Lethal(60)

“Doesn’t matter.”

“What’s your take?”

“On what?”

“On everything that’s been discussed.”

“Is Lee Coburn his real name?”

He seemed taken aback by the question. It was several seconds before he replied in the affirmative, but she wasn’t entirely convinced of his truthfulness.

“Why did the woman in your office say that he was dead?”

“She was under my orders to. For Coburn’s protection.”

“Explain that, please.”

“He’s been in a very precarious situation down there. I couldn’t risk someone coming to suspect him of being an agent and calling an FBI office and weaseling out verification of it. So I put it through the bureau pipeline that he’d been killed while on assignment. It’s even in his service records in case a hacker gets into our system.”

“You’re the only person who knows he’s alive?”

“Me and my assistant who answered the phone.”

“And now me.”

“That’s right.”

“So if something happened to Coburn, any information that he’d passed along to me regarding Sam Marset and The Bookkeeper, or anything that I’d picked up inadvertently, would be extremely valuable to the FBI and the Justice Department.”

He answered with reluctance. “Yes. And Coburn is willing to place your life in jeopardy in order to safeguard that information. Tell me the truth. What have you got? What’s Coburn after?”

“Even I don’t know, Mr. Hamilton.”

She figured that he was questioning her veracity during the long silence that followed.

Then he asked, “Are you saying any of this under duress?”

“No.”

“Then help me get other agents to you. They’ll come in and pick up you and your daughter. You don’t have to fear any reprisal from Coburn. He won’t hurt you. I’d stake my career on that. But you need to be brought in so I can protect you. Tell me where you are.”

She held Coburn’s gaze for several long moments while her common sense waged war with something deeper, something elemental that she couldn’t even put a name to. It tugged at her to abandon her innate caution, to stop playing it safe, to forsake what she knew and to go with what she felt. The feeling was powerful enough to make her fear it. She feared it even more than she feared the man looking back at her with fierce blue eyes.

She went with it anyway.

“Didn’t you hear what Coburn told you, Mr. Hamilton? If you send other agents in after us now, you’ll never get The Bookkeeper.” Before Hamilton could respond, she returned the phone to Coburn.

He took it from her and said, “Too bad, Hamilton. No sale.”

“Have you brainwashed her?”

“Forty-eight hours.”

“Waterboarded?”

“Forty-eight hours.”

“Jesus Christ. At least give me a phone number.”

“Forty-eight hours.”

“All right, goddammit! I’ll give you thirty-six. Thirty-six, and that’s—”

Coburn disconnected and dropped the phone onto the bunk, then asked Honor, “Do you think this tub will float?”





Chapter 23





When Tom got home, Janice was deep into a word game on her cell phone. She didn’t even know he was there until he moved up behind her and spoke her name, then she nearly jumped out of her skin. “Tom! Don’t do that!”

“Sorry I startled you. I thought you would have heard me come in.”

He tried but failed to keep his bitterness from showing. She was playing word games with someone she’d never met who lived on the other side of the world. His world was crumbling. It seemed to him an unfair imbalance. After all, everything he did, he did to try and win her approval, to elevate her regard of him, to make their godawful life a little better.

Of course it wasn’t her fault that he was having a bad day. She didn’t deserve being the scapegoat for it. But he felt defeated and resentful, so rather than saying something that would set off a quarrel, he left his briefcase there in the den where he’d found her and went into Lanny’s room.

The boy’s eyes were closed. Tom wondered if they simply hadn’t reopened after blinking, or if Lanny was actually sleeping. Did he dream? If so, what did he dream about? It was masochistic to ask himself these questions. He would never have answers to them.

He continued to stare down at the motionless boy and recollected something that had happened shortly after Lanny’s birth, when he and Janice were still trying to come to terms with the extent of his limitations and how they would impact their future. A Catholic priest had called on them. He came to comfort and console, but his platitudes about God’s will had upset and angered them. Within five minutes of his arrival, Tom had showed him to the door.

But the cleric had said one thing that had stuck with Tom. He’d said that some believed impaired individuals like Lanny had a direct line to God’s mind and heart, that although they couldn’t communicate with us here on earth, they communed constantly with the Almighty and his angels. Surely it was another banality that the priest had taken from a how-to-minister-to-the-flock manual. But sometimes Tom wanted desperately to believe it.