Last Chance to Die

6



It was almost 11 P.M. by the time Vail changed clothes, and he and Kate drove back to FBI headquarters. At the lab Nate Wilhelm introduced himself as being from the Chemical Unit. Vail took out the plastic-bag-wrapped packet and handed it to him. “We think there’s a disc inside the envelope and that it’s covered with some water-catalyst powder, possibly potassium, meant to destroy it,” Kate said. “The envelope appears to be water-soluble, too.”

Wilhelm pulled on a pair of thick latex gloves. “Do you need to preserve the package for prints or handwriting?”

Vail looked at Kate. She said, “Just to be on the safe side, you’d better try.”

The examiner put on a pair of safety glasses and a dust mask. Then, with an X-Acto knife, he slit open the end of the envelope. Careful not to drag out any more powder than necessary, he used a pair of padded forceps to remove the disc from the paper container. He took the packet to another workstation and shook out all the powder he could. Then he put a small amount of it into a test tube. Using a pipette, he dripped a couple ounces of water into the tube. The powder bubbled furiously. “It looks like potassium, and it reacts to water like potassium.”

He pulled off the gloves and put on a fresh pair, going back to the disc. He dusted it off with a large fingerprint brush, then held it up to the light. “No latents.” Out of a box that dispensed them, he took a sterile cloth and wiped the disc off on both sides. He did it twice more with fresh cloths and then took off his mask, glasses, and gloves. “That should do it.”

Vail took it by the edges and touched his fingertip to the non-play side of the disc, testing it for any reaction to the moisture from his hand. There was none. He asked Wilhelm for a plastic protective sleeve and dropped it into his side jacket pocket.

Kate said, “Nate, we don’t want this to show up on any paperwork. Will that cause you any problems?”

“Less paperwork is never a problem, Kate.”

“Thanks.”

As Kate and Vail started toward the elevator, he said, “Should we wait until tomorrow to see what’s on this?”

“Like you could wait.”

He laughed. “I was just trying to see how tired you were.”

When the elevator door opened, the only passenger, a black man, said, “Steve Vail?”

It was Luke Bursaw, an agent Vail had worked with in Detroit more than five years earlier. “Luke,” Vail said, shaking hands with him. “What are you doing here?”

“I finally got my ‘office of preference’ transfer. I’m at the Washington Field Office now, working general criminal. Are you back with the Bureau?”

Vail looked at Kate. “I’m sorry. This is Kate Bannon. She’s—”

“Sure, I remember Kate from Detroit. And now she’s a deputy assistant director. We get most of the memos over at WFO. How are you, Kate?” He extended his hand.

Kate took it. She remembered him because he was the only agent Vail had worked with in Detroit, usually when a difficult arrest needed to be made. The most memorable one was where Vail and Bursaw came barging into the office with four bank robbers handcuffed together early one morning. One of them, also wanted for murder, had been on Michigan’s ten-most-wanted list. It happened shortly after she’d arrived in Detroit, and the thing that had always stuck with her was that no one seemed to think it was out of the ordinary, at least not for Vail.

Bursaw had gone to Penn on a wrestling scholarship and majored in philosophy. He’d gained a couple of pounds since she’d last seen him, but he still seemed to move with an athlete’s ease. “And I remember you, Luke. What brings a WFO agent here at this time of night?”

“I caught a couple of shifts as night supervisor that nobody wanted—you know, holiday pay. And I had some evidence to drop off at the lab on the way home.” Bursaw turned back to Vail. “One thing I do know about you, Steve, is how good you were at ducking questions. So what are you doing here?”

“Actually, I am back with the Bureau, sort of as an independent contractor, working with Kate.”

Bursaw glanced at him carefully, letting Vail know that there were still holes in his story that would be queried later. “Small world. Where are you staying?”

“Over on Sixteenth Street.”

“Any chance we could get together? Share some lies over a beer?”

“Sure. I’ll give you a call.”

