He held it out to her. She hesitated momentarily.
Who the hell got mail these days?
The thought was enough to pique her interest.
She levered herself out of her chair and reached for it. “I’ll take it.”
She did just that, waving the junior agent away, and glanced around her cubicle. Her immediate neighbors weren’t at their desks. She knew they were locked in the main meeting room, trawling through Reilly’s case files, looking for anyone he might go to for help. Satisfied she had a moment of privacy, she sat back down and examined the envelope.
As the junior agent had said, it bore no return address. It had Canadian stamps with an illegible postmark. Reilly’s full name and the field office address were written in neat but overly small block capitals with an old-fashioned ink pen.
She carefully tore it open. Inside was a single brown folder, in which were two sheets of drawing paper from a pretty decent artist’s sketchpad. On each sheet, portrait layout, someone had drawn the face of a male adult. Under the first face, written in the same block capitals, were the letters “FF”
At first, the letters under the second face, “RC,” didn’t mean anything to her either. Then it suddenly hit her, and she couldn’t help but gasp, though luckily there was no one around to hear her.
They were initials.
RC was Reed Corrigan.
The one guy who knew what the hell was going on. And why.
There was also a small note with them, written by the same hand, with the same pen. It said:
Hope these help. With eternal thanks, L+D
She put the note aside and laid out the drawings side by side and stared at them for a few seconds, then she pulled out her personal cell phone and took full resolution, sixteen megapixel shots of each portrait and of the note. She then pulled out a large blank envelope from her desk, put the three documents back in their folder and the folder in the envelope. Then she folded the original envelope in half, hiding Reilly’s name, and stuffed it at the bottom of a drawer in her desk.
Although it went against everything she’d said to Tess, everything she’d been tasked with by Gallo-along with every single shred of self-preservation and common sense-she’d already decided to find a way to get the drawings to Sean. He wasn’t around to see that she was finally thinking of him as Sean, now that she’d gone over to his side. The change felt irreversible.
Someone had to help him. With Aparo dead and Tess willing but at risk, she was all he had left-but she couldn’t tell anyone about it. She was fully aware that she’d be risking her career, not to mention potential prison time, if she contacted him without telling her superiors and passed on the drawings instead of handing them in. And even though it went against everything she believed in-the FBI, for her, staunchly stood for Fidelity, Bravery and Integrity, as it did for pretty much every agent she’d come across apart from Lendowski-and everything she fought for, she felt she had to do it. She sensed that his life, his career, even his family’s future, could all hinge on it.
She couldn’t hand the envelope over to Gallo. He’d either dismiss its contents, or he’d share it with Henriksson, who in turn would quickly ensure that the drawings ceased to exist.
There was one small problem. She had no way of contacting Reilly. Tess, however, could. She was sure of it. She’d need to involve her, at least to get through to him, however queasy that made her in terms of Tess’s wellbeing as well as that of the kids. But she had no choice. There was simply no other way she could think of to get the drawings to him, and she was convinced they would prove to be more than useful.
She grabbed her keys and, without bothering to inform anyone, hurried out.
47
Chelsea, New York City
It wasn’t just the image of Orford and his possessed, terrified look that was haunting me.
It was his words.
That’s why you’re here, right? To set us free. Ralph, Marcus, me, Reilly…
Us.
That damn word.
Two small letters that were driving me nuts.
And yet, and yet… yes, the guy was under the influence of some monster drug. The killer in the baseball cap had talked about the “great warriors of consciousness,” compared it to them pushing the envelope on mind trips. Who knew what was going through Orford’s brain at the time he said these things. But still-what if the drug had actually taken away his inhibitions. What if it was an “in vino veritas” moment-the notion that being loosened up with alcohol frees us to say what we really mean?
What if my dad was part of them?
What if he’d killed himself out of guilt and remorse, or they’d bumped him off because he was about to blow the whistle on their activities?
And what the hell were they?
It was around five in the afternoon and we were sitting around the big island in Gigi’s kitchen.
Orford’s laptop was on the counter, taunting me. I’d told Kurt and Gigi I needed them to crack it open. It could tell us exactly what Orford had done to Alex, which could help fine tune his recovery and make sure he gets the right therapy. They’d said it would take a bit of time for them to get past its password. Regardless, it wasn’t the priority. We had something more pressing to figure out.
“We’ve got three names,” I said to Kurt and Gigi as I finished telling them what had happened. “Ralph Orford, psychiatrist, killed off using some kind of psychoactive drug. Someone called ‘Ralph,’ who also died in some way that was a ‘fitting tribute to his work.’”
“Poetic,” Kurt said.
I shrugged. “We’ve got another guy, ‘Marcus,’ who was also recently bumped off. And they seem to be part of something called ‘the Janitors,’ and they’re being wiped out to ‘clean house.’”
Kurt flinched. “What did you say? ‘Janitors?’”
He hunched over his laptop and started punching away at the keys like he was living in fast forward, then he turned the screen to face me. “Janitors. It’s here. In the web history of Rossetti’s editor.”
I leaned in for a closer look.
“See, here,” he pointed out. “He searched for ‘janitors government secret,’ ‘CIA janitors,’ ‘janitors murder.’” Followed some links from them. I had a quick look at them. They all led nowhere. Just random sites that had the words scattered in them, but not directly relevant to the kind of thing we’re talking about.”
I asked, “What about Rossetti’s search history?”
“He worked from home, where he had a Version FiOS connection. They’re harder to crack.”
“We need to look at both their search histories more closely. And we need to ID these three Janitors,” I said. “Which shouldn’t be too hard. I mean, Marcus isn’t such a widely used name. Male, adult. Died recently. We also know their skill sets. They do accidents-Rossetti’s fire, the Portuguese reporter’s climbing accident. They do heart attacks-Rossetti’s editor, Nick. And they do mind games. My son Alex, Orford-”
“And maybe your dad,” Gigi added.
“Maybe,” I said.
Gigi had been studying the framed photo I’d snatched off Orford’s desk. She set it down on the island. “And we’ve got this. Three guys in full mid-life crisis who decided they’d rather play ‘Deer Hunter’ than ‘Deliverance.’”
“So these ‘Janitors,’ they clean things up by killing people?” Kurt asked while Gigi started tapping away at her keyboard. “You think the guy who called you was one of them?”
“I think so,” I said. “Either ‘Ralph’ or ‘Marcus.’ Maybe he was a whistleblower. He contacts Rossetti first. They find out. They kill Rossetti and his editor. For some reason, they weren’t able to figure out who he was. I guess neither Rossetti nor his editor knew who he was, and if they set a trap for him, he saw it and avoided it. He knows how they operate; he’s one of them. He knows what to look out for. So he tries to get his story out again, with me. Only this time, they get to him.”