I found that I had pressed the button. The phone was ringing. I was making the call I had made already a thousand times in my career.
(And see what I do? A thousand times in my career, as if the actual number is lost in the blur of memory. I had made the call, before that day, 209 times. Some of those times I had sent a text message. But my conscience was stained with 209 positive identifications.)
The phone rang in my ear while it rang in Gaithersburg.
I was ready for it to be over, and it was over. I knew where the man was, and fuck Barton and fuck Cook and fuck Dr. Venezia-Karbach: I was ready. The words were poised on my tongue, ready to be said: It is all done. It is all set.
“Marshals Service. This is Bridge’s office.”
It was a woman’s voice, bright and cheerful. It was Janice. Bridge’s assistant. When she answered it meant he was out in the field. In the field or in a meeting.
Opportunity. It was Castle. Castle whispering in the dark. Opportunity.
Janice, patient, cheerful: “Hello?”
“Yes,” I said. “Hello.” There was no voice I could have done better. Cold as steel, flat as dirt ground, a smoky whisper of a southern accent. “It’s me.”
The rain lashed against the flimsy balcony doors, and they rattled in their grooves. My number would have come up blank—a field number—but so, too, I suspected, would Mr. Bridge’s own cell-phone number, blank, masked, agent-to-base communication, the same as mine. From Janice’s POV, a blank is a blank. It was a wild risk to try out such an assumption in these circumstances. This was just one of many risks I was taking, about to take.
“Well, my goodness. Are you calling from your meeting?” Janice had a little southern accent of her own, a late-modern southern accent, more Atlanta than Little Rock. I put her in her late twenties. Red lipstick, sensible shoes. A dog at home, something cute and loyal.
“Yes,” I said carefully. “That’s right. Still here.”
“And are you checking up on me, sir?”
Janice’s tone was sugary, chipper, borderline flirtatious. In response I tried out a noise, something I had never heard performed but imagined must exist, a matching of tone with tone: I chuckled. A gruff Bridge-style chuckle.
“No, my dear. I am not checking up on you.”
“Well, sir, maybe you should be.”
I wondered if he ever called her Jan. I wondered if she called him Lou. I wondered if Lou saw Jan at the office Christmas party. I wondered if he brought his wife, sipped eggnog, made toasts, got tipsy, took a cab home, coached soccer, saved for college, took the minivan to the minivan place when the brakes were squealing. I wondered about the whole normal human world.
“What is it I can do for you, sir?”
What could she do for me? Having come this far, what happened now? I focused on the voice, the manner, the best way to get what I needed rather than thinking about what I was doing and why. Had I stopped to think, I might have asked myself the very logical question: Was I out of my goddamn mind?
What was I hoping to get, giving Janice that cold, slow, mild accent, I was not yet entirely sure, nor did I know why I’d done it.
Because of a dagger on a file? Because of some sloppy grammar? Because of an unusual pattern of fact?
It was none of those. I had seen messy files before. I had seen strange facts in cases before, and sometimes they had been reconciled and other times not. What was different this time, what had driven me to my unusual action, was Bridge’s voice. The way he had sounded in our last call, tight and tense as a bent wire. His voice on the phone at 9:36, calling early for the first time ever.
My hand drummed on the desk, as my hands were always doing.
“I just had a quick question for you. About the case.” I had dropped back into an all-business tone: Fun time is over, Janice.
“And which case is that?”
My mind reeled momentarily. How many cases? How many runners? How many Jackdaws? How many of me?
I gave her the case number, and she said, “What?”
I gave it to her again. I read it slow, digit by digit, and she repeated it back and said she was sorry but she just did not know which case I was referring to. “That number is just not coming up.”
“The boy,” I started, and almost gave the name, then I stopped. I held my breath. That number is just not coming up.
“Should I ask Marlena?”
“No—no, that’s not…forget it. Forget I called.”
I didn’t smoke or pace around in tight circles. I didn’t even think, really. I hung up the phone and went onto the balcony and stood and listened to the distant howl of sirens while the rain blew around me in curtains. It was weird how calming it was, how it gave me this—I won’t say peace, not peace, exactly, but a peaceful sense of the irreversible. I was a stone that was falling. I had jumped, and there was no way to jump back.