The Racketeer Page 0,60

phone, but he walks me through this amazing device. The flight is over before we can finish.

I find a computer store in the Atlanta airport and I kill an hour browsing through the gadgets. Technology will be the key to my survival, and I am determined to know the latest. Before we leave Atlanta, I mail the letter to Vanessa Young. No return address.

We land in Jacksonville at dark, rent a car, and drive thirty minutes to the beaches east of the city. Atlantic Beach, Neptune Beach, Jacksonville Beach, you can't tell where one ends and the other begins. It's a cool area with hundreds of neat cottages, some residential, some rentals, and assorted small hotels and modern condos facing the ocean. The raisins for lunch are long forgotten and we are starving. We find a seafood place on a pedestrian mall a block from the water and devour oysters and shrimp. It's a young crowd at the bar, lots of pretty girls with tanned legs, and I can't help but stare. So far, everyone is white, and I wonder if I'll stand out. The Jacksonville metro area has a million people and 18 percent of them are black, so Pat does not think my ethnicity will be a problem. I attempt to explain what it's like being black in a white world but realize, again, that some things cannot be fully covered over dinner, if ever.

I change the subject and ask questions about the Witness Security Program. Pat is based in Virginia and will soon return home. Another marshal will become my contact, my handler, and this person will not in any way attempt to keep me under surveillance. He, or she, will always be close by in case of problems, or trouble. Typically, my handler will have several other "persons" to monitor. If there is a hint of something gone wrong, I will be moved at once to another location, but, Pat assures me, this rarely happens.

What will it take for the bad guys to find me? Pat says he doesn't know because this has never happened. I press him: "But surely you've had to relocate some people."

"I've never been involved in a relocation, but, yes, it has happened. To my knowledge, and I've been handling informants for ten years, there has not been a serious threat against one. But I've heard of a couple, maybe three, who became convinced they had been discovered. They wanted to move, so we swooped in and they vanished, again."

For obvious reasons, neither the law library nor the general library at Frostburg offered books on witness protection, so my knowledge is limited. But I know the program has not been perfect. "So no problems whatsoever? That's hard to believe."

"I didn't say it was perfect. There's a great story from thirty years ago, a legend in the business. We had a serious Mafia informant who squealed on the family and took down some big bosses, one of the FBI's biggest grand slams ever. This guy had a bull's-eye on him you could hit blindfolded. We took him deep, buried him, and a few years passed. He was a postal inspector in a town of fifty thousand, perfect cover, but he was a crook, right? A thug by birth, and it was impossible for him to stay clean. He opened a used-car lot, then another. He got into the pawnshop business, started fencing stolen goods, and eventually found his way into the marijuana trade. We knew who he was, but the FBI did not. When he got indicted, he called his handler to come bail him out of jail. The handler freaked out, as did everyone along the ladder, all the way up to the Director of the FBI. There was a mad scramble to get him out of jail and off to a new location. Jobs were threatened, deals were cut, judges were pleaded with, and they eventually got his charges dismissed. But it was a close call. So don't start laundering money again."

He thinks his last comment is funny. "I've never laundered money," I say without a smile.

"Sorry."

We finish dessert and head for my new home. It's on the seventh floor of a tower, one of four in a cluster lined up along the beach, with tennis courts and pools scattered below. Pat explains that most of the units are rentals, but a few have permanent residents. I'm here for six months, and then it's up to me. It's a one-bedroom unit,