The Book of Fate - Brad Meltzer [116]
She freezes, finally realizing what I’m getting at. Every reporter has a line they promise themselves they’ll never cross. From the look on her face as she turns back to me, Lisbeth just skipped, hurdled, and jumped over it. “I never would’ve used that stuff, Wes.”
My legs buckle, barely able to hold my weight.
“You know that’s true, right?” she asks, reaching out for my shoulder.
As I pull away, an adrenaline surge crackles under my skin. I grit my teeth so tightly, I swear I have feeling in my lip again instead of just phantom pain. “Gimme the recorder,” I growl.
She doesn’t move.
“Gimme the damn recorder!”
Fumbling as she pulls it from her purse, she offers a look that says, You don’t have to do this. But I’m done believing. I snatch the recorder from her hand and stride back to the deck.
“Wes, I know you don’t believe this, but I never meant to hur—”
“Don’t say it!” I snap, whipping back to face her and jamming a finger at her face. “You knew what you were doing! You knew it!”
Shoving my way outside and plowing toward the stern of the yacht, I cross over to the far railing, chuck the tape recorder into the water, and pivot back toward the helicopter.
“Everything okay?” Tommaso asks as he holds the helicopter door open and ushers us inside.
“Perfect,” I snap. “Just get us the hell out of here.”
69
Sitting cross-legged on the linoleum floor and surrounded by piles of stacked-up acid-free archival boxes, Rogo flipped through his fourth file folder in the past fifteen minutes. “What’s I&W?”
“I&W for what?” Dreidel asked, hunched forward on a wooden chair and reading through one of Boyle’s files.
“Doesn’t say. Just I&W with lots of dates next to—wait, here’s one: I&W for Berlin.”
“Indicators and Warnings. Or as General Bakos used to put it: all the trash talk and warning signs that our intelligence picks up about specific threats,” Dreidel explained. “Why? Is that what—?” He looked over at the attendant and kept his voice to a whisper. “Is that what Boyle was requesting? All the different I&Ws?”
“Is that bad?”
“Not bad—just—indicators and warnings are the kinds of things you usually find in the PDB.”
“President’s Daily Brief. That’s the report you were talking about before, with the CIA guy and the handcuffed briefcase?”
“And the place where The Roman’s payouts were decided,” Dreidel added. “Don’t forget, a year before the shooting, The Roman was denied a major sum of money for some hot tip in Sudan, which also, since they clearly were never stupid enough to be seen in the same place together, tells us which one of them used Sudan as their last—and only—known location.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“The Three—The Roman, Micah, O’Shea—are from the Service, the CIA, and FBI. When they link brains, think of all the information they have access to.”
“I understand how they work . . . but to do all that—to set it all up—no offense, but . . . just for a six-million-dollar payout?”
“What makes you think they were only doing it once? For all we know, if the payment went through, they would’ve come back every few months—and if they upped each payment, six million becomes ten million becomes an easy seventy to eighty million dollars by the time they’re done. Not a bad annual salary for preying on America’s fears.”
“So you think they—?”
“Don’t just focus on the they—think of who else had access to that same info. I mean, nothing happens in a vacuum. To even ask for that first six-million-dollar payment, they clearly had to’ve known something big was about to happen. But what if they weren’t the only ones?”
“So you think someone else knew?” Rogo asked.
“All this time, we’ve been assuming that The Three and Boyle were enemies. But what if they were competitors? What if that’s why The Three’s multimillion-dollar payday got turned down—because the White House already had a similar tip—a similar indicator and warning—from someone else?”
“I got ya—so while The Three or The Roman or whatever they call themselves kept bringing the White House their best hot tips, Boyle—or someone else