would do business in hot, dry places where scorpions were common.
Except for one potentially disastrous trip behind the Berlin Wall, Lang's duties had never taken him from his station in the grimy building across the street from the Frankfurt am Main Hauptbahnhof. He had been with the Third Directorate, intel, where he spent his days scanning newspapers from Iron Curtain countries and watching replays of government-sponsored talking heads reading the fiction that passed for news in the Marxist world.
Do not listen to the news broadcast from the imperialist. Western democracies, only that approved by the State; the life you save might be your own.
His one experience in real enemy territory had cured forever his resentment at having not been chosen for ops, Fourth Directorate, those romantic, James Bond swashbucklers of popular fiction. Truth was, they were nuts to take the chances they did.
Informational bureaucrat though he had been, he still took the weapon issued every new graduate of the Agency's training school in Virginia, the Farm.
He looked at it as he might have gazed on his high school letter jacket, a relic of a distant time… if he hadn't swapped the jacket in the backseat of a borrowed Ford for the purported chastity of…
Her name was lost to antiquity.
Other than requisite training, he had never even fired the weapon. Years after leaving the Agency, he had shot a man with the assailant's own gun, a matter of self- defense, and he had killed another, also to preserve his own life.
Ironically, neither was with the firearm he was given for the purpose.
Out of the Agency, he had applied for and been accepted to law school, viewing the profession as just one more form of the chicanery practiced by the Agency. Grateful he was separated from employment she considered dangerous no matter how many times he explained, Dawn had supported him until he graduated.
In spite of exemplary grades, he never considered working in one of the law factories. He went into practice on his own.
His shadowy government contacts steered a certain clientele his way: a Columbian importer who had helped the Agency but had been arrested for intent to distribute the cocaine surprisingly found in his coffee shipments, an officer of a foreign bank who had simply misunderstood U.S. Treasury reporting requirements by a few million dollars.
Not like it was real money, the man had explained in an interview the day of his acquittal due to the government's inability to locate a key witness. The same witness, Lang later learned, who had chosen the week of the trial to avail himself of the use of a yacht cruising the Greek Isles. Lang had no desire to know the name of the boat's owner.
His practice flourished, and he and Dawn hoped for a child until a tumor appeared on an X-ray, stabbing into her vital parts. The end was mercifully quick for her, devastating to him. Years later he never missed a holiday placement of roses on the grave on the hill under the big oak tree, a site that now included the rest of what family he had had.
Lang left the automatic in the drawer and turned to the laptop computer that sat on a small table next to the bed. He clicked it on and punched a series of keys. The last time it had been on was 9:27 the night before.
But he had been at Manuel's then.
A few more taps revealed that the password had withstood several attempts before the machine had shut down as programmed.
Frowning, he reached for a bedside phone. 'Harvey, what time did you take Grumps out last night?'
Harvey, the building concierge, not only enjoyed making a few extra bucks walking or feeding Grumps in Lang's absence; he actually liked the dog.
'Dunno 'xactly, Mr. Reilly. He was full of piss 'n' ginger, so we went for a long 'un. Here to Peachtree Battle, Rivers Road, back to West Wesley. Maybe half an hour, maybe more. I do anything wrong?'
'No,' Lang said. 'Nothing. Just curious.'
The route would have taken a half hour at least, more if Grumps had insisted on exploring every smell he encountered.
Lang sat down on the bed, listening to the crunch of dog food from the kitchen. Someone had tossed the place, no doubt about it. The method had been different but the purpose was the same as whoever had killed Lewis.
Or was it?
The destruction and disarray of the laboratory had been intended to look like a random invasion. What was it Morse had said? A junkie looking to feed a habit. Yet the missing hard drive and notebook pages belied the scenario the killer had wanted believed.
Lang's condominium had been searched by a professional, someone after something very specific. Someone who didn't intend Lang to know.
Or someone leaving something behind.
Standing, he crossed his condo back and forth, removing every switch plate and the cover for every electrical outlet.
He found it in the telephone's receiver. It was a device about the size of the battery for a hearing aid. Not only every word spoken on the phone would be transmitted, but every sound in the apartment as well. He suppressed his rage at the invasion of his personal space and his gut reaction to remove it. Instead he left it in place.
It might be useful.
Before he left, Lang took two hairs from his head. Licking his finger, he stuck the first one to the top of the knob on the door that let out onto the common hallway. The second he put on the underside. Both would fall off at the slightest touch. Any professional would expect the possibility that he had left a telltale and would replace it.
Not many would anticipate a second.
SEVEN
Peachtree Center
227 Peachtree Street
Atlanta, Georgia
Thirty Minutes Later
As usual, Sara was already at her desk outside his office when Lang walked in. He frowned as he took the stack of pink call slips.
'The mayor said it was, important,' she called after him.
It always was.
To the mayor.
Unable to find work with any Atlanta firm amid the very public federal investigation at the end of his term, the mayor had joined a personal-injury group in South Florida where mere suspicion would go unnoticed among the indigenous sleaze.
But the mayor had not moved far enough away to prevent micromanagement of his defense with daily multiple phone calls and at least one trip to Lang's office per month.
The note said the mayor wanted to discuss the tax- evasion counts, possibly the toughest to beat. If you spent it, you presumably had it. Explaining the source of large sums of cash was likely to be embarrassing if not incriminating. The mayor's credit cards reflected less than a thousand dollars a year charged in spite of a publicly flamboyant lifestyle. The gambling trips, the gifts, the dinners had been paid for in cash. Cash was both untraceable and suspect. The excuse of weekly poker games in some crony's basement wasn't going to satisfy the U.S. Attorney. Those proceeds hadn't been reported, either.
The mayor blamed the failure to declare the money on his personal inability to keep adequate books. The government blamed it on his personal inability to keep his hands out of any funds being paid to contractors by the city.
