Chapter 45

The questions went on for hours; the sun had long since set outside before any of them let up. They went on so long that I had to ask for something to eat; I hadn't had anything since breakfast, which was a distant memory by then. They brought it to me, too, a sandwich one of them found someplace. I'd long since been uncuffed, and I wolfed it down with the water they kept providing me.

A lot of the questioning had to do with the Liberator, which most of them had never heard of. They simply couldn't comprehend how I'd snuck an actual gun into the Senate Office Building. But one of the FBI guys—the ones who'd been pointing their weapons at me were FBI, I found—volunteered that he'd read something about it, and it went more easily from there.

Later on somebody else brought in the actual thing itself for me to identify. When I'd told them how I'd disposed of it they'd apparently tracked down the cab I'd used and it was still there stuffed behind the seat. I gave it a grateful pat when I saw it again, it had saved my life twice over—once when I'd shot Quiller and again when Golden hadn't realized it was empty.

One of the FBI guys commented that it did indeed look like a kid's toy gun. I told him it shot just fine, real bullets—or one, anyhow. "Try it if you want to," I said. He declined.

After a while they loosened up enough to actually give out a bit of information rather than (as is cops' usual way) simply acting as bottomless receptacles for whatever I'd tell them. Both Golden and Quiller were, they told me, still alive and kicking. Golden, in fact, was no worse than woozy with a bad headache; he'd actually regained consciousness unaided, and had been the one to call for help. I'd shot Quiller in the chest all right, but I'd missed everything really important—it was, after all, only a low-caliber pistol round—and he, too, was expected to recover after surgery to remove the bullet.

In fact, as time went along we became quite pals-y. At one point I remarked about the rental car I'd left at Union Station, and an FBI guy offered to pick it up and return it for me. When I handed him my keys he diligently set about removing the one to the car.

"Don't bother," I told him with a small laugh. "The rest are just bogus." I explained about the subterfuge that had let me smuggle my single bullet into the Russell Building in plain sight. The fibbies exchanged glances with one another over that, and I wondered whether there'd be a memo going around about a new security alert.

We went over the whole thing in excruciating detail, and over it again and again. They listened to the entire recording, from the moment I'd turned it on in the john all the way to when I'd cut it off with Feathers in the elevator, asking me for commentary as we went along. And more commentary, and more commentary; I found myself describing Golden pulling the drapes together and every other step of what I'd been doing and what others had been doing.

Somewhere in there fairly early on McDonough sent Feathers off for a few minutes to get a warrant for Golden's arrest. I was kind of sorry not to be there when they executed it; that sonofabitch had caused more misery, including to both Susan and me, than any one person had the right to cause.

Finally I called it quits for the night; I was getting punchy. McDonough and Feathers, who'd been there the whole time—the others seemed to come and go in relays—were feeling the same, I think. I'd go to an FBI safe house for the night, and "we'll have some more questions for you tomorrow, I'm afraid," McDonough told me.

While the FBI setup was being finalized McDonough and I sat and talked a little.

"You'll probably want to think about going into the witness security program yourself when we're done, Larry," he remarked—we'd got on first-name terms hours earlier. "More for your own safety than any need for your testimony, though."