The Sixth Man Read online

  concession, including me. But then again I think I look every day of my age and then some.”

  Paul continued. “Our mother divorced my father when I was nine. She married Edgar’s father, and they had him shortly afterward.”

  “So you two were together as a family for how long?”

  “Until I left for college.”

  “And your mother and stepfather are dead?”

  “My stepfather died about the time I left. Our mother passed on seven years ago. Cancer.”

  “What happened to your stepfather?” asked Sean.

  “He had an accident.”

  “What sort of accident?”

  “The sort where he stopped breathing.”

  “And your father?”

  “He and my mother divorced when I was a little girl. Haven’t heard from him since. Probably why she divorced him in the first place. Not the most caring man in the world.”

  Sean said, “How did you get permission to hire a lawyer to represent your brother?”

  “Eddie is a brilliant person. It wasn’t that he could sort of remember everything he ever saw, read, or heard. He could recall it precisely right down to the date and time he’d experienced it. And he could take pieces of any puzzle you gave him and spit out the solution in no time. He operated on a different plane than the rest of us.” She paused. “Do you know what an eidetic memory is?”

  “Like a photographic one?” said Sean.

  “Pretty much. Mozart had one. Tesla too. Someone with an eidetic memory can, for instance, recite pi’s decimal places to over one hundred thousand. All from memory. It’s a genetic thing coupled with a little freak-of-nature occurrence. It’s like the wiring in the brain is simply better than everyone else’s. You can’t learn to be eidetic—you either are or you aren’t.”

  “And your brother obviously had an eidetic memory?”

  “Actually something more than that. He never forgot anything, but beyond that, like I said, he could see how all the pieces of any puzzle went together. ‘This fact affecting that fact’ sort of thing. No matter how disparate or seemingly unrelated. Sort of like looking at an anagram once and knowing exactly what it’s really saying. Most people use about ten percent of their brain. Eddie is probably up around ninety to ninety-five percent.”

  “Pretty impressive,” said Michelle.

  “He could have achieved greatness in any number of fields.”

  “I sense a but coming,” prompted Sean.

  “But he didn’t have a lick of common sense. Never did, never will. And if something didn’t interest him he ignored it, regardless of the consequences. Years ago, after he forgot to pay his bills, renew his driver’s license, and even pay his taxes, I got a power of attorney from him. I couldn’t do everything for him, but I tried my best.”

  “If you did all that, how could you remain in the shadows of his life? The press didn’t even mention that he had a half sister after he was arrested.”

  “I’d been gone for a long time. And I’d never come back home for long. And I had a different last name. But much of the help I provided him could be done long-distance.”

  “But still.”

  “And I’m a private person.”

  “Is that why you moved here?” asked Michelle.

  “Partly.” She sipped her coffee.

  “Hilary is dead, too,” said Sean suddenly. “Did you know that?”

  CHAPTER

  26

  FOR THE FIRST TIME Kelly Paul did not appear to be in control. She set the coffee cup down, raised a hand to her eyes, and then put it back down. “When?”

  The tone was one of curiosity mixed with anger. Sean thought he might have also gleaned a hint of regret.

  “Last night, outside of Bergin’s house.”

  “How?”

  Michelle glanced at Sean, who said, “She was set up and shot.” He leaned forward. “Do you have any idea what’s going on here, Ms. Paul?”

  Paul wrested herself from whatever she was thinking. Clearing her throat, she said, “You need to understand that my brother didn’t kill those people. He was framed.”

  “Why? By whom?”

  “If I knew that I wouldn’t need you. But I would say that whoever did it is particularly powerful and well connected.”

  “Why would people like that be targeting your brother?”

  “Well, that’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, now isn’t it?”

  “And you’re saying you don’t even have an idea?”

  “I’m not really saying anything. You’re the investigators.”

  “So you knew Bergin had hired us?”

  “I suggested it. He told me he knew you, Sean. I’d read about some of the work you’d done. I said we needed a pair like you on the job because it wouldn’t be simple.”

  “When was the last time you saw or spoke to your brother?” asked Sean.

  “You mean before he stopped talking at all?”

  “How did you know that? That your brother had stopped talking?”

  “Teddy told me. And the last time I spoke with my brother was by phone a week before he was arrested.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing of great importance. Certainly not that he suspected six bodies were buried at the family farm.”

