But she was also a shade haughty as she stood inside the door looking for someone to come forward and claim her, the sign of the middle-rank bureaucrat.
Griffin let her stew.
Finally he stepped out of the booth, caught her eye, and nodded. She walked stiffly past tables and booths toward him.
“Ms. Lowenstein,” he said.
Lily nodded to control her apprehension. “And you are?”
“That doesn't matter. Sit down.”
She sat, nervous and uneasy, so she went on the attack. “How did you find out about my debts?”
Bill Griffin smiled thinly. “You don't really care about all that, Ms. Lowenstein, do you? Who I am, where I got the debts, why I bought them up. None of it matters a damn, right?” He gazed at her trembling cheeks and lips. She caught his look and stiffened her face. Inwardly he nodded. She was terrified, which made her vulnerable to alternatives. “I have your markers.” He watched her brown eyes as they shifted uneasily. “I'm here to offer you a way to get out from under.”
She snorted derisively. “Out from under?”
No gambler cared much about simply erasing debt. Gambling was a compulsion, an illness. Debt was an embarrassment and danger, but it had little impact until it meant the tracks, the bookmakers, anyone who ran a game would refuse to let you play without cash on the table. Griffin knew Lily was in a daily scramble to come up with enough to place more than a five-dollar track bet.
So he offered her the bone that wagged this dog's tail: “You can start fresh. I wipe away your debts. No one ever knows, and I give you enough to start over. Sound good?”
“A fresh start?” An excited flush appeared above Lowenstein's collar. For a moment, her eyes were bright with excitement. But just as quickly, she frowned. She was in trouble, but she was not an idiot. “That depends on what I have to do for it, doesn't it?”
In his military intelligence days, Griffin had been one of the army's best recruiters of assets behind the Iron Curtain. Lure them with the personal advantages, the moral principles, the rightness of the cause until they were compromised. Then when they balked at what you asked them to do, and they always did sooner or later, drop the carrot, tighten the screws, and lean. It was not the aspect of his job he had liked most, but he had been good at it, and it was time to lean on this woman.
“No, not really.” His voice dropped thirty degrees. “It depends on nothing. You can't pay me off, and you can't be exposed. If you think you can do either, get up and walk out now. Don't waste my time.”
Lily turned red. She bristled. “Now you listen to me, you arrogant?”
“I know,” Griffin cut her off. “It's hard. You're the boss, right? Wrong. I'm the boss now. Or tomorrow you'll be out of a job, with no chance of getting another. Not in the government, not in D.C., probably not anywhere.”
Lily's stomach turned to stone. Then to mush. She started to cry. No! She would not cry! She never cried. She was the boss. She…
“It's okay,” Griffin said. “Cry. Get it out. It's hard, and it's going to get harder. Take your time.”
The more he spoke compassionately, the harder Lily wept. Through her tears, she watched him lean back, relaxed. He waved to the waitress and pointed at his glass. He did not point at her or ask what she wanted. This was not social; this was business. Whoever he was, she realized suddenly, it was not he who was blackmailing her. He was only the messenger. Doing a job. Indifferent. Nothing personal.
When the waitress brought his beer, Lily turned her head away, ashamed to be seen red-eyed and crying. She had never had to deal with anything like this, anyone like this, and she felt terribly alone.
Griffin sipped his beer. It was time to produce the carrot again. “Okay, feel better? Maybe this'll help. Think about it this way ? the ax was going to fall someday. This way, you get it over with, wipe the slate clean, and I give you a little extra, say fifty thousand, to get you started again. All for a couple of hours' work. Probably less time, if you're as good at your job as I think you are. Now, that's not so bad, is it?”
Wipe the slate clean… fifty thousand… The words burst into her brain like a blaze of sunshine. Start again. The nightmare over. And money. She could really start over. Get help. Therapy. Oh, this was never going to happen again. Never!
She dabbed her eyes. She suddenly wanted to kiss this man, hug him. “What… what do you want me to do?”
“There, right to the point,” Griffin said approvingly. “I knew you were smart. I like that. I need a smart person for this.”
“Don't try to flatter me. Not now.”
Griffin laughed. “Feisty too. Got the spirit back, right? Hell, no one's even going to get hurt. Just a few records erased. Then you're home free.”
Records? Erased? Her records! Never. She shuddered, and then she took hold of herself. What had she expected? Why else would they need her? She was a record librarian. Chief of Federal Resource Medical Clearing House. Of course, it was medical records.
Griffin watched her. This was the critical moment. That first shock of a new asset knowing what he or she was actually going to have to do. Betray their country. Betray their employer. Betray their family. Betray a trust. Whatever it was. And as he watched, he saw the moment pass. The internal battle. She had gotten a grip on herself.
He nodded. “Okay, that's the bad part. The rest is all downhill. Here's what we want. There's a report to Fort Detrick and CDC and probably to a lot of other places overseas, too, that we need deleted from all the records. Wiped out, erased clean. All copies. It never existed. The same with any World Health Organization reports of virus outbreaks and/or cures in Iraq in the last two years. Those, plus all records of a couple of telephone calls. Can you do that?”
She was still too shocked to speak. But she nodded.
“Now, there's one other condition. It must be done by noon.”
“By noon? Now? During office hours? But how ??”
“That's your problem.”
All she could do was nod again.
“Good.” Griffin smiled. “Now, how about that drink?”
CHAPTER TEN
Smith worked feverishly in the Level Four lab, pushing against a wall of fatigue. How had Sophia died? With Bill Griffin's warning ringing in his head, and considering the lethal attacks on him in Washington, he could not believe her death had been an accident. Yet there was no doubt how she had died ? acute respiratory distress syndrome from a deadly virus.
At the hospital, the doctors had told him to go home, to get some sleep. The general had ordered him to follow the doctors' advice. Instead, he had said nothing and driven straight to Fort Detrick's main ate. The guard saluted sadly as he passed. He had parked in his usual of near USAMRIID's monolithic, yellow brick-and-concrete building. Exhaust ventilators on the roof blew an endless stream of heavily filtered air from the Level Three and Four labs.
Walking in a semi-trance of grief and exhaustion, carrying the refrigerated containers of blood and tissue from the autopsy, he had showed his security ID badge to the guard at the desk, who nodded to him sympathetically. On automatic pilot, he had continued walking. The corridors were like something in a hazy dream, a floating maze of twists and turns, doors and thick glass windows on the containment labs. He paused at Sophia's office and looked in.
A lump formed in his throat. He swallowed and hurried on to the Level Four suite where he suited up in his containment suit.
