CHAPTER 91

Some minutes later Cunningham is escorting me back out of the LeMont Federal Building and I say bitterly, “Why are you here? Aren’t you going out with the feds?”

With a weary sigh he says, “I hate helicopters. Let the feds have the glory. And I’m dead tired, Caleb. I mean, you try riding in secret in a Mardi Gras float, all bent over, not able to move, breathing in diesel fumes … ”

We get to the doors and there are flashes of lightning in the darkness. Camera crews, reporters, and others are clustered outside.

Cunningham says, “Don’t scream at me when I say this, but Morgan isn’t totally to blame.”

“The hell he isn’t!”

My former boss taps my elbow. “Remember when I first briefed you on this, back when you were outside, washing your truck? I said that a lot of high-level meetings were going on, both here and in DC? That there were international security implications? Well, yeah, I found out from one of the local FBI agents … DC screwed Morgan over, and good.”

“How?”

He rubs his face for a second. “Yeah, there were international implications, all right. The boys at the Hoover building got contacted by the FSB.”

“Who?”

“The FSB,” he says. “The Russian spy agency that replaced the KGB. Somehow they got wind of the investigation going on down here, and they told the FBI that they had some good intel they were going to pass on. Just be patient, the Russians said, we’ll help you out.”

I say, “The Russians didn’t have anything.”

“Not a goddamn thing,” he says. “Morgan’s superiors didn’t want him to go full-out in his investigation … they wanted to wait for the Russians to step in, help us break up the plot, get great headlines about a reset in the American-Russian relationship, all that good shit. So Morgan was held back, and yesterday, Ivan called the feds and said, oops, our bad, we can’t help.”

I feel worn, tired, and betrayed. All of the dead and wounded out there … it could have been prevented. If I hadn’t focused on the wrong Needham. If Morgan had shown a stiffer spine. If my old bosses had flipped off the FBI and told them that they would handle it …

Lots of ifs.

Cunningham gently slaps me on my back. “By the way, Caleb. The review board found that your use of force was justified and cleared your name. With everything going on, I forgot to tell you. It’s not too late, if you want to come back to the force … ”

His voice fades as I try to grasp what he’s saying, but I’m indifferent to the news. On top of everything else, it just doesn’t seem that important. But a tiny part of me is glad that I’ve been vindicated.