The Informant

7

ON MONDAY MORNING at six A.M. Elizabeth walked into her office at the Justice Department. She wanted to spend the two hours before anyone else arrived getting caught up on the mail Geoff had left for her. The two hours before the phones started ringing would give her a chance to learn what she had missed and to find out what had been done about it so far. Deputy Assistant Hunsecker was acting as though disagreeing with him were a moral failing, and he'd given her the only administrative punishment she'd ever had. She wanted and needed to keep her job.

She had decided over the weekend that she would pretend to herself that it wasn't a great injustice that she was on the verge of being fired from her job after twenty years with the department. She'd worked in the bureaucracy long enough to know that allowing herself to nurse a grievance would eventually make staying at this job impossible. The only appropriate thing to do now was to pay attention to her work and do the best job she could.

She unloaded her briefcase on the desk and stopped. Her in-box had already been piled with files and memos when she'd left on Wednesday. Now it was empty. The other box was empty too, which was where she put papers that needed to be filed. Had Geoff filed everything? She recalled one of the files that had been in the box on Wednesday. It was a file she had made ten years ago about the expenses involved in centralizing the information obtained on organized crime wiretaps. Since another set of centralizations was coming, she wanted to refresh her memory of what was involved and how much it had cost the last time. She went to the correct filing cabinet, opened the drawer, and found the red card she had placed between two other files when she had taken that one so she could replace it easily.

She remembered a couple of other files and checked for them. None of them had been returned to the cabinets. They were simply gone. As she continued her search, she tried to delay the slowly growing conviction that this was Hunsecker's work. She looked around in Geoffrey's space for signs of whatever must have come in for her since Wednesday afternoon. There were no reports, no memos, no inquiries, not even a phone message. She went back to her office to see if anything had been stored in the locked file drawer in the left side of her desk.

At seven, Geoff came in. He was carrying the briefcase that he seemed to bring primarily to hold his snacks and newspapers. "Good morning, Elizabeth. Get through the exile okay?"

"It wasn't as bad as I'd feared or as good as I'd hoped. Have a good weekend?"

"Sure." He finished putting away his things, then said, "What's wrong?"

"I can't seem to find anything. I expected quite a pile of mail and stuff. Where is it?"

He came into her office and looked at her desk. "I had all of it right here and in order on Friday afternoon." He pointed at an empty space. "Right here."

"You didn't leave anything in the pile that was classified or sensitive, did you?"

"No," he said. "Everything like that is locked up in the reading-room safe."

She shrugged. "Then it probably isn't important. But I'll let you know when I find out what became of it." She went into her office and closed the door. It had occurred to her that having someone remove the files for her current cases was exactly what would probably happen if she were fired. Maybe Hunsecker had used her two-day suspension to get the AG's office to approve the firing. Maybe that was what the suspension had been for.

One of the buttons on her telephone lit up, then began to blink as Geoffrey put the caller on hold. She picked up the phone and hit the button. "Waring."

"This is Dale Hunsecker. I'm waiting."

She steeled herself for what she had to say. "If what you're waiting for is an apology, I know I owe you one. What happened last week was a misunderstanding that I allowed to happen. I wasn't ignoring your orders when I requested that surveillance on Frank Tosca. Conditions had changed, and I had new information that made it an emergency. I should have called you to explain before I did anything. I'm sorry."

"Well," he said. "I have to say that I'm pleasantly surprised. I expected you to say 'I told you so.'"

"About what? Don't tell me Tosca has been killed."

"No. As soon as the surveillance was lifted, Tosca took his family and slipped away. Right now we don't know where he is. He left three men in his house, apparently to guard it. They were murdered on Thursday night. Their bodies were found in various parts of the house."

"How were they killed?"

"Let's see." He seemed to be perusing something. "Two shot, one bludgeoned to death."

"Do you know where the one who was bludgeoned was found?"

"Aah, I don't see that information in this report. It does say he was unarmed."

"Of course. The killer must have gone there without a gun. He killed one and used that man's gun to kill the others."

"He would do that? He'd go to the house of a Mafia capo without bringing a gun?"

"I'm guessing that he did. He was here in Washington and probably flew to New York, so he couldn't have taken a weapon with him or he'd have been stopped at airport security. He must have arrived in Tosca's neighborhood after the FBI surveillance ended, and moved in. He's been doing this for a long time. I've been told by informants that he hasn't done anything but kill people since he was about fifteen."

"So he would arrive unarmed and see three armed men, and say, 'Great, they're at my mercy'? I don't see it."

"He didn't want to kill three men. He wanted Tosca. I think he arrived, determined that someone was in the house, and assumed it was Tosca. You have to realize that they wanted him to think that. They wouldn't have been there to protect the parakeet. They were there to ambush him."

"So he went through with it and killed them all. I still find it difficult to understand why he'd do that."

"People who kill for a living aren't exactly normal. They don't think the way we do, and they don't all think alike. This one is unusual. He was brought up to do it, and he knows instantly how to kill each opponent without having to stop and think. If he hadn't killed each person he's come up against, he'd be dead. This happened Friday?"

"Thursday night."

"Then we've got to find Tosca right away."

"Why Tosca?"

"Because that's who the killer was looking for on Thursday night. Unless Tosca's dead, he's still searching. If we want him, we'll have to be where Tosca is."