I.t was nearly midnight when Lee Sawyer’s head hit the pillow after a
hastily eaten dinner. His eyes, however, failed to close, although a
massive weariness tugged at him. He looked around the tiny living space
and abruptly decided to get up. He padded through the hallway in his
bare feet, undershorts and T-shirt and plopped down on a beaten-up
recliner in the living room. The typical career of an FBI agent didn’t
often lend itself to long-standing domestic tranquillity.
Too many missed anniversaries, holidays, birthdays. Gone for months at
a time, no end in sight. He had been severely wounded in the line of
duty, a traumatic situation for any spouse. There had been threats to
his family from the human waste he had dedicated his life to
eradicating. All for the cause of justice, of making the world, if not
better, at least momentarily safer. A noble goal that didn’t sound so
special when you were trying to explain to your eight-year-old over the
phone why Daddy was going to miss another baseball game, another recital
or school play. He had known that going in; Peg had too. Being so much
in love, they truly believed they could beat the odds, and they had for
a long time. Ironically, his relationship with Peg was now better than
it had been in years.
The kids, though, were a different matter. He had taken the full brunt
of the blame for the breakup and maybe he deserved it, he thought. Only
now were his three oldest kids beginning to talk to him on anything
approaching a consistent basis. Meggie was completely gone from him. He
didn’t know what was going on in her life. That’s what had hurt the
most. The not knowing.
Everyone had choices to make and he had made his own. He had enjoyed a
very successful career at the bureau, but that success had come with a
cost. He walked to the kitchen, pulled out a cold beer and plopped back
down in the recliner. His magical sleeping potion of choice. At least
he wasn’t into the hard liquor. Yet. He finished the beer in several
large gulps, lay back in the chair and closed his eyes.
An hour later, the telephone ringing roused him from a deep sleep. He
was still sitting in the recliner. He picked up the telephone receiver
on the table next to his chair.
“Yeah?”
“Lee?”
Sawyer’s eyelids fluttered briefly, then opened. “Frank?” Sawyer looked
at his watch. “You’re not with the bureau anymore, Frank, I thought the
private sector lets you keep more regular hours.”
On the other end of the line Frank Hardy was fully dressed and sitting
in a nicely furnished office. On the wall behind him hung numerous
mementos depicting a long and distinguished career with the FBI. Hardy
smiled. “Too much competition out here, Lee. Just having twenty-four
hours in a day doesn’t seem fair.”
“Well, I’m not ashamed to admit it’s about my limit. What’s up?”
“Your plane bombing,” Hardy said simply.
Sawyer sat straight up, fully awake now, his eyes focusing in the
darkness. “What?”
“I got something here you’re going to need to see, Lee. I’m not clear
on exactly what it all means yet. I’m about to brew a pot of coffee.
How long will it take you to get here?”
“Give me thirty minutes.”
“Just like old times.”
In five minutes Sawyer was fully dressed. He slipped his 10mm pistol
into its holster and went down to the street to fire up his sedan. On
the drive over he reported in to headquarters to alert them to this
recent development. Frank Hardy had been one of the best agents the
bureau had ever produced. When he left to start his own security firm,
every agent had felt the loss, but no one begrudged Hardy the
opportunity after his many years of service. He and Sawyer had been
partners for ten years before Hardy made his exit.
They had been a prolific team, beating the odds on a number of
high-profile cases and bringing to justice criminals who had gone far
underground. Many of their targets were now serving life sentences
without parole at various maximum-security federal prisons around the