“What did he do?” I asked Ross.
“Bosworth was a computer guy, specializing in codes and cryptography. I can’t tell you much more than that, partly because I’d have to kill you if I did, but mostly because I can’t explain it to you anyway since I don’t understand it. It seems he was doing a little personal work on the side, something to do with maps and manuscripts. It earned him a reprimand from OPR”—the Office of Professional Responsibility was responsible for investigating allegations of misconduct within the FBI—“but it didn’t go to a disciplinary hearing. That was about a year ago. Anyway, Bosworth took some leave after that, and next thing he popped up in Europe, in a French jail. He was arrested for desecrating a church.”
“A church?”
“Technically, a monastery: Sept-Fons Abbey. He was caught digging up the floor of a vault in the dead of night. The legate in Paris got involved and managed to keep Bosworth’s background out of the papers. He was suspended with pay when he returned and ordered to seek professional help, but he wasn’t monitored. He came back to work in the same week that an interview with an ‘unnamed FBI agent’ appeared in some UFO magazine alleging that the Bureau was preventing a proper investigation of cult activities in the United States. It was clearly Bosworth again, burbling some nonsense about linked map references. The Bureau decided that it wanted him gone, so he was put through the process. His security clearance was downgraded, then pretty much removed entirely, apart from allowing him to switch on his computer and play with Google. He was shifted to duties beneath his abilities, given a desk beside a men’s room in the basement, and virtually cut off from contact with his colleagues, but he still wouldn’t break.”
“And?”
“In the end, he was given the option of a ‘fitness for duty’ examination at the Pearl Heights Center in Colorado.”
Fitness for duty examinations were the kiss of death for an agent’s career. If the agent refused to submit to one, he or she was automatically fired. If the agent submitted, then a diagnosis of mental instability was frequently the outcome, decided long before the agent even arrived at the testing center. The evaluations were carried out in medical facilities with special contracts to examine federal employees, and usually stretched over three or four days. Subjects were kept isolated, apart from their interactions with medical personnel, and required to answer up to six hundred yes-or-no questions. If they weren’t already crazy when they went in, the process was designed to make them crazy by the time they left.
“Did he take the test?”
“He traveled to Colorado, but he never made it to the center. He was automatically dismissed.”
“So where is he now?”
“Officially, I have no idea. Unofficially, he’s in New York. It seems that his parents have money, and they own an apartment up on First and Seventieth in a place called the Woodrow. Bosworth lives there, as far as anyone can tell, but he’s probably a basket case. We haven’t been in contact with him since his dismissal. So now you know, right?”
“I know not to join the FBI, then start dismantling churches.”
“I don’t even like you walking by the building, so recruitment is hardly a concern for you. This stuff didn’t come for free. If Bosworth is tied in with this thing in Williamsburg, then I want a heads-up.”
“That’s fair.”
“Fair? You don’t know from fair. Just remember: I want to be informed first if Bosworth smells bad on this.”
I promised to get back to him if I found out anything he should know. It seemed to satisfy him. He didn’t say good-bye before he hung up, but he didn’t say anything hurtful either.
The most recent call was from a man named Matheson. Matheson was a former client of mine. Last year, I’d looked into a case involving the house in which his daughter had died. I couldn’t say that it had ended well, but Matheson had been satisfied with the outcome.
His message said that someone was making inquiries about me and had approached him for a recommendation, or so they claimed. The visitor, a man named Alexis Murnos, said he was calling on behalf of his employer, who wished to remain anonymous for the present. Matheson had a highly developed sense of suspicion, and he gave Murnos as little to go on as possible. All he could get out of Murnos, who declined to leave a contact number, was that his employer was wealthy and appreciated discretion. Matheson asked me to call him back when I got the message.
“I wasn’t aware that you’d added discretion to your list of accomplishments,” Matheson said, once his secretary had put me through to him. “That’s what made me suspicious.”
