Beneath the single hundred, there was only blank paper.

“You can count it,” Koller said calmly. “It’s all there.”

Before MacCandliss could straighten up, he felt a sharp jab at the base of his neck. In that same instant, with just a small amount of pressure, the succinylcholine was in his body.

Koller’s powerful arms had him before he could even mount a struggle. Less than twenty-five seconds later, restraint was unnecessary.

“You’re a very stupid man,” Koller said.

MacCandliss, terrified, felt the muscles in his body begin to quiver as though insects were burrowing below his skin. The man let go of him and he dropped to his knees, then toppled over onto his back.

“What have you done to me?”

“Did you really think your little safe-deposit box would protect you? It took me ten minutes to find the key you taped under your bureau drawer. Ten minutes. Your lawyer’s name was all over papers in your desk. We’ll have no trouble getting him to cooperate with us when we reason with him and he learns about the perversions you’ve been involved in.”

MacCandliss was wide awake and alert, but nearly helpless. His chest was tightening, squeezing on his heart.

“I’m dying…”

Did he say that aloud, or just think it?

“You’re not dying, but you will die,” Koller said. “I didn’t inject enough sux to overdose you. I wouldn’t want you to miss your fall. You see, you’re going to jump out this hotel window and splatter. I do hope nobody is underneath when you land.”

MacCandliss’s lips felt like stone, unmovable. The quivering of his muscles had stopped.

“Why?” he mouthed before he could no longer move his lips.

“I love it,” the killer said. “It never fails. Always the same question from you guys. Why? Well, hell, I honestly don’t know why somebody paid me to kill you. But I do know why you will kill yourself. You see, although you don’t know it, you called the help desk at work yesterday and had your laptop sent to the IT department for some routine maintenance. Shame on you for having so much kiddie porn on it. Gruesome stuff, really. Somebody tipped you off about the find. There’s an e-mail to that effect, which you apparently read last night, so you know the noose around your neck was starting to tighten. They were going to bag you on child porn. Do you know what they do to short eyes in prison?

“So you checked into this hotel last night. Brought only a few of your things, which you’ve already seen here. Nobody is going to question why Phillip MacCandliss jumped out the seventh-story window of the Crescent Hotel. The sux will already be metabolized, so your autopsy won’t show any drugs. ‘And he had two little girls,’ everyone will say. ‘Such a shame.’ ”

Nearly effortlessly, Koller lifted MacCandliss off the floor and turned so that his mark could get one last look at the money.

“Easy come, easy go,” Koller said. “My advice is to just relax and enjoy the ride.”

Phillip MacCandliss felt himself being maneuvered over the windowsill. For a moment, as he hung down, his lids fell open, giving him a view of the scene seven stories below. Then he felt hands pushing on his bottom, and he began to slide forward.

It’s not going to happen, he thought.

But it was.

He slid off the sill and was instantly airborne. The wind whipped past his face as the world rose up to meet him. Despite what he had read on several claim filings from vets who had near-death experiences, his demise wasn’t painless and beautiful, or filled with a warming, beckoning light. There was only pain, brief and beyond excruciating. Nearly every bone in his body shattered at once. His skull erupted against the hood of a parked car. Fragments of his brain exploded onto the windshield like a spattering of bugs.

Seven stories above, Franz Koller mussed the bedspread, scattered the pornographic photos about, set the toiletries on the sink, and left Room 727 through Room 725, pausing only to check that the door between them was locked.

Nicely done.

CHAPTER 38

“If there ever was a DVD recording of the Aleem Syed Mohammad operation, it’s gone now.”

Saul Mollender sounded bewildered, but also more energized than Nick had ever heard him.

It was nearly half past midnight, and the Mole had just returned the call Nick had left on his machine at seven, giving him details of Jillian’s meeting with the nursing school dean. Patient volume on the four-stop Baltimore loop had been unusually light, and Nick and Junie were already parked on the street by her house, nearly done cleaning up the RV.

“Does that make any sense?” Nick, now slouched in the driver’s seat, asked Mollender. “We’re talking about one of the most high-profile cases that Shelby Stone has ever had. Since they had the capability to do so, how could it not have been recorded?”

“I don’t have any record of the surgery in my database either.”

“That’s crazy.”

“But there’s more. When can we meet?”

“Now?”

“Of course now. Do you want to know what’s happened here or don’t you?”

Nick rubbed at the gritty fatigue stinging his eyes. The day had started early, and the ecstatic exhaustion from his time with Jillian had never gone away.

“You can’t tell me over the phone?” he asked.

“If I wanted to tell you over the phone, I would have told you over the phone,” the Mole said, suddenly sounding like his old testy self.

Junie, who had finished restocking, waved that she was done, and motioned Nick to lock up.

“Jillian won’t be off duty until one,” he said after Junie had left. “I want her to be there.”

“Does she have my plaque?”

“If she does, she’ll bring it.”

“I don’t want to meet in or near the hospital.”

Are you going weird on me? Nick came close to asking.

“Okay, we’ll meet wherever you want,” he said instead. “But remember, I have to drive in from Baltimore.”

“Should be fun without any traffic for a change. There’s an all-night coffee shop, Mike’s, on South Dakota near Eighteenth. One thirty?”

“Make it two,” Nick said.

Just as he hung up, Junie startled him with a knock on the passenger side door.

“This folder was on the kitchen table with a note from Reggie for you,” she said, passing it over.

“He’s an artiste on the Internet,” Nick replied, “so I asked him to do a little research for me. Thanks.”

“Next time, ask him to do some homework. Good job tonight.”

Junie winked at him and headed to her house. As the quiet closed in, Nick flipped through the articles Reggie had put together, then closed the folder and sat staring through the darkness at nothing in particular. Quickly, his thoughts homed in on Umberto-clear images of the man as he was at FOB Savannah, working in the base clinic during his off-hours, taking vital signs, straightening up the waiting room, smiling and joking with the patients. Always smiling. Always joking.

What in the hell had become of him? Why was Mollender suddenly acting so secretive? What was the connection between Belle and Dr. Nick Fury? Had she really crossed paths with Umberto, or did she hear the name from someone else?

Hopefully the answers to those questions would not remain elusive for much longer.

Finally, with a prolonged stretch and a deep sigh, Nick flipped open his cell phone and called Jillian.

“Hope you can stay awake a little longer,” he said. “We’ve been summoned by the Mole.”

IT SEEMED as if the owners of Mike’s L.A. Diner and Coffee Emporium had tried and failed any number of times to find an identity for the place. There was neon and more neon, framed black-and-white glossies of Bogie, Bacall, and Betty, and a grease-stained menu that was a cross between a railroad car diner’s and Starbucks’. There was also, at almost two in the morning, a decent-sized crowd that included college students from nearby Catholic University, street people, and a few affluent suburbanites, but did not, to this point at least, include Saul Mollender.