“I don’t know where he is. What I gave you – his name – Allenwood – Stanford – that’s it. And it wasn’t easy to get.” He paused. “Look,” he said, “I think you should take this guy seriously. He’s-”

“Let me tell you something,” Kovalenko said in a bored voice. “I’ve got a lot on my plate. I got terrorist cells – real guys with bombs – up north. I’ve got problems with container ships and dirty bombs, snake-heads and Chechens. Not to mention the Nigerians, who are into everything. And guess what? I’m facing surgery. On my gallbladder! You realize how serious that is?”

Burke wanted to kill him. “How serious what is?” Burke asked. “The bombs or your gallbladder?”

Kovalenko smiled, as if Burke had just given him permission for something. “Let me explain it to you,” he said. “What this is all about – you and me, sitting here together, having a chat like we are – is cooperation. You want your business open? You want the indictment dropped? Help me find the guy.”

“I have,” Burke told him.

Kovalenko shook his head, and sighed, feigning infinite patience. “Not really.” He took another sip of wine. “Truth is, yes! I’d love to have a chat with Mr.” – he glanced at the card – “Wilson. But I got to be frank with you. He’s nowhere near the top of my To Do list. And anyway,” he said, waving the card as if to dry it, “what good does this do me? It’s yesterday’s news.”

“It’s his name. The prison must have records. Stanford… You could find him.”

Kovalenko shrugged. “Maybe. But how does that help you? If I find him?”

Burke couldn’t believe it.

Kovalenko laughed. “You want to reopen, right?”

Burke nodded.

“Okay,” Kovalenko said, “what’s it called?” He frowned, pretending to think hard. “Asshole Associates, right? Something like that. You want to reopen Asshole Associates. No problem. Here’s what you do: You find your client! But find him before I do. Because if I find him first, it doesn’t do fuck-all for you. You understand what I’m saying? Don’t tell me where he was a couple of months ago. Because that doesn’t help me.”

Burke took a deep breath, and counted to five. “Let’s say I do find him-”

“Then we’ll have a deal,” Kovalenko told him, suddenly magnanimous. “I’ll tell the Garda to back off, and you can go back to doing what you do best: setting up fronts for people who cheat on their taxes.”

Burke took an even deeper breath. He wanted to hit the guy. Instead, he said, “How do I know you’ll do what you say?”

Kovalenko shrugged. “Because I always do what I say. Meantime, don’t call me. Don’t harass my assistant. She’s busy, and, as incredible as it may seem, I’ve got other priorities.”

Other priorities. It was all Burke could take. He sat where he was, watching the red mist descend in front of his eyes, trying to decide whether to bitch-slap the guy or head-butt him. It wouldn’t help things, he realized that, but it would give him a feeling of great satisfaction – if only for a little while.

Kovalenko had no way of knowing, but Burke had a temper. The kind that was hard to control. His parents had worked hard to exorcise it, taking him all the way into Charlottesville for karate lessons, where the civilizing effect of bowing to one’s opponent soothed his mother.

If I smack this guy in the face, Burke thought, there won’t be any real damage, not really. Unless he pulls a gun, and blows my head off. So maybe I should just put him out: grab him by his fucking tie, give it a jerk, and head-butt him. For a moment, this seemed like a plan. But only for a moment. Assaulting an FBI agent could only end with Burke behind bars and the old man totally banjaxed. Even so…

He was still thinking about it when he saw the young girl next to him, cringing toward her boyfriend, practically crawling into his lap. She looked terrified. And so, Burke saw, did Kovalenko, though he was better at hiding it.

He got to his feet. The adrenaline fade left him jangled and disoriented. Turning, he pushed his way through the crowded pub, and out to the sidewalk. For a moment, he stood there with his eyes closed, face turned to the sky, feeling the drizzle.

A rough day on the Irish Sea. The ferry pitched and plunged in the rain, plowing through a sea of whitecaps. Burke stood by the rail on the deck, shivering in the spray from the bow. His eyes were on the water, but his mind was in London. It would have been grand to inflict a bit of bodily harm on Kovalenko – a mistake, yes, but a delicious one. Now, he’d probably never see him again.

The main cabin of the ferry was filled with uniformed schoolkids returning from a trip to the big city. They were filled with youthful energy, teasing and flirting, relentlessly mobile, whooping with laughter.

Not so, himself. He felt like a hermit crab, hunkered into his Burberry, dark thoughts behind his eyes.

CHAPTER 32

Back at home, Burke fell into a dark funk, one pointless day collapsing into the next. More than two weeks slid by as Burke did nothing but watch the tube and drink. Most nights, he slept in his clothes.

He felt trapped.

He was furious with Kovalenko, yes, but his anger extended to Jack Wilson, too. The moment Francisco d’Anconia walked into Aherne & Associates’ offices, there was only one way things were ever going to work out, and that was with Mike Burke holding the bag.

But it wasn’t just anger he felt. Beyond that, he was worried. All of a sudden, Kovalenko had more important priorities than Jack Wilson, not the least of which was his gallbladder. How long had that been going on? Burke wondered. Then he remembered the phone conversation he’d had with Kovalenko’s subordinate, or whoever he was: You’re in a lot of trouble, my friend. Were they all like that? Was it in the job description, that you had to be a dick? What was it he’d said about Kovalenko? He’s in the shop.

It hadn’t made sense, but now it did. Kovalenko was in the hospital, or at the doctor’s, or something. And now he was having surgery. Christ, Burke thought, Kovalenko’s not even paying attention.

And if Kovalenko wasn’t worried about Wilson, who would be? Burke might take the story elsewhere, but… where? He didn’t have enough to persuade anyone who could do anything about it that Wilson was dangerous.

On a few occasions, when Burke had managed to tear himself away from the tube, he’d done a little research into particle beam or “directed energy” weapons – enough to know that, even in the midst of the Iraq war, the Pentagon was pouring money into it. A firm in Virginia was developing something called StunStrike, a device that worked off a Tesla coil and delivered a small bolt of lightning to blind and stun combatants. Raytheon was doing its own work in the field, devising weapons that could knock out the electronics of things like Stinger missiles, land mines, drones, and even aircraft.

Another project, based on the same basic technology, involved a beam that could microwave a crowd – or the inhabitants of a building. Essentially, the beam heated the water in the human body to a point where victims felt as if they’d received an instant sunburn. It more or less stopped them in their tracks, and the beauty of it was that afterward, they were fine. So it had civilian applications. Crowd control. Preventing stampedes. And then, if the people in front of you didn’t stop, you could ratchet up the setting until they felt like they were on fire. Jack it up a little more, and you’d boil them until their skin split.

Kovalenko might have known about these Pentagon efforts, but he wouldn’t connect them to Tesla, whose heyday had been more than a hundred years ago. The truth was, Kovalenko didn’t know enough to worry about Jack Wilson.