O’Neal was browsing his notes as he recounted these unhopeful facts to Bellweather and Walters. He had collected a lot more information but sifted out the useless clutter. Who cared what brand of shoe she preferred, or the name of her childhood dog? The two men across from him were grim and tense, and their mood was impatient. It was only six in the morning, still dark outside. Aside from the guards trolling the hallways, they were the only ones in the building. Walters had called him at midnight and insisted he rush in with whatever he had. “So you have nothing we can use against her?” Walters prodded the second he wrapped up, looking like he just got hit by a bus.

“No. Not really. But this is just preliminary. A little more time, I’ll find something. Always do.”

He didn’t feel it necessary to remind them that he had finally nailed their boy Jack. Not that they had congratulated or even thanked him. Then again, in Wiley’s case, a little more time had meant four long months with millions in billings.

“We don’t have more time,” Bellweather snapped. He rubbed his eyes and slid back his chair.

He and Walters looked exhausted. Both were unshowered and unshaven, wearing yesterday’s wrinkled clothes-in Walters’s case a golf shirt that showed off his overhanging gut and shorts that displayed his sunburned, hairy legs. Neither man had slept the night before, O’Neal concluded. Walters had developed a nervous twitch that made his left eye flutter. Bellweather seemed cooler and somewhat more collected, but the competition was light.

“Look, you warned me to be careful,” O’Neal complained. “That limits my options.”

“All right, what’s next?” Bellweather asked.

“Haven’t gone into her home yet. Who knows what could turn up there, or what nasty surprise we could leave. We could try to infiltrate her family. They always know more dirt than anybody.”

“Can you get into her office?” asked Walters, looking hopeful for the first time.

“It’s a secure facility,” O’Neal replied, wincing as if to underscore how tough it would be. “But yeah, probably. It’ll take a little creativity, though. You want to see how much she’s got on you, right?”

“That would be nice,” Bellweather observed. A wicked smile broke out, his first of the morning.

“But if that doesn’t work,” Walters snapped, playing the tough guy and pounding a hand on his desk, “it’s time to consider other measures. Something more extreme.”

“Extreme” was a vague and interesting word. It could mean blackmail, extortion, or perhaps something considerably more drastic.

O’Neal did not warm to this idea, nor did he ask for clarification. He was more than willing to bend and break a few laws for these people-or, more accurately, their money. No way, though, was he going to snap legs or waste anybody on their behalf. It was a stupid, desperate suggestion anyway.

After a respectful moment meant to suggest he was being thoughtful about it, O’Neal said, “Forget it, Mitch. Christsakes, she’s a federal agent.”

“So what?” Mitch was suddenly enjoying the thought of her dead.

“Settle down and think. Maybe a week ago you coulda tried something like that. Not now. Not after she popped this bomb on you. Something happens to her now, if she slips and falls on ice, Feds will be crawling up your ass.”

“But-”

“Shut up, Mitch,” Bellweather snapped with a mean scowl. He turned back to O’Neal. “What about Wiley?”

“What about him? I’m not sure what you want me to do at this point. We’re keeping this guy Wallerman on ice, for now.”

“Where?”

“Holed up in a luxury suite at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. Room’s four grand a day, he’s ordering takeout from Atelier’s and Alain Ducasse’s, insists on going to a Broadway play every night. He’s got us by the balls and knows it. He’s costing you boys a bundle. He’s two million in the bag on us already, and now he’s making noise about more. A lot more.”

Bellweather and Walters exchanged looks.

“What does that mean?” Bellweather asked.

“Says he’s already accomplished everything we asked. We already got all the help two million will buy.”

“How much is he asking?” Walters asked.

“An additional five.”

“Five what?”

“What do you think? Five million, or he swears he’s through.”

“Greedy bastard.”

“Thing is, at these prices you should make a decision about Wiley fast. I know you fellas can afford it, but he’s getting expensive.”

“Well, it’s touchy at this point,” Bellweather moaned, sounding uncharacteristically uncertain. “Consider the possibility that Wiley conned us. Somebody did, and there are only two candidates. Wiley or Arvan.”

“Or maybe both,” Walters commented.

“Yeah, but Wiley’s done something like this before,” O’Neal argued, and the insinuation was clear. “Once that we know of.”

An uncomfortable silence hung in the air a moment. They had reached the real purpose of the meeting. Everything was coming unglued so fast: first, Mia’s terrifying hint to Jack about that incriminating picture with Earl Belzer; then that horrible bitch getting their precious polymer stopped in its tracks; now the disastrous news that the report that had drawn them to the polymer in the first place was a hangman’s noose.

The jackhammers just kept striking. What was next?

It was all happening so fast. They needed to get in front of this thing, get control. This was no time to lash out blindly; neither could they afford to sit tight and do nothing.

“I called Phil last night,” Bellweather said softly. “We played with the possibilities until four this morning. Somebody’s taking us on a ride.”

“Where’s Arvan?” Walters asked. He’d given some thought to this as well, and had formed his own suspicions about who might be behind this catastrophe.

“Nobody knows. The Pentagon tried for hours to locate him. He’s disappeared, been gone for months. He took our money and fled to Central America.” When nobody responded to that revelation, he suggested, “He might’ve done this alone, or at the least he was Wiley’s accomplice.”

“Wiley’s not our boy,” Walters countered, hefting a paperweight in his hand and looking quite sure of himself.

“I suppose you have a reason for that blind opinion.”

“Sure, plenty of them. Because Wiley owns a quarter of the polymer. Because he thinks he’ll make billions on this deal. So why feed us a poisoned chalice? Why flush a fortune down the toilet? Doesn’t make sense. Also, he’s still in plain sight, right where we can reach out and touch him.”

“Maybe he’s not as smart as we thought,” O’Neal offered.

“Or he’s smarter than we thought,” Bellweather snarled, still under the influence of his long, rambling discussion with Jackson the night before. The lawyer never liked Wiley; he certainly never trusted him. Perhaps it was an emotional bias, but he was strongly inclined to believe Wiley was the driving force behind this fiasco. Bellweather badly wished Jackson were here in the room with them now, applying his aloof logic to the situation.

Unfortunately, at a well-attended press conference the night before, the crooked senator Jackson was representing had made a crass stab at pinning the rap on his dead wife. The attempt bombed badly. The senator’s teenage children became incensed at all the mean things he said about their mom and hastily rushed out to the parking lot where they convened a fascinating press conference of their own.

The kids confessed they were lurking in a dark corner of the basement, pushing a little coke up their noses, when Dad came bounding down the stairs happily hauling a big sack. Peeking around a bunch of old boxes, they watched their old man pack the dough in the freezer. Took him twenty minutes to cram it all in.

Jackson was with the senator now, at the federal court where he was being arraigned. Jackson had shifted his strategy; now the senator was being framed by his own kids, a bunch of selfish, rotten, ungrateful thugs who got the money pushing drugs to rich classmates at their elite private school. The senator was probably a lost cause, but Phil Jackson never left a client in a lurch, especially when it was such a public spectacle and Jackson could preen and glower in front of the cameras. It was good for business.