down. Take the ramp to the subbasement-space nine is reserved for you.”
“Three-two-zero-four, subbasement, space nine. Got it, thanks.”
“No problem.” Then, under his breath, as the blue Prizm rolled through the gate and started up the hill: “Who’d you have to blow to park up there?”
Inside, the security precautions were no less stringent. A guard met Linda in the subbasement garage and escorted her to an elevator that communicated only with the lobby, where he turned her over to Cynthia Pool, an efficient, perfectly preserved clerk-secretary in her late fifties wearing a dress-for-success outfit from the early eighties-tailored navy pantsuit, white blouse with a ruffled bow, black Naturalizers with stacked heels.
“Very impressive security,” remarked Linda, as Miss Pool led her to a second elevator, which, to Linda’s surprise, had buttons for six floors-three of them turned out to be underground.
“None of it’s for us, hon. We’re only here because they needed our office space at headquarters.”
The elevator doors slid silently open; Linda followed her guide down a series of white corridors remarkable for their featurelessness. No nameplates on the doors, all of which were blue, all of which were closed. No art on the walls, and the only signs were for fire exits.
“Now, pay attention to the route,” warned Miss Pool, turning right, then left, then right again. “If you lose your way and wind up somewhere you’re not supposed to be, you could find yourself up in Counterintelligence being interrogated with a rubber hose.” She stopped abruptly and slipped the picture ID hanging on a chain from her neck into a slot mounted outside yet another anonymous-looking blue door.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Only about the rubber hose-they’re a little sensitive in Counterintelligence, these days. After you.”
Exhausted from her long walk, Linda felt her legs start to weaken as she crossed the threshold, and sent up a quick prayer:
And her prayer was answered, after a fashion: just inside the door stood a file cabinet tall enough for Linda to lean against casually while her legs recovered. It struck her as an odd place to put a file cabinet-then she saw that the little anteroom was so crammed with free-standing metal cabinets, white cardboard record boxes, precarious stacks of perforated computer printouts, and collapsing slag heaps of overflowing red, brown, or buff accordion file folders that there was scarcely room left over for the secretary’s desk and chair.
Miss Pool edged past Linda without comment and rapped with sharp knuckles on the interior door of the suite. “Linda Abruzzi is here.”
“Already? Jesus H. Christ, the body isn’t even cold yet.” The voice was a little too hearty for nine o’clock in the morning, which fit the stories Linda had heard about her predecessor’s drinking, part of his legend by now, along with his size, his eccentric wardrobe, his mastery of the Affective Interview, his heroism in the Maxwell case, and his open contempt for the Bureau-cracy. “Come on in.”
Linda let go of the file cabinet, found to her relief that her legs had regained their strength, picked her way across the crowded anteroom, and opened the door to see an enormous bald man in a plaid sport coat on his knees in front of yet another file cabinet.
“One question,” said Special Agent E. L. Pender, FBI, soon to be Ret., marking his place in the roll-out bottom file drawer with his left hand, reaching up to shake Linda’s hand with his right. “How bad did you have to fuck up to get sent here?”
“I take it you haven’t read my personnel file,” she replied. Even kneeling, he was so tall that Linda didn’t have to stoop to shake his hand, which was roughly the size of a waffle iron.
Pender glanced pointedly around the windowless office-if anything, it was even more cluttered with printouts, file folders, record boxes, and file cabinets than the anteroom-and shrugged. “It’s around here someplace. But I don’t pay much attention to personnel records-and if you’d ever seen mine, you’d understand why.”
“I heard you had your own coffee cup hanging on the rack over at OPR,” joked Linda. The Office of Professional Responsibility was the Justice Department’s equivalent of an internal affairs division.
“Only a rumor. But they do know I take it black. Have a seat, take a load off.”
Linda hesitated-the only chair in the room was behind the desk, which was buried under yet another slag heap of computer printouts and file folders.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Pender, reading her mind. “That’s your chair, that’s your desk, this is your office now.” He took the file folder he’d been looking at and turned it sideways in the drawer before standing up.
“What about you?” Linda tested the stability of the desk chair, then lowered herself into it carefully, using both hands on the arms for balance the way the physical therapist in San Antone had taught her.
“I’m gone, I’m history. The eagle flies until the end of the month, but I had some vacation saved up, and it was use it or lose it. I only came in today to finish going through these old files, refresh what’s left of my memory- some idiot publisher’s paying me a shitload for my memoirs. They’re also paying somebody else a shitload to write them, thank God.”
“But aren’t you supposed to be training me or something?”
“For what? They’re shutting down Liaison Support at the end of the year, when Steve McDougal retires. It’s outlived its function-everybody’s on-line with everybody nowadays. That’s why I asked how bad you fucked up-no offense intended.”
“None taken. I was afraid it was something like that.”
“Now that I’ve seen you motorvatin’, though, I’m guessing it has more to do with that.” Pender cleared off a space and perched one enormous cheek on the edge of the desk-his thigh was nearly as wide around as Linda’s waist. “What’s the story?”
Linda took a long, deep breath, let it out slowly. Might as well get this over. “MS,” she said. “MS is the story-I was diagnosed with primary progressive multiple sclerosis a few months ago.”
Pender didn’t miss a beat. “Dang,” he said. “I hate it when that happens.”
Not quite the reaction she’d been expecting-Linda let out a startled laugh. “Yeah, me too,” she said after a moment, then quickly changed the subject. “So what’s my job exactly? What is it I’m supposed to do around here?”
“Do?” Pender snorted derisively. “Frankly, my dear, nobody gives a toasted fart.”
3
“You okay in there, sweetheart?” Simon Childs tapped gently on the bathroom door. Sometimes Missy only wanted to be sure the pager would actually summon him; other times she did it out of pure mischief.
“Mo hah, mo hah.”
And for a strange, out-of-time moment, as he approached the tub, Simon saw his baby sister not as she was now, but as he still held her in his mind’s eye: a darling, round-faced, whitey-blond five-year-old Kewpie doll with a loving heart and an unquenchable sense of wonder. Then she broke the spell by bleating “Mo hah!” again in her deep-toned, uninflected voice. Simon blinked and found himself looking down at a naked, waterlogged, sparsely haired, morbidly obese, forty-nine-year-old idiot with a protruding tongue and slit eyes lost in folds of fat, whose pale skin was tinged blue as a result of the cardiac condition her doctors had predicted would prove fatal before another year had passed.
Best not to think about that, though. Simon and Missy had been abandoned by their mother after their father’s death and were raised by a paternal grandfather as tyrannical as he was wealthy. After his death, it was just the two of them, their trust funds, and the hired help. Simon was fifty-one now; for forty-nine years Missy had been the only constant in his life, and no matter how often Simon told himself it was better this way, more merciful for her to predecease him than for him to leave her behind, he knew in his heart that he was going to be lost
