but behind closed doors, according to “unnamed sources,” he had a tendency to agonize over decisions. His critics relentlessly seized upon this as the ultimate sign of weakness. A particularly scathing article in the New York Observer went so far as to attribute it to his height, or lack thereof. Only two presidents in the past century have measured under six feet tall, the article pointed out: Jimmy Carter and Bretton Morris.

But as he sat behind his desk and waited for Dobson to patch him in with Bass so he could break the bad news, President Morris felt something deep and strong in his gut. Something certain. That this night, of all nights, was going to haunt him for the rest of his life.

Clearly, Dobson hadn’t shared the details of that file in his hands because what was in that file could embarrass the hell out of the administration, if not worse. Giving specifics to his boss meant knowing the truth, and knowing the truth meant accountability.

Rule #1: Presidents don’t get impeached for the things they don’t know.

So leave it at that, right? Lawrence Bass had been involved in something he shouldn’t have been, and whatever it might be was enough to keep him from becoming the next director of Central Intelligence.

There was just one problem, one more thing the president didn’t know. That file in Clay Dobson’s hand?

There was nothing in it.

It was empty.

Chapter 31

“Who is he?” asked Dobson, pausing before a sip of coffee. At nine a.m. the following morning in his West Wing office, he was already on his third cup of the day. At least three additional cups, if not more, would follow before noon. Always black. Just black. No sugar.

“Maybe it’s better if you don’t know,” replied Frank Karcher, sitting on the other side of Dobson’s desk with his thick arms folded. The current National Clandestine Service chief of the CIA never drank coffee. Nor did he smoke or consume alcohol. From time to time, though, he did give orders to have people killed.

This was the first time the two were meeting publicly, as it were, in Dobson’s office. For the past two years, they had met in secret, a routine that had been no small feat given that the beat bloggers working the nation’s capital made Hollywood paparazzi look like agoraphobic slackers. The empty parking garages after midnight, the abandoned warehouse in Ivy City — that part of their plan was over. It would now be expected that Karcher’s name show up on the White House visitors’ log.

Dobson forced a smile, an attempt at patience with his strangest of political bedfellows. “If I didn’t need to know the guy’s name, Frank, you wouldn’t be sitting here,” he said. “Your mess is my mess.”

Karcher couldn’t argue with that, choosing instead to simply scratch the back of his very large head before opening the file in his lap. This one wasn’t empty. “His name is Trevor Mann,” he began, summarizing in bullet-point fashion. “Former Manhattan ADA with an outstanding conviction rate... left to become general counsel for a hedge fund... apparently that didn’t go too well.”

“What happened?” asked Dobson.

“The firm was sued by one of its largest clients, the Police Pension Fund of New York City. This guy, Trevor Mann, discovered during the trial that the hedge fund managers were withholding evidence that should’ve been given to the prosecution. In short, the cops were getting screwed out of profits.”

Karcher was about to continue when he glanced up at Dobson and suddenly stopped. There was something about Dobson’s expression, although Karcher couldn’t quite peg it. “What is it?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Dobson lied. “Go on. Or better yet, let me guess. The lawyer grew a conscience and sold out the hedge fund managers.”

“Something like that,” said Karcher. “He ended up being disbarred. Now he’s teaching at Columbia Law. Ethics, no less. Just finished his second year there.”

Dobson took another sip of coffee, leaning back in his chair. He knew that Karcher, all six foot two and two hundred and forty pounds of him, could be a sick fuck with a short fuse, if provoked.

But Dobson also knew what they had in common, what had initially brought them together.

A complete and thorough understanding of leverage.

Chapter 32

“Frank, did you ever take Latin?”

Karcher, a bit wary of the lack of segue from Dobson, slowly shook that large head of his. When he first enlisted in the army over thirty years ago, they had to special-order his helmet. “I’m assuming you did?” he asked.

“Yeah, four years of it at Phillips Exeter Academy,” said Dobson, fully aware of how pretentious that sounded. “And you know what the irony is? The only Latin expression that’s ever had any meaning to me whatsoever in my job is one that most anybody would know without studying the language for a single goddamn day. Quid pro quo.”

Karcher was well acquainted with the expression. He also knew where Dobson was heading with it. But before he could even open his mouth to mount his defense, Dobson went right on talking.

“Last night, I convinced the president of the United States to make you the next director of the CIA. You, Frank. Not the half dozen or so more qualified men at the top of the intelligence world, but you. I did this because this was our agreement, what you got in return for helping me with my plan. And everything was going well with that plan, wasn’t it?”

Dobson paused. It was a rhetorical question, but he still wanted at least a nod from Karcher, something that would make it all very clear. Not that Karcher agreed with him. Screw that. Rather, that Karcher understood just who exactly had the leverage.

So let’s see it, big boy. Tilt that huge melon of yours up and down like a good soldier.

And there it was, right on cue. It was the slightest of nods but a nod just the same, and for a proud man like Karcher, easily more painful than passing a cactus-sized kidney stone.

Dobson continued. “So now you’re here telling me that not only is the kid still alive up in New York, but there’s also a new guy, the boyfriend of the reporter, who might know everything as well?”

“I’ll take care of it,” said Karcher.

“That sounds awfully familiar.”

“Then what do you want me to say?”

“Nothing. I want you to do,” said Dobson. “As in, whatever it takes to clean this up. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Quid pro quo, Frank.”

“I got it.”

The hell he did, thought Dobson. “Quid pro quo!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “I want my fucking quid pro quo!”

Karcher didn’t say another word. Not even good-bye. He stood up from his chair and walked out of Dobson’s office.

Cave quid dicis, quando, et cui.

Chapter 33

Paranoia, I was quickly discovering, has a sound all its own. Loud.

“Christ, do you hear that?” I asked as we walked south along Broadway after leaving the Oak Tavern.

Owen turned to me without breaking stride. “Hear what?”

“Everything,” I said.

It was as if someone had grabbed a giant municipal dial with two hands and turned up the volume on the entire city. The clanking of a construction crane overhead, the idling engines of the bumper-to-bumper traffic, the back-and-forth chatter of the people we passed along the sidewalk — I could hear every single noise Manhattan had to offer, louder than ever before. And each one, I was convinced, wanted to kill me.

“It’s actually pretty cool, if you think about it,” said Owen.

That wasn’t exactly the reaction I had in mind. “Cool?”

“Yeah. Three-point-eight billion years of evolution tucked away in your DNA,” he said. “Survival instincts. Hear better, live longer.”

We came to a stop at a DON’T WALK sign at the corner of Fifty-Eighth Street. My neck was craning like Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist. We were out in the open, two sitting ducks. “Are you sure it isn’t hide better, live longer?”

“I know how it must seem,” he said, “but we’re actually fine for a bit.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“The Achilles’ heel of the intelligence community,” he said. “They only act on intelligence.”

“Meaning what, exactly?”

“Our two friends from the park are too busy right now turning your apartment upside down. They want to know what you know. They’ll comb through every hard drive you have; they’ll hack your phone records, bank and credit card accounts, anything and everything. Then they’ll wait and hope.”

“For what?”

“For us to do something foolish,” he said. “That reminds me. Can I borrow your phone for a second?”

“Sure,” I said, handing it to him. “Hey! What the hell?”

The kid promptly took my iPhone and dropped it down the sewer. Plop.

“Now we’re fine for a bit,” he said.

I got it. GPS. On or off, it’s always on. In which case...

“What about your phone?” I asked. I knew he had one on him.

“Let’s just say my phone’s configured a little differently.”

The WALK signal flashed. It might as well have been a starter’s pistol. Owen immediately took off, crossing Broadway and heading east on Fifty-Seventh Street. I was struggling to keep up with him in every sense.

“Where are we going?” I called out.

“I told you,” he said over his shoulder. “I need to make a stop. It’s close by.”

I jogged up alongside him. The kid was a workout. “Yeah, but you didn’t say where.”

“It’s right up ahead.”

As we walked another block, I couldn’t help picturing the two guys ransacking my apartment. As unsettling as that was, though, the idea that they were there instead of getting ready to leap out from around the next corner with guns blazing managed to muffle the loudness between my ears. Still...

“If we’re supposedly safe for a bit,” I said, “why are you walking so damn fast?”

“Margin of error,” he said, his shoulders lifting with a quick shrug. “There’s always the chance I could be dead wrong.”

And just like that, the city was screaming into my ears again, right up until the next corner, where Owen stopped on a dime and pointed.

“There,” he said. “That’s where we’re going.”

I followed the line of his finger across the street to a giant glass cube, at least three stories high and just as wide. If it had been shaped like a pyramid, we would’ve been in front of I. M. Pei’s entrance to the Louvre in Paris.

Instead, it was the entrance to the Apple store beneath the concourse of the General Motors Building. Is the kid buying me a new iPhone?

“What do we need to do in there?” I asked.

“What they’re hoping for,” he said. “Something foolish.”

Chapter 34

Owen looked as if he were casing the joint, but only to me. To the rest of the store he simply looked like another Apple fanboy browsing about the tables of iPads, iPods, and iPhones.

I was following closely behind him. “Are we waiting for something?” I finally asked. “Or someone?”

Owen stopped in front of a MacBook Pro, angling the screen toward him a bit before clicking on the icon for the Safari Web browser. I couldn’t tell if he’d even heard me.

“McLean, Virginia,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“That’s where the very first Apple store opened. It was in a mall called Tysons Corner Center in McLean, Virginia.”

“I would’ve guessed somewhere near Cupertino,” I said.

“Yeah, I would’ve guessed the same thing.” He was typing a series of letters and numbers into the search bar. It looked like gibberish. “Instead, Steve Jobs opened the first store nearly three thousand miles away from his headquarters.” Owen turned to me. “Interesting, huh?”

“I suppose.”

“Of course, you know what’s also in McLean?” he asked.

