"You and your brother. Do it, Frederickson. Then step away from the stacks to where I can see your whole body. Don't try to bandy words with me or attempt any other kind of distraction. I'm an excellent marksman, and if I even sense that you're going to try to move on me, I'll put a bullet through your heart."
"Wouldn't that mess up your tidy little office here?"
"I'll just throw out your corpse along with the bloody books and magazines. The office needs cleaning anyway."
"Yeah, but how much fun would that be? I thought you specialized in heart removal."
"You're trying to bandy words, Frederickson. I have warned you."
I regarded the black bore of his Glock, which was steady and remained aimed directly at my chest. I took out the Seecamp, tossed it after the Beretta.
"Now sit on the stack of magazines to your right. Both feet flat on the floor, hands on your knees."
I sat.
"How did you find out about me?"
"Didn't you read in my dossier that I'm arguably the world's premier private investigator?"
"I thought we had solved the problem of people being willing to talk to you and your brother."
"Now there's a startling admission if ever I've heard one."
"It doesn't make any difference. You'll eventually tell me who steered you toward me, and that person will pay with agony and death."
"Wooaa. Tough talk for a company lackey. You can certainly kill me, but what you can't do is impress me. It doesn't take any balls to inform on your people, torture, and kill when you do what you do. Now, if you really had been what so many Haitians believed you to be, that would be a different matter. The immigrants and exiles here consider you a hero, but all you really are is one more chickenshit informer who's been on the CIA payroll for years."
Shadows moved in his ebony eyes. He leaned against the door-jamb, blinked slowly as he regarded me. I stared back. Finally he said, "Informer? Hardly. It appears you don't know as much about me as I thought you did. I fear you don't appreciate my. . work."
"So you're a full-fledged field operative, maybe a case officer. Big deal."
He grunted. "We don't have titles in my department. My department doesn't have a name. We don't keep organizational charts."
"You work for Ops."
He raised his white eyebrows slightly. "Do I?"
He most certainly did. But the idea of a kind of Shadow Ops within Ops, working off the chart, in a manner of speaking, and perhaps unbeknownst to even the director of Operations and the roster of case officers was not totally out of the question. They grew some pretty strange weeds at Langley. If my situation had not been so dour, I might have found the notion intriguing, as opposed to irrelevant to my present circumstances. I said, "Being a high-profile Catholic priest in Haiti must have cramped your style."
"Not at all. My non-Church duties were purely administrative."
"What did you administrate?"
"Haiti. You could consider me the chairman of the board of the controlling entity. People like Papa and Baby Doc and the generals were essentially my CEOs, and the Ton-tons and Fraph their administrative assistants. The business really ran very smoothly for decades. Then, of course, things got out of hand. But we'll be back there, the same as we'll be back in Cuba after Castro dies."
"With the Mafia providing your CEOs and administrative assistants."
"Exactly. Now you're beginning to understand."
"What do you call this department of yours among yourselves?"
"We don't call it anything. You're a fool, Frederickson, just like this president. What the hell good do you think this silly report of yours is going to do? You can't touch us. They could fire everybody at Langley-every clerk, secretary, director, analyst, and field operative-and blow up the building, and it wouldn't matter to us. We can't be rooted out, only transplanted. We're not listed on any budget; we pay our own way. The CIA is our host body of choice, but there are others."
"Interesting that you should compare yourself to a parasite."
"Ugly, but curiously accurate. Ever try to kill a tapeworm, Frederickson?"
"Hey, I'm giving it my best shot."
"It was an exercise in futility, even before you ended up here as my guest. We're the people you're really after, and, until now, you didn't even know we existed. We're invulnerable. Only a handful of people buried deep within the agency make up our organization, and none of these individuals has ever been a political appointee or a director, not even a director of Operations. So you can reorganize the CIA any way you like, and it won't affect us. Put the CIA out of business, and we'll just pack up shop and move elsewhere. After all, we only have a dozen other intelligence agencies to choose from."
"I should bite my tongue for saying this, Professor, but it sounds to me like you're whistling in a graveyard. I think you're full of shit. If you weren't worried about the report, you wouldn't have been sending out your boys of summer to butcher potential witnesses and informants."
He shrugged. "Moving is inconvenient. We prefer that things remain as they are. Incidentally, I enjoyed your remark about whistling in a graveyard. Your dossier describes you as occasionally witty, and I'm glad I've had this opportunity to appreciate your wit firsthand."
"Why the hell did you kill Thomas Dickens, Fournier? That didn't even make the halfwit mark. It made no sense at all."
"You killed him, Frederickson. You killed him the moment you decided to try to use him to further the cause of people of your political persuasion."
"I wasn't planning to use him for anything at all."
"That's not the way I heard it. I received information that at some opportune time in the future you were going to use Mr. Dickens to try to severely embarrass a friend of ours. The act of plagiarism itself was, of course, very trivial, but the lapse in ethics could have been used not only to tarnish Mr. Kranes's personal reputation, but also to damage his credibility and thus his political career. That would not be trivial. He's very important to our plans, and we weren't going to sit around and wait for you to drop that shoe."
"Your fucking information was wrong, Fournier!" I snapped. "That plagiarism business was strictly between Dickens and Kranes. I was just acting as a go-between. It was business, and the deal was done. Dickens never even asked the real name of the man who'd been stealing his poems, and I didn't tell him. You killed that man for nothing!"
"It seems I was misinformed," Fournier replied in a flat, uninterested tone. "Pity."
"And why that way?! For Christ's sake, couldn't you have just shot him?!"
I wasn't sure the lean, white-haired killer was going to answer, but he obviously enjoyed hearing himself talk, and after a few moments of reflection, he said, "I will grant you that the method of execution was perhaps inappropriate, Frederickson."
"Inappropriate?!"
"It doesn't make any difference now, but it could have complicated matters. One has to use the tools at hand, and some tools are blunter and less flexible than others. You can't carve scrimshaw with a chainsaw."
"What the fuck does that mean?!"
He smiled thinly, but there was no humor reflected in the black pools of his eyes. "Be patient," he said softly. "I promise you an answer."
Guy Fournier was making me very angry, and I couldn't afford to deal in any emotional currency, particularly not the very debilitating coin of anger. I took a deep breath, slowly let it out, then yawned. "Look, Professor, this has all been very interesting and informative, but I'm getting sleepy. I think I'll head home now."
"I think not. I have a surprise for you."
"I hate surprises. I don't mean to sound impatient, Fournier, but if you're not going to let me go home, tell me what the hell we're waiting for. What happens next?"