Andrew Klavan - The Identity Man

The car turned a corner onto a side street of shattered houses, some no more than dust and lumber piled on dead grass. Shannon stared out at them but hardly saw them, immersed in what the man was telling him, still all murk and confusion. His sluggish effort to work out the truth of the matter was getting him nowhere. This was way beyond his powers.

"So what was it then?" he said. "What was it-some kind of scam to steal money?"

Foster let out a big guffaw. "A scam to steal money? Son, I work for the federal government. We don't need a scam to steal money. We are a scam to steal money. Look up 'scam to steal money' in the dictionary, there's a picture of the federal government right there. Scam to steal money! God save me from an uneducated public."

Slowly, Shannon turned to face him. Close up, Foster's aura of seediness was even more apparent, the threadbare shine of his suit and the wasted-junkie thinness of his frame even more painful to look upon. Close up, he had a fidgety, watchful junkie demeanor, too, something frantically alert in the smart, bright eyes.

"That cop," said Shannon. "Gutterson…"

"Gutterson!" Foster spat back the name as if the dead detective had been a bill for back taxes.

"He was never after me, was he?"

"Ah!" Foster took one hand off the steering wheel and tapped a finger against the side of his own head. "Now the clock is beginning to tick."

"He was after Henry Conor."

"The mist is parting. Finally."

The fields of rubble and dead grass fell away as the car turned another corner. Here was a long side street of antique office buildings with elaborate cast-iron facades. Between their tiers of pillars, arched windows, some broken, some just dark, exuded emptiness like a vapor, an atmosphere of abandonment coiling above the entire block. Vaguely, Shannon recognized where they were, realized they were not that far from his own brownstone.

"Who is he then?" said Shannon. "Who's Henry Conor?"

"Henry Conor is you," Foster answered, turning the wheel. The Crown Victoria slid to the curb, into the shadow of a building bleak with ruin. "Least, he's you-or he's no one."

Shannon waited for more. Foster shut the car down with swift, jerky movements, scoping the area all the while, his head turning back and forth, his sharp eyes darting here and there. He pulled the car keys out of the ignition and fiddled with them nervously.

"I made Henry Conor up," he said with a quick, mirthless smile. "I invented him, dog. And then I got you to take his place."

Into the louring building. Up four flights of dark stairs. Graffiti on the gray, abandoned walls and chips and scars in the paint where the plaster showed through like an exposed nerve. Down the gutted hallway to a carved wooden door where Foster knocked out a quick code, then used a key.

Shannon followed him across the threshold. Inside: a loft stripped bare. Chairs and card tables and a cot under the exposed heating pipes and fluorescent bulbs. There were three laptops, two playing various squares of video footage, one showing a series of oscillators. Shannon saw images of his apartment, Gutterson's outline traced in chalk on the floor.

Two men were here, both in shirtsleeves, both wearing guns, one weaselly, playing Patience at a table, one slick and handsome, lying on the cot, reading a magazine about pretty girls in their underwear.

Foster shut the door.

"You were watching me," Shannon said to him. It made him feel sick to see it.

"Listening, too," said Foster flatly.

"Don't worry," muttered the slick guy on the cot, turning a page. "We covered our eyes when you jerked off."

"I didn't cover my eyes," muttered the weasel dealing cards. "I dug it."

"We were watching out for you, boy," Foster said. "You were our guy in place. You were Henry Conor. We knew they'd come for you."

"You invented this guy…"

"A follower of Reverend Jesse Skyles, a friend of Peter Patterson, a man who knew what Patterson knew, a man on a mission."

Shannon looked at the videos of his empty apartment, the hallway outside the door, the street outside the brownstone. The whole place must've been rigged with cameras and microphones.

"Why me?" he asked.

"You showed up for it, darling. You answered the call and came to the mall. Guess you wanted it more than the others we tried. Or maybe you were just the first one stupid enough to check his cell phone. I don't know."

"No," said Shannon. "No, I mean…" He stared at the videos, fascinated, thinking about all that time he was being watched. "No, I mean, why me instead of one of you? If you needed a man in place, why didn't you use an agent, one of your own?"

"We're breached, baby face. Augie Lancaster's got more men in my agency than I have. That's why we're flying a little bit off the radar here. Way off the radar, the truth be told. What you're looking at right now is every agent I have that I can trust, minus a higher-up who's funneling the money."

The two men waved without looking up from what they were doing. Shannon stared at them dully.

"Anyway, I didn't need an agent. I didn't want an agent." Foster moved to one of the big arched windows. He stood to one side and looked out and down, checking the street below. "All I wanted was a body, an identity. A treasure at the end of the treasure hunt. Someone the trail led to, if you see what I mean."

Shannon did not see what he meant. "The trail…"

"The clues. We left clues for them to find. Computer traces. E-mails. Graffiti in empty houses. Remarks made to informants on the street. A photograph of a man sitting in a car. Signs that Peter Patterson hadn't been alone, that he shared his information with someone-and that now that someone had come to town, a man on a mission, looking for justice."

Shannon shook his head. More murk, more confusion.

Foster, glancing over at him from the window, laughed. Gestured at him for the benefit of his colleagues. "Look at this fool. Doesn't even know who Lancaster is." Then, explaining it to Shannon: "Lancaster runs this town. Runs this state. Could run this country if no one stops him. And his network goes so deep, we've never been able to get near him without getting derailed or blown or reassigned. Then-by the grace of God-literally by the grace of God-along came Peter Patterson. Low-level city bookkeeper, nobody even knew he was there. But he was well enough placed to see where the money was going, federal money, state money, programs, going where it always goes, into the pockets of the people who control it, in this case Lancaster and his gang. For years he lived with it-this Patterson, I mean. Sure, he lived in a bottle to kill his conscience, but it seemed to be working for him. Then, one day, he heard the Reverend Skyles preaching in some asshole of a church somewhere and he got the word and came to Mr. Jesus. Climbed out of the bottle. Found his conscience. Began to make overtures to us. Feeling us out. Working up his courage, you know. We were reeling him in slow by slow. We almost had him. But we're so damned breeched. They got to him first."

Finally-and it really did feel like clouds parting in his head-the light began to shine for Shannon. He began to understand. His lips parted as he gazed at Foster. "They killed him. Your informant-Patterson. Lancaster killed him."

"Had him killed. Just as dead as ever he could be. Right in the middle of the storm and the riots, too, so whatever evidence there was was lost in the rain and confusion. There was no way to make the case. Oh, we knew who did it, all right. Only one man Lancaster could trust with a job like that. But we'd never have broken him. In fact, with our agency so corrupted, we could barely move without giving ourselves away. So we had nothing. Again. And in a single leap, Augie was free-free and going national to boot. A hero because his city was so corrupt it collapsed in a rainstorm. That's the government for you: it fails upward. It has three new remedies to fix everything it just destroyed."