This much I did know. Or, at least, I was able to figure it out given the kid’s résumé. “Langley,” I answered.

He nodded. “Just saying.”

With that, he punched the Enter button, the screen instantly going black as if he’d turned it off. Just as quick, it flashed back on with a burst of white and a loading icon I’d certainly never seen before on a Mac or any other computer, for that matter. We weren’t in Kansas anymore.

“Any blue-shirts looking this way?” he asked, typing what looked to be a password.

I looked around. All the Apple store employees in their blue T-shirts were busy with other customers.

“All clear,” I said. For what, though? A Swiss bank account withdrawal? Rerouting planes over Kennedy?

Owen pulled a flash drive from his pocket, sliding it into a USB port and pulling up a video file. Immediately, I recognized the image. The beige carpet, the beige walls, the seamless tunnel of blandness...

Once again, I was back at the Lucinda Hotel.

The angle of the video — looking down — was from the end of the hallway on the seventeenth floor. My first thought was that Owen had tapped into a feed from a surveillance camera, albeit a color one with a super-crisp picture. Why would the Lucinda spring for that? They wouldn’t.

“I attached the camera above the exit sign by the stairs,” said Owen, all but reading my mind. “It’s wireless.”

He interrupted the live feed to cue up the footage from the beginning, back when he first checked into the hotel. He had recorded everything. Every second of every minute of every person who wanted to kill first him and then, later, me.

He was fast-forwarding through it all, but it was all right there, surreal as hell. Claire’s killer arriving. Owen leaving. My showing up, followed by the duo from Bethesda Terrace, who, after wielding their magic pliers, indeed pulled double duty as the world’s fastest cleanup crew, complete with removing Claire’s killer wrapped in a blanket. Perhaps the most unsettling part about that detail was how nonchalant they were carrying a dead body toward the stairwell. Just another day at the office.

Next came the arrival of the police and me again. Or, at least, it would’ve been. Owen had paused the recording, rewinding slowly before stopping on a clean shot of one of our would-be assassins. With a crop, cut, and paste, Owen fed the image into what I gathered was some kind of restricted personnel file of the CIA. But nothing was happening.

“Shit,” he muttered under his breath. “So much for the front door.”

That was when things got a bit freaky.

Owen reached into his other pocket, pulling out a small contact lens case. Before I could even ask what the hell he was doing, he’d put a red-tinted lens in his left eye and stared directly into the tiny camera above the MacBook Pro’s screen.

Now, suddenly — open sesame — everything was happening. Pixelated fragments of the guy’s facial features were bouncing from one photo to the next at the speed of a strobe light while charts and graphs measured the similarities. Seizure alert. The screen looked like the love child of a PowerPoint presentation and a pinball machine on tilt.

“This might take a while to get a match,” said Owen, removing the lens from his eye with a quick pinch.

“You just hacked your way into the CIA, didn’t you?” I asked.

He looked at me and flashed the quickest — and guiltiest — of smiles. “Hacked is such an ugly word,” he said.

Chapter 35

Owen watched the screen and waited. I waited and watched Owen. He was doing that thing again, washing his hands under an imaginary faucet.

And me? What was I doing?

From the get-go, the very beginning, I’d been playing catch-up. Who killed Claire? Who was the source she was going to see, and what did he know?

Now I knew. So what next?

It seemed pretty obvious to me. Of course, that should’ve been my first red flag.

“Owen?” I said.

“Yeah?”

His eyes remained locked on the screen. He was barely even blinking. That was fine. He didn’t need to look at me so long as he listened.

“We need to go to the police,” I said.

“Yeah, I know. That makes sense.”

“Good.”

“But we’re not going to.”

“Why not?”

“Because it doesn’t work that way,” he said. “They can’t help us.”

“They can at least protect us.”

He threw me a look. “You really think so?”

It had occurred to me. Maybe I wasn’t seeing the big picture, or at least how it looked from his point of view. “You want to go to another paper, is that what you’re saying? Maybe a news network?” I asked.

Finally, he stopped rubbing his hands and turned to me. The words were calm and measured, but the meaning was anything but. To hell with whistle-blowing. This was no longer about going public. This was now personal.

“A decision was made to kill my boss... then Claire... then me... then you,” he said. “And if you can make a decision like that, you’re not worried about the law. You’re above the law.”

Attorneys, especially former prosecutors, generally bristle at the idea of anyone being above the law. Then again, I’d been disbarred.

“What exactly do you have in mind?” I asked.

“The only way to smoke them out is to remain their target,” he said. “Think about it. As long as they’re coming for us...”

“It’s a path right back to them,” I said.

Owen nodded — bingo — before glancing back at the screen. “Now we just need a little background information,” he said. “Always get to know better the people who want you dead.”

Words to live by.

So there you had it. Why we were standing in the middle of an Apple store playing match-dot-com with the personnel files of the CIA. Let them come after us, Owen was saying. Let’s be foolish.

“Can I borrow your phone for a minute?” I asked. “I seem to have lost mine.”

Owen ignored my sarcasm. “Who are you calling?”

“No one.”

He still wasn’t sure, but he handed it to me anyway. Then he watched as I made a beeline to the accessories section, pulling an i-FlashDrive off the shelf.

As I began to open the package, a female blue-shirt with a ponytail and geek-chic glasses came over in a panic. She looked as if I’d just defaced the Mona Lisa.

“Sir! You can’t just—”

“How much is it?” I asked, reaching for my wallet.

She craned her neck to check the price. “Forty-four ninety-five,” she said. “Plus tax.”

I gave her fifty. Then, before she could tell me she needed to scan the bar code, I removed the drive and handed over the packaging. “I think I’ll pass on the extended warranty,” I said, walking away.

I returned to Owen while plugging the drive into his phone. “What are the file names of the two recordings you showed me at the Oak Tavern?” I asked.

He gave me the names and I transferred them to the drive. I handed him back his phone. “Thanks,” I said.

He motioned to the drive as I put it in my pocket. “What’s that for?”

“Just tell me where I can meet you in an hour,” I said, taking a couple of steps back.

“Wait. Where are you going?”

I reached for my sunglasses, sliding them on. “Margin of error,” I said. “Just in case you get us both killed.”

Chapter 36

I quickly wrote everything down on the only blank piece of paper I could get my hands on in the back of the cab taking me across town to Eighth Avenue. It was the flip side of a log sheet the driver was using to keep track of fares. He was fine letting me have it, although when I also asked for his pen and clipboard it was clear I was pushing my luck.

“You want to drive, too?” he asked.

After he dropped me off in front of the New York Times Building, it dawned on me how long it had been since I’d last set foot in Claire’s office. One reason was that she didn’t actually have an office, just a desk out in the open in the very crowded national affairs section. Visiting Claire was like being on the wrong side of the bars at the zoo. No privacy. You were essentially on display.

The other reason was the guy sitting twenty feet from her desk who actually did have an office, a Brit by the name of Sebastian Cole. Before I first met Claire, she and Sebastian had a brief, hush-hush office romance that, according to Claire, “was the second-best-kept secret after Deep Throat.”

“You might want to go with a different analogy,” I suggested after she told me that, on one of our early dates. “At least for my benefit.”

I remembered we both cracked up over that.

Anyway, as Claire described it, she was young and he was her boss, a surefire way to jeopardize your career even before you really have one. After four months, she ended it.

In the grand tradition of the British stiff upper lip, Sebastian handled her breaking up with him with aplomb, sparing her any retaliation such as reassigning her to the obituary department. Good for him. Even better for Claire. As for me, that was a different story.

The true extent of Sebastian’s coping abilities was put to the test a couple of years later at cocktail party thrown by another editor in national affairs. The test consisted of seven simple words spoken by Claire. Sebastian, I’d like you to meet Trevor...

So much for the British stiff upper lip. Instead, I got the stink eye along with all the bloody attitude that an Oxford-educated, bow-tie-wearing chap hailing from Stoke d’Abernon could throw my way. Sebastian hated American lawyers and hated even more the idea that Claire would be with one. At least, that was how she explained it later. I was more partial to the adage that guys will be guys, especially when it comes to girls. Jealousy rules the day, and at the end of it we’re all just a lyric in a Joe Jackson song. Is she really going out with him?

But that was then. This was now. Claire was suddenly gone, and neither of us would ever be with her again. That was certainly the subtext as I sat down with Sebastian. Let bygones be bygones.

“I’m in shock,” he said from behind his desk, slowly twisting a paper clip in his hands. I could tell he’d been crying, as had everyone else I’d passed en route to his office.

“Shock is a good word,” I said.

We discussed the details of how he’d heard the news, an early-morning phone call at home from the executive editor.

“Where was she going?” Sebastian asked.

“Seeing a source,” I said.

I watched his face carefully, looking for a tell. If he knew anything about Owen and his recordings, he’d never admit it. Not verbally. While I was 99.9 percent sure Claire hadn’t said anything to him or anyone else at the paper yet, the.1 percent chance that she had would certainly grow with a slight twitch or flinch from Sebastian. But there was nothing.

Nor, I was sure, would there be anything to be found on the computer at her desk. Ever since some Chinese hackers infiltrated the Gray Lady’s computer systems back in the fall of 2012, Claire kept all her sensitive files on her personal laptop and nowhere else.

Of course, maybe those “Chinese hackers” were really just Owen showing off from an Apple store in Beijing. Anything was possible at this point, I figured...

“I don’t mean to be rude,” Sebastian said finally after an awkward silence. We were simply staring at each other across his desk. “But I’m fairly certain you didn’t come here just to commiserate with me, Trevor.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I need to ask you to do something.”

“You mean, like a favor?”

“Sort of. Although depending how things play out, I might actually be the one doing you a favor,” I said. “Confused yet?”

“Intrigued is more like it.”

“That’s good,” I said. “Now tell me, on a scale of one to ten, how strong is your willpower?”

