sat down and lowered his steaming coffee to the floor. The smell of it filled the room.
“I’m Special Agent John Peoples with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
“Good for you. What am I doing here?”
“You are here because you do not listen.”
He brought his eyes to mine to make sure I was doing what he just said I do not do. He was my age, maybe a little older. He had all of his hair and it was a little too long for the bureau. I guessed that it wasn’t a style choice. He was just too busy to get it properly cut.
His eyes were the thing. Every face has a magnetic feature, the thing that draws you in. A nose, a scar, a cleft chin. With Peoples everything was drawn to the eyes. They were deeply set and dark. They were worried. They carried a secret burden.
“You were told to stand down, Mr. Bosch,” he said. “You were told rather explicitly to leave things alone and yet here we are.”
“Can you answer a question?”
“I can try. If it’s not classified.”
“Is my watch classified? Where’s my watch? It was given to me when I retired and I want it back.”
“Mr. Bosch, forget about your watch for now. I am trying to get something through that thick skull of yours but you don’t want it to get through, do you?”
He reached down for his coffee and took a sip. He grimaced as he burned his mouth. He put the cup back down on the floor.
“More important things are at work here than your private investigation and your hundred-dollar retirement watch.”
I put a look of surprise on my face.
“You really think that’s all they spent on me after all those years?”
Peoples frowned and shook his head.
“You are not helping yourself here, Mr. Bosch. You are compromising an investigation that is vitally significant to this country and here all you want to do is show how clever you are.”
“This is the national security rap, right? It is, isn’t it? Well, Special Agent Peoples, you can hang on to it for next time. I don’t consider a murder investigation to be unimportant. There are no compromises when it comes to murder.”
Peoples stood up and stepped toward me until he was looking directly down at me. He leaned over the bed, putting his hand against the wall for support.
“Hieronymus Bosch,” he yelled, actually pronouncing it correctly. “You are trespassing! You are driving the wrong way down a one-way street! Do you understand!”
He then turned and went back to his chair. I almost laughed at the theatrics and for a moment thought that he did not realize that I had spent twenty-five years working in rooms like these.
“Am I getting through to you at all?” Peoples said, his voice calm once again. “You are not a cop. You carry no badge. You have no provenance, no case. You have no standing.”
“It used to be a free country. That used to be enough standing.”
“It’s not the same country it used to be. Things have changed.”
He proffered the file held in his hand.
“The murder of this woman is important. Of course it is. But there are other things at play here. More important matters. You must step back from it, Mr. Bosch. This is the final warning. Stand down. Or we will stand you down. And you won’t like it.”
“I bet I’ll end up back here? Right? With Mouse and the others? The other enemy combatants. Isn’t that what you call them? Does anyone even know about this place, Agent Peoples? Anyone outside your own little BAM squad?”
He seemed momentarily taken aback by my knowledge and use of the term.
“I recognized Mouse when they brought me in. I was window shopping.”
“And from that you think you know what goes on here?”
“You’re working the guy. It’s obvious and that’s fine. But what if he’s the one who killed Angella Benton? What if he killed the bank security man? And what if he killed an FBI agent, too? Don’t you care about what happened to Martha Gessler? She was one of your own. Has the world changed that much? Is a special agent no longer special under these new rules of yours? Or does the line change according to convenience? Am I an enemy combatant, Agent Peoples?”
I could see it hurt. My words opened an old wound if not an old debate. But then a resolve came across his face. He opened the file in his hands and took out the printout I had made at the library. I could see the mugshot of Aziz.
“How did you know about this? How did you make this connection?”
“You people.”
“What are you talking about? No one here would tell you -”
“They didn’t have to. I saw your man tailing me in the library. Make a note of that-he’s not that good. Tell him to try Sports Illustrated next time. I knew something was up so I ran a search through the newspaper files and came up with that. I printed it out because I knew it might flush you people out. And it did. Your kind are very predictable.
“Anyway, then I saw Mouse when they were walking me down the hall and I sort of put things together. Money from my robbery was under the seat of his car when you arrested him. But you don’t care about that or the two and maybe three murders attached to it. You just want to know where that money was going. And you don’t want a little thing like justice for the dead to get in the way of that.”
Peoples slowly slid the printout back into the file. I could see his face changing, growing darker around the eyes. I had stuck my words directly into a nerve.
“You have no idea what the world is like out there or what we are doing about it in here,” he said. “You can sit here and be smug and talk about your ideas of justice. But you have no fucking idea what is out there.”
My response to that was a smile. My words came readily.
“You can save that speech for the politicians who change the rules for you until there are no rules anymore. Until something like justice for a murdered and violated woman adds up to nothing in the equation. That’s what’s going on out there.”
Peoples leaned forward. He was about to spill and he wanted to make damn sure I got it.
“Do you know where Aziz was going with that money? We don’t know but I can tell you where I think he was going with it. To a training camp. A terrorist training camp. And I’m not talking about in Afghanistan. I’m talking about within a hundred miles of our border. A place where they train people to kill us. In our buildings, in our planes. In our sleep. To come across that line and kill us with blind disregard for who we are and what we believe. Are you going to tell me that I’m wrong, that we should not do everything we can to find such a place if it exists? That we should not take whatever measures are necessary with that man to get the information we need from him?”
I leaned back across the mattress until my back was against the wall. If I’d had a cup of coffee I wouldn’t have ignored it the way he was ignoring his.
“I’m not telling you anything,” I said. “Everybody’s got to do what they’ve got to do.”
“Wonderful,” he said sarcastically. “Words of wisdom. I’m going to get a wall plaque for my office and put that right on it.”
“You know, I was in a trial once and the lawyer on the other side said something I always try to remember. She quoted a philosopher whose name I don’t recall offhand-I’ve got it written down at the house. But this guy said that whoever is out there fighting the monsters of our society should make damn sure that they don’t become monsters themselves. See, because then all is lost. Then we don’t have a society. I always thought that was a good line.”
“Nietzsche. And you almost got the quote right.”
“Getting the quote right isn’t what matters. It’s remembering what it means.”
Peoples reached into the pocket of his coat. He pulled out my watch. He threw it to me and I started putting it on. I looked at the face. The hands of the clock were set against a gold detective’s badge with the city hall on it. I noted the time and saw that I had been in the cube longer than I had thought. It was almost dawn.
