“She’s playing you, Henry,” Nico said.
“In what way?”
Graff trusted Nicoletti implicitly to be a man who held secrets, but he was also a natural-born sadist. Nico loved waterboarding prisoners, watching them scream in pain. He loved getting in their heads. He loved watching the men and women being stripped naked and filmed. The guy was a grade-A psychopath. And he was perfect for his job. If Nico was telling Graff he had a problem with Feinstein, Graff had to listen. This man was the number-one person in his operation he trusted, to the exclusion of all others.
“I don’t feel comfortable even talking to you about such matters. Do you mind if I send you the surveillance photos?”
Graff’s heart sank. His worst fears were coming to life. A fear of betrayal.
“Send what you have.”
Graff ended the call. He experienced a terrible emptiness in his gut. He sensed that something was going badly wrong.
A ping sounded from his encrypted email.
Graff double-clicked on the email. Eight photos opened up. They all showed Karen Feinstein in flagrante with Andrew Forbes, a man whose father Graff had served with. The father was Special Forces, CIA, before he formed his own billion-dollar management consultancy in DC. The son was part of the jigsaw. The first piece in the jigsaw. But he had never imagined the son, and certainly not Feinstein, betraying his trust.
His mind flashed back to the photos of his wife Karen had shown him. The compromised, sickening photos he couldn’t erase from his memory. The photos with a movie star half her age. That one had hurt the most.
It was happening again.
The more he thought about all the betrayals, the more detached he became. Graff absorbed a numbness, his way of dealing with such situations. The years and years of blood, filth, and corpses had filled his soul with a darkness he was unable to expunge, a cancer devouring his very being.
There was nothing left. No love. Just duty.
A duty to protect. To serve. To sacrifice.
Graff stared out his windows across the floodlit monuments. He began to feel a sense of his own mortality. Whatever strength he had slowly ebbed away.
He called Nico.
“I’m sorry, Henry,” he said. “How do you want it to play out?”
“I’ll figure something out. In the meantime, we need to get McNeal out of the way. We take him out first and then we can focus on her and that little fucker.”
Graff ended the call as he sensed he was losing his bearings. All of a sudden, the world of intrigue he had inhabited and immersed himself in for so long was collapsing around him. The people within the intelligence community he trusted were gone, and alliances he had built over the years, were crumbling.
His mind flashed images of Feinstein with Forbes, the preppy kid. The confident, smart, risk-taking young man, not too unlike himself. But whereas Forbes had contented himself with being the President’s bag carrier, sashaying around the Hamptons with his Ivy League friends, skiing in Europe in the winter, Graff had joined the American military. He had learned to kill. He had a higher calling. Maybe Forbes had once had what it took to become Special Forces like his father. But Graff believed that time had come and gone. Andrew Forbes had gotten soft. He didn’t know about sacrifice. Real sacrifice. He would never sacrifice himself for the greater good.
A few minutes later Graff’s cell phone rang.
“Henry, it’s Karen.”
A mixture of grief, anger, and jealousy ran through his veins. But he detected an iciness still running through his blood. “Nice to hear from you,” he said. Graff was good at concealing his true feelings. “Got the latest?”
“We’ve got a team in place. We can deal with this situation before it reaches DC.”
“Method?”
“Cop car. Drug stop. Drugs found. Shot. It’s going to look like McNeal went bad.”
Graff was quiet for a few moments. “I like it. Very elegant.”
“Do we have the green light? I’m talking McNeal neutralized. Problem solved.”
Graff sighed long and hard. He closed his eyes and could see that Karen’s next target could be him. He could see it with startling clarity. McNeal’s investigation might be ended with the Internal Affairs cop being killed. But what about the files and documents McNeal would have stored? The Feds might have ignored the evidence. What if that changed?
He knew too much. He knew it all. He knew it went all the way to the top. He also knew Karen would have no compunction about saving her own skin. He would have to be sacrificed. At some stage. Maybe not tonight. Maybe not for a while. He had no way to know for sure how it would end. But eventually, they would come for him. He too would die.