“No. Not yet. They all lawyered up, but I can tell Saito is shitting bricks, waiting for the hit squad,” Malone said as quietly as his deep voice allowed him to go.
Saito-sanknew the same thing we did. TheKyodainawould rather see their people in the ground than in custody.
“Does he know where Ken’Ichi might have gone?” I asked, wanting him to know exactly where the man was so we could end this.
“If he does, he isn’t saying,” Malone said.
“Maybe I should take a shot at him?”
Malone stopped, shoved his hands into the pockets of his dress pants, and then said, “You’re off the case.”
Even though it wasn’t a surprise, it still stung.
“I can’t hand in my badge. Not yet. Not until he’s behind bars,” I told him the truth.
“No one wants your badge,” Malone said, a rare sign of emotion in his voice.
“Four years, hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of dollars spent. I’m pretty sure someone is out of a job.”
“While this operation is a bust and management has closed us down, they also know the truth. We all know the truth, which is that we’ve gathered more information on theKyodainaand the Leskovs from this than the Bureau has in a decade. We have one of their senior operators in jail, along with a chain of money and guns. It wasn’t a complete failure, Langley. We just need to review the data, regroup, and try again.”
“It wasn’t a win, though,” I responded.
He didn’t disagree, but he did say, “Sometimes, winning comes in a series of small steps.”
“Violet told me we’d gotten too big for our britches,” I said with a wry smile. “That we were pretty stupid if we thought we’d be able to tumble down their house of cards that easily.”
“We’ve knocked them back quite a few pegs. They aren’t going to be able to use Mori Enterprises shipping containers for a long time, if ever again. They’re going to have to shore up all their legitimate businesses to hide the criminal ones deeper. I can guarantee you, Leskov isn’t going to be dealing with Mori anytime soon,” he said. “I’m not done with any of them.”
“But I am?”
“You’re too close to it now. You were already too close, but it was to our advantage before. Now… Now you have Violet Banner tangled in it, and you will always worry more about her than any other aspect of the operation.”
It was the truth.
“It’s why we need to find Ken’Ichi,” I told him. The thought of him coming after Violet or any of the people I loved as a way of getting back at Jada and me curled fear through my stomach.
“I’ll keep you in the loop with him the best I can,” he said.
“What do they want me to do now?” I asked.
“They’ll find a desk for you here, locally.”
“Chase down anonymous calls about terrorists in people’s backyards?” I scoffed.
“It’s still a shipping hub. Lots of activity at the docks.”
“I’m not sure I can do that. A desk. It really isn’t me,” I said.
“Not the same thrill as driving a yacht across the Atlantic at seventy knots?” he asked with a rare Malone smile.
I grinned. “Not even close.”
What I didn’t tell him was about all the doubts floating around in my head. Thoughts about how I’d joined the FBI for all the wrong reasons. For the respect of a man who would never even know that I was law enforcement just like him. Because I’d thought I had to prove I wasn’t bad to the core. That I could do more than cause wreckage and ruin to people’s lives. I’d momentarily thought that came with a badge and a gun, but it still hadn’t stopped me from risking everything.
I needed to find a different way to be a better man.
“You’re good at it, though,” Malone said, as if he could hear my inner turmoil. “You’re a natural. The Bureau is going to need you and what you know.”
