by Glenn Roug
were still sitting in the plane and said to me, "The FBI people are waiting for us."
"Where?"
"At their headquarters. Why do you think we're in Washington?"
I expected him to hail a cab, but he led us towards the airport parking lot. I was afraid to ask, and indeed there she was, with her missing windshield and layers of dirt. It was already early November. It was too cold to ride in an open car like this. But Doc Minus Two did not care, and did not neglect to make me pay at the exit. There was not much traffic that time of night, which meant that we got to our destination quickly, but also that nothing stopped Doc from driving like a maniac and freezing me solid.
The J Edgar Hoover Building is an ugly structure inside and out. It has a boring, uninspiring façade, and possesses all the charm of a cold-war era utilitarian monolith. Its roof looks as if an oversized airport control tower decided to perch on top of it without regard to whether or not it fit in there. Inside there are many doors and wall sections with small windows, and people sitting in front of glowing computer screens along narrow tables, no doubt dreaming of the day when they could work in another building. They let us in after Doc Minus Two spoke to someone on the phone, and then they took us to a small meeting room with two tables pushed together and six chairs, and told us to wait.
Someone walked in ten minutes later. She was a light-skinned black woman in her late fifties, smartly dressed and with rimless glasses sliding down her nose. Her and Doc Minus Two's eyes met briefly as she entered, and then he went back to his tablet and she pulled up a chair and sat next to me. "Al?" as asked softly.
I nodded and reached a hand. She shook it. "Eileen Hentschel. Section Chief. Glad you could come."
"Hentschel?" I glanced at Doc Minus Two but he did not budge. "That's a rare enough name that it would be a weird coincidence if the two of you were not related."
"We are married," she said. She did not sound happy about it.
I shot out of my chair and pointed at her and then at him. "You two are married?"
Doc Minus Two was still busy with his tablet. "Why is that so hard to believe?" he asked.
"It's hard to believe any woman would marry you," I said to him. "Let alone one with a job. I thought you lied about having a wife back then."
"Let that be a lesson to you. I don't lie about marriage. It's too solemn a subject."
"So your wife is with the Bureau? I'd never have believed it. Are you two still together or working on a divorce?"
She sighed. "We're separated, not divorced, if you have to know."
"How can someone whose job is law enforcement be married to this man?"
"It often puzzled me, too," she said. "Of course any marriage with this man wouldn't last. Even if I were to ignore his numerous faults, I'd have to report him to my bosses for his investigation techniques alone. For the sake of us both, we decided to separate."
"That and she didn't like the company I was keeping," Doc Minus Two interjected. "I didn't like her friends, either. I find people without a criminal record boring."
I was still unable to recover from this even as I sat down again. "That explains how you're so well connected."
That offended him. He put the tablet down and glared at me. "No, the opposite is true." He pointed at his wife. "They are the ones who enjoy my connections. In this case, as in many others, I point out crimes and suspects to them that they should have discovered by themselves if they had half the competence I do. The only thing I ask in return is help with the apprehension of some of these characters."
She nodded. "We're still good partners. Let's say we use each other."
"With such FBI connections," I asked Doc Minus Two, "Why didn't you know from the start that K and her people were impostors? It took you until Florida to figure it out."
"It didn't occur to me to check at first. I had no reason to believe they were lying to you. I even bought the story of the FBI informer. Hook, line, and sinker. It didn't surprise me." He gave his wife a quick glance but she did not react to the provocation.
"What gave them away?" I asked.
"The flight manifest."
"What do you mean?"
"It started with the pilot's widow. Remember Mrs. Rossi?"
"The one who disappeared?"
"The one who resurfaced a few days later."
"They found her? Glad to hear. Is she okay?"
He nodded. "As okay as someone with a drinking problem could be. That night she suffered another of her nervous breakdowns, screams and all, and she wandered off into a bar without an ID and drank herself to the point that she passed out. She spent two days in the hospital until she remembered who she was and they let her go."
"So, they never touched her."
