“And, get this, the mayor winged him.”
“What?”
“Yep, Kennedy. Got off a few shots. That saved some lives.”
She relayed this news to the deputy director.
“You okay?” she asked Cage.
“Fine,” Cage responded. “Cracked a rib while I was covering my ass is all.”
But her gut tightened. She heard something else in his voice, a tone, a hollowness.
Jackie, it’s Tom’s mother . . . Jackie, I have to tell you something. The airline just called . . . Oh, Jackie . . .
“But?” she asked quickly. “What happened? Is it Kincaid?”
“No, he’s okay,” the agent said softly.
“Tell me.”
“He got C. P., Margaret. I’m sorry. He’s dead.”
She closed her eyes. Sighed. The fury steamed through her again, fury that she herself hadn’t had a chance to park a bullet in the Digger’s heart.
Cage continued. “Not even a firefight. The Digger shot toward where the mayor was sitting. C. P. just happened to be in the wrong place.”
And it was the place that
I’d
sent him to, she thought bitterly. Christ.
She’d known the agent for three years . . . Oh, no . . .
Cage was adding, “The Digger capped four other friendlies and we’ve got three injured. Looks like six civies wounded. Still a half-dozen reported missing but no bodies. They probably just scattered and their families haven’t found them yet. Oh, and that Czisman?”
“Who, the writer?”
“Yeah. Digger got him.”
“What?”
“He wasn’t a writer at all. I mean, he was but that’s not what he was doing here. The Digger’d killed his wife and he was using us to get him. The Digger took him out first though.”
So, it’s been amateur night, she thought. Kincaid, the mayor. Czisman.
“What about Hardy?”
Cage told her that the young detective had made a one-man assault on the bus the Digger’d holed up in. “He got pretty close and had good firing position. Might’ve been his shots that hit the Digger. Nobody could tell what was going on.”
“So he didn’t shoot himself in the foot?” Lukas asked.
Cage said, “I’ll tell you, it looked like he was hell-bent on killing himself but when it came right down to it he backed off and went for cover. Guess he decided to stick around for a few years.”
Just like me, Lukas the changeling thought.
“Is Evans there?” Cage asked.
Lukas looked around. Surprised that the doctor wasn’t here. Funny . . . She’d thought he was coming down to the lobby to meet her. “I’m not sure where he is,” she
answered. “Must be upstairs still. In the document lab. Or maybe the Crisis Center.”
“Find him and give him the good news. Tell him thanks. And tell him to submit a big bill.”
“Will do. And I’ll call Tobe too.”
“Parker and I’re gonna do crime scene with PERT then head back over there in forty-five minutes or so.”
When she hung up the dep director said, “I’m going down to the Mall. Who’s in charge?”
She nearly said, Parker Kincaid. But caught herself. “Special Agent Cage. He’s near the Vietnam Memorial with PERT.”
“There’ll have to be a press conference. I’ll give the director a heads-up. He may want to make a statement too . . . Say, you miss a party tonight, Lukas?”
“That’s the thing about holidays, sir. There’ll always be one next year.” She laughed. “Maybe we ought to make up T-shirts with that saying on them.”
He smiled stiffly. Then asked, “How’s our whistle-blower doing? Any more threats?”
“Moss? I haven’t checked on him lately,” she said. “But I definitely have to.”
“You think there’s a problem?” The dep director frowned.
“Oh, no. But he owes me a beer.”
* * *
In the deserted document lab Dr. John Evans folded up his cell phone. He clicked the TV set off.
So they’d killed the Digger.
The news reports were sporadic but as best Evans could tell there’d been minimal fatalities—not like the Metro shooting and not like the yacht. Still, from the TV images,
Constitution Avenue looked like a war zone. Smoke, a hundred emergency vehicles, people hiding behind cars, trees, bushes.
Evans pulled on his bulky parka and walked to the corner of the lab. He slipped the heavy thermos into his knapsack, slung it over his shoulder then pushed through the double doors and started down the dim corridor.
The Digger . . . What a fascinating creature. One of the few people in the world who really was, as he’d told the agents, profile-proof.
At the elevator he paused, looked at the building directory, trying to orient himself. There was a map. He studied it. FBI headquarters was much more complicated than he’d imagined.
