“CHARLOTTESVILLE?” Dominic asked. “I thought—”
“Since the time of Director Hoover, the Bureau has had a safe house facility down there. Technically, it doesn’t belong to the FBI. It’s where we keep the Gray Files.”
“Oh.” He’d heard about that from a senior instructor at the Academy. The Gray Files—outsiders never even knew the term—were supposed to be Hoover’s files on political figures, all manner of personal irregularities, which politicians collected as other men collected stamps and coins. Supposedly destroyed at Hoover’s death in 1972, in fact they’d been sequestered in Charlottesville, Virginia, in a large safe house on a hilltop across the gentle valley from Tom Jefferson’s Monticello and overlooking the University of Virginia. The old plantation house had been built with a capacious wine cellar, which for more than fifty years had held rather more precious contents. It was the blackest of Bureau secrets, known only to a handful of people, which did not necessarily include the sitting FBI Director, but rather controlled by only the most trusted of career agents. The files were never opened, at least not the political ones. That junior senator during the Truman administration, for example, did not need to have his penchant for underage females revealed to the public. He was long dead in any case, as was the abortionist. But the fear of these records, whose continuation was widely believed to be carried on, explained why Congress rarely attacked the FBI on matters of appropriations. A really good archivist with a computerized memory might have inferred their existence from subtle holes in the Bureau’s voluminous records, but that would have been a task worthy of Heracles. Besides, there were much juicier secrets than that to be found in the White Files squirreled off in a former West Virginia coal mine—or so an historian might think.
“We’re going to detach you from the Bureau,” Werner said next.
“What?” Dominic Caruso asked. “Why?” The shock of that pronouncement nearly ejected him from his chair.
“Dominic, there’s a special unit that wants to talk to you. Your employment will continue there. They will fill you in. I said ‘detach,’ not ‘terminate,’ remember. Your pay will continue. You’ll be kept on the books as a Special Agent on special assignment to counterterrorism investigations directly under my office. You’ll continue to get normal promotions and pay raises. This information is secret, Agent Caruso,” Werner went on. “You cannot discuss it with anyone but me. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir, but I cannot say I understand.”
“You will in due course. You will continue to investigate criminal activity, and probably to act upon it. If your new assignment turns out to be not to your liking, you can tell me, and we’ll reassign you to a new field division for more conventional duties. But, I repeat, you cannot discuss your new assignment with anyone but me. If anyone asks, you’re still a Special Agent of the FBI, but you are unable to discuss your work with anyone. You will not be vulnerable to any adverse action of any kind as long as you do your job properly. You will find that the oversight is looser than you’re used to. But you will be accountable to someone at all times.”
“Sir, this is still not very clear,” Special Agent Caruso observed.
“You will be doing work of the highest national importance, mainly counterterrorism. There will be danger attached to it. The terrorist community is not a civilized one.”
“This is an undercover assignment, then?”
Werner nodded. “Correct.”
“And it’s run out of this office?”
“More or less,” Werner dodged with a nod.
“And I can bail out whenever I want?”
“Correct.”
“Okay, sir, I’ll give it a look. What do I do now?”
Werner wrote on a small pad of paper and handed it across. “Go to that address. Tell them you want to see Gerry.”
“Right now, sir?”
“Unless you have something else to do.”
“Yes, sir.” Caruso stood, shook hands, and took his leave. At least it would be a pleasant drive into the Virginia horse country.
CHAPTER 4
BOOT CAMP
THE DRIVE back across the river to the Marriott allowed Dominic to collect his bags—with a twenty-dollar bill to the bellman—and then punch in his destination on the Mercedes’s navigation computer. Soon he was southbound on Interstate 95, leaving Washington behind. The skyline of the national capital actually looked pretty good in his rearview mirror. The car drove well, about what you’d expect of a Mercedes; the local talk radio was pleasingly conservative—cops tended to be that way—and traffic wasn’t too bad, though he found himself pitying the poor bastards who had to drive into D.C. every day to push paper in the Hoover Building and all the other government-grotesque buildings surrounding The Mall. At least FBI Headquarters had its own pistol range for stress management. Probably well used, Dominic thought.
