Bingo! In a flash, one giant piece of the puzzle fell into place for Jonathan. As the realization dawned, a smile bloomed. He wagged a forefinger at Irene as the reality clarified. “You guys didn’t hire us to protect the world from financial calamity. Well, maybe that was part of it, but you hired us because you don’t know if you can trust your own people.”
“I already stipulated to that,” Irene said, but she looked away as she did.
“No, you didn’t,” Jonathan pressed. “You said you couldn’t trust your people to keep it quiet — the financial Armageddon argument. In reality, you think that maybe your people are running this thing.”
A longer silence this time as the director measured her words. “It’s not just my people,” she confessed at last. “Ramsey Miller can’t write off the possibility that his people might have a hand in it, too.”
“But why?”
Irene shook her head. “I have no idea. That’s the part that makes no sense to me. And because it makes no sense, I don’t give that possibility any more weight than, say, a thirty percent possibility.”
“Thirty percent is a lot,” Boxers said.
Jonathan finished the thought: “Certainly too high to take a chance.”
Irene held up her hands as if to stop someone approaching her. “Tell you what, guys. Let me pursue that possibility on my own, okay? There are plenty enough people in the universe with motivation to do harm to Yelena Poltanov — excuse me, Anna Darmond. Why don’t you focus on those? If nothing else, those are the kinds of leads that my shop can’t follow without asking a lot of questions.”
“And you’ll start sharing for real?” Jonathan pressed.
Another hesitation. “Let’s do this,” Irene said. “I’ll tell you if this turns out to be a problem within the federal law enforcement community, and I promise I’ll tell you early. However, I will not gratuitously share dirty laundry with you.”
Jonathan weighed the deal. Irene had dedicated well over half her life to the Bureau, and if it turned out that her tree was full of bad apples, she had every right to manage the problem from within.
Finally, Jonathan offered a handshake. “Deal,” he said.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It was nearly one in the morning when Becky pulled her Volkswagen Jetta back into her parking space at Eastern Towers. They’d hit four ATMs in Annapolis for a total of $1,200. If people were indeed tracking him, there could be no clearer beacon than a cash withdrawal, and this one would lead his enemies in exactly the wrong direction. He worried, of course, that his pursuers might read the ruse for what it was and therefore concentrate their search for him in Virginia, but he recognized that that kind of double-reverse logic could drive a person insane.
There’d been no tolls to pay along the way, and Becky had made a point to call her mother while she drove, staging a casual conversation that would give her plausible deniability if she needed it one day. They’d no doubt passed through some traffic cameras, but David figured that if the police didn’t know who they were looking for, the hazards posed by cameras were minimal.
“What are you going to do now?” Becky asked as she pulled the parking brake.
He looked at her, and for the first time, he began to realize just how hopeless a situation he’d created for himself. “I haven’t a clue,” he said. “I don’t even know for sure that I’m not being ridiculously paranoid. I’m afraid to do anything, but I feel stupid doing nothing.”
Becky slid the key from the ignition, triggering the interior light. She gave him a hard look. “You look like you’re a mess,” she said. “Well, you are a mess on the outside, but you look like you’re a mess inside, too. You’re welcome to stay with me, if you’d like.”
He wasn’t sure why, but the offer stunned him. “Really?”
“Sure. I just went to the store, so there’s plenty of food in the apartment. I don’t have much in the way of guest accessories, but what I’ve got is yours. For the time being, anyway. For tonight.”
Without all the makeup, she really did look three years younger and ten degrees hotter. Her offer tugged at him, causing him to feel guilty about all the months of shittiness he’d thrown her way.
“Sure,” he said. “Thank you. The minute there’s any danger, I swear—”
“Okay, I’ll be really honest with you,” she interrupted. “I really do think that you’re making a lot out of nothing. Or maybe I just hope you are. But I don’t worry too much about the danger.”
The dome light turned itself out, and it was time to climb out of the car. As they walked to the exterior door of the complex, David unconsciously kept his hand over the pocket where he’d stuffed the cash. He thought he saw Becky notice, and he thought she rolled her eyes, but in the darkness, he couldn’t tell for sure.
As they rode up together in the elevator, David wondered what it would be like to have to live in this kind of squalor. David knew that he hadn’t earned his wealth — unless you could compensate someone for the trauma of living with the poster child of a right-wing-nut-job father — but he was confident that one day he would make good on the debt, if only by virtue of his intellect.
For the people who lived here, though — for the people who actually depended on the next paycheck for their very existence — this might be the pinnacle for them, the moment for which they’d waited all their lives. He didn’t understand how you could wake up every morning if every morning guaranteed a shit-smelling elevator ride.
The elevator dinged on the eleventh floor, and Becky led the way into the institutionalized dreariness. The hallway was a cavern of doors, and although more lights were functional than non-, the overall effect was a yellow pall that portended bad things.
“Are you all right?” Becky asked. “You look… funny.”
He forced a smile. “It’s been a long night.”
Becky’s apartment was the third from the end of the hallway, on the right. He noted that she had her key out well in advance of her arrival at the door, and David concluded from that that she was perpetually ready to fend off a hallway attacker with a Schlage in the eye.
She slipped the key into the lock, and a few seconds later, they were swallowed by the land of yellow. When the door was closed, she turned two dead bolts, and then used her key to turn a third. She left the key ring dangling from the slot.
“Want that iced tea?” Becky asked.
“Sure.”
“Take off your coat and have a seat,” Becky instructed, pointing toward the living room that was separated by an imaginary line from the dining room, which in turn was separated from the kitchen by a half wall.
David stripped off his coat, then realized he didn’t know what to do with it.
“That’s the closet there,” Becky said, pointing with her forehead.
David opened it to reveal a level of order and neatness that was foreign to him. The closet couldn’t have been more than thirty inches wide, yet it held four coats to cover the needs of each season, plus a vacuum cleaner, and somehow it didn’t look crammed. She even had spare hangers.
With his coat hung, he walked to the same loveseat he’d occupied before.
Becky joined him in the living room with two glasses of tea. She handed him one and helped herself to her chair.
“So,” Becky said, the word constituting a complete sentence. “What’s your next move?”
“I don’t know,” David confessed. “For now, I’m trying to stay focused on staving off the panic. And please don’t tell me again that you think I’m making this up.”
“I didn’t mean that as an insult. I just like to lean on the positive side of things until there’s no other choice.”
“So I should look at this mess as if my glass is one-eighth full, not seven-eighths empty?” He sold the comment with a smile and took a sip of tea. It was better than he’d expected.