Which left him with one strategy-but two different variants of it. He played them out in his mind, then settled on the one that seemed more logical.
He couldn’t not tell Roos. There was a chance Roos would get a similar call from someone who was on Erebus. Tomblin didn’t think it would come from within the CIA-Roos had been working on the outside long enough that the new analysts, like the one who had alerted Tomblin, didn’t know him. Furthermore, they were under strict instructions not to inform anyone about it. Still, a lot of ghosts from their past were skulking around Erebus. Tomblin knew that.
He picked up his encrypted cell phone and called Roos.
His old partner was, not unexpectedly, livid. He said he hadn’t yet heard about the drawings, which was probably true, although given how high the stakes had reached and how good Roos was at dissembling, Tomblin couldn’t be sure.
Either way, he brought him up to speed with the analyst’s assessment.
Roos asked, “So… options?”
“I don’t know,” Tomblin said. “There’s a chance no one will sell us out.”
“You want to count on that?”
“Not really. And I don’t want it hanging over me like that, not knowing if and when someone does sell us out.”
“I don’t either. So it’s only a question of time before Reilly knows who at least one of us is.”
“That’s a fair assumption,” Tomblin replied.
Roos didn’t say anything for a moment. Tomblin knew he was letting the thought play itself out, allowing competing scenarios to unfurl in his mind’s eye.
“He’s gonna come after us, Gordo,” Tomblin added, his tone somber and resolved. “Sooner or later, unannounced, and unforgiving. It’s gonna happen. And I think we need to kill off that uncertainty and make it happen.”
“You want to flush him out?”
“Yes,” Tomblin said, already visualizing the endgame that would get rid of his problem once and for all. “On our terms. With a home-court advantage.”
“The blind,” Roos said.
Tomblin wasn’t surprised that his old partner had come to the conclusion he’d expected of him. “Exactly,” he told him. “The blind. I’ll set it up.”
SATURDAY
59
NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, Manhattan
Gordon Roos.
My nemesis was called Gordon Roos.
It didn’t even end up costing me any money. The anonymous informant on the other end of Gigi’s fiber-optic Internet link only seemed too happy to rat him out without bothering with the ten thousand dollars we’d offered. This guy just said he owed Roos some payback without specifying what it concerned, and said that if fingering him caused Roos grief, that was reward enough. He told us where we were likely to find him, then he disappeared. Given the way Erebus was set up, if he didn’t want to us to be able to contact him or trace him, we wouldn’t be able to. He’d popped up, given us his good cheer, and sunk back into the murky bowels of Daland’s creation.
Kurt and Gigi had run a check on his name, of course, to see if it was genuine. They had to dig a bit deeper than they would have with your average Joe, but they tracked him down to a house in Ocracoke, North Carolina through, of all things, a pilot’s license. They didn’t turn up the cabin up in the Blue Mountains that our mystery informant had told us about, but that didn’t surprise me. It probably wasn’t registered in his name. Which made perfect sense-given what they intended to use it for.
I looked around the hospital room at my assembled avengers and I’ve got to say that we didn’t exactly look invincible. There was me, just barely back from the dead, still with a couple of IV lines pumping magic potions into my veins and monitors giving out reassuring little beeps that I was still alive. Kurt, who looked like he’d sprinted into a brick wall, what with the broken nose in splints and the black eyes. Although the splints and the strips across his brow and over his upper lip did have something vaguely superhero-esque about them and he did wield some potent superpowers at his computer, he was far from a lethal weapon out in the field, which is what this was going to turn into to, without a doubt. Gigi, also damaged and still nursing the aftershocks of a concussion and a noticeable bulge on her skull. Deutsch was intact-so far. I was determined to keep it that way.
Deutsch said, “It’s a trap.”
The light outside was fading fast, courtesy of us being just two days away from the winter solstice, and the encroaching darkness was mirroring the somber mood on her face.
“Of course it’s a trap,” I said. “That’s what I was hoping for.”
“You were hoping for a trap?” Kurt asked, his emotive range limited by the gauze socks stuffed up his nostrils.
“They’re watching,” I told him. “They’re watching everything. Even Erebus. Especially Erebus. This was bound to generate a rise in them. It had to. It was always going to be more likely than getting a shout from someone real who knows them.”
Kurt, despite his cloaked face, still managed to convey deep concern. “So… you’re not going to go, obviously?”
I looked at him like he was speaking Urdu.
“You’re going to go?” he asked, incredulous.
“There’s a difference between going in blind and going in prepared,” I told him. “I don’t intend to go in blind.”
“But surely you don’t need to.” He swung his look over at Deutsch. “Why don’t you call it in and get a SWAT team up there and arrest the guy? You’re FBI. You know what’s going on. You know the whole story. You’re a witness to all this. That’s got to count for something, doesn’t it?”
“Calm down, Snake” Gigi said. “She may know the whole story, but it doesn’t mean it counts for squat in terms of evidence. Which, from what I gather, is nonexistent,” she said, turning to Deutsch.
“Correct,” Deutsch said. “All they have right now is Reilly,” she told Kurt, “wanted for murder, with a lot of evidence to support that.”
“Everything else, everything about Roos,” I added, “it’s just a story, a fairy tale-my overactive imagination. Any court-appointed defense attorney with a mail-order law degree would walk all over it in the opening seconds of a preliminary hearing, assuming we ever got that far. Assuming they let any of us live that long.”
“So you’re going to go after him,” Kurt said. “In your current condition. Knowing it’s a trap.”
“Like I said. I don’t plan on going in blind.” I looked over at Deutsch. “And I think we have a couple of surprises we can use to our advantage.”
“You’re nuts,” Kurt protested. He flicked an outraged glance at Deutsch. “He’s nuts, right? And you’re OK with that? You need to do something.” He turned back to me, gesticulating wildly now. “I mean, look at you. You just had a heart attack, for Christ’s sake.”
“‘Sudden cardiac arrest,’” I corrected him with a half-smile. I straightened up. “Look. I didn’t start this. Hell, I didn’t even know I had a son until they came after him and maybe, in some perverse sense I can actually be grateful for that. But I’m not. He was living happily with his mom and they took that away from him. Then they killed a lot of people, ending with my own partner. So I don’t care if Annie here said she had enough evidence to bring Roos in. We’re past that. Besides, even if we had a halfway decent case, there’s no jail that’s going to hold these people. They’re connected enough to make some kind of deal or get some kind of pressure applied and they’ll be back out there in no time, with us all in their crosshairs. Which I’m not comfortable with. No, there’s only one way this is ending, and that’s with me making sure they get what they deserve and they don’t live to bother any of us or anyone else for that matter, any more.”