“I don’t care if she’s the wife of the goddamned president,” a man boomed. “No one gets in without a search and if you can’t handle that, then find someone who can.” He signed off. “Fucking unbelievable. Old bats thinking we’re going to swipe twenty bucks from their handbags, delivery men too lazy to carry boxes to the front door, but if something goes wrong, they’ll be the first to raise a stink, calling the papers to complain that we weren’t doing our jobs.”

“Nothing’s going to go wrong, Marty. A woman couldn’t get groped in here without us knowing about it.”

“Yeah, but if she does, I’ll have ten deadweight rookies in here asking me what they should do about it, while that fucker has free run of the building.”

The door creaked open.

“What the hell are you two doing back—?” the first man boomed.

“There’s been a seat mix-up,” a woman said. “An elderly couple is in ours—”

“Then tell them to move!”

The women continued in the same calm voice. “The usher feels it would be less intrusive if we took the seats beside them—”

“I told you where to sit! We picked out the sight lines to cover every—”

“We’ve checked the sight lines and they’d be the same.”

“I don’t care. You sit where I assigned you, and if there’s someone there, then you move them. Why the hell you couldn’t figure that out without bothering me—”

“Because you asked to be apprised—personally apprised—of all complications.”

“This isn’t a complication, Chin. It’s ass-wiping, and you can damned well do your own.”

The door clicked shut. I looked over to see a young couple in formal wear heading back to the foyer.

“Idiot,” the woman muttered.

“He’s under a lot of pressure,” her partner said. “He saw what happened to McMillan, and he knows if this goes bad, he’s next.”

“Stress, my ass. Dubois is in his element. He wants to be in control so he can take full credit if he pulls this off. But if he doesn’t, you can bet your ass it’ll be everyone else’s fault.”

Jack touched my arm and motioned that we should move on. I had to agree. All we’d accomplished here was overhearing Martin Dubois, the agent now leading the investigation after the last one had been “reassigned.” The guy might be a jerk, but he seemed to be doing the job.