THIRTY-ONE

I made Lisa wait in the underground garage at WMFO while I went upstairs. I couldn’t allow her to be seen with me, and she’d be just as safe in the car. Even Kevin Finnerty knew better than to have Vincent Wax kill her in the FBI’s basement.

Upstairs, I considered my first problem. I had a shopping list to fill, but it was only a quarter after six. Like every other field office in the FBI the place was still humming. Word of our suspension had to be the talk of the building, and Finnerty’s order for us to stay away would have been made just as clear to our fellow agents as it had been to us. I didn’t have to go to my office on the third floor, which took some of the pressure off, but it still wasn’t going to be easy.

I started at the tech room on the second floor. Not much danger getting busted down there where the techies lived. They never got the word about anything. Gordon Shanklin grinned as I came through the door.

“Puller? What is this? A second visit so soon?”

I went past him without a word, to a shelf against the nearest wall. I grabbed my radio code-changing unit and hurried toward another shelf farther down the way, where I selected a handful of miniature TV camera/radio transmitter assemblies and a single tiny microphone attached to a ten-foot length of black electrical cable. I selected a leather satchel from a collection of them on another shelf close by, stuffed the gear into it, and headed back out the door.

“Sorry to be rude,” I told Gordon on my way by. “But you know how it is at the top.”

I heard him snort as I started for my next stop.

There was no doubt in my mind that Finnerty’s Mercury Marquis would be in the garage in the basement. The ADIC never went home before nine o’clock. And the car was there, I discovered when I stepped out of the elevator and into the garage. I didn’t bother to check on Lisa, sitting in my Caprice down the row. She couldn’t be anywhere safer.

Code-changer in hand, I went through the motions of opening the trunks of three supervisors’ cars and pretending to test their codes, then moved to the ADIC’s Mercury next to the elevator. I went around to the driver’s door, opened it to get the keys to the trunk, but saw they weren’t hanging in the ignition. I scanned the seat, looked behind the visor, went through the glove compartment and the console between the front seats. Finally, I searched the floor of the car itself, but they were gone.

I walked down the length of the garage to the car maintenance area, a large space that looked like a gas station without the pumps. Freddy Vitek was the night man this week. He crawled out from under a Ford convertible when I called his name, wiped his hand on a red shop rag as I told him what I needed. He stepped inside his tiny office, opened a wall-mounted case, and plucked a set of keys from the hundreds hanging on the hooks inside, then handed them to me without a word and went back to his Ford.

Back at Finnerty’s car I opened the trunk and bent inside to inspect his radio unit. From my pocket I pulled the microphone/transmitter unit and long cable I’d removed from Gordon Shanklin’s collection upstairs. I bent closer to the radio unit, located the auxiliary power supply socket at the rear, plugged the end of the cable into it, then ran the black cable through the pass-through at the rear of the trunk and up behind the back seats of the car. I crawled back out of the trunk, walked around the car and peered inside to check my work. I nodded. Couldn’t see a damn thing. Finnerty wouldn’t either, not unless he made a point of looking for it.

I walked the ADIC’s spare keys back to Freddy Vitek. He didn’t even bother to acknowledge me as I passed by on the way to the cabinet in his office. I replaced the keys and headed back upstairs.

At the main switchboard on the second floor, Gerry Ann Walsh was busy handling calls. She looked at me with questioning eyebrows.

“Don’t bother,” I mouthed. “I know where it is.”

I walked around behind her and grabbed the all-clear book from the top drawer of the gray metal file cabinet at the back of her space, opened it, and made a mental note of the code I needed, then replaced the book.

“Thanks,” I mouthed again as I left Gerry Ann to her callers.

Next it was the gun vault on the third floor, the same floor as my own office in Squad 17. Now I had to be more careful.

I spotted a couple of agents from my squad talking in the hallway ahead, so I ducked into a doorway until they moved on. I double-checked to make sure the coast was clear, then hustled to the gun vault, twirled the combination, and was in and out in less than a minute. I tucked a Sig Sauer nine-millimeter semiautomatic into my briefcase with the electronic gear, along with the four-inch silencer I would attach to the pistol later.

Back in the garage, I climbed into the Caprice and smiled at Lisa. She smiled back as we headed back up to the street and on our way to Brodsky at the Hilton. Before we got there, I called my father’s nursing home and caught Jack Quigley in his office.

“Cutting it close, aren’t you?” he told me. “We were getting ready to box up his stuff and have it ready for you to pick up when you come to get him.”

I told him why I was calling, that I was ready to use my Visa card to settle the account, to keep my father right where he was.

“You’re going to pay?” he said. “You’re actually going to give me some money?”

“I’m in a hurry, Jack.”

“How much? How much you want to put on the Visa card?”

“All of it.”

“Ninety-five hundred dollars? You’re kidding, right?”

“You want it or not?”

He shut up and ran it through.

That night at the Hilton we rehearsed. Lisa, Brodsky, and I, along with Gerard Ziff, who came over to get his instructions for the next morning. I practiced for a couple of hours on a few of the skills I hadn’t used for a while, performing them over and over as I worked to get ready. Brodsky gave me a few tips from his detective days, a couple of things I’d never thought about.

“Look,” he told me around eleven-thirty, as we were finishing up for the night, “just think of a lock as a woman.”

His smile showed he wasn’t accustomed to using it.

“Get in there and feel around. Hit the right place, it’ll open up for you.”

I stared at him. “Another joke? Jesus, Brodsky, don’t tell me you’re finally letting go.”

He quit smiling. “Just took awhile, Monk, that’s all. A lotta bad history, lotta bad blood. For you people, too … Don’t think I haven’t noticed.” He glanced at Lisa. “But you two …”

He let the words die, then started again.

“We’re both here to get what we need, that’s all I’m telling you. And you’re not doing the feeb thing … not running a game on me.” He paused. “What I’m trying to say is that you don’t suck.”

I grinned at him. Lisa touched his beefy shoulder.

Gerard Ziff went home. The rest of us went to bed.