Boston looked up with burning eyes. “I’ve been at NIOS from the beginning, from the day it was formed. I was army intelligence, I was CIA. I was on the ground running assets when Shreve Metzger was having keg parties in Cambridge and New Haven. I was key in our resisting the Pink Revolution—the socialists in the nineties and oughts. Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Lula in Brazil, Néstor Kirchner in Argentina, Vázquez in Uruguay, Evo Morales in Bolivia.” He regarded Sachs coldly. “Do you even know who those people are?”

He didn’t seem to expect an answer. “I orchestrated two regime changes in Central America and one in South. Drinking in shitty bars, bribing journalists, sucking up to mid-level politicos in Caracas and BA. Going to the funerals when my assets got accidentally on purpose killed in a hit-and-run, and nobody could know what a hero they’d been. Begging Washington for money, cutting deals with the boys from London and Madrid and Tokyo…And when it came time for a new director at NIOS, who’d they pick? Shreve Metzger, a fucking kid with a bad temper. It should’ve been me. I’ve earned it! I deserve it!”

“So when you realized Shreve had made the mistake with Moreno you decided to use that to bring him down. You leaked the kill order and the intel. You expected you’d be his replacement.”

He muttered angrily, “I could run the place a hundred times better than he could.”

Pulaski asked, “How’d you beat the polygraph?”

“Oh, that’s tradecraft one-oh-one. See! That’s my point. This business isn’t about pushing buttons and playing computer games.” He sat back. “Oh, hell, just arrest me and have done with it.”

Chapter 87

CHAPTER 87

SCANNING,” THE VOICE HISSED through an earbud. “No transmissions, no signals.”

The whispering probably wasn’t necessary. The men were in a wooded area well out of earshot of anyone in Spencer Boston’s house.

“Roger that,” Jacob Swann acknowledged, thinking the phrase sounded somewhat ridiculous.

No transmissions, no signals. This was good news. If there had been other officers around to back up Boston’s arrest, the chatter would have shown up on Bartlett’s scanner. Bartlett, a mercenary, was as dull as a slug but he knew his equipment and could find a microwave or radio transmission inside a lead box.

“Any visuals?”

“No, they came alone. The woman detective—Sachs—and the uniform with her.”

Made sense, Swann reflected, only these two and no backup. Boston was a whistleblower and possibly a traitor but he wasn’t dangerous in the resisting-arrest sense. He’d kill you with a Hellfire in Yemen or ruin your political career by planting rumors that you were gay in an ardently Catholic South American country. But he probably didn’t even own a gun; two NYPD cops would be plenty to bring him in.