Just before hitting Richmond, the female voice on his computer told him to take a right onto the Richmond Beltway, which presently delivered him to I-64 west toward the rolling, wooded hills. The countryside was pleasant, and green enough. Probably a lot of golf courses and horse farms. He’d heard that CIA had its safe houses here from back when they had to debrief Soviet defectors. He wondered what the places were used for now. Chinese, maybe? Frenchmen, perhaps. Certainly they hadn’t been sold. The government didn’t like letting go of things, except maybe to close down military bases. The clowns from the Northeast and Far West loved to do that. They didn’t much like the Bureau either, though they were probably afraid of it. He didn’t know what it was about cops and soldiers that bothered some politicians, but he didn’t much worry about it. He had his rice bowl, and they had theirs.
After another hour and fifteen minutes or so, he started looking for his exit sign, but the computer didn’t need him.
“PREPARE TO TURN RIGHT AT THE NEXT EXIT,” the voice said, about two minutes ahead of time.
“Fine, honey,” Special Agent Caruso replied, without getting an acknowledgment. A minute later, he took the suggested exit—without so much as a VERY GOOD from the computer, and then took some ordinary city streets through the pleasant little town and up some gentle hills to the north wall of this valley, until finally:
“TAKE THE NEXT LEFT AND YOU HAVE ARRIVED AT YOUR DESTINATION . . .”
“That’s nice, honey, thank you,” he observed.
“YOUR DESTINATION” was the end of an entirely ordinary-looking country road, maybe a driveway, since it had no lines painted on it. A few hundred yards farther and he saw two redbrick abutments and a white-rail gate that was conveniently swung open. There was a house another three hundred yards off, with six white pillars holding up the front part of the roof. The roof appeared to be slate—rather old slate, at that—and the walls were weathered brick that hadn’t been red in over a hundred years. This place had to be over a century old, maybe two. The driveway was recently raked pea-sized gravel. The grass—there was a lot of grass here—was a luscious golf-course green. Someone came out of a side door and waved him around to the left. He twisted the wheel to head behind the house, and got a surprise. The mansion—what did you call a house this big?—was larger than it first appeared, and had a fair-sized parking lot, which at the moment held a Chevy Suburban, a Buick SUV, and—another Mercedes C-class just like his, with North Carolina tags. The likelihood of this coincidence was too remote even to enter his imagina—
“Enzo!”
Dominic snapped his head around. “Aldo!”
People often remarked on their resemblance, though it was even more apparent when they were apart. Both had dark hair and fair skin. Brian was the taller by twenty-four millimeters. Dominic was perhaps ten pounds heavier. Whatever differences in mannerisms they’d had as boys had stayed with them as they’d grown up together. Since both were partly Italian in ancestry, they hugged warmly—but they didn’t kiss. They weren’t that Italian.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Dominic was the first to ask.
“Me? What about you?” Brian shot back, heading to help with his brother’s bags. “I read about your shoot in Alabama. What’s the story?”
“Pedophile,” Dominic replied, pulling out his two-suiter. “Raped and killed a cute little girl. I got there about half an hour too late.”
“Hey, ain’t nobody perfect, Enzo. Papers said you put an end to his career.”
Dominic looked right into Brian’s eyes. “Yeah, I managed to accomplish that.”
“How, exactly?”
“Three in the chest.”
“Works every time,” Captain Brian Caruso observed. “And no lawyers to cry over his body.”
“No, not this time.” His words were not the least bit jolly, but his brother heard the cold satisfaction.
“With this, eh?” The Marine lifted his brother’s automatic from its holster. “Looks nice,” he said.
“It shoots pretty good. Loaded, bro, do be careful.”