Secret of the Seventh Son - By Glenn Cooper Page 0,8
with the second-highest visibility in New York! This Doomsday asshole gets caught on your watch, you move up. You’re a woman, you’re ethnic, a few years you’re an assistant director at Quantico, maybe a Supervisory Special Agent in D.C. The sky’s the limit. Don’t fuck it up by involving me, that’s my friendly advice.”
She gave him a stare to freeze mud. “I certainly appreciate this reverse mentoring, Will, but I don’t think I want to rely on career advice from a man who is sliding down the org chart. Believe me, I don’t love this idea, but we’ve gone over it internally. Benjamin and Ronald refuse to move anyone from Counterterrorism, and there’s no one else in White Collar or Organized Crime who’s done this kind of case. They don’t want someone parachuting in from D.C. or another office. It makes them look bad. This is New York, not Cleveland. We’re supposed to have a deep bench. You’ve got the right background—the wrong personality, which you’re going to have to work on, but the right background. It’s yours. It’s going to be your last big case, Will. You’re going out with a bang. Think of it that way and cheer up.”
He took another run at it. “If we catch this guy tomorrow, which we won’t, I’ll be history by the time this thing goes to trial.”
“So you’ll come back to testify. By then the per diem will probably look pretty good.”
“Very funny. What about Nancy? I’ll poison her. You want her to be the sacrificial lamb?”
“She’s a pistol. She can handle herself and she can handle you.”
He stopped arguing, sullen. “What about the shit I’m working on?”
“I’ll spread it around. No problem.”
That was it, it was over. It wasn’t a democracy, and quitting or getting fired were not options. Fourteen months. Fourteen fucking months.
Within a couple of hours his life had changed. The office manager showed up with orange moving crates and had his active case files packed and moved out of his cubicle. In their place, Mueller’s Doomsday files arrived, boxes of documents compiled in the weeks before a sticky clump of platelets turned a few milliliters of his brain into mush. Will stared at them as if they were stinking piles of dung and drank another cup of overstewed coffee before deigning to open one, randomly plucking a folder.
He heard her clearing her throat at the cubicle entrance before he saw her.
“Hi,” Nancy said. “I guess we’re going to be working together.”
Nancy Lipinski was stuffed into a charcoal-gray suit. It was a half size too small and it pinched her waist enough to force her belly to bulge slightly but unattractively over the waistband. She was pint-sized, five feet three inches in stocking feet, but Will’s assessment was that she needed to drop some pounds everywhere, even from her rounded soft face. Were there cheekbones under there? She wasn’t the kind of hard-body grad Quantico typically spit out. He wondered how she’d passed muster at the academy’s Physical Training Unit. They busted it down there and didn’t cut the gals any slack. Admittedly, she wasn’t unattractive. Her practical collar-length russet hair, makeup, and gloss were all put together well enough to complement a delicately shaped nose, pretty lips, and lively hazel eyes, and on another woman her cologne would have done the trick for him. It was her plaintive look that set him off. Could she really have become attached to a zero like Mueller?
“What are you going to do?” he said rhetorically.
“Is this a good time?”
“Look, Nancy, I’ve hardly cracked a box. Why don’t you give me a couple of hours, later this afternoon maybe, and we can start talking?”
“That’s okay, Will. I just wanted to let you know that even though I’m upset about John, I’m going to keep working my tail off on this case. We’ve never worked together but I’ve studied some of your cases and I know the contribution you’ve made to the field. I’m always looking for ways to improve, so your feedback’s going to be extremely important to me…”
Will felt he had to nip this kind of wretched talk in the bud. “You a fan of Seinfeld?” he asked.
“The TV show?”
He nodded.
“I mean I’m aware of it,” she replied suspiciously.
“The people who created the show made the ground rules for the characters, and those ground rules set it apart from all the other sitcoms. Do you want to know those rules? Because they’re going to apply to you and me.”