Page 158 of Hang on St. Christopher

“This is no way to treat a colleague,” I said.

“Almostcolleagues. A true colleague would not have flown across the Atlantic Ocean and come into my home. A true colleague would have made a phone call, ascertained the fact that fundamentally we are all on the same side, and left it at that.”

“Are we all on the same side?”

“Yes, we are.”

“That’s a relief. I thought maybe you were going to kill me.”

“No, you’re right. I am probably going to kill you. I’ll certainly kill you if you don’t answer all my questions,” he said without cracking a smile.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why would you kill me?”

“You’re a rogue element, Duffy. Coming all the way here. Breaking into my house? You realize that the work I do cannot be jeopardized by someone like you.”

“What is the work you do?”

“Like I say, I’m asking the questions,” he said, pointing the gun at my forehead again.

“Take the handcuffs off, and I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

He shook his head.

“You wouldn’t really kill me in cold blood.”

“As you can probably imagine, this basement is adequately soundproofed. I even improvised a range down here at one time. This wouldn’t make any noise at all.”

“If I start screaming...”

“I won’t let you start screaming. And one of the advantages of living in the country is that everyone lets you be.”

“I wondered what you were doing out here at the end of a long commute.”

He nodded. “Most everyone else lives within the Beltway. But I don’t like to hang out with everyone else. I like to be away from DC and Langley and all those flags at Arlington. When you drive past this house, you probably thinkretired schoolteacheror something like that.”

“You don’t thinkwet-work technician for the CIA’s Special Activities Division.”

He shook his head. “No, you don’t think that. So no one bothers me and I can do what I like. If I kill you, no one will hear it, no one will know about it, no one will know you were ever here, and tonight I’ll take my boat out onto the water as I often do and no one will notice me drop a couple of garbage bags over the side in the darkness.”

“What about the car?”

“I’ll dump that in South Baltimore.”

“I told my sergeant back in Carrickfergus that I was coming here.”

He shook his head. “Not to this address,” he said in a let’s-not-play-stupid-games voice. “This is a classic Sean Duffy lone-wolf op. You’ve got form, buddy. And it wouldn’t even matter if you did tell him. There’s no evidence that you ever arrived here, and there won’t be any forensic evidence that you were ever in my house, I can assure you of that... Now that that’s settled, it’s question time. How,exactly,did you find me? I thought I’d been very careful.”

“A kid made you at Belfast Airport. An informant of mine. And I followed your trail from Knock to Inverness, to Iceland.”

He groaned. “I never thought anyone would go to all that trouble. Don’t you have anything better to do?”

“Not really.”

“Tell me precisely what you did, so I can make sure I never make that mistake again.”

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