refused. He said I’d done enough.” She shook her head. “Maybe I
should still sell it–believe me, no one could ever do enough.”
She fell silent for a bit and Lee chose not to break it. She stared
across at him. “We really were accomplishing a lot of good.”
“What do you want, Faith? You want me to break out in applause?” Her
eyes flashed at him. “Why don’t you get on that stupid motorcycle and
get the hell out of my life?”
“All right,” Lee said calmly, “if you thought so highly of what you
were doing, how did you turn out to be a witness for the FBI?”
Faith covered her face with her hands, as though she were about to
start bawling. When Faith finally looked at him she seemed so
distressed, Lee felt his anger slip away.
“For some time Danny had been acting strangely. I suspected that maybe
someone was on to him. That scared the hell out of me. I didn’t want
to go to prison. I kept asking him what was wrong, but he wouldn’t
talk to me about it. He kept withdrawing, became more and more
paranoid, finally even asking me to leave the firm. I felt so alone,
for the first time in a long time. It was like I had lost my father
again.”
“So you went to the FBI, tried to cut a deal. You for Buchanan.”
“No!” she exclaimed. “Never!”
“What, then?”
“About six months ago there was a lot of news coverage about the FBI
breaking a major public corruption case, involving a defense contractor
bribing several congressmen to help it win a large federal contract. A
couple of employees at the defense contractor contacted the FBI and
revealed what was going on. They were actually part of the conspiracy
early on, but were granted immunity in exchange for their testimony and
assistance. That sounded like a good deal to me. Maybe I could get a
deal too. Since Danny wouldn’t confide in me, I decided to go for it.
The lead agent was named in the article: Brooke Reynolds. I called
her.
“I didn’t know what to expect from the FBI, but I knew one thing: I
wouldn’t tell them much right away, no names or anything, not until I
saw what the lay of the land was. And I had leverage. They needed a
live witness with a head full of dates, times, names, meetings, records
of votes and agendas to make this work.”
“And Buchanan was ignorant of all this?”
“I guess not, considering he hired someone to kill me.”
“We don’t know that he did.”
“Oh, come on, Lee, who else could it be?”
Lee thought back to the other men he had seen at the airport. The
device in the man’s hand was a high-tech blowgun of sorts. Lee had
seen a demonstration of one at a seminar on counterterrorism. The gun
and ammo were constructed solely from plastic to allow passage through
metal detectors. You hit the palm trigger and the air compression
fired a tiny needle either tipped or filled with a deadly toxin, like
thallium or ricin, or the all-time favorite of assassins, curare,
because it reacted so damn fast in the body that there was no known
antidote. in a crowd, the act could be carried out and the assassin
gone before the victim fell dead.
“Go on,” he said.
“I offered to bring Danny into the fold.”
“And how did they react to that?”
“They made it very clear that Danny was going down.”
“I’m not following your logic. If you and Buchanan were going to turn
witness, who were the Feds going to prosecute: the foreign
countries?”
“No. Their representatives didn’t know what we were doing. As I said,
the money didn’t go directly to the governments. And it’s not like
CARE or the Catholic Relief Services or UNICEF would ever condone
bribery. Danny was their unofficial and unpaid lobbyist-in-residence
but they had no idea what he was doing. He represented about fifteen
such organizations. It was tough going. They all had their agendas,
took a scattergun approach. They typically proposed hundreds of
single-issue bills, instead of a few comprehensive ones. Danny got