Thomas Perry - The Informant

"It's not much, but I would have hated to die with that bastard smirking at me."

Schaeffer pointed at the window, his face unsurprised. "See that?"

Sal Castiglione turned in an almost involuntary reflex to look, and Schaeffer shot him in the back of the head so he would die instantly.

Schaeffer stood still and listened. There were no sounds of sirens, no sounds of people running up the stairs. There had been plenty of time since the first gunshots. He supposed the sixth floor of the old stone building was too high up and too substantial to let the noise reach the street.

He walked across the loft to the area that was set aside as a kitchen. He couldn't help wondering if Vince had ever used any of the appliances. He began going through drawers and saw the place was fully equipped. After a moment he found what he had been looking for-a reusable fabric grocery bag. He took it and returned to the living room area. He started by taking the guns dropped by Pugliese and the two soldiers. He put them in the bag, added the three guns he had taken from the dead security men, then went through the wallets of the five men in the living room and took the cash. He dug the car keys out of Pugliese's pocket. He considered searching the loft for money, but he knew Vince would not have made finding it an easy matter. He decided he'd used up his time.

He went through the big loft apartment opening doors, searching for the secret way out, and then found it. He opened a plain door near the kitchen and saw that inside was an auxiliary heating and air-conditioning unit. A person who opened the door would normally have closed it again because all that was beyond the box-shaped HVAC unit was what looked like a plain white wall. But he stepped in and pushed it, and the wall swung away from him on hinges to reveal a space beyond. He sidestepped through it and found himself on the landing of a staircase that had apparently been closed off during remodeling. There was a small airline bag sitting on the landing beside the door. He picked it up and opened it.

He had found Pugliese's escape kit. It held a Browning. 45 pistol and two spare magazines, a large stack of bills, and a few credit cards and driver's licenses and passports in different names. He put the kit into his grocery bag and went down the eleven flights of stairs to the steel door. He carefully turned the bolt so it wouldn't make a noise and opened the door a half inch to look out at the underground garage. There were the same few cars as before, but no people.

He opened the door the rest of the way and hurried to the black car that Pugliese and his men had used to go after him on the street. He used the remote control button to unlock the door. He got in, started the car, and drove it up out of the garage. He drove the three long blocks to where his car was parked, left the black car around the corner from it, and walked back carrying his bag of guns and money. He set it in the trunk of his Camry, then got behind the wheel and drove. It was late night now, and it meant there would be less traffic on the major routes out of Chicago. If he turned west at the interstate, he could be in Los Angeles in three or four days.

It was Monday morning, and Elizabeth Waring was finally at home. Chicago had been a defeat, a horrible misstep. It had also been a searing humiliation for her. She had gone into a crucial and dangerous situation without being clear in her own mind about what was going on or what she intended to do. She had gone fact-finding with a gun in her pocket. That was about all it was. All of her years of experience and her native ability to extrapolate information from bits of available data to figure out what was going on had deserted her. No, she had deserted them. All she had done was stumble on the name of a man the Butcher's Boy was likely to visit and then rush to be there too.

She had not decided in advance what she wanted to accomplish. Did she want to prevent him from making a deal with Pugliese, or from killing him? Did she want to protect him from being killed in an ambush, or did she want to arrest him? The answer to all of those questions had been yes. She had wanted him to see spontaneously that the whole world of organized crime was always going to be arrayed against him and that his only sensible choice was to turn himself over to Elizabeth Waring of the Justice Department. She had not brought enough federal officers to make his capture even possible because she had some notion that he would go quietly and willingly. It was ridiculous. He was not capable of reacting that way. His only strategy in life was the opposite, the strategy of wild animals. If he was surrounded and vastly outnumbered, he would be more vicious than ever and kill more of the attackers. In his world, agreements were more than risky. They were usually suicidal. They were an enemy's way of disarming him so he could be killed.

She had come to him with an offer he must have seen as naive and foolish. She had hoped he would be desperate enough to consider it, but he wasn't. He could never be. Then she had toyed with the idea of pulling a gun on him and holding him in custody. That was stupid because he would always take the chance that someone wouldn't shoot in time, or would miss, or wouldn't kill him. He would always take the chance, instantly, without hesitation, moving as fast as he could to evade and counterstrike.

Now she was going to have to do the thinking she had not done before. She needed to find an unambiguous position in relation to him and then construct a plan that would induce precisely what she wanted to happen. And she wouldn't try to do it alone this time. That had been a childish reaction to the refusal of Hunsecker to see the value of an informant like this one. She would have to design an ambush for the Butcher's Boy. It would have to involve enough federal officers to overwhelm him, to swarm him and physically overpower him. It was the only way to keep him alive and hold him long enough to make a deal.

She had always liked Monday mornings. Some of the people at work had told her she liked it because she didn't drink, but that wasn't why. Monday seemed to be the fresh start that would give her a lead on all the problems she was supposed to solve. She always drove to work early and got a sense of what was happening before the others came in, then selected the most pressing problems and the most promising leads and got people working on them as soon as they arrived. During breaks and lunchtime, she would turn her attention to issues that had to do with the kids or the household that required her to talk to someone during business hours.

There had been a couple of hundred Monday evenings when she had gone home physically and mentally exhausted, but glad that she had proceeded that way because the rest of the week would be better. This morning she began by looking at the routine activity reports that her analysts had set aside because they'd seen something in them that didn't seem routine. There was often a suicide in which the deceased had more than one bullet wound, a missing boater who'd never gone sailing before, a man killed in a hunting accident wearing a business suit. Sometimes it would be a violent incident with lots of victims and witnesses who had names from a single ethnic group. Occasionally that was a sign of organized crime. It usually took only a short time each morning to clear up some misunderstanding or refer the cases to regional offices for further investigation.

This morning, as she was going through the reports, her phone rang. "Justice Department, Waring," she said.

"Elizabeth? This is John Holman, over at the FBI. I was hoping you'd be in early."

"Hi, John. Are you still in Chicago?"

"No, I got back last night. When I came in this morning, I saw some information I thought you'd be interested in-some stuff we got on a couple of wiretaps over the weekend."