“I’m afraid Mr. Bartlett isn’t able to see any visitors right now, and
I don’t see an appointment for you.” The receptionist spoke with icy
authority.
“I’m making an appointment–for right now,” Arliss Dupree said. “Tell
him he’ll want to see me. It’s about a matter of mutual concern.
Interdepartmental business, O.K.?”
“I’m very sorry, Mr. Dupree, but…”
“Save you the trouble, I’ll just mosey on down and knock on his door.
You can give him a head’s up, or not. His office is down that way,
right?” A grin played across Dupree’s ruddy moon face. “Don’t trouble
yourself, girl. We’re going to be fine.”
The receptionist spoke hurriedly, softly, into the microphone of her
headset. After a moment, she stood up. “Mr. Bartlett said he’d be
pleased to see you. I’ll show you to him.”
Dupree looked around the director’s spartan office and for the first
time felt a twinge of alarm. It wasn’t the comfortable burrow of the
typical career officer–of the lifer who surrounded himself with photos
of loved ones and stacks of unfiled paper. It barely showed signs of
human habitation at all.
“And how can I help you today, Mr. Dupree?” Alan Bartlett stood behind
a large desk, so uncluttered it might have been a floor model at an
office-furniture store. There was something glacial, Dupree thought,
about the man’s polite smile, something unreadable about the gray eyes
behind the aviator glasses.
“Lotsa ways, I suppose,” Dupree said, and sat himself down
unceremoniously on the blond-wooden chair facing Bartlett’s desk.
“Starting with this whole Navarro business.”
“Most unfortunate, the recent revelations,” Bartlett said. “Reflects
poorly on all of us.”
“As you know, I wasn’t pleased by the TOY you arranged,” he said,
referring to the cross-departmental assignment of temporary duties.
“That much you made clear. Perhaps you knew something about her that
you chose to be less than forthcoming about.”
“Naw, that wasn’t it.” Dupree forced himself to meet Bartlett’s steady
gaze. It was like talking to an iceberg. “Frankly, it undermines my
authority when a member of my staff gets shifted around like that,
without my knowledge or consent. Some of the staffers will always
assume it’s some sort of promotion.”
“I suspect you didn’t come here to discuss your personnel difficulties
or management style, Mr. Dupree.”
“Hell, no,” Dupree said. “Here’s the thing. The rest of us at Justice
always give you guys at I.C.U a wide berth. You get up to your stuff,
and most of the time we’re just as happy not to know about it. But this
time, you started something that’s leaving jelly stains on my carpet,
you see what I’m saying? Putting me in a tight spot. I’m not making
any accusations, I’m just saying that it got me thinking.”
“An unaccustomed activity for you, no doubt. You will find it grows
easier with practice.” Bartlett spoke with effortless mandarin disdain.
“I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed,” Dupree said. “But you’ll
find I can still cut.”
“How reassuring.”
“It’s just that something about the whole thing smelled bad to me.”
Bartlett sniffed. “Aqua Velva, would that be? Or Old Spice? Your
aftershave arrives before you do.”
Dupree just shook his head, in a show of good-natured confusion. “So I
poked around a little. Learned a little more about you, about where
you’ve been. I hadn’t realized before that you owned a huge piece of
property on the Eastern Shore. Not your typical federal employee, I
guess.”
“My mother’s father was one of the founders of Holleran Industries. She
was one of the heirs to the estate. That’s not a secret. Nor is it
something I choose to draw attention to, I’ll admit. I have little
interest in the high life. The life I’ve decided to lead is a rather
plain one, and my tastes are, on the whole, modest. Anyway, what of
it?”
“Right, your mother was a Holleran heiress I found that out, too. Came
as a surprise, I got to say. Way I see it, it’s kind of flattering that
a multimillionaire would deign to work among us.”
“All of us must make decisions in our lives.”
“Yup, I guess that’s true. But then I’m thinking, how much else is
there about Alan Bartlett that I don’t know about? Probably a lot,
right? Like, what’s with all those trips to Switzerland. Now,
Switzerland I guess because at the OSI we’re always dealing with
money-laundering, that place always sets off alarm bells. So it gets me
wondering about these trips of yours.”
