Thomas Perry: The Informant

She kept the file she had been building in a lower drawer of her desk in the back. Each time she was promoted she moved it to her new office, until she had moved from the computer rooms in the basement all the way up to the fourth floor seven years later. Only then did she send it to the archives.

Three years after that she was looking for it again. She had noticed the same kind of sudden rampage as before. This time it started with Tony Talarese dying in the kitchen of one of his restaurants. Tony Talarese had been wearing a wire for the FBI at the moment when he'd been killed. It was a macabre scene, as she pictured it while listening to the recording. His wife had been standing at the stove wearing a big pair of oven mitts when the shooter had struck. She had shrieked, rushing toward her fallen husband, flapping her arms like a bird to free her hands of the mitts. When she got to him, she hugged him, pulled up his shirt, and then screamed, "A wire! The son of a bitch is wearing a wire!" At the same time, she had spotted the out-of-proportion hysterical tears of two young hostesses and a waitress, and correctly guessed why they were so heartbroken at the death of her husband. At the moment when the FBI agents monitoring the wire burst in, she was shrieking "Whores!" and chasing them with a kitchen knife. The killing moved outward and upward from Talarese. Mafia captains died unexpected, violent deaths, and there were so many explanations for each death that there could be no explanation.

Some experts said it was the young men trying to get the old men out of the way so they could move up. But Elizabeth noticed that the first casualties had been young men. Others said outsiders must be invading the established Mafia territories, but there were no sightings of possible successors-no Latin American gangs, no black gangs, no bikers, or prison gangs. When a capo fell, nobody took over.

She was sure it had been him again. He had come back to create trouble for them once more. It had been her theory at the time, and still was, that he had gone somewhere to retire-Brazil, Thailand, Paraguay-and the Mafia, or just some part of it, really, had tried to make good on its old reputation for hunting down its enemies. They had always had great success with sticky-fingered card dealers and addicted drug runners. It would be very different trying to find and punish him. Months later she had listened to a wiretap recording in which one member of the Lorenzo family had told another, "Stay out of it. Don't look for him. If the Balacontano family still wants him, then he's theirs. If they don't get him on the first try, he'll kill some of them, and we'll see what falls out of their hands as they go down. Maybe we'll be able to pick something up-a business, a territory. But stay away from him."

He was someone they feared with an almost superstitious fear, because they knew him. When he was still in his late teens, he had been the one these men called in when they needed a truly professional murder. In his twenties he knew many of the midlevel soldiers and upper-level dignitaries, at least by sight, and had bargained with some of them, because those were the people who hired outside specialists. Her informants told her he always did what he had agreed to with an icy efficiency, took his pay, and disappeared. There was no trail to his employers, and not much chance that anyone could have followed him away from the final meeting.

Years later, when something had gone wrong and he had decided he needed to cause trouble, his reputation actually helped. When he began cutting down important men, the ones who recognized the work as his were sure that rival bosses must be employing him to destroy the competition. For a long time it had never occurred to anyone that Carl Bala had simply become so arrogant and overconfident in his growing power that rather than paying this man his fee for a hit he'd done, he had told one of his underlings to arrange an ambush in Las Vegas to kill him. It had been the most expensive act of parsimony ever.

There was a quiet buzz, and Elizabeth picked up her phone. "Yes?"

"It's the FBI New York office. Agent Holman."

"I'll take it."

When she heard the click, she said, "This is Elizabeth Waring. Is this Agent Holman?"

"Good afternoon," Holman said. "I'm calling because I was assigned to supervise the surveillance of Frank Tosca's home. I'm afraid there seems to be some kind of misunderstanding. I understood that your office had requested an intensive surveillance of Tosca."

"That's right. We appreciate your efforts very much. Has something turned up?"

"Well, yes. Special Agent Carlson, my section chief, sent a request for some paperwork-a designation of the case, some cost approvals-to Deputy Assistant Attorney General Hunsecker, and the response was 'What surveillance?' I thought the least I could do was pick up a phone and see if we could straighten this out. Mr. Hunsecker's staff seems to think he won't approve it."

"It was an emergency request," she said. "It hasn't gone through Mr. Hunsecker yet. I'm pretty sure my second, Bob Fulton, explained it to your duty agent last night. I had an inquiry from a person I know to be a professional assassin of some standing. He wanted to know who Michael Delamina's boss was. Then, late last evening we got the news that Delamina had been murdered some hours before I spoke with the assassin. What we were trying to do was prevent another murder."

"We've observed some significant security precautions around Mr. Tosca's house in Glen Cove. He seems to live at a pretty high level of alertness."

"There are a lot of people with reasons to want him dead. But at the moment, I think he's finally got one who's capable of getting in, killing him, and getting out."

"What's his reason? Is somebody paying him?"

"I don't know his reason for certain. I think he retired a long time ago. But I think that twice in the years since then, some young, ambitious soldiers have found him and tried to collect on the old contracts."

"Who put out the contracts?"

"I know Carl Bala put one out on him before he went to prison. People have said it's in the millions."

"Balacontano? Is he even alive to pay off?"

"As of this moment he is. He's safe and sound in a maximum security special wing, where nobody gets to see him but the doctors and the visitors he listed when he went in. But he'd almost certainly pay off. He's in for life, so there's no use for Bala's money that would bring him more pleasure than the death of this hit man."

Agent Holman was silent for a few seconds. "I'd hate to shut this down now. I can keep up the surveillance on Tosca's house until the end of the day. At that time, if I don't have the official approval for the operation, we'll have to stand down. Do you think you can get it?"

"All I can guarantee is that I'm going to try very hard. Thanks so much for buying me some time."

One of the other phone lines had been blinking for at least thirty seconds. She knew it must be someone from Hunsecker's office calling to find out what she was doing. She couldn't think of a way to answer that without appearing to have disregarded everything Hunsecker had said. She picked up the telephone. "Elizabeth Waring."

"Waring." It wasn't a secretary. It was Hunsecker. Waring was aware that her door was opening and that her assistant, Geoffrey, was holding a hand-scrawled note, looking worried. She nodded to him and pointed at the door. He turned and went through it.

"Hello, Mr. Hunsecker. I'm sorry if I kept you waiting. I was on another call with the FBI in New York."

"So it's true."

"Late last night we received the news that Michael Delamina had been murdered. I realized that I had to try to head off the next murder."

"You did exactly as this killer asked-you started an FBI investigation of his enemy."