She waited until he’d fallen asleep. Then she scrawled a note, telling him where she’d gone, in case he got up before she was back.
75
She parked in the underground parking garage across the street from the courthouse. Finding a space there was no problem at this time of night.
The courthouse was closed, but her ID allowed her to enter after hours. She greeted the security guard, Rodrigo, by name.
“Very late for you, Judge,” Rodrigo said.
“No rest for the wicked,” she said.
“No, ma’am.”
She took the elevator to the ninth floor. It was dark, and her footsteps echoed.
A security guard walked by. She tensed. Not someone she knew. She kept going down the hall to her lobby. She unlocked the door and switched on the light.
She remembered Hersh’s words, when he first came to her office: I could pick that lock inside of a minute and a half.
Might he have left his file for her here, in her office?
Maybe, maybe not. He’d said he might bring it by. But at the same time, he was less than impressed by the security in the courthouse. Her office was easy to get into, too easy.
She looked around, looked at her desk, the side table heaped with paper, all the usual places. But nothing that looked like it could be Hersh’s file.
As she scanned the room, she was hyperaware of the noises around her, of passing footsteps, someone coughing as he or she walked by. Her nerves were taut.
Then a thought occurred to her. You a big Trollope fan?
He’d been showing off when he picked her book safe right off the shelf. But neither one of them had said anything aloud about it being a hiding place. So perhaps...
She looked at the bookcase where Barchester Towers was shelved.
It was gone.
What the hell? She winced as she thought of her favorite pearl earrings and the pile of cash, almost five hundred dollars. Well, she had bigger things to worry about.
Then she found the book safe on the shelf below. Someone had moved it.
Maybe a signal?
She pulled the book off the shelf and opened it. Inside the compartment, in addition to the cash and the earrings, were a couple of folded pages and a small USB stick.
Hersh’s file.
Juliana unfolded the papers and realized quickly she was looking at a bank transaction. Multiple transactions. Wire transfers. Between the Russian Commercial Bank of Cyprus, a subsidiary of the VTB bank of Russia, and Mayfair Paragon.
Proof that Yuri Protasov was a Kremlin puppet.
She wondered where Hersh could possibly have found it. She slotted the USB drive into her laptop. That opened a PDF document containing the same information. She downloaded it and e-mailed it to herself.
She wondered how many statutes Hersh had broken in order to secure this damaging information. How many laws he’d broken. All her life, she’d been a rule-follower, she realized. She loved the certainty, the absoluteness of abiding by a set of rules. But the rules were no longer helping. If she was going to survive, and protect her family, she’d have to make up her own rules.
She refolded the pages and put them, along with the USB stick, in her purse. Then she turned off the lights and locked the door, but before she did, she glanced into the hallway to make sure no one was coming.
She left the courthouse the same way, said goodnight to Rodrigo, and walked out into the plaza, into the adjoining Center Plaza building, to the elevator bank. And down into the parking garage. Everything was quiet. The elevator stopped on the floor below and someone got in, a man wearing a hoodie and orange sunglasses and Beats headphones, his head bopping. He pressed his floor button; then he pulled back his hoodie, and she saw the shaved head and the jutting jaw, and her stomach did a flip. The ropy muscles, the powerful build.
The fake janitor. Greaves.
He inserted a small key in the elevator panel, and the elevator shuddered to a stop between floors.
“The good news for you,” he said, “is that this is the last you’ll be seeing of me.”
She froze in place. There was nowhere to run. Her pulse raced. “What do you want?”
“Seems you weren’t a good candidate for blackmail,” Greaves said. “You got pushed, and you just started digging. Trying to get the goods on us, and maybe getting a little close. So that changes the whole calculation, see. You’re clearly not someone who can be intimidated into silence. Not someone who can be humiliated onto the sidelines.”
“I’m glad you figured that out.”
“Which means there’s no point making threats any longer.”
“Then what do you call this?”
“Oh, I’m not here to threaten you. I’m here to terminate you.” He said it matter-of-factly, as if he were ordering a pizza. In that moment she noticed he was wearing blue nitrile gloves, like a surgeon’s.
He lunged at her, shoved her hard into the elevator wall. Her head bounced against the cladding. He was on her now, his big arms around her, his hands clutching her throat, squeezing hard.
She tried to struggle, to kick and swing her arms, but she could barely move them; he was too close, and he was so much bigger. She could smell his meaty breath.
He made unwavering eye contact with her. She could see every capillary in his eyes. What was that thing they say, that if a mammal makes prolonged eye contact with another, it’s an assertion of dominance — to be followed by fighting or screwing?
Greaves was going to kill her.
But he was not doing it quickly. If he wanted to, he could surely dispatch her easily and quickly, snapping her neck in an instant. Instead, he seemed to be protracting the process. This was not just a professional task to him. He was enjoying it.
His hands squeezed her throat, and she gagged.
She tried to say “Please,” but it came out blez.
Finally she wrested a hand loose from his grip. She felt around for her purse, found it on her left side, over her shoulder, just out of reach. She was seeing stars. She could smell the man’s aftershave, the gloves, a rancid odor of sweat.
Her fingers scrabbled inside the purse, felt stuff, objects her fingers didn’t recognize. Her head was swimming.
Greaves began to talk, in a calm voice. “Somebody with a grudge followed you out of the courthouse,” he said. “An aggrieved felon you once sentenced, perhaps.”
She screamed soundlessly.
“A criminal you put away when you were an assistant US Attorney, let’s say. There will be theories. I see a big front-page story in The Boston Globe. A story about how vulnerable judges are. The governor will say it’s shocking.”
He squeezed harder now, and her head felt like it was exploding. Her body had gone into panic mode. Her lungs were burning: it felt like they were on fire, like her chest would explode.
“Lots — of people — will show up — at your funeral.” He throttled her harder, and her eyes felt like they were going to pop out.
It can’t end this way. Her thoughts were like a rusted hinge, shrieking again and again, Can’t end this way can’t end this way.
Can’t end this way.
The strength was seeping out of her body, ebbing away, like rice paper dissolving in water.
Then she touched the cold metal of the knife, felt around for the button she’d pressed once before and thumbed it open. The blade jumped in her hand.
She remembered Hersh’s instructions: Upward toward the heart. It’s a steeply upward arc through the belly into the pericardial sac.