“My willpower? Is this a trick question?”

“No, I’m simply looking for the truth.”

“In that case... nine-point-five,” he answered. “How’s that?”

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“Why? What number were you looking for?”

I folded my arms. “On a scale of one to ten? Eleven.”

Chapter 37

I’d piqued his interest. Sebastian was a newsman, after all. He was actually leaning in a bit over his desk, waiting for me to explain.

“First, can I borrow an envelope and a pen for a moment?” I asked.

“What for?”

I cocked an eyebrow. “Really?” The cabdriver on the way over here — a complete stranger — had given me less of a hard time.

Sebastian relented, reaching behind him to grab an envelope from his credenza before scooping up a red felt-tip pen next to his keyboard. “Here you go,” he said.

He couldn’t see what I began to write in my lap. That was on purpose. What I did want him to see, however, was the i-FlashDrive I took out of my pocket when I was finished.

After I placed it in front of me on the edge of his desk, it immediately became all he could look at. Even more so when I sealed it in the envelope along with the note I’d written in the cab on the ride over.

I handed him back the pen. Then the envelope. “It’s all yours,” I said.

Sebastian adjusted his horn-rimmed glasses as he read the front of the envelope. He looked at me, then at the envelope, and then back at me again.

“You’re kidding, right?” he asked.

“Unfortunately, no,” I said.

“What’s this all about?”

“It’s all in the note and on the flash drive.”

“No, I mean the instructions.”

He flipped the front of the envelope around to me, but of course I knew what I’d written. Only open in the event of Trevor Mann’s death.

Admittedly, it was a bit melodramatic as far as instructions went, but I couldn’t have been more concise or direct.

“And I mean it, too,” I said. “The only way you open that envelope is if I’m dead.”

“This has to do with Claire, doesn’t it?”

“Of course.”

“Why can’t you share it me while you’re alive?”

“Good question,” I said. “But that’s a flash drive for another day.”

I watched as Sebastian looked at the envelope again, staring at it now. He knew exactly what was in his hands. A major story. Front page, far right column, above the fold.

“Why would you trust me?” he asked.

“Because you were the one who taught Claire,” I said. “‘Never burn a source.’”

In that moment, the way Sebastian nodded while choking back a tear, it was as if Claire were suddenly in the room. Although for the very first time, she was no longer standing between us.

“You’re an idiot,” he said. “You realize that, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“She loved you.”

“I know,” I said.

“I mean, she really loved you.”

“I know.”

The rest didn’t need to be said. I had loved Claire just as much as she had loved me — that wasn’t why I was an idiot.

I was an idiot because I hadn’t done anything about it.

Standing, I thanked Sebastian for his time and, yes, his trust. “Keep it in a safe place,” I half joked, referring to the envelope. He smiled, although I could tell there was something else on his mind.

He hesitated, falling silent. “Trevor, maybe you should sit down again,” he said.

Slowly, I did. “What is it?” I asked.

“I wasn’t going to tell you,” he began to explain, almost as if he were disappointed in himself. “Now I realize that would be wrong.”

Chapter 38

There wasn’t a cloud in the sky when I walked out of the Times building, but I was in a complete fog. Dense. Thick. Furious.

All I could see was the next step in front of me, nothing more. I knew where I was ultimately heading, except I couldn’t remember making the decision to go there. Or, for that matter, either of the two stops beforehand. It was a bit like sleepwalking. In the middle of my worst possible nightmare.

“Can I help you find something?” asked the sales clerk at the Innovation Luggage store at the intersection of Sixth Avenue and Fifty-Seventh Street. He was a blur standing right in front of me. His voice sounded like a distant radio station.

“I need a small duffel bag that comes with a lock,” I said.

“A lock, huh?” he repeated, tapping his chin in thought. “Combination or key?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Will you be flying with it? The TSA folks can—”

“Really,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”

He led me over to a wall display of cubbyholes that looked like a tic-tac-toe board. Before he could even make a suggestion, I saw what I needed.

“The one in the middle,” I said.

He took down the bag and I gave it a quick once-over. It was black, medium-sized, with a small padlock — the key for it, along with a spare, hanging from a zip tie around one of the handles.

“Yeah, I’ll take it,” I said.

“Do you want it in its box or would you like this one?” the clerk asked. By this point, it was abundantly clear that what I really wanted was to get the hell out of there.

“This one’s fine,” I said, already reaching for my wallet.

He spun the price tag around. “You’re in luck. It’s on sale.”

“Good,” I grunted, or something to that effect, as I pulled out my Amex.

I didn’t care about the price. I also didn’t care about using a credit card. The charge — and my location — could be traced in an instant. Even quicker than an instant. It would be like drawing a straight line to me, then lighting it like a fuse.

So be it.

Trevor, maybe you should sit down again. There’s something you need to know...

“Are you all right?” asked the clerk. He certainly didn’t think so. It was bad enough that I had all the charm and charisma of a cinder block. Now I was standing there frozen like one.

“Sorry,” I said, handing over my credit card. He ran it and I signed. As he handed me back the receipt, I nodded at the zip tie holding the keys. “Do you have any scissors?”

He glanced around under the counter, finding a pair. “Here, let me,” he said, cutting the tie. Then he leaned in as if he were about to whisper some nuclear codes. “Just so you know, that lock really doesn’t offer much protection. It’s super-easy to open without the key.”

“Not if you’re a cop,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

But I was already halfway out the door. Me and the Fourth Amendment.

Without just cause and a warrant, my new duffel bag might as well have been Fort Knox with two side pockets and a shoulder strap.

Good thing.

Because I wasn’t about to fill that duffel bag with jelly beans.

Chapter 39

Walking into a bar with a gun tucked under your shirt is one thing. Doing it in a bank?

One block shy of my Chase branch on the Upper West Side, I dumped the Beretta M9 in a trash can. I didn’t need it. Trust me.

“Do you have your key?” asked the safe-deposit box attendant on the lower level.

Maybe the woman picked up on my vibe, or maybe this was how she acted with everyone who came through the bank, but her monotone delivery was music to my ears. There would be no polite chitchat. No delay. In fact, she even had her guard key raised in her hand, ready to go.

Quickly, I reached for my key — sandwiched between the one for my apartment and the one for my office up at Columbia Law — and showed it to her. The irony. I never used to keep it on my key chain. Then, one day, I’d asked Claire about a certain key on hers.

“This way I don’t have to remember where I put it,” she’d told me.

I never knew what Claire kept in her safe-deposit box. I never asked. That was because I didn’t want her asking what I kept in mine.

She hated those “damn things” even more than I did.

Standing alone in the small viewing room with nothing but white walls and a shelf, I opened the lid and removed an original SIG Sauer P210. Steel frame, wood grip, locked breech. Old school. And, in the right hands, still the most accurate semiautomatic pistol in the world.

Then out came my Glock 34 with a GTL 22 attachment giving it a dimmable xenon white light with a red laser sight. As a weapons instructor during my first year at Valley Forge once declared with the kind of sandpaper voice that only a lifetime of smoking unfiltered Lucky Strikes will give you, “Sometimes shit happens in the dark.”

Both guns went into the duffel along with four boxes of ammo, one shoulder holster, and one shin holster, the latter being custom-made to accommodate the light and laser sight on the Glock 34.

Like I said, I didn’t need the Beretta M9.

Finally, there were some paper goods. Two wrapped stacks of hundreds totaling ten grand. Cash for a rainy day. Or, in this case, when it was pouring.

And that was that. Everything I’d come for, everything I needed. Before zipping the duffel closed, I took one last look inside it. Then I took one last look inside the safe-deposit box.

If only I hadn’t.

Sticking out from underneath my birth certificate was a 1951 Bowman Mickey Mantle rookie card. My father had given it to me after my very first Little League game. “Take good care of it,” he told me. “It’s your turn.”

The card was far from mint condition. One of the corners was dog-eared, and there were a couple of creases along the side. But it had been given to me by my father, who had gotten it from his father, and that made it absolutely perfect.

I picked up the card, staring at it in my hands, and suddenly it weighed a million pounds. My knees buckled and my legs gave out. I fell back against the wall, sliding slowly down to the floor. I couldn’t stand up. I couldn’t breathe. I could only cry.

“The autopsy...” Sebastian had begun.

Claire was an organ donor, so it had already been performed. He’d seen the results. He’d had to. Leave it to the Times to need a corroborating source before reporting the cause of death of one of its own.

“What?” I asked. “What is it?”

Sebastian hesitated, his eyes avoiding mine. But it was too late for second thoughts; he had to tell me.

“Claire was pregnant,” he said.

Chapter 40

Ready or not, you sons of bitches, here I come...

I took the stairs, walking the six flights up to my apartment on the top floor. The SIG Sauer was in my hand, my hand was hidden in the duffel, and the duffel was hanging off my shoulder.

Fog or no fog, there was a small part of my brain that knew exactly how stupid I was being. Whatever fine line existed between risky and crazy, I was nowhere near it. What I was doing bordered on insane. I was a walking death wish, and if it hadn’t been for the rest of my brain, I would’ve surely turned around and hightailed it out of my building.

But the rest of my brain was consumed by one thing, and one thing only. Love of justice perverted to revenge and spite. That was how Dante defined it during his tour through Hell.

Vengeance.

I shared the sixth floor with only one other tenant, a trader at Morgan Stanley who left each morning at the crack of dawn. His apartment faced the back of the building; mine faced the front. I got the natural light, he got the quiet.

Fittingly, there was nothing but silence as I passed his door, heading toward mine at the opposite end of the hall.

Out came the SIG Sauer from the duffel, leading the way. All the while, I kept waiting for a sound, a noise, something up ahead to let me know I had company. But that would be too easy, I thought.

Sometimes you just have a feeling you’re about to catch a break. This wasn’t one of those times.

