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  The ADIC could no longer remain silent.

  “What possible good can this do you?” he demanded. “More evidence against you, is all this is. More evidence to put both of you in prison for the rest of your lives.”

  “There’s not going to be any prison,” Lisa told him. “Not for us, not for you.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” He shook his head. “You really think you can hurt me? That two useless FBI agents—a woman, for Christ’s sake—can possibly hurt a man like me?”

  Lisa came back and stood directly in front of him.

  “Here are your orders, Finnerty. You will prepare a signed statement … every detail about your secret files. Where you got them. How you’ve been using them.” Her voice rose. “You will expose the rest of your group, identify each of them to us, then use your batphone here to call them and tell them it’s over.”

  Finnerty’s gray eyes darkened with rage. Hearing such demands from an ordinary FBI agent was killing him. Taking orders from a woman would destroy every last vestige of his self-control.

  Lisa continued, her voice sharp as she commanded him to obey. “You will admit to the extortion of Judge Brenda Thompson and to your blackmailing of Senator Randall.”

  Sweat began to bead on Finnerty’s brow. His hands began to clench and unclench, then move toward his paperwork. Almost, I told myself. My hand returned to the weapon in my holster.

  “You will name everyone you’ve done the same thing to,” Lisa went on. “You will give me a letter of resignation, which I will hand-carry directly to the president. You will not return to your office. You will never again enter the Hoover Building for any reason. You will have no contact with any member of the FBI. Finally, you will give us the files in that vault in your home and keep out of our way as we load them up for the White House.”

  “I’ll see you in hell first!” he screamed, spitting with fury, specks of saliva flying with the force of his words.

  Lisa reached for a pad of yellow paper on the desktop, tossed it at him. The pad struck Finnerty in the chest and fell into his lap. He left it there, just sat and stared at us.

  God damn it, I thought. What’s it going to take to push him over the edge?

  “Start writing!” Lisa shouted. “I don’t have all night.”

  Finnerty’s face turned purple. He stared at the stack of paperwork to his right, then reached for it. But he didn’t actually touch it. Instead, his right hand fell to his lap, toward the yellow pad still lying there. He grabbed at the pad, but only succeeded in knocking it to the floor. He bent to retrieve it.

  I watched his right shoulder, saw it change directions as he grabbed for the weapon I’d known would be on the floor under his feet. When his gun came up toward Lisa I shot him in the face.

  There was a sharp cough from my silenced semiautomatic.

  And a round red hole in the center of his forehead.

  A millisecond later the tumbling bullet took most of his brain and splattered it across the wall to the right of the windows behind him.

  A look of immense surprise filled the ADIC’s face as his already dead body flew backward against his chair, then collapsed sideways and slid to the floor.

  I turned to Lisa. She stared at Finnerty’s body for a moment, then at me. I saw in her eyes the questions already forming, but it still wasn’t time to answer them.

  I slipped around Finnerty’s desk, careful to avoid stepping in the blood and gore on the other side, then pulled a pair of needle-nose pliers from my pocket and moved to the wall. I found my bullet quickly, covered in the worst of the goo running down the wall, used the pliers to tug it out of the crater it had formed. I dropped the messy and misshapen slug into my pocket, used the pliers again to pick up the Sig Sauer nine-millimeter that had fallen from Finnerty’s hand as he died.

  I pulled a handkerchief from my jacket, used it to hold the Sig while I transferred the silencer from my gun to his, then aimed his weapon directly into the same crater from which I’d pulled my own bullet. I squeezed the trigger. Another cough. This time I left the bullet in the wall. I knelt on one knee and replaced the Sig next to Finnerty’s hand, stepped carefully back around the desk and rejoined Lisa.

  Her eyes couldn’t seem to leave the carnage, especially the bloody gun on the floor.

  “That …” she said. “This won’t …”

  “Later,” I told her. “It’s time to leave.”

