Джозеф Файндер - Judgment

Proof that Yuri Protasov was a Kremlin puppet.

She wondered where Hersh could possibly have found it. She slotted the USB drive into her laptop. That opened a PDF document containing the same information. She downloaded it and e-mailed it to herself.

She wondered how many statutes Hersh had broken in order to secure this damaging information. How many laws he’d broken. All her life, she’d been a rule-follower, she realized. She loved the certainty, the absoluteness of abiding by a set of rules. But the rules were no longer helping. If she was going to survive, and protect her family, she’d have to make up her own rules.

She refolded the pages and put them, along with the USB stick, in her purse. Then she turned off the lights and locked the door, but before she did, she glanced into the hallway to make sure no one was coming.

She left the courthouse the same way, said goodnight to Rodrigo, and walked out into the plaza, into the adjoining Center Plaza building, to the elevator bank. And down into the parking garage. Everything was quiet. The elevator stopped on the floor below and someone got in, a man wearing a hoodie and orange sunglasses and Beats headphones, his head bopping. He pressed his floor button; then he pulled back his hoodie, and she saw the shaved head and the jutting jaw, and her stomach did a flip. The ropy muscles, the powerful build.

The fake janitor. Greaves.

He inserted a small key in the elevator panel, and the elevator shuddered to a stop between floors.

“The good news for you,” he said, “is that this is the last you’ll be seeing of me.”

She froze in place. There was nowhere to run. Her pulse raced. “What do you want?”

“Seems you weren’t a good candidate for blackmail,” Greaves said. “You got pushed, and you just started digging. Trying to get the goods on us, and maybe getting a little close. So that changes the whole calculation, see. You’re clearly not someone who can be intimidated into silence. Not someone who can be humiliated onto the sidelines.”

“I’m glad you figured that out.”

“Which means there’s no point making threats any longer.”

“Then what do you call this?”

“Oh, I’m not here to threaten you. I’m here to terminate you.” He said it matter-of-factly, as if he were ordering a pizza. In that moment she noticed he was wearing blue nitrile gloves, like a surgeon’s.

He lunged at her, shoved her hard into the elevator wall. Her head bounced against the cladding. He was on her now, his big arms around her, his hands clutching her throat, squeezing hard.

She tried to struggle, to kick and swing her arms, but she could barely move them; he was too close, and he was so much bigger. She could smell his meaty breath.

He made unwavering eye contact with her. She could see every capillary in his eyes. What was that thing they say, that if a mammal makes prolonged eye contact with another, it’s an assertion of dominance — to be followed by fighting or screwing?

Greaves was going to kill her.

But he was not doing it quickly. If he wanted to, he could surely dispatch her easily and quickly, snapping her neck in an instant. Instead, he seemed to be protracting the process. This was not just a professional task to him. He was enjoying it.

His hands squeezed her throat, and she gagged.

She tried to say “Please,” but it came out blez .

Finally she wrested a hand loose from his grip. She felt around for her purse, found it on her left side, over her shoulder, just out of reach. She was seeing stars. She could smell the man’s aftershave, the gloves, a rancid odor of sweat.

Her fingers scrabbled inside the purse, felt stuff, objects her fingers didn’t recognize. Her head was swimming.

Greaves began to talk, in a calm voice. “Somebody with a grudge followed you out of the courthouse,” he said. “An aggrieved felon you once sentenced, perhaps.”

She screamed soundlessly.

“A criminal you put away when you were an assistant US Attorney, let’s say. There will be theories. I see a big front-page story in The Boston Globe . A story about how vulnerable judges are. The governor will say it’s shocking.”

He squeezed harder now, and her head felt like it was exploding. Her body had gone into panic mode. Her lungs were burning: it felt like they were on fire, like her chest would explode.

“Lots — of people — will show up — at your funeral.” He throttled her harder, and her eyes felt like they were going to pop out.

It can’t end this way . Her thoughts were like a rusted hinge, shrieking again and again, Can’t end this way can’t end this way .

Can’t end this way .

The strength was seeping out of her body, ebbing away, like rice paper dissolving in water.

Then she touched the cold metal of the knife, felt around for the button she’d pressed once before and thumbed it open. The blade jumped in her hand.

She remembered Hersh’s instructions: Upward toward the heart. It’s a steeply upward arc through the belly into the pericardial sac .

She summoned the strength, willed the muscles in her arms to contract, and with a great upward thrust she sliced into the man’s body. Not aiming, just driving upward. The blade pulsed and tugged in her hands, like a fishing pole with a hooked fish. Greaves’s eyes opened wide. Then wider still. His mouth gaped. His face was contorted. The hands on her throat went slack.

With a sudden surge of strength, he threw her to the floor of the elevator, her arms pinned, grasping her shoulders with talon claws, a big cat pouncing on its prey. She screamed, swung her feet wildly, kicking at him. The man’s weight was heavy on her. But then his grip on her let up, and he collapsed, canting to one side, and she was able to wrench herself free. She gasped, deep and hard, choking for air. Her head was swimming.

When she looked at Greaves she saw that something had changed in her attacker’s eyes. The fury of his gaze had given way to something more like disbelief. His mouth had gone slack. He looked dazed. At first she wasn’t sure if he was dead or alive.

He was still. His blood pooled on the floor.

Maybe he was dead.

She struggled to her feet, and catching sight of the key in the elevator panel, she turned it. The elevator started moving.

It opened on the first garage level. The elevator doors opened. She stumbled out into the darkness, the cool air, the smell of gasoline.

She looked back at Greaves’s sprawled body, his staring eyes.

She pressed the elevator’s lock button to keep the car from moving.

Then she looked for help. She raced through the garage, low-ceilinged and dark, but saw no one. She saw an exit sign, flung open the door, ran up an echoey stairway, up two flights, came out into a Center Plaza building, dark and deserted, a dingy fluorescent cast.

She ran to the revolving door, then out onto the street. It was drizzling now, the sidewalk gray. No cops in sight. During the day you’d see plenty of police cruisers out here on Cambridge Street, in the vicinity of the courthouses and City Hall.

She crossed the street, no cars coming in either direction, onto City Hall Plaza, a great desolate campo paved in brick.

She descended the steps toward City Hall, a hulking concrete monstrosity, looking for a cop.

She had killed a human being.

It was only just sinking in.

She had killed a man. An attacker, yes. But she’d done this.

She was half out of her head. She’d just been almost strangled.

I killed a man .

She wondered what she looked like to other people, her hair matted and damp, her blood-spattered clothes astray. Panic in her eyes. She didn’t look like a judge, like an upstanding citizen. She probably looked like a crazy person out here in the middle of the night.