Outside, the air hit him like a freshly washed towel, heavy and hot and damp enough to make breathing hard for a moment. Mike waited until Pete cleared the doorway, bag of bottles in hand. 'Spill it.'
'Chairs first. You'd better be sitting down for this.'
Mike gestured at the tatty deck chairs on the rear stoop. 'How bad is it?'
'Bad enough.' Pete dropped into one of the chairs and handed Mike a bottle. 'Go on, sit down.'
Mike sat. 'I don't think anyone's listening here.'
'Indoors.' It was a statement, not a question.
'They lock everything down.' Mike popped the lid off the beer. 'Can't blame them for being suspicious of cops- we don't have that kind of home life.'
'Yeah, well.' Pete glanced up at the roof suspiciously, then shrugged. The rumble of traffic and the scritching of cicadas would make life hard for any eavesdroppers. 'I called Tony Vecchio up today.'
Mike sat bolt upright. 'Shit, man! Not from work-'
'Relax, I'm not that stupid.' Pete took another swig from his bottle.
Mike peered at him. He was obviously rattled. Maybe even as badly rattled as Mike was, in the wake of his little chat with Smith. Explosive collars. What else is going on? 'I'm not going to like this, am I?'
'I needed to ask some questions.' Pete looked uncomfortable. 'We've gone native, you know? Inside FTO, surrounded by the military and their national security obsession, we've stopped trying to do our jobs properly. I don't know about you, but I swore an oath to uphold the law-remember that? Anyway, I wanted to get some perspective. Tony knew about Matt because he was there when Matt came in, so I figured he'd help.'
'You wanted a priest to hear your confession.'
'Exactly.'
Mike sighed. 'Okay, so spill it.'
'Tony stonewalled!' Pete looked angry for a moment. 'First he said he didn't know anything. Then he told me that he'd never heard of Matt, that nobody of that name had come in, there were no WPP admissions this year. Then he told me I'd been suspended on full pay, medical disability in the line of work, for the past ten weeks, and he appreciated how I must feel! I mean, what the fuck?'
'Shit.' Mike tipped the last of his bottle down his throat, then leaned forward. 'You want to know what I think.'
'Yes?'
'Close call.' He wiped his forehead. 'Listen, what you did was amazingly stupid. If you'd asked me… shit. They've farmed us out to the military. We belong to Defense right now, we don't exist on personnel's books-I mean, I'll bet if you went digging you'd find that we've both been listed on medical leave ever since this thing started. And the paperwork on Matt will be a whitewash. He's a ghost, Pete, like the poor fucks in Gitmo, trapped in Daddy Warbucks's machine. Have you met Dr. James yet?'
'James? Isn't he Smith's boss? The political one?'
'Yeah, him. I take it you haven't met… James is a Company man, all the way through. Works for the NSC, runs covert ops, the whole lot. That's who we're working for. And you know what happens to people who go outside official channels in CIA land? You just don't do that. I've been doing some reading in my copious spare time. You, me, we got sucked in because we were already on the edge of something very big and very classified and very black. Eric told me some, some stuff. About how the military perceive the national security implications of what we're up against. It made my hair stand on end. I think he's wrong about some-maybe most-of this, but I couldn't tell him that to his face. Now, I happen to think we ought to be treating this more like a policing problem, ought to be enforcing the law-but doesn't that sort of presuppose that we're dealing with criminals? What I'm hearing is that like Matt, they think we're dealing with another government, a rogue state, like North Korea or Cuba or something. And right now, they've won the argument. I don't see us getting any backup from Justice, Pete. If you start going behind their backs without evidence, they will stick it to you hard. But if we don't, who knows what kind of mess they're going to get us into?'
'Shit.' Pete stared at him.
'Drink.' Mike reached into the bag, thrust another bottle at Pete. 'Listen, we'll work on this together. Just keep an eye on what's going on, okay? Compare notes. Try to remember who we are and what kind of job we're supposed to be doing, so that if the spooks fuck up we'll be in the clear and able to carry on. Maybe talk to Judith, she's FBI, I think she'll see it our way. Form a, I guess, a Justice Department network.' He found he was waving his hands around helplessly. 'We're the underdogs right now. Defense grabbed the ball while our team's back was turned. But it's not going to last forever. And when we get an opportunity to make our case we need to be ready…'
Telephony Intercept Transcript
LOGGED 18:47 04/06
'Hello, who's this?'
'Paulie?'
'Miriam-I mean, hi babe! Wow! It's been ages, I've been worrying about you-'
'Yeah, well, there's been some heavy stuff going down. I take it you heard-'
'How could I not? I'm, like, this side of things is completely firewalled from, you know, your uncle's other business interests, but I've been catching it from all sides. You were right about the shit hitting the fan, then Brill turned up with her usual calm head on and sorted most of it out, but they've been running me ragged and I haven't heard anything from you, you could have written! So what's going on in fairyland?'
'Politics, I think. First they dragged me over there full time, then they wouldn't let me back out. I've been out of the loop so long: I mean, I'm frightened. Anyway, now I'm running some errands for them in New Britain they've eased up a bit. I get to cross over here and make phone calls, y'know, like prisoner's privileges? But that's all I can do right now, until they're sure nobody's made me. I'm officially in France, at least that's what the INS think. Anyway, I am going to get them to clear me so we can do lunch and start putting things back together, soon. Trust me on this, right? Tomorrow I've, well, I've managed to wangle a week in New London. I'm supposed to be moving carpetbags of confidential letters about, but I've figured out a better way. So I get to drop by the works and see who's holding it together, or not as the case may be, bang heads and kick ass, that kind of thing. Then let's do lunch, hey?'
'Sounds like a plan, babe.'
'Well, that's most of the plan, anyway. There is something else. Two somethings, actually. Tell me no if you don't want to get involved, okay?'
'Miriam, would I?'
'Just saying. Look, one of them's probably not an issue. I want you to round me up a prescription for a friend. Nothing illegal but he can't get to see a doctor-he's out of the country-so if you could order it from one of those dodgy Mexican Web sites and mail it to me I'd be ever so grateful.'
'Um, okay. If you say so. What's it you're wanting?'
'Um. Two packs of RIFINAH-300 antibiotic tablets, one hundred tabs per pack, not the small twenty-tablet bottles. They should only set you back a few bucks-it's dirt cheap, they use it all over the third world. As soon as you've got it, mail it to me via your, uh, contact. Family postal service should reach me soon enough.'
'Okay, I think I've got that, RIFINAH-300, a hundred tablets per pack, two packs. That it?'
'Well, there's the other thing. But that's the one I think you might want to punt on.'
'Hmm. Tell me, Miriam, okay? Let me make my own mind up?'
'Okay, it's this: I want all the information you can find-public stuff, company financials, profiles of directors, that sort of thing-on two companies. The first is the Gerstein Center for Reproductive Medicine, in Stony Brook. The second is an outfit called Applied Genomics Corporation. In particular I'm interested in any details you can find about financial transfers from Applied Genomics Corporation to the Gerstein Center-and especially about when they started.'
'Applied Genomics, eh? Is this-is this like our old friends at Proteome?'
'Yes, Paulie. That's why I said you could say no. Just walk away from it and pretend you never heard from me.'
