The Kill Room

could they use Boston’s house and could he send his family off for the day?
    Boston had agreed and headed up here immediately.
    As Sachs and Pulaski approached the large Colonial they paused, looking around the trim lawns, surrounding woods, molded shrubbery and gardens lovingly, almost compulsively, tended.
    The young officer was breathing even more rapidly now.
    You nervous?…
    Sachs noted that he was absently rubbing a scar on his forehead. It was the legacy of a blow delivered by a perp on the first case they’d worked together, a few years ago. The head injury had been severe and he’d nearly given up policing altogether because of the incident—which would have devastated him; policing was a core part of his psyche and bound him closely to his twin brother, also a cop. But thanks largely to the encouragement and example of Lincoln Rhyme he’d gone through extensive rehab and decided to remain on the force.
    But the injury had been bad and Sachs knew that the post-traumatic stress continued to snipe.
    Can I handle it? Will I fold under pressure?
    She knew the double-tap answers to those questions were, in staccato order, yes and no. She smiled. “Let’s go bust a bad guy.”
    “Deal.”
    They made their way quickly to the door, bracketing it, hands near but not touching their weapons.
    She nodded.
    Pulaski rapped. “NYPD. Open the door!”
    Sounds from inside.
    “What?” came the voice. “Who is that?”
    The young officer persisted. “NYPD! Open the door or we’ll enter.”
    Again from inside: “Jesus.”
    A moment passed. Plenty long enough for Boston to grab a pistol. Though their calculations were that he would not do so.
    The red wooden door opened and the distinguished, gray-haired man peered out through the screen. He absently stroked the most prominent crease in his dry, creased face.
    “Let me see your hands, Mr. Boston.”
    He lifted them, sighing. “That’s why Shreve called me. There’s no meeting, is there?”
    Sachs and Pulaski pushed inside and she closed the door.
    The man brushed a hand through his luxuriant hair then remembered he should be keeping them in view. He stepped back, making clear he was no threat.
    “Are you alone?” she asked. “Your family?”
    “I’m alone.”
    Sachs did a fast sweep of the house while Pulaski stayed with the whistleblower.
    When she returned Boston said, “What’s this all about?” He tried to be indignant but it wasn’t working. He knew why they were here.
    “Leaking the STO to the DA’s Office. We checked flight records. You were on vacation in Maine on the eleventh of May but you flew back to New York in the morning. You went to the Java Hut with your iBook. Uploaded the scan of the kill order to the DA. And flew back that afternoon.” She added details about tracing the email, the tea and Splenda and the blue suit. Then: “Why? Why did you leak it?”
    The man sat back on the couch. He slowly reached into his pocket, extracted and clumsily ripped open a pack of antacid tablets. He chewed them.
    Reminiscent of her Advil.
    Sachs sat across from him: Pulaski walked to the windows and looked out over the manicured lawn.
    Boston was frowning. “If I’m going to be prosecuted it’ll be under the Espionage Act. That’s federal. You’re state. Why did you come?”
    “There are state law implications,” she answered, intentionally vague. “Now tell me. Why’d you leak the STO kill order? Because you thought it was the moral thing to do, telling the world that your organization was killing U.S. citizens?”
    He gave a laugh that was untidy with bitterness. “Do you think anybody really cares about that? It didn’t hurt Obama to take out al-Awlaki? Everybody thinks it’s the right thing to do—everybody except your prosecutor.”
    “And?” she asked.
    He rested his face in his hands for a moment. “You’re young. Both of you. You wouldn’t understand.”
    “Tell me,” Sachs persisted.
    Boston looked up with burning eyes. “I’ve been at NIOS from the beginning, from the day it was formed. I was army intelligence, I was CIA. I was on the ground running assets when Shreve Metzger was having keg parties in Cambridge and New Haven. I was key in our resisting the Pink Revolution—the socialists in the nineties and oughts. Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Lula in Brazil, Néstor Kirchner in Argentina, Vázquez in Uruguay, Evo Morales in Bolivia.” He regarded Sachs coldly. “Do you even know who those people are?”
    He