The Informant

26

HE WOKE UP in Milwaukee in the evening. He had driven out of Chicago after Salvatore Castiglione had escaped. The drive had been only a bit over an hour and took him out of Illinois and into Wisconsin. It had been a small irony to him to be taking the same drive he and Vincent Pugliese had made together the day they had broken the ambush in the cornfield.

In Milwaukee he had checked into the first large hotel he had seen, a Marriott Residence Inn, gone into his room, showered, and slept. It was now after six o'clock, and he had caught up on the portion of last night's sleep that he had lost. He felt alert and energetic and restless.

He had suffered a serious setback last night in not being able to finish the job. All three Castiglione brothers had to go. It wasn't that he had a strong feeling of dislike for Salvatore Castiglione. He had never really known young Sal in the old days. Sal had been no more than fourteen when Schaeffer had arrived to do some more work for the Castiglione family. He had seen him, but they had never spoken. He remembered young Sal in his grandfather's house when he had come in to negotiate a deal on a man named Harrow.

Harrow was a problem for the family, and old Salvatore hated to let problems go on for very long. Harrow had made some odd but unforgivable moves when he had arrived in Chicago. He had gone to a number of restaurants and demanded that they pay him a monthly fee in exchange for a guarantee that the Health Department would pass them on their inspections. He said he was an official for the public employees' union and that he was trying to work with the restaurant owners to improve conditions so the members of his union didn't have to fill out a lot of forms listing hazards and violations. He said it would help the restaurants, the city, and the customers.

Some restaurants paid him, and others didn't. The following month, the ones that hadn't paid were cited for vermin infestation, incorrect water temperature, or dirty kitchens, and closed temporarily by the Health Department. It had apparently not occurred to Harrow that he was not the first person to think of this way of making money. The ancient Romans had done it, and it was familiar to the Castiglione organization, which was already being paid to protect some of these same establishments. There were even some—the Palermo and the Bella Napoli—that were owned by people connected to the Castigliones.

Old Salvatore had not made any telephone calls or filed a complaint with City Hall, as some important men might have done. He simply told one of the young men who hung around his house all day waiting for orders to go call someone who knew how to reach the Butcher's Boy. When the Butcher's Boy arrived, they had a talk, and then Schaeffer went out to study Harrow's movements.

Two days later he reported back to old Salvatore. Harrow was not involved in any way with any union. He had simply put one of the health inspectors on his payroll. But he did have several friends, maybe relatives, who were cops. At the end of the day shift Harrow would sometimes go meet these cops at the Shamrock for a few beers.

"Cops?" said old Salvatore. "What the f*ck? He hangs out with cops and they didn't tell him what he was doing to himself?"

"I don't know what they told him, or if they know about his way of getting money. But before I kill him and his inspector, I thought you should know about the cops."

"You're right. Thank you," said Castiglione. "I appreciate your manners and your good judgment. But go ahead and kill the bastards. I'd be happy if you got it done by dinnertime so those cops that drink with him will find out right away."

He went to the Health Department and waited for the inspector, followed him to his first stop, a Chinese restaurant on South LaSalle Street. He waited until the inspector left, walked up the street behind him, and shot him in the back of the head with a silenced pistol. Before the inspector collapsed onto the pavement, Schaeffer was in the middle of a crowd of people walking to the next corner. He turned at the intersection instead of waiting to cross, while some of the others turned around and went back to join the gaggle of people looking down at the fallen man.

He drove directly to Harrow's house. He knew Harrow would have some way of knowing if anyone stood on his front steps, so when he rang the doorbell, he held an envelope full of cash in his left hand, flapping it absentmindedly against his thigh. A man who was used to getting cash in envelopes would know the exact look, feel, sound, and flexibility of money. First-time blackmailers and drug thieves might be fooled by cut paper, but not Harrow.

After a few moments the door opened, and Harrow stood there looking watchful. He was a big man, about forty years old, with a fringe of strawberry blond hair above his pink face. He glowered. "What can I do for you?"

"Compliments of the Bella Napoli restaurant." He held out his left hand with the envelope.

Harrow reached for it as Schaeffer's right hand came up holding the silenced pistol. He fired one shot into Harrow's chest and pushed him backward into the house, where Harrow fell. He stood over him and fired another round through his skull, closed the front door, and walked to his car. As he reached the sidewalk, he had to stop to let three ten-year-old boys flash past on bicycles. They were moving too fast to look at his face or to see him as anything more than a blur.

