Nick Fine had cut the legs right out from under Oliver Lincoln.
Lincoln was sitting in his cell, on the lower bunk, dressed in a plain white T-shirt and a pair of too-short jeans. On his feet were flip-flops. Above Lincoln, another man lay on his bunk, staring at the ceiling, doing nothing. The man was a child molester named Martin Cole. The first day they placed Lincoln in the cell with Cole, Cole had been sitting on the lower bunk. Without saying a word to Cole, Lincoln had pulled him off the bunk, drug him over to the foul-smelling, shit-splattered toilet in the cell, and bashed out two of Cole’s teeth against the toilet bowl. He then instructed Cole to move himself—and the mattress he’d been lying on—to the upper bunk, and he further instructed him that whenever Lincoln was in the cell, Cole was to lie on the upper bunk, doing and saying nothing.
Oliver Lincoln was a very angry man, and Martin Cole had been taught a lesson that many others had learned before him: Lincoln may have appreciated the soft and finer things in life, but there was nothing soft about him.
As it had done with Bianca Castro, the FBI had laid out its case against Lincoln. It had Bianca willing to testify that he had paid her to kill Jubal Pugh. Based on that testimony, they would then build the box around Lincoln, which would be constructed like this: Jubal Pugh had given statements prior to his death that a man named Mr. Jones had paid him and directed him to coerce Muslim Americans to commit terrorist acts, the results of which had been the deaths of a number of people, two of them children. One of Pugh’s men took a photograph that the FBI had used to identify Lincoln. Previously, the photo had been of questionable value as evidence, but since Bianca had testified that Lincoln had ordered her to kill Pugh, the FBI now had the link between Pugh and Lincoln that it needed. So, as a minimum, the FBI could send Lincoln to jail for life for Pugh’s murder—and the murder of the poor man who ran the junkyard where Pugh had worked. But now, thanks to Senator Fine, the FBI could put the bow on the package: it could convict Lincoln for being the mastermind behind the terrorist attacks. All the Bureau had to do was to get him to admit that he’d worked for Broderick.
But he wouldn’t.
“Nick Fine hired me,” Lincoln said.
“You’re lying,” the Bureau responded. “You know that in order to save your rotten ass you gotta point the finger at somebody, and you knew if you pointed the finger at a dead senator you’d be screwed. So instead, you lying bastard, you’ve decided to accuse Nick Fine.”
“I’m telling you it was Fine,” Lincoln said.
“Can you prove it?” the Bureau said.
And that was the rub. He couldn’t prove it.
As a minimum he was going to spend the rest of his life in jail. His days of Rubinacci suits and champagne were over. He might be able to avoid the death penalty—the case that he’d organized the terrorist attacks wasn’t airtight, but it was tight enough that he’d never see the outside of a jail cell again.