The Enemy Within by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Author:Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Language: eng
Format: epub

The Cover-Up

If we do not attack organized criminals with methods and techniques as effective as their own, they will destroy us.

—Robert F. Kennedy

21

Walter Cain clutched his New York Times. He hadn’t opened it, preferring to stare out the trains window instead. Spindly trees stood near the railroad tracks. Through them, he could see pristine snow and smoke coming from a chimney not too far away.

He had deliberately taken the local to New Haven. He figured if someone recognized him, he could get off at any station and disappear into a New York suburb or one of Connecticut’s more rustic towns. He would look out of place until he got a change of clothes, but he had a plan for that.

He had a plan for everything.

He sat in the middle of the car, holding his Times so hard that his hand hurt. He’d had the presence of mind to grab a briefcase before he left his apartment. He’d stuffed the case with underwear and toiletries, then locked it so that it wouldn’t snap open at the wrong time.

So far, no one had recognized him. The only people who had talked to him had been the clerk at the ticket window, the porter who’d punched his ticket, and a portly gentleman who asked if the seat across the way was taken.

The portly man got off before the train crossed into Connecticut. Cain didn’t see where and didn’t care. He was counting on the other passengers to have that same sort of disinterest in him.

He’d only chosen New Haven because he’d been there once, with some friends for the Yale/Harvard game. He leaned his head against the filthy window. The snow deepened as he got farther north—apparently that warm spell, which had hit New York a week or so ago, hadn’t been as severe here. But the northern communities always got more snow and a deeper, colder winter.

He was leaving everything behind.

The thought should have been freeing. But it wasn’t. In the past week, he had become a completely different person, one he knew lurked inside him, but which he’d never thought would emerge.

He’d thought Essie would protect him. Essie, with her sad, pretty face and her understanding ways. Essie knew the power of redemption. She said God could forgive anything.

She had almost convinced him.

And then she died.

But before she died, she’d had to suffer humiliation that he couldn’t even imagine. His own people had investigated her. Maybe, if Essie had been a graduate of Vassar or even someone who had gone to secretarial school, then the FBI wouldn’t have cared.

Hoover wouldn’t have cared.

That old fat fuck had ruled on Essie himself. That’s what SAC Hart said when he called to apologize. The fat fuck had said that such a woman would compromise an FBI agent. The KGB could use her past to buy him and make him a double agent.

Someone should have asked Cain. No one could have turned him. And if the FBI knew what she had been, then they wouldn’t have been shocked at the revelation if it ever came from the KGB.

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