He pulled the phone out of his pocket. Maybe he should call 911 now, in case he hit the ground and lost consciousness again.
He opened Jeff’s phone. It had a text message:
Job successfully completed?
He pressed the keys for 911. “Fire,” he choked out. He could barely breathe. “Two eighty-four Clayton Street in Cambridge.”
There wasn’t time to say any more. He closed the phone and pocketed it. Then he turned back toward the open window. The nearest branches of the yew tree were fairly close, just a couple of feet below and three or four feet off to his right.
Jump or you’ll burn alive.
Straight down was the driveway. The drop would probably kill him. If he jumped to the right and immediately grabbed at the branches . . .
He felt the fire roasting his back. He could hear it roaring behind him. Smoke billowed and rolled.
It was now or never.
He pulled himself up—harder than it used to be, and the pain nearly crippled him—and, pulse racing, he hurled himself forward. He felt the branches scrape against him and he grabbed with both hands. The branch in his left hand immediately snapped off. The one in his right held, though. It bent, and Rick grabbed with his left hand for a bigger branch closer to the tree’s trunk. His hands were scratched and sliced but he managed to get hold of a sizable limb just as the branch in his right hand snapped. He fell, hanging on with only his left, dangling from the foliage, his body convulsing with pain, his arms trembling from the exertion. With his right he scrabbled desperately, finding only air, grabbed again and clutched another limb. Letting the branches scrape against his face and arms, he lowered himself, and then the limb in his left hand cracked and he plummeted.
He landed, hard, on the driveway, on his knees, but his fall was broken somewhat by the tree’s foliage. It was painful, but nothing compared to what he’d recently had to endure.
He collapsed, breathed in and out, deeply, and he coughed and coughed. His throat felt as if it were burned. He coughed some more, finally gulped a deep breath, and waited for his head to stop swimming.
As soon as he could, he pulled out Jeff’s phone and texted back one word: Done.
62
He staggered to his car, panting heavily. His throat was sore from the smoke and his eyes were stinging.
He had to leave before the fire trucks arrived.
The fire seemed to be localized on the third floor, but it was a wood-frame house and would go up quickly and easily. He heard sirens, which meant they’d be arriving momentarily. Maybe they could save the house.
He wondered if they could. He hoped so.
* * *
Andrea was in the hotel suite when he returned. “I think I’ve got it, the—” She saw him, took it in. “Shit, Rick, what happened to you? Are you okay?”
His face and hair were covered with black soot. He looked like a chimney sweep. He’d attracted double takes in the hotel lobby. “I need some new clothes.”
“Where were you?”
“Never mind that. Tell me what you found.”
“I need to show you. But where’ve you been?”
He told her some, then went into the bathroom, turned on the shower, and let it run. He came back out and began stripping off his smoke-saturated clothes. He did it without modesty; they had seen each other naked before. She didn’t look away.
“You reek of smoke.”
“Take me through what you’ve got.”
She talked to him while he showered. “The key piece was B&H Packing, that meat-packing plant. Apparently, Sculley’s Bay Group has a dozen subsidiaries and two of them have as their principal ownership a nonprofit entity called the Donegall Charitable Trust. Including a meat-packing plant in South Boston. So the paper trail points directly to Thomas Sculley.”
“All right. That’s great. That’s great.”
When he finished showering, he toweled off and he still smelled of smoke.
“Can you pull up the Cambridge Fire Department’s Twitter feed?” he said.
By the time he was dressed, she called him over to her laptop.
CAMBRIDGE FIRE DEPT. @CAMBRIDGEMAFIRE
BREAKING: fire sweeps through west Cambridge house. Firefighters respond to 284 Clayton Street for a 2 alarm fire.
“Sweeps through means the fire wasn’t contained, I assume,” she said.
“I don’t know. What about a body?”
As if the Cambridge Fire Department’s Twitter feed could hear him, another tweet rolled down the page.
CAMBRIDGE FIRE DEPT. @CAMBRIDGEMAFIRE
2 alarm fire 284 Clayton Street sadly claims 1 life.
“He’s dead.”
“Who?”
“My old fr—neighbor. Jeff. He died in the fire.”
“Oh my God.”
“Wait. They’re going to assume it’s me who died in the fire. Until Jeff’s body is identified.”
“So that buys you time, doesn’t it? How long could that take?”
He shrugged. “Maybe a day. Maybe less. I don’t know.”
She noticed his eyes were wet. “He tried to kill you. If you hadn’t stopped him, that would have been your body in the house.”
“Still. I killed a man.”
“He torched your house and tried to kill you because they offered him a better deal than splitting the proceeds from the sale of your house.”
“I need to get over to the FBI,” he said.
63
This time he met Special Agent Donovan in the reception area of the FBI’s Boston field office, on the sixth floor of 1 Center Plaza in the big ugly sixties building complex called Government Center.
“I can’t take you back to the bullpen,” Donovan said. “Should we go out for a cup of coffee?”
“No,” Rick said. “This is official. Put me in an interview room.”
Donovan sniffed. “You been camping?”
