It was an indication of the rising fortunes of the United States Marshals Service that it had recently acquired a brand-new headquarters office, a huge eleven-story bronze-tinted glass cube, one of a set of four in a block-long square of federal office towers across the Arlington Memorial Bridge over the Potomac a mile down Jeff Davis Highway from the Pentagon. It was a significant step up from their former HQ in a nondescript strip-mall somewhere in Rosslyn. The director’s office had a skyline view of Washington and all the capital landmarks, one of the true status indicators in the eternal game of Beltway Bungy-Bingo. The next building over, an identical bronze glass cube, was the headquarters of the DEA. The directors could wave to each other from their top-floor office suites. They probably did. Other federal agencies, including the ATF and liaison units of the DIA, the IRS, and the NSA, had suites in the other two buildings, along with hundreds of unmarked and unidentified offices whose work was, now that you ask, actually none of your damn business, thank you very much.
The whole Arlington federal area was a broad flat concentration of brand-new offices and a very expensive mall, built over what had once been a magnificent stand of old red oaks and copper beeches. All the streets were six lanes wide, separated by broad central boulevard gardens with well-tended shrubs and flowering plants. The cars on the street tended toward battleship-gray Bimmers and Volvo wagons, or Ford vans with black-tinted windows carrying grim-faced men hither and yon on apparently vital errands, or federal-blue Lincoln Town Cars with bulletproof glass and Kevlar side panels driven by solid-looking chauffeurs with surgically bypassed smile muscles, who wore single-breasted blue suits and aviator glasses and had white flex-cord earplugs stuck in their ears and who were always looking around at the rooflines and keeping one hand inside their jackets.
The main garage for the Marshals Service HQ had an unmarked driveway that led down into a multilevel underground parking area heavy with surveillance cameras and motion-detector sensors. The garage included storage areas for command trucks, satellite uplink communications vehicles, armored raid tanks, all-terrain vehicles, even some multiengine high-velocity offshore racing boats. The rooflines and lampposts were studded with security cameras, and plainclothes perimeter guards were always strolling around the walkways and parkettes between the four bronze towers. Everything about the place said SERIOUS BIGTIME FEDERAL LAW RIGHT HERE. Every time Luke drove down the parking ramp toward the steel-barred entrance gate, he felt like Jonah sliding down the whale’s gullet.
He slowed the Crown Victoria to a crawl and triggered the infrared code beam in his grill. The steel grate lifted with a hydraulic whine, and the surveillance camera mounted over it swiveled and centered on the car. Somewhere inside the building the car was being run through a recognition system and the entrance time noted on a database. If it failed that clearance process, the primary gate would still lift, but the car would be trapped in between this grate and the secondary barricade about fifty feet farther in. Once inside that fifty-foot concrete hallway, there was no escape, and the hallway itself was reinforced with ferro-concrete blast deflectors that would direct the force of any suicide-bomb explosion back up the parking ramp and away from the building’s substructure. Armed guards positioned in observation posts and hardened shelters would overcome and arrest anyone who tried to get through on foot. There was even a halon gas system in place to put out secondary electrical fires. And that was only the stuff Luke knew about.
Everyone realized there was a lot more to the security systems than they’d been told about, but no one was stupid enough to demonstrate any interest in the subject. The HQ was classed and graded as a level-one hard-target building, partly because of the Witness Protection admission facility it contained and partly as a response to the alarming increase in bomb threats—and bomb deliveries—against federal facilities around the country. The Marshals Service was taking the escalation in domestic terrorism very, very seriously.
