busy street, and then through the underground shopping arcade. All
around you, people are shot. You claim that you are being chased by a
maniac. You promise to show us this man, this American. And yet there
is no maniac. There is only you. A strange American spinning fairy
tales.”
“Goddamnit, I’ve told you the truth!”
“You say a madman from your past was responsible for the bloodshed,” the
rookie said in a quiet, steely voice. “I see only one madman here.”
The older policeman conferred in Schweitzerdeutsch with his barrel
chested colleague. “You were staying at the Hotel St. Gotthard, yes?”
he finally asked Ben. “Why don’t you take us there?”
Accompanied by three policemen–the barrel-chested one walking behind
him, the rookie ahead of him, and the older policeman close by his
side–Ben made his way through the underground arcade, up the escalator,
and down the Bahnhofstrasse toward his hotel. Though he was not yet
cuffed, he knew that this was merely a formality.
In front of the hotel, a policewoman, whom the others had clearly sent
ahead, was keeping a custodial watch over his luggage. Her brown hair
was short, almost mannish, and her expression was stony.
Through the lobby windows, Ben caught a glimpse of the unctuous Hotel
page who’d attended to him earlier. Their eyes met, and the man turned
away with stricken look, as if he’d just learned he’d toted bags for Lee
Harvey Oswald.
“Your luggage, yes?” the rookie asked Ben.
“Yes, yes,” Ben said. “What of it?” Now what? What more could there
be?
The policewoman opened the tan leather hand luggage. The others looked
inside, then turned to face Ben. “This is yours?” the rookie asked.
“I already said it was,” Ben replied.
The middle-aged cop took a handkerchief from his pants pocket and used
it to lift an object out of the satchel. It was Cavanaugh’s Walther PPK
pistol.
CHAPTER THREE.
Washington, D.C.
A serious-looking young woman strode briskly down the long central
corridor of the fifth floor of the United States Department of Justice
Building, the mammoth Classical Revival structure that occupied the
entire block between Ninth and Tenth Streets. She had glossy dark brown
hair, caramel-brown eyes, a sharp nose. At first glance she looked part
Asian, or perhaps Hispanic. She wore a tan trench coat, carried a
leather briefcase, and might have been taken for a lawyer, a lobbyist,
maybe a government official on the fast track.
Her name was Anna Navarro. She was thirty-three and worked in the
Office of Special Investigations, a little-known unit of the Justice
Department.
When she arrived at the stuffy conference room, she realized that the
weekly unit meeting was already well under way. Arliss Dupree, standing
by a white board on an easel, turned as she entered and stopped in
mid-sentence. She felt the stares, couldn’t help blushing a little,
which was no doubt what Dupree wanted. She took the first empty seat. A
shaft of sunlight blinded her.
“There she is. Nice of you to join us,” Dupree said. Even his insults
were predictable. She merely nodded, determined not to let him provoke
her. He’d told her the meeting would be at eight-fifteen. Obviously it
had been scheduled to start at eight, and he would deny ever having told
her otherwise. A petty, bureaucratic way of giving her a hard time.
They both knew why she was late, even if nobody else here did.
Before Dupree was brought in to head the Office of Special
Investigations, meetings were a rarity. Now he held them weekly, as a
chance to parade his authority. Dupree was short and wide, mid-forties,
the body of a weight lifter in a too-tight light gray suit, one of three
shopping mall suits he rotated. Even across the room she could smell
his drugstore aftershave. He had a ruddy moon face the texture of lumpy
porridge.
There was a time when she actually cared what men like Arliss Dupree
thought about her and tried to win them over. Now she didn’t give a
damn. She had her friends, and Dupree was simply not among them. Across
the table, David Denneen, a square-jawed, sandy-haired man, gave her a
sympathetic glance.
“As some of you may have heard, Internal Compliance has asked for our
colleague here to be temporarily assigned to them.” Dupree turned to
her, his eyes hard. “Given the amount of unfinished work you’ve got
here, I’d consider it less than responsible, Agent Navarro, if you
accepted an assignment from another division. Is this something you’ve
been angling for? You can tell us, you know.”
