Resistant

—LANCASTER R. HILL, LECTURE AT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, NOVEMBER 12, 1938

The three days Tim Vaill spent in the hospital had passed like months. All he thought about was getting out, getting back to work, and starting the hunt. Now, five days after his discharge, he was finally right where he needed to be—in Franklin, Tennessee.

He was seated in his agency-issued Chevy Impala, parked across the street from the blue clapboard colonial home of the man who murdered his wife. The photo, in a white envelope, was tucked into the inside breast pocket of his suit jacket. It would be a weapon of last resort, but he would use it if he had to.

Seated beside Vaill was his new partner, Charles McCall, a handsome African American man in his late twenties. Vaill was impressed by McCall, but more because of his street smarts than his Ivy League diploma from Penn. There were a lot of smart folks who joined the FBI. Most were idealistic and came into the Bureau with a strong belief they’d get back in action and adventure what they’d be giving up in private sector pay.

Most of those young recruits were wrong. The Bureau was a lot of paperwork, a lot of waiting around, and, true to its name, a lot of bureaucracy.

“How long are we going to sit here and wait?” McCall asked.

Those were the first words either man had spoken in twenty minutes. Initially, Vaill had asked to go on this assignment alone, but his boss, Beth Snyder, immediately denied the request. He felt bad for giving McCall the cold shoulder, but he was still in deep mourning, and all a new partner did was remind him of the partner he’d never have again.

Then there were the headaches—blinding, distracting pain, mostly above his right ear, where the bullet had been removed, but also behind his eyes. There was nothing predictable about what brought them on, and nothing reliable to make them go away. They usually lasted just three or four minutes, maybe two or three times a day, but the duration had been getting longer, and the pain worse. Yesterday’s attack had lasted nearly a half hour. Thankfully, he was alone in his hospital room at the time.

Tylenol and Motrin were no help, and he didn’t dare mention them to his boss or his doctor. If he did, he would be out of the field in a blink, and in all likelihood, back in the hospital. Some sort of migraine, he convinced himself. Half the people he knew had them. A few of them every day. Until Alexander Burke was behind bars or roasting on a spit in hell, he would do his best to get through them and control his irritability toward McCall.

Vaill checked the house using high-powered binoculars just as Lola Burke entered her living room. She was a slender, pretty woman with shoulder-length blond hair, wearing a blue knit sweater and form-fitting jeans. Her face was fresh and innocent, almost cherubic. It would have been tough to pick her out of a line-up as the wife of the FBI’s most-wanted man in America. Vaill kept watching as she passed out of the living room, then returned. Having aced all his psychological profiling and behavioral analysis classes at Quantico, he could sense the woman was nervous—maybe waiting for something.

“I think we’re clear, Chuck,” Vaill said. “Let’s go have ourselves a little chat.”

Vaill never dreamed he’d be doing fieldwork so soon after being discharged from the hospital. Against his wishes, Beth Snyder had tried to give him a cushy desk job with the task force assigned to monitor the Doomsday Germ. He was to work with the huge team trying, so far unsuccessfully, to pin down any of the Society of One Hundred Neighbors. Finally, with his doctor’s go-ahead and his own burning passion to avenge Maria, Snyder had relented, but only after extracting from him a pledge of objectivity.

At the start of the Doomsday Germ crisis, a top-secret communications pipeline had been established involving every hospital. The goal of the pipeline was to record each documented case of the Doomsday Germ. The FBI put hospital administrators on notice that information leaks would not be tolerated. Any such leak could result in obstruction charges and even impact JCAHO accreditation, vital for a hospital’s federal funding.

The containment strategy was necessary to subvert the panic that would follow should news of the germ, and more specifically the plans of the terrorist group calling itself One Hundred Neighbors, spread to the public. Not surprisingly, there were some leaks, but mostly the media chose to act responsibly, reporting the story as an emerging strain of streptococcus pyogenes and nothing more.

For now, the extent and deadly potential of the Doomsday Germ was a well-guarded secret. But with their deadline growing ever closer, the One Hundred Neighbors would not keep it a secret much longer. And when word got out, and the mutilation and death rates began to soar, confidence in our hospital system and health care in general would quickly collapse under the strain.

Vaill had studied the files on Alexander Burke and sensed the man’s wife knew more than she had shared with the agents who had questioned her. He wanted a crack at her himself.

“She’s already been interviewed by three other agents more experienced at interrogation than you,” Snyder said. “She doesn’t know anything. She and Alexander have been on the outs, and she hasn’t heard from him in months. What makes you think you’re going to find out anything different?”

