by Chris Holm
She’d never seen a transfer go through so quickly. But O’Brien had been motivated. “You’re lucky you’re keeping your badge,” she’d said. “If it were up to me, you’d be leaving here in chains.”
Thompson spotted her keys atop the mantel. Snatched them up and headed for the door. She was late. Halfway out, she doubled back and grabbed the manila folder on the counter. She’d brought it home from the office yesterday and needed it today. If she’d forgotten it, she would have had to turn around.
Once she was on the road, she let her car’s GPS guide her through the unfamiliar streets to I-43. She headed not south toward the field office, but north toward a small town called Grafton. Toward her new assignment.
The sky was clear and bright, the Saturday-morning traffic sparse. The September air was just crisp enough to remind her of summer’s passing. She drove with the windows down, the radio off, her hair blowing, enjoying the roar of the wind in her ears, and the sun’s warming glow through the windshield.
The drive was flat and green, the highway divided by a strip of grass and lined with trees on either side. Occasionally, the trees would fall away, and farmland would peek through.
She exited the highway and headed west on a commercial stretch. Best Buy, Costco, Home Depot. Eventually, a town sprung up around her.
Ever smaller streets, ever more residential, until finally she stopped outside a modest ranch in a nondescript suburban neighborhood. The house was white with red shingles. Arched windows and doorways lent it an almost Spanish air, making it something of an oddity on this block.
Thompson strode up the short walkway onto the porch and rapped twice on the front door. An agent peeked through the narrow window to the side of it. He unlocked the door—bolts clunking, chains rattling—and let her in. “Where is he?” she asked.
“Kitchen,” the agent replied.
He was eating breakfast when she walked in. Half a grapefruit. A cup of coffee. A pill organizer sat beside his plate, the kind with a compartment for every day of the week. A tan ball of fur snored quietly on his bony lap. “Agent Thompson,” he said, smiling.
“Morning, Frank,” she said.
She hadn’t liked Hendricks’s plan one bit when he’d called to read her in. It was too dangerous, she thought, and there were too many opportunities for it to go wrong.
Honestly, it had gone wrong. The deal had been that Yancey would be delivered alive and made to answer for what he’d done. But in the end, he’d given Segreti no choice. Thompson wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. Yancey was a bad man. The bomb blast that leveled Segreti’s safe house killed nine federal employees, some of them her friends. And then there was that poor bastard who Yancey shot dead in the parking garage—a case that officially remained unsolved because Cameron could never testify without compromising the Bureau’s case against the Council.
Thompson knew nothing about Yancey’s role in bringing the members of the True Islamic Caliphate into the country. Bellum made sure anything that could implicate them in the bombing of the Golden Gate was buried.
Segreti’s apparent suicide, which was supposed to happen once Yancey was safely neutralized and removed from the train car, was another sticking point for her. She thought it reckless and unnecessary. But Segreti refused to testify against the Council unless the world thought him dead—not to protect himself, he insisted, but because he couldn’t stand another Albuquerque on his conscience—so it was unavoidable.
Staging it had been easy enough. Every BART train is equipped with between eight and twelve cameras; they simply leaked the most convincing angle to the press and had Hendricks’s Bellum contact, Reyes, delete any footage that made it clear Segreti shot six inches past his own left ear.
Enlisting Reyes in the effort, however, had taken some work. Hendricks reached out to him a few hours before he was supposed to exchange Segreti for Cameron, using the number from the texts Cameron had intercepted. At first, Reyes was furious—Hendricks had assaulted him, after all, and put several of his men in the hospital. Hendricks let him vent. When Reyes finally ran out of steam, Hendricks told him what he knew of Yancey’s interest in Segreti.
“You really expect me to take your word for it that Yancey’s in the pocket of some vast criminal conspiracy?” Reyes had asked.
“No,” Hendricks had replied. “That’s why I need you to get in contact with Special Agent Charlotte Thompson of the FBI.”
Hendricks provided him with no contact information, instead insisting Reyes do the legwork, so he would know she wasn’t fake. In the time it took for him to track down her phone number, Hendricks filled her in on his exchange with Reyes and gave her a rough outline of his plan. Once Reyes was onboard, it was simply a matter of moving the pieces into place and everyone playing his or her respective part.
In a way, she thought, Segreti’s apparent demise was fitting. He’d been resurrected on camera and killed again the same way. This time, the FBI wasn’t leaving anything to chance—aside from Charlie and her handpicked detail, the only people in the Bureau who knew Segreti was still alive were O’Brien and the director himself.