“And he gave you nothing?”
“Zilch. I suggested that he contact you himself, if he had any concerns. He told me that he would, but then said that he’d appreciate it if I kept his visit strictly between the two of us. Naturally, I called you as soon as he left.”
I thanked Matheson for the warning, and he told me to let him know if there was anything more that he could do. As soon as we were done, I called the offices of the Press Herald and left a message there for Phil Isaacson, the paper’s art critic, once they’d confirmed that he was due in later that day. It was a long shot, but Phil’s expertise extended from law to architecture and beyond, and I wanted to talk to him about House of Stern and the auction that was due to take place there. That reminded me that I had not yet heard back from Angel or Louis. It was a situation that was unlikely to last very much longer.
I decided to drive into Portland to kill some time until I heard from Phil Isaacson. Maybe tomorrow I would leave Walter with my neighbors and return to New York, in the hope that I might be able to get in touch with former special agent Bosworth. I set the alarm system in the house and left Walter half-asleep in his basket. I knew that as soon as I was gone he would make a beeline for the couch in my office, but I didn’t care. I was grateful to have him around, and his hairs on the furniture seemed like a small return for the company.
“They all have names.”
My grandfather’s words came back to me as I drove, now echoing not only Neddo but also Claudia Stern.
“Two hundred angels rebelled…Enoch gives the names of nineteen.”
Names. There was a Christian bookstore in South Portland. I was pretty certain that they’d have a section on the apocrypha. It was time to take a look at Enoch.
The car, a red 5 Series BMW, picked me up at Route 1 and stayed with me when I left the highway for Maine Mall Road. I pulled into the parking lot in front of Panera Bread and waited, but the car, with two men inside, headed on by. I gave them five minutes, then moved out of the lot, keeping an eye on my rearview mirror as I drove. I saw the BMW parked over by the Dunkin’ Donuts, but it didn’t try to follow me this time. Instead, after making a couple of loops of the area, I spotted its replacement. This time the BMW was blue, and it had only one man in the front, but it was clear that I was the object of his attentions. I almost felt resentful. Twin BMWs: these guys were being hired by the hour and being paid cheap. Part of me was tempted to confront them, but I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to control my temper, which meant there was a good chance that things could end badly. Instead I made a call. Jackie Garner answered on the first ring.
“Hey, Jackie,” I said. “Want to break some heads?”
I sat in my car outside Tim Horton’s doughnut shop. The blue BMW was in the Maine Mall’s lot across the street, while its red sibling waited in the parking lot of the Sheraton. One at each side of the road. It was still amateurish, but it showed promise.
My cell phone rang.
“How you doing, Jackie?”
“I’m at the Best Buy.”
I looked up. I could see Jackie’s van idling in the fire lane.
“It’s a blue BMW, Mass. plates, maybe three rows in. He’ll move when I move.”
“Where’s the other car?”
“Over by the Sheraton. It’s a red BMW. Two men.”
Jackie seemed confused.
“They’re using the same
badge?”
“Same model, just a different color.”
“Dumb.”
“Kind of.”
“What are you going to do about the guys in red?”
“Let them come, I guess, then we can deal with them. Why?”
I got the sense that Jackie had an alternative solution.
“Well,” he said, “you see, I brought some friends. Do you want this done quietly?”
“Jackie, if I wanted it done quietly, would I have called you?”
“That’s what I thought.”
“So who did you bring along?”
He tried to avoid the question, but I pinned him down.
“Jackie, tell me: who did you bring?”
“The Fulcis.” He sounded vaguely apologetic.