  The snow had turned serious by the time we came back up out of the garage. I turned the wipers on to brush it back, but it was already sticking to the ground outside. Lisa didn’t say a word until we were two blocks away from WMFO, when she turned to me and ordered me to stop the car.

  “I saw what you did,” she told me when I pulled to the curb. “I know exactly what you did.”

  I said nothing.

  “You used me. You used me to execute him. You lied to me to get me to help you. You knew what he’d do when I yelled my orders at him, that he would rather die than take that kind of abuse from a woman. That he’d never confess, that he’d …”

  She stopped talking, then reached for the door handle and opened the door.

  “Lisa,” I said. “You had to know. You had to know there couldn’t be a trial. Not for us, not for him.” I touched her arm. “We all knew that. Gerard, Brodsky, all of us. And you did, too.”

  She shook my hand away, slid out of the car, turned back to me. Snowflakes began to cover her head and shoulders as she spoke.

  “You can’t possibly think this will work,” she said. “That we’re going to fool anybody with that phony suicide.” She paused. “And Christ, Puller, our fingerprints are all over this thing, and I don’t mean real prints. You used bureau equipment. The bug in Finnerty’s car, the bugs in his house. How long is it going to take for them to come get us?”

  “Nobody’s coming. Nobody’s going to come.”

  She stared at me.

  “Think about it, Lisa. Think about a trial, ours or Finnerty’s. What the bureau would have to let the public know in order to prosecute any of us. What the public would force Congress to do about it.” I shook my head. “Just think about it.”

  “But you murdered him,” she said. “We murdered him.”

  “He killed himself.”

  “Brodsky knew, Gerard Ziff knew. You used me,” she repeated, “all of you.”

  “We used each other, all of us. Each of us gets something out of this, you included. Don’t pretend you don’t know that.”

  She shook her head, her eyes downcast. She spoke without looking at me.

  “Maybe I did,” she said. “Maybe I’m no better than you are … than any of you are.” She looked at me. “But I do know one thing. I’ve got to go away from you until I know for sure.”

  She turned and started to leave.

  “Lisa,” I called to her, “don’t do this. At least let me give you a ride home. At least give me a chance to help you understand.”

  She looked back at me and shook her head.

  “I don’t need a ride, Puller,” she said. “Right now I’d rather use a taxi.”

  I opened my mouth to argue, but she’d already turned and walked away into the storm.

  FORTY

  Super Bowl Sunday came to a Fredericksburg buried by the same snowstorm that had started the night I killed Finnerty. Snow had continued to fall all that night and into the following week. I welcomed it, found myself hoping it would never go away.

  For me it was like a shroud, a funerary blanket to hide the gruesome events of the past few weeks, as well as a clean base on which to make a brand-new start. A new start I had to make soon, I kept telling myself, but one I just couldn’t force myself to accept.

  The problem was Lisa. She’d gone away that night, and I hadn’t seen or talked to her since. She’d gone on leave after the shooting and got herself reassigned to the Baltimore office when she came back. And I couldn’t seem to move beyond her loss, couldn’t make myself stop missing her so
much I simply didn’t care about anything else. Even the Super Bowl, and the five-thousand dollars I’d had to bet just to get her out of my mind long enough to watch it.

  As I’d told Lisa, there wasn’t even a ripple in our lives following the ADIC’s death. Finnerty hadn’t bothered to tell anyone he’d suspended us. Lisa had gone away for a week, I’d gone straight back to the office and my SPIN squad. And the cover-up had begun. This time it was the Hoover Building using Quantico rules.

  News of Finnerty’s “suicide” had been all over the radio and TV an hour after we’d left him. Information like that was impossible even for FBI Headquarters to keep under wraps. Brenda Thompson would have heard it before she went to bed for the night, at which point she must have decided his insanity had killed him, that she was free to continue with her own dream. And she would be free, I knew. Free from Kevin Finnerty, at least, and maybe even from her long-ago nightmare in Brookston.

  Then the Hoover Building would have gone to work on the real problem, how to save itself from extinction, should the truth ever become known.

