Chapter 50
I was not a fan of early mornings—Macy shared that antipathy, which might be another reason we got along so well—but I was awake before seven a.m. that Sunday.
I made a mug of instant coffee, took it to my office, and opened the floor safe.
From it I removed the documents retrieved years earlier from the plane wreckage in the Great North Woods.
The plane had been lost for years, but I’d found it, although people had died along the way, died for what I was now holding.
It was an early list of Believers, the compromised and the compromisers, those who had allied themselves, with varying degrees of willingness, to a specific cause: the search for the Buried God.
It was, depending on whom one asked, a relic of a fallen angel, a representation of one, or the angel itself.
The reality, objective or otherwise, didn’t matter so much as the harm these people were visiting on the world with their activities: the accrual of wealth and influence untampered by moral, social, or environmental concerns, and the creation of a shadow rule of the wealthy and powerful over the poor and the vulnerable.
The head of the serpent was the Backers.
If they could be dealt with, the serpent would be decapitated.
Somewhere in these papers lay clues to the Backers’ identities, a pattern of acquaintance and association waiting to be revealed.
I had spent a long time trying to establish that pattern, when finances and opportunity permitted.
Of course, I could simply have handed over the documents to SAC Edgar Ross of the FBI, but I didn’t trust Ross to share with me whatever he might subsequently uncover.
Ross knew I was in possession of the documents because I’d passed selected contents to him when any of those named in them were set to assume positions of especial prominence or authority.
Once informed, the FBI, or Ross’s particular dirty-tricks section of it, would move against them, exposing their failings to the light or using them as material for blackmail: financial impropriety, assaults, affairs, forced abortions for younger lovers, rape, all were grist to Ross’s mill.
Fire was fought with fire as their own methods were used against them.
But this was a personal matter for me. For reasons I did not understand, I represented a threat to the Believers, yet they were reluctant to move decisively against me.
They closed in, but did not strike. Sometimes, I felt they might even be frightened, though that could have been vanity on my part.
It might have been my recent conversations with Angel that led me to look again at the papers.
In the years since their retrieval I had added notes, additional supporting documents, copies of bank accounts and affidavits, but soon, everything would have to be gone from my possession.
I’d achieved what I could, and I accepted that others could do more.
But I had a solution, however partial, to the puzzle of the Backers’ identities, because the name of one institution recurred more often than any other: the Colonial Club of Commonwealth Avenue, Boston.
But of course, Ross must already have known that because he, too, was a member of the Colonial Club, which I had learned only relatively recently.
Ross had been a part of my life for decades. I would not have called him a friend, and he would not put my interests before those of the bureau, but I’d never had cause to doubt his commitment to obstructing the Believers until I learned about his membership of the Colonial Club.
Ross, heeding. Ross, enjoining.
Ross, waiting.