There was a security station at the second gate, framed in bulletproof glass, staffed by two guards, one of them sitting in front of an array of video screens and sensor boards. Luke fished out his ID and rolled down the window as they reached it. One of the blue-uniformed guards was a young black woman, stony-faced and carrying a Hechler & Koch MP-5 machine pistol. She was wearing a Kevlar vest. Luke looked at the fire-select switch on the MP-5 as she came forward to the car. It was set to three-round bursts. The weapon was on a shoulder sling, but the little black muzzle of the piece was aimed right at his head, and her right index finger rested along the outside of the trigger guard, a twitch away from the firing position. She leaned down and looked at Luke’s ID and then took another long look at Doc’s as well, matching the pictures to their faces. If she was impressed, she managed to conceal the reaction very well. “Can you pop the trunk, sir?” was all she said.
She looked about fifteen to Luke. Doc opened the glove compartment and pressed the yellow trunk release. The trunk lid popped, and she walked away to check it out. The car was sitting on a steel grid, and a surveillance camera was giving the other guard inside the station a look at the underside of the car. Luke and Doc said nothing to each other, mostly out of habit, since there were also high-sensitivity directional mikes aimed at their windshield. Doc drummed on the dashboard and sighed while the woman did a complete circuit around the car. Finally she nodded and went back to the station. The second gate rose up into a recessed slot, and Luke drove over the tire-damage spikes and into the Level One parking area. The entire floor was lit with halogen lamps in recessed ceiling fixtures covered with steel grids. It was high-noon-bright inside. Fugitive Ops had a special section on Level Three, and they rolled down the ramps and past hundreds of other federal cars and vans in marked-off sectors.
WITSEC—NO ACCESS
COURT SECURITY COORDINATOR—RESERVED
LIAISON COMMISSION—RESERVED
U.S. MARSHALS—NO ACCESS
DIRECTOR—RESERVED 24 HOURS
SPECIAL OPERATIONS
TRAINING
INTEL AND ANALYSIS—NO ACCESS
ASSET SEIZURE
FUGITIVE OPS—TARGET ACQUISITION
FUGITIVE TEAMS
Luke’s slot was next to Norm Brewer’s charcoal-gray Jeep Cherokee. They climbed out, and Luke set the lo-jack and the alarm with his hand remote as they walked away from the car. The car chirped and beeped, and Doc chuckled a bit to himself as they got to the steel door that led to the elevator banks.
“What are you laughing at?” said Luke, as he punched their floor number on the board. The machine rose with a silent rush of power and speed, pressing them into the carpeted floor. A surveillance camera in the upper right corner of the elevator whined once and settled on them.
“I’m just remembering what it was like in the old offices. They had a buzzer at the bottom of the stairs and a glass door with ‘Marshals Service’ on it in gold paint. Upstairs the place was all baby-shit yellow and puke green, you know, those two-toned walls they always painted our offices in. The guard was an old war vet named Homer Bukowitz. His piece was a Colt .45 I think he got in Roosevelt’s ride up San Juan Hill. The whole place was made of plywood and ripple-glass, and the director’s office was in the corner overlooking the parking lot and the ARCO station on the corner.”
“Things change, I guess.”
Doc chuckled again. “I guess our pay raise is in the mail then, hah?”
Luke grinned at that. “Oh yeah, any day now. I think it’s coming in on the Titanic, isn’t it?”
The elevator stopped, and the doors rolled back. They walked out into a broad entrance hall with closed office doors running down one wall. Luke walked to a door like all the others and slid his ID card through the reader slot. There was no sign on the door, no sign on any of the office doors on any floor in the building. If you didn’t know the number, you didn’t belong there anyway. The door buzzed and popped open.
Fugitive Ops was a large cluttered office floor filled with wood-veneer desks and dark green filing cabinets, desktop computers, gun cabinets, and work tables. Just about every flat space was piled high with computer printouts of felony stats, Justice Department crime projections, and updated Wanted lists filed by almost every state and local police agency in the nation. The two inside walls were covered with duty rosters and assignment sheets, car vouchers and trip sheets, all the usual paperwork and housekeeping lists you’d find in any law enforcement facility.
