"Who told you all this?"
"Secret Service agent came back one hour ago. Told me everything."
"Broad guy, buzz cut, tan face?"
"Yes. That is him."
"Nice of him. To give you all that info."
Hacmed looked at me unsurely. "What do you mean?"
"Nothing, sorry. Anything else?"
"They are processing Homer now. They are to release him into general population tomorrow. First thing. With rapists and killers." Hacmed shook his head, on the verge of tears again.
Sever had gone to great lengths to make sure I knew that Homer would suffer worse than he already was unless I turned myself in. Either Homer or I was going to be charged with the murder of Mack Jackman. The decision was up to me.
"You must leave." Hacmed ushered me to the back door. "You must go hide."
I said, "Hacmed, listen to me. This is not your fault."
He pulled his head back through the gap and regarded me with mournful eyes. "No? Then whose fault it is?"
The slab of the high-rise towered over me, black windows framed with white concrete, an imperious honeycomb. I'd left the Jaguar three blocks away in a grocery-store parking lot, keys in the wheel well for Induma. Concrete planters and reinforced trash cans were positioned around the base of the building, measures against unresourceful car bombers.
Feeling oddly naked without my rucksack, I pulled the cell phone from my pocket and placed a final call.
Steve's voice answered me gruffly. "I thought I told you only to call me if you were about to get killed."
"Yeah, well."
"Shit," he said. The wind blew across my cheeks, the receiver, and then Steve said, "Hello?"
"I'm here. You make any headway?"
"I'm hitting the databases every time I can grab a minute, but I have to do this quiet, like I said. Jane Everett's not the most common name, but it's not the most unusual either. A good number of hits so far, none matching the profile or the picture."
I cleared my throat. "Don't try to reach me. Don't call this number. Wait and I'll contact you. If I can."
"Listen, Nick, your mother-"
"If you don't hear from me, tell Callie…"
"What?"
"Tell her thanks for believing me."
I snapped the phone shut before he could say anything else. I set it on the concrete and smashed it with the heel of my shoe. Then I pried out the circuit board and bent it in half and dropped it through a sewer grate. The plastic casing I dumped in a trash can.
Odds were good that I'd soon become an enemy of the state, with all the attendant privileges. Or one of those anonymous corpses, hidden in a heating duct, discovered weeks later when the weather shifted. Disappeared, but this time for good. Sadly, I felt as if now I had more to lose than ever. So much had changed over the past six days. I had shared my past with Induma and Callie, and that meant I would miss them with more of myself.
A bus wheezed by on Figueroa, then slowed with a gassy exhale. The nighttime breeze swirled up hot-dog wrappers and a few early leaves. Leaning back on my heels like a rube in Manhattan, I contemplated the commanding building. It all but blocked out the sky.
I was sweating through my Jesus shirt.
Before I could lose my nerve, I walked into the lobby. A moderate amount of traffic to and from the elevators, even at this hour. By dint of habit, I put my head down and veered past the reception console. I didn't like signing visitor books, not that any of that would matter anymore. The rent-a-cops, distracted with phones and a shrill woman who'd misplaced a coat, didn't notice me.
I slid through the closing elevator doors. Thumbing the button for the thirteenth floor, I realized I'd turned away from the rear mirror and the security camera it likely hid. So many habits, stretching back so many years. But this was the end, the time to lay aside Liffman's rule-book and head into the belly of the beast.
I counted the passing floors, my heart racing, pins and needles in my fingertips. The doors parted and I forced myself out, assailed by the bright fluorescents. At the end of the hall, beside the reception desk, hung the vast crest with its eagle and flag.
The woman looked up. Behind her was the open squad room, desks arrayed around waist-high partitions. Despite the loosened ties and sloughed suit jackets, the room was the picture of industry. Agents flipped through files, pulled faxes from machines, jabbed fingers at booking photos.
I kept on toward the receptionist. My palms were slick. I shrank from a passing agent as if he were infectious. The overhead security cameras felt like interrogation lights in my face. Shying from their glare, I reached the desk. Nowhere else to go now. The receptionist, nicely made up like a 1950s front woman, smiled at me expectantly. A few of the agents glanced up from their desks. I was having a hard time getting air.
"Yes?" she asked.
A swirl of nausea, like the sickness that accompanied my 2:18 wake-ups, except more vivid under the bright lights. Beyond the partition I recognized the wide shoulders of Reid Sever. He was facing away, bent to scrutinize a document. The strip of white flesh beneath the line of his buzz cut was pronounced.
"I'm…" My throat froze up. I couldn't get my name out.
"What, sir?"
"I… I'm…" My eyes tracked up to Sever. He-and every other agent in the room-was now staring at me. I was completely, pathetically immobilized.
Sever said, "Nick Horrigan."
Chapter 38
"Release Homer now or I won't talk." My arms ached. It didn't help that Sever was steering me by the cuffs, shoving me through one hall after another. Agents and secretaries paused at their monitors and over their cups of coffee to take note.
"You're not setting the rules," he said, with that soft edge of a Southern accent.
"That was the deal. You know it and I know it."
"We don't have a deal."
"We both know this has got nothing to do with Homer. You used him to get to me. It worked. He's not valuable to you anymore. If you want me to talk, cut the guy a break and let him out before they dump him into general pop."
Sever didn't slow. We passed a few open office doors, and then the cuffs bit into my wrists, and my shoulders strained in their sockets as I jerked to a halt. I could hear him breathing hard behind me, feel his fist tight around the handcuff chain. Finally he tugged me back, pivoting me around another corner. A few more painful steps and we were outside a double-reinforced door, peering at a guard through ballistic glass.
Sever leaned close to the embedded microphone and said, "Let him go."
The guard rolled back from the window on his chair and disappeared. The buzzing of secured doors. A metallic rumble. A moment later Homer was escorted through the door, a guard on either side, white latex gloves gripping him at the biceps. He was trembling, a mountain of shivering rags. His mouth worked on itself, his beard shifting. He saw me, blanched beneath the dirt, and tried to tell me something but couldn't. The guards moved him past us toward the elevator and shoved him in. The doors slid shut, and the guards walked by again, snapping off their gloves and chuckling to themselves.
They nodded through the window. The door clicked open, and they disappeared.
Sever hadn't moved. He said, "What's that bum to you anyway?"
"A friend."
"You got some fucked-up habits, Horrigan."
We were moving again. "Where are you taking me?"
"Interrogation."
"I want to talk to Wydell."
Sever made a noise of severe irritation, and the cuffs sank deeper into my flesh. Another hall, a doorway, past a female agent whose eyes lingered on Sever for an extra beat. I was the piece-of-shit offender, the foil for admirable men with admirable tasks and intentions. My arms pinned behind me, I approached a metal door. Sever didn't slow down. I hit it with my chest, and it banged open. He hurled me inside, and I staggered two steps and fell onto a wooden chair in the middle of the concrete box. The chair tilted up on two legs, then settled back with a clatter. Sever closed the door. Locked it. No security camera. No one-way mirror. Bare bulb overhead for that gulag effect.