Thomas Perry - The Informant

She glared at him, then looked away, scowling out the window at the traffic.

"As soon as we're finished talking, I'll leave."

"You had already killed Michael Delamina before you asked me who he worked for. As soon as I told you, three of Tosca's men were killed in his house. I suppose you didn't do that."

"Of course I did."

"So that's all the information you will ever get from me."

"I'm not here to get information. I'm here to tell you something you don't know that might get you somewhere if you move fast. There is going to be a meeting. Among the people there will be at least some of the old men. Frank Tosca called it, and it will take place tomorrow."

"Where?"

"I don't know. I don't know how it's being done. For all I know, it may be a bunch of them chatting on video. But most of the old men are used to talking to people face-to-face."

"Does Tosca have the power to call a meeting like that?"

"He wants to be the most powerful man in the country, and he thinks he sees a way. Carlo Balacontano has been in jail for a long time. All those years he's had a succession of caretakers on the outside taking his orders to run the Balacontano family."

"I know. Tosca wants to be boss."

"To do it, he needs Carl Bala's blessing. The thing the old man wants most in the world is me."

"Oh. Of course he would." Her mind was leaping over obstacles now and ranging ahead like a hunting dog on a scent. "And killing you would prove to Bala that Tosca was loyal to him and that he was strong enough to run the family."

"Tosca has been trying to find me for the old man for a couple of years. Now I'm here and it's starting to occur to him that the one of us who dies might not be me. But he also sees that this moment could be his big chance. If he says all he wants is to kill me, he can get the rest of the Balacontano soldiers, the holdouts, to come in and take his orders. They want me dead. But if he can get the heads of the other twenty-five families to agree to hunt for me too, then he's the guy to take over for Carl Bala."

"It sounds like a great deal for him," she said. "Even if somebody Tosca doesn't know kills you, he'll still be the hero because he called the hunt. He can hardly lose."

Schaeffer turned and looked at her, his eyes alert but cold. "He can lose."

"If you're going to steal my car, let me off now. I need to start finding out what I can."

He pulled over suddenly, and she was disconcerted. She was almost thrown, first into him, and then into the dashboard. The car rocked. He flung the door open, stepped beneath the Metro sign, and then disappeared down the stairway to the station.

She snatched her BlackBerry out of her purse and pressed the number to dial the night supervisor of Organized Crime and Racketeering. "Fulton," the voice said.

"Fulton, it's Waring. The killer turned up again. He just ducked into the Metro station at L'Enfant Plaza. There's got to be a way to shut it down before he gets away."

"Hold on and let me find out." There was a click, and then a moment later he was back. "Elizabeth?"

"I'm still here."

"L'Enfant Plaza is the perfect station for him and the worst for us. He can get on the blue, orange, green, or yellow lines in either direction-every line but one-and in two stops he could get on the red line too. Keeping all the trains from leaving would shut down the whole system at rush hour. We'd have a panic. Even if capturing him wouldn't involve shooting, it's still too risky."

"But we'd have him."

"All we'd be doing is handing this guy five hundred hostages."

"I guess it was too much to hope he'd made that kind of mistake."

There was a pause. "Elizabeth?"

"What?"

"This brings up something that I think you need to know."

"What is it?"

"I'm taking a risk to say this."

"Then don't. At least don't say it on the phone. I… uh, forgot something at the office, so I've got to go back in anyway. I'll be there in ten minutes."

It was fifteen minutes before she walked back into the office. She went directly to Fulton's office and knocked.

"Come in."

She entered, closed the door, and sat down in front of Fulton's desk. "Tell me."

He looked at her, then at the desk, where his fingers were fiddling with his pencil. "You've given me some breaks and helped me out a number of times. Still, I almost called you back to ask you not to come in."

"It's that bad?"

"Bad enough. While you were suspended, he had a couple of his assistants search your office."

"Which he had a perfect right and excuse to do, of course. I'll admit I was surprised when I came back and saw everything in my in-box was missing."

"Did you get it back?"

"I'm pretty sure I got it all."

"Then they haven't found anything that will make you look bad."

"Is he really trying to do that? He's been friendly today. He came this close to admitting he was wrong about trying to keep Tosca under surveillance. If he had simply let my arrangement with the FBI stand, we would have kept three men alive and possibly caught the Butcher's Boy, and he knows it."

"He's not your friend. There was an upper-level staff meeting Friday. 'Why does this professional killer know Waring? Why does he come to her after twenty years and ask for information? Why would she give it to him? How does he know where she lives?' And he's looked into the conviction of Carlo Balacontano twenty years ago. He says he's got a nose for things that don't smell right. Why would the head of one of the five New York families bury the head and hands of a Las Vegas businessman on his own horse farm in Saratoga? If he did that, then who knew about it and called in a tip to tell the FBI where to look? Why did the Justice Department buy into that?"

"It's ironic," she said. "That's exactly what I said twenty years ago. I said it over and over, but everybody said, 'That just shows how arrogant Carl Bala is.' And I kept insisting, until finally John Connor, the deputy assistant AG at the time, pressured me into taking a long vacation out of the country. If I hadn't agreed, it was pretty clear I was going to be out."

"I don't suppose anybody at the time wrote anything down about your objections."

"Of course not. At least not that I've ever seen. What Connor did was put a notation in my personnel file that said the long vacation in Europe was 'health-related.' For the next ten or twelve years I had to explain that to my new bosses during every annual evaluation and every promotion committee. I would say it was a great opportunity, and they took it to mean I was attached to some foreign police force."

"He knows about that too," said Fulton. "He thinks you had a mental breakdown and they saved your career by covering it up."

She shrugged. "What else could it be? And I must be having another one now."

Fulton shook his head. "I told him I thought it might have been a pregnancy that you weren't ready for. You were twenty-two. You could have given up the baby. That's the kind of thing that doesn't get spelled out in attendance records and doesn't matter much all these years later."

"Very creative," she said. "Thanks for trying." She stood up. "And thanks for the warning too. I'll be very careful not to let him see that I know." She looked at her watch. "While I'm here, I think I'll do a little catching up on work I missed during my suspension."

Fulton stood up too. "What I was really trying to head off was your saying something to him like what you said to me tonight."

"What do you mean?"

"This killer, the Butcher's Boy. He's the real problem right now. Hunsecker's gut tells him that cops who have exclusive relationships with criminal informants almost always end up being corrupt. Pretty soon they're protecting the source from things that would normally get him and only passing on information he feeds them. Ultimately they end up working for the informant."