It was a corner office, so the other two walls were tinted bronze glass and shaded with slatted blinds. The sun was still high in the sky, but the light through the glass was a brilliant amber, and black shadows from the slatted blinds gave the whole office the feel of a seaside hotel. The glass itself was treated to resist infrared surveillance, and a white-noise generator made electronic eavesdropping a technical impossibility, even with a laser surveillance system, which was designed to translate sound-wave impacts on the inside of the windows into minuscule changes in the distance reading on the laser and then back again into sound waves on the system recorder. The white-noise generators gave the whole office a muted, hushed feeling, as if an ocean were somewhere close, just beyond hearing range. It made speaking and hearing a little tricky, giving you the illusion that you had a slight hearing problem, but you got used to it.
Today was a Sunday, so there was no one in the place but Norm Brewer, who was holding down the weekend duty officer spot. Norm was sitting in the coffee lounge next to the washrooms, dressed to the nines in a custom-tailored white shirt, a striped rep tie, Italian navy-blue slacks, and dark blue leather Italian loafers. He had on a shoulder-rig holster with a stainless Beretta nine-mill on his left side and a double-mag case on the right side. He was reading a copy of the ATF Seized Property Notice that ran regularly in most national newspapers. This one was inside a copy of USA Today. Luke always got a kick out of the ATF 800 number that ran with the notice: 1-800-ATF-GUNS.
Norm Brewer was a crewcut kid about twenty-six years old, built like a running back with a neck size somewhere in the three-digit area, pecs like dinner plates, and a very narrow waist. A squeaky-clean Methodist kid from Nebraska, Norm had spent several years in Court Security and was one of the few younger men to make it to Fugitive Ops, a position usually reserved for men with a lot of seniority. Since there were only thirty-four hundred Marshals in the service, the prime positions were hard to come by, and there was a lot of hard feeling between the old guard and the new crop of recruits fresh out of Glynco. The D.C. courthouse was a particularly bad example of this sort of intramural tension, and The Washington Post had been carrying an ongoing feature detailing the small-minded bitchiness of the combatants on all sides of the struggle. Seniority struggles made a great deal of the daily operations of the Marshals Service as tricky as a tenure fight in a faculty lounge, except in the Marshals Service all the contestants were armed.
Norm Brewer had made it to Fugitive Ops because his uncle had once been a U.S. Marshal, but once Norm got inside, it was his willingness to do anything, work whatever god-awful hours no one else would accept, run whatever miserable stake-out he was asked, and do it all with an inexhaustible cheerfulness, that kept him on the right side of the door.
Norm looked up from behind the paper as Doc and Luke came in looking for fresh coffee. It was typical of Norm Brewer that the pot was not only full but full of a really excellent blend of Colombian-Kenyan that he shopped for in Georgetown. The rich complex scent filled the small lounge.
“Mr. Zitto,” he said, getting up from the battered vinyl couch and putting the paper down. “Let me pour that for you.”
Luke raised a hand, grinned at the boy.
“Take a break, Norm. I can pour my own. And the name is Luke, okay? You make me feel like I should have a walker.”
“You should,” said Doc. “You told me so yourself. We’ll get you one outta Stores, okay? Sit down, Norm, will ya? He’s the cripple, not me.”
“Mr. Hollenbeck. Your wife called.”
“She did?” said Doc. “What’d she want?”
“She said to tell you a Mr. Marcuse called.”
Doc turned and looked hard at Brewer.
“She said that?”
Brewer reacted to the look. “Well, yes. I’m sorry, sir.”
“He called my house?”
“Yes, sir. Is that bad, sir?”
Luke watched the exchange. Celandre Marcuse was Doc’s Haitian cab-driver fink, the one who had tipped them off about Rona’s location yesterday. He had no idea what Doc’s protocol was with his finks, but he was pretty sure that a call to the house was one of the major nonos. Luke never gave a fink his home number. That’s what pagers were for. If Doc was giving out his home number, Doc’s style of snitch control was strictly against the rulebook. Luke sipped at his cup and waited to see how this would play out. Fink management was the slipperiest aspect of the job. An agent without his own fink network was like a hunter without a gun dog.