Rick surrendered his iPhone and his driver’s license to the woman behind the glass, as required. Jeff’s Nokia he held on to. “This is for you,” he said, clapping it into Donovan’s hand.
“What is it?”
“It’s text messages and probably phone calls from the guy who hired Jeff Hollenbeck to kill me.”
Inside the secure area, Donovan got Rick settled in a small room that had a small table and four chairs. There was nothing on the walls. Then he went off to hand the Nokia to a tech. He came back five minutes later with two cups of coffee. “I put cream in yours. I wasn’t sure. That okay?”
“That’s fine.” Rick started to tell him about Jeff and the fire, but Donovan interrupted after a few minutes. “Hold on, Rick. We have to get a few procedural things clear first. If I’m opening a new case, I need to set up a preliminary investigation.”
“This is attempted murder and arson. You should have enough evidence here to present a case to the US attorney’s office and get the authority to make an arrest.”
Donovan looked as if he was about to scoff and then thought better of it. He knew Rick well enough at least to know that he didn’t make things up. They’d shared information in the past. They respected each other. “Let’s hear what you have.” There was a knock at the door. “That was fast,” Donovan said. He got up and keyed the door open.
A thin, wan man in his forties, balding on top, nerd glasses, handed Donovan a sheet of paper. The tech knew his role in the organization and dressed the part. “Holy crap,” Donovan said. “Thanks, John.” He closed the door.
Still standing, he folded his arms. “This was fast for a couple of reasons. The Nokia flip phones download to Cellebrite in a matter of seconds. Also, this is a Sprint phone, and Sprint has a portal exclusively for law enforcement, so tracing the calls was fast.”
“The texts?”
“They took precautions. The texts came from a spoof
ed number. It’s easy to do and just about impossible to crack. Takes forever, anyway. Two phone calls came in from the same blocked number.”
“What’s ‘holy crap’?”
“The number belongs to a guy we have a closed case on. One Emmet Boyle of Lynn, Mass. An Irish illegal.”
He wondered if that was the guy with the shamrock tattoo. “A closed case?”
“Any number of reasons. Not enough evidence. Priorities. Who knows. But this is a bad guy.”
“What do you have on him?”
“Unsubstantiated accusations of arson, murder for hire. He comes from Belfast, Ireland. Believed to be part of a gang of Irish immigrants formerly associated with the Provisional Irish Republican Army.”
“The terrorists.”
“One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” Donovan said. He was Irish, too, Rick had to remind himself. The politics are fraught.
“But all that IRA stuff is done, I thought.”
“The IRA ended its armed campaign a decade ago. Which left some fairly skilled killers looking for work.”
Rick shook his head. “Meaning—what? They’re contract killers?”
“Contract muscle.”
“Hired by who?”
“If we had that, we’d have an open case.”
“Where’s the phone?”
“In the tech lab. It’s evidence.”
“Evidence for what?”
“I’ve got at least enough now for a preliminary investigation.”
“Like I said, you have enough for an arrest. I need my phone back.”
A line creased Donovan’s brow. “What do you want, Rick—the phone or an FBI investigation?”
“The phone and an arrest. I didn’t officially give the FBI the cell phone, so I’d like it back.”
For a moment, it looked as if there’d be a standoff. But Donovan knew Rick was right. “I’ll see what I can do.”
He returned more than ten minutes later. There had probably been a discussion with a superior. Donovan handed Rick the phone. “You’ve got a text.”
He opened the phone.
Meet at 7 as arranged
Rick’s stomach clutched. They still thought he was Jeff, but he couldn’t convincingly be Jeff if he didn’t know the prior arrangements. After a moment he texted back: Can’t appear where I know anyone. Change meet to Dunkin Donuts South Boston.
He held his breath waiting for a reply. It came a few minutes later.
Which location?
Relieved, he texted: Old Colony Ave.
64
The Dunkin’ Donuts on Old Colony Avenue in Southie was perched in the middle of a big parking lot, which made it a useful place to meet. It was a busy street, another advantage. Or so he was told. Rick was no expert.
He sat in his rented Saturn parked within view of the entrance. He wore a Red Sox cap and was barely recognizable.
He watched the customers enter.
A teenage boy with a bad case of acne. A man in glasses and an ill-fitting blazer, who could have been an accountant. An overweight woman in her twenties wearing a pantsuit. He gave a second look to a man who looked as if he worked with his hands but decided he was probably a construction worker.
He had nothing but fragmentary memory to go on. A shamrock tattoo on the man’s wrist and not much more. He’d seen that only close up. Leathery hands. But the man he was waiting to meet would be powerfully built and in his fifties or older, maybe closer to sixties. Rick was twenty minutes early but wouldn’t have been surprised if the man—Shamrock, he’d call him—arrived early, too. He’d look around, probably make a circuit, before he got his coffee.
Then at five minutes before seven a man came striding purposefully along the sidewalk and up to the restaurant. There was little question this was Shamrock. A bull-necked man of around sixty with a hard look, wearing an expensive-looking black leather jacket and a gray tweed scally cap. He had a pug nose and a scowl and big hands. He looked like a tough SOB. He was chewing gum. The cap was the giveaway. It was a flat cap, a longshoreman’s cap with a small brim. It might as well have been a neon sign with an arrow.