Which was all the more reason why I wasn’t expecting the door to my apartment to be wide open, or kicked down, or hanging off its hinges like some giant calling card. And sure enough, it wasn’t.

The door was closed. Locked, too. Easing my back against the wall and out of the line of fire, I reached over for the knob. It barely budged. Maybe the whiz kid, Owen, was wrong. They never came. They weren’t inside.

Maybe.

I took out my key — everything was one key or another now — and unlocked the door as quietly as possible. It was a losing battle. There was simply no preventing the audible snap of the dead bolt retreating. In the silence of the hallway, the way the sound echoed, it might as well have been a giant gong announcing my arrival.

I waited for a moment, trying to listen again into my apartment while staying clear of the door. I could hear every beat of my heart, every swallow, every breath I was taking — but nothing more. Each second passing was all the more reason to believe no one was waiting for me on the other side.

Still, that didn’t stop me from putting the duffel down on the floor and pulling out the Glock to go with my SIG Sauer. I was like the title of a badass wannabe country song. “Double-Fisted with Pistols.”

I peeled my back off the wall, my shirt damp with sweat and sticking to my body. Damn, it’s hot.

Whether I was steeling my nerve or just stalling, I suddenly found myself counting back from ten. That, and thinking of Dante once again and the final line of the inscription he encountered on the Gates of Hell.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Chapter 41

I stepped back, raised my right foot, and let it fly, my heel hitting the door dead center with a deafening bam! The door flew open and my duffel bag quickly followed as I kicked it into the foyer to draw their fire. But the only noise I heard was the bag sliding across my hardwood floors.

My turn.

Crouched low with both guns drawn, I angled around the door frame, my eyes darting left, right, and everywhere. Nothing moved. No one was there.

Correction. No one was still there.

Creepy isn’t bursting into your apartment to see it ransacked. It’s bursting into your apartment to see everything as you left it... and still knowing someone’s been there.

Owen wasn’t wrong; I’d had company. The vibe was immediate. The proof came soon after.

I’d already done a quick sweep of every room to ensure I was truly alone when I circled back to my foyer and tried to think how they would think. Owen had summed it up. They’d want to know as much about me — and what I knew — as they could.

I started in my library and the easiest egg in the hunt, my laptop on my desk. Gone.

Next was the fruit bowl in my kitchen, where my mail piled up instead of fruit. All the mail was there, but at the bottom of the bowl was where I kept a spare key to the apartment, as well as one for my car and my office at Columbia.

All three keys? Gone.

By then, the old yew-wood chest in my bedroom was a foregone conclusion. I pulled open the top drawer on the right, which held my passport along with the lone weapon I kept in the apartment for protection, a 9mm Parabellum.

Gone and gone.

They had my hard drive. They had access to my home, my office, my car. They had one of my guns and the only way I could leave the country. Maybe they’d taken a few other things, but by that point I’d stopped looking.

Then I just stopped.

I froze in the middle of my bedroom, trying to listen. I’d heard something. The sound was faint but definitely there, or at least somewhere. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from.

There it was again.

I took a few wrong steps toward the door out to the living room, only to turn around when I heard it yet again. The sound was coming from my bathroom. I was positive I’d already looked in there. It wouldn’t hurt to check again, would it?

I sure as hell hope not.

Guns up and elbows locked, I put one foot in front of the other and moved toward the bathroom. After a few steps, I had the sound pegged. It was water. Not running, but dripping.

There was no need to channel Chuck Norris again. The door to my bathroom was wide open. The only kick I needed was one to my pants.

After a few deep breaths, I slowly peered around the hinges... and saw everything I’d seen the first time. My sink. My toilet. My shower. Nothing and no one else.

Ker-plop.

Immediately, my eyes went to the shower. The sliding doors were two-thirds closed. I could see enough through the frosted glass to know the boogeyman wasn’t standing behind them. I simply hadn’t turned off the water all the way after showering that morning.

I should’ve known, though. The déjà vu alone was enough of a tip-off. Those motherfuckers...

After a few steps forward to reach for the knob, I took one giant jump back. I wasn’t surprised about anything they’d taken from my apartment, not at all.

It was what they’d left behind.

Chapter 42

“Detective Lamont, please,” I said, although the “please” was hardly polite. It sounded more like Right away, dammit! I couldn’t help it.

Not that it changed the officer’s answer on the other end of the phone. “He’s off duty, do you want his voice mail?”

No, I want his actual voice. I stared down again at the business card Lamont had given me, even flipping it over twice, as if somehow that would make his cell phone number magically appear. It wasn’t printed on the card.

“Is there a way you can reach him for me?” I asked. “It’s important.”

“Oh, wait a minute,” said the officer, his voice trailing off as if he were reaching for something. “There’s a note here. Are you Trevor Mann?”

“Yes.”

“Hold on a second.”

It was more like thirty seconds, but I hardly cared so long as the next voice I heard was Lamont’s. On second thought...

“What the hell were you thinking?” he immediately barked, skipping right past any pleasantries. The way he said “hell,” it pretty much rhymed with “truck.” He was pissed.

I knew he was referring to Bethesda Terrace. There were a few ways he could’ve found out already, but I wasn’t interested in asking. I had my own line of questioning, beginning with “Where are you?”

“At home,” he answered. “They patched the call from the precinct. Where are you?”

“At home as well.”

“I tried calling.”

“I just got here,” I said. “More importantly, how fast can you get here?”

“Why?”

“Because you’re not going to believe this.”

“You might be surprised,” he said.

“Not as much as I was. Claire’s killer is in my bathtub.”

I was expecting any number of responses from Lamont, all of them falling under the heading of disbelief. Instead, I got sarcasm.

“Is the guy still dead or is he doing the backstroke now?” he asked.

“You think this is funny?”

“Do you hear me laughing?”

No, I didn’t. This was about more than Bethesda Terrace. I was missing something.

“They must have put him there,” I said. “They’re trying to frame me.”

“They, as in the two federal agents who just left my apartment twenty minutes ago?” he asked. “The ones you shot at in Central Park?”

“They were there to kill me. Christ, what the hell did they tell you?”

“I think you’re going to need a lawyer, Mr. Mann.”

“I am a lawyer, Detective Lamont.”

“You know what I mean,” he said. “We’re going to need a formal statement from you regarding Claire Parker’s murder.”

“Are you saying I’m a suspect?”

“More like a person of interest,” he said. “And I’m hopeful you’ll cooperate with us.”

“This is crazy.”

“With all due respect, Mr. Mann, I’m not the one with a dead guy in my bathtub.”

“But I can prove—”

He shut me down so fast I was actually startled. “You’ll have your chance, I assure you,” he said.

I was back to my original question. “Fine. Then when can I expect you here?”

“You can’t,” he said. “It’s not my shift. Detectives Charrington and Goldstein will be there soon. We’ve got to do things by the book, Mr. Mann.” He paused. “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I answered. I finally did understand. Or, at least, I was pretty sure I did. A lot of years had passed since I’d read the book he was referring to. It was the one we had in common.

Lamont wasn’t ticked off. He was tipping me off. The faster I got off that phone...

The better my chances of staying alive.

Chapter 43

“Stupid, stupid, stupid...” I muttered, berating myself as I quickly hung up the phone.

In the heat of the moment, at the shock of seeing Claire’s killer in my own bathtub, I’d gotten sloppy. Leave it to Lamont to catch my mistake.

He was now the official study guide — the human SparkNotes — for 1984. The two detectives he told me were coming to my apartment instead of him had the names of two other characters from the novel. Had he said one without the other, I probably never would’ve made the connection. But the two together? Charrington and Goldstein?

By the time he tacked on, “We’ve got to do things by the book,” I knew what Lamont was trying to tell me, the clever to my stupid. Big Brother was most likely listening in. My phone line was tapped.

So now they knew where I was. Where are they?

I dashed from the phone to my living room window, which faced the street below, pressing my nose against the glass. There was a windowless white van double-parked directly in front of the building. They hadn’t exactly spray-painted BAD GUYS on the hood, but I just had a feeling. This wasn’t the dry cleaners or a florist making a delivery. Nor was it the cable guy.

Time to pare down.

I kicked off my shoes, threw them in the duffel along with one of the guns — the Glock — and bolted from my apartment. Once in the stairwell, I silently stepped along the concrete in my socks for a peek over the railing, five flights down. One of the two guys from Bethesda Terrace was turning the corner to the second floor. It was only a glimpse, but that was all I needed.

Where’s the other one?

I ducked back into the hallway, eyeing the elevator. The floor light moved from 2 to 3, and it wasn’t stopping. There was my answer.

The options were shrinking fast as I ruled out the roof. The closest I’d ever gotten to jumping from one building to another was watching a Nike parkour commercial. With the alleyways on both sides of me measuring at least ten feet wide, this was no time for a crash course, emphasis on crash.

The only remaining option seemed to be standing my ground and letting the bullets fly. It was two against one — not the best odds — but probably my best chance.

Unless.

I made my way over to the middle of the hallway. There were only two apartments on the sixth floor, but there were three doors. As fast as you can say Monty Hall, I was opening door number three.

Like a moment straight out of This Is Your Life, I was flashing back to one of my earliest cases as a prosecutor with the Manhattan DA’s office. A sicko had killed his wife in their Upper East Side apartment and almost got away with it, thanks to the way he disposed of her body. He literally threw her away like yesterday’s trash.

Of course, he denied it, so one of the things I had to prove during the trial was that a 5-foot-7-inch woman weighing 145 pounds could indeed make it all the way down a garbage chute. I came up with the idea to film a crash test dummy with the same dimensions and show it to the jury. Worked like a charm.

But what about a 6-foot-1-inch man weighing 190 pounds?

I pulled open the chute with my free hand, looking into a black rectangle that might as well have been a black hole.

There was only one way to find out.

