Stone Barrington 06-11

Stone said, rising, “let me know what results you get.”
    “Hang on,” Griggs said. “This won’t take as long as you think.” He got up and left the office for a few minutes, then returned. “A good right thumbprint and two partials,” he said. “My guy is running them through the FBI computer now. Come on, let’s go see what he comes up with.”
    Stone and Callie followed Griggs down a hallway to another office, where the detective was sitting at a computer.
    “Got anything yet, Sam?” Griggs asked.
    Sam hit the return key and sat back. “Shouldn’t take long,” he said. “Hang on,” he said, “what’s this?”
    The group walked around the computer and looked over the detective’s shoulder. The screen displayed a message:
    ACCESS TO THIS FILE DENIED.
ENTRY REQUIRES APPROVAL
AT DIRECTOR LEVEL
UNDER PROTOCOL 1002.
    “You ever seen anything like that before, Sam?”
    “No, Chief, I haven’t.”
    “What’s protocol ten-oh-two?”
    “I don’t have the slightest idea,” Sam said.
    “Who the hell is this guy?” Griggs muttered.
    “I’d really like to know that,” Stone replied.

24
    T HE NEXT MORNING, STONE CALLED DINO. “HOW ARE you?”
    “Not bad. Where the hell are you now?”
    “In Palm Beach.”
    “You rotten bastard.”
    “Yeah, I sure am.”
    “And if I know you, you’re getting paid for it.”
    “Right again.”
    “Why didn’t I go to law school?”
    “Listen, I want to run something by you.”
    “Okay, shoot.”
    “I’m trying to identify a guy down here who isn’t who he says he is. You remember our friend Paul Manning that you arrested for me?”
    “Sure, he’s dead.”
    “Nope.” Stone took Dino through what he knew about Manning/Bartlett thus far. “Then last night, I got his prints off a glass, and the local cop shop ran them for me.”
    “And he turns out to be the Lindbergh baby?”
    “Nope. At least, I don’t think so. But something weird happened: We’re logged on to the FBI print database, and when we transmit the print, we get a message saying access is denied without approval from the director level, and it mentions something called ‘protocol ten-oh-two.’ What it sounds like to me is some sort of national security thing, like maybe he has a CIA connection.”
    “Nah,” Dino said. “I’ll tell you what I think it is, and I’ll give you five-to-one odds I’m right. The guy is in the witness protection program.”
    This stopped Stone in his tracks. “But that doesn’t make any sense. Manning’s background is not that of somebody the government would want to protect. In fact, he doesn’t even exist, in a legal sense.”
    “Maybe he testified against somebody in a criminal trial somewhere.”
    “I suppose it’s possible, but I would think that Manning would do everything he could to avoid putting himself in such a position. Also, Bob Berman checked out Bartlett, and he says the man’s identity is thin, that he has no financial background to speak of. Even his driver’s license is recent. That doesn’t sound like the kind of identity the Department of Justice would create for somebody in the program.”
    “No, it doesn’t, but there’s another possibility.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Let’s say that Manning or Bartlett, or whoever whatever the fuck his name is, gets involved in some criminal deal, and he gets busted and rats out his partners in return for immunity and the program.”
    “Possible, but it seems unlikely.”
    “Go with me, here, Stone. Anyway, they put him in the program and he finds himself stuck in Peoria or someplace, running a Burger King, and he doesn’t like it. So he bails out of the program—happens all the time. Once the government gets these people in the program, the feds run their lives, and they’ve got fuck-all to say about it. Lots of them go overboard.”
    “True enough.”
    “So our guy is on the street, now. Maybe he sells the business and the house the government bought him, so he’s got a few bucks. He finds someplace he likes, in this case, Minneapolis, though God knows why anybody would want to be stuck there in the winter, but he can’t use his old name because whoever he ratted on still wants to cut his heart out and eat it for dinner. So he has to make up his own new identity, and he doesn’t do the greatest job in the world. After all, he’s not Justice; he can’t call up the State Department and tell them to issue him a new passport, so he does the best he can. He gets a