Page 107 of His Wall

The lawyer's hands went higher.

Conrad set his whiskey glass on the coffee table. He set it down slowly. Deliberately. He laid his hands flat on his knees.

He looked at her with an expression I could not read.

"You are the assistant."

"I am the FBI agent who just shot your man, Mr. Weiss. Put your hands up."

He raised his hands.

Calm. Patient. The same warm pale-blue eyes he had been looking at me with two hours ago. He was not afraid. He was watching her.

I got to my feet. The cabinet was at my back. The plaster dust had settled on my shoulders. There was a piece of it in my hair I felt with my hand when I pushed the hair back off my forehead.

She did not look at me.

She kept her weapon up. Her dark hair had come halfway out of the low knot at the back of her neck. The gray sweater was half-untucked at her hip from where the holster had dragged at it. The watch was on the inside of her left wrist. Her hands were not shaking.

The sirens were coming up the avenue.

They came up faster than I would have expected. I did not know whether they had been on their way all this time or Leah had called them before she came into the apartment. Either way I was grateful. The sirens hit the corner of Eleventh, the lobby intercom buzzed once, and the apartment filled.

Agents in vests came up the stairwell three at a time. Two of them broke for the window where the gunman was on the floor with his shoulder bleeding into the rug. One went to the lawyer at the wall. Two went to Conrad on the couch. Two more came around me at the kitchen counter with their weapons low.

One of them said, "Sir, are you injured?"

I said no.

The gunman went out on a stretcher with his shoulder packed and his cuffed hands across his chest. The lawyer went out cuffed at the wrists, talking fast about client privilege to a woman in a Bureau jacket who was writing her words down without responding. The forensic team came in with cases and gloves.

Conrad was last.

Two agents gestured at him to stand. He stood before they had finished the gesture. He straightened the lapel of his gray suit. He held his wrists out without being asked.

They cuffed him. He did not flinch.

The lead agent walked him toward the door. As he passed the kitchen counter where I was standing, he stopped.

The agent at his elbow looked at me. He let it happen.

Conrad turned to face me.

The pale-blue eyes were on mine. The same warm fond look I had been looking at for ten years. The wrists in the cuffs in front of him.

"I built you, Julian."

I looked at him.

The man who had chosen me before my mother had died. The man who had used a grieving twenty-six-year-old kid's talent as the entry point and had spent ten years calling it faith. The man who had been on my couch an hour ago telling me the Vanguard was his.

"No, Conrad."

I let it sit.

"You used me. There is a difference."

He held my eyes for one beat. Two. The corner of his mouth moved in the small fond smile he had been giving me at lunch every Thursday for nine years. Then the agent at his elbow stepped forward and Conrad turned, and the two of them walked him out of my apartment, and the door closed.