When he came back to the Castle at six, the old man was in his office. He opened his cash drawer, stood, and handed Schaeffer the money he had offered for the job. Then his black eyes, like beads, flicked to the side, and he smiled, his long, tobacco-stained teeth suddenly visible. "Come in here." He beckoned to someone in the doorway. "That's right. I saw you. Come in here now." The voice was not the hard, imperious one that he used with his men, but the softer, slightly higher, cracked voice was more horrifying because it was so forced, so false.

A boy about thirteen or fourteen appeared from around the corner and stood in the doorway. He wore jeans and high-top basketball sneakers, which was the style then, and a sweatshirt. "This is my grandson," Castiglione said. "He's the youngest, Salvatore. Named after me."

"Hello," Schaeffer said.

The boy looked at him darkly, but said nothing.

Old Salvatore said, "That's right. Take a good look. That's the scariest man you're ever going to see. Doesn't look scary, does he?"

"No."

"Well he is. Look in his eyes. You see now?"

"I don't know."

"Does he like you, or does he hate you?"

"I can't tell."

"That's because the answer is 'neither.' He looks at you the way you look at a fish. It's alive now, maybe not tomorrow, but it doesn't matter which."

"I get it."

"Good." He gave the boy a push. "You see another one like him, make sure he's on your side."

Young Salvatore had grown up. As of last night he was the reigning Castiglione. Schaeffer was irritated that he hadn't managed to kill him. It was a chore, and now it would be harder and more dangerous.

He was fairly certain that the reason Salvatore had gotten away was that he hadn't been able to get to him fast enough. As soon as he had broken into the Castle, the clock had started running. He had killed everyone he'd seen, even the girl in Joe Castiglione's bed. He'd known at the time that even she had to die. He had heard people say that killing somebody was egotism—thinking your own life was more valuable than somebody else's. Those people didn't understand either life or death. Your life wasn't better than someone else's. Your life was valuable to you because it was yours. What was egotistical was thinking you could neglect to do the smart, self-protective thing when you had the chance and still manage to survive. It was thinking your superiority gave you leeway. You could afford to leave your enemies alive because they weren't as smart or as strong or as lucky as you were. Well, you couldn't afford to think that way.

If he'd made a mistake last night, it was not going upstairs in Paul Castiglione's house to kill the woman yelling down the stairs. Presumably it was Paul's wife. He'd made the decision, not to let her live, but not to waste the time going up there to find and kill her and whatever kids there were. Apparently he had made the wrong choice. She must have called Salvatore as soon as she heard the alarm go off.

He dressed and went downstairs to eat dinner, and then came back up and used his laptop computer to find Vincent Pugliese's address. He was tentatively pleased because he knew the area in the center of the city fairly well, unless the Chicago business-people had torn everything down and replaced it since he'd left the country. Finally, he took the time to examine his weapons and give them a hasty cleaning. He cut up a T-shirt, stripped the pistols, and wiped them down. He used a section of a curtain rod to run a patch through the shotgun barrel. He left the shotgun in two pieces in his bag, but reassembled the pistols and reloaded them and the spare magazines.

If Eddie could have seen what he was doing, he would have thought he was crazy. He had always been against picking up somebody else's gun and using it. After Eddie and the boy had gotten to Manny Garcia by killing his two bodyguards, the boy had picked up one bodyguard's Colt Commander. Eddie had shaken his head. "That man was not a pro, or he wouldn't be dead."

The boy had replied, "His gun fired fine. There was nothing wrong with it. He just couldn't hit anything. He didn't have the balls to hold the gun steady."

"You should wipe your prints off and drop it," Eddie said. "You don't know where that thing has been."

"Are we talking about germs?"

"No. He might have killed an archbishop, four Supreme Court justices, and Miss America with that damned gun."

Now it was about nine-thirty in the evening, time to drive back to Chicago. He stepped outside and went to his car. On the drive to Chicago along Lake Michigan he could feel his alertness growing as night came on. The sky was turning dark, and a few white clouds high above the lake east of the road were illuminated by the last of the sunlight to the west.

There was really no good plan but to go to Vincent Pugliese's address in Chicago and study it for vulnerabilities. Sal Castiglione would be trying to save himself now, and the logical way was to surround himself with his own people. That meant using Vince Pugliese to reassure the soldiers and rally them. But it was possible that Castiglione would simply leave town for a time and wait until calm returned.

