in a black suit, white shirt and blue tie, smartly cut hair that had once been brown but was now turning grey. He made Archer immediately too, and headed over. Archer rose to greet him, but looked behind the man at the same time. No one had followed him.
Sanderson offered his hand. Archer let the Sig drop in his pocket and pulled his own hand, shaking it.
‘Bobby Sanderson.’
‘Sam Archer.’
‘Yeah, I knew your father. I’m sorry about what happened to him.’
Archer nodded.
‘Anyway, Let’s take a seat,’ Sanderson said.
The waitress from the bar approached again, having seen Sanderson arrive, and he ordered coffee, black, no sugar, no milk. Once she was gone, he turned back to Archer.
‘Right. From the start, tell me everything. I already heard it from Timmy, but I want to hear it first hand from you.’
It took Archer ten minutes or so. He gave Sanderson every detail, as he had with Cobb earlier. He paused towards the beginning as the waitress returned with Sanderson’s coffee, but then he told him everything that had happened from the moment he got the call in London to them sitting right here, across from each other at the table.
Once he'd finished, he looked at Sanderson, gauging his response. The FBI Assistant Director didn’t move, looking straight back at him. Then he spoke.
‘Two words,’ he said. ‘Holy. Shit.’
‘Exactly.’
‘First of all, do not say a word to another person about anything you just told me. Understand?’
‘Yes.’
‘I mean it kid. I’m saying that for your own good. I’m an old friend of Timmy’s, but there are a lot of people out there who wouldn’t care if you end up locked in a jail cell for the rest of your life. Or worse. The FBI has to maintain its image. I don’t need to tell you how damaging this could be if word got out to the public.’
Archer nodded. ‘It stays with me. You have my word.’
‘I’ll need more than that,’ he said. ‘But we’ll deal with that later.’
He drank from his coffee.
‘I manage the Security Division,’ he explained. ‘But after Timmy called me last night, I pulled the files on the team up here. Their individual folders, the case files, the reports, the whole lot. I saw your father was sent up here to investigate.’
‘Yeah. It got him killed. That’s why I got involved. And they whacked Parker for sure. Most likely Lock and Gerry too.’
Sanderson thought for a moment, then swore.
‘This doesn’t shock me as it should. People in Washington have been keeping a close eye on this team for a while. Let’s just say they haven’t been conducting themselves in a low-key manner. Before you lost contact with Agent Gerrard, did he tell you what he did to get sent here?’
Archer frowned, then shook his head.
‘He mentioned he’d had some kind of demotion. That’s all.’
Sanderson snorted.
‘That’s one way of putting it. He struck an EAD.
‘EAD?’
‘Executive Assistant Director.’
‘He punched him?’
Sanderson nodded.
‘Luckily for him, the guy was an old acquaintance. It wasn’t a play fight either. He sucker-punched him. Knocked him out cold.’
‘Why?’
‘The guy was having an affair with Gerrard’s wife.’
Archer paused.
‘Wow.’
‘Exactly. The guy he struck, Jankowski, admitted that he deserved it, which saved Gerrard’s career. But the people above him didn’t see it that way. You don’t hit a senior agent ever, no matter what the provocation. They didn’t fire Gerrard but they threw the book at him. He was demoted and sent here to take over the Bank Robbery team. Doesn’t seem like a demotion, but trust me, this was a job no one wanted to take. A poisoned chalice, if you will. Like walking the plank.’
Sanderson sipped his coffee. There was a pause.
‘So what’s the plan?’ Archer asked. ‘Can we close this thing out?’
‘Before that, there’s something else I haven’t mentioned,’ Sanderson said. ‘I read the case-file. The latest report from your father was crucial. He had good news.’
‘What?’
‘He said he had proof that someone in the Bank Robbery Task Force team was on the other side. Someone who wasn’t Agent Gerrard.’
‘Great. What kind of proof?’
‘Photographic.’
Archer sat forward, interested.
‘Shit, that’s perfect.’
‘He didn’t want to reveal over the phone what exactly was in the shots. He wanted to deliver it in person back in D.C, face-to-face. He was due to return the night he was killed.’
Archer thought for a moment.
‘Siletti and O’Hara must have found out somehow,’ he said.
‘Or Sean Farrell. I listened to the recording of the phone-call your father made to his superiors. He said this was enough proof to take them