His finger hovered over the down button but before he could push it a voice called, “Hi.” He turned. Saw somebody walking toward him from the second bank of elevators.
“Hi, there, Doctor,” the voice called again. “You heard?”
It was that young detective. Len Hardy. His overcoat was no longer perfectly pressed. It was stained and sooty. There was a cut on his cheek.
Evans pushed the down button. Twice. Impatient. “Just saw it on the news,” he told Hardy. He shrugged the backpack off his shoulder. The doctor grunted as he caught the bag in the crook of his arm and began to unzip it.
Hardy glanced absently at the stained backpack. He said, “Man, I’ll tell you, I spoke a little too fast there, volunteering to go after that guy. I went a little crazy. Some kind of battlefield hysteria.”
“Uh-huh,” Evans said. He reached inside the backpack and took out the thermos.
Hardy continued, chatting away. “He nearly nailed me. Shook me up some. I was maybe thirty feet from him. Saw his eyes, saw the muzzle of his gun. Man . . . I was suddenly real happy to be alive.”
“That happens,” Evans said. Where the hell was the elevator?
Hardy glanced at the silver metal cylinder. “Say, you know where Agent Lukas is?” the detective asked, looking up the dark corridor.
“I think she’s downstairs,” Evans said, unscrewing the lid to the thermos. “She had to brief somebody. The lobby on Ninth. Didn’t you just come that way?”
“I came in through the garage.”
The doctor pulled the top off the thermos. “You know, Detective, the way you told everybody about the Diggers and Levelers? You made it sound like you didn’t trust me.” He turned toward Hardy.
Evans looked down. He saw the black, silenced pistol Hardy was pointing at his face.
“Trust didn’t have anything to do with it,” Hardy said.
Evans dropped the thermos. Coffee splashed onto the floor. He saw the flash of yellow light from the muzzle of the gun. And that was all he saw.
That handwriting was the worstest thing against me.
–B
RUNO
H
AUPTMANN, REFERRING TO THE EVIDENCE IN HIS TRIAL FOR THE
L
INDBERGH BABY
K
IDNAPPING
The agent was young
enough to still be thrilled at the idea of being an FBI employee. So he didn’t mind one bit that he’d been assigned the midnight-to-8 shift New Year’s Eve in the Bureau’s Security Center on the third floor of headquarters.
There was also the fact that Louise, the agent he was working with, wore a tight blue blouse and short black skirt and was flirting with him.
Definitely flirting, he decided.
Well, okay, she was talking about her cat. But the body language told him it was flirting. And her bra was black and visible through the blouse. Which was a message too.
The agent continued to gaze at the ten TV monitors that were his responsibility. Louise, on his left, had another ten. They were linked to more than sixty security cameras located in and around headquarters. The scenes on the monitors changed every five seconds as the cameras sequenced.
Louise of the black bra was nodding absently as he talked about his parents’ place on the Chesapeake Bay. The intercom brayed.
It couldn’t have been Sam or Ralph—the two agents he and Louise had replaced a half hour ago; they had total-clearance entry cards and would’ve just walked inside.
The agent hit the intercom button. “Yes?”
“It’s Detective Hardy. District P.D.”
“Who’s Hardy?” the agent asked Louise.
She shrugged and went back to her monitors.
“Yes?”
The voice crackled, “I’m working with Margaret Lukas.”
“Oh, on the Metro shooter case?”
“Right.”
The legendary Margaret Lukas. The security agent hadn’t been with the Bureau very long but even he knew that Lukas would someday be the first woman director of the FBI. The tech pushed the enter button, spun around to face the door.
“Can I help you?”
“I’m afraid I’m lost,” Hardy said.
“Happens around here.” He smiled. “Where you headed?”
“I’m trying to find the document lab. I got lost on the way to get some coffee.”
“Documents? That’s the seventh floor. Turn left. Can’t miss it.”
“Thanks.”
“What’s this?” Louise said suddenly. “Hey, what
is
this?”
The agent glanced at her as she hit a button to stop
the video camera scan and pointed to one of the monitors. It showed a man lying on his back not far from where they were now, on this floor. The monitors were black and white but a large pool of what was obviously blood ran from his head.
“Oh, Christ,” she muttered and reached for the phone. “It looks like Ralph.”
