Page 78 of Captured By the Pakhan

What I do not tell him is where the house is.

And what I do not tell him is anything at all about the boy in it — not his name, not his age, not the fact that he exists. I make that decision in about a second and a half, and I will think about it for a long time afterward; the honest reason isn't operational.

I said I'd side with the kid.

"Six weeks," Logan says. He's sitting down now, across the table, with his tie loose. "You were in a house."

"Yes."

"And they didn't hurt you."

"One of them hit me once on the first night, before he knew anything, and then never again, and neither did anybody else." I hold his eyes. "That's the truth. You can decide what it means, but I'm not going to dress it up for you."

He rubs his face with both hands.

"The badge," he says. "On Rennick. You're sure it was real."

"I've been looking at those for nine years."

"Then that's — " He stops. "Raven, that's not possible. There's no surveillance package on you."

"There's a warrant."

"There's a warrant, and there's a wire, and there isn't anything else. I have looked. I have looked constantly, because I have been trying to find out where you were for five weeks and I have privileges on the case file, and there is no field surveillance authorized anywhere in this country under your name." He leans forward. "If a man with a real badge has been photographing you for nineteen days, he wasn't doing it on the case. He was doing it on something else, out of somewhere I can't see, and filing it to an address that isn't in the system."

"Compartmented."

"Compartmented means a case number and a controlling office and a name, and he told you he didn't get one." Logan's face has gone grey. "Do you understand what that is? That's not compartmented. That's somebody running an agent privately using Bureau credentials."

"Who can do that?"

"Nobody. Nobody can do that."

"Logan. Who can?"

He sits back very slowly.

"You'd need somebody who can open a file without a case," he says. "Who can classify without a review. Who can move a body across offices and bury the paper trail in an administrative action that nobody audits because it's above the audit." He is talking to the table now. "You'd need it above the SAC. Above the ADIC. That's — Raven, eleven people in this building's chain could do that, and I could name all eleven."

And I sit in a plastic chair with my hands cuffed behind my back and finally, four days and two thousand five hundred miles later, say it out loud:

"Claudio Danesi."

Logan's head comes up.

And what happens in his face isn't confusion. That's the thing I'll remember. It isn't who? — it's a man watching four separate things he has been carrying for five weeks slide together and lock.

"He signed the classification," Logan says.

"He what?"

"He signed it. Your classification, the wire, the whole action — I saw the signature block in week one, and it meant nothing to me at the time because an AD signs forty things a day." He's gone very still. "An Assistant Director doesn't personally sign the paperwork on a Supervisory Special Agent out of another field office. That's four levels down. I looked at that signature, and I thought it was a courtesy."

Neither of us says anything for a moment.

"Raven," he says. "If it's him, then this building isn't safe for you."

"I know."