The Informant

by Thomas Perry

  "No, that's new," Amanda said. "And so is the chicken. Jim cooked that, so it's called 'Chicken della Romeo.'"

  Elizabeth took the two plastic containers out and closed the refrigerator with her hip. "How are you coming on the college applications?"

  "Fine," he said. "They're not due for months."

  "But if you know what the essay topics are, you can write rough drafts and then have lots of time to polish them."

  "I've still got to get through the first semester. Want me to start working on my law school applications too?"

  "Not a bad idea," she said. "A smart guy like you could have everything done ten years in advance."

  "I'll start thinking about it." He paused. "There. I'm done thinking. No."

  She sat down to eat, and one at a time Jim and Amanda drifted back upstairs to their work. Elizabeth was silently grateful that they had taken her spate of absences and late nights as a small, inconsequential passing variation in the routines they had always followed since their father died. For most of those years her job had been different, an eight to five job with an hour commute on either end, and the occasional Saturday or Sunday when Organized Crime was swamped with information.

  She showered, changed into a pair of soft exercise pants and an old T-shirt, and curled up on the couch with a cup of tea, her laptop computer, and her briefcase. It was good to be home. Even if she couldn't see or hear the kids from down here, just feeling them upstairs safe, working at the things they needed to do, was comforting. She had been out on the streets of unfamiliar cities with a gun in her coat pocket, but it was over now, like a fever passing. She had made an energetic but ultimately foolish attempt to turn a killer into a witness. The fact that her effort had turned out to be hopeless didn't mean it had been worthless.

  The killer had given her information that would probably lead to the convictions of two Mafiosi on old homicides. That was quite a lot of success by any standard. Before she had left the office today, she had written reports on those two cases, requesting that warrants be obtained to search for the surviving evidence in the places where the Butcher's Boy had said it would be. Hunsecker would not be delighted by the way the information was obtained, but it wouldn't stop him from claiming credit if two important criminals were convicted.

  Her reckless behavior had yielded some results, but she'd had enough now. Just being at home with Jim and Amanda made her wonder what she could have been thinking. She wasn't a field agent, she was a bureaucrat. If she hadn't made it home, what would have become of them? It was as though the night the Butcher's Boy had materialized in the darkness in her room, she had lost all sense of caution and judgment. He had been like a ghost returning, suddenly willing to tell her the answers to all of the things she'd been wondering about. She hadn't been able to resist.

  She opened her laptop and used her password to get into her Justice Department account. She wanted to see what had been added to the continuing accumulation of details of the Butcher's Boy's visit to Los Angeles.

  The federal agencies were the best in the world at the patient, almost superhumanly thorough collection and analysis of details, and her section of the Organized Crime and Racketeering Division was one of the great engines of analysis. Anything that was discovered by local or state law enforcement, or by the FBI, DEA, or any other organization, was noted, entered in the records, and cataloged. Every connection was explored, every lead followed.

  There was news. The man killed on Marengo Avenue in Pasadena early in the morning was named Randall Alan Simms. He was shot in the middle of the road. At the time he was carrying a German-made Heckler & Koch rifle with the barrel machine-threaded to hold a silencer. Simms was a former soldier who had served in the first Gulf War and had been given an honorable discharge after half of a second enlistment because of unspecified medical reasons. She sensed a covered-up mental illness. That would come out too, because she would not be the only one to wonder. Simms's address was in Van Nuys, California, and he was listed as unemployed, which probably meant he was paid in cash.

  The two men in Griffith Park were Stephen Fields and Brent Patterson. Fields had two DUIs, a breaking-and-entering charge that was dropped, and three domestic violence convictions. He had served six months of a one-year sentence for the third. Patterson had an assault conviction and an aggravated assault bargained down. There was a weapons charge that had put him away for two years. Fields was listed as a former employee of the Macedonian Security Group, but he'd been carrying an ID issued by the Able Security Company.

  The Los Angeles FBI field office would, by now, be all over the Able Security Company, its bookkeeping, and its present and past employees. She was willing to bet that the blue Crown Victoria the Butcher's Boy had mentioned on the phone was registered to the company. There would be some connection to somebody in the Lazaretti family, even if it was only that they'd once hired the company to guard a construction site the family owned.

  She wrote notes to herself to be sure that somebody in her section kept up with the investigation of the victims. It was important to know who this hit team actually consisted of. Had there been three, or thirty? Was the security company the umbrella for a lot of illegal activities, or was killing people a sideline of a few employees?

  She made notes on every aspect of the events in Los Angeles. At eight o'clock she was still checking her e-mail for updates. At eleven she put away her notes and the laptop. She knew that she had to start doing some planning to set her trap for the Butcher's Boy, and it made her uncomfortable. She could only attract him to some specific place at a specific time by getting him to believe some attractive lie. He would trust her because he had treated her honorably—trusting a person he'd invested in was human nature. And she would betray him.

