Full Disclosure (41 page)

The post-office stakeout wore into days of boredom. No one approached the postbox, no one moved the package. Sam and Rita would at times begin games of I-spy to fill in an hour. They began counting people with red shirts, and then yellow hats. On the morning of the fourth day they began to compare the number of sprinkles on the donuts to select the best one. Paul, listening in on the audio feed, smiled and read files, glad he had not gone with them.

Paul interrupted their animal alphabet quiz shortly after one p.m. on the fourth day. “Guys, Zane just called. The eight tapes just arrived along with a Post-it note that says ‘Thanks.'”

“The package hasn't moved in the last three days. I can see it, and it's our package, our label,” Sam protested. “You're watching the same picture I am, boss. It's right there.”

“Go retrieve the package. Find out if she looped the security feed on us.”

Paul heard a door slam as Sam left to check out what had happened. “Rita, you might want to give him room to blow off steam when he gets back.”

“After four days of sitting here, I'm liable to kick something too. It never left our sight, boss. We've been stuck on this image like bees on honey.”

“Speaking as someone who has that monitor image practically tattooed to the inside of my eyeballs, I didn't see it either. Maybe something middle of the night, when we only had security lighting to work with to see the box?”

“Maybe. Sam's coming back.”

Sam slammed the door. “It's been steamed open and replaced with a bunch of white paper. She had to have done a swap with one blue-and-white package for another, retrieved the documents, and swapped the package back so that when Tim walked by and glanced at the label for us he would see the same handwriting as what he had put into the box. The view
of the package is rarely blocked on the video, maybe half a minute when someone tall stops to have a conversation at the end of the aisle. Someone on the post-office staff was helping her. They were at the box at least twice and not challenged by staff as not supposed to be there. We can pursue it. We have the security feed. She had inside help, boss.”

“I agree. But we don't have time to pursue it today. We have all thirty tapes. We don't have her. Come home, Sam. I need Rita identifying the names for these tapes, and you and I have thirty arrests to plan. We'll come back to this and ask questions later about who helped her.”

“I feel like an idiot.”

Paul smiled. “She's good at this. She probably had someone watching the same video you did, so don't worry about it. Just remember, you're buying dinner.”

Sam laughed. “Yeah, rub salt in the wound, boss. We're coming home.”

Paul took the eight tapes to Nathan in the audio lab himself. “The same as the last tapes, I need copies carefully made, we will listen to the tapes and bring you a list of names, and we need you to find an audio match and tell us who is on each tape.”

“Got it.”

“One new reality. You find a match and find a name, you tell that name to no one but me. Not Sam, not Rita, not Arthur, not even the director.”

“Knowing the names from some of the earlier tapes, I can imagine who these might be. I'll tell only you. I would prefer to duck the politics of this and not write anything down until you give me the green light to make the names official.” Nathan made copies of the tapes and handed them to Paul.

“I'll be back with the names shortly. It's not much, but order dinner on me. Something good.”

Nathan smiled. “Appreciate it.”

Paul entered Arthur's office shortly after eleven p.m. the next evening and closed the door. “We have names for the last eight high-profile tapes. It would be worth interrupting the director's evening to put him on a secure conference call.”

“That bad?”

“Worse.”

Paul drove home, trying to reach Ann on her phone but getting only her recording. She must be in the air. It was going on one a.m. and he hoped she would be on the ground soon. He left a message for her, that they had the thirty names, and for her to call him when she could.

They had thirty tapes, they had thirty names. Now it was arrests, interviews, a press conference, arraignments, and then passing the thirty murder cases off to the U.S. attorney general's office. The list of names was enough to make the anger run deep. People with money and power paying for murder. He needed the arrests just to be able to sleep at night. He needed the justice.

Paul found Sam and Rita in the war room early the next morning, comparing notes over a box of donuts. “Where are we at, boss?”

Paul found himself a glazed donut from the box while he waited for the locks to engage. After the click, he nodded to the board. The list of thirty were neatly written in Rita's handwriting. “I've got the green light for arrests,” he told them. “The U.S. attorney general is sending a task force of lawyers. We lock them in the room to keep from leaking word of this, and we brief them on what is going to happen. We plan the deal we are going to offer for each of the murders. We don't have the lady shooter to testify, so we hope we can get some of these people to take a deal and offer a guilty plea. And we hope our lawyers are good.

“Sam, assemble our full team in the conference room. Let's brief them in. Then let's decide who we want to conduct each interview. We'll put our guys into the field in the next twenty-four hours to the nearest FBI office based on where their arrests are going to be made. I want to have the interviews happen within hours of the arrest. Have you decided the ones you want?”

“Henry Green and Lilly Delta.”

“Rita?”

“Nichole Sims and Frank Teller. Who are you going to take, boss?”

“I'm going to stick to roving between cases based on who needs help. And I'm going to take responsibility for herding those lawyers to make sure they are helping us rather than slowing us down.”

Sam pushed the box of donuts over. “That's a two-donut problem.”

Paul laughed and took a second one.

Paul walked to the front of the conference room, onto the platform, and turned on his microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, please find a seat at one of the tables and give me your attention. I am about to tell you why your boss had you surrender your phones and electronic devices on the way in, and why you have now been locked in this room.”

The lawyers and paralegals in the room found chairs and the room grew quiet.

“My name is Paul Falcon, I'm FBI based here in Chicago.” He turned on the projector and began to click through thirty murder-scene photos. “One lady shooter murdered all these people. She was paid, and paid well, to kill them. She began in 1989, and her thirtieth murder was in 2003. She's been silent the last nine years. That changed a few months ago.”

Paul changed the photo on the screen to tapes spread out on his desk. “These are thirty tape recordings of the murders
for hire. Who to kill, how much they would pay, and why they wanted it done. She's offered the tapes in return for a deal for when she is caught. We have identified the voices on the tapes.

“Tomorrow we are going to be arresting”—he looked at a list on a sheet in his hand—“four congressmen, three CEOs, two CFOs, one professional football coach, two State Department officials, two cops, three DEA agents, a former governor, a mob boss, three mob-family enforcers, a banker, two arms dealers, and five rich ex-wives.” Paul started displaying the photos of the arrest targets on the screen while he waited for the burst of conversation to die down.

He finally gave a whistle and the mike amplified it enough he got the silence he wanted. “Yes, we are very certain on the audio matches and the authenticity of the tapes. Your immediate task is to put together a package of search warrants for financial and phone records, and to craft the deals we will offer to each individual in return for a guilty plea for murder for hire. We plan to look hard at each of these individuals, and for whatever else they might have done to break the law in the years since.

“Each murder will be assigned a legal team and a lead prosecutor. Your boss is making those assignments. I need the best work of your career because you can bet each one of these individuals is going to have the best defense attorney money can buy on retainer. The clock is running. We begin the arrests in twenty-four hours.”