be cold about these things, I yanked it out and stuffed it in my pocket, because my fingerprints were on it, and I didn’t want the police to know I’d been there. I’d already killed two men that morning, and it would stretch credulity if they found me with another corpse, like I just happened to be involved in another homicide, and, gee, what a terrifically funny coincidence, huh?
I got up and grabbed Katrina’s arm, then tugged her down the street. Some of the kids I’d seen drinking at the bodega had come around the corner, attracted by the dead man’s scream, and they got a good look at the two of us scurrying away. There was nothing I could do about that, unless I wanted to race back there and threaten them with a bloody Bic pen. From the looks of them, that would be a very stupid idea. This was one of those neighborhoods where seven-year-olds get Uzis for their birthdays. Anyway, with any luck they’d be the kind of kids who’d never tell the police anything, one of those code-of-the-hood things. Even if they did talk, what could they say? They saw a man and woman running away from the crime scene?
Katrina and I intermittently walked and ran, block after block, until I was sure we’d put enough distance between us and the corpse that even a local sweep wouldn’t catch us. I finally dragged her into a pizza shop and we dodged into a booth near the back.
She reached into her purse and withdrew a Handi Wipe, passed it to me, and said, “Wipe your hair. You got splattered by that man’s blood.”
I did as I was told, saying, “Thanks.”
She nodded. “You always show girls such a good time?”
“Not always.”
“No wonder you’re thirty-nine and single.”
“Yeah, no wonder.”
The good news here was that her sense of humor seemed to be coming back. What does that tell you about her? Line her up to get murdered and suddenly she’s all bubbles. Interesting.
“What did we do?” she asked.
“Damned if I know,” I admitted. “But it’s got to be the same people who tried to kill us in Moscow.”
“Not necessarily.”
She was right, of course. There could be two different groups after us. There could be a dozen. But being right, and being right, are two different things. These were the same bastards; I was sure of it. So was she.
I got up and went to the counter and ordered a pizza, partly because I was hungry and partly because I didn’t want to arouse attention from the shop’s proprietors, who were under the perverse impression that their booths were reserved for paying customers.
When I got back to the table, Katrina was playing with a napkin and staring at the tabletop. She looked perfectly calm. It was impossible to tell she was contemplating the fact she’d just nearly gotten her head cleaved in by a murderer wielding a butcher knife.
I said, “You did good back there. It took nerve to pull out that spray while he came after you.”
“Practice, practice, practice. Grow up in TriBeCa back in the good years and life was always exciting.” Her eyes wandered around the shop, then she said, “What are we going to do?”
“We’re not going back to our apartments. We’re not going back to our cars. We better assume they’re very well connected and getting more desperate.”
“The police? The FBI?”
“Eventually. But not until we figure out what to tell them.”
She nodded at that, because we were both lawyers, and the first thing every attorney thinks of is how much not to disclose to the police. Not that either of us would consider lying, but there’s always the tricky question of how high you want to stick your ass in the air. We’d introduced ourselves to the CIA’s most closely held secret asset, hid the truth when somebody tried to kill us in Moscow, fled from a crime scene, and possibly committed a few other misdemeanors-littering even-the sum of which could get us in very ugly trouble with the law. I had not the slightest doubt what General Clapper was going to do to me when this story came out. If I didn’t have so many other things on my mind, I would’ve been contemplating what I wanted to do after I left the Army.
However, we were obviously long past the point where our legal careers were our overriding concerns. I said, “Do we agree we’ve stumbled onto something important enough to cause our deaths?”
She automatically said, “Agreed,” which, considering the circumstances, wasn’t any stretch.
“Do we agree Morrison’s probably innocent, that somebody’s trying to keep us from proving that?”
She hesitated, and in a very lawyerly tone said, “Explain that.”
“The evidence suggests Morrison’s been framed. By whom is debatable, but whoever did it wants to keep it that way. You and I have somewhere, somehow, touched something that puts us at risk.”
“Okay,” she admitted, very practically.
“What is it we touched?”
“You’re the one with the theories. Tell me.”
“Try this,” I said, and she bent forward, her eyes searching my face. “What’s this whole thing about? What was Mary working on all those years? What did Morrison’s arrest solve?”
“The mole hunt.”
“Right. The CIA and FBI knew somebody was giving the Russians things… important things… sensitive things. They caught lots of small fish, and even some big fish-Ames and Hanssen-but that didn’t tie all the knots. The molehunters were still stubbornly plugging away, still following clues, still tracking their prey. Eventually, they’d catch him-or her. It was just a matter of time and circumstance. So the Russians fed them Morrison. They framed him with enough things and in such a way that almost any open questions would be answered.”
“So the mole is still operating?”
“And somehow, we’ve touched something that puts him or her at risk.”
The girl behind the counter called out my number, so I went up and got our pizza. We sat and munched for a while. What I’d said made sense. It wasn’t necessarily correct, but it made sense. There were other explanations, but if I was right about Morrison being innocent then you had to seriously consider this possibility.
And if you agreed with that, you’d agreed with this, too: Whoever did the job on Morrison had gone to a lot of time and trouble. They had had somebody tip off the CIA in the first place. They had planted documents covered with his fingerprints in that vault in Moscow, then released them to the CIA.
All of which added up to this: Whoever did this was an intelligence professional with extraordinary resources, somebody in the CIA or the SVR who knows espionage intimately. Possibly, maybe even definitely, somebody with tentacles in both intelligence services.
Katrina finally said, “The FBI won’t believe a word of it. They’ll think we’re a couple of sleazy attorneys trying to get our client off.”
“Yes, they probably will,” I agreed, digging into a particularly greasy slice of pepperoni with sausage, struggling to ignore its resemblance to the gruesome stuff that had splattered out of the killer’s eye an hour before.
She asked, “Any ideas how to handle that?”
Instead of answering that, I said, “How much do you know about lie detectors?”
“What I learned in law school. They’re considered fairly valid. Some study was done that gave them something like a ninety-eight percent accuracy rate.”
“Do you remember what accounts for the other two percent or so?”
“Remind me.”
“Lie detectors work by sensing changes in your body temperature and normal body rhythms. There are chemicals that fool the machine. Supposedly, you can even train yourself to defeat them, like Buddhist meditation techniques, where you disenfranchise your mind from your body.”
“Your point being?”
I swallowed hard once or twice. “Let’s talk about Mary.” My face turned dark as I added, “I went over and had a chat with her last night. It wasn’t pretty.”
“How ugly was it?”
“She admitted she helped take down her husband. They approached her months ago. I don’t know how big her involvement was, but it had to be substantial because they were reporting back to her on what they were finding.” I squirmed around uncomfortably, then added, “She, uh, well, she also admitted she’s one of Eddie’s witnesses.”