  There must be many ways to capture him. It was possible to meet in a restaurant and have all of the workers and customers be FBI agents. She could meet him on a bus and have all the bus seats occupied by FBI agents. All they'd have to do was drive him to jail. She could meet him in an airport, where they would both have to be unarmed. She felt frustrated. People had been trying to betray and kill him for twenty years. Was there anything that he hadn't seen before and wouldn't recognize instantly? She needed something new and outlandish that would never occur to him.

  She thought about the times when she had seen him. He had come into her bedroom to talk to her in the night. He had appeared suddenly when she was getting into her car at the dry cleaners. He had come to her hotel in Los Angeles. What all of those occasions had in common was that she hadn't known in advance that he was coming. He had a way in, and a better way out that nobody would be blocking. If she asked for a meeting, he might come, but not to some prearranged place at a particular time. Could she possibly guess in advance where and when he would choose to surprise her? And if the trap worked and FBI agents had him surrounded, that wouldn't mean that he would surrender.

  She thought about places. There was the Washington Metro. It would be possible to fill a train car with agents looking like commuters and to flood the platform of a station with other agents, but was there any way to keep civilians out without his seeing the trap? There were restaurants, bars, stores. She just had to pick a place, find a way to isolate it from the public, block every means of escape, and persuade him to meet her there.

  The trap was already beginning to feel like a chance for a stupid mistake. When a large number of people were together in one room, they had great potential for deciding on the right answer to a question. They called it the wisdom of crowds. But crowds had an even greater potential for mixed or misunderstood signals, for false alarms, for simply bumping into each other when the time came to act.

  The Butcher's Boy was great in crowds. He had operated in crowds all his life, made his way to his targets in front of large numbers of people, none of whom seemed ever to have seen him kill or been able to describe him afterward. She had seen him operate in crowds, and it had been an education. He adjusted his posture, his gait, hi
s expression to match the people around him. Even when people had suddenly begun shooting at him in Chicago, his expression was a voluntary act of muscle control.

  No crowds. She would have to arrange the worst possible kind of trap and meet him alone. She would have to talk to him and get him to come to her out of trust in her word and her personal integrity. And then she would have to give some signal that brought in the hidden men with bulletproof vests and automatic weapons.

  It was late. She put her notes in her briefcase with the files, locked it, and stood. It was time to get to bed. Cross-country travel was exhausting, and she'd come off her flight and put in a few hours of work afterward. Maybe tomorrow, after a night's sleep, something brilliant would occur to her. She checked the locks on the doors, set the alarm, and climbed the stairs, turning lights off as she went. When she reached the upstairs hallway, she saw the lights in the kids' rooms were off.

  She went to bed so tired that the problems and worries of the day seemed to merge into a single category—things she could not solve without sleep. For a few seconds she thought about the Butcher's Boy. It occurred to her that he was probably traveling again, somewhere alone in a car on the night roads, and she wondered which city he was heading for. And then she was asleep.

  At two A.M. she was startled awake. Her mind struggled to the surface, aware that there was some kind of emergency. She had been hearing noises, and there weren't supposed to be noises. Elizabeth sat up, switched on the light by her bed, kicked a little to get the blankets off, and swung her feet to the floor.

  A male voice startled her. "Stay right there. Don't move." The voice was sharp, angry, coming from inside her room just on the other side of her bed.

  She sat still, not daring to turn around, her eyes squinting in the light. She fought to catch up. The kids had been in the house. Had this man overlooked them? Maybe they'd heard him breaking in and gotten out. Maybe they were on the stairs trying to get out right now. She had to keep him occupied. "Who are you? What do you want in my house?"

  "I'm Number One, and wherever I am, I own it. Don't try to do anything. I have a man with your son and one with your daughter. If anything happens, they'll die first."

  Her chest felt like it was being crushed. She tried to breathe, but her breaths were quick and shallow, her chest refusing to expand to take in air. Her heart seemed to be pounding harder and harder. "You don't need to harm my children." She had a desperate hope. "Having them can't help you."

  "They're not going anywhere," the man said. "This will be a family thing from beginning to end."

  "What do you want?"

  "The Butcher's Boy. You were with him in L.A. Tell us where he is and get him to come here."

  "I don't know where he is," she said. "If I did, he'd already be in jail. I work for the Justice Department."

  "We know where you work," he said. "You're not being helpful, so now it's time to get ready for what comes next. Get up slowly and put your hands up."

  She slowly stood and turned.

  He surged forward instantly, so she hadn't come completely around before he was there, delivering a bare-handed slap to the side of her head. She completed her turn and saw Jim and Amanda at the entrance to the room, each with a man holding a pistol close to their heads.

  "Oh, God," she said. "You can't."

  "What do you think, guys? Think we can't?"

  One of the two men, a man in his late twenties or early thirties with spiked blond hair, answered, "We can do what we want."

  Number One said, "You know who's paying us. They want their money's worth. They want him dead, now."

  "They're the same people who used to pay him," she said. "I'm sure they're offering a lot because they're really scared. But you're not helping yourselves by coming here."

  "Why not?"

  "I have no way to know where he is or where he's going. When I left Los Angeles, he was there. When I got home to Washington this afternoon, I learned that after I left he killed two professional shooters in a blue Ford Crown Victoria and then drove it to Pasadena and killed Tony Lazaretti. I'm sure after that he left town."

