Darkest Fear (Myron Bolitar 7)

“She stays,” Myron said.

“No,” Kimberly Green said. She was still wearing the ball-and-chain earrings, still the jeans and black turtleneck, but the jacket now was spearmint green. “We’re not exactly thrilled about talking to you and Cheekbones boy over there”—she gestured toward Win—“but at least you have some clearance. We don’t know her. She goes.”

Win’s smile spread and his eyebrows did a quick up-and-down. Cheekbones. He liked that.

“She goes,” Green said again.

Esperanza shrugged. “No biggie,” she said.

Myron was about to say something, but Win shook his head. He was right. Save it for the important battles.

Esperanza left. Win got up and gave Myron the chair. He stood on Myron’s right, arms crossed, totally at ease. Green and Peck fidgeted. Myron turned to Eric Ford. “I don’t think we’ve met.”

“But you know who I am,” Ford said. He had one of those smooth soft-rock-DJ voices.

“Yes.”

“And I know who you are,” he said. “So what would be the point?”

Oookay. Myron glanced back at Win. Win shrugged.

Ford nodded at Kimberly Green. She cleared her throat. “For the record,” she said, “we don’t think we should have to go through this.”

“Through what?”

“Telling you about our investigation. Debriefing you. As a good citizen, you should be willing to cooperate with our investigation because it’s the right thing to do.”

Myron looked at Win and said, “Oh boy.”

“Some aspects of an investigation need to be contained,” she continued. “You and Mr. Lockwood should understand that better than most. You should be anxious to cooperate with any federal investigation. You should respect what we’re trying to do here.”

“Right, okay, we respect. Can we skip ahead, please? You looked us up. You know we’ll keep our mouths shut. Otherwise none of us would be here.”

She folded her hands and put them in her lap. Peck kept his head down and scribbled notes, Lord knew on what. Myron’s decor maybe. “What we say here cannot leave this room. It is classified to the highest—”

“Skipping,” Myron said with an impatient hand roll. “Skipping.”

Green slid her eyes toward Ford. He nodded again. She took a deep breath and said, “We have Stan Gibbs under surveillance.”

She stopped, settled back. Myron waited a few seconds and then said, “Label me surprised.”

“That information is classified,” she said.

“Then I’ll leave it out of my diary.”

“He isn’t supposed to know.”

“Well, that’s usually implied with words like ‘classified’ and ‘surveillance.’ ”

“But Gibbs does know. He loses us whenever he really wants. Because when he’s out in public, we can’t get too close.”

“Why can’t you get too close?”

“He’ll see us.”

“But he already knows you’re there?”

“Yes.”

Myron looked up at Win. “Wasn’t there an Abbott and Costello skit that went like this?”

“Marx Brothers,” Win said.

“If we were out in the open about tailing him,” Green said, “the fact that he’s a target could become public knowledge.”

“And you’re trying to contain that?”

“Yes.”

“How long has he been under surveillance?”

“Well, it’s not that simple. He’s been out of range a lot—”

“How long?”

Again Green looked at Ford. Again Ford nodded. She balled her hands into fists. “Since the first article on the kidnappings appeared.”

Myron sat back, feeling something akin to a head rush. He shouldn’t have been surprised, but damned if he wasn’t. The article came flooding back to him—the sudden disappearances, the awful phone calls, the constant, eternal anguish, the picket-fenced lives suddenly bulldozed over by inexplicable evil.

“My God,” Myron said. “Stan Gibbs was telling the truth.”

“We never said that,” Kimberly Green said.

“I see. So you’ve been tailing him because you don’t like his syntax?”

Silence.

“The articles were true,” Myron said. “And you’ve known it all along.”

“What we did or did not know is not your concern.”

Myron shook his head. “Unbelievable,” he said. “So let me see if I got this straight. You have a serial psycho out there who snatches people out of the blue and torments their families. You want to keep a lid on it because if word got out to the public, you’d have a panic situation. Then the psycho goes directly to Stan Gibbs and suddenly the story is in the public domain …” Myron’s voice died off, seeing that his logic trail had hit a major pothole. He frowned and forged ahead. “I don’t know how that old novel or the plagiarism charges tie in. But either way, you decided to ride it. You let Gibbs get fired and disgraced, probably in part because you were pissed off that he upset your investigation. But mostly”—he spotted what he thought was a clearing—“but mostly you did it so you could watch him. If the psycho contacted him once, you figured, he’d probably do it again—especially if the articles had been discredited.”

Kimberly Green said, “Wrong.”

“But close.”

“No.”

“The kidnappings Gibbs wrote about took place, right?”

She hesitated, gave Ford an eye check. “We can’t verify all of his facts.”

“Jesus, I’m not taking a deposition here,” Myron said. “Was his column true, yes or no?”

“We’ve told you enough,” she said. “It’s your turn.”

“You haven’t told me squat.”

“And you’ve told us less.”

Negotiating. Life is being a sports agent—constant negotiating. He had learned the importance of leverage, of doling out, of being fair. People forget that last one, and it always costs you in the end. The best negotiator isn’t the one who gets the whole pie while leaving scant crumbs behind. The best negotiator is the one who gets what he wants while keeping the other side happy. So normally, Myron would dole out a little something here. Classic give-and-take. But not this time. He knew better. Once he told them the reason for his visit to Stan Gibbs, his leverage would be zippo.