“Actually, I’ve got a problem, and you’re the perfect person to run it by.”

“What kind of problem?”

“A woman from headquarters, an intelligence analyst, went missing a few months back, and I wound up with the case. So far I’m getting nowhere.”

Vail took the DVD out of his jacket and handed it to Kate. “Any reason this can’t wait until morning?” he asked her.

“It can wait. Besides, I am beat.”

“We’ll get a running start at it first thing tomorrow.”

“Sure.” The elevator opened onto the first floor, and the two men got out. “Nice seeing you, Luke.”

“You too, Kate.”

As they walked toward the street exit, Bursaw said, “Any idea how long you’re going to be here?”

“To tell you the truth, it’s starting to look like the minute I stepped off the plane, I’d already been here too long.”

Vail and Bursaw found a bar that wasn’t far from headquarters. Since it was relatively empty, they went to the far end and climbed onto a couple of stools. After the bartender had brought them beer, Bursaw asked, “So what could possibly have brought you back to the Bureau after the way they treated you?”

“You know you’re one of the few people I ever trusted.”

“I can’t really remember you trusting anyone. Sounds like you’re about to tell me that you can’t tell me.”

“If you knew what this was about, you’d thank me for not involving you, especially when they start hooking people up to the polygraph.”

“That serious?”

“I think you know I wouldn’t be keeping it from you if it weren’t.”

Bursaw nodded and then took a sip of beer. “You’re right, I don’t want to know. But how did you get involved in it?”

“I did some work for the director six months ago, in L.A.”

“That Pentad thing, that was you?”

“More Kate than me. I was just looking for a change of pace.”

“From the little I heard, you got it—and then some.” Bursaw looked at him for some reaction, but Vail just shrugged. “You never did like a lot of noise.” Bursaw chuckled salaciously. “But you and Kate, huh? That’s got to be a major factor in you being dragged back in.”

Vail snorted. “It was supposed to be, but unfortunately we don’t seem to be a good fit.”

“You know what Nietzsche said—‘Woman was God’s second blunder.’ ”

“Is that a shot at me or at Kate?”

Bursaw took a scholarly tone. “Philosophy is not a discipline of answers but one of contemplation.”

“Great, things aren’t surreal enough around here. Now I’ve got a black guy quoting Hitler’s favorite philosopher.”

“Whether it’s working or not, that’s still a good-looking woman,” Bursaw said.

“She is that,” Vail said. “But enough about my blundering celibacy. What’s the story on the missing employee?”

“Her name is Sundra Boston. She’s an intelligence analyst at headquarters, or at least she was. I didn’t know her. She disappeared about three months before I was transferred back here. I’ve got this cousin, Eden. Nice gal, but she married a loser. Actually, ‘drunk’ would be a more accurate description. They got a couple of kids, and he’s always going off on these drinking binges, leaving her with nothing to get by on. Anyway, she met Sundra at church, and they became friends. My cousin may have made a couple of bad choices in her life, but she’s not a complainer. When her husband takes off, she sucks it up and doesn’t say anything to anyone. I suppose it’s as much out of embarrassment as anything else. She said that somehow Sundra always seemed to know when she was going through those times, and she would show up unannounced at Eden’s with a carload of groceries. She’d been doing it for over a year. When I got back here, Eden pulled me aside at a family get-together and asked me if I could find out what happened to her. She thought Sundra had been transferred to some secret assignment or something.

“So I checked indices and found that we had a case on her disappearance, and that it was being handled on my squad. I’d been back in D.C. less than two weeks, knew nothing about the case, and I hadn’t caught on to my supervisor yet. So I went in and asked him about it.” Bursaw shook his head and took a long pull on his beer. “Steve, this guy is everything that is wrong with the new Bureau. He actually grew up in Beverly Hills—that’s right, my brother, 90210—and couldn’t get through an hour of the day without performing some affectation. He calls the bad guys ‘thugs’ and ‘hoodlums.’ When I asked him about Sundra, he gave me the rundown and told me that the investigation was at a standstill. Then he cocks his head to the side in thought and says, ‘You know, she’s an African-American, too. You could probably find her, because these people would talk to you.’ And you think the leadership was bad when you were in. Then he reassigns the case to me as if he had just had some sort of movie-of-the-week life-altering epiphany.”

