I, Alex Cross

banking — they don’t necessarily know when I go to the ATM — but just about everything else is in there. The program was under all kinds of legal scrutiny, since it had come out that the US government was using it to track terror cells, post 9/11. Whatever the obstacles, though, someone at the Bureau had gotten around them.
    "If this were my case, which it isn’t, I’d follow the numbers," Mahoney said, still peppering me with information. "I would start with the biggest depositors into Nicholson’s account and work my way down from there. I don’t know how much time you’ll have, though, Alex. This thing is unbelievably hot. Something is not right here, in a big way."
    "Isn’t the Bureau already on it? They have to be, right?"
    It was the first question I’d asked in five minutes of nonstop talk. Ned was as manic as I’d ever seen him, which is saying a lot, since he’s usually a buzz saw on Red Bull.
    "Honestly, I don’t know," he said with a shrug. He shoved his hands into his pockets, and we started another lap around the sunken garden.
    "Something’s sure up, Alex. Here’s an example. I don’t understand it, but the whole case has been moved out to the Charlottesville Resident Agency, which is a satellite. They’ll work with Richmond, I guess."
    "Moved? That doesn’t make any sense. Why would they do that?"
    I knew from past experience that the Bureau didn’t swap cases around midstream on a whim. It almost never happened. They might cobble a task force between offices to cover a wider area, but nothing like this.
    "Word came down from the deputy director’s office yesterday — and they transferred the files
overnight
. I don’t know who the new SAC is, or if there even is one. Nobody’ll talk to me about this case. As far as they’re all concerned, I’m just a guy running a lot of field agents. I shouldn’t even be on this anymore. I definitely shouldn’t be
here
."
    "Maybe they’re trying to tell you something," I said, but he ignored the joke. It was pretty lame, anyway. I just wanted to calm Ned down a little if I could. I wanted him to speak slowly enough that I could follow.
    He stopped by the big Rodin in the garden, took my hand, and shook it in an oddly formal way. "I’ve got to go," he said.
    "Mahoney, you’re freaking me out a little here —"
    "See what you can get done. I’ll find out what I can, but don’t depend on the Bureau in the meantime.
For anything.
Do you understand?"
    "No, Ned, I don’t. What about this bank list you were just talking about?"
    He was already walking away, up the stone stairs toward Jefferson Drive.
    "Don’t know what you mean," he said over his shoulder, but he was patting his coat pocket when he said it.
    I waited for him to leave, then checked my pocket. There, along with my keys, was a black-and-silver thumb drive.

Chapter 69

    NED COULD LOSE more than his job for handing over the kind of sensitive information he’d just given me. He could go to jail too. I owed it to him to do as much with the list as I could. So I took his advice and started right at the top — with Tony Nicholson’s biggest single "benefactor."
    If someone had told me a month ago that Senator Marshall Yarrow of Virginia had a connection to a scandal like this, I would have been highly skeptical. The man had too much to lose, and I don’t mean just money — though he had plenty of that too.
    Yarrow was a billionaire before he was fifty, riding the dot-com wave in the nineties and then getting out. He’d turned part of his fortune into a Bill Gates–style foundation, run by his wife, focused on children’s health initiatives in the United States, Africa, and East Asia. Then he leveraged all that good will, and another big pile of money, into a Senate campaign that no one took too seriously — until he won. Now Yarrow was in his second term, and it was an open secret in Washington that he’d already formed an off-the-books exploratory committee, with his eye on the next presidential election.
    So yes, plenty to lose — but he wouldn’t be the first Washington politician to blow it all on hubris, would he?
    With a little calling around, I found out that Yarrow had a working lunch in his office that day, followed by a one thirty TVA caucus meeting, both in the Russell Senate Office Building. That would put him in the southwest lobby just before one thirty.
    And that’s when and where I went after him.
    At one twenty-five, he came off the elevator with a