Special Agent Merrill Fitzsimmons had been with the Bureau for twenty-nine years—twenty-nine successful, decorated years. He’d been thinking about working three more years, by which time his youngest would have her master’s. And he figured when he did retire, he’d be leaving at the top of his game and he’d have no problem at all landing a job as a consultant. Yep, with consulting fees and his pension, he’d be able to buy that Bayliner he’d always wanted.
But now he was thinking that maybe he’d pull the plug this fall. Debbie would have to get a loan to finish school—Christ, what the hell did she need a master’s for anyway?—and he would kiss the Bayliner goodbye. The way it was going now, he’d be lucky to get a job as a greeter at Wal-Mart after he left the Bureau.
And it was all because of that fuckin’ Oliver Lincoln.
Folks had initially been delighted when they’d pinned the terrorist attacks on Pugh and Broderick’s bill had failed, but after four and a half months all the delight had disappeared. Now everybody—the president and Congress and every two-bit scribbler who wrote for a paper—wanted the people behind Pugh, and they began to crap all over the director of the FBI. And they wanted to know who killed William Broderick. He may not have been a hero anymore, but he had been a U.S. senator. So they dumped on the director and, as the old saying went, the crap flowed downhill—right onto Merrill Fitzsimmons.
Fitzsimmons was drowning in crap.
At first he figured it’d be a piece of cake. They knew Oliver Lincoln had met with Pugh. Pugh had even identified the guy’s voice. Fitzsimmons figured, with all the resources at his disposal—they’d given him everything he’d asked for—that in a couple of weeks he’d have Lincoln’s head mounted on his wall.
They had the laptop Lincoln had given Pugh, and the laptop had e-mails in it that supposedly came from Lincoln, and the e-mails told Pugh how to orchestrate the attacks. But they couldn’t trace any of the e-mails back to Lincoln. The e-mails had been sent from public libraries, places where Lincoln didn’t have to open up an account, and nobody at the libraries remembered seeing Lincoln on the days the e-mails had been sent. It was possible that Lincoln had never even been in the libraries; some nerd could have fixed things so it only looked like the e-mails came from libraries. At least that’s what the Bureau’s nerds said, those useless geeks, so the laptop turned out to be no help at all.
Lincoln’s man Jack, the guy with the Russian accent who had helped Lincoln, was a dead end too. They showed Pugh thousands of pictures of possible suspects, but no one looked like Jack. Jack, whoever he was, had disappeared and might not even be in the country.
Same way with Lincoln’s bank accounts. Lincoln had paid Pugh a couple million bucks, but there was no money trail from Lincoln to Pugh, nor was there any evidence that Lincoln had received money from someone to pay Pugh.
The waffle house where Lincoln had met with Pugh was another bust. None of the sixteen people who worked there—all of ’em with two-digit IQs—could say that Lincoln had ever been to the restaurant. They knew Pugh had been there because he was a frequent customer, but they couldn’t remember him being there with a bearded guy wearing sunglasses and a baseball hat on the day Pugh said the meeting occurred.
“The man was wearing a Tampa Bay baseball cap,” Fitzsimmons said to the waitress who usually served the table where Pugh and Lincoln had sat. “You can’t see many of those around here.”
“Well, to tell you the truth,” the waitress said, lowering her voice, “I always thought baseball was a game for pussies and I never pay it any attention. Now if the man had been wearing a Dolphins hat …”
The only satisfaction that Merrill Fitzsimmons had was tormenting Lincoln, but even that small pleasure had soured. The first time he met Lincoln in the flesh, he had to ring the bell at the gate to be allowed onto Lincoln’s estate and then had to wait to be admitted, like he was a damn Amway salesman instead of a federal agent. And after the big wrought-iron gates had finally swung open, he and three cars full of agents had driven up the quarter-mile driveway to Lincoln’s mansion only to find Lincoln waiting for them, cool as you please, with his lawyer.
Now that had really pissed Fitzsimmons off. How in the hell had Lincoln known he’d been tied to Jubal Pugh? And how had he known the FBI was coming to his house that night? Obviously Lincoln had a source someplace in the government—in the Justice Department or Congress or right in the Bureau itself—and this source had given Lincoln so much warning that he had time to call his shyster.
And Lincoln’s shyster was good. The man’s name was Lamont Greene. He was very calm, very quiet, very businesslike—and as flexible as a rock. Every step of the way, he made Fitzsimmons jump through every legal hoop he could construct just to slow Fitzsimmons down. And when they questioned Lincoln—on five separate occasions—Greene had been there instructing his client to say nothing more than his name. When they asked Lincoln to take a lie detector test, Greene had laughed out loud, like that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.
Fitzsimmons’s only satisfaction to date was that his men had torn Lincoln’s mansion apart during their search—they had just ripped the place up—and fuck Greene’s threat to sue them for the damage they’d caused. Fitzsimmons worked for the United States goddamn government, and he didn’t care if they doubled the national debt to settle with Lincoln. And, speaking of money, there was one other thing that made Fitzsimmons smile: Lincoln had to be paying Lamont Greene about six hundred bucks an hour. He could only hope the arrogant bastard would have to declare bankruptcy by the time they were done with him.
But after months of trying and thousands of man-hours expended by his agents, Fitzsimmons couldn’t pin one damn thing on Oliver Lincoln. Lincoln had been too careful. He could find no connection between Lincoln and Kenneth Dobbler or Edith Baxter—or anyone else on the planet who might have paid Lincoln. He couldn’t figure out who had killed Senator William Broderick or Rollie Patterson, the U.S. Capitol cop who shot Mustafa Ahmed. He couldn’t even arrest the damn air marshal that had killed Youseff Khalid, even though he knew the marshal had been tipped off that Khalid would be on the plane that day.
Yes, retirement was beginning to look very, very good to Merrill Fitzsimmons.