“No, but I’m not gonna give the Morelli Underboss the name of everyone in the very task force designed to disrupt them. Maybe you guys turn on each other that easily, but I’m not gonna spill on my colleagues, even if they are assholes.”
It was very difficult to withstand Angelo Messina’s gaze, I had come to understand. It was difficult then, but I stared back. It was one thing to work with him myself, but I wasn’t going to sell out everyone else on the task force.
“Then what you mean,” Angelo said at last, “is not that youcan’tdo it, butwon’t. Listen, Bax, I respect your scruples. Loyalty is important. But one way or another I’m getting those names. If you don’t give them to me, I’ll just get them another way, only that will take more time, and more people could die before then. Some of them could be people you know.”
I thought it over. It sounded soreasonablewhen he said it, but I had to remember, this guy wasn’t on the side of the angels.
Still, it wasn’t as though the task force members were undercover agents. Some of them had been named in the papers as working on Operation Safe Center already. The information wasn’t confidential, but I still didn’t feel comfortable sharing their names. “You’re making me into a rat,” I muttered.
He shook his head. “There are rats and rats.”
It struck me as so ridiculous that I began to laugh. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It means, Bax, that if youdogive me their names, I won’t share them. You won’t even have to write them down, just say them out loud, I’ll run each search, then I’ll wipe the names from my mind.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” I grumbled. But I was already giving in, and he could see it. “Fine,” I grunted. “Why don’t you start with me?”
* * *
“Where didyou learn to do this?” I asked, dazed, as he logged into some server somewhere, hit a few keys, and brought up my entire financial history, down to the candy bar I’d bought during lunch break two weeks ago.
“I didn’t. I found some young genius black hat who needed quick money, and she built me a back way into a few systems. It’s not foolproof and it’s not a deep dive, but it’s enough. I can access bank records, basic police checks, but anything classified is beyond the scope of this search. In those cases, I go back to my friend and ask her to take a closer look. But right now I’m only looking for indicators, anything that looks suspicious, or might lead to something.” He scanned the computer screen as I stared at my finances laid out on the screen.
“See anything there I should give an explanation for?” I asked, tired of the silence.
“Iamwondering why anyone would become an FBI agent with a salary like that.” I bit my tongue, and Angelo went on, “No gambling, no excessive or frequent deposits of cash, limited alcohol purchases, nothing that looks like a drug problem. You might want to cancel that gym membership in Virginia while you’re here.”
Shit. I preferred the local gym over the Quantico facilities, and I actuallyhadforgotten to pause my membership while I was here in New York again. “Noted.”
“You look clean to me.” He glanced at me. “Well? Are we doing this or not? Give me a name.”
Were we doing it? I didn’t have much choice. “Captain Matthew Walsh,” I sighed.
We went through every name of every task force member I could think of, and even the few I couldn’t quite remember, Angelo was able to find easily enough with open searches, or by looking around the intranets of various federal departments.
“Well, this is terrifying,” I commented, as he nosed around in the FBI.
“As I said, anything beyond the surface requires special skills that I don’t have.”
“But you haveaccessto people with those special skills.”
“Sure, but it’s not like the FBI doesn’t know when someone’s poking around in their files. It’s a cat-and-mouse game, Bax, and the secret is knowing when to take the cheese and when not to.”
I stretched, and my neck cracked. “We’ve been at this for hours and found nothing. Are you prepared to admit now that no one on the task force is involved?”
Angelo stared at the screen a few moments, then shook his head. “For now, I agree there are more viable suspects we can look into on my side of things. But I’ll send the names of these task force members that I’d like to check into further to one of my contacts.”
“That wasn’t the deal,” I said, sitting up straight. “You said you’d look into it, and you have.”
“There are a few names that need extra attention.”
“You didn’t say that before.”
“Would you have given me the rest of the names if I had? Listen, some of them will just have sealed records because they’ve worked undercover or had classified projects. Maybe they’ve worked counterterrorism or black ops. It’s mostly the federal agents, and there’s only a handful of names. But if there’s a chance there’s something on one of them, we need to find it.”
I looked at his handwritten note of names. His writing was neat, unremarkable. Matthew Walsh, Ethan Villiers, Tim Carmichael, John Wade—the latter two were ATF agents—and Detective Daniel Kowalski of the NYPD. “I guess I’m the idiot for giving you their names in the first place,” I said bitterly.
Angelo gave the tiniest smile. “As I said, I could have found all those names on my own, Bax, you just helped make it faster. If it makes you feel any better, it’s pretty standard for your kind to have holes in their records. It’s the whole point of going undercover—no oneknowsyou’re undercover. Take Walsh, for example. He was undercover for a while, although it’s not in his record.”