  “How long had the place been in your family?”

  “My mother and stepfather bought it when they got married. After our mother died, she left it to both of us. I was living abroad and so I told Eddie to take it.”

  “Even after he started working for the government he lived with his mother?”

  “Yes. He was at the local IRS office in Charlottesville, although I know he had responsibilities that would take him to Washington fairly regularly. Edgar really had no ambition to move into his own place. He liked the farm. It was quiet, isolated.”

  “And he obviously lived there alone after your mother died.”

  “He had no alternative. I was out of the country.”

  “Where were you living abroad?” asked Sean. “And what were you doing?”

  Paul, who had been staring at a spot on the wall about a foot above Sean’s head, now swung her gaze directly in his direction. “I wasn’t aware that I was the subject of your investigation. And yet the truly personal inquiries seemed all aimed in my general vicinity.”

  “I like to be thorough.”

  “A grand attribute. Just point it in the direction of my brother’s case.”

  Sean took this snub in stride. And he did note that her vocabulary and tone had subtly changed. “We’ve read the police file on the bodies discovered at the farm.”

  “Six of them. All men. All white. All under the age of forty. And all as yet unidentified.”

  “As I understand it nothing has come back on fingerprints or DNA.”

  “Quite remarkable. On the TV police shows everyone’s in the database and it only takes a few seconds to find them.” Paul smiled and took a long sip of coffee.

  “I could see one or two or maybe even three not being in the system. But all six?”

  “I think you and Michelle need to go there and look around.”

  “You’re officially retaining us?”

  “I thought I already had.”

  “With Bergin dead, it gets complicated. His associate, Megan Riley, is on the papers. She’s willing but really green. I’m not sure the court will allow her to continue in a solo capacity.”

  “You’re a lawyer,” said Paul bluntly.

  “You checked me out?”

  “Of course I did. I’d be a fool if I hadn’t. You can cocounsel with Riley.”

  “I’m not in practice anymore.”

  “I think you might want to reconsider that. You can wear two hats. Detective and lawyer.”

  “I’ll think about it,” said Sean. “Right now the FBI have Megan Riley holed up somewhere in Maine emptying out her brain cells.”

  Paul appraised him with a shrewd look. “You think your green l
awyer can hold up against the Bureau?”

  “I don’t know,” said Sean, giving her a curious glance.

  “Brandon Murdock?” said Paul.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Teddy told me he was trying to break through the wall of legal confidentiality to find out who the client was. Teddy said it would eventually have to come out, but he’d managed to hold the fellow off so far.”

  “The FBI usually gets its way.”

  “Not disputing it. But let’s make them work a little harder. I’m no lawyer but I’d say finding out who killed all those people and Teddy and now Hilary takes precedence over trying to discover who’s paying for Eddie’s defense.”

  “So you’re assuming that all the deaths are connected?” said Michelle. “The six bodies and Bergin and his secretary. Killed by the same person?”

  “Teddy Bergin didn’t have an enemy to his name. And why kill Hilary except for something she knew? And that right there proves Eddie is innocent. There was no way he got out of Cutter’s Rock to kill either one of them.”

  Sean considered this. “That’s true. If they are connected.”

  “The proof is out there. All you have to do is find it.”

  “I’ll draw up a retainer agreement and have you sign it.”

  “More than happy to.”

  “Anything else we need to know?”

  “I believe you’ve got plenty to think about.”

  As they rose to go she added, “I doubt it would be smart to leave poor Megan with the FBI too long. You might want to make some noises about unlawful detainment or something like that, just to get the Bureau’s blood going. Mention something about calling up a TV station or newspaper reporter. They just love that stuff down at the Hoover building. Makes their butts get all tight and squirmy.”

  Sean looked at her strangely. “You have a lot of experience with the FBI?”

  “Oh, more than you’ll probably ever know, Mr. King.”

  CHAPTER

  27

  PETER BUNTING SAT in his office in Manhattan. He enjoyed living in New York. He had an office in downtown D.C. and his company had a facility in northern Virginia, but New York was unique. The energy here was visceral. As he walked to work each day from his Fifth Avenue brownstone he knew he was where he belonged.