Doc gave Luke a meaningful glance and went out to the main office to call his wife. Norm Brewer watched him go with a worried expression on his unmarked face.
“Did I do something wrong, Mr. Zitto?”
“Not at all, Norm. Doc’s a husband. They get that hunted look after a while. You’re not married, are you?”
“I’m still GS 7, sir. I can hardly afford my underwear.”
Luke laughed at that. Norm gave him a grin, and then slapped his forehead. He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a slip of pink paper.
“This call came for you just now, sir.”
“From the CO?” said Luke, taking the slip.
“No,” said Brewer. “It’s from Rothgar Fiertag.”
Luke took the slip and read it. Rothgar Fiertag’s role was supervisory and nonoperational, but he had to be somewhere up there in the chain of command, since the commanding officer of their fugitive team tolerated his incessant interference. His note was short and to the point:
My office at 1720 hours.
Canaday’s with me.
Fiertag.
Great. Somebody had tipped off Rothgar Fiertag. Probably Bolton Canaday himself. If Canaday wanted to make this an official visit, then he had an agenda that wasn’t entirely selfless. Quelle surprise, as Aurora would say. Doc Hollenbeck came back into the room, and Luke handed him the note. Doc read it and sighed theatrically.
“Well that’s just jim-dandy, Luke. Let’s go see what they want.”
They said good-bye to Norm Brewer and headed back out to the elevator banks. Waiting for the elevator, Luke quietly asked Doc what the problem was with Celandre Marcuse. Doc looked puzzled.
“He’s not supposed to call my home unless it’s an emergency. He has my pager. I called him. He was on duty last night. This morning, he was talking the night over with some of the other drivers, and one of them—guy named Raj—said he had been all over the K Street sector, including the Zanzibar.”
That bothered Luke. “Why? You think Marcuse tipped him off?”
“He wouldn’t do that. Raj said he was dropping off a fare at the Marine barracks and rolled by there on his way to the navy yard, says he always gets a fare at the yard, and he was going past the Zanzibar when a guy flagged him down.”
“So? I still don’t see why this would attract Marcuse’s attention.”
“Well, he sure as hell knew we were interested in the place. He’s not stupid. The guy has an education, Luke.”
Luke nodded. He just had an instinctive mistrust for snitches, and active snitches really made him nervous. Doc’s face reflected some of the same feelings.
“Anyway, this fare made a big impression on this Raj guy. For one thing, he was real surveillance-conscious, kept checking the rearview, made the guy go around K Street three times.”
The elevator door opened up. A couple of agents were inside, a woman who worked in Target Acquisition named Vivian Cruz and a man Luke didn’t know. Doc nodded to them both and kept his mouth shut until they reached the top floor. He stopped Luke in the hall outside Fiertag’s office door.
“So, three times around K Street?”
“Yeah,” said Doc. “The D.C. cops were still writing up the fire in Rona’s room, and when they went past that, the guy seemed very interested, and he asked Raj if he knew what was going on.”
“What’d Raj say?”
“What do you think? Raj says he doesn’t know. The guy makes him go around one more time, he really guns the location, like there’s something there he needs. Down in Southeast, that’s a scary area, all the drivers are paranoid, so this kind of behavior, it rings the guy’s bells. Raj is watching him real close.”
“He get a good ID?”
“Oh yeah. Told Celandre the guy was scary. Had a pocked-up face and a twisted lip, from a scar. Black eyes. Big, maybe six feet or better.”
“Any accent?”
“None. Spoke regular English.”
“I don’t get it. What made this Raj so interested? This could be anybody. Everybody looks at cops when there’s something going on. What’s the big deal with this one fare?”
“How should I know? From what Raj told Celandre, I think the guy scared him, like he just seemed weird. Hinky. Whatever, he made a big impression on him. The guy stood out.”
“He record the fare?”
