Bishop glanced over and nodded. He was carrying a small gray cabin bag that didn’t seem especially full. It had wheels, but he didn’t use them. Kealey felt the guy was trying hard to be present, but he recognized the mechanical movements, the programmed responses. He hoped Bishop would snap out of it enough to be of some use. He would need help in New York, not extra baggage.
The first-class car wasn’t empty, but it was nearly so. They had the forward section to themselves. There were facing chairs and side-by-side chairs; Kealey selected the former, with a small table between them, close to the door. He didn’t want anyone overhearing what they had to say. That was another advantage trains had over airplanes.
Not that they had anything to say, immediately. Bishop stared out the window as the train moved through the station. Kealey finished his coffee, ate a few bites of a biscotto, and tried to imagine what he was thinking. What does one think when his child dies? In a terrorist attack that he survives.
“You want to talk about it?” Kealey asked.
“Not really.” Realizing that had sounded more dismissive than he’d obviously intended, Bishop looked at him and said, “No thanks.”
“I was there,” Kealey said.
That got Bishop’s attention. “At the convention center?”
Kealey nodded. “I was there for Julie Harper’s dinner.”
Bishop leaned forward. “What do you know?” His eyes were open now, alert.
“Only what you do, I’m guessing,” Kealey said. He leaned into the table. “Reports of an inside job. G-man killed last night near a Trask lab. And… I’m sorry, truly sorry for what you’re going through.”
That caught Bishop off guard. He had gone into professional mode, not thinking of his own loss.
“Thank you,” he said.
“If it’s any consolation, even a small one, I took some of those SOBs out personally,” Kealey told him.
“Not at the dinner,” Bishop said. “I was there.”
“No. We were in the parking garage when it all started. Armed myself from my little trunk arsenal, made our way in through a kind of back door.”
“We?”
“My date, sort of. Allison Dearborn, a Company shrink. Her nephew-”
“Was the one who tweeted,” Bishop said. “I heard about that. Your idea?”
“We all pitched in.”
“Well done,” Bishop said. “That’s why you’re on this job. Couple of directors playing who-can-you-trust.”
“Pretty much. What about you?”
“You mean, how did I get picked?” Bishop asked. He shrugged a shoulder. “Who knows why the higher-ups do what they do. I spent most of my career behind a desk. Then, suddenly, I got a field assignment.” Bishop smiled thinly and looked down. “It does matter, Ryan.”
“Sorry?”
“What you did in Baltimore,” Bishop said. “You got a chance to act. I’ve never felt so goddamn helpless.”
“It’s only temporary,” Kealey assured him. “We’re going to find these guys, and we’re gonna skin them.”
Bishop nodded. “You ever smoke?”
“No. I’m vice free.”
“Really?”
“Sure. Unless we’re including the Ten Commandments.”
That drew a little smile from Bishop. “I promised my daughter I’d quit. Just when I need one most.”
Bishop looked like he was about to lose it, and Kealey sat back to give him space. Bishop rallied when the conductor came by for their tickets, followed by a porter, who asked them if they wanted anything to eat or drink. Kealey hoped he didn’t ask for anything hard. He didn’t. All he wanted was water and a bran muffin. Kealey was guessing that would be the first food he’d had in a lot of hours.
There was usually a lot of get-to-know-you chat on an almost three-hour train ride, but not this time. Kealey didn’t think Bishop was snubbing him when he went back to his tablet and checked e-mails. But it also didn’t help Kealey get to know the man on whom his life could possibly depend. That was important. He didn’t want to be relying on a man-even a thoroughgoing professional-whose thoughts were elsewhere.
“I probably know the answer, but why did you agree to this?” Kealey asked.
“You mean, now?”
Kealey nodded.
“I could ask you the same thing,” Bishop said. His reply wasn’t challenging; it was a simple statement.
“I don’t follow,” Kealey said. “I didn’t lose anyone-”
“If you were still officially a Company man, you would have been given mandatory leave. You killed people in Baltimore. Enemy combatants as far as we know, but there’s been no investigation. The good fortune of you being in the right place at the right time, and armed, has not been questioned.”
Kealey made a face. “I don’t think I like that.”
“You misunderstand,” Bishop said. “Or maybe I’m not making myself clear. I don’t doubt you. But standard operating procedure has gone out the window. It always does in these situations.”
“I’m here because the president asked me to be,” Kealey replied. “I have a habit of saying what’s on my mind, which is one reason I’m not a Company man anymore. Brenneman obviously felt the situation required that kind of outside point of view.”
“And someone who was already primed by action, maybe even a little hair trigger after the day’s events,” Bishop said. “The president wanted a pit bull and not a bloodhound. I’ve seen hundreds of psych profiles over the years to understand how people get into one of the ‘triple o’ situations, where they overreact, overreach, or overcompensate. That’s why ninety percent of my subjects go bad. Not because they are bad, but because they shouldn’t have been doing what they were.”
“Are you saying I’m a good witch or a bad one?”
“Neither, Ryan. I don’t know you. I’m saying that I understand why the president picked you,” Bishop replied. “Since I got the call last night, I’ve been zeroing in on what we have here. The scope of this suggests we’re dealing with the ‘other’ ten percent. A person or persons who are bad because they are bad. That’s why I’m here. Because truly bad men don’t just take cash from the evidence locker or shoot someone because they’re angry at their spouse. They don’t just kill my daughter. They kill a lot of daughters. That’s not going to happen on my watch, if I can prevent it.”
Kealey took a moment to reflect on what Bishop had said. “I like that. But there’s something that doesn’t jibe.”
Bishop regarded him. “What’s that?”
“We don’t know that New York has anything to do with Baltimore. Shouldn’t you be there, where the FBI poser was ID’d?”
Bishop smiled thinly. “Touche. There’s something else.”
Goddamn it, Kealey thought. Nothing ever changes, except to get worse. “What didn’t the sons of bitches tell me?” he asked.
“It came in very early this morning, and I’m sure they didn’t want to wake you,” Bishop said.
“I’m sure they just didn’t want to tell me,” Kealey said. “What is it?”
Bishop touched the tablet several times, then handed it over. It was an eyes-only message from FBI director Cluzot:
Cargo from Quebec hijacked. Believed to be in NYC.
“What cargo?” Kealey asked. A frisson of fear rolled up his spine. His first thought was of a nuclear weapon.
Bishop leaned over and tapped another button. A color photograph came up. It was a mug shot with an RCMP stamp in the corner.
“Top assassin, Pakistani born, spent her teenage years in Damascus and Cairo” he said quietly. He touched a button, and the screen dissolved. It would take a password to get back in. “Heartless merc, no apparent ideology. A CIA agent and I put her on a private jet up there with three Pakistani caretakers. At least, we thought they were. We don’t know what happened, except that three Pakistanis were found dead at the airport after we left, the plane ended up in New York, it was on the ground for under an hour, and then it headed out over the Atlantic.”
“To where?”
“We don’t know that, either,” Bishop said. “The transponder was shut off, and either it was blown up at sea or some pretty sophisticated technology was apparently employed to erase the image from radar. We’re still looking into that.”