'My, my, what's that?'
'It's the last sketches from Trig Carter's book. Real damn interesting,' said Bob, loudly.
'How'd you find it?'
'What?'
What was wrong with his ears?
'I said, 'How did you find it?'
' 'When I thought about his last painting, I figured it, pretty close. The reason the painting was so different was his clue: his way of saying to those who came after him, 'Look this over.' But no one ever came. Not until me.'
'Nice work,' said Bonson.
'What's in it?'
'What?'
What was wrong with his ears?
'I said, 'What's in it?'
' 'Oh. Just what you'd expect,' said Bob, still a bit loud.
'People, places, things he ran into as he began to prepare his symbolic explosion of the math building. A couple of nice drawings of Donny.'
'Trig Carter was a traitor,' said Bonson.
'Yeah?' said Bob mildly.
'Do tell.'
'Give it over here,' said Bonson.
'You don't want to see the drawings, Bonson? They're pretty damned interesting.'
'We'll look at them. That's enough.'
'Oh, it gits better. There's a nice drawing of this Fitzpatrick.
Damn, that boy could draw. It's Pashin, everybody will be able to tell. That's quite a find, eh? That's proof, cold, solid dead-on proof the peace movement was infiltrated by elements of Soviet intelligence.'
'So what?' said Bonson.
'That's all gone and forgotten.
It doesn't matter.'
'Oh, no?' said Bob.
'See, there's someone else in the drawing. Poor Trig must have grown extremely suspicious, so one day, late, right after the big May Day mess, he followed Fitzpatrick. He watched him meet somebody.
He did. He watched them deep in conversation. And he recorded it.'
Bob held it up, a folded piece of paper, the lines that were Pashin brilliantly clear.
Bob unfolded the rest of the drawing.
'See, Bonson, here's the funny part,' said Bob, loudly.
'There's someone else here. It's you.'
There was a moment of silence. Bonson's eyes narrowed tightly, and then he relaxed, turned to his team and smiled. He almost had to laugh.
'Who are you, Bonson?' Swagger asked, more quietly now.
'Really, I'd like to know. I had some ideas. I just couldn't make no sense of them. But just tell me. Who are you? What are you? Are you a traitor? Are you a professional Soviet agent masquerading as an American? Are you some kind of cynic playing the sides against each other? Are you in it for the money? Who are you, Bonson?'
'Kill him?' asked one of the men on the team, holding up a suppressed Beretta.
'No,' said Bonson.
'No, not yet. I want to see how far he's gotten.'
'Finally it makes sense,' Bob said.
'The great CIA mole. The big one they've been hunting all these years.
Who makes a better mole than the head mole hunter?
Pretty goddamned smart. But what's the deal? Why did no one ever suspect you?'
He could sense that Bonson wanted to tell him. He had probably never told anyone, had repressed his reality so deep and imposed such discipline on himself that it was almost not real to him, except when it needed to be. But now at last, he had a chance to explain.
'The reason I was never suspected,' he said finally, 'was because they recruited me. I never went to