“Took him to an address up on North Capitol. Long run. On the way up, the guy starts making small talk, only this is not a small-talk guy. He starts asking Raj if he works that area a lot, what kind of fares does he get. Say tonight, did he pick up a guy who—”
Luke could see it coming.
“Not by name. But Celandre pushed him a bit on it. He says it sure sounds like our guy. Age, size, markings, hair color. Said he was a friend from Guyana. Except he doesn’t give Raj a name. From what he says, I think the guy was looking for Rona.”
“I want to talk to this driver.”
“Yeah, I—”
At that point the door to Fiertag’s office opened up, and Rothgar Fiertag appeared in the doorway. He was in Sunday golfer clothes, complete with one of those silly flat hats. He was actually wearing plus fours and argyle socks. His silvery hair was curling out from under his hat, and his lean tanned features were set and disapproving.
“I heard you talking out here. I have two people from Treasury waiting. Where the hell were you?”
He stepped back out of the way as they walked into his outer office. The secretary’s station was empty, and Fiertag kept up a low-level stream of complaints about their sense of timing as he ushered them through into his main office. The office draperies were drawn, and the blinds closed. The room was as dim as midnight, the only light coming from a green-shaded banker’s lamp on Fiertag’s desk.
Fiertag always worked in the dark, with the draperies drawn. He liked to believe that they had heavy surveillance on people like him. Who they were depended on the last op-ed column he had read in Jane’s Intelligence Review. As they came through the doors and into the bookcase-lined office, two men rose up out of a pair of leather wing-backs and turned to face them.
Coming across Fiertag’s Oriental carpet, Luke recognized the dark Celtic features of Treasury agent Bolton Canaday. Canaday was short, perhaps five eight, and theatrically skinny, with a thick head of pure white hair and black shadowing on both cheeks. His eyes were recessed and red-rimmed—he suffered from a wide range of allergies and was always sucking on an asthma inhaler—but his body was as sinewy and lean as a marathon runner’s under the baggy brown suit, the blue shirt, the vaguely greasy black tie worn loosely around his corded and blue-veined neck.
Luke thought of him as a prototypical IRA whiskey priest and even entertained the amusing speculation that Canaday had some tenuous but working connection with Sinn Fein, as absurd as that would be. It was damn unlikely, but Luke held on to the thought just because it made him feel warm all over every time he had to work with the man, whose dominating credo in interagency operations was strictly predatory; he offered nothing but vague intimations while scooping up every bit of hard data he could reach, and when he left the building, it was wise to count your rings.
Canaday offered Luke his hand, shook it once, hard, and then dropped it as if Luke had something contagious. He smiled, showing a ragged picket of yellow sticks and pale tumbled tombstones in a vivid red field. Treasury had a great dental plan. Why the hell Bolton Canaday wouldn’t use it was a mystery to Luke. Doc shook hands all around while Luke tried to size up the other guy.
No one he knew, but he had the look of a Justice Department lawyer, with his gray Hugo Boss pinstripe suit and black loafers, a very expensive Mara tie, and his hair swept back in that leonine, windblown look that was all over the capital like a persistent skin rash these days. The little round wire-frame glasses—probably made of plain glass—completed the perfect image of the Ivy League lawyer, and he had that tall, lazily athletic frame you saw on professional tennis gigolos and Beltway psychiatrists. In his hand he held a thin black plastic case, an IBM ThinkPad model that Luke knew went for over nine grand retail. Laptops had replaced cell phones as the official status accessory of the Beltway desperado.
Fiertag made the introductions with the expectant air of a lab tech dropping four rats into a Cuisinart as he settled in behind his desk, seeming to grow in size as he reestablished skin contact with his official furniture.
“Deputy Zitto, Deputy Hollenbeck, I think you know Special Agent Canaday. And I’d like you to meet Reed Endicott.”