Dear God: the Fulci brothers. They were mooks for hire, twin barrels of muscle and flab with more chips on their shoulders than all the employees of the Frito company put together. Even the “for hire” part was misleading. If the situation offered sufficient scope for mayhem, the Fulcis would happily offer their services for free. Tony Fulci, the elder of the two brothers, held the record for being the most expensive prisoner ever to have been jailed in Washington State, calculated on a length-of-stay basis. Tony did some time there at the end of the nineties, when a lot of prisons were hiring out their inmates to large corporations to do telesales and call-center work. Tony was given a job phoning people on behalf of a new ISP named FastWire, asking its rivals’ customers to consider switching service from their current provider to the new kid on the block. The sum total of Tony Fulci’s only conversation with a customer went pretty much as follows:
Tony (reading slowly from an idiot card): I am calling on behalf of FastWire Comm—
Customer: I’m not interested.
Tony: Hey, let me finish.
Customer: I told you: I’m not interested.
Tony: Listen, what are you, stupid? This is a good deal.
Customer: I told you, I don’t want it.
Tony: Don’t you hang up that phone. You hang up that phone, and you’re a dead man.
Customer: You can’t talk to me like that.
Tony: Hey, fuck you! I know who you are, I know where you live, and when I get out of here in five months and three days I’m gonna look you up, then I’m gonna tear you limb from limb. Now, you want this piece-of-shit deal or not?
FastWire quickly abandoned its plans to extend the use of prisoners as callers, but not quickly enough to prevent it from being sued. Tony cost Washington’s prisons $7 million in lost contracts once the FastWire story got around, or $1.16 million for every month Tony was incarcerated. And Tony was the calm one in the family. All things considered, the Fulcis made the Mongol hordes look restrained.
“You couldn’t have found anyone more psychotic?”
“Maybe, but they would have cost more.”
There was no way out of it. I told him I’d head toward Deering Avenue and try to draw the solo tail away, with Jackie following. The Fulcis could intercept the other guys wherever they chose.
“Give me two minutes,” said Jackie. “I just gotta tell the Fulcis.
Man, they’re juiced. You don’t know what this means to them, getting to do some real detective work. Tony just wished you could have given him a little more notice. He would’ve come off his meds.”
The Fulcis didn’t have to go far to take the red BMW. They simply blocked it off in the Sheraton’s lot by parking their truck behind it. The Fulcis drove a customized Dodge 4X4 inspired by the monster-truck DVDs that they watched when they weren’t making other people’s lives more interesting in a Chinese way.
The BMW’s doors opened. The driver was a clean-shaven, middle-aged man in a cheapish gray suit that made him look like an executive for a company that was struggling to make ends meet. He weighed maybe 150, or roughly half a Fulci. His companion was bigger and swarthier, possibly bringing their combined weight up to a Fulci and a quarter, or a Fulci and a half if Tony was abusing his diet pills. The Fulcis’ Dodge had smoked-glass windows, so the guy in the suit could almost have been forgiven for what he said next.
“Hey,” he said, “get that fucking tin can out of the way. We’re in a hurry here.”
Nothing happened for about fifteen seconds, while the Fulcis’ primitive, semimedicated brains tried to equate the words they’d heard spoken with their own vision of their beloved truck. Eventually, the door on the driver’s side opened, and a very large, very irate Tony Fulci jumped gracelessly from the cab to the ground. He wore a polyester golf shirt, elastic-waisted pants from a big-man store, and steel-toed work boots. His belly bulged under his shirt, the sleeves of which stopped above his enormous biceps, the material insufficiently Lycraed to make the stretch demanded of it by his pumped arms. Twin arcs of muscle reached from his shoulders to just below his ears, their symmetry undisturbed by the intrusion of a neck, giving him the appearance of a man who had recently been force-fed a very large coat hanger.
His brother Paulie joined him. He made Tony look a little on the dainty side.
“Jesus Christ,” said the BMW’s driver.
“Why?” said Tony. “Does he drive a fucking tin can as well?”
Then the Fulcis went to work.
