Quincannon Read Free

2
    Early the next morning, Quincannon was the first to arrive at the Secret Service field office in the U.S. Mint at Fifth and Mission streets — one of the rare occasions that anyone had ever come in ahead of Boggs. The small, cramped room smelled of steam heat and Boggs’ Havana cigars; Quincannon opened one of the windows overlooking Mission Street to let in cold, moist air. He had taken two drinks before leaving his rooms, as was his custom every day, and he took another now from his pocket flask — a small one, to keep his thoughts sharp at the center and dull at the edges. Then he sat down at his cluttered desk.
    There were three desks in the office, the largest belonging to Boggs; the third was assigned to young Samuel Greenspan, who was now somewhere in the Pacific Northwest following a different lead on the counterfeiting case. Boggs, Greenspan, and Quincannon composed the main staff of the San Francisco office. Boggs, in fact, had been one of the original thirty operatives brought together to form the Service in 1865, more than twenty-five years ago, and had been hand-picked to open this office, one of eleven scattered throughout the country. Before that, he had been a private detective in Washington, D.C., specializing in counterfeiting cases, and a personal friend of both Quincannon’s father and William P. Wood, the first Chief of the Service. Rumor had it that Boggs had also helped to draw up the original list of six general orders that he kept framed on the wall above his desk. He had quoted those articles for so long and so often, verbatim, that Quincannon had them memorized too.
    1. Each man must recognize that his service belongs to the government through 24 hours of every day.
    2. All must agree to assignment to the locations chosen by the Chief, and respond to whatever mobility of movement the work might require.
    3. All must exercise such careful saving of money spent for travel, subsistence, and payments for information as can be self-evidently justified.
    4. Continuing employment in the Service will depend upon demonstrated fitness, ability as investigators, and honesty and fidelity in all transactions.
    5. The title of regular employees will be Operative, Secret Service. Temporary employees will be Assistant Operatives or Informants.
    6. All employment will be at a daily pay rate; accounts submitted monthly. Each operative will be expected to keep on hand enough personal reserve funds to carry on Service business between paydays.
    Article 3 had been a constant bone of contention during the ten years Quincannon had worked in the San Francisco office. What he considered justified expenditures seldom coincided with Boggs’ opinion; their arguments had been mostly amiable, like an ongoing chess match each of them looked forward to — Quincannon for the challenge of finding a winning gambit, Boggs because he almost always won. That had been the case, at least, until the incident in Nevada the previous year. Now it was Article 4 that Boggs most often quoted — the continuing fitness and ability of Quincannon as an investigator. But he raised the issue gently, knowing as he did the full story of Katherine