Endicott shook hands firmly, establishing his Real Guy credentials so mechanically that he might have been battery-operated. It was unclear whether the smile made it to the eyes, which stayed hidden behind the lenses through a trick of the green light on Fiertag’s desk.
“Mr. Endicott is with Justice. He’s here purely in an advisory capacity, am I right, Mr. Endicott?”
Endicott inclined his head and offered a radiant and only slightly reptilian revelation of truly outstanding dentistry. His hair shimmered in the green glow of Fiertag’s desk lamp, one black lock falling artfully—even coyly—over one chiseled brow. Two flat circles of green light appeared and disappeared in his lenses. Setting the laptop on his—well, on his lap—Endicott spoke quietly and apparently to no one in particular while he pressed buttons and flicked switches and powered up his machine.
“Thank you, Marshal Fiertag. Yes, I’m just here to advise Special Agent Canaday. This is a routine interagency consultation, but you’ll understand that, while we all share the same goals, there are some operational considerations, ah, that we have to …”
“Consider?” said Luke.
Fiertag shot him a look. Endicott smiled.
“Yes, of course. Now I’m going to let Bolton fill you in on today’s events … and I’ll just step in if I think there’s anything that needs …”
“Distorting?” said Luke, ignoring Fiertag’s death-ray stare.
Endicott laughed once, out loud, a true Bar Harbor snort, a kind of nasal whinny that suggested amusement without confirming its source.
“They said you were droll, Luke. I see we’ll have to be on our toes around here. I think we understand one another.”
That was too easy. Luke let it go. They all looked at Bolton for a few seconds until he realized they were waiting for him to speak. He jerked upright in the wing-back and leaned forward, placing his elbows on his knees, folding his hands as if in prayer or, in his case, as if listening to an altar boy’s confession.
“Okay. Here’s the thing. We’ve developed information through some overseas assets that leads us to believe that a Central American cartel is shipping counterfeit U.S. currency through Atlanta. This stuff is very very good. Virtually undetectable.”
Endicott’s fingers were flickering lightly over his keypad. His head was down, but it was clear he was listening intently. Canaday was obviously stepping through a pasture here, and in his bare feet. Just to trip him up, Luke tossed him a grenade.
“Syrian?”
They both jumped.
What’d they think, he couldn’t read?
“Gimme a break, Bolton,” he said. “This isn’t the CIA here. It was in the Times last year. Hell, the year before. The Iranians or somebody, financing a professional counterfeit ring in the Bekaa Valley. They had real U.S. mint plates of one-hundred-dollar bills, and they were using real currency paper to print out thousands and thousands of these bills. The idea was to undermine the U.S. dollar, or something along those lines. It was in the news for a few days, then bing, it drops off the pages and nobody is saying anything.”
Bolton managed to avoid looking across at Reed Endicott. He went up a tiny notch in Luke’s estimation. Canaday smiled carefully and fumbled for his asthma spray. He put it to his lips and inhaled for quite a while. When he pulled it away from his mouth, his sallow face was slightly pinker.
“Well, you’re bang on about that, Luke. It was the Syrian stuff. So we had someone on the inside—a source, you understand. I can’t say anyt’ing about that.”
Fiertag obviously felt he hadn’t been heard from often enough.
“We understand the protocols, Bolton. Please go on.”
“Yes sir, t’ank you, sir. So anyway, t’ings go along, we’ve got some help from the Big Eye—”
Big Eye was one of the geosynchronous satellites in a permanent orbit over the Central American isthmus and the Caribbean. Access to it was controlled by the National Security Agency, but most qualified federal agencies could have it zeroed on a target sector if they gave the NSA enough lead time.
“And we don’t want to roll ’em all up too fast. We have an AWACS and some National Guard choppers, we get IR shots of the hand-off in Georgetown—”
“Where’s that?” asked Doc. “Not the D.C. one?”
“It’s in Guyana. On the coast.”
Doc nodded.