Chapter 44

Zip-zip.

I quickly put the SIG back in the duffel with the Glock. Tossing the bag ahead of me, I listened for the sound it made on impact. A hollow, echoing, bone-crushing BANG! would spell certain doom.

Instead, what came back to my ears was more of a muffled thud, and with it the decent chance that there was enough trash in the Dumpster below to break my fall. Call it only possible doom.

I jumped up, grabbing the exposed pipe running parallel to the wall, and swung my legs into the chute. Cirque du Soleil wouldn’t be calling me anytime soon, but it got the job done. I was in.

Gravity took over as I began to free-fall, as did the panic of not being able to slow myself down. My hands kept slipping against the metal lining of the chute, which felt like it had been coated with grease or whatever god-awful slime had built up after years and years of funneling garbage. If the fall didn’t kill me, maybe the stench would. But so far, the smart money was on the fall.

I was dropping too fast — my hands were useless. So were my feet, the soles of my sneakers sliding like ice skates. Shit, this is going to hurt...

Plunging into the Dumpster, I felt my right knee buckle, followed by a sharp, stabbing pain in my left thigh. There was plenty of garbage to break my fall, all right, but none of my neighbors were throwing out their old pillows.

For a few seconds, I simply lay there sprawled like a frozen snow angel, catching my breath while taking a quick inventory of all my moving parts. Nothing seemed broken, but I could already feel the bruises forming. I wanted to scream out in pain. Instead, I settled for a slight moan. I had to stay quiet and listen. Did they hear me?

With any luck, the two guys were back in my apartment searching for me top to bottom in every room. I’d now have plenty of time to slip out the basement door near the storage lockers.

So much for luck, though.

I heard the sound the second I turned to look for the duffel amid the other bags of garbage. It was the creaking of hinges, one of the doors to the chute somewhere high above me. Damn.

There was nothing to see but darkness as I looked up into the chute. Still, I could picture one of them peering down, trying to tell if indeed I’d been crazy enough to jump.

I wanted to move out of the way, hug the side of the Dumpster, but even more than that, I wanted to stay absolutely, positively quiet. I didn’t move.

Ten seconds passed. Twenty. Everything around me... everything above me... was silent. I kept waiting for the sound of those hinges again, the door closing as one of them maybe convinced the other. Nah, there’s no way he jumped. He’s not that crazy...

If only.

Finally, it came. The sound I wanted. Unfortunately, it was preceded by the sound I’d never imagined.

Crazy? We’ll show you crazy...

Chapter 45

Like a missile, he shot into the Dumpster headfirst, his hands outstretched. Had I been standing a few inches to the left, he would’ve crushed me for sure. I suppose I should’ve felt lucky about that, but I was too busy falling back on my ass from the force of his impact to give it much thought.

Get up! Those were the only two words I was telling myself. If I didn’t, I was a dead man. Get up! Get up! Get up!

I pushed off whatever I could, trying to stand. He was doing the same, although I could tell he was feeling the pain of his landing. He was hobbled, favoring his right leg. But his right arm was working just fine as he dug his hand into his jacket. He wasn’t reaching for his business card.

Besides, we’d already met back at Bethesda Terrace. He’d been a split second away from killing me until Owen intervened. But Owen wasn’t here to tackle him. It was up to me.

I lunged for him. It was like trying to dive in one of those birthday bouncy houses, my feet all but giving out underneath me. The best I could do was wrap up his legs and send him toppling over, but his hand was still on his holster.

My guns were in my duffel somewhere. His gun was at his fingertips.

Blindly, I reached for the nearest trash bag, swinging it across my body into his as hard as I could. The gun went flying as he fell back into the pile of garbage, his head banging against the steel wall of the Dumpster with a horrific crack! He should’ve been knocked out cold.

Instead, he was just getting warmed up.

Screw the gun, said his grin. He’d find it later after he beat me to death with his bare hands.

I didn’t even see the first punch, a lightning-fast roundhouse. He hit me high up on the jaw, a bull’s-eye to the molars. The only thing that kept me upright was the second punch, a roundhouse to the other side of my head. That one split my lip, the blood spraying everywhere like an exploding packet of ketchup.

His smile grew wider as I fell to my knees. I was practically teed up for him, about to be lights-out. We both knew it. The only thing delaying the inevitable was the one thing he wanted to know. He dangled the question as if it were my salvation, the only way he’d spare me.

“Where is he?” he asked. “Where’s the kid?”

I was dizzy, nauseous. My vision was quickly narrowing, blurred and fuzzy around the perimeter. That was why I didn’t see it at first, even though it was only a few feet to the left. My duffel.

The chain of the zipper was catching just enough light from the naked bulb overhead. The pull tab was on the near side, within arm’s reach. How fast do I need to be? Can I distract him?

The answer came suddenly with the piercing hiss of hydraulic pistons as the trash began to rumble all around us. It wasn’t exactly divine intervention, but I wasn’t complaining. This wasn’t your ordinary Dumpster. It was also a compactor — clearly triggered by weight — and it was about to do its job.

For one second, he took his eyes off me. It was like a reflex hammer to the knee. He couldn’t help it. He had to see what the hell was happening... that yes, the wall was closing in behind him.

And that was all I needed. Just one quick second.

Zip.

Chapter 46

My hand dove into the duffel, feeling for the first piece of metal I could find. I pulled out the Glock as he turned back around.

Surprise, buddy. The wall’s closing in from this side, too.

I squeezed off two rounds right to his chest, his body thrashing as if he’d just been jolted with electric paddles.

He wasn’t the only one shaking, though. I’d never shot anyone before. The feeling was otherworldly, and not in the good way.

Trying to hold it together, I stood over him. His eyes were closed, his body motionless. The only thing missing was the coffin.

Still, something wasn’t right. There’s something else missing.

There should’ve been blood — lots and lots of it — staining his white shirt. The moment he opened his eyes was the moment I realized why there wasn’t any. He was wearing a vest.

The shots were still echoing in the Dumpster as the hydraulics of the compactor suddenly hissed to a stop. Another sound, someone’s voice, immediately filled the silence.

“Gordon!”

He now had a name. We both looked up at the chute. Gordon’s partner was calling down to him. He’d undoubtedly heard the gunfire.

With my Glock pointed at Gordon’s head, I raised a finger to my lips. Don’t answer. I needed a moment to think, not that I really had one.

“Gordon!” came the voice again, even louder.

The only thing I knew for sure was that I didn’t want his partner coming down for a visit.

“Tell him you’ll be right up,” I said.

Just in case Gordon had thoughts of his own, I tightened my grip on the Glock. As nervous as I must have looked, I’d already pulled the trigger twice.

What Gordon wouldn’t have given to know where he’d dropped his gun.

He coughed, his face contorting with pain. The vest had stopped the shots, but the wind had been knocked clear out of him. He was struggling to catch his breath.

“All good,” he finally yelled. “I’ll be up in a minute.”

I didn’t look away, not for a second, as I leaned down to pick up the duffel with my free hand.

“You have a badge?” I asked, only to see him shake his head. “How about a wallet?”

“No.”

Strange thing was, I believed him. In his line of work you don’t really carry ID around with you. In any event, I wasn’t about to risk searching him.

“I should kill you,” I said.

“But you won’t.”

He was right. Shooting a man in self-defense was one thing. Shooting him in cold blood was something else entirely. Something I wasn’t.

“Who’s behind all this?” I asked. “Who wants the kid dead?”

He just stared at me. If he knew, he wasn’t telling. Where had I seen that before?

Would I really be bothered by the moral implications of an injection that could make him tell me what I wanted to know? Nothing is ever black and white.

Not even the truth.

Chapter 47

“Real slowly,” I said, “I want you to pull up your right pant leg.”

If I was ever going to leave that Dumpster alive, I couldn’t risk his having a second gun. He pulled up his pant leg to show me there was no shin holster.

“Now your left one,” I said.

No shin holster there, either.

“Satisfied?” he asked.

“Not yet,” I said. “I want you to tie your shoelaces together.”

I was expecting him to give me a look that said You’ve got to be kidding me. Instead he just said no.

“No?”

“That’s right,” he said. “No.”

But it was the way he said it. Cocksure. As if he’d suddenly regained all the leverage. Really?

I knew exactly what he was thinking. Forget the shoelaces, if I couldn’t kill him, the only things about to be tied were my hands.

“Fine,” I said.

But it was the way I said it. And had he been paying a bit more attention, he would’ve stopped smiling well before I lowered my aim and fired one shot into his right foot.

“Motherfucker!” he screamed as the dime-sized hole in his black wing tip gurgled blood like a garden hose.

He grabbed his foot and I grabbed the side of the Dumpster, climbing out with my duffel. I walked straight out the basement door to the back of my building, through the alley, and onto the sidewalk. As soon as I turned the corner, I hailed a cab.

Only after telling the driver the address did I lean back in the seat and think about what I’d done, or more to the point, how I hadn’t thought twice about doing it.

Most people will live their entire lives believing they know exactly who they are and what they’re capable of. But that’s only because most people will never have to find out for real.

I ran my tongue over my split lip, tasting the warmth and slight saltiness of my own blood.

This was for real, all right. As real as it gets.

Chapter 48

“Jesus Christ, what happened?” asked Owen as he opened the door.

“Oh, nothing really,” I said. “I just beat up a fist with my face, that’s all.”

He leaned toward me for a closer look. The closer he got, the more he winced. “I’ll go get some ice.”

He backtracked to grab the ice bucket near the television and headed off down the hallway while I put down my duffel and made a quick turn into the bathroom. I opened one eye slowly to the mirror. The other eye was already swollen shut. Cut me, Mick...

I washed off all the blood and gave the hand towels a proper burial in the garbage pail below the sink. Housekeeping could put them on our tab, because there wasn’t enough bleach in the world to bring those puppies back to white.

