Brian Mcgrory - Dead Line

My escort was waiting at the door. He led me across a hard floor, straight, then left, then right. He sat me down on a coarse cloth chair and said, “You’re being watched. If you try to leave, you’ll be immediately killed, so my advice to you is not to do anything stupid. As soon as you hear the door shut, pull off your hood if you like. We’ll take care of you shortly.”

Take care of you shortly.

I wasn’t 100 percent sure I liked the sound of that. I wasn’t even 25 percent sure. Regardless, the door shut, I yanked off my hood, and drank in my environs.

I was in a small, windowless room in some sort of bunker, with cement floors, walls and ceilings. It looked like it was decorated by the same people who designed Alcatraz. There were just three chairs in the room, all of which looked like they were purchased at a yard sale, facing each other, beneath an overhead light. The walls were unadorned. There was no rug. Rustic would be a compliment. Minimalist describes a style; this was just plain old and bare.

I sat and I sat and I sat. I had no watch. My cell phone was someplace other than with me. I could picture poor Peter Martin calling it every two minutes and screaming at some confused thug, “What do you mean, he’s a hostage. We’re on deadline. Let him fricking go!”

Finally, the door opened, and standing before me was the elusive, reclusive Toby Harkin, America’s most wanted, right there, right then, in the flesh.

My friends at the Traveler had dubbed him the Casanova Convict. They’d written that he could either charm or harm, depending on his mood, and I could sense that, actually see that, from the exact moment when Toby Harkins walked into the room.

He was something of a pretty man, with refined features on an unblemished face. His thick black hair was slicked back, Wall Street style. His eyes were a blaze of blue, which some might say weren’t unlike mine. His hand, when he offered it to shake, was surprisingly soft, especially considering where it had been and what it had done. Not to worry, I’m still every inch a heterosexual, but I couldn’t help but be momentarily taken when a man whom I had only known in pictures had suddenly, in the flesh, entered my life.

“You look like you’ve fallen,” he said, seeming sincerely concerned as his eyes drifted from my face to my soiled clothes. He added, “I hope my guys were professional with you.”

Yeah, professional killers. Professional assholes. “They got me here alive,” I replied, and he didn’t press me for more details.

Regarding Toby Harkins again, he was slighter than I might have expected, thin, wiry. He wore a pair of olive-colored cargo pants and a tight blue-striped polo shirt that was stretched across his shoulders and arms. He looked like he could have been heading out for a weekend on Cape Cod, which made me wonder if that’s in fact where we were.

“Thanks for coming, Jack,” he said.

There’s that Jack thing again, just like on the phone. I replied, “You’re welcome, Toby. Of course, I wasn’t offered a whole lot of choice.” The exchange was a bit of déjà vu, taking me back to the first conversation I had ever had with Jankle six nights before, after his own lackeys had escorted me to his downtown office.

Harkins smiled. I didn’t. It was important for me to keep in mind that I wasn’t sitting here with any ordinary source, but a ruthless killer who had embarked on a reign of terror in the Boston underworld unlike anything that the city had ever known. Legend has it that he always shot his victims in the forehead so that he could see the look in their eyes the moment they realized they were about to die. I wondered if he’d want to see that look from me before this night was out, but if he did, he wouldn’t get the story that he seemed to want even more.

I said, “So there’s a point to all this, I assume.”

He looked at me for a long moment, caught slightly off guard by the idea that someone was questioning him, rushing him along, an anomaly in a world in which he always retained complete control — his flight from justice aside.

“There is,” he said, leaning back. “But slow down. First off, thanks for holding off on printing that story about my old man. You did the right thing, and I’ll explain why in a moment. But know that I appreciate it.”

“I held back,” I interjected, “because we didn’t have all our facts lined up, not because of any request from you.”

He seemed not to care about that, and said only, “Regardless, the right thing got done, which is too rarely the case, Jack.” And he smiled again, though at what, I wasn’t sure.

He asked, “You got both paintings?”

“Received the second one, the Rembrandt, on Saturday night. We’ll be reporting its authenticity in tomorrow morning’s paper.”

I hesitated, then asked, “Have you been following our coverage every day?”

Truth is, I didn’t give a rat’s furry ass whether he read my paper every day. The question was merely an unsubtle attempt to find out if he had been in hiding in the Boston area, and thus able to acquire the paper. He responded, smiling again, “I do, Jack. I do. Online.”

Ah, another online reader, taking for free what others paid for. The Internet was going to be the death of newspapers, I tell you, but that’s not really the point here.

“And if you hold up your end of the agreement, you’ll get all the others back as soon as the article appears in print,” he said.

It’s probably worth noting here that we had no agreement, Toby and I. What we had was a single phone call that preceded this face-to-face meeting in which no ground rules, no accommodations, no deals had been set or met. I saw no need to raise the point, and instead said dismissively, “Let’s see where this takes us.”

He sighed deeply, his thin chest rising and falling as he exhaled.

“Jack,” he said, and believe me, this Jack thing was getting old. “Jack, this is big. My story is important. I don’t think I’m going to survive much longer, but you might be my only hope.”

In many ways, politicians and high-level crooks — who are, as I’ve said, often one and the same — share a lot in common, and one of the most prominent traits is this: They think that the entire world revolves around them, that people care, that everyone wants to help. I guess it comes from having fearful underlings catering to your every whim every hour of the day.

I wanted to explain to him in elaborate detail just how little I cared, but at the same time, I wanted to hear what it was that he had to say. So I nodded and said, “Tell me what you’ve got.”

He seemed satisfied with that response. He leaned forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees, and said, “The FBI wants me dead.”

Stop the presses. I mean, whoo-fucking-eee. That’s what he grabbed me off the streets of Boston and flew me on board a helicopter to the middle of nowhere in the dark of an angst-ridden night to tell me, that the FBI, the investigators who’ve been trying to track him down for years now, want him dead?

“And your point is?”

He furrowed his otherwise smooth brow and bit his bottom lip in thought as he looked sternly across at me.

“I mean, they really want me dead. If they find me, they’re going to kill me.”

I considered this for a long moment as I studied the fear in his eyes and the anxiety that flashed across his face. It sounded like the typical lament of a criminal who had spent a career confounding some of the best-trained law enforcement officers in these United States, and now was living to regret it. His head was filled with grandiose conspiracy theories. The rustle of trees in the autumn breeze was, in his mind, the movement of government snipers in the nearby brush. The passing plane overhead was a spy drone capturing his every move.