Chris Mooney - World Without End

"You haven't touched your meal," Faust said. He, of course, was not eating. He did not eat out at restaurants, even ones as splendid as Aujourd-hui. All those diseased hands touching his food, plates, and silverware the thought was nauseating. But he did partake of the wine, knowing of its well-documented medicinal value, and asked the wine steward to leave the bottle on the table without opening it. First Faust had wiped down the bottle using the sterilized swabs he kept in a kit on his breast pocket, and then he had wiped down the glass.

"You saw the front page of the New York Times'?" Gunther asked.

"The article about the CIA mole, Peter McFadden." Gunther knew that McFadden was Faust's CIA contact.

"Yes. It's all over the news."

"Aren't you worried McFadden might blab on us?"

"No."

"I envy your confidence."

"There's no reason to worry. McFadden doesn't know about us." And he'll be dead by the end of tomorrow, Faust added privately. He had several other contacts besides McFadden, contacts well placed with the CIA and FBI.

"Mr. McFadden is not what's really on your mind, is it?"

"It's the suit."

"I thought so. You feel you let me down."

"If I had arrived there just a few minutes earlier "

"I asked you to stay and help Mr. Craven get set up to retrieve the fingerprints. We fed the fingerprints to our FBI contact and now know that the CIA is involved. I asked you to go inside the lab to rescue Stephen and you did. You were the one who discovered the phone call on Stephen's cellular phone." The name John Riley and the phone number had been displayed on the phone's LCD screen.

"Come, Gunther. We have much to celebrate."

"They're questioning McFadden around the clock. He's all over the news and so are you. They're blaming you for what happened in Austin. We're out in the public eye. It's only going to get worse."

"We know that a high ranking CIA field officer is not only involved with a prominent figure from the Russian Mafiya, he's somehow connected to the stolen military suit from Praxis. We know this because the men who entered that Beacon Hill condo were the same men we saw at the skydiving school in Texas."

"We should have bugged the place first. That way we could have heard what went on inside Riley's condo. But we sat back and let those CIA dudes " "We'll find the answers soon enough, Gunther. That's why I had you place the call to the Boston police. Let them do the work for us."

"Another contact?"

Faust smiled.

"This evening was intended to be a celebration, not a business meeting.

Please. Relax and enjoy yourself."

"Everything's unfolding around us, and you're acting like it's no big deal."

"You should really try painting, Gunther. It helps soothe the mind."

"One last question."

"For you, anything."

"All these years I've worked with you to steal this technology " "We're not stealing, Gunther. We're keeping these weapons out of the hands of animals like Raymond Bouchard and Misha."

"I know. I understand."

"Then what is your question?"

"What are you doing with all this stuff?"

Faust's eyes were lit with a private thought.

"All good things, Gunther, come to those who wait."

Inside the back of the Fox 25 News van was a mobile operations center used for surveillance. The interior was warm, the darkness cut by the light glowing from the four flat-screen color monitors with interior shots of John Riley's condo. The space between the wall-mounted surveillance and computer equipment was narrow but roomy enough to allow Raymond Bouchard to cross his legs. He leaned back in his chair, drumming the fingers of his left hand across the console as he watched the monitor on his left: two Boston detectives, their hands covered in latex, stood above John Riley's body while a crime-scene photographer took pictures.

"Who called the police?" Bouchard asked, and yanked his attention to Owen Lee, who sat in the chair next to him.

"You know what this is?" Lee slid an object down the console. It was roughly the size of a golf ball, black, and mounted on a small stand that had a wire running from it. What held Raymond's attention was the small lens inside the ball's center.

"A Web cam," Raymond said, the gears of his mind already in motion.

"We found it after you left. It was inside the armoire, mounted on top of the computer monitor. It wasn't there the other day when we searched the condo." Lee's voice was tight.

"Riley must have brought it home from work today."

Raymond cleared his throat.

"What are you trying to tell me, Owen?"

"We ran a trace on the line. It led back to Amsterdam. To the Renaissance Hotel."

"Where Riley's girlfriend is staying."

"She saw the entire thing, Ray."

Raymond's head filled with a white noise. He sat motionless, his eyes locked on the monitor showing John Riley's dead body.

"I used a jamming unit," he said.

"But after you killed Riley, you picked it up and shut it off I saw you. What you and I talked about, she heard it. She heard it and saw everything, Ray. Everything."

"And then she called the police."

"We were lucky enough to plant the surveillance equipment and the drugs," Lee said.

"We had to escape by the fire exit."

"She's only one person. We can discredit her."

"What if she has evidence?"

"Like what?"

"Ray, that video-conferencing software Riley was using, all you need to do is press a button and it will start recording. Riley also had a microphone plugged into his computer." Owen Lee's eyes danced with a nervous energy.

Raymond felt the veins tighten in his head. He placed his forehead on the fingers of his left hand and massaged the skin. His eyes cut sideways, out the van's front windshield, where people bundled in their winter coats marched up and down the streets and jogged through the slow traffic. They were near the Boston Common. The traffic was heavy, the night air peppered with red brake lights, the storefronts dark.

"She doesn't know who we are," Raymond said and looked back at the monitors.

"It won't take her long to figure it out. Goddammit, Ray, I told you not to go in there. I told you to let me handle it."

On monitor one, detectives dusted for prints inside the living room. On another monitor, a shot of the bedroom, the gram bags of cocaine Lee had planted were now lined up on the bedspread. It was supposed to be a simple drug overdose. Case closed. But now, because of an oversight on his part, the simple plan was about to escalate into a disaster. The Boston cops were treating it as a possible homicide, and if what Lee was saying was true about the girlfriend recording -fuck. Raymond took a deep breath.

"I'll have a copy of the 911 call she placed within an hour," Lee said.

A pause, then he added, "On the bright side, I don't think she'll go to the police right away. Right now, she's in shock. She knows she's dealing with pros. She's going to want to flesh out a plan, think this through. That buys us some time."

"You talk with Cole?"

"He's not picking up."

"Just find her," Raymond said. When he closed his eyes, he saw himself at sixteen, alone in his dark bedroom and wrapped up in a blanket on the mattress on the floor. The house had been stripped bare of all of its valuables, his mother down the hall and crying into the night, refusing to accept her new fate.

Six o'clock on a Friday evening in Austin. The air had finally cooled, and the pleasant breeze was full with the smell of barbecued steaks and hamburgers wafting up from a nearby grill and charged with the sounds of neighbors out in the backyard talking to one another and kids giggling and laughing as they splashed around in the condo's community pool. Conway, still dressed in his sweat-soaked gray sweatshirt and Red Sox baseball cap, sat on his shaded brick patio next to a black wrought-iron table where he and Pasha had shared many weekend breakfasts. Only now Conway was alone.