The Devils Teardrop

he said, “So. I guess the question is—should I pay?”
    Now Lukas looked at Cage. He answered, “We feel that unless you pay the ransom or an informer comes forward with solid information about the Digger’s whereabouts we won’t be able to stop him by four p.m. We just don’t have enough leads.” She added, “I’m not recommending you pay. This’s just our assessment of what’ll happen if you don’t.”
    “Twenty million,” he mused.
    Without a knock the office door opened and a tall man of about sixty, wearing a gray suit, stepped inside.
    Oh, great, Kennedy thought. More cooks in the kitchen.
    U.S. Representative Paul Lanier shook the mayor’s hand and then introduced himself to the FBI agents. He ignored Wendell Jefferies.
    “Paul,” Kennedy told Lukas, “is head of the District Governance Committee.”
    Though the District of Columbia had some autonomy Congress had recently taken over the power of the purse and doled out money to the city like a parent giving a reckless child an allowance. Especially since the recent Board of Education scandal Lanier had been to Kennedy what an auditor is to a set of accounting books.
    Lanier missed the disparaging tone in Kennedy’s voice—though Lukas seemed not to—and the congressman asked, “Can you give me a heads-up on the situation?”
    Lukas ran through her assessment once more. Lanier remained standing, all three buttons of his Brooks Brothers suit snugly secured.
    “Why here?” Lanier asked. “Why Washington?”
    Kennedy laughed to himself. The prick’s even stolen my rhetorical questions.
    Lukas answered, “We don’t know.”
    Kennedy continued, “You really think he’d do it again?”
    “Yes.”
    The congressman asked, “Jerry, you’re not seriously thinking of paying.”
    “I’m considering all options.”
    Lanier was looking dubious. “Well, aren’t you concerned with what it’ll look like?”
    “No, I don’t care how it looks,” Kennedy snapped.
    But the congressman continued in his politician’s perfect baritone. “It’s going to send the wrong message. Kowtowing to terrorists.”
    Kennedy glanced at Lukas, who said, “It is something to think about. The floodgates theory. You give in to one extortionist there’ll be others.”
    “But nobody knows about this, do they?” Kennedy nodded to the note.
    “Sure, they do,” Cage said. “And more’ll know pretty soon. You can’t keep something like this under wraps for long. Notes like this have wings. You bet they do.”
    “Wings,” Kennedy repeated, disliking the expression intensely and all the happier that Lukas was running the show. He asked her, “What can you do to find him if we do pay?”
    Lukas again responded. “Our tech people’ll rig the drop bag—with a transmitter. Twenty million will weigh a couple hundred pounds,” she explained. “It’s not something you can just hide under the seat of a car. We’ll try to track the perp to his hideout. If we’re lucky, get both him and the shooter—this Digger.”
    “‘Lucky,’” Kennedy said skeptically. She was a pretty woman, he thought, though the mayor—who’d been married to his wife for thirty-seven years and had never once considered cheating on her—knew that beauty is mostly expression of eye and mouth and posture, not God-given structure. And Margaret Lukas’s face hadn’t once softened since she’d walked into his office. No smile, no sympathy. Her voice was flinty now as she said, “We can’t give you percentages.”
    “No. Of course you can’t.”
    “Twenty million,” mused Lanier, the controller of the purse strings.
    Kennedy rose, pushed his chair back and stepped to a window. Looked out on the brown lawn and trees speckled with dead leaves. The winter in Northern Virginia had been eerily warm for the past several weeks. Tonight, the forecasters were predicting, would be the first big snow of the year but at the moment the air was warm and humid and the scent of decomposing vegetation wafted into the room. It was unsettling. Across thestreet was a park, in the middle of which was a big, dark, modern statue; it reminded Kennedy of a liver.
    He glanced at Wendell Jefferies, who took the cue and joined him. The aide wore aftershave; he must have had twenty different scents. The mayor whispered, “So, Wendy, the pressure’s on, huh?”
    The aide, never known for his restraint, responded, “You got the ball, boss. Drop it and you and me both, we’re gone. And more than