Seeing Vincent Pugliese's address was daunting. It was an old gray stone office building six stories high with an imposing façade built in the early part of the last century. There was a stone arch with a pair of concrete pillars, and through the glass doors he caught a glimpse of a black-and-white marble mosaic floor in the lobby. As he moved slowly past the front of the building in traffic, he saw that the bottom floor held several businesses with separate entrances—a coffee shop, a travel agency, a credit union, a restaurant called Mimi's.

After studying the place for two minutes, he could read Vince Pugliese's intention in every aspect of it. Pugliese would want to achieve a low profile, but still have Castiglione soldiers coming and going. The first-floor businesses were sure to be a tangle of legal agreements between fourteen or fifteen different entities, all companies that didn't involve a door you could knock on or the name of an actual person. They would be as insubstantial as cobwebs. When all were brushed away, the owner would be another company owned by Vincent Pugliese.

He turned to drive around the building. It was perfect. Old Salvatore Castiglione had bought a fantasy castle for himself, but Pugliese had built a village. One reason the Mafia worked was that a powerful man could offer jobs to all of his relatives and friends, giving them all a visible means of support and lots of free time for schemes and sidelines. Pugliese had his whole first floor occupied by businesses, all of which were ones he could use for money laundering and reinvesting. And the constant presence of people loyal to him behind those ground-floor windows meant he was a very difficult man to sneak up on. The lobby was a bare marble floor with two elevators. It was guarded by a pair of security men behind a desk facing the door. If something happened, Pugliese's people could probably cut the power to the elevators and engage the locks on the door and turn the place into a slaughtering floor.

Off the alley behind the building was the entrance to an underground parking garage where Pugliese and his friends could park their cars off the street. Pugliese was as well protected as a man in Chicago could be. There were not likely to be any surprises in his life.

Schaeffer drove another two blocks farther on and parked in a parking structure beside a movie theater. It was a mild September night, with a slow stream of moving air coming in off the lake. He had already decided that the most likely way to defeat the security of Pugliese's building would be to enter through the underground garage. From there he would look for the features that he couldn't see from the outside. He knew there would be some kind of exit there. Vince was too smart to let his fortress become a prison. He wouldn't let himself be trapped by his own defenses. He would have built in a private way around the barriers. It might be a separate elevator from the sixth floor down to the garage that skipped the intervening floors. It might be a walkway that led from this building to the one beside it or even a tunnel to another building. But his guess was that somewhere in the underground garage would be a plain steel door painted the same color as the walls. On it would be a sign that said something like ELECTRICAL or STAND PIPES or SHUT-OFF VALVE, something that would help the mind move past the door because the words gave the impression that all the questions had been answered. But that door would be Pugliese's way out.

He walked toward the gray building, his eyes constantly scanning, his mind evaluating and contemplating the thousand details they passed over. He looked at traffic patterns in the neighborhood to be sure there wouldn't be a jam that kept him from getting out, searched for security cameras high on the sides of the building or in the ceiling of the garage, watched for police cars to determine the frequency of routine police patrols. He looked at the people walking along the street, and even more closely at anyone who was not walking, just standing by a building or a bus stop. He looked at upper windows for any sign of a police surveillance team or the dark silhouette of a sniper a few feet back from an open window. He studied faces, watching for eyes that stared back at him with too much interest, ones that looked away quickly, or any he had seen before. Always he had a hand close to one of the guns. As he walked he could feel the hard handgrip of the gun beneath the fabric of his coat brush the inside of his wrist.

Darkness had reclaimed the city as he approached the gray stone building. The lights were on in the travel agency and the credit union, but all the desks were empty, the surfaces cleared except for computer monitors, keyboards, and mice. The magenta neon at Mimi's Ristorante was brighter now, and the coffee shop had taken on the forlorn look they all had in the evening, empty except for a few solitary people.

Then, unexpectedly, Vincent Pugliese came out of the building, flanked by two men in dark suits. He looked almost the same as he had twenty years ago. The slicked-back hair was more gray than brown now, and his frame looked a bit broader. The expression on his face was a pinch at the eyebrows, slack skin in the cheeks. He looked as though he hadn't had much sleep. He and his two men went to the curb and looked up the street in the direction of the garage.

A gleaming black Mercedes sedan that had to be Pugliese's came out of the driveway behind the building, turned to the right, and glided toward the curb where Pugliese and his two men waited. Schaeffer kept moving along the street toward them. He stepped into the space behind an accidental grouping of five men who had just come out of a big building up the street, probably all leaving at quitting time. He kept them ahead of him like blockers as they walked toward Pugliese.

"I need to talk to you."