That got me wondering as Owen returned with a full ice bucket. I just wanted to make sure.

“You didn’t check in under Winston Smith again, did you?”

“Of course not,” he said. “Care to guess, though?”

I wasn’t really in the mood. Then again, I was the one who’d brought it up. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll take Fake Names for five hundred.”

Turns out, the kid did a pretty decent impression of Alex Trebek. “Eric Arthur Blair,” he said.

I stared at him blankly with my one good eye. I had no clue.

“What is George Orwell’s real name?” he answered.

Of course. The kid was as consistent as he was clever. That might have explained why he’d chosen to hide out in another hotel, this time in two adjoining rooms at the Stonington down in Chelsea. Frankly, though, I didn’t know which genius to believe.

On the one hand was Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

On the other hand was Owen channeling the Fodor’s travel guide to Manhattan. “There are over two hundred fifty hotels in this city, totaling over seventy thousand rooms,” he informed me. “As long as you weren’t followed here, I think we’re good.”

He looked at me, cocking an eyebrow. That was my cue to assure him that no, I hadn’t been followed to the hotel.

“Besides,” he added, “we’re both in desperate need of some sleep, as well as showers.” He sniffed the air around me. “And one of us is a little more desperate for that shower than the other, if you don’t mind me saying. Where the hell were you?”

After fashioning an ice pack from the liner bag in the ice bucket, I filled Owen in on where I’d been. The Times Building. The luggage store and the bank. (Hence the duffel and its contents.) Then my apartment and... oh, yeah, did I mention the Dumpster?

I would’ve preferred to leave out the part about Claire being pregnant, but that would’ve left unanswered the only question Owen could’ve had for me when I was done explaining. Particularly about the trip to my apartment. Are you freakin’ nuts?

Maybe I was. But at least he now knew why.

“I’m very sorry,” he said.

“Thank you.”

He was staring at the carpet, a fresh wave of guilt over Claire’s death crashing down on him. “I just feel so—”

“I know you do,” I said. “But don’t. I told you, this will never be your fault.”

“It’s not fair, though,” he said. “It’s not fair.”

I looked at him, with his shaggy hair and baggy jeans, forgetting for a second the incredible intellect he possessed. He truly was just a kid, wasn’t he? Never more so than in that moment.

For everything he knew about the world, Owen was still learning the greatest lesson of them all. Life.

“Your turn,” I said. “Any luck at the Apple store?”

Owen’s update was a lot shorter, as he’d had no luck identifying the two guys who wanted us dead. The fact that I’d learned the first name of one of them didn’t really change anything. But I had an idea what could.

“I need to get ahold of Detective Lamont again,” I said.

“Where is he?”

“Hopefully still at home. His precinct patched me in last time.” I took a step toward the hotel phone before stopping. Thoughts of my home line being tapped had jumped squarely in the way. “Is there any chance they would’ve bugged Lamont’s phone, too?”

Owen didn’t answer. He was suddenly glued to the television. I hadn’t even realized it was on; the sound was down.

“What’s up?” I asked, pulling up alongside him. I literally had to nudge him to respond. “What are you watching?”

“Something pretty strange,” he said.

Chapter 49

Next to the CNN logo were the two favorite words of any news network. BREAKING NEWS.

Above those words was Wolf Blitzer, presumably elaborating on the other two words filling the screen next to him. BASS OUT.

Owen quickly grabbed the clicker, turning up the volume. No sooner could we actually hear the Blitzmeister, as Claire got such a kick out of calling him, did the scene cut to the East Room of the White House.

The name Bass didn’t register with me at first, but as soon as I saw him standing at the podium, I put it together. Lawrence Bass was supposed to be the next director of the CIA. Now here he was — flanked by the president on one side, his family on the other — announcing that he was withdrawing his name from consideration.

“Wasn’t his confirmation hearing coming up pretty soon?” I asked.

“That depends,” said Owen.

“On what?”

“If you think this morning qualifies as pretty soon.”

Owen had pegged it, all right. That was pretty strange. On the flip side, Bass’s rationale couldn’t have been more common. Not only was he turning down the CIA director’s post, he said he was leaving his current position as director of intelligence programs with the National Security Council. Why?

To spend more time with his family.

“Turn it up more,” I said.

Owen ramped the volume on the remote as we both sat down on the edge of the bed to watch.

“Some decisions are easy, others are hard,” Bass explained, his hands tightly gripping the podium. “And then there are the ones that are both.”

He turned to glance at his wife, who was corralling their young twin daughters, an arm draped over each of their shoulders. The girls, who looked to be around seven or eight, were smiling, almost preening for the host of photographers before them. As for the wife, she was wiping away a tear.

“As honored as I was to be chosen by President Morris to lead the Central Intelligence Agency, I couldn’t ignore the sacrifice it would require of my family,” Bass continued. “All my life, I’ve known only one way to approach a job — and that’s with everything I have. That’s what I would’ve brought to my job as CIA director, just as I did at the NSC. But in the end, there’s an even more important job for me, and I already have it. That’s to be the very best father and husband I can be. So as much as this was a hard decision for me, in some ways — three very beautiful ways, to be exact — it was an easy one.”

With that, he let go of the podium, stepped back, and hugged his wife and daughters — one, two, three. The sound of cameras clicking away was nearly deafening, even through the television.

“Very touching,” said Owen as the screen switched back to Wolf Blitzer. He was introducing some pundit for comment.

“Yes, it was,” I said.

Owen turned to me. Each of us knew what the other was thinking. “For a minute there, I almost believed him.”

“Yeah, me, too,” I said.

Chapter 50

A hot shower and some sleep used to do wonders for me. I’d wake up with that can-do attitude straight out of a breakfast cereal commercial trumpeting all those essential vitamins and nutrients.

Now I was just wondering if I’d live to see another breakfast.

Not to say there weren’t any saving graces.

For instance, watching Owen hack one of those disgusting websites selling personal information about people was the best irony I’d seen in a long time. It looked simple, too. That is, until I asked Owen what he was actually doing.

“It’s called a Structured Query Language injection,” he explained. “SQL for short. I trick the website into incorrectly filtering for string literal escape characters.”

String literal escape characters? Structured Query Language injection?

Carry on, I told him.

The upshot was that we weren’t taking any chances in communicating with Detective Lamont. That resulted in the second-best irony I’d seen in a long time. We were evading the prospect of the highest of high-tech surveillance by going seriously old school.

“How did you know I had a fax machine at home?” asked Lamont the moment we stepped into the backseat of his car that night outside what used to be the Juliet SupperClub near Twenty-First Street and Tenth Avenue. Given how many people had been either stabbed or shot at coming out of the place, I figured he’d know it well.

“I’ll let Owen tell you,” I said, making the introduction. Nothing in my fax had mentioned I was bringing someone along, and certainly not someone so young.

“How old are you?” asked Lamont. He was squinting. Partly because there was barely any light in the car, but mostly due to disbelief.

“Nineteen,” answered Owen.

Lamont turned to me. “My car’s older than him.”

I glanced around the interior of his Buick LeSabre, my eyes moving from the crank handles for the windows to the ashtray below the radio. An ashtray.

“Your car’s older than everybody,” I said.

With that, the headlights of an oncoming car lit my banged-up face. We were still parked along the curb.

“Shit,” said Lamont. “How did that happen?”

I told him the story. It also gave me a chance to thank him for tipping me off about my phone line.

“Call it a hunch,” said Lamont. “The two guys who paid me a visit were CIA.”

Owen chimed in. “Special Activities Division, right?”

“How did you know?” asked Lamont.

“Let’s just say we share the same company health plan.”

Lamont shot me another look. He’s nineteen and he works for the CIA? “What other surprises do you have?” he asked.

Lamont had helped me up until this point based on little more than his gut. The time had come to prove his instincts right. I asked Owen to take out his phone and show Lamont some highlights from the hallway of the Lucinda Hotel.

“How’s that for a special activity?” I said as we watched the body of Claire’s killer being removed from the room.

Then came the main attraction. The big picture, if you will.

Owen showed Lamont the two recordings he’d played for me at the Oak Tavern. Even having seen them already, I got the same anxious, uneasy, pit-in-my-stomach feeling I’d had the first time. All of it was so painful to watch. And yet that was all I could do. I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen.

As for Lamont, he remained completely silent. In fact, he barely even moved. I tried to imagine all the things he’d seen as a New York City detective. Much of that, I was sure, was far more unsettling from a blood and guts standpoint.

But this was different. This had implications. The likes of which he most definitely hadn’t seen before.

“We need a favor,” I said as soon as the second recording was finished.

I half expected Lamont to shoot back, “No, what you need is a federal grand jury.” This was the guy, after all, who had warned me about trying to do other people’s jobs.

But that seemed like a very long time ago. A lot had changed. Including Lamont.

“Let me guess,” he offered, nodding at Owen’s phone. “You have faces but no names.”

“Exactly,” I said.

Lamont looked at me and nodded again. Sometimes a man’s character reveals itself slowly. Over months, maybe even years. Other times, all it takes is a New York minute.

“Yeah, I can help you,” he said.

As he threw the car into drive and pulled away from the curb, he began to whistle. It was the first few bars of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

Buy me some peanuts and what?

Chapter 51

Lamont reached for his cell, tapping a speed dial number as we stopped at a red light at the corner of Tenth Avenue. He waited a few seconds while the line rang. We all waited.

After a couple more rings, someone picked up. It was a guy’s voice. I could just make it out. “Hey,” the guy said. “Where are you?”

“You’re about to get an e-mail from someone you don’t know,” Lamont said into the phone. “I need you to do me a favor.”

“Go ahead.”

Hearing the voice for the second time, I recognized it. Lamont was talking to his partner, Detective McGeary.

“There’ll be three videos attached,” Lamont continued. “Load them into CrackerJack and run that ID filter thingamajiggy.”