  He stretched out a kink in his neck and studied the file on his desk. It appeared on an electronic tablet. No paper was kept here. Everything of importance was locked in impenetrable server farms far away from here. Cloud computing was king in Peter Bunting’s world.

  He had studied the career paths of Sean King and Michelle Maxwell and came away reasonably impressed. They both appeared to be hardworking, clever, and practical-minded. But he concluded that some of their success had also been due to luck coming along at just the right moment. And luck was not something one could count on happening all the time. How that might benefit or hurt him he wasn’t sure.

  He thumbed a button and the screen changed along with the subject area.

  Edgar Roy.

  His main problem.

  What to do about his E-Six was consuming an inordinate amount of his time. And yet the matter was of paramount importance to him. Even though he had set up some stopgap measures he was unacceptably behind schedule. And Secretary Foster was right: the quality of the analysis had diminished. The status quo could not be sustained. He could lose everything he’d worked for.

  Ellen Foster and her ilk were unforgiving. They would cut him off without a second thought. They might be plotting against him right now. No, there was no “might” about it; they were plotting against him. And Mason Quantrell was probably helping to orchestrate the entire scheme. The worlds of public and private sector had meshed into a single organism in the national security field. Players from both sides hopped back and forth with increasing frequency. It was now nearly impossible to tell where the government side ended and the for-profit machines began.

  When he had first decided to make the intelligence field the place where he would make his mark, the arena was a disaster. Too many agencies with too many people writing too many reports, often about the same thing, that no one had time to read anyway. Too many eyeballs watching the wrong things. And, most critical, no one wanted to share information for fear of losing budget dollars or hard-won turf. DHS didn’t talk to CIA. DIA didn’t interface with the FBI. NSA was its own country. The other alphabet agencies did their own thing. No one, not one person, knew it all, didn’t come close to knowing it all. And when one didn’t know it all, one made mistakes, enormous ones; the sort where lots of people died.

  That was how Bunting had commenced building his grand plan. Combining the basic tenet of the entrepreneur and the motivation of a patriot wanting to protect his country, he had seen a national security need and filled it. Once the concept had been tested and approved, the E-Program had been expanded and upgraded every year. It was no academic exercise. In that Mt. Everest of information collected every day by America and its allies, there could be one or two pieces of data located far apart in the gathering baskets of the intelligence community that might very well prevent another 9/11.

  The successes of the E-Program had been early and often. Some could argue quite persuasively that the world was basically in a shitty state. But Bunting was one of the few who knew that things could be far worse. How close the United States and its allies had drawn to the precipice. How narrowly they had avoided events that would have resulted in greater devastation than when those jumbo jets had slammed into those buildings. In six months alone Edgar Roy’s analysis had prevented at least five major attacks on both private and military targets around the world. And a host of lesser but still potentially deadly incidents had been broken up because the man could stare at the Wall and get it to reveal its secrets like no other analyst in history. And the results of his strategic conclusions could be felt around the world in a thousand different ways.

  But it all came down to finding that one right person. That was always the challenge. The average career of the Analyst was only three years. After that even the mightiest of minds had had enough. And then they were given golden retirement packages and put out to pasture, like stud horses—only, unfortunately, without the possibility of siring their replacements.

  The phone rang. He licked his lips and tried to remain calm. It was a scheduled call. It was the primary reason he was in the office today. He lifted the receiver.

  “Yes? Yes, I’ll hold.”

  A moment later the man’s voice came on. Bunting drew a shallow breath and answered. “Mr. President, thank you for making time for me, sir.”

  The conversation was swift. It had been pretimed for five minutes. And it was only because Peter Bunting was such an important player in the intelligence community that the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue had bothered to call at all.

  “It’s been my pleasure and honor to serve my country, sir,” said Bunting. “And I give you my word that all of our goals will be met, on time. Yes, sir, thank you, sir.”

  The men then got down to the details.

  As the phone timer clicked to five minutes, he said good-bye, set the receiver down, and looked up at his assistant.

  She said, “I guess you really know you’ve made it when the president calls you.”

  “You’d think that would be the case, wouldn’t you?”

  “It’s not?”

  “Actually it only means you have a longer way to fall.”

  After she left he put his feet up on his desk and interlaced his fingers behind his neck. Bunting personally knew hundreds of intelligence analysts, smart people from the best schools who operated in specialties.