John Gilstrap - At all costs

Then there were the bodies: the worst sacrilege of all. To this day, the entry team remained where they had fallen, denied the simple dignity of burial, all because the people in charge had placed their careers above human decency.

Well, Nick could fix that now. He could fix a lot of things, in fact.

It was one-thirty by the time he’d printed everything he needed, and then it was time to go. He placed the two-inch stack of papers into his briefcase and clicked it closed. He’d told his family he was headed to Arkansas for business, but left a note for his boss that he needed a few days off to attend to a sick relative in Oregon. With an overnight bag in one hand and his briefcase in the other, Nick walked briskly toward the door. He’d still have a short wait for his ride, once he reached the lobby, but that was okay. He knew the guard on duty that night, and for weeks the guy had wanted Nick to see pictures of his new baby.

As he headed for the elevator, Nick marveled at the value of this gift he’d been given. How often, he wondered, did a person get to travel back into his own past to set the future straight?

How do they do this?” Irene moaned, resting her head in her hands. “They just evaporate. Like they were never here.” Not counting the fitful forty-five minutes on the plane where she forced herself to sit with her eyes closed, she’d been without sleep for nearly thirty hours. The last time she remembered feeling this bad was when she’d graduated high school and spent seven days in a beach house playing drinking games. “What are we missing, Paul?”

Paul Boersky, looking remarkably natty by comparison, stared out the window of the state police barracks and considered his response. Built in the early fifties, the barracks was even dumpier than the squad room in Phoenix. By the look of the place, little had been updated since the first day of occupancy. The yellow cinderblock walls had been rendered even yellower by decades of nicotine, and while the floors appeared to have been recently waxed, the janitor would have been well advised to spend his time in a more fruitful endeavor, given the number of missing tiles.

“What are we missing?” Paul restated. “Not a thing except the Donovans.” He turned away from the window and helped himself to a folding chair.

Irene lowered her forehead onto the Formica tabletop. “Very funny,” she growled.

“I’m not trying to be funny,” he defended himself. “I’m serious as a heart attack. I think we know everything that’s out there to know. Problem is, we can’t read their minds.”

“We’re the FBI,” she reminded him. “Mind reading is in the job description.”

He drained his Styrofoam cup, then leaned forward, forearms on the table. “Look, we know these two are getting help from Harry Sinclair.”

Her head came up. “We do? We know that?”

He shrugged. “Okay, we don’t have evidence to indict, but what the hell? I mean, they have their kid call him, and then he scrambles the call and disappears. That’s quite a coincidence.”

She weighed the logic. “So they’re that much more likely to disappear for another fourteen years. Wonderful. Is this old man their only family?”

Paul replied through a giant yawn. “The only family they could turn to. Jake’s parents are both dead-the mother just a couple of years ago and the father when he was just a kid. In fact, when Mama kicked the bucket, the Philadelphia office flooded the church and cemetery with undercover agents, just in case Jake showed up to pay his respects. On the other side, Carolyn’s dad disappeared when she was little-you knew that. But her mom’s in a home now, blowing spit bubbles and picking imaginary bugs off her blankets.”

Irene winced at the imagery. “Sensitive as always. Okay, so we’re not missing anything. Let me rephrase the question: How are we going to find them and get them back?”

Paul took a deep breath through his nose and let it go. “Well, as things stand now, we have to wait for them to make a mistake-something they seem unwilling to do. If we get a good solid connect between Sinclair and the Donovans, though-something better than a bloodline and a telephone call-we can get a warrant to dig deeper into Sinclair’s contacts, to see who he’s using to help them disappear.”

She shook her head. Every argument became a circle all of a sudden. “Never happen,” she sighed. “The Bureau’s launched too many fishing trips against him over the years. The U.S. Attorney for the Chicago District is too intimidated by Sinclair’s juice to go back to the well with anything short of a smoking gun.”

She straightened in her seat and arched her spine over the chair back to stretch the weary muscles. “They’re just so damned calculating,” she said. “I keep thinking back to the moment I first arrested him.” Before I brought all this crap down on myself. “He was so cool-arrogant, even. So pissed off that I would suspect him of using drugs.” She chuckled. “As opposed to mass murder, for God’s sake. What must he have been thinking? He had to be shitting bricks, but he never showed a thing. What does that say about a man?”

Paul answered without hesitation. “It says he’s had a lot of time to practice. He’s been preparing for this moment for over a decade.”

No, there was more to it than that. What would breed that kind of complacency, that kind of self-awareness? Her mind replayed the details of the raid on Marcus Ford, and she saw Donovan standing there, revolver in hand. She remembered that hesitation that no one else wanted to talk about. Was he prepared to shoot? Was he planning to shoot? Why else would he be armed, but to effect his escape? He said it was for defense, but was that believable? Didn’t everyone who took up arms do so with a notion to attack? Of course they did.

So why didn’t he attack, then? Because he never stood a chance? Maybe…

An opening door interrupted her thoughts as a trooper who looked to be fourteen poked his head into the tiny classroom office. “Excuse me, Agent Rivers,” the trooper said. “The sergeant thought you’d like to know that your boss is on CNN.”

Eyebrows raised all around, and Irene and Paul shared a look before following the trooper out to the tiny lunchroom, where an ancient television sat wedged into a corner of the counter. From the looks of things, Peter Frankel was holding court with his fans in the press, standing behind a lectern bearing the seal of the FBI. A tangle of microphones obscured most of his chest. Irene had to hand it to him. Here was a man born to be on television. His white smile, blue eyes, and quick wit were everything J. Edgar could have hoped for.

“I don’t think that’s relevant at this point, Gail,” the deputy director said in response to an unheard question. “What’s relevant is justice. Senator Albricht is first and foremost a citizen of the United States, and as such, he is innocent until proven guilty…”

“What’s he talking about?” Irene asked the young trooper.

The trooper laughed. “Apparently, the senator from the great state of Illinois has a thing for diddling kids.”

Irene turned to Paul. “Was this on television this morning? Something about magazine subscriptions and club memberships?”

Paul shrugged. “Got me. I spent the morning sleeping.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the trooper interjected. “That’s how he got discovered. Somebody leaked it to the press.”

Irene turned her attention back to the television. Sooner or later, she figured, the Donovans would come up.

“Given his staunch opposition to your nomination as FBI director,” a reporter asked from off-camera, “some have suggested that perhaps you leaked this information, sir.”