  Orders would have been given immediately following the discovery of the ADIC’s body. The instant the director had been shown the videotapes we’d left in Finnerty’s office, specially trained agents would have raced to the ADIC’s home, into his office, where they would have found copies of the same thing, along with the ripped-away bookcase and the secret vault. It wouldn’t have taken them a half-hour to blow the vault door off, to get inside and find the evidence of Finnerty’s treachery.

  They would have searched the rest of the house and found my bugs, my official bureau bugs. They’d have figured out what had been done, and, more importantly, who’d done it. We hadn’t left any fingerprints, but they would know. Fortunately for us, they wouldn’t want to know. Still didn’t want to know.

  The Hoover Building didn’t give a damn about Kevin Finnerty. All they cared about was that his crimes had been kept in house. By leaving a trail of bread crumbs back to WMFO I’d given them exactly what they needed. We are a family, after all. As long as the dirty laundry stays hidden, everything’s okay.

  And the cover-up would include the murders, as well—Vincent Wax’s slaughter of three good people, his attempts to kill Lisa and me. I could barely make myself think about Brodsky. How we’d started together, the respect that had developed between us, the growing friendship I was looking forward to enjoying in the future. I wondered when that particular lump in my throat would finally go away.

  Bottom line, none of this would ever make the papers or TV. The public would never have a clue, but each of them—the sheriff, Jabalah Abahd, and Pastor Johnson—had been avenged, and that’s all that really mattered.

  The rule of law is a majestic concept, but it’s most majestic when you don’t look too hard at it. Sometimes the law doesn’t work at all, and when it doesn’t—when it can’t even be allowed to try—someone has to step up. This time that someone turned out to be me, but I knew better than to feel like a hero. Heroes are supposed to be selfless. In a perfect world of altruistic justice, my motives would have been perfectly clean, but perfect worlds are hard to find.

  To make what I’d done altruistic, I shouldn’t have gotten anything back, but I did. And I don’t mean such nebulous things as a better society or a more peaceful world. I mean pretty damned earthbound things like Lisa and I keeping our jobs. Like eliminating—at least for now—the dreaded polygraph the ADIC sooner or later would have forced on me. With Finnerty dead I was safe from bureau lie detection long enough for Dr. Chen to turn me into the android I’d have to become to get into the counterterrorism program where I belonged.

  I thought for a moment about the French government’s belief that Finnerty and Wax were not the only two involved, that there were other FBI agents providing the information the ADIC had been using. Angry people who might very well want to come after Lisa and me to avenge his death, or continue their master’s work with a new set of secret files.

  It could be true—most likely it was true—but I knew better than to worry about it. Finnerty had been the ideologue, the Hoover disciple. With him gone, his gang would disappear back into their holes. As for Vincent Wax, he was nothing but muscle, and nobody ever cared about hired help. As a matter of fact, Finnerty’s cabal would be damn happy Wax was no longer around to cause them trouble.

  As Finnerty had known she would, Brenda Thompson had been okayed by the Judiciary Committee on Friday morning, then confirmed by the entire Senate after lunch. Madam Justice Thompson’s swearing-in ceremony the following Wednesday had drawn hundreds of well-wishers to the Supreme Court building, including our director and the president of the United States.

  I was happy for her.

  Justice Thompson wasn’t the first member of the high court with a history, and she wouldn’t be the last. She would take her place alongside her just-as-imperfect brethren, to continue a long line of magnificent jurists with their own human frailties. As a man with one or two smudges on his own escutcheon, I was happy the nation’s highest court wasn’t filled with angels.

  I stared past the TV and out the window.

  Nearly six o’clock and the evening sky was already dark, just as clear as it had been every night since I’d killed Finnerty. The moon was bright enough to cast shadows on the snow. Carl Sandburg wrote about the grass that covers the battlefields of Austerlitz and Waterloo, the turf that hides the bleeding wounds of war. From the dome I couldn’t see our hometown battlefield, across the meadows under Marye’s Heights, but under the snow there was grass on that horrific ground as well. The snow made it look even more benign than Sandburg’s grass, and I was counting on the snow to do the same thing for me that it had done for those mangled soldiers.