“How’d your appointment with the doc go?” Thompson asked. Segreti looked like he’d lost weight since she’d last seen him—which seemed impossible, since it was only days ago—and he’d developed a sickly pallor.
“Good,” Segreti said. “He says the cancer’s responding to treatment. I might have another year in me after all. And he gave me something for the nausea, so food’s been staying down a little better.”
“Glad to hear it.”
The dog, Ella, stirred and looked at Thompson. Then she yawned and went back to sleep.
“How’s she been doing?” Thompson asked.
“A little better every day, but the agents tell me she still whines something fierce whenever I leave.” He smiled again. “Whatcha got there?”
Thompson opened the manila folder. Handed him the top page. When Segreti saw it, he laughed. It was a death certificate with his name on it.
“Thought you might get a kick out of that. In the eyes of the U.S. government, you’re officially a dead man.”
“Twice over now. You got anything else in there for me?”
She handed him the second document. “That’s a copy of your immunity agreement. Everything’s exactly as we discussed, and as you can see, the attorney general has signed off on it.”
Segreti read it carefully, nodding when he reached the section that ensured that Cameron and Hendricks could not be prosecuted for what went down in San Francisco. Then he set the document aside.
“So,” Thompson said, “what now?”
Segreti smiled. “Now you pull up a chair and I tell you everything I know about the Council.”
44.
HEADLIGHTS SPLASHED ACROSS Sal Lombino’s living-room window and cast a diamond pattern that slid leftward up the wall. As Sal’s ex backed her Mercedes out of the driveway, his daughter, Izzie, waved from the backseat. Sal, watching through the window, waved back, a smile pasted on his face for Izzie’s benefit. As soon as the car slid out of sight, he frowned and said, “That fucking whore.”
It was Sal’s weekend with Izzie. He was supposed to have her until tomorrow night, but an hour ago, Vanessa called to say she’d just won tickets to tonight’s performance of Disney on Ice. If he’d picked up the call, he would’ve put the kibosh on his ex’s bullshit, but like an idiot, he’d let Izzie answer, and once she heard about the tickets, she could barely contain her excitement. Sal couldn’t bring himself to break her heart, so he agreed to let her go.
It was just one weekend, he told himself—and Vanessa had better relish it. One of these days she’d push him too far, and he’d be forced to have her taken care of. Then every weekend would be his weekend with Izzie.
At least the empty house gave him a chance to make a phone call. He’d been planning on doing it first thing Monday, but with Izzie gone, there was no point in putting it off.
He headed to the g
uest bedroom, activated the audio jammer, and dialed the number for the chairman’s latest burner.
“Hello, Sal.”
“Mr. Chairman,” Sal replied.
“Please. I’m at home. The room’s been swept, and active countermeasures are in place. You can speak freely.”
“Thank God. That makes this conversation a whole lot easier. I have good news.”
“Let’s hear it, then.”
“Those photos of the junior senator from Texas worked like a charm. He agrees that his constituents are unlikely to reelect someone of his…proclivities…and assures me that, come Wednesday, we can count on his vote—provided he can count on our discretion.”
“He was the final holdout, wasn’t he?”
“Yeah, which means the legislation’s gonna pass. Bellum stands to make billions in domestic contracts. Their stock is already through the roof—it’s gonna hit the stratosphere once the news breaks. The Council should see a thousand-fold return on its investment, at least.”
The majority of Bellum stock was owned by Council front companies, and had been since Bellum’s initial public offering five years ago.
“That is good news! Any updates on the investigation?”
“It’s winding down, and based on everything my sources tell me, we’re in the clear. As far as the Feds are concerned, Yancey died a hero. Bellum thinks he was a reckless idiot whose poor judgment made them inadvertently complicit in a terrorist attack on U.S. soil, so they’ve worked hard to bury any evidence of their dealings with the True Islamic Caliphate. Even the Council has no idea you and I maneuvered Yancey into place and ensured that the boat and bomb schematics found their way into the proper hands. They made it clear when we started down this path they didn’t want to know how the sausage was made.”