“Because she hasn’t spoken to the man whose wife her husband murdered,” Vaill had replied.

The next day he had a plane ticket and a new partner.

The flagstone walkway was bordered by neatly tended shrubs. Vaill led the way up three steps to the front door. He brushed a hand across the breast of his suit coat for reassurance the envelope was still there, and rang the doorbell. Lola Burke checked them out through her sidelight window. Her expression went from curious to saturnine in the time it took her to open the door. She did not bother asking who these latest suits were, or what they wanted. According to her file, well before her husband became first an agent, then a fugitive, she knew what a G-man looked like, and also that they seldom brought anything but trouble.

“I guess there’s no shortage of Feds,” she said. “You people just keep rolling in like Old Man River. I haven’t heard from him if that’s what you’re here to ask.”

Vaill and McCall flashed their badges—protocol. Lola sighed and made a face as if they were her least favorite vegetable. She kept her arm against the door frame, as a barrier.

“Mrs. Burke, I’m Special Agent Tim Vaill and this is my partner, Special Agent Charles McCall. I know we’re not the first agents to come here to speak with you, but it’s very important that we find your husband. We were wondering if we could try again.”

Lola rolled her eyes and lowered her arm.

I’ve been through this all before and I’ve got nothing more to tell you, but go ahead if you really need to.

They followed her into a bright and airy kitchen. Light spilled into the room from a bank of mullioned windows that looked onto a lush lawn. The home, from Vaill’s quick inspection, was well appointed—nice furniture throughout, granite countertops in the kitchen, new appliances, too, but nothing that looked unaffordable on an agent’s salary. If Burke’s motive for murder was money, it certainly wasn’t ending up here.

“Want something to drink. Water?”

“No thank you, we’re fine,” Vaill said, speaking for both himself and McCall. If Maria were here, she’d be the one speaking for Vaill.

Lola shrugged. “Suit yourself,” she said. She took a seat at the kitchen table, with her back to the windows, leaned back, and waited. Vaill sat where he had a full-on look at her face. Either she was an expert with makeup, or her smooth, porcelain skin showed none of the strain he’d seen on other people who’s loved ones had gone missing.

She doesn’t think he’s gone forever.

“Before you get going,” Lola said, a slip of venom in her voice, “let me save you both some trouble. I haven’t seen him. I haven’t heard from him. I have no idea where he is, or where he might have gone. I don’t know why he did what he allegedly did. All I know is that he’s gone and you’re here to harass me some more, as if my life isn’t already enough of a shit mess, because you think my husband murdered two of your own. Does that about sum it up?”

Just prior to leaving on this trip, Vaill had spent several hours with the brightest minds from the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU), getting a crash course on some of their techniques. In the span of her short and embittered speech, Lola Burke had given away four glaring tells confirming she was a liar. She was fidgeting with her hands, acting nervous. She was also uncooperative, making negative statements and complaints, saying nothing to support the search. In addition, he’d get more eye contact from a blind person, but when she did look at him, her pupils were the size of two nickels, possibly the result of a pheromone found more commonly in liars than truth tellers.

Thank you, BAU.

It was going to take patience and finesse to get her to come clean—and perhaps the picture.

“We apologize for adding any strain to what is most certainly a difficult time, Mrs. Burke,” McCall said. “If you don’t mind, could you tell us about the last time you spoke to your husband?”

Good, Vaill thought. Let McCall get all the bullshit out of the way. He’s smart to keep it nonconfrontational—good cop, bad cop.

Lola sighed heavily. She then went through a long and passionless diatribe about the day her husband left for his latest assignment. She shared what he ate for breakfast that morning, how he kissed her good-bye and said he’d call her soon, same as he always did when he left on an assignment. She was adamant that he did nothing at all out of the ordinary—no indication that he was planning on going rogue.

McCall dutifully took notes, even though Lola had already provided the same information to the agents who had been there before.

“So there’s nothing else?” McCall said. “No explanation for your husband’s actions? No idea where he might be?”

Lola shot McCall an angry sideways glance. “I don’t have any information, Agent McCall. I’d be more interested to know what you all have come up with.”

Jackpot.

This was the opening Vaill had been waiting for.

“You want our theories?” he asked.

“I’d like to think the massive manpower of the FBI could come up with something, so yes.”

More anger. More negativity. More lies.