  I looked at my watch. Kickoff in three minutes. It was time to turn off my mind long enough to enjoy the game, to fully enjoy the money I had riding on the outcome.

  I rose from the couch and went to the kitchen, grabbed a couple of Sam Adamses, a bag of Ruffles, and a tub of chemically enhanced cheese dip, took them back to the coffee table in front of the couch. I sat again and stared at the food and drink, then admitted there was one more thing I had to get out of the way before the game.

  Annie Fisher.

  I hadn’t seen or heard from her since the day I left her drying out in my bed. She’d always accused me of being a pathological caregiver, and—at least in her case—it was hard to deny. We’d parted badly and I couldn’t stand to leave it that way.

  She answered after the first ring.

  “Annie,” I said.

  “Puller.”

  I waited for more, but there wasn’t any.

  “I feel bad, Annie … about the way it ended.”

  “Why does it have to end?”

  “Don’t you think we’re past that point?”

  “So why are you calling?”

  “To reassure you, I guess. That I’m always here, that I’ll always be here for you. That I’m a friend you can count on, no matter what.”

  She laughed, but there wasn’t any humor in it.

  “Tell you what, Puller. I’m up to my ass in friends right now, but should there be an opening, you’ll be the first one I call.”

  Then the sound of her slamming the phone in my ear.

  I hung up, looked out the window. I had to be crazy. Even to me, my words had sounded both lame and terrible at the same time. I’d have said the same thing in her place.

  I grabbed my beer and took a long swallow. Balls. My mojo was leaking fast. I couldn’t love Annie, I couldn’t stop loving Lisa. What the hell’s the matter with you? I asked myself. You’ve got everything you need. Super Bowl … beer … chips and dip. If you had a baseball cap to turn backward you’d have it all.

  On the screen, the Dallas kicker was teeing up the ball to start the game. I reached for a chip, dipped it, then dropped it back into the dip when my telephone rang. I scowled at it. Obviously Annie wasn’t finished with me. The sarcasm hadn’t done it for
her. Luckily, I’d turned down the volume on the answering machine to keep from being disturbed during the game. She could vent into the machine but I didn’t have to listen.

  The Dallas kicker gathered himself and the crowd turned silent.

  “Come on, Denver,” I said out loud to the waiting Broncos. “I need this game … gotta have this game. Don’t make me beg.”

  The kicker lofted the ball into the San Diego sky. It came down at the goal line, to Jamal Edwards, the Broncos’ fastest man, the man who was going to help turn my five grand into ten. Ten thousand dollars for my Visa card debt to Pinewood Manor. Ten K to keep the pastor away a while longer.

  Edwards tucked the ball, started to his left, then cut back up the center. My heart stopped for an instant as he broke past the wedge and into the clear before being dragged down by the kicker himself. Christ, I thought. Christ. A good omen. A great omen.

  The network went to commercial, to a whole string of the brand-new commercials that often turned out better than the game itself. I took the opportunity to listen to Annie’s message on my machine. I leaned to my left and punched the play button, then stiffened as I heard the caller’s voice. I stared at the machine as my last partner came straight to the point.

  “We have to talk,” Lisa said. “Not about Finnerty—you were right about what we had to do—but about us.” She paused. “I’m here, Puller, is what I’m trying to say. Call me when you get the chance.”

  She hung up and I continued to stare at the machine. On the TV screen, the game was back. I turned to it.

  Bronco quarterback Phil Danders took the first snap of the game, dropped back two steps, and fired a pass over the middle, good for a dozen yards and a first down. I watched it like a man watching a dream, seeing it, knowing how good it was for the bet I’d made, but somehow at the same time detached. The second play was a screen pass, good for another twenty.

  I rose to my feet and pointed the clicker at the TV, turned it off. I reached for the telephone but pulled my hand back. I only needed one thing, and it sure as hell wasn’t a phone conversation.