He turned, looking at her obliquely, and she saw an odd and powerful light in his eyes. She saw, too, that he was no longer the man he’d been a month ago, that desperate, bloody, half-crazy fugitive who’d arrived on her doorstep.
She didn’t know this man. This was the Bob that Donny had loved, so focused you felt his power even now, sitting in the bedroom as he buttoned up his shirt. Now he scared her a little.
“Julie, you listen here. When I’m gone, I want you to scrub down every surface in this house with ammonia, because it’s the only thing that will take off fingerprint oils. Throw out all your dishes and glasses and silverware. Now, you know what you have to do?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Run through it again. Tell me.”
“In five days, I drive four hours in any direction to any pay phone I can find. Then I call long distance to – uh, the number is three-three-one, four-five-two, six-seven-eight-three and I do my Lurleen accent – low, trashy, the kind of girl Elvis used to pick up in Tupelo bars before the Ed Sullivan show – ”
He smiled.
“Then I ask for Memphis. Agent Memphis.”
“Yes.”
“They’ll test you. They’ll ask you what the dog’s name was, and it wasn’t Pat like they put in the papers, it was Mike. I wasn’t hit once, like they said, but twice. You’ll have to tell them that.”
“I know all that. Then I tell him what you told me.”
“Yes.”
“Then I hang up and drive away.”
“How long on the phone?”
“No more than two minutes.”
“Don’t forget to stop and have lots of change for the phone. You should have at least ten dollars in quarters.”
“All right.”
“Then you drive back here. I can’t begin to think there’s a chance in hell they’d ever track you. You don’t know about me, you never heard about me, I don’t exist. Nobody will know.”
“And then the fun part,” she said bitterly, “you get killed. The FBI kills you in some little Arkansas roadhouse.”
“Maybe. But I have a few cards up my sleeve.”
“Oh, Bob.”
The sun was coming over the eastern rim of the desert now, and it bled through the sky. For just a moment the room itself seemed soaked in blood – blood everywhere, red and glinting and wet and black. But blood most of all in the narrow eyes of Bob Lee Swagger.
She shuddered, and tried to think of other things.
“Nick!”
It was Howard, and he didn’t sound pleased.
“Uh, yes, Howard?”
“Would you come in here, please?”
“Sure.”
Nick left the bull pen and headed into the little office out of which Howard was running the operation.
“Nick – ”
Howard did not ask him to sit down, not a good sign.
“Nick, just what is it you’ve been doing?”
“Ah, well, you know, mainly monitoring the reports on Bob’s movements as they’re routed here from Washington, and coordinating with the local officers and keeping contact with our surveillance teams sited in the area, and monitoring the readiness of our quick-react teams, you know, Howard, trying to stay alert and keep our readiness high and – ”
“I’ve just had a very irate call from Ben Prine in D.C. The head of Cointelpro.”
“Yes.”
“He says a request originated from this office concerning access to Bureau files on a private security firm called RamDyne over my authorization. I didn’t authorize anything. Do you know about this?”
Nick wasn’t an adept liar. A tide of phlegm rose in his throat and he was stunned at his own sudden loss of confidence and clarity of thought.
“It was only to save you time, Howard. I know you’ve got your big picture to worry about, so I just routed the request through your office with your name…uh, it’s just a kind of…”
He ran out of words.
Howard glowered at him.
“What do you think you’re doing, Nick? What game are you playing?”
Nick bumbled into a confused account of his investigation of the Eduardo Lanzman affair, the source who’d told him Lanzman was Salvadoran, his idea that a high-tech electronic eavesdropping van may have been used, his clumsy discovery of the mysterious RamDyne firm that seemed to have a line on such expensive equipment. He rambled on semicoherently about the coincidence of a Salvadoran agent maybe being killed by the Salvadoran secret police only weeks immediately before the suspiciously “accidental” murder of a Salvadoran archbishop despised by certain elements of his own regime. But he saw that he wasn’t making much progress with Howard.
“I tried all the usual channels and came up with nothing. Like, nothing. So I tried to show some initiative and…” He trailed off lamely.
“Nick,” said Howard, a deep sadness coming over his bland face, “I’m very disappointed in you. Why didn’t you come to me with all this?”
“Well, Howard, actually, um, I did and you said – ”
“Nick, we have an open-and-shut case on Bob Lee Swagger. We have means, motive and opportunity. We have some circumstantial ballistics evidence. We have witnesses, including, I might add, yourself. Nick, what on earth are you doing? Whose side are you on?”
“Howard, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you about the ballistics. I’m wondering if it’s technically possible to – ”
“All right, Nick, this is how things fall apart. Junior agents running around on their own, not reporting to authority. Unauthorized leaks to the press. It’s the beginning of the end of Bureau discipline, which is the beginning of the end of the Bureau.”
“Howard, I – ”
“RamDyne, you’re right, is very connected. To our cousins in Langley, among half a dozen other secret agencies. They do a lot of things we can’t afford to do officially. Sometimes these things don’t look so good; sometimes they’re ambiguous; sometimes they do little bad things to prevent big bad things. Their secrets are very closely held. If you pick at them, or uncover something out of context, it can lead you exactly where you shouldn’t go, and cause all kinds of problems for all kinds of people. Do you understand that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Nick, you’re not supposed to see the big picture. Other people do that. You’re supposed to do the jobs we give and do them well. Let us connect the dots. You catch the crooks.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Nick, it pains me to do this. I’d thought perhaps after your screwups in the past, you’d turned over a new leaf, and I might have been tempted to forego your suspension. But you haven’t. I’m removing you from this detail. You’re to fly back to New Orleans immediately and begin your suspension. Sorry, it has to be this way. Some years ago you messed up. I thought you’d worked hard and overcome that mistake. But you keep messing up, Nick. You’re a loose cannon. You’re not a team player. You want too much, you want it too fast.”
Nick realized he’d just gotten blindsided. It hit him with a force he hadn’t felt since Myra died.
“All the way through, Nick, you insist on doing things your way. If you’d bumped Swagger up to the Alpha category, if you’d taken him prisoner, if – oh, Nick, you’ve done so poorly. We’ve tried so desperately to help you. And now you pull this on us.”
“I’m sorry, Howard,” blurted Nick, stunned. “I didn’t know it was so serious. I was trying to do a thorough job and I – ”
“Nick, that’s all I have for you. I want you – ”
“Nick?”
It was Hap Fencl leaning in.
“Excuse me, Howard,” he said, “but I have a woman on the line who swears she knows where Bob Swagger is, and insists on talking to Nick.”
“For Christ’s sake, Fencl,” blurted Howard, “she’s probably just another – ”