Reeder said, “We’re getting off to a bad start.”
Fisk said, “I don’t deny complicity in this thing. But the American Patriots Alliance... isn’t that what they call themselves?... I thought was just National Enquirer nonsense.”
Eyes hooded, Rogers said, “I saw Lawrence Morris leaving your office.”
“By the way,” Reeder said pleasantly, “Lawrence is in our custody. So we have a kind of baseline for comparison, here.”
Fisk said, “I think I will take another coffee.”
Reeder got it for her.
Then, settling across from her again, he said, “You were saying?”
“Morris has probably already told you this. He came around and said if I cooperated with ‘certain people’ in government, who were not fans of President Harrison, I would be next in line for the Director’s chair.”
“The next president would appoint you.”
She nodded.
“What did they want from you?”
Tiny shrug. “What they had in store for me over the long haul, I couldn’t say. First order of business was to assign the Yellich death to the Special Situations Task Force.”
Reeder and Rogers exchanged glances.
Reeder said, “To keep tabs on the unit.”
Fisk nodded again, sipped her coffee; it was too hot.
Reeder said, “What did you tell Morris?”
“I told him no.”
“Bullshit,” Rogers said.
“I did tell him no.” Fisk sighed. “That was before Senator Blount called me.”
Reeder straightened; Rogers, too.
He asked, “When was this?”
“Right there with Morris in the office, sitting across from me. How he signaled that old bastard I have no idea. But suddenly there was that buttermilk Southern drawl in my ear.”
Reeder frowned. “Threatening you?”
“Not exactly. Not directly. It was as if he was an old friend checking in with me. Understand, I had met with the Senator on occasion and dealt with him on some matters — a powerful man like that gets around, and gets his way. But suddenly we were old friends.”
“How so?”
Her eyes closed. Tight. “He talked to me about my husband and the work he does at his company, and how distressing it was that accidents occurred sometimes in the plant. He mentioned my son in college at Georgetown and my daughter at NYU and congratulated me on how fine they were, what outstanding young people, but wondered how I could bear having them live in such dangerous cities where ‘any terrible thing’ might happen.”
“A Southern-fried threat.”
Her eyes opened and she trained their near blackness on Reeder. “You have a daughter, Mr. Reeder. How would you have reacted?”
“I’d have tracked him down and beaten him to death. But that’s just me.”
Fisk stared at the table. “It was a phone call that — had it been recorded, and perhaps it was — might seem innocuous as a Christmas card. But the meaning was clear. I could rise to the directorship, or I could wonder every damn day about the safety of those I love. That’s what they call a Hobson’s choice, isn’t it?”
Rogers said, “And when they murdered Jerry Bohannon, you made a choice, too, didn’t you? To betray everything your office stands for! And what’s a little kidnapping of one of your people? Or a sniper taking Trevor Ivanek out?”
Fisk was immobile, not trembling at all. But tears began to trickle down her cheeks.
“I had no idea,” she said, “things would go so far.”
Reeder said, “Why not? They’d already killed Amanda Yellich.”
“In... in retrospect, I realized I’d... enabled Agent Bohannon’s murder. But I had no contact person — Morris dropped out of sight, no more phone calls came from Senator Blount, and I was sidelined in this awful game. When I put out the apprehend order on the two of you, and everyone else on your team, my thought was to pull you in where I might protect you.”
“The operative word,” Rogers said, “being ‘might.’”
Fisk’s shoulders went slowly up and down. “If you don’t believe that, there’s nothing I can say or do.”
“You’re wrong,” Reeder said. “There is something.”
Her eyes lifted to his. “I’m listening.”
“You cooperate. Fully.”
Fisk nodded.
“For now, you retain your office as Assistant Director. You report back to me, or someone else designated by the President, any contact you have with Alliance conspirators. They’ll be running scared now, so they may reveal themselves either directly or inadvertently.”
Fisk nodded.
“Despite the innocuous surface of Blount’s words, they constitute a threat. We may be able to track the way Morris signaled the Senator to make that call — hell, Morris will probably tell us himself. Eventually, both of you will be called upon to testify. In the context of everything else that’s gone down, two witnesses should be enough. The Senator will go down, and the Alliance exposed.”
Fisk nodded.
“As for your future,” Reeder said, “I think your full cooperation will mean you’ll see no federal time. I’ll ask the President to instruct the Justice Department that you be granted immunity, or he’ll give you a pardon if necessary.”
“He’d do that?”
Reeder gave her half a smile. “He kind of owes me one.”
Fisk shrugged, her expression stoic. “Of course, I’m onboard with this. If my husband is willing to leave his company in the hands of others, would relocation and new identities be a possibility?”
He nodded, once. “I’d recommend it. Highly probable.”
She turned to Rogers. “I know you’re disappointed in me.”
Rogers said nothing, though her glare was eloquent.
“But I do have a kind of peace offering,” Fisk said. “From the blood DNA at the scene of the Wooten slaying we identified the shooter — one Jadyn Sims. At first blush, Sims seems to be a mercenary but I believe what we have is a compromised CIA asset. He was brought in yesterday by my Domestic Terrorism unit, and a ballistics matchup links a weapon in his possession to both the Wooten and Ivanek shootings. And a handgun links him to the Bohannon killing.”
Reeder said, “That makes him a potentially key witness.”
The AD nodded. “I believe he can be turned, now that the conspiracy will inevitably be exposed. He’ll be facing treason charges, as well as murder, and we’ll give him a chance to bargain for his life by cooperating.”
Rogers’ eyes flared. “Are you seriously suggesting that the murderer of Trevor Ivanek and Jerry Bohannon should receive immunity?”
Fisk didn’t flinch from Rogers’ gaze. “Not immunity. Just the avoidance of the death penalty. But know this... I’ll have to live with the deaths of those two agents for the rest of my life.”
“If I had my way,” Rogers said, “the rest of your life would be about thirty seconds.”
Fisk swallowed. Nodded. “I know there’s no making it up to you.”
Reeder smiled pleasantly. “Actually, Margery, you already have. And maybe Patti will come around, too, someday. After all, you’ve done us a big favor.”
Fisk’s eyebrows went up. “What favor is that?”
He reached out and held his partner’s hand, tight. “Now we can go out and arrest that son of a bitch Wilson Blount.”
Sunday afternoon, after an Army transport had taken them to Nashville International Airport, Reeder and Rogers rented a Chevy Tahoe from National. They were about to call on a United States Senator in Franklin, Tennessee, twenty minutes south of Nashville — one of the safest and least-taxed cities in America.
This enclave of top CEOs of multinational corporations, with scores of golf courses and dozens of museums in a historic Civil War city, included the Brandon Park Downs gated community, just outside the center of town. Here Senator Wilson Blount lived on a beautiful lakefront estate in a magnificent country manor house in the antebellum manner.