“I take it you haven’t had any luck getting those African-Americans to tell you where she is?”

Bursaw grinned. “Don’t start,” he said. “So I pull the file and find out that very little had been done after the first thirty days. I made up my mind right there to jump on it with both feet.”

“Not to belittle your altruism, but what does she look like?”

“You’re right, she is good-looking. Which doesn’t hurt. But I figure with what she did for my cousin, she must be a good person and deserves to have someone searching for her for real.”

“A Bureau employee disappears and no one is making it a priority?”

“At first they did have the full-court press on it, but when they found that she was in major debt . . . well, like you always said, they prefer the theory that requires the least amount of work. So they decided that she probably just took off for parts unknown and changed her name or got married or both so she could wipe the slate clean.”

“Define ‘major debt.’ ”

“Almost fifty K on credit cards alone.”

“Isn’t it hard to run up a bill that big without enjoying some of society’s moral taboos?”

“You don’t spend much money, do you, Steve? Even though you won’t read it in the file, I think that’s what they thought,” Bursaw said. “It wasn’t drugs. She’d just had a physical and been screened. And all her phone records and credit-card receipts have been checked, so it’s unlikely that she had a gambling problem. But she did like nice things. She’d recently bought a house and had a nice car. From what I’ve been told, she always dressed much better than the rest of us government humps. With that kind of taste, fifty thousand isn’t such a big leap.”

“So they’re trying to put it to sleep, and you’re going to make them pay for it by embarrassing them with their ineptness.”

“I would like nothing better, but I’m not sure anyone will notice.”

“You haven’t changed much, Luke.”

Bursaw smiled slowly. “As if I have to explain the joys of belittling management to you. The good news is that I’m not getting any pressure to solve it. The bad news is, there’s something wrong with it that I can’t figure out.”

“Wrong how?”

“Okay, let’s assume she took off to get out from under that debt. The search-warrant inventory at her house showed that she left everything there, and I mean everything. She had a fairly new laptop computer. It was still there. Seven-hundred-dollar shoes that hadn’t been worn. And for me, maybe the toughest thing to explain, her designer suitcases were still there. The price tags still on them.”

“Have you called the locals to see if there’ve been any other incidents of women missing under similar circumstances?”

“Some sort of serial thing, yeah, I thought of that, but you know what a mess that can start. I do have some feelers out, though.”

“When did you last check her credit cards?” Vail said.

“I look at them once a week. Nary a blip anywhere.” Bursaw took another sip of his beer. “I’d like you to look at it.”

“What is it that you think I can do? I didn’t go to an Ivy League school.”

“I don’t know, maybe I’m on tilt with this. Maybe I’m trying too hard to show the world how smart I am or, more likely, what a moron my supervisor is. I don’t know. You were always good at finding things no one else could. Maybe take a look at the file. See if I’m missing anything.”

“Right now my days are pretty full.”

Bursaw gave him an easy grin. “How are your nights?”

“With everything I’ve got going on, I would have to be a blithering idiot to say yes.”

Bursaw drained his beer. “Then let’s go take a look at the file.”

It was a little after nine when Kate got to the off-site the next morning. She was surprised when she heard the shower going. Evidently Vail had slept in. She made a pot of coffee and, when it was ready, poured herself a cup. In the observation room, she started reviewing the information Vail had pinned to the wall. A few minutes later, he walked out of the kitchen and held up his cup. “Thanks.”

“You and Luke reminiscing over too many beers last night?”

“Actually we were at WFO until about four A.M. reviewing the case file on his missing analyst.”

“I thought you didn’t like this work.”

“I like the work just fine. In fact, it’s the reason I dislike the people who keep getting in the way of it.”

