She waited for it while the old man slid the inner envelope out from under the manuscript. She saw a name, but there was no address.

He said, “Who is this Harold Middleton and how are we supposed to find him?”

9 - JOSEPH FINDER

9

JOSEPH FINDER

The moment her Nextel phone chirped, Special Agent M. T. Connolly had a bad feeling.

She’d just gotten into the elevator at the brand-new building that housed the FBI’s Northern Virginia Resident Agency, on her way back to her office. It was a cubicle, actually, not an office, but she could always dream.

Glancing at the caller ID, she immediately recognized the area code and exchange prefix: the call came from the Hoover building—FBI headquarters in D.C. Not good. Only bad news came from the Hoover building, she’d learned. She stepped out of the elevator and back onto the gleaming terrazzo floor of the lobby.

“Connolly,” she said.

A man’s voice, reedy and overly precise: “This is Emmett Kalmbach.”

He didn’t actually have to identify himself; she’d have recognized the prissy enunciation anywhere. Kalmbach was the FBI’s Assistant Director who oversaw the hundreds of agents in D.C. and Virginia who worked out of the Washington Field Office as well as her satellite office in Manassas, Virginia. She’d met Kalmbach a few times, enough to recognize his type: the worst kind of kiss-up, kick-down bureaucratic infighter. A paper-pushing rattlesnake.

Kalmbach had no reason to call her directly. At least, no good reason. And why was he calling from the FBI’s national headquarters, instead of from his office on Fourth Street?

“Yes, sir,” she said. She sounded blasé, but she felt her stomach clench. She watched the brushed-steel elevator doors glide shut in front of her. The two halves of a giant fingerprint, etched on the elevator doors, came together. The fingerprint had been some government committee’s idea of art, which was precisely what it looked like: art by government committee.

“Agent Connolly, who is Jozef Padlo?”

Ah ha. “He’s an inspector with the Polish National Police and he’s working a triple homicide in Warsaw that—

“Agent—Marion, if I may—”

“M. T., sir.”

But he went on smoothly, ignoring her: “—Our legat in Warsaw just emailed me a letter rogatory from the Polish Ministry of Justice, requesting that we grant immediate entry into the U.S. to this . . . Jozef Padlo. He says you personally guaranteed him clearance. Our legat is understandably ticked off.”

So this was what he was calling about. She hadn’t gone through channels, so some junior FBI paper-pusher, who’d picked the short straw and had ended up assigned to the American Embassy Bureau in Warsaw, had gotten bent out of shape.