The Sixth Man

by David Baldacci

  tapped on the glass wall separating them.

  “Mr. Roy, I’m Megan Riley.” She pressed one of her business cards against the glass. Her face flushed again as Roy just sat there staring at the ceiling. She slowly withdrew the card and put it back in her pocket.

  “Mr. Roy, I’m representing you in your legal case. You are being charged with multiple counts of murder. Do you understand that?”

  Nothing.

  She stared at Sean, who nodded encouragingly at her while Michelle gave him an incredulous look.

  Megan said to Roy, “We have to prepare your defense and we need your full cooperation in order to do that.”

  The ceiling, however, still captured Roy’s full attention.

  Sean said, “Mr. Roy, another person connected with your case has been murdered. Hilary Cunningham worked for Ted Bergin. She was shot and her body left at his house.”

  This also prompted no reaction from Roy.

  Sean abruptly got up and moved around the glass so he was standing right next to the man. Michelle immediately rose and joined him.

  “Do you think this is wise?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know, but I figure we have nothing to lose.”

  “Except a body part if he really is a psycho.”

  “That’s why I have you, for protection.”

  He leaned down so close to Roy that he could smell the man’s breath. At least, Sean thought, he was still breathing. That was more than could be said for Bergin or Hilary, or the six guys in the barn.

  “We met the client,” he whispered. His voice sank even lower. The only one who could hear him now was Roy. “Your sister, Kelly Paul?”

  Sean leaned back, studying the other man. Then he hunched forward again, his cheek nearly touching Roy’s ear. “And Judy Stevens sends her best. And she believes in your innocence. She asked me to tell you that.”

  Sean scrutinized the other man’s features again. Silence lingered for a few beats.

  Megan started to say something, but Sean stopped her. “I think that’s enough for today.”

  “But he hasn’t said anything,” exclaimed Megan.

  Sean looked at Michelle in a way that indicated he didn’t necessarily agree with this statement.

  As they walked down the hall, Sean slowed his pace as Brandon Murdock approached.

  Michelle said, “What, does the Bureau have a satellite office at Cutter’s Rock now?”

  “I thought you’d have something better to do with your time than talk to a wall.” He glanced at Megan. “You know, you really should think about who your friends are here. The wrong alliances can get you in trouble.”

  “I’m Edgar Roy’s lawyer. That’s the only alliance I’m concerned with,” replied Megan.

  “You’re his lawyer for now.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Sean.

  “Just that things change.”

  “Come on, Murdock, you’re among friends. What’s so special about Roy? Why do you care about the guy so much?”

  “Six bodies.”

  “Jeffery Dahmer had a lot more than that and I didn’t see the Bureau flying around the country stirring up trouble.”

  “Every case is its own kingdom.”

  Michelle smirked. “So now you’re a poet?”

  “You folks have a productive day.” Murdock walked off.

  At the inn, after Megan went to her room, Sean and Michelle sat in the small front parlor.

  “When I mentioned Kelly Paul’s name to Roy?”

  “I didn’t know you did. I couldn’t hear what you said.”

  “That was intentional in case they were recording. But when I did say the name, I got a reaction. It wasn’t much, but there was a slight jerk of the head, a tiny widening of the eyes.”

  “You really think he understood you?”

  “I really do. And that’s not all. The same thing happened when I mentioned Judy Stevens.”

  “So he is faking? Why would he do that? To keep from going to trial? That’s a long shot. He can’t be a zombie forever.”

  “I’m not sure it’s just to keep from going to trial.”

  “What other motivation would he have?”

  “If we answer that question, we answer pretty much everything.”

  CHAPTER

  32

  EDGAR ROY SAT in his cell. He had assumed the usual position. Long legs splayed out, his back at a comfortable angle against the metal chair that was bolted to the floor. He fixed his gaze on the far end of the ceiling. It was six inches to the right of the back wall and four inches from the wall perpendicular to that. Roy imagined that spot to represent a crossroads of sorts. There was actual comfort for him in that tiny piece of concrete.

  Over his shoulder a camera recessed into the wall behind a protective transparent shield watched his every move, not that there were any moves. A listening device embedded in the wall recorded everything he said, not that he had said anything since coming here.

  Lesser minds might not have been able to pull this off, at least over a long period of time. But one thing Roy had always been good at was losing himself within his mind. For him, his brain was a very interesting place to be lost. He could entertain himself endlessly with memories, puzzles, and assorted contemplations.