From behind them came a soft thunk. Louise gave a sudden jerk and grunted as the front of her blouse disappeared in a mist of blood.
“Oh,” she gasped. “What—?”
Another pop. The bullet struck the back of her head and she pitched forward.
The young agent turned toward the doorway, lifting his hands, crying, “No, no.”
In a calm voice Hardy said, “Relax.”
“Please!”
“Relax,” he repeated. “I just have a few questions.”
“Don’t kill me. Please—”
“Now,” Hardy asked matter-of-factly, “your computers’re running Secure-Chek software?”
“I—”
“I’ll let you live if you tell me everything I ask.”
“Yes.” He started crying. “Secure-Chek.”
“What version?”
“Six oh.”
“And if you don’t log in at regular intervals a Code Forty-two goes out over the Inter-Gov System?”
“That’s right . . . Oh, look, mister.” He glanced at the body of the woman beside him, which twitched twice. Blood flowed into the control panel. “Oh, God . . .”
Speaking slowly, Hardy asked, “You started your shift at midnight?”
“Please, I . . .”
“Midnight?” he repeated, a schoolteacher coaching a child.
The agent nodded.
“What was your first log-in time?”
He was crying hard now. “Twelve twenty-one.”
“When’s the next time you have to log in?”
“One-oh-seven.”
Hardy glanced at the clock on the wall. He nodded.
Panic in his voice, the young agent continued. “On holidays we use a pattern of increasing intervals, so after the second log-in we—”
“That’s all right,” Hardy reassured the agent then shot him twice in the head and pushed the button to release the door.
* * *
The man who was not Detective Len Hardy, a fictional name, but was in reality Edward Fielding made his way to the elevator.
He had until 1:07 before the automated alarm would go off.
Plenty of time.
The building was virtually deserted but still he walked the way he knew he should walk. With an aura not of urgency but of preoccupation. So if he were to run into one of the few remaining agents here they’d merely glance at his pass and, judging Fielding’s demeanor, decide to let him continue on to wherever he was headed on his important business.
He inhaled deeply, took in the smells of the laboratory, the offices, the morgue. Feeling a wrenching thrill to be here—in the center of the law enforcement uni
verse. The corridors of FBI headquarters. He remembered, a year ago, the Digger muttering insistently about going to an art museum in Hartford. Fielding had agreed and the crazed man had stood for an hour in front of a Doré illustration from the
Divine Comedy
: Dante and Virgil about to descend into hell. This is just what Fielding felt now—as if he were on a tour of the underworld.
As he walked through the hallways he spoke silently to his teammates. No, Agent Lukas and Parker Kincaid and Dr. John Evans . . . No, my motive isn’t revenge for faded politics or terrorism. It’s not exposing social injustice. Nor is it greed. Twenty million? Christ, I could’ve asked for ten times that.
No, my motive is simply perfection.
The idea of the perfect crime was a cliché, true. But Fielding had learned something interesting when he’d been studying linguistics, looking for just the right words and phrases to use in the extortion note. In an article in the
American Journal of Linguistics
a philologist—a language expert—had written that although serious writers are told to avoid them, clichés have value because they describe fundamental truths in universally comprehensible terms.
The perfect crime.
Fielding’s holy chalice.
Perfection . . . It was intoxicating to him. Perfection was everything—the way he ironed his shirts and polished his shoes and trimmed his ear hairs, the way he set up his crimes, the way they were executed.
If Fielding had had an aptitude for the law he’d have been a lawyer and devoted his life to creating the perfect defenses for impossibly guilty clients. If he’d had a lust
for the outdoors he’d have taught himself everything there was to learn about mountain climbing and made the perfect solo ascent to the summit of Everest.
But those activities didn’t excite him.
Crime did.
This was just a fluke, he supposed, to be born utterly amoral. The way some men are bald and some cats have six toes. It was purely nature, he’d decided, not nurture. His parents were loving and dependable; dullness was their only sin. Fielding’s father had been an insurance executive in Hartford, his mother a homemaker. He experienced no deprivation, no abuse. From an early age, though, he simply believed that the law didn’t apply to him. It made no sense. Why, he spent hours wondering, should man put restraints on himself? Why shouldn’t we go wherever our desires and minds take us?