a figment of some overactive imaginations. Maybe Langley first spread it, maybe some bored Tourist. But it’s a nice idea.”
“You think so?”
“Sure. Something stable and direct in our befuddled world. A bible for living.”
“Luckily for you, you have the Bible itself.”
Roth nodded, and when he spoke again, his tone was earnest. “Please. You and me, we’re enemies—I understand that. But trust me: The man who did this to me is much worse than I am. You’ll at least look into it?”
“Okay,” said Milo, not sure how long his promise would last.
“Good.”
Samuel Roth hunched forward and lightly patted Milo’s knee, then leaned back against the wall. Without ceremony, he clenched his teeth. Something crunched in his mouth, like a nut, and Milo smelled the almond bitterness in Roth’s exhale. It was a smell he’d run into a few times in his life, from people either utterly devout or utterly frightened. The hard way out, or the easiest, depending on your philosophy.
The assassin’s veined eyes widened, close enough that Milo could see his own reflection in them. Roth seized up three times in quick succession, and Milo caught him before he fell off the cot. The yellow-tinted head rolled back, lips white with froth. Milo was holding a corpse.
He dropped the body on the cot, wiped his hands against his pants, and backed up to the door. It had been years since he’d faced this, but even back then, when he saw death more often, he’d never gotten used to it. The sudden heft. The fast cooling. The fluids that leaked from the body (there—Roth’s orange jumpsuit darkened at the groin). The quick cessation of consciousness, of everything that person—no matter how despicable or virtuous—had experienced. It didn’t matter that minutes ago he’d wanted to ridicule this man’s false piousness. That wasn’t the point. The point was that, within this concrete cell, a whole world had suddenly ceased to exist. In a snap, right in front of him. That was death.
Milo came out of his daze when the door against his back shook. He stepped away so Sheriff Wilcox could come in, saying, “Listen, I got some folks here who—”
He stopped.
“Christ,” the sheriff muttered. Fear stalled in his face. “What the hell’d you do to him?”
“He did it to himself. Cyanide.”
“But … but why?”
Milo shook his head and started for the door, wondering what Mary Baker Eddy said about suicide.
Special Agent Janet Simmons gazed at Milo across the scratched white table in the Blackdale interview room. Despite his size, her partner, Special Agent George Orbach, was clearly the inferior in their relationship. He kept getting up to leave the room, awkwardly returning with Styrofoam cups of water and coffee and lemonade.
Simmons had a fluid, engaging interview style, which Milo supposed was part of Homeland’s new training. She leaned forward a lot, hands open except when she pulled a strand of dark hair behind her ear. Early thirties, Milo guessed. Sharp, attractive features marred only by a right eye that wandered. The ways she positioned her beauty were supposed to close the psychological distance between interviewer and interviewee, making it less adversarial. She even pretended not to notice his stink.
After sending George Orbach out again to find milk for her coffee, she turned to him. “Come on, Milo. We’re on the same side here. Right?”
“Of course we are, Janet.”
“Then tell me why the Company’s working out of its jurisdiction on this one. Tell me why you’re keeping secrets from us.”
Mrs. Wilcox’s delicious lemonade was starting to give Milo a sugar high. “I’ve explained it,” he said. “We’ve been after Roth for years. We learned he’d crossed the border in Dallas, so I went to Dallas.”
“And you never thought to call us?” She arched her brow. “We do have a Dallas office, you know.”
Milo wondered how to put it. “I decided—”
“I? Tom Grainger no longer makes decisions in New York?”
“I advised,” he corrected, “that if Homeland Security were brought in, you’d send in the cavalry. The Tiger would spot it in a second, and go underground. The only way to track him was with a single person.”
“You.”
“I’ve followed his case a long time. I know his modus operandi.”
“And look how well that worked out.” Simmons winked—winked. “Another successful day for Central Intelligence!”
He refused to meet her challenge. “I think I’m being very helpful, Janet. I’ve told you that he had a cap of cyanide in his mouth. He didn’t like the idea of living in Gitmo, so he bit. You could blame Sheriff Wilcox for not giving him a cavity search, but I don’t think that would be fair.”
“He talked to you.” Her tone became gentle; her wandering eye came back in line. “You had a conversation. That deputy with the girl’s name—”
“Leslie.”
“Right. He said you had twenty minutes alone with him.”
“More like fifteen.”
“So?”
“Yes?”
Admirably, Simmons didn’t raise her voice. “So, what did you talk about?”
“A man like that, a superstar assassin—he needs more than fifteen minutes to start talking.”
“So you just sat there? Staring at each other?”
“I asked him questions.”
“Did you touch him?”
Milo cocked his head.
“Did you try to beat the information out of him, Milo?”
“Certainly not,” he said. “That’s against the law.”
She looked as if she were going to smile at that, but changed her mind. “You know what I think? I think you and the whole Company—you’re desperate. You’ve lost whatever shred of credibility you had left, and you’ll do anything to keep hold of your pensions. You’ll even kill for that.”
“It sounds like you’ve put some real thought into this.”
She let the smile appear this time; perhaps she thought he was joking. “Tell me what the Tiger had on you that was so damaging. Tom wasn’t running him, was he? For your dirty little jobs? I don’t know what you guys do in your tower, but I suspect it’s pretty nasty.”
Milo