He turned only his eyes. It was Elizabeth Waring. She had separated herself from the stream of pedestrians beside him, appeared at his shoulder, and spoken close to his ear. He spun on his heel, put his arm around her waist, and walked her back in the direction he had come from. They walked a hundred feet or more before he said, with barely contained anger, "What do you want to talk about?"

She was aware that their body language, him embracing her that way and leaning close to her to speak, was intended to make them look like a couple. She said, "The way we start is that I tell you not to kill Vincent Pugliese."

"You've already made that impossible. Now go tell him not to kill me."

"What you did last night has made a lot of people come to this part of town who weren't here yesterday. Besides the regular contingent of FBI from the Chicago office, there are planeloads on their way from Washington and from all over the Midwest. How much more the wiseguys are doing, I can only imagine. But I'll know in another day because it's my job."

"Go do your job. You don't belong out here."

He released her and took a step that separated them by a few inches. Suddenly a shot tore the air, then four more at once, all incredibly loud, and beside him a wall of glass at the front of a closed women's clothing store had a constellation of holes. Cracks appeared to connect them, and the glass came down like a curtain at his feet.

He grasped Elizabeth's arm so hard it hurt and yanked her up into the windowless display, dragging her with him between headless manikins wearing cotton jackets and shorts. There were more shots, some blasting chips from the plaster manikins and pounding one of them backward onto the display. Elizabeth could see there were men firing from the windows of a big black car that was pulling up to the curb near where they had stood.

He pulled Elizabeth through the display of manikins, artificial grass, and colored leaves and down into the center aisle of the store. They ran toward the back of the dimly lighted building. At the end of the sales floor, there were two doors. The one he chose took them into a room full of more racks of dresses and coats, stacks of boxes, a table set up for wrapping. He saw a door to the side of the room and pulled Elizabeth through it.

They were out the side door into the alley, and they both ran hard without speaking. They knew that in a moment the black car could drive around the building and into the alley in front of them. They had to be out of sight before that happened or they would be trapped. They turned into the narrow space between two buildings and ran toward the next street. When they approached the end of the dark passageway, he held up his hand for her to stop, and she managed to do it without running into him. She turned to look behind her down the long, narrow space and put her hand in her pocket to wrap her fingers around the grips of the gun.

He grasped her arm again and tugged her out onto the sidewalk and to the right. He walked purposefully down the street with his arm around her, squeezing her affectionately. Now and then he would look around, not in a panicky, harried way, but calmly, as though he were just checking the crowds of people to see if any of their friends were among them. Elizabeth was surprised for a second at how good a physical actor he was, but then reminded herself that he'd have to be to get close to his victims and walk away after he'd killed them.

"We've got to get out of the street," he said. "Vince is probably calling everybody he knows to get them here."

There was the scream of a siren. "My side seems to be getting here quicker," she said. "They'll protect us."

"If they know who you are, they might try. But they'd fail because too many of the other side are already here. What are you doing out here alone with a gun?"

"What gun?"

"You didn't let go fast enough when I pulled your arm to get you to come along, so I saw it."

"I'm not giving it to you."

"I didn't ask. If you can hit anything smaller than a building with it, I'd rather you keep it."

"I'm competent." She pointed across the street. "Can't we just go into a restaurant like that one and wait?"

"Not that one. It's the Bella Napoli. Somebody in the Castiglione family owns it. Today they're probably using it as a command post for twenty or thirty soldiers. Keep walking, but not too fast. We're a nice, middle-aged couple going somewhere. We heard some noise a few minutes ago, probably, but we don't think it can be any big deal. We think it's a construction crew."

"At night?"

"A road crew, then. The point is, we're not the sort of people who believe we need to run from anything."

"Innocent as babes."

"This isn't funny. The family is stirred up. They aren't going to give up on us."

"Us?"

"They need more revenge than they can get with one person."

"How about that massage place?" It was a white storefront, with four Asian women in white shorts and T-shirts looking out the front window through gauzy curtains to see what the commotion was. "Who owns that?"

"Can't risk it. This close to Vince's place, they might be hookers, and that takes protection." He saw something up the street ahead of them that didn't make him happy. He took her hand and walked with her in a diagonal across the street, around a corner, and then took another diagonal onto State Street, and then up the front steps of an enormous church.

"You think a church is any safer than a restaurant?"

"It's the Holy Name Cathedral. I'm hoping there won't be anybody in there who will rat us out for a tip." He reached up to tug one of the big bronze doors and it opened automatically, powered by a hidden hydraulic system. "That gives me the creeps."