I could hear McGeary chuckle. “You mean the ISOPREP for facial recognition?”

“Yeah, that’s the one.”

“What am I looking at?” McGeary asked.

“That’s the thing,” said Lamont. “You can’t look at them, not even a glance. At least, not yet.”

“You’re joking, right?”

“Just trust me on this, okay?”

The line was silent for a few seconds. “Yeah, sure,” McGeary said finally. “Whatever.”

“Thanks, partner,” said Lamont. “I’ll see you shortly.”

He hung up, turning to us in the backseat. Owen’s fingers were already hovering over his phone, ready to type in McGeary’s e-mail address. Lamont gave it to him.

“I need to send the files one at a time,” said Owen. “They’re too big as a group.”

“Whatever it takes,” said Lamont. “As you could tell, I’m not the most tech-savvy guy in the world. All I know is that prepping files on that damn machine takes a while. This way, we’ve got a head start.”

“Is he really not going to watch them?” I asked, incredulous. “That was like putting a biscuit on a dog’s nose.”

“Yeah, I know,” said Lamont.

“Are you trying to protect him?”

“I’m trying to give him the option. I’ll explain it to him at the precinct, and he’ll make the decision. That way, he owns it,” Lamont said. “You can’t unwatch what you just showed me.”

“Done,” said Owen, looking up from his phone. “All three sent.”

“Good, thanks,” said Lamont as the light turned green.

He turned left onto Tenth Avenue, heading the only way you can, which is north. The traffic was one-way.

Apparently, though, someone didn’t get the memo.

“Jesus, look at this asshole,” said Lamont, pointing up ahead.

Amid all the taillights was a pair of headlights, right smack in the middle of the street and coming right toward us. Fast. The guy was either drunk or a tourist or both.

Lamont flashed his high beams as drivers began leaning on their horns left and right. A taxi fifty feet ahead of us missed getting hit by inches as the oncoming car swerved around it at the last possible moment.

Whoever it was wasn’t stopping. If anything, he was picking up speed.

“Get over!” I yelled at Lamont.

But to his credit, he wasn’t thinking only about us. Every car around us was in danger.

Lamont jammed the brakes and reached down by the shotgun seat, grabbing a cherry top. There was no time to throw it up on the roof of his car. He quickly plunked it on the dash, flipping it on.

I shielded my eyes as best I could to the blinding flashes of red and blue filling Lamont’s car. Even more blinding was the white of the two headlights getting closer and closer. The car was right in our lane and there was nothing between us.

What the hell is happening?

“Hold on!” said Lamont.

Chapter 52

I braced for the collision. My arms outstretched, the palms of my hands pressed hard against the back of the front seat. Owen was doing the same.

Lamont, white-knuckled, had the steering wheel gripped at ten and two. He was bound to get the worst of it. Is this LeSabre so old it doesn’t even have airbags?

I could already hear the crash in my head, the horrible crunch of metal against metal, of glass shattering, of Newton’s First Law being proven at 120 decibels.

But those sounds never came. It was an entirely different one we heard, albeit just as loud.

At the last possible second, the oncoming car came to a halt mere inches from our front grille, the tires screeching as if they were being ripped from their rims. I couldn’t just smell the burnt rubber; I could taste it.

“Son of a bitch!” shouted Lamont.

Whatever relief came from not being hit was quickly overtaken by his anger. He couldn’t unbuckle his seat belt fast enough to get out of the car and tear this driver a new one.

With the cherry still spinning on the dash, he was barely more than a silhouette as he opened the door and swung his legs out all in one move. The moment his heels reached the asphalt, I could hear a door opening on the other car. Someone was getting out, another silhouette.

But I still recognized him. So did Lamont.

Just not fast enough.

Before Lamont could even reach for his gun, the sound of shots split the air. There were four of them right in a row. Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!

Instinctively, I ducked, but not before seeing Lamont drop to the ground, his hands clutching his chest. He was gasping, wheezing, trying to catch his breath. It was the sound of a man dying.

All at once, I wanted to puke, to mourn him, to click my heels three times and wake up safe in my bed next to Claire. But all I could see was Owen right beside me, completely frozen. He couldn’t have been more exposed if he’d had a neon target on his face.

“Get down!” I screamed, grabbing his shoulders.

As I pulled him flat against the backseat, the second wave came, as I’d known it would. There were so many shots I couldn’t keep count, one after another riddling the windshield. I’d expected the sound of shattering glass, but not like this. Not with bullets flying over us.

Damn, my kingdom for my duffel...

I’d left the bag back at the hotel, not wanting to bring what amounted to a small arsenal into Lamont’s precinct. Call me crazy.

But I wasn’t that crazy.

I reached down, grabbing the Glock strapped to my right shin. With that and two extra clips, I had just enough for one plan.

“Get ready,” I said.

“For what?” asked Owen.

I flipped the safety. “We’re getting out of here.”

Chapter 53

All I knew was that my ears would have to be my eyes.

That flashing cherry meant I couldn’t see out of the car, but it also meant he couldn’t see in — he being Gordon’s partner. It was him, all right. The gamble was whether it was only him.

That was what I was hearing, though. Shots from only one gun. One gun, which he was currently reloading. The slide and click were unmistakable.

I could almost hear his thoughts, too. He knew I had a weapon. His buddy, Gordon, had a hole in his foot that proved it. Sitting this one out, Gordo?

I sure as hell hoped so.

There was no time for any countdown or a moment to steel my nerve. My window was now, and it looked a lot like the space between the front and back seats. The car was in park and idling, but not for long...

GO!

I popped up like a deranged, gun-toting Whac-A-Mole, firing blindly through the windshield and into the other car. As I unloaded half my clip, the only thing I was aiming for was to send Gordon’s partner scrambling for cover.

GO!

I lunged over the seat, shifting into reverse with my gun hand while punching the gas with the other. Steering wasn’t exactly a high priority as we took off backward with Owen sneaking peeks out the back window.

“Clear!” he shouted, while I remained on the floor of the front seat.

All the surrounding traffic had backed the hell away as soon as they heard the gunfire, more of which was now spraying through what remained of the windshield. Suffice it to say, Gordon’s partner didn’t particularly like this latest development. Meanwhile...

“Thirty feet!” shouted Owen with the update, the distance before we’d hit another car. Or anything else, for that matter.

By now it had stopped raining shards of glass over my head. We were out of range. Time to get a better view.

I pulled myself up by the steering wheel, immediately spinning us into a one-eighty that nearly flipped us over and had Owen practically doing a somersault across the backseat.

“Jesus!” he yelled.

“Sorry!” I yelled back.

The second we were on all four tires again, I grabbed the rearview mirror, twisting it into my eye line to see what Gordon’s partner was doing behind us. Instead, I should’ve been looking straight ahead.

“Car!” said Owen. “Car!”

I looked just in time to see a white BMW swerving up on the curb to avoid us. So did the taxi behind it. Now we were the asshole who didn’t get the memo. We were going the wrong way.

The chorus of horns kicked in, but the only car that really mattered was still behind us. Glancing into the rearview mirror again, I could just make out Gordon’s partner getting back behind the wheel. For the first time, I could see what he was driving. A Jeep Wrangler.

I killed the cherry and made the first turn possible, onto Twenty-First Street. We were finally going the right way, but it was clear we were about to have company.

Just how fast can a Buick LeSabre from the early eighties go?

Chapter 54

My right foot was like a cinder block on the gas, while my head was like a bobble doll, bouncing all around as I tried to see through the shot-up windshield. There were so many cracks and jagged edges, I might as well have been looking through a prism.

I blew through one red light and then another without a scratch, a double dose of lucky on our way to the West Side Highway. More lanes, less traffic, better chance of losing him. Or so I was thinking.

“He’s gaining,” said Owen, looking out the back while I frantically weaved in and out of the cars around us.

“How many behind?” I asked.

“Five cars,” he said. “Shit, make that four.”

We were a block away from the highway, but suddenly that idea wasn’t looking so good. I couldn’t shake him. Four cars back would become three and then two and then one, and he’d be right on my tail, shooting out my tires.

I glanced back at Owen. “Time for plan B,” I said.

“I didn’t know we had a plan A.”

“Good, then you won’t fight me on this.”

He fought me anyway.

“Hell, no,” he said after I told him what I wanted him to do. “It’s two against one.”

“Yeah, but we’ve got only one gun,” I said. “That makes it one against one.”

“Then I’ll be the decoy,” he said. “I’ll distract him.”

“Yeah, right before he puts four bullets in your chest.”

It wasn’t just what I said, it was the way I said it. Angry. Pissed.

Guilty.

All I could see was Lamont falling to the ground. It was playing in my head over and over, a vicious loop.

And as Owen went silent, it was as if he knew exactly how I felt. He’d felt the same thing with Claire.

I need you to run with this story, kid. Literally...

“Okay,” he said, relenting. “But you better know what you’re doing.”

“I do,” I assured him. And with any luck, that wouldn’t be a lie.

Flipping the cherry back on, I looked up ahead to the end of the block about fifty yards away. I was straddling both lanes as parked cars dotted each side of the street like Morse code. What I needed was two cars lined up opposite each other like gateposts. Because I was about to close the gate.

The sound of my jamming the brakes was immediately drowned out by everyone else’s brakes behind me. Not only was I stopping on a dime, I was stopping on an angle to block both lanes. Instant chaos.

No one was going anywhere... except Owen.

“Now!” I told him.

He hesitated for a split second, but that was it. He burst out of the backseat, dashing around the corner and out of sight as fast — and as low — as he could.

Now it was my turn.

Only, I was heading in the opposite direction. Suddenly, my life had become an existential fortune cookie.

Man chased too long must find new path.

Chapter 55

With the cherry still flashing on the dash, there came an eerie silence as I all but crawled out of the front seat on my hands and knees to avoid being seen.