“This is the first I’ve heard of it,” she told him truthfully.
“That right? Well, maybe I’ve been leaping to conclusions here,” he
said, his tone softening a bit.
“Quite possibly,” she replied, dryly.
“I was making the assumption that you were wanted for an assignment.
Maybe you are the assignment.”
“Come again?”
“Maybe you’re the one under investigation,” Dupree said in a mellower
tone, evidently pleased by the idea. “It wouldn’t surprise me. You’re
a deep one, Agent Navarro.” There were laughs from some of his drinking
buddies.
She shifted her chair to get the light out of her eyes.
Ever since Detroit, when the two of them were staying on the same floor
of the Westin and she turned down (politely, she thought) Dupree’s
drunken, highly explicit proposal, he’d been leaving condescending
little remarks, like rat droppings, in her performance evaluation
folder:… as best she can given her obviously limited interest…
errors a result of inattention, not incompetence… He described her to
a male colleague, she’d heard, as “a sexual harassment suit waiting to
happen.” He tarred her with the most vicious insult you can give
someone in the Bureau: not a team player. Not a team player meant she
didn’t go out drinking with the boys, including Dupree, kept her social
life separate. He also made a point of papering her files with mentions
of mistakes she’d made a few minor procedural omissions, nothing at all
serious. Once, on the trail of a rogue DBA agent who’d been turned by a
drug lord and was implicated in several homicides, she’d neglected to
submit an FD-460 within the required seven days.
The best agents make mistakes. She was convinced that the best ones in
fact-made more minor gaffes than average, because they were focused more
on following the trail than on following every single procedure in the
manual of rules and regs. You could slavishly observe every last
ridiculous procedural requirement and never crack a case.
She felt his stare on her. She looked up, and their eyes locked.
“We’ve got an unusually heavy caseload to deal with,” Dupree went on.
“When somebody doesn’t do their share, it means more work for everyone
else. We’ve got a midlevel IRS manager suspected of organizing some
pretty complicated tax scams. We’ve got a rogue FBI guy who seems to be
using his shield to pursue a personal vendetta. We’ve got some aTF.
shit-heel selling munitions from the evidence vaults.” That was a
typical array of cases for the OSI: investigating (“auditing” was the
term of art) misconduct involving members of other government agencies
in essence, the federal version of internal affairs.
“Maybe the workload here is a little much for you,” Dupree said,
pressing. “Is that it?”
She pretended to jot down a note and didn’t reply. Her face was prickly
warm. She inhaled slowly, struggling to tamp down her anger. She
refused to give in to his baiting. Finally she spoke. “Look, if it’s
inconvenient, why don’t you refuse the request for interdepartmental
transfer?” Anna asked it in a reasonable tone of voice, but it wasn’t
an innocent question: Dupree lacked the authority to challenge the
highly secretive, all-powerful Internal Compliance Unit, and any
reference to the limits of his authority was bound to infuriate him.
Dupree’s little ears reddened. “I’m expecting a brief consult. If the
spook hunters at I.C.U knew as much as they pretend, they might realize
that you aren’t exactly cut out for that line of work.”
His eyes shone with what she imagined was contempt.
Anna loved her work, knew she was good at it. She didn’t require
praise. All she wanted was not to have to spend her time and energy
trying to hang on to her job, clinging by her fingernails. Again she
kept her face a mask of neutrality. She felt the tension localize
itself in her stomach. “I’m sure you did your best to make them
understand.”
A beat of silence. Anna could see he was debating how to reply. Dupree
glanced at his beloved white board at the next item on his agenda.
“We’ll miss you,” he said.
Shortly after the meeting broke up, David Denneen sought her out in her
tiny cubbyhole of an office. “The I.C.U wants you because you’re the
best,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”
Anna shook her head wearily. “I was surprised to see you at the