Family? A boyfriend, maybe?”
“No, of course not,” she said. “I spoke to no one.”
He smiled. “All of us who work in this field deal with a hundred details every day, a lot of them sensitive. We’d never intentionally reveal anything, but sometimes we make—” he paused, then chose “errors. Maybe we have plans that have to be cancelled due to our responsibilities at Justice.” What in the hell was he getting at?
He smiled again. “You know. You get a call from the boss—your Mr. Brayer, and then you have to break a date. My wife has gotten used to it, but believe me,” he chuckled, “it took many years.”
She saw it coming, but had to wait. He said, “You call your boyfriend and say, ‘Sorry, can’t go. I’ve got to serve a warrant.’ ”
Elizabeth said, coldly, “I just told you I spoke to no one. I have an excellent memory. Now tell me what’s going on.”
This time Grove answered. He was a large man about fifty years old, with small, sharp eyes and a broad, expressionless face. “We’re here to find out why the people you’re investigating seem to know in advance what the next move is. Your superiors consider you bright and perceptive, Miss Waring. Surely that must have crossed your mind.”
“Yes,” she admitted. In fact it had kept her awake until after two last night, but she wasn’t going to tell him.
His expression didn’t change. He said, “Well, it occurred to Mr. Connors too. He’s asked us to find the problem.”
She wondered whether she would be able to keep herself under control. Her head was beginning to throb. “And so you’re asking me.”
He nodded. “And so we’re asking you.”
She said quietly, “But I don’t know. I was just told to do it, and when I got a call from the two agents—but they weren’t agents, were they?—I served the subpoena. I spoke to no one.”
Daly said, “Do you have any suggestions for us, Miss Waring?” So there it was: the chance to serve as the anonymous accuser. “We’re not making much progress.” The methods of interrogators were always the same.
“No,” she said. “I only know I’m not the one. I don’t have any idea how they know what to do or when to do it. It might be they just figured it out. I was the agent in the open. I’d been to FGE the day before and gotten nowhere. The next logical move was to audit their records. Maybe they just put the pieces together.”
The two were already standing up and putting their notepads away.
Elizabeth felt a sudden desperation. She knew it was part of their craft, that they were trained to make her tell them things because she wanted to know what they knew, but she couldn’t help herself. “Wait,” she said. “Whom else are you talking to?”
Daly’s chubby face turned to her in a look of bright hope. “All of the agents, I suppose. The judge and his staff. Are we missing someone?”
She said, “No, I don’t think so.” Watching them leave, she regretted having said anything.
Elizabeth shut the door and dialed Brayer’s room at the Sands. When he answered she said, “John, I’ve just been grilled by two men from—”
He interrupted, “I know, I know. Internal Security. Don’t let it bother you. They’re looking for a leak.”
“I know they’re looking for a leak,” she said in frustration. “But I’m not it.”
“No,” said Brayer, “and neither am I. But I had to put up with it too, and so does everyone else.”
“Then it’s not because I was the one who—”
“No, dammit,” he said. “It isn’t. So forget it. I’ve got things going on here and I can’t take the next hour to hold your hand. So get back to work.”
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“More killings.” He hung up.
ELIZABETH SAT WITH THE DEAD TELEPHONE in her hand. The field reports were still in a pile on the table, set aside to make room for the Internal Security men. But killings. Brayer had said killings. That made the field reports obsolete, she thought. Half of them were more than twelve hours old. The petty chieftains had been running for cover for two days. By now some of them could be anywhere—given twelve hours Damon could be in Hong Kong. Or dead. But Elizabeth had been assigned to the field reports, and the only way back into Brayer’s good graces was to do what you were told. And she had been told to analyze the field reports. But how did Brayer know there had been killings? She picked up the pile of reports and leafed through them quickly. They were almost uniform. There were no reports of murders among them, just the opposite: what she held in her hand were thirty or forty individual ways of saying that nothing was happening. If there were killings, Brayer hadn’t gotten the information from the field, because as soon as a call came in, the typescript was run off and distributed to everyone on the case. Her heart stopped. Oh, God, she thought. Was it the mistake or the suspicion that she was the security leak?
Elizabeth sat motionless for a moment, then remembered she was still holding the telephone, and set it back on the cradle. She thought it through again. No, it wasn’t like Brayer to take someone off a case and say nothing. He wouldn’t leave her in a quiet office with a pile of out-of-date reports to keep her out of the way while the others handled everything sensitive, would he? But then why hadn’t he explained what was going on? Then it hit her. There was another possibility. That was if the killings were local. The field agents would be reporting directly to the local controller. And the controller right now happened also to be the unit head. John Brayer.
There was one way to find out, she thought. If the agents were in the field the controller would call in the report to the FBI office, even if the controller was John Brayer himself. And if Brayer had called in and the report had been withheld from her, she decided, she was damned well going to know why.
The car’s headlights threw a bright wedge of light into the dark Illinois fields and the car rushed forward to occupy it, never quite fast enough to catch up. He drove in the silence of intense concentration. He knew he had to figure it out, but no matter how he arranged the facts, there was something he didn’t know how to account for. It was the thing that was most dangerous.
Maureen spoke. “I didn’t sell you.”
“Huh?” he said.
“I said I didn’t tell them where you were.” Her voice, coming from the darkness, sounded frightened. Of course.
“Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “No, do worry, but not about that. I know you didn’t. You might be stupid enough to sell me to them and then panic when you realized they would take you out too. They’re not stupid enough to send a face I knew. Not unless they didn’t know where I’d be. You did fine. Your fee just doubled.”
He sensed in the darkness that her body relaxed from a rigidity that must have gripped it for some time. Stupid, he thought, both of us—her for being afraid and me for letting her sit there like that and not noticing. And the gun she must have near her hand will disappear now. She won’t let me see it, and she’d deny it if I said it, but I know it’s there. Probably under her skirt, between her legs.
“What now?” she said.
“Now we’ve got trouble,” he said. “Did the old man know the cover?”
“Yes,” she said. “But he didn’t blow it. He wouldn’t and anyway he couldn’t be sure they’d get us both.”
“I suppose,” he said. “But the cover is blown. We’ll get rid of the car in a bit.”
She was silent, so he went back to his concentration. Something was going on. He thought about the comical surprise on Crawley’s face when the slugs had ripped into him in the motel room. But that was just a distraction. Crawley was Bala’s creature. What was he doing in Chicago? Chicago belonged to Toscanzio. It was Toscanzio’s responsibility to get the man who’d killed Castiglione if he was in Illinois. It shouldn’t have been Crawley; they’d never hire an outsider for the one who’d gotten Castiglione. It should have been Toscanzio’s soldiers, maybe half a dozen. And they wouldn’t have sneaked in to do it quietly. They’d have smashed in and demolished him, torn the whole motel down if they had to. It didn’t make sense unless killing Castiglione had worked. He smiled to himself. There was no question about it. The bastards were at each other’s throats.