  The three men exchanged a glance, then shifted their feet, as though they were suddenly uncomfortable. "Okay. Let's put the kids in their rooms where they can't get in the way. Keep them separate. I'll take this lady downstairs and find a way to persuade her to help us."

  The young one with spiked hair dragged Amanda out the door, and the third, a man in his thirties with a cap of curly black hair and a tattoo on his hand that Elizabeth couldn't quite make out, pushed Jim hard, once, like a punch. They went along the upstairs hallway toward the other bedrooms. The older man, the leader, took Elizabeth to the staircase and down to the first floor. When she reached the bottom, she got a clearer glimpse of him. He was just under six feet, with sandy hair and a body that seemed angular and lean, with sinewy muscles in his forearms. His jaw seemed habitually clenched, and his eyes narrowed. He clutched her arm and brought her through the living room to the little den that she used as an office for paying bills and filing financial papers.

  She said, "You must know that I don't have any power over a man like him. I can't make him do anything. He isn't my friend. You could wait forever, and he would probably never come here. I don't have a way of reaching him."

  "I have confidence in you."

  "He's a professional killer and he doesn't care what happens to people like me."

  "I'm not actually going to tell you what to do in this situation, ma'am. Your description of him is probably right. It sounds true, anyway." He leaned closer to her. "If you can understand that much about him, you can probably understand us too. We've taken this contract. When it started, there were six of us. Now there are three. We don't care how this feels to you or what happens to your son or daughter. What we care about is this guy we agreed to kill. We want you to help us get him."

  "How?"

  "Like I said, I'm not going to tell you what to do. It's up to you to find a way."

  "But I just told you I don't know how. I tried to persuade him to give the department information in exchange for protection. He won't talk to me because he's positive he can kill anyone who comes after him."

  "Good for him. I'm going to give you time to think about what I want. But I also want you to think about us for a little while. We've killed people too. I've done a lot of them in different ways, in different places. If I have to leave you and your kids gutted like fish, I promise you I'll never lose a second of sleep over it. But I can make this an unhappy night without killing them. What are their fingers worth to you? Their eyes?"

  "Please," she said. "Don't even say that." For the first time she felt helpless panic. She could form no plan, no idea of how to prevent, or even delay, this horror.

  He shook his head. "I don't get any pleasure out of doing those things, or any pain either. My friend up there has already said he wants to spend a couple of hours with your daughter. In a few minutes I may tell him it's okay. While you listen to her scream, you can think about how to give me what I want before he kills her."

  Maybe this was a nightmare. Was she caught in that hellish moment before the relief would flood in and she'd realize that none of it ever happened? No. If she was thinking of the possibility, then it should already be over. She was so frightened that her breathing didn't seem to be giving her any oxygen. Her arms and legs felt as though the motor neurons had been severed. She could feel them, but she couldn't get them to move.

  "I can go online and find out if he's been seen anywhere since Los Angeles, or if something happened anywhere else that could be his work."

  "That's a start," said the man. "I have to warn you, though. If I think you're sending a distress signal or something, I'll bring everybody down here and go to work on you in front of the kids."

  She said, "My laptop is in my briefcase."

  "Go ahead."

  She went around him to get to the briefcase in the living room. She had gotten a better look at him in
the office. He was slightly taller than average, with a bony quality—shoulders that weren't heavily muscled but square, like machined parts. His forearms, hands, and feet seemed large, his fingers long, with knotty red knuckles. His face was fair, but it had a reddish tint in some places, and he had a bony jaw and wrinkles at the eyes, as though he had spent time squinting into the sun. The eyes themselves were a flat, faded brown, and his hair a coarse, dirty blond. He spoke what she thought of as the enlisted man's dialect. Somewhere at the back of it was an accent that was vaguely southern.

  She had started into the living room when his sinewy forearm hooked around her neck. She could smell his musky underarm and feel his hot breath on the back of her neck. She stopped to keep from choking.

  "Go slow," he said. "If you get too far ahead, I'll start to get nervous."

  She waited.

  "Okay, go."

  She began to move, and he was with her, his arm and part of his torso pressed against her as she walked. Her sensation was that he was attached to her like some parasitic animal about to feed. She fought the claustrophobic, powerless feeling. She bent her knees and touched the briefcase handles.

  "If there's a gun in there, you'd better tell me now."

  "I work in the Kennedy building in an office. I don't carry a sidearm."

  She took the laptop, cradled it in her arms, and walked back toward the little office with the man keeping his hand on her left arm in a painful grasp. He tugged her to the dining room and pulled out a chair at the table. "Sit here."

  She had no idea why he preferred the dining room, but it seemed that he needed to get his way about everything. She set her computer on the shiny polished table, opened it, and signed into her Justice Department account.

  "Remember, I'm watching," he said. "Don't make contact with anybody."

  She opened her e-mail account, then saw one from John Holman at the FBI and clicked on it. The e-mail filled the screen, and as she read it, she began to scroll down.