“I can’t speak for the Bureau,” Vaill said, his eyes fixed on her, “but I’ll tell you what I think. There are three possible reasons why someone would betray their country: money, sex, or ideology. Now, you’re a good-looking woman, Lola. If you don’t mind my saying so, any man would be a fool to betray you in that way. That doesn’t mean anything, though. As they say, love is blind and it can be blinding. But you don’t seem like a woman scorned, and if your husband had left you for another woman, if he’d been seduced into this betrayal, you’d have had at least some suspicion along the way. You seem angry with us for intruding, but not angry at Alexander. So let’s take sex off the table for the moment.”

“Whatever.”

“How about money? Did he get paid to murder two agents? If he did, it had to be a hell of a lot of money, which would make me think again about sex … or drugs, I suppose. But when I look around this house, and from what I could tell of Alexander, I don’t see a man obsessed with money, or on drugs. Just my opinion, maybe I’m wrong.”

“You’re not,” Lola said flatly.

“So, that leaves ideology—a belief so profound, so consuming, it could make a person commit an unspeakable act. It would need to be something at their core—a powerful, misguided sense of justice. Maybe you share that belief. Maybe that’s why you’re angry with us instead of outraged and sickened by your husband’s actions. Is that your husband, Lola? Was he a misguided individual? Is that why you’ve lost him?”

“Misguided is your word,” Lola said, looking away.

“Well, I lost something, too,” Vaill said. “Mrs. Burke, I’m not speaking to you as an agent. I’m not even here to vilify your husband. I’m here because of this scar.”

He pushed aside his hair to give Lola a look at the track left by the bullet that had torn through his scalp and into his brain.

“Why are you showing this to me?” Lola asked, looking away quickly.

“Because that’s where your husband shot me,” Vaill said. “I was standing next to my wife, my partner, a beautiful woman named Maria, when he shot her dead at point-blank range. Right here, just above the bridge of her nose. Then he shot me—twice.”

“Please stop.”

“I didn’t see evil in Alexander’s eyes. I saw fervor—a belief. And I don’t see any evil in you, Mrs. Burke. I see a woman who loves her husband very much, the way I loved my wife. And I think he made a promise to you. I think he told you he’d come back for you when he could, when it was safe. But I’m here to tell you that he’s never going to come. He’s never going to come because sooner or later we’re going to get him—and because the belief that led him to kill my wife is stronger than his love for you. Like me, the person you love more than anything, is never coming back.”

This time, Lola’s quivering lip and the tears welling in her eyes seemed genuine.

“I … I want you to leave,” she managed.

“We can do what’s right, Mrs. Burke,” Vaill went on, ignoring her plea. “We can do what’s right and not turn our back. Please, Mrs. Burke, you’re not in any trouble. You won’t be in trouble. You have my word on that. But please stop lying for him. Tell me everything you know that might help us and we’ll be gone.”

Lola bit her lower lip.

“Please go,” she said. But there was no force behind her words.

Vaill forged ahead.

“Do it for my wife.”

He withdrew the envelope with the crime scene photos inside and spread the three of them on the table. It had ripped at his guts to keep it so near to his heart, but Lola Burke was close to cracking. This was a beautiful woman’s flesh and blood and bone. Lola gasped at the gruesome photographs. Even McCall looked disturbed. Vaill kept his eyes fixed on her, in part to keep himself from looking at the pictures again.

A tear broke loose from the corner of Lola’s right eye and wound down her cheek. She flipped the photo facedown on the table.

Then, without a word, she stood, walked through the kitchen entranceway, and disappeared down the hall. McCall was reaching for his gun, but Vaill raised a hand to hold him back.

“Don’t, Chuck,” he said. “We’re okay.”

A moment later, Lola returned with a small plastic baggie. She passed it over to Vaill.

“This is the DVD my husband sent me after he disappeared,” she said. “It’s the last time I heard from him. It contains everything I know. I’m sorry about your wife. I’m so sorry.”

She walked McCall and Vaill to the door.

“We’re going to have this handled by our evidence-processing people. You know the drill. There’s almost sure to be more questions once we’ve gone over this,” McCall said.

“I’ll be here,” Lola said. “I’m not going anyplace for the time being.”

“It goes without saying that if you hear from your husband, please call me,” Vaill said, passing over his card.

“I can’t promise that.”

“As you wish.”

The two agents had driven more than a mile before McCall spoke.

“That was masterful, man,” he said. “Truly masterful. I know that picture was a tough thing for you to show, but you did it. And just at the right moment, too. This DVD could be the break we need.”

McCall had his phone out, dialing the field office while he was driving and talking.

Vaill was facing away from him, face turned toward the passenger window, eyes closed tightly. The blinding pain behind his eyes had come on with unrelenting force.