The man squinted and cast a glance around the exterior, then entered.
Rick got out of the car and, making sure Shamrock wasn’t looking out, crossed the street.
Directly across the street was a dive bar. It had a green awning with a Guinness sign on it and a green-painted door. There were four or five customers in here. The ones at the bar looked like regulars. The window in the front door had a good view of the Dunkin’ Donuts.
He texted Shamrock:
Saw someone I know in DD. Meet me in bar across street.
He wondered if this change in plans would screw things up. He watched out the bar window.
But not a minute later Shamrock came striding out. It was hard to tell whether he was pissed off or that was his normal glower.
He crossed the street and entered the bar. His eyes shifted side to side. He must have known what Jeff looked like; they’d probably met before.
Rick sat in a booth near the bar.
Thirty seconds later Shamrock’s eyes slid past Rick’s face and kept moving.
An instant later his eyes slid back and alit on Rick’s.
A moment of recognition, and then he smiled nastily.
He approached Rick’s booth and slid in next to him. Rick could feel something poking into his side. The blood drained from his face.
Shamrock leaned in close and whispered into Rick’s ear. Rick could smell the barbershop and feel Shamrock’s humid breath.
“So it’s the other fella’s body in the house, not yours. Ballsy gobshite, I’ll give you that. But stupid as shit.”
Rick’s pulse accelerated wildly. He knew this was it and that it could go any number of ways. He tried to look unafraid but couldn’t help a slight twitching in his left eye muscle.
“Here’s how we’re going to play it, boyo,” Shamrock whispered. “You and I are going to walk out of here nice and quiet. My nine millimeter’s safety is off. I will not hesitate to put a bullet in your spine.”
Rick swallowed, nodded.
The gun in Shamrock’s windbreaker pocket was hard in Rick’s ribs.
“Get up after me and if you try to fuck around, it’ll be the last time.”
Shamrock got up from the booth, and Rick slid out, light-headed, heart jackhammering.
Shamrock helped him out, grabbing hold of his elbow as he did so, yanking him roughly to his feet.
This was, Rick realized, the most foolish thing he’d ever done. Bravery was akin to stupidity. He was about to die. He looked around the bar frantically but kept going. Shamrock’s arm was around his shoulder. They could have been two friends who’d had too much to drink.
Shamrock shoved the front door open and Rick felt a gust of cold air hit his face.
He took a breath, then said, blandly, “You’re surrounded.”
Shamrock laughed disdainfully.
Three men in blue FBI windbreakers seemed to materialize out of thin air. As they shouted, “FBI!,” Rick dropped to the ground as he’d been instructed to do. He felt the sting of asphalt on his face.
Shamrock didn’t even struggle. He knew there was no point.
As Rick got up, he caught Shamrock staring at him with burning hostility. “You goddamned son of a bitch,” he said. “You don’t know what you just did.”
65
Rick was surprised—pleasantly—at how quickly he was able to write the exposé. He knew the subject matter well.
Still, it took him all night. He was powered by caffeine and outrage.
In the morning he e-mailed the piece to Dylan, the copy desk guy at Back Bay.
Half an hour later Rick’s phone was ringing.
“Dylan.”
“Dude, you’re serious?”
“Absolutely.”
“I post this, I could lose my job.”
“Dylan, I wouldn’t want to put you in a situation where you—”
“No, no,” Dylan interrupted. “I put that in the plus column.”
* * *
It had been one gaseous speech after another. The head of the Boston Redevelopment Authority boasting about the Olympian Tower—“the tallest structure in Boston at twelve hundred feet high and sixty-five stories”—and the mayor had talked about “this gleaming silver tower on the site of what was once Boston’s blighted Combat Zone.” A brass band played a John Philip Sousa march. Confetti fluttered down over the VIPs, blasted high into the air from six confetti cannons. The TV lights barely made a difference on this bright sunny day.
Groundbreakings were deadly dull, no matter how much confetti you pumped in, whether you use a silver spade or gold. Everyone wanted to claim some piece of credit. Nobody really wanted to be there. No ground was actually broken. Everything was theater.
Thomas Sculley understood this instinctively. He’d had countless groundbreaking ceremonies for the buildings he had put up. So his remarks were blessedly brief.
The mayor of Boston had introduced Sculley, whom he called “a man of singularly philanthropic bent.” Sculley, dressed in a beautiful blue suit, had taken the microphone and spoken just a few sentences.
“When I came to this country fifty-two years ago from Belfast with just a shovel and a wheelbarrow, I’d never in a million years have imagined that one day I’d be standing up on a stage with the mayor of Boston. I’d never have imagined people would someday be waiting just to hear the words come out of my mouth. Oh, wait. As my wife reminds me, they’re not.” Polite laughter. “So with no further ado, let’s break ground for the greatest building in the greatest city on earth!”
Andrea hadn’t been invited to the ceremony, but it took no more than a quick call to Sculley’s office to wangle an invitation for her and a guest. After all, Geometry Partners was to be given office space in the new Olympian Tower. She was here to celebrate, too.
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