“Whose idea was the twenty-five percent?” the IG asked.

“Mine,” Jack confessed without embarrassment. “I insisted on a big piece of the action. I fought damned hard for it.”

Nobody asked why. The answer was obnoxiously obvious. The role of a confidence man is just to do that-to build confidence in the sucker. By battling hard for a big stake of ownership, Jack was conveying that the polymer was a sure thing. The idea that he had outsmarted the best brains in the Capitol Group was immensely entertaining, though nobody smiled.

“How did you get the tapes?” Rutherford II asked, almost incredulously.

“Well, by then I had… let’s call them serious trust issues with my new partners. They had burgled my home and obviously weren’t above blackmail and extortion, and God knows what else. As part of the contract, I had an office in CG’s headquarters-a small, out-of-the-way cubbyhole on the second floor. It afforded me a building pass and an opportunity. These people showed no compunction about breaking laws; I decided to protect myself. I wore a wire almost every time I talked to them. I recorded all phone conversations.”

“And that’s the source of all these tapes?”

“A handful of them,” Jack admitted.

“And the rest?”

“Almost every time I made my rounds around the headquarters I sprinkled listening devices around. I placed four in Mitch Walters’s office. Another three in each of the firm’s conference rooms, including the one on the top floor where the senior executive and board meetings are held. Believe me, those are some of the more captivating tapes.”

“And how did you monitor those bugs?” asked one of the FBI agents, making no effort to disguise his admiration. An irrelevant technical question, and the Feds at the end of the table already knew the answer, but they wanted the Defense people to share their amazement at Jack’s scheme.

Jack turned to him and said, “I had rented an apartment across the street. The devices have a range of one mile. My apartment was only a hundred yards away. I’d built a console with five noise-activated taping machines, and hired a crew to monitor the action around the clock.”

For the first time it really began to dawn on everybody what a truly remarkable find Jack Wiley was.

Harper bent forward. “How many tapes did you make?”

“A lot. Too many thousands of hours to be worth listening to. I didn’t want to overburden you, so my crew and I sifted through them. We disposed of anything too mundane or irrelevant, and preserved only those conversations that show legal culpability.”

“Give us an example.”

“Okay. For example, you won’t hear Dan Bellweather ordering five whores from a D.C. call girl service, but you will hear him arranging payments to senators and congressmen to shove the authorization for the polymer through with two speedy votes. You’ll also hear how he paid a certain House member to assassinate the GT 400, the only real competition. Mia incidentally got a taped copy of that hearing. It’s very entertaining in a rather vulgar way.”

Jack paused and searched their faces. “If I’m boring you, stop me,” he said facetiously. “Or to take another example, you will hear Mitch Walters illegally offering post-administration jobs to several top assistant secretaries, and you will very clearly hear him arranging the cover-up on the polymer.”

Nobody looked the least bit bored.

“Anything else?” the IG asked, clearly rattled.

“Yes, plenty,” Jack assured him, no longer smiling, now looking quite grim. “Understand, I didn’t go into this with the intention of uncovering such a large scandal. But the more I saw, the more I heard, the more I learned, the more horrified I became. I realized that I was way over my head. I became frightened. The power of the Capitol Group is overwhelming. They could destroy me as easily as a tank could crush a bug.”

The people across the table weren’t buying this, not one bit. But they also suspected that they would never be able to prove Jack was lying. Any man who could pull off such a staggering swindle wasn’t likely to leave sloppy evidence around. Whatever they thought of, he had undoubtedly thought of first.

Mia stood up and announced, “My client is tired. It’s been a very exhausting few days. You can ask all the questions you want later.”

“Where are these tapes and when can we have them?” Harper asked with a gleam in her eye.

“Tonight. They’re in a moving van shuttling around the streets of northern Virginia. Frankly, I’d like to get them off my hands. Tell me where you want them delivered.”

Harper finally raised the point Mia and Jack had been anticipating from the beginning, the most important point. “What about legal admissibility? These tapes were made without the permission of both parties.”

Graves glanced at Mia and, by unspoken agreement, he handled this. “When Mia first came to us she mentioned she had an inside source. She provided us with the film showing Jack’s home being burgled and the crude attempt to frame him. In her view he was still at risk, and so was she.”

“Then what?” Harper asked.

“Well, it looked serious, so I took that film to Justice. They went to a federal judge for permission to tape all Jack’s phone conversations and plant bugs in CG’s headquarters.”

“On what grounds?”

“Conspiracy, burglary, attempting to fix a federal bid. You might even say Jack was acting as our agent. The bugs and tapes were legally authorized. The fruits are quite admissible in any court in the land.”

Harper and Rutherford II showed no hint of surprise at this astounding revelation. Nothing Jack did surprised them any long-er. Of course he got a judge to authorize his actions. Of course he had the FBI in his pocket. If the president walked in the room and kissed Jack’s ass, they wouldn’t bat a lash.

And though they knew they’d never be able to prove it, they were sure Jack had this whole thing planned out before he ever made that first call to the Capitol Group.

“Will Mr. Wiley testify?” Rutherford II asked Mia. In his mind he was already plotting the next move.

“In two days, you will have six hours to conduct a lengthy deposition. I suggest you film it. A lot of trials will come out of this, and Jack doesn’t intend to spend the rest of his life bouncing through witness chairs. He promises to appear in court, to verify the accuracy of his filmed testimony and get it entered into evidence. That should be sufficient to use it as many times as you like. Name the time and place, Jack and I will be there. He’ll swear to the provenance of the tapes, and he’ll detail the story he just told.”

“I’ll call as soon as it’s arranged,” Harper said.

“Just so we’re clear,” Mia mentioned, as if it was an afterthought, a niggling little last-minute detail, “Jack just saved the Department of Defense from a twenty-billion-dollar scam.”

For the first time, their brains concentrated on how much this was going to cost. The math was done quickly inside their heads and the sum was staggering. The howls were immediate and loud. “We’re not about to pay out two billion dollars,” Rutherford II shouted adamantly.

“You already signed the contract,” Mia reminded him.

If Mia took the lawyer’s standard one-third cut, her share would be in the neighborhood of six hundred million dollars.

No wonder she had resigned, Harper realized with a shock.

Mia looked at their faces. “You know the old cliché-think how much you’re saving, rather than spending.”

“The answer’s still hell, no.”

“You don’t want the tapes?”

“At that price, forget it. You’ve told us enough anyway. We’ll find other ways to pursue the case,” he answered smugly.

“I’d be interested to learn how.”

“We’ll take your client to court and sue. Or, if we want to play hardball, we’ll have Mr. Wiley here detained as an uncooperative material witness, or charge him as a coconspirator. You’re not the only lawyer in this room, young lady.”