"I guess you're probably not one of their regulars." They slipped inside and the huge bronze door swung shut. The sanctuary was big and ornate, but there seemed to be nobody in it at the moment.

They moved quickly toward the altar past a screen that seemed to repeat the leaf pattern of the bronze doors, staying on the right aisle, trotting past what seemed like a hundred rows of wooden pews. They reached a row of confessional booths. When they heard the big front door opening again, Elizabeth reached for the door of one of the confessionals, but the Butcher's Boy held her arm and shook his head. He held her hand and pulled her with him to the big gallery pipe organ set on the right side of the sanctuary in its own alcove. He dragged her into the alcove where they were shielded from view by clustered marble pillars. There was a seat for the organist and four keyboards, but he went to look at the wood paneling beside the row of gold organ pipes above the keyboards. She whispered, "We could hide in the chapel. It's right up there, past the altar on the right."

He whispered, "They'll search it." He took a small pick the size of a toothpick and an equally small tension wrench out of his wallet. He was staring at a keyhole she hadn't noticed, barely visible at one side of the wooden façade of the organ. He probed the lock and picked it in a few seconds. He opened the door, pulled down a small set of folding steps, and pushed her in front of him. She climbed in, and he followed, then pulled up the steps and closed the door.

They were inside the organ. They took a few steps along a narrow walkway and stopped. Directly in front of them was the row of tall gilded organ pipes and behind them, a mesh screen. The windowless space was open far above to the ceiling of the cathedral, so there was dim light. All the way to the top there were platforms and railings and steps that connected the different levels, all of them in a light-colored hardwood. On each level she could see hundreds of organ pipes arranged in rows graded by length and diameter from the size of a ballpoint pen to the size of her waist, and mounted in wooden enclosures. Most of them were gleaming metal tubes, but others were wooden quadrangles. She and the Butcher's Boy stood side by side behind the row of façade pipes, looking out the narrow spaces between the pipes and through the fabric mesh and listening. She put her right hand on the gun in her pocket and held it there.

There were three of them. She heard them before she saw them. They wore leather-soled shoes, and they were walking along the pews toward the altar. One was on each side, brushing the walls occasionally as they moved ahead. The third came up the center aisle, where there was a long runner that muffled his footsteps. Now and then each of them would stop, bend low, and sight under a section of pews in case someone was hiding under the wooden seats. She wondered if the older one in the center could be Vincent Pugliese. Probably he wasn't. Underbosses of major families didn't do this kind of work.

The men stage-whispered as they reached the front. "I guess he didn't come in here."

"Somebody did. I saw the front door shut from the street."

"Did he have a black suit with a funny white collar?"

"It wasn't a priest. There was a woman with him."

"That's refreshing."

"You think that's funny?"

"Somebody's here, but there's nobody in the pews. Now what?"

"Take a look up there around the altar and pulpit." There was the sound of hard soles on the broad marble steps, and now Elizabeth could see them more clearly. She shuddered. Each time they eliminated a hiding place, they were more likely to find the unlocked door into the organ.

"Check the confessionals." She heard small doors opening and shutting quickly as the man moved down the line. That was where she would have been if not for him.

There were the sounds of shoes on the floor of the sanctuary again, moving off. The big front door opened and she heard traffic sounds from outside, the whisper of car tires, a distant horn, then silence.

His face was right beside hers. "They're gone."

She was so relieved that she felt like grinning, but controlled it. "I guess they don't spend as much time in churches as you do, or they'd have found us."

He said, "You wanted to talk to me. So here we are. Talk, and then we can each go about our business."

"You're in very big trouble," she said. "It looks as though everybody in the Mafia would like you to die."

"They're doing their best to make it happen."

"I can make sure it doesn't. You'll be given protection. I don't mean a guard coming by to look through a prison window at you once in a while. I mean dedicated people on duty twenty-four hours a day with nothing else to do but make sure you don't mysteriously beat yourself up and hang yourself with a bed sheet."

"Why would I be willing to go to a prison? I've never even been charged with anything."

"It wouldn't need to be a prison. It just has to be safe. Joseph Valachi was on an army base. You could be somewhere like that."

"Valachi was in prison. He was moved to an army base because he got hit with a pipe."

"That was half a century ago. We can do better now."

"So can I."

"After last night there will be nowhere you can hide. As soon as the old men know you went after the Castigliones, they'll drop everything and make sure of it. They'll be scared. Even the ones who wanted Tosca dead will be after you. You're a menace to them."

