The NIOS director realized his muscles were cramping from the pressure on the unit.
Metzger put the phone away and gave a faint nod to the man he’d worked with for several years, ever since Metzger had replaced the prior head of NIOS, who’d disappeared into the vortex of politics. An unsuccessful vanishing.
“Thanks for coming in,” the director said quickly and stiffly, as if he felt he should make some reference to the ruined vacation. The Smoke affected him in many different ways. One of which was to muddle his mind so that, even when he wasn’t angry, he’d forget how to behave like a normal person. When an affliction rules your life, you’re always on guard.
Daddy, are you…are you okay?
I’m smiling, aren’t I?
I guess. It just looks, you know, funny.
The admin director shifted. The chair creaked. Spencer Boston was not a small man. He sipped iced tea from a tall plastic cup, lifted his bushy brows.
Metzger said, “We’ve got a whistleblower.”
“What? Impossible.”
“Confirmed.” Metzger explained what had happened.
“No,” the older man whispered. “What are you doing about it?”
He deflected that incendiary question and added, “I need you to find him. I don’t care what you have to do.”
Careful, he reminded himself. That’s the Smoke talking.
“Who knows?” Boston asked.
“Well, he does.” A reverent glance at the magic phone.
No need to be more specific than that.
The Wizard.
Boston grimaced, troubled too. Formerly with another government intelligence agency, he’d been a very successful runner of assets throughout Central America — his region of choice — in such fulcrum countries as Panama. And his specialty? The fine art of regime change. That was Boston’s milieu, not politics, but he knew that without support from Washington, you and your assets could be hung out to dry at the worst possible moment. Several times he’d been held captive by revolutionaries or insurgents or cartel bosses, he’d been interrogated, he’d probably been tortured, though he never talked about that.
And he’d survived. Different threats in DC; same skills at self-preservation.
Boston’s hand brushed his enviable hair, gray though it was, and waited.
Metzger said, “He—” Wizard emphasis again. “—knows about the investigation but he didn’t say a word about any leaks. I don’t think he knows. We have to find the traitor before word trickles down to the Beltway.”
Sipping the pale tea, Boston squinted more furrows into his face. Damn, the man could give Donald Sutherland a run for his money in the distinguished older power-broker role. Metzger, though considerably younger, had a much more sparse scalp than Boston and was bony and gaunt. He felt he looked weaselly.
“What do you think, Spencer? How could an STO have gotten leaked?”
A look out the window. Boston had no view of the Hudson from his chair, just more late-morning reflected light. “My gut is it was somebody in Florida. The next choice would be Washington.”
“Texas and California?”
Boston said, “I doubt it. They get copies of the STO but unless one of their specialists is activated, they don’t even open them…And, as much as I hate to say it, we can’t dismiss the office here completely.” The twist of his impressive head indicated NIOS headquarters.
Granted. A co-worker in this office might have sold them out, as painful as it was to think about.
Boston continued, “I’ll check with IT security about the servers, copiers and scanners. Polygraph the senior people with download permissions. I’d do a major Facebook autobot search. Well, not just Facebook but blogs and as many other social media sites as I can think of. See if anybody with access to the STO’s been posting anything critical of the government and our mission here.”
Mission. Killing bad guys.
This made sense. Metzger was impressed. “Good. A lot of work.” His eyes strayed to the vista. He saw a window washer on a scaffolding three or four hundred feet up. He thought, as he often did, of the jumpers on 9/11.
The Smoke expanded in his lungs.
Breathe…
Send the Smoke away. But he couldn’t. Because they, the jumpers on that terrible day, hadn’t been able to breathe. Their lungs had been filled with oily smoke rising from the crest of the flames that were going to consume them in seconds, flames roiling into their twelve-by-twelve-foot offices, leaving only one place to go, through windows to the eternal concrete.
His hands began to shake again.
Metzger noted that Boston was regarding him with a close gaze. The NIOS head casually adjusted the photograph of him, Seth and Katie and a snorting horse, taken through a fine set of optics that happened, in that instance, to record a dear memory, but wasn’t dissimilar to a scope that could very efficiently direct a bullet through a man’s heart.
“They have proof of completion, the police?”
“No, I don’t think so. Status is closed, that’s all.”
Kill orders were just that — instructions to eliminate a task. There was never any documentation that an assassination was actually completed. The standard procedure when asked was to deny, deny, deny.
Boston began to ask, “Are we doing anything…?”
“I’ve made calls. Don Bruns knows about the case, of course. A few others. We’re…handling things.”
An ambiguous verb and object. Worthy of the Wizard.
Handling things…
Spencer Boston, of the impressive white mane and more impressive track record as a spy, sipped more tea. The straw eased farther through the plastic lid and gave a faint vibration like a bow on a viola string. “Don’t worry, Shreve. I’ll find him. Or her.”
“Thanks, Spencer. Anytime. Day or night. Call me, what you find out.”
The man rose, buttoned his ill-tailored suit.
When he was gone Metzger heard his magic red phone trill with a text from his surveillance and datamining crowd in the basement.
Identified Nance Laurel as lead prosecutor. IDs of the NYPD investigators to follow soon.
The Smoke diminished considerably at reading this.
At last. A place to start.
CHAPTER 12
Jacob Swann approached his car in the lot of the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia airport.
He set his suitcase into the trunk of his Nissan sedan carefully — his knives were inside. No carry-on with them, of course. He dropped heavily into the front seat and stretched, breathing deeply.
Swann was tired. He had left his Brooklyn apartment for the Bahamas nearly twenty-four hours ago and had had only three or so hours’ sleep in that time — most while in transit.
His session with Annette had gone more quickly than he’d expected. But, after he’d disposed of the body, finding an abandoned trash fire to burn the evidence of his visit last week had taken some time. Then he’d had to take care of some other housekeeping, including a visit to Annette’s apartment and a risky but ultimately successful trip back to the site of Moreno’s shooting itself: the South Cove Inn.
He’d then had to get off the island the same way he had last week: from a dock near Millars Sound, where he knew some of the men who clustered daily to work the ships or smoke Camels or ganja and drink Sands, Kalik or, more likely, Triple B malt. They would also handle various odd jobs. Efficiently and discreetly. They’d hurried him via small boat to one of the innumerable islands near Freeport, then there’d been the helicopter ride to a field south of Miami.