“That’s a relief. I won’t lie, this high-wire act has done a number on my stomach. If Bellum had been connected to the attack in any way—”
“—we would have scapegoated the living fuck outta Yancey to limit the exposure and shorted all our Bellum stock before the news broke, like we discussed. Relax, Wentworth. The plan worked like a charm. We made the FBI and Homeland Security look like chumps. Sent Bellum in on a white horse to save the day. Turned playing cops and robbers into a multibillion-dollar industry. Now that we control both sides of the equation, there’s no limit to the money we can make. And as an added bonus, we managed to smoke Segreti out and kill him too.”
“That was a happy accident.”
“Maybe,” Sal replied, “or maybe it was, you know, poetical. If it weren’t for him, I mighta never picked the Golden Gate to hit.”
“How’s that?”
“Frank was always going on about how he’d retire out there one day. Got the idea from some boring-ass old movie. After he tried to drop a dime on us, I figured what better fuck-you? Turns out, the guy was serious. Guess he shoulda moved to Boca instead.”
“Anyone ever tell you that you’re a vindictive motherfucker?”
“Yeah, my bitch ex-wife, every day for five years.”
By the time Sal hung up, he was feeling good. Wentworth, it seemed, had forgiven him—and why shouldn’t he? Together, they’d delivered on a promise to the Council seven years in the making.
He felt so good, in fact, that when he saw the stranger standing in the bedroom doorway with a gun, he shook his head and laughed.
“Something funny?” the man asked.
“Yeah,” Sal replied. “You’re one unlucky son of a bitch, that’s what. If I were you, pal, I’d turn and walk away right now, because, believe me, you picked the wrong house to break into.”
“No,” he said. “I didn’t. But I caught the tail end of your phone call, Sal, and I’ve gotta say, you should really show the mother of your child a little more respect.”
“Wait—did Vanessa put you up to this? It’d explain the bullshit with the tickets. So, what, she thought she’d get Izzie out of the house and send some dumbfuck goon to rough me up?”
“Your ex has no idea I’m here. As far as she knows, she won those tickets fair and square.”
“What the fuck is this about, then?”
“I have some questions for you. You’re going to answer them.”
“Is that so.” Sal’s eyebrows raised in disbelief.
“You might not believe it, but yes.”
“Who the hell do you think you are?”
“Last year, you and your people sent a man to kill me. I took it personally—and I’m not the kind to turn the other cheek. Call it a character flaw.”
Sal went pale. His heart thudded in his chest. Suddenly, he wished to hell he kept a piece in the guest room, but he didn’t, because that might tip anyone who searched it that there was more to this room than there appeared.
“I don’t…how did you find me?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Bottom-line it for me, then.”
“Okay.” Hendricks smiled. “Frank Segreti says hello.”
Acknowledgments
I’m incredibly fortunate to have some of the finest folks in publishing in my corner. Chief among them are my agent, David Gernert, and my editor, Joshua Kendall, who helped shape this book into the best version of itself. Thanks, gents. I owe you big-time.
Special thanks to Ellen Goodson, Anna Worrall, and the rest of the Gernert Company team; Pamela Brown, Sabrina Callahan, Betsy Uhrig, and everyone at Mulholland/Little, Brown; Sylvie Rabineau of RWSG Literary Agency; and Tracy Roe.
Thanks also to Steve Weddle, at whose urging Michael Hendricks was created; my family—Burns, Holm, and Niidas—for foisting my books on anyone within reach; and the crime-fiction community, who’ve embraced me as their own at every turn.
My deepest gratitude is reserved for my wife, Katrina. Without her unwavering love and support, Lord knows where—or who—I’d be.
About the Author
Chris Holm is the author of The Killing Kind, the first novel to feature Michael Hendricks, and of the Collector trilogy, which blends fantasy with old-fashioned crime pulp. He is also an award-winning short-story writer whose work has appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies. Holm lives in Portland, Maine.
Also by Chris Holm
The Killing Kind
THE COLLECTOR SERIES
The Big Reap
The Wrong Goodbye
Dead Harvest
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Epigraph
SEVEN YEARS AGO Chapter
TODAY 1.
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44.
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Chris Holm
Newsletters
Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or
dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2016 by Chris Holm
Cover design by Henry S. Yee
Cover art by Murat Taner / Getty Images
Cover copyright © 2016 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Author photograph by Joshua Atticks
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The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First Edition: September 2016
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The author is grateful for permission to reprint lines from “Red Right Hand,” written by Nick Cave and published by Mute Song Limited.
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ISBN 978-0-316-25954-5
E3-20160803-NF-DA
