“I couldn’t do that without—”
“Never mind,” Gregor said. “Let’s get the two of them back in here and start making phone calls. Your career just died.”
“There’s something else,” Canfield said.
“What?”
“Well, you saw that newsletter. Harridan already had his sights set on that party at the Ross’s. The last thing Steve told me the last time I talked to him was that there was supposed to be another feed. At the party itself. Harridan was going to bug the party and the women were supposed to sit somewhere and take notes and make tapes.”
“Did you do a sweep of the house for bugs?”
“Of course I didn’t. The secret service might have done a sweep for bombs and that kind of thing, though. Because the first lady was coming. We did inform the Bureau that America on Alert was interested in that party.”
“Thank God for small favors.”
“I’m not anywhere near as stupid as you’re trying to make me out to be,” Canfield said. “What I did made perfect sense, whether you’re willing to accept that or not. When somebody’s undercover, they often have to break off communications for short periods of time. It’s not unusual. I didn’t want to do anything that might blow his ID.”
“Right,” Gregor said.
Then he got off his chair, opened the door to the conference room, and called down the hall for Frank Margiotti and Marty Tackner to come back in.
3
Usually, Gregor Demarkian told Bennis Hannaford everything he was thinking. She was one of those people who made it almost useless not to, when she focused herself on you. Tibor sometimes said she had X-ray vision. This time, he was silent most of the way back to the city in the car, and she did not seem inclined to question him. The ride back was depressing in too many ways. Gregor hated this time of the year. What vegetation was visible from the highway was either dead or pinched. The evergreen trees looked as if they’d had all the sap drained out of them. There was far too much concrete. Gregor knew nothing about highway design, or about who designed them. He did know that in some places the highway didn’t block out all evidence of normal life, but that here it did. Government incompetence were the words going around in the back of his skull, but he wasn’t about to say them out loud. He hated those old men who had nothing to talk about except how much more awful young people were today than they had been back when they themselves had been young, and the government too. What bothered him was that he couldn’t keep his mind off Canfield and what he’d done, or not done. The fact of it was stuck in his brain, and he knew that in spite of the phone calls he’d made from the Bryn Mawr police station—and that he’d made Canfield make—he’d do some calling on private lines as soon as he got to his phone at home. Maybe all the complaining older people and conservatives did had some basis. Gregor couldn’t imagine anybody he’d been at Quantico with pulling a stunt like this. Then he thought about it some more, and decided it wasn’t true. He hadn’t heard of anybody doing exactly what Canfield did, but he had heard of them doing some pretty strange and stupid things, and sometimes when the stupidity was especially high, people were killed. For some reason, it was always worse when Bureau agents got together with agents from Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Gregor could remember Jack Houseman the first time they’d had to deal with ATF in the flesh.
“What the hell do these idiots think it means?” Jack had said. “Drink, smoke, and shoot at stuff?”
They were off the highway and in the city. They must have been there for some time, because the neighborhoods were beginning to look familiar. Gregor suddenly remembered that Canfield had always spoken of Steve Bridge in the past tense. He’d done it right at the beginning: I had a partner. Gregor was not one of those people who pined for the glory days of the FBI. He had come in at the tail end of J. Edgar Hoover’s reign, and as far as he was concerned, the old man had been a raving psychopath. A raving psychopath with power was not a comfortable thing. Still, there were levels of minimum professionalism, the least to be expected code of conduct, something, and Canfield had passed all those things on his descent into absurdity. Gregor was still convinced that a man with a mission was the most dangerous man on earth, and that a man on a holy mission carved a special place for himself in hell. He now thought that a man who took nothing seriously might be almost as bad.
They were on Cavanaugh Street. Gregor had no idea how they’d got there. He looked around and saw nobody he knew, and not much of anybody he did not know. Bennis had pulled up to the curb in front of the brownstone house where their apartments were.