"So what you're offering is some form of protective custody in exchange for testifying against Mafia guys."

"It's my help for your help. Yes, I hope that there will be some people you can testify against—maybe a Mafioso you personally saw kill somebody. Maybe you killed somebody and he paid you. We can't bring you in to testify against somebody who did something minor. It wouldn't work well in court. But I'm hoping you'll give us tips on whatever you know was going on, and we can follow your leads and get our own evidence about what's happening now. Most likely you and I would spend some months talking every day. Then your job would be to testify in the trials of major criminals. The whole process would probably take a couple of years. You would be protected at whatever level is necessary. And I mean any level."

He spoke deliberately. "I'm sure you're sincere about what you're saying," he said. "But you'll have to forgive me if I don't jump at the idea of Justice Department protection."

"I know, you have good reason to believe you're better at this than either the Justice Department or the Mafia. But you have to be able to close your eyes long enough to sleep. And two or three years of invisibility could make a huge difference. Some of the old men could die. Others could ask themselves why they're wasting their time on you and quit. Every day above ground is a good day. I can offer you a thousand days," she said. "Face it. If you want guaranteed survival, you're going to be my informant. Nobody else can protect you."

"You're very open and I can see you're trying to be honest," he said. "But no, thank you."

"But why? Don't you trust me?"

"I don't mean to be insulting. But you work for a huge organization. If I went in with you, within ten minutes nothing would be up to you anymore." He turned toward the doorway. "Those guys are long gone. Let's get out of here before somebody comes to play the organ."

He started to push open the door, but there was another faint hum. Someone was opening the big bronze doors at the back of the church again. "Wait." He closed the door.

Six people entered this time. She could tell because as each entered, the door would begin to shut until the next touched it and it huffed open again. There was a deep male voice that said, "Griggs, Lattimer, take the wings. Foltz, Talavera, Jackson, you take point." After about ten seconds a voice said, "Left side's clear, Agent Meade."

Elizabeth leaned close to him and whispered, "They're FBI."

He whispered back, "This is a great time to be quiet."

"We can let them know we're here, and you'd be safe."

"You wouldn't. I can hardly miss you from here."

"I've got a gun aimed at you too."

"Then we can kill each other, or we can be quiet."

They stood in silence, unmoving, as they listened to the sounds of the six FBI agents searching the sanctuary. "Right side's clear too, Agent Meade, and so are the confessionals."

"All clear in the choir loft."

"The altar is clear."

"The chapel is clear."

"Check the sacristy."

They heard leather-soled shoes trotting up the aisle toward the sacristy.

"See if there are any doors around that organ up there." One of the agents who had been by the altar came down the steps and walked back and forth in front of the organ. Now the Butcher's Boy had his gun in his hand. Through the mesh and between the organ pipes, Elizabeth watched the FBI agent moving around a few feet in front of her, but she kept the gun in the corner of her eye. If it came up to aim, she was going to drag that arm down with all her weight. But the agent didn't seem to notice the keyhole in the wooden panel.

"All right. Let's move on," said Agent Meade. The door at the rear of the church opened once, then again and again, until the church was in silence.

The Butcher's Boy pushed the organ door open, and he lowered the steps to the floor. They both came down into the sanctuary. He replaced the steps, closed the door, and inserted his pick into the keyhole to push a pin tumbler or two out of line to lock the organ door. Elizabeth looked toward the cathedral entrance, then back at him, but he was already walking toward the other side of the sanctuary. "Wait," she said.

He stopped, and when he turned toward her, the gun was already in his hand. She showed him she still had her gun, and left it pointing in his general direction, but didn't aim. "I just wanted to stay together."

"I'm going out through the rectory door. Catch up with the FBI agents on the street and you'll be fine."

"But we're not done talking."

"That's not what I want to talk about," he said. He began to back toward the other side, his gun still held steady. "You've got nothing to offer me."

"In another day or two, protective custody might sound really good."

"Then we'll talk another day." He kept moving slowly backward.

"Give me a phone number," she said.

"I don't have a phone."

"Take mine." She pulled it out and prepared to toss it.

"So you can track me by GPS satellite?"

"Then take my number. 202 555-8990. Can you remember it?"

"202 555-8990."

He turned into the space to the left of the altar and past the sacristy. After a second she heard a standard-size door open and then shut.

Elizabeth put her gun into her purse and stood still, listening. It was only after about a minute that she realized what she had been listening for was gunshots.