next touched it and it huffed open again. There was a deep male voice that said, 'Griggs, Lattimer, take the wings. Foltz, Talavera, Jackson, you take point.' After about ten seconds a voice said, 'Left side's clear, Agent Meade.'
Elizabeth leaned close to him and whispered, 'They're FBI.'
He whispered back, 'This is a great time to be quiet.'
'We can let them know we're here, and you'd be safe.'
'You wouldn't. I can hardly miss you from here.'
'I've got a gun aimed at you too.'
'Then we can kill each other, or we can be quiet.'
They stood in silence, unmoving, as they listened to the sounds of the six FBI agents searching the sanctuary. 'Right side's clear too, Agent Meade, and so are the confessionals.'
'All clear in the choir loft.'
'The altar is clear.'
'The chapel is clear.'
'Check the sacristy.'
They heard leather-soled shoes trotting up the aisle toward the sacristy.
'See if there are any doors around that organ up there.' One of the agents who had been by the altar came down the steps and walked back and forth in front of the organ. Now the Butcher's Boy had his gun in his hand. Through the mesh and between the organ pipes, Elizabeth watched the FBI agent moving around a few feet in front of her, but she kept the gun in the corner of her eye. If it came up to aim, she was going to drag that arm down with all her weight. But the agent didn't seem to notice the keyhole in the wooden panel.
'All right. Let's move on,' said Agent Meade. The door at the rear of the church opened once, then again and again, until the church was in silence.
The Butcher's Boy pushed the organ door open, and he lowered the steps to the floor. They both came down into the sanctuary. He replaced the steps, closed the door, and inserted his pick into the keyhole to push a pin tumbler or two out of line to lock the organ door. Elizabeth looked toward the cathedral entrance, then back at him, but he was already walking toward the other side of the sanctuary. 'Wait,' she said.
He stopped, and when he turned toward her, the gun was already in his hand. She showed him she still had her gun, and left it pointing in his general direction, but didn't aim. 'I just wanted to stay together.'
'I'm going out through the rectory door. Catch up with the FBI agents on the street and you'll be fine.'
'But we're not done talking.'
'That's not what I want to talk about,' he said. He began to back toward the other side, his gun still held steady. 'You've got nothing to offer me.'
'In another day or two, protective custody might sound really good.'
'Then we'll talk another day.' He kept moving slowly backward.
'Give me a phone number,' she said.
'I don't have a phone.'
'Take mine.' She pulled it out and prepared to toss it.
'So you can track me by GPS satellite?'
'Then take my number. 202 555-8990. Can you remember it?'
'202 555-8990.'
He turned into the space to the left of the altar and past the sacristy. After a second she heard a standard- size door open and then shut.
Elizabeth put her gun into her purse and stood still, listening. It was only after about a minute that she realized what she had been listening for was gunshots.
27
He was out on the street alone again. There was a feeling he was getting from Elizabeth Waring that she wasn't exactly telling the truth. She wasn't telling him something that she considered important. She said she was interested in getting him into a guarded room someplace and asking him questions. That wasn't a surprise. But she was alone. When the FBI showed up, she wasn't much happier to see them than he was. She had told him the arrival of FBI agents was an opportunity to save both of them, but it had sounded like a bluff. When he had refused, she had seemed almost relieved.
She must have been making offers she hadn't cleared with any of her bosses. She was just hoping if she got him, they'd be glad enough to back her up. But for the moment, she wasn't telling anybody what she was up to because they would have stopped her. That was the way her pitch felt to him. It wasn't even a very good deal. She hadn't even offered immunity from prosecution. Was he supposed to think that was an oversight? The most peculiar part of her behavior was that she wasn't just hunting with the hounds anymore. She was hiding with the foxes too. That had to be a new experience for her, and it might make her easier to deal with later if he needed to.
He reached into his pocket and took out the little leather wallet he had picked out of her jacket pocket while he'd had his arm around her on the street. On the front was a deeply etched seal with an eagle on it. He opened the wallet and saw it was her Justice Department identification. He put it back into his pocket and kept walking to the parking structure where he'd left his car.
Parking structures were often good places to kill people. He'd used them a number of times, but it was important to check first for surveillance cameras, to be sure they were clear like this one. But he'd been in and out of this one already and it was fairly well lighted, so it was possible he'd been seen by people working for Vince Pugliese. He took a few moments to look for smudged finger marks on the car, unlocked it, and opened the hood to see if there were any signs of tampering. He didn't see any. He knew that if there was a device, there would be an attempt to place it where he wouldn't see it. He looked under the car, then closed the hood, and started the car. Searching for bombs was really only looking for an amateur's clumsy errors. A pro's work was invisible. A bomb could be set off by turning the ignition key, but it could also be done by running a wire from the brake lights or the headlights, or by making a call with a cell phone that sent a current to an initiator, or by a rocker switch that closed a circuit when the car hit a bump. Since the army had been fighting enemies for years in the Middle East who used improvised explosive devices, there were now probably thousands of young guys with fresh discharge papers who knew their way around explosives better than he did.
He backed out of his space and drove off the lot. It was ten minutes before he stopped bracing for the explosion that hadn't come. He drove a few miles away before he began searching for a twenty-four-hour mailing and copying center. When he found one in a mini-mall, he parked on the street and went inside. He used a computer to match the print font of Elizabeth Waring's ID, typed the name Elliot Lee Warren, and printed and trimmed it. He positioned it on the identification so it covered her name. He used a webcam to take his own picture, printed it in a small format, put it over her picture, and then scanned the identification and printed it. The finished identification would not have fooled experts, but he didn't intend to show it to any. He deleted everything he'd done on the computer. Then he paid his bill. He used the laminating machine to laminate it, paid for that, and left.
He drove back downtown toward Vincent Pugliese's building. He had a very strong feeling about what Pugliese was doing now that there was only one remaining Castiglione brother, and if he was right, he only had one more stop to make. He parked his car by the curb on a street three blocks from Pugliese's building. It was about nine o'clock now. The early evening traffic had drained people out of the center of the city toward the suburbs, but when he reached the area around Pugliese's building, it was still not back to normal. There were still men in the streets in twos and threes when any men walking should have been alone, heading for parking structures to claim their cars and drive home.
He was losing the time of night when he could hope to get to Pugliese. If he stayed on these streets until everyone out here was either a gangster or a cop, the only things that could happen were that he would be recognized and killed or arrested. He walked to the alley behind the building, went down the ramp into the underground parking lot, and began to search. He opened the door labeled JANITOR'S STORAGE, then tried the ELECTRICAL door, then one that was unmarked but contained an array of vertical pipes and valve wheels. Finally he found a door with RISERS stenciled on it. He opened it and saw there was a stairway leading upward into the dark.