  He’d begun thinking about his earliest recollections going forward in exact chronological order. His first memory had been at eighteen months. His mother had spanked him for closing the door on the cat. He remembered exactly what she had said, the shriek of the cat, the cat’s name—Charlie—the song being played on the radio when it had happened. Colors, smells, sounds. Everything. It had always been that way for him. Other people complained that they couldn’t remember where they had been yesterday, or that long-ago memories just wouldn’t come to mind anymore. Roy had the opposite problem. He had never been able to forget anything, no matter how trivial, no matter if he wanted to forget it or not. It was there. It was all there.

  I can never forget anything.

  Over the years he had come to terms with this ability. He had learned to compartmentalize it all in discrete places in his mind, which seemed to have limitless space, able to elasticize when he needed it to, like putting in another USB memory stick or a zip drive. He could recall it instantly if need be, but he didn’t have to think about it until he wanted to.

  He had never sought notoriety for this special ability. Indeed, growing up he’d always been considered a freak because of the way his mind worked. Consequently, he’d tried to hide his special talents rather than flout them. Then, conversely, people who knew of his gifts had always called him an underachiever.

  It was easy to label someone, he felt, until you walked in his shoes. But no one could ever truly walk in his shoes.

  Since the camera was behind him he was able to move his eyes and alight on a different spot on the ceiling. He forgot about being eighteen months old, about the spanking and the shrieking cat.

  His sister.

  And Judy Stevens.

  They were the only friends he had.

  But they had not forgotten him. They were perhaps working on the outside to help him. These people who had come to visit him. Sean King and Michelle Maxwell. And the young woman, Megan Riley. His lawyer was dead. His secretary murdered. That was what they had said. Roy actually remembered everything they had said, everything they had worn, every body tic made, every pause, every bit of eye contact. The tall woman was skeptical. The short woman was nervous and naïve. The man seemed solid. Maybe they were there to help him. But he had long ago given up on trusting anyone completely.

  His mind turned to that awful day. On a whim he’d stepped into the barn. Smells from his childhood had come bolting at him from all directions. He’d looked up at the old hayloft. And more memories had come back to him. He’d walked around the bottom level of the barn, running his hand along the old John Deere tractor parked in one corner, its tires rotted. The old tool bench, the oat bins, the rusty license plates
he and his sister had collected and tacked to one wall.

  When he’d come to the patch of earth alongside one wall of the barn he’d stopped. The hay here had been moved aside and the dirt was freshly turned over, though he didn’t know why. He’d knelt next to this section and picked up a clod of dirt, squeezed it, and let it drizzle out between his fingers. Good Virginia clay with its sweet, nauseating smell.

  He’d noticed a shovel resting against one wall, picked it up, and shoved the digging end into the disturbed earth. He dug away until he stopped and dropped the shovel. Revealed in the dirt was something not even his mind would have predicted.

  It was a human face. Or rather what was left of it.

  He’d turned to run back to the house to call the police when he heard the sounds.

  Sirens. Lots of them.

  By the time he got to the door of the barn the police cruisers were skidding to a stop in front of the house. Men in uniforms with guns were leaping from their rides. They saw Edgar, pointed their guns, and ran toward him.

  Roy had instinctively stepped back into the barn. It was a mistake to do so, of course, but he wasn’t thinking clearly.

  The police had cornered him there.

  “I didn’t do this,” he’d cried out, glancing sideways at what he now knew was a burial site.

  The uniforms had followed his gaze to the disturbed dirt. They’d crept to the edge of it, and their jaws tightened when they saw what was down there. The rotted face looking back at them. Then they’d stared down at Roy’s dirty pants, the shovel lying on the ground. The clay on his hands. They’d drawn in closer.

  One uniform had barked, “You’re under arrest.”

  Another had spoken into his portable mic. “Tip paid off. We got him. Red-handed.”

  As Roy had looked at the man and heard what he said, his perfect mind completely shut down.

  After he’d been arrested and charged, the only thing Roy could possibly think of to do was withdraw into his mind. He did this when he was afraid, when the world stopped making sense for him. Now he was afraid, and the world had stopped making sense.

  They had tried to get him to talk. An army of psychologists and psychiatrists had been employed to evaluate his condition and determine whether he was faking or not. Yet they had never encountered someone with a mind like his. Nothing they asked, no ploy they used against him, had worked. He could hear them, see them, but it was as though an invisible buffer had been placed between him and the outside world. It was like experiencing it all through a wall of water. The army of shrinks had finally given up.

  After that, his next stop had been Cutter’s Rock.

  Roy knew the exact parameters of his cell. He’d memorized the routines of all the guards. He knew when they ate their breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He knew the latitude and longitude of Cutter’s Rock. And he knew that Carla Dukes was Peter Bunting’s inside person. This was from two overheard pieces of conversation, innocuous to anyone who lacked stellar observational and analytical abilities. After all that time grappling with the Wall, Roy’s skills were honed razor sharp.