"No, they didn't. Then I got some more information about her husband. The underworld really does believe he was killed for unpaid debts. I double checked and guess what? He was never assigned to Flight 2251."
"Are you saying he wasn't the pilot on that flight?"
"He wasn't on the flight, period."
"Why was he on the list, then?"
He lifted a finger. "Ah. There you go. Remember Dominique Lasbrant?"
"The one whose parents said had never flown?"
He nodded. "So now you have two people on the list who were nevertheless not on 2251. I began to go over the rest of the list."
"You found more who weren't on that flight?"
"Let me put it this way: the only person on the list who was on that flight is you."
I could feel my eyes narrow. "That was not the flight manifest, then."
"You got it. I managed to get a hold of the real manifest for that flight and it has nothing to do with the list they gave you. What you received from K was a random list of sixty six people who have been murdered in the course of the previous two years — and you."
"Why me? Why was I added to the list? Why tell me it is the manifest?"
"To scare you," Eileen said. "To make you believe there was something special on that flight that someone was willing to kill all passengers to keep a secret."
"The map?"
She nodded. "They were slowly leading you in that direction, so that you'd want to go to Crete and into that cave despite all the dangers and the outright ban. That takes some persuading. They made you think there was something in there that's so important someone would kill sixty people for it. They knew you wouldn't be able to resist."
"All this to get me to die in that cave?"
"Not exactly," Doc Minus Two said. "That too was just a means to an end. There was a purpose to all this, and you were a tool, not the ultimate goal. But they needed you dead under that slab."
"Will someone finally tell me what was their ultimate goal?"
"Soon," he said. "I'm all ready to tell you, but you got to do this one last thing for us. Telling you now would ruin it."
"The lineup?"
"Not a real lineup," Eileen said. "Just one person we want you to identify. One who wasn't picked up yet; the last suspect." She got up and looked at me until I rose from my chair, too.
"Where are we going?"
"To the hospital?"
"What hospital?"
"George Washington University Hospital, right around the corner," Doc said. He got up, too.
"What am I going to do in a hospital?"
"Visit your wife."
I was getting tired of being surprised. "What?"
"She's there for extensive examination at our request," Eileen said. "You better come, but I must insist you remain behind the agents. That goes for you, too." She gestured at Doc Minus Two. "You let them do their job."
"Examined for what?" I protested. "Why would you ask her to get examined and why here in Washington?"
"Because they have a great cancer center here and because it's easier to protect her while she's in Washington," Eileen said. And then they refused to answer any more questions.
XV
III.
We were six who entered the hospital. Two young FBI agents led the way with a quick step. A short distance behind them was another operative, a lower level chief, who supervised the two. Eileen walked behind him. Her job consisted of making sure Doc Minus Two and I stayed at least one hallway length behind the three men, and that we did not talk too much. I was still trying to find out more. "Why would the last suspect come to this hospital where my wife is? Is it to take her hostage?" But Eileen and Doc Minus Two shushed me.
We went down several white hallways. The agents knew where they were going. They did not stop to look around. After five minutes we saw them enter a patient room. Eileen stopped us from following them inside it. One of the agents stuck his head out a moment later and signaled her that it was safe, and only then did she let us in. It was a small white room with two beds. Jane was lying on one of them, surrounded by medical devices that hooked up to a battery of electrical sockets on one end and to various parts of her body on the other. She seemed tired and depleted. She stared blankly at us as we entered and said nothing. Josh was there, too, sitting on a chair next to her bed, holding her hand and rubbing it softly. On the floor next to him was a bag of goodies that he had brought for her, with food and drinks and a change of clothes. The three agents sat silently on the other bed, waiting for Eileen's cue.
"What are you doing here?" Josh said to me with evident hostility. "And who are all these people?"
I ignored him. "Why didn't you tell me you were in a hospital?" I demanded of Jane. "Thank God we got here in time before the last suspect made it here."
"He's already here," Doc Minus Two said.
"Arrest this man," Eileen ordered.
The agents