Black Friday (or Black Market) - James Patterson [92]
“Everybody’s just fine, Archer,” Mary K. spoke. She’d snuck up from behind, and scared the living shit out of him.
“They understand the problems you’re having. We’ve been watching the news.”
Mary K. gave her brother a hug. She’d been nineteen when their parents had died in Florida. Carroll had looked after her after that. He and Nora had always been around to talk to her about her boyfriends—about Mary Katherine wanting to be a serious painter, even if she couldn’t make any decent money at it. They’d been there when she needed them, and now it was the other way around.
“Maybe they understand okay about my work. How about the other thing? Caitlin?” Carroll’s head turned slowly toward his sister.
Mary K. took his arm and draped it over her housecoat and shoulder. She was such a softie, such a sweet gentle and good lady. It was time she found someone as terrific as she was, Carroll often thought Probably she wasn’t helping her cause, living with him and the kids, either.
“They trust your parental judgment. Within reasonable bounds, of course.”
“That’s news.”
“Oh, you’re the Word and the Light to them, and you know it. If you say they’ll like Caitlin, they instinctively believe it—because you said it, Arch.”
“Well, they didn’t show it the other morning. I think they’ll like her. She’s a terrific person.”
“I’m sure she is. You have good instincts about people. You always knew which of my beaus was worth a second look. You’re a sucker for people who are full of life, full of love for other people. That’s what Caitlin’s like, isn’t she?”
Arch Carroll looked down at his sister, and gently shook his head. Finally he grinned. Mary K. was so smart. She had an artist’s sensibility, but she was so practical. A curious combination, and irresistible in his opinion.
Carroll stretched his arms. The wound, that souvenir of a morning in France, still ached. “One day soon, I’m going to take a week off. I swear it. I’ve got to get back in touch with the kids.”
“What about your friend, Caitlin? Could she take a week off too?”
Carroll said nothing. He wasn’t sure if that was such a good idea.
He went off to bed, where he lay exhausted, but unable to fall over the edge into steep. The No. 13 Wall computer screens were still running through his mind, perplexing images. If there was any one avenue he could follow on the trail of Green Band, it would lead inevitably to Washington, and deeper into the restricted files of the FBI.
Arch Carroll snored quietly, slept dreamlessly, and when his bedside alarm went off it was just before dawn and dark still.
Chapter 69
WASHINGTON, D.C, CARROLL had always thought, was the ultimate Hitchcock movie location: so elegant, so quietly lovely and distinguished, yet with paranoia.
At 9:00 A.M. he squirmed from a blue Metro cab with a dented fender. His face was slapped with raw cold and drizzle on Washington’s 10th Street Carroll hiked his jacket collar up. He squinted through a thick, soupy, morning haze, which obscured the concrete box that was the J. Edgar Hoover Building.
Once inside the Hoover memorial, he found the procedure at the escort desk mechanical and unnecessarily slow. It irritated Carroll in the worst bureaucratic way. The Bureau’s famous procedures, the inefficiency they created, played like a skit appropriate for “Saturday Night Live.”
After several minutes of phone checks, he was granted a coded blue tag with the FBI’s official insignia. He slid the plastic card into a metal entry gate, and passed inside the hallowed halls.
An attractive woman agent, a researcher for FBI Data Analysis, was waiting outside the elevator on the fifth floor. She wore a man-tailored suit; her chestnut hair was wound back in a tight, formal chignon.
“Hello, I’m Arch Carroll.”
“I’m Samantha Hawes. People don’t call me Sam. Nice to meet you. Why don’t you come this way, please.”
She started to walk away, pleasant but efficient. “I’ve already collected as much material as I can for you to look at. When you told