“Okay, so the route from there, it’s tricky—”
“I don’t think these men need to hear the entire narrative, Bolton,” said Endicott. Bolton sent him a brief but malevolent look, and then canceled it with a gnomish leer.
“I go on a bit, I know. You’ll understand, Luke and Doc and me, we’re all cops together. We find this stuff real interesting, don’t we, boys?”
“I’m riveted,” said Doc. “Couldn’t move if I was goosed.”
Canaday laughed again. “Well, to make a long tale short, we spend a lot of time and taxpayers’ dollars rolling up these people. We made some good arrests last year. Some of those people are in our care right now, Mr. Fiertag.”
Fiertag nodded in solemn and wise concurrence. He had no idea in hell who was in Witness Protection right now—Mary Magdalene? E.T.? Elvis?—but he liked the flattery.
“So where does all this lead but right here to the capital? What happened today, we had a big street operation going on. We had reason to believe that a transfer was set for someplace around the Washington Monument. Our guy was in place—”
“Your fink?” said Luke.
“I think that’s obvious from the context,” put in Endicott.
“Yes,” said Canaday, after a short pause. “Our fink. So who should come along but someone we know—he’s on the sheet as a Known Associate—and my people make him as soon as he shows up—”
“On foot?” said Doc.
“Yes … on Constitution Avenue, there at 17th. By the aquarium.”
“And this guy is Paolo Rona?”
“Well, we didn’t know that at the time. We just knew him as a buyer.”
“How?” said Doc.
“How what?”
“How’d you know him as a buyer if you didn’t know who he was? You just said you didn’t know it was Paolo Rona at that point.”
“Gentlemen, this isn’t an interrogation,” said Fiertag. “This is a consultation between agencies, and it’s being held for your benefit, Deputy Hollenbeck. Yours too, Deputy Zitto.”
Luke watched Fiertag during this little speech. Dammit, he’s covering for these guys. Canaday had gotten his act together during the distraction.
“He was, according to our source, one of the buyers our source had been doing business with.”
Endicott looked up from his laptop.
“I think I can help you there, Bolton. Agent Canaday is trying to be discreet, of course, but I think we can speak freely here. Our source is, naturally, someone at ease in the criminal circles. He came to our attention during a Treasury buy-and-bust operation a few months ago, and since then has been most helpful in … assisting our inquiries, as the Brits would say. One of his sidelines consists in stolen credit cards, as well as various templates and laminates related to the production of federal documents.”
“Such as driver’s licenses?” asked Luke.
“And American Express cards,” said Endicott, smiling at Luke. “I think you see what we mean here, when we say that, while our source is an active participant in our investigations, he nevertheless must continue to appear to be in his old life—”
“Appear?” said Luke. “He’s getting a free ride, you mean.”
“Would you have him suddenly stop selling stolen or forged documents, then? How to explain his sudden good fortune to his criminal associates? How to preserve his … access … to the criminal milieu? Access, for example, to a buyer who, when the arrest occurred, happened to be the object of a rather … inefficient … takedown attempt on the part of the two of you just this last evening. Or am I misinformed?” He looked at Fiertag over the tops of his wire-frames. Fiertag squirmed in his leather chair.
“Our deputies conducted a thoroughly professional arrest process last night, but these events are by nature chaotic, and it sometimes—”
Canaday was grinning hugely.
“You stepped on your dicks, boyos, don’t say me different. It happens to the best of us, Mister Endicott. I didn’t see you out there on K Street trying to run down our fella, now did I. Don’t be tugging on Luke’s chain like that, there’s a good lad. Luke, they tell me, at one point, you ended up under a car or some such. Things got a bit hectic, I’d say. Had you dropped your wallet or like that?”
In spite of himself, Luke had to grin. Canaday might be a sleazeball careerist with the soul of a swamp adder, but at least he wasn’t a lawyer.
Doc was smiling too.
“No, it was his contact lens. Didn’t find that, did we, Luke?”