  And he knew that Bunting would do anything in his power to get him back. So he could scale the Wall again and again. To help keep the country safe.

  Edgar Roy had no problem helping to keep his country safe. But nothing was ever that simple. He knew there were sixteen American intelligence agencies. They employed well over one million people, of which a third were independent contractors. There were nearly two thousand companies that worked in the intelligence field. And officially over a hundred billion dollars was spent on intelligence matters, though the exact number was classified and was actually far larger. It was a huge universe, and Edgar Roy found himself at the very center of it. He was, literally, the man who made sense out of what otherwise would be a colossal mass of ever-growing, incomprehensible data. It was like ocean waves, relentless, pounding, but bristling with importance for those who could divine its depths. It sounded poetic, but what he did was actually immensely practical.

  It was a lot riding on his slender shoulders. And if he stopped and thought too much about it, he would have been paralyzed. The conclusions that he drew, the pronouncements that he made, the analyses that he helped produce were used to make polices that had global impact. People lived and people died. Countries were invaded or not. Bombs dropped or not. Deals were struck or allies jettisoned. The world shook according to Edgar Roy.

  To the average citizen it would have seemed totally far-fetched: one person basically telling American intelligence what to do. But the dirty secret of intelligence was that there was simply too much damn intelligence for anyone to make sense of. And it was so interconnected that unless one had all the pieces it was impossible to make informed comprehensive judgments. It was a gigantic global puzzle. But if you had only part of the puzzle you would be doomed to failure.

  He had initially been fascinated by the Wall. It was a living, breathing organism to him, one that spoke a foreign language that he had to learn. After several months, though, that fascination and interest had somewhat faded. While the subject matter was complex and challenging even to him, once he had seen the results of his input, the reality of what he was doing had come crashing down on him like a bunker-busting bomb.

  I’m not cut out to play God.

  CHAPTER

  33

  THE NEXT MORNING Sean and Michelle and Megan had breakfast, not at Martha’s Inn but at a restaurant a quarter of a mile away. After they’d filled up on eggs and toast and coffee, Sean said, “We think Carla Dukes is a plant.”

  “What makes you say that?” asked Megan.

  “Her office was bare. No personal items. She doesn’t intend on staying long. Like Mark Twain and Halley’s Comet, I think she came in with Edgar Roy and she’ll go out with him.”

  Megan said, “It really seems like people have it in for Edgar Roy.”

  “The question is why?” said Sean. “You said Bergin spoke with you about him.”

  “Just about some spot research, nothing substantive. You said you met the client, Roy’s sister, Kelly Paul. What was her story?”

  “She wants to help her brother. She has a POA for him and retained Bergin to rep him. Bergin was her godfather.”

  Megan finished her coffee. “So we have a client who won’t talk. The FBI won’t tell us anything. Mr. Bergin and Hilary are dead with no leads.”

  “We need to find out what Roy was really doing,” said Sean.

  “What do you mean?”

  “An IRS geek turned alleged serial killer does not generate this much federal excitement,” explained Michelle. “We talked with his boss at the IRS. He wouldn’t tell us anything, which actually told us a lot.”

  Sean added, “And he had a friend who worked there. She said Roy stopped working there months before he was arrested. He called her once and said he was working on something sensitive, but he couldn’t say any more.”

  “So you think Roy was involved in something else? Maybe something criminal?”

  “No, maybe something having to do with intelligence work.”

  “I thought you might get there,” said the voice.

  She was standing near their table. When Sean looked up he wondered how the woman was able to move so silently.

  Kelly Paul took off her large sunglasses and said, “May I join you?”

  She had on black jeans, a woolen vest, and a thick corduroy jacket over that. Heavy boots with fur toppings were on her feet. She looked ready for a long winter’s stay in coastal Maine.

  Sean scooted over and Paul slid in next to him. “Megan Riley, this is Kelly Paul. Our client,” he added awkwardly.

  The women shook hands.

  “Understand the FBI was giving you the third degree,” said Paul. “Hope they didn’t leave any permanent wounds.”

  Before Megan could answer, Sean said, “What are you doing up here?”

  “Perfectly logical question,” replied Paul.

  “Could I have
an answer?” said Sean, when it seemed apparent she was not going to provide one.

  “Figured taking in the lay of the land myself was a good proposition.”

  “But it’ll come with the cost of your anonymity,” pointed out Michelle.

  Paul got the attention of their waitress and ordered a cup of tea. She remained silent until it arrived and she took a sip. She set the cup