“That sounds more like a rationalization than a defense, Vail.”

“Of all the times Luke helped me in Detroit—and some of them were pretty touch and go—the guy never once asked me for a favor. Until last night.”

“Sorry. It’s just that I would have thought you had enough to do.”

“I guess that’s when you find out if someone is truly worth your friendship.”

“Were you able to help him?”

“I gave him a few suggestions. I’m not sure he needed them. He’s not the guy I’d want after me,” Vail said. “You ready to watch that disc? Or did you peek last night, Katie?”

“No.” She took it out of her briefcase. “But I was a little surprised you trusted me with it.”

“It wasn’t me trusting you that was the problem—it was me trusting me if I held on to it.”

She laughed cynically. “Oh, honesty. Is that your latest tactic to deceive me?”

“I figured if anything would keep you off balance, it would be telling the truth. Apparently that’s not going to work either.”

She set the disc in the DVD player. On the monitor screen, they recognized the meeting room at the Denton safe house. It was followed by a couple of seconds of static and then by someone holding a hand-printed sign in front of the camera. On it were written the date, the time, and the name Charles Dennis Pollock. “That should eliminate any guesswork about who’s starring in this little production.”

Another few seconds of static were followed by two men sitting in the room. Pollock, recognizable from his security-background photo, was unknowingly facing the camera. He opened a briefcase that was on the floor next to him and handed a sheaf of papers to the other man. In turn, the man, who carefully never let any of his face be exposed, handed Pollock three bundles of bills and then in heavily accented English demanded, more than requested, that it be counted. While Pollock obliged, the handler deliberately held up the documents he had received and slowly paged through them so they could be captured on video. Several had CLASSIFIED stamped across them. Pollock then placed the money in his briefcase. A brief discussion ensued about what other material Pollock could provide. The screen again went to static. Vail fast-forwarded it until the end. There was nothing else on it.

“That’s it? What about the golden thread or whatever you call it?”

“The golden cord,” Vail said. “I don’t know.”

“Maybe Calculus was just screwing with us and wrote ‘Ariadne’ on the envelope to frustrate us so we’d be willing to pay more.”

“That’s a possibility. Spies do love mind games. Maybe Pollock somehow has the answer to whoever’s next. There’s only one way to find out.”

“You want to arrest him?”

“That does seem to be the next logical step now that we have irrefutable evidence that he’s a spy.”

“Then I’ve got to let Bill Langston know.”

“Come on, Kate. You know that finding the next name is going to be tough enough without going through the system.”

“Even you can’t arrest someone for espionage without somebody somewhere authorizing it. There’s no other way but the system. Finding out who Pollock is and that he’s a spy has brought us back into the aboveground world of rules and—God forbid—the law.”

It was moments like this that reminded Vail he’d been correct in choosing a life in which he answered to no one. And since Kate had told him that a relationship with her was no longer possible—everything else being equal—he would have gone off on his own and done whatever he needed to do to resolve the situation with this man who had committed treason. But the only reason, or at least the deciding one, he’d taken this assignment was to help Kate regain her reputation. “How about if we just interview Pollock? If he doesn’t cooperate, I’ll call Langston for authorization. But first I want a chance to find out if he has the key to the next name before he disappears into a bureaucratic maze that in all likelihood will shut this down. With Calculus gone, it looks like he’s our only shot.”

“What are you going to do if he does cooperate, leave him out there?”

“If he’s cooperative, we’ll ask him to take a ride and hand-deliver him to Langston so he can take all the bows. That’ll keep him happy, and hopefully we’ll have the next clue.”

“So either way, by the end of the day Langston will be notified.”

“If that’s what you want, absolutely.”

“I really hate it when you start a promise with ‘if.’ ” She studied his face briefly for signs of deception. As usual there were none. “Okay, but I’m driving. That way I can abandon you at the first sign of trouble.”

Vail laughed. “That off-ramp was three or four exits ago.”