A beat. “Excuse me?”
“Well, you do head over to Switzerland a bunch, am I right?”
“What gives you that idea?”
Dupree pulled a sheet of paper from the breast pocket of his jacket. It
was slightly crumpled, but he laid it flat on Bartlett’s desk and
smoothed it out. On it was a series of dots, in a roughly circular
array. “Sorry it’s so crude, I drew it myself.” He pointed to the
topmost dot. “Over here, we got Munich. Just under it, Innsbruck.
Moving southeast, Milan. Turin. Then, a little more easterly and a
little further north Lyon. Dijon. Freiburg.”
“And this would be an adult-education course in geography that you’re
taking?”
“Naw,” Dupree said. “Took me a long time to get this stuff. I had to
go through the computers at passport control and the major airlines,
too. Major pain in the ass, I can tell you. But these are all airports
that you traveled through at some point over the past fifteen years. A
lot of them direct from Dulles, some of them with a connecting flight
through Frankfurt or Paris. So here I am, and I’m looking at this
scatter of points. All these dreary goddamn airports and what do they
have in common?”
“I expect you’re going to tell me,” Bartlett said, a look of chilly
amusement in his eyes.
“Well, Christ, take a look at the scatter. What would you conclude?
It’s obvious, isn’t it? They’re in a circle of points within a
two-hundred mile radius of Zurich. They’re all a hop and a skip from
Switzerland-that’s what these places got in common. They’re all places
you’d go if you wanted to go to Switzerland and maybe didn’t want to
have “Switzerland’ stamped on your passport. Either of your passports,
in your case: I was impressed to see you have two authorized passports.”
“Which is not uncommon among officials in my particular line of work.
You’re being absurd, Mr. Dupree, but I’ll play along. Let’s say I have
indeed visited Switzerland–so what?”
“Right, so what? No harm, no foul. Only, why’d you tell me you
didn’t?”
“You’re really being deliberately dense, Mr. Dupree, aren’t you? If I
choose to discuss my vacation plans with you, you’ll be the first to
know. Your behavior today calls into question your fitness to discharge
your official responsibilities. It also, if I may say so, verges on
insubordination.”
“I don’t report to you, Bartlett.”
“No, because seven years ago, when you sought transfer to our unit, you
were turned down. Judged not to be of I.C.U caliber.” Bartlett’s voice
remained cool, but his cheeks had colored. Dupree knew he had rattled
him. “And now, I’m afraid, I’ll have to call this conversation to an
end.
“I’m not finished with you, Bartlett,” Dupree said, standing up.
A death’s-head smile: ” “Great works are never finished. Only
abandoned.” So said Val ry.”
“Harper?”
“Good-bye, Mr. Dupree,” Bartlett said serenely. “Your commute home to
Arlington is a long one at this time of day, and I know you’ll want to
beat the rush hour.”
Ben awoke, aware first of the soft early-morning light, then of Anna’s
soft breathing. They had slept in the same bed. He sat up slowly,
feeling the dull ache in his limbs, his neck. He could feel warmth
radiating from her nightgown-clad body a few inches away.
He walked slowly to the bathroom, the pain now awakening too. He
realized -he’d slept through an entire day and night. Ben knew he was
badly battered, but it was better to move around, stay as limber as
possible, than to confine himself to bed. Either way it would take time
to recover.
He returned to the bedroom, quietly picking up his phone. Fergus
O’Connor in the Caymans was expecting his call. But when he tried to
switch the phone on, he discovered that the battery was dead. Anna had
apparently forgotten to charge it. He heard her stirring in the bed.
He slipped the phone into its charger cradle and called Fergus.
“Hartman!” Fergus exclaimed heartily, as if he’d been waiting for Ben’s
call.
“Give me some news,” Ben said, hobbling to the window and looking out
over the traffic.
“Well, I’ve got good news and bad news. Whaddaya want first?”
“Always the good first.”
There was a beep on the line another call coming in but he ignored it.
“Right. There’s one shady lawyer in Liechtenstein who came to his