Chapter 46

The news reporters were still trying to play catch-up the next morning. They'd had a pretty confusing day the day before. First there was the drama of the "attempted assassination" of a popular Senator in his own office, and the shooting of his top aide. Then I'd been "cornered" in the Justice headquarters and an FBI team was being dispatched to "take me down." Then ... for a little while, nothing. The next thing they knew, warrants were being served on the two "victims" of this heinous "attack" for their arrests while they were, for Christ's sake, still in the hospital, and the "cornered assassin" was suddenly the man nobody wanted to talk about any more. All largely without official explanation.

They hadn't known whether to shit or go blind.

I got to watch the Justice news conference Wednesday morning on the TV in which McDonough tried to sort the mess out for them. In the "culmination of a long-standing investigation," he said, Sen. Golden had been "placed in custody" for "serious criminal activity"—exactly what, he said, would have to remain unspecified until the indictment. As for me, also still unnamed, I had been "exonerated of all criminal charges" but likewise remained "in custody" as a "cooperating witness."

They still weren't sure what to make of it all. I think McDonough had actually added as much confusion as clarification to the situation. But I was pretty happy about the exoneration stuff, even though the part about my being "in custody" rankled a little. Was I really? I asked the fibbie who was with me and just got a waffle.

It turned out, though, that the "custody" business was mostly a formality. All they really wanted out of me, as McDonough had told me at the end of the previous day's session, was a formal statement of what underlay the audio I'd given them. My shooting Quiller was officially accepted as self-defense, and there'd be no charges. My clobbering Golden with his own paperweight was simply brushed under the table.

Hell, I guessed, if you can't smack kidnapers of little girls and people who order up murders in their own offices upside the head, who can you hit?

The last two hours of the afternoon was taken up by my giving a "deposition" meant to provide the underpinning of the audio. It focused, of course, on the ten or twelve minutes I'd been in Golden's office; they'd play a bit of the audio and then ask me what everybody'd been doing at that time, and so on. They had a digital video camera in there, and recorded it all.

At the end McDonough again offered me witness protection. I said I'd like to think about it overnight, and he said fine. For the most part it seemed like a pretty good deal; I had no close friends I'd be leaving behind, no relatives I cared a lot about, nothing much of my life. The biggest negative was that I'd have to walk away from my field, computer programming. On the other hand, an even bigger plus would be that I'd stay alive to move on to whatever else I might choose.

That night I'd pretty well decided to take him up on it, provided only that I could be put in the same program with Susan. We could move someplace else, start our lives over again as brand new people and both of us have the fresh beginning she'd so much wanted. I was feeling pretty good about things, in fact, as I went to sleep in the same FBI safe house I'd used the previous night.

By the next morning, though, the whole thing had become a moot point.

Apparently Golden hadn't much liked his situation. He had to know that, between Susan and me, he was finished; all that lay ahead for him was disgrace and a huge prison term. By complaining of serious continuing headaches he'd got the hospital to keep him an extra day; there was a guard at his door, but he had a room to himself. Somewhere in the wee small hours of darkness he'd got up, heaved a chair through the window and followed it out before the guard could reach him. He was on the seventh floor, and it was a straight drop to the pavement below.