Jeffery Deaver - The burning wire

Another sign of losing his touch?

He nodded to the man to sit. Wearing a black suit that had seen better days, Brent was nondescript, a little jowly with direct eyes under swept-back hair, sprayed into place. He wore steel-rimmed glasses that had been out of style when Dellray had been running him. But they were practical. Typical of William Brent.

The CI crossed his legs and glanced at the tree. He wore argyle socks and scuffed penny loafers.

"Been well, Fred?"

"Okay. Busy."

"You always were."

Dellray didn't bother to ask what Brent had been up to. Or what his present name was, for that matter. Or career. It would have been a waste of energy and time.

"Jeep. Strange creature, isn't he?"

"Is," Dellray agreed.

"How long you think he'll live?"

Dellray paused but then answered honestly, "Three years."

"Here. But if Atlanta works out, he'd probably last for a while. If he doesn't get stupid."

Dellray was encouraged by the extent of his knowledge. Even Dellray hadn't known exactly where Jeep was going.

"So, Fred, you know I'm a working man now. Legitimate. What'm I doing here?"

"Because you listen."

"Listen?"

"Why I liked running you. You always listened. You heard things. Got this feeling you hear things still."

"This about that explosion at the bus stop?"

"Uh-huh."

"Some electrical malfunction." Brent smiled. "The news said that. I've always wondered about this obsession we have with the media. Why should I believe anything? They tell us that untalented actors and twenty-nine-year-old pop stars with excessive tits and cocaine problems behave badly. Why does that merit more than a millisecond of our consciousness?… That bus stop, Fred. Something else happened there."

"Something else happened." Dellray had been assuming one role with Jeep. That was a made-for-TV movie, melodramatic. But here, with William Brent, he was a Method actor. Subtle and real. The lines had been written over the years but the performance came from his heart. "I really need to know what."

"I liked working with you, Fred. You were… difficult but you were always honest."

So, I'm one quarter of the way to dharmic enlightenment. The agent said, "Are we going to keep going here?"

"I'm retired. Being a snitch can be detrimental to your health."

"People come outa retirement all the time. Economy's fucked. Their social security checks don't go as far as they thought." Dellray repeated, "We going to keep going here?"

Brent stared at the elm tree for a long, long fifteen seconds. "We'll keep going. Give me some deets and I'll see if it's worth my time and the risk. To both of us."

To both of us? Dellray wondered. Then continued, "We don't have many details. But there's maybe a terror group called Justice For we don't know what. The leader might be somebody named Rahman."

"They were behind it, the bus stop?"

"Possibly. And somebody who might be connected with the company. No ID yet. Man, woman, we don't know."

"What exactly happened that they aren't saying? A bomb?"

"No. The perp manipulated the grid."

Brent's eyebrow rose behind the archaic glasses. "The grid. Electricity… think about it. That's worse than an IED… With the grid, the explosive's already there, in everybody's house, in everybody's office. All he has to do is pull a few switches. I'm dead, you're dead. And not a pretty way to go."

"Why I'm here."

"Justice For something… Any idea what's on their to-do list?"

"No. Islamic, Aryan, political, domestic, foreign, eco. We don't know."

"Where'd the name come from? Translated?"

"No. Was intercepted that way. 'Justice.' And 'For.' In English. Other words too. But they didn't get 'em."

" 'They.' " Brent gave a furrow of a smile, and Dellray wondered if he knew exactly what Dellray was doing here, that he'd been tweaked aside by the brave new world of electronics. SIGINT. "Anybody take credit?" the man asked in his soft voice.

"Not yet."

Brent was thinking, hard. "And it would take a whole lot of planning to put something like this together. Lot of strands to get woven."

"Would, sure."

And a flutter of muscles in Brent's face told Dellray that some pieces were falling together. He was thrilled to see this. But of course revealed nothing.

Brent confirmed in a whisper, "I have heard something, yes. About somebody doing some mischief."

"Tell me." Trying not to sound too eager.

"There's not enough to tell. It's smoke." He added, "And the people who can tell me? I can't let you contact them directly."

"Could it be terror related?"

"I don't know."

"Which means you can't say it isn't."

"True."

Dellray felt an uneasy clicking in his chest. He'd run snitches for years and he knew he was close to something important. "If this group or whoever it is keeps going… a lot of people could be hurt. Hurt really bad."

William Brent made a faint, candle-extinguishing noise. Which meant that he didn't care one bit, and that appeals to patriotism and what was right were a waste of breath.

Wall Street should take a lesson…

Dellray nodded. Meaning the negotiation was under way.

Brent continued, "I'll give you names and locations. Whatever I find, you get it. But I do the work."

Unlike Jeep, Brent had himself displayed several qualities of dharmic enlightenment when Dellray had been running him. Self-control. Cleanliness of spirit-well, body at least.

And the all-important honesty.

Dellray believed he could trust him. He snared him in a tight gaze. "Here it is. I can live with you doing the work. I can live with being cut out. What I can't live with is slow."

Brent said, "That's one of the things you'd be paying for. Fast answers."

"Which brings us to…" Dellray had no problem paying his snitches. He preferred to bargain favors-reducing sentences, cutting deals with parole board case officers, dropping charges. But money worked too.

Paying value, getting value.

William Brent said, "The world's changing, Fred."

Oh, we're back to that? Dellray mused to himself.

"And I've got some new prospects I need to pursue. But what's the problem? What's always the problem?"

Money, of course.

Dellray asked, "How much?"

"One hundred thousand. Up front. And you have a guarantee. I will get you something."

Dellray coughed a laugh. He'd never paid more than five large to a snitch in all his years running them. And that princely sum had bought them indictments in a major dockside corruption case.

One hundred thousand dollars?

"It's just not there, William," he said, not thinking about the name, which Brent probably hadn't used in years. "That's more than our entire snitch bag put together. That's more than everybody's snitch bag put together."

"Hm." Brent said nothing. Which is exactly what Fred Dellray himself would have done, had he been on the other side of the negotiation.

The agent sat forward, his bony hands clasped. "Give me a minute." Like Jeep in the stinky diner earlier, Dellray rose and walked past a skateboarder, two giggling Asian girls, and a man handing out fliers, looking surprisingly rational and cheerful, considering his cause was the 2012 end of days. Near the dharma tree he pulled out his phone and made a call.

"Tucker McDaniel," was the clipped greeting.

"It's Fred."

"You got something?" The ASAC sounded surprised.

"Maybe. A CI of mine, from the day. Nothing concrete. But he's been solid in the past. Only he wants some money."

"How much?"

"How much we got?"

McDaniel paused. "Not a lot. What's he got that's gold?"

"Nothing yet."

"Names, places, acts, numbers? Scraps?… Anything?"

Like a computer rattling off data in a list.