New York drivers have a well-earned rep for impatience, but even they know when to lay off their horns. You honk at a cop and you’re likely to see some real impatience, and that old Buick LeSabre blocking traffic was an unmarked police car, as far as everyone could tell.

Everyone, that is, except the guy at the wheel four cars back who wanted me dead.

Quickly, I made my way behind a Prius parked along the curb. The angle was wrong, though. I couldn’t see well enough up the street.

So much for the gift of silence, too. The line of cars now stretched all the way down the block, well beyond sight of the flashing red and blue. Any driver bringing up the rear had no idea why he was stopped. The horns began kicking in, one louder than the last.

Fine by me. I was banking on the confusion.

As fast as I got to the curb was how slowly I began moving alongside the parked cars, peering over the hoods until I had a clean line. But it wasn’t happening. The headrest of a seat, a side-view mirror — something was always in the way.

I should’ve been able to spot him by now.

Finally, there came a good angle. I was maybe twenty feet away, sidled up next to the back tire of a MINI Cooper. Looking through the glass of the rear hatch, I had the perfect view.

Of nothing.

I could see the Jeep, but the driver’s seat was empty. The engine was running, and I couldn’t suppress the immediate thought that maybe I should’ve been, too.

Gripping my pistol with both hands, I was whipping it around like a pointer. Where are you? Over here? Over there?

I didn’t know whether to move or stay put. People were starting to get out of their cars. Some were yelling, others walking ahead for a closer look. No one knew what was happening. Including me.

Then, with one glance to the left, I saw him.

He poked his head out from behind the Prius back where I’d started. I’d gone to him; he’d come to me. We’d missed each other. He had no intention of letting that happen again.

Like a bull out of the gate he came at me, running with his arm raised. His first shot caromed off the sidewalk mere inches to my left, the sound setting off screams up and down the block. People were scattering everywhere as I bolted around the next car at the curb, just barely eluding the second shot. Had the MINI Cooper been any less mini, I would’ve been nailed in the back for sure.

Three-point-eight billion years of evolution tucked away in your DNA...

Immediately, I spun around with my arms locked, the inside of my index finger flush against the trigger. Once again, I had the perfect view.

And once again, it was of nothing.

The sidewalk was empty. He wasn’t there.

But he was far from gone.

Chapter 56

I’ve never cracked the cover of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. It’s never even made the to-read pile next to my bed. But I had to believe that somewhere buried in the book was a rule that said if the enemy knows where you are but you don’t know where the enemy is... move.

As fast and low as I could, I zigzagged across the street, stopping only when I saw some bald guy in a suit halfway out of his shiny red Cadillac. He was crouched, looking through the window with his entire head exposed as if he’d somehow missed that physics class in high school explaining the effect of a speeding bullet on a piece of glass. This just in, pal, the bullet wins...

“Hey,” I tried whispering, which was pretty much a lost cause given the cacophony of horns still blaring. The entire street had become a parking lot, an exceedingly angry one at that.

“Hey!” I tried again, louder.

Finally, he turned around and I motioned with both hands for him to get down. That immediately got me a look suggesting I should mind my own effin’ business. Then he saw the gun in my right hand. That did the trick. He ducked back into his seat so fast he literally banged his bald head on the top of the car.

Any other time, any other place, that would’ve been funny.

I wasn’t laughing.

All I could do was keep looking left and right as I approached the other sidewalk, my head on a swivel. Forget my trigger finger, the slightest movement anywhere in front of me had my entire body twitching. Throw in some self-doubt, and I was close to drowning in my own sweat. Did I really need to go after a trained CIA field agent head-on?

Too late.

It was like lightning before the thunder. I first saw a flash in the corner of my eye. I turned quickly to look, squinting for focus, and heard a booming voice right behind it.

The voice was saying something. He was saying something. But he was too far away; I couldn’t make out the words.

The voice, though... I knew the voice. It was familiar.

It was Owen.

He was sprinting toward me on the sidewalk, his cell phone lit up with one of those flashlight apps. Damn, those things are bright. He was close enough now, the words beginning to come together.

“You!” he was screaming. “Find you!”

Find me? No.

Behind me!

I spun around, hands out front, my eyes blowing up wide with panic as I looked out over the barrel of my pistol to see another gun already lined up with my chest. Somehow he’d gotten behind me.

Now he was right in front of me, dead center. All Gordon’s partner had to do was pull the trigger. But he suddenly had a problem...

He couldn’t see me.

The light from Owen’s phone hit his face so fast I could practically see his pupils snap shut. He raised his arm to shield his eyes, but it was the other arm I was watching. The one with the gun. He was swinging it right at Owen.

There was no thought, no planning, no decision. Just instinct. And maybe a little trace memory thrown in for good measure in case he was wearing a bulletproof vest.

In other words, I aimed a little bit higher.

I got off two shots. I couldn’t tell if the first one hit him, but there was no doubt about the second. Let’s just say it was going to be a closed-casket funeral, and leave it at that.

“C’mon,” said Owen. “Let’s go.”

That was all he said. Or maybe that was all I heard.

For sure, it was more than I was able to say, which was nothing. I could barely breathe, let alone talk. But I was keenly aware. The kid came back for me.

Later, I would thank him. The heart rate would slow; the thoughts and words would come. I’d point out that this was the second time he’d saved my life. I’d even crack that I’d never been so happy to have someone ignore what I asked him to do. If Owen had fled back to the hotel from Lamont’s car as I’d asked — as he’d told me he would — I would’ve been the one lying on the pavement in a pool of blood.

But he hadn’t. So I wasn’t.

Yes. Later, I would do all this. When there was time to think and sort things out. But the moment after I pulled the trigger was no different than the moment right before.

No thought, no planning, no decision. Just instinct. The same instinct Owen had.

Let’s go.

Chapter 57

I went to sleep having killed a man. I woke up thinking I’d at least find out who he was.

It didn’t matter if he wasn’t carrying ID. There were other ways. So many other ways. Fingerprints. Dental records. Facial recognition software. If ever there was a job for CrackerJack...

“What time is it?” I asked Owen with my one good eye open off the pillow. My head was killing me. The rest of me wasn’t faring much better.

Owen was sitting on the edge of the other queen bed in our two-room bunker at the Stonington staring intently at the television and the start of the local morning news. He could’ve been a statue if it hadn’t been for his hands. They were doing that dry wash thing again. What’s the deal with that?

“It’s six,” he answered.

That explained the hint of daylight along the perimeter of the drawn curtains, not to mention why I still felt so tired. It was barely dawn, and I’d only been asleep for a couple of hours. Longer than Owen, though, apparently.

There’s one exception to the age-old maxim about news reporting — if it bleeds, it leads — and that’s the early-morning broadcast. At the start of the day, one thing trumps everything else. The weather. Short of an apocalypse, that’s what people want to hear about first. The eternal question? It’s not the meaning of life. It’s Will I need an umbrella?

According to the far-too-chipper weatherman pointing out some incoming clouds on the Doppler radar, the answer was a definite maybe. There was a forty percent chance of showers in the afternoon.

Of course, there was a hundred percent chance of two shooting deaths overnight in the Chelsea section of Manhattan.

The weatherman, still grinning, sent it back to the anchor, who did her best to segue into a more somber tone as the words DETECTIVE DEATH appeared on-screen. Next to them was a picture of Lamont. He must have fallen to the ground a thousand times in my mind before I’d finally been able to drift off to sleep.

Now tell us who the goddamn son of a bitch was who killed him. Tell us about “Gordon’s partner.”

As if he could read my mind, Owen stopped rubbing his hands and glanced back over his shoulder at me.

“They’re not going to know,” he said softly.

The second he said it, I knew he was right. Even if the police did know, they wouldn’t be quick to release the name to the press. It would raise more questions than answers.

“At this time, the identity of the second victim, who is believed to be the man responsible for Detective Lamont’s murder, is unknown,” said the anchor, so keyed to her teleprompter that she didn’t seem to even grasp how twisted that sounded.

Even more so because there wasn’t even a mention of the other triggerman. Me.

Was there really no one who saw me shoot him?

The anchor moved on to a fire in a Queens tenement building, prompting Owen to shut off the television. As soon as he turned to me, I knew the question coming, and it certainly wasn’t about how I’d slept.

“How do you want to do this?” he asked.

That was the part we hadn’t discussed after returning to the hotel. The how. Our focus had been the what, as in What do we do now? The night had changed everything.

Detective Lamont was dead, and we knew why. We owed it to him, his family, and everyone he worked with to come forward. Maybe Owen was right. Maybe justice wouldn’t be served in the end. But it no longer seemed like our call to make.

“Lamont’s precinct,” I said. “I think that’s where we begin.”

Owen nodded. “Do you want to call ahead?”

“No. Let’s just show—”

Before I could get the word up out of my mouth, Owen’s phone lit up on top of his backpack by the TV. I thought it was an incoming call at first, but there was no ring, no buzzing or vibrating.

“That’s strange,” said Owen, going over to check it.

“What is?” I asked.

“It’s an e-mail.”

“So?”

“I shouldn’t be getting any,” he said. “The account uses an entity authentication mechanism I designed myself. It’s way beyond the X.509 system.”

I stared at him blankly. “Okay, now in English,” I said.

“It means that for me to get an e-mail it has to be piggybacked on one I already sent. But I only set up the account yesterday. I haven’t sent an e-mail to anyone.”

No sooner did he say it than we both realized he was wrong. He had sent an e-mail to someone. From Lamont’s car.

“What’s it say?” I asked, watching him read.

Owen tossed me the phone so I could see for myself. It was more than an e-mail. It was hope.

Underneath a screen grab from one of the interrogation videos were a name and an address in Washington, DC. Georgetown, to be exact.

My partner always believed in what he was doing, McGeary added. I hope you do, too.