Luke shook his head. “No, no we didn’t, Doc, thank you for asking.”
Endicott and Fiertag seemed to resent the alteration in room dynamics. Endicott flicked a switch on his laptop, closed it softly, and folded his long delicate hands on top of it.
“Well, I think you see the picture. This Rona fellow, he was apparently trying to buy some of the counterfeit currency that our source was handling—”
“We’re at the stage where what we’re trying to do is get what’s left out there off the street, roll up all the buyers we can, you understand?” put in Canaday, helpfully.
Endicott paused, took a breath, and went on. “As I understand it, as Agent Canaday came forward to effect the arrest, your man made some resistance.”
“Resistance!” said Canaday, throwing up his hands. “He tried to blow me head off with a bloody great cannon. And I unshriven, a Catholic too.” Canaday was clearly having a very good time, which made Luke uncomfortable, although he had no idea why.
“What’d he show?” asked Doc.
“Show? He showed me a Glock. He showed me the rude end of a bloody great Glock machine pistol. Leave it to the Nazis to come up with a plastic gun.”
“What happened?” asked Luke.
“One of my people shot him. Shot him into a complete state of death.”
“Who?”
“Who was the agent? I don’t think you know her. Sherry Wolokoff. She used to be with our Miami station? Plays soccer all the time? Big-shouldered girl, with a wonderful head of bright red hair.”
“I know her,” said Doc. “She played shortstop last Memorial Day. She’s the one?”
“Yes. Her first.”
“How’s she doing?”
Canaday put on a long face. “Not well. It hits them hard, the young ones. She’s in the shooting board now.”
“Where’s it being held?” asked Luke. Canaday looked at Endicott. Endicott looked at his watch.
“Over at Treasury. As a matter of fact, we need to be there soon, Bolton. So, if that—”
“I’d like to come along,” said Luke.
“Me too,” said Doc.
Endicott looked at Fiertag. Fiertag put his hands out on the carved leather top of his rosewood desk, like a cardinal saying the Kyrie Eleison.
“Luke, I hardly think that’s appropriate. Treasury doesn’t drop in to audit our shooting inquiries, do they?”
“No sir, but we have—”
“I wonder,” said Endicott, “I wonder,” said Endicott, “I wonder if you have a personal … if there’s an element of private vendetta here, to be perfectly … ahh …”
“Presumptuous?” offered Luke.
Endicott bared his teeth.
“Hah, yes … if I may be … presumptuous. Luke—may I call you Luke?—I understand that this Rona fellow was responsible for an assault on a court security guard—”
“A U.S. Marshal,” said Fiertag. “Her name was Aurora Powys. She’s on a disability leave right now.” The way he said it made it clear that the disability was not simply physical. Endicott inclined his head in Fiertag’s direction.
“Yes, Aurora Powys. You worked with her at one time, didn’t you? Luke?”
Arrogant little snot. Doc shifted in his chair, moving forward to the edge of it, keeping half an eye on Luke. Luke said nothing. Endicott took the point as made and stood up, gathering his laptop. Bolton Canaday sent Luke a warning look, then rose to leave. As if in an afterthought, he slapped his breast pocket and pulled out a brown manila envelope. Endicott turned to watch as Canaday walked over to Luke and handed him the envelope.
“What’s this?” said Luke.
“I figured you’d be the Doubting Thomas. You get that way when you want a man real bad.”
Endicott stepped close. “Bolton, I think we’ve given Luke here all the information we really—”
“I know you do, sir, and I thank you for your participation. But you’ve never actually chased a man, have you, sir?”
Canaday waited. Endicott fussed but subsided.
“I thought not. What we do, it’s not quite like a fraternity paper chase across Boston Common, is it Luke? I thought you’d want to see, you know, to get what do they call it now, Doc?”
“Closure?” said Doc.
“Yes,” said Canaday, raising his bony hand, exposing a grimy cuff. He smelled of beer and sandalwood.
“Closure. That was the word.”