The blue BMW stayed with me all the way to Deering Avenue, hanging back two or three cars but always keeping me in sight. Jackie Garner was behind him at every turn. I had picked the route because it was guaranteed to confuse anyone who wasn’t a native, and the fact that he was still within the Portland city limits, instead of being led into open country, would make the tail less likely to believe that he had been spotted and was about to be confronted. I reached the point where Deering becomes one-way, just before the intersection with Forest, forcing all traffic heading out of town to make a right. I took the tail with me as I turned, then went left onto Forest, left again back onto Deering, and took a hard right to Revere. The BMW had no choice but to stick with me every time or risk being dumped, so that when I braked suddenly he had to do the same. When Jackie shot in behind him he realized what was happening. There was no other option for the BMW except to try to use the bread company’s lot to buy himself some space and time. He pulled in fast, and we came at him in a V, trapping him against the wall.
I kept my gun tight against my body as I approached. I didn’t want to scare anyone who might happen by. The driver kept his wrists on the wheel, his fingers slightly raised. He wore a baggy blue suit with a matching tie. The wire of his cell phone earpiece was clipped to the lapel of his jacket. He was probably having trouble raising his buddies.
I nodded to Jackie. He had a little snub-nose Browning in his right hand. He kept it fixed on the driver as he opened the door.
“Get out,” I said. “Do it slowly.”
The driver did as he was told. He was tall and balding, with black hair that was just a little too long to look good.
“I’m not armed,” he said.
Jackie pushed him against my car and frisked him anyway. He came up with a wallet, and a .38 from an ankle holster.
“What’s this?” said Jackie. “Soap?”
“You shouldn’t tell lies,” I said. “They’ll turn your tongue black.”
Jackie tossed me the wallet. Inside was a Massachusetts driver’s license, identifying the man before us as one Alexis Murnos. There were also some business cards in his name for a company named Dresden Enterprises, with offices in the Prudential in Boston. Murnos was the head of corporate security.
“I hear you’ve been asking questions about me, Mr. Murnos. It would have been a lot easier to approach me directly.”
Murnos didn’t reply.
“Find out about his friends,” I told Jackie.
Jackie stepped back to make a call on his cell. Most of it consisted of “uh-huh’s” and “yeahs,” apart from one worrying interjection of “Jesus, it broke that easy? Guy must have brittle bones.”
“The Fulcis have them in the bed of their truck,” he
told me when he was done. “They’re rent-a-cops from some security agency in Saugus. Tony says he thinks they’ll stop bleeding soon.”
If Murnos was troubled by the news, he didn’t show it. I had a feeling that Murnos was probably better at his job than the other two jokers, but somebody had asked him to do too much too quickly, and with limited resources. It seemed like time to prick his professional pride.
“You’re not very good at this, Mr. Murnos,” I said. “Corporate security at Dresden Enterprises must leave a little something to be desired.”
“We don’t even know what Dresden Enterprises is,” said Jackie. “He could be responsible for guarding chickens.”
Murnos sucked air in through his teeth. He had reddened slightly.
“So,” I said, “are you going to tell me what this is about, maybe over a cup of coffee, or do you want us to take you to meet your friends? It sounds like they’re going to need a ride home, eventually, and probably some medical attention. I’ll have to leave you with the gentlemen who are currently looking after them, but it’ll only be for a day or two until I find out more about the company you’re working for. That will mean paying a visit to Dresden Enterprises, possibly with a couple of people in tow, which could be very professionally embarrassing for you.”
Murnos considered his options. They were kind of limited.
“I guess coffee sounds good,” he said, finally.
“See?” I said to Jackie. “That was easy.”
“You got a way with people,” said Jackie. “We didn’t even have to hit him.”
He sounded mildly disappointed.
It transpired that Murnos was actually empowered to tell me a certain amount, and to deal with me directly. He just preferred to sneak around until he was certain of all the angles. In fact, he admitted that he had amassed a considerable quantity of information on me without ever leaving his office, and he had partly guessed that Matheson would contact me. If worse came to worst, as it just had, he would then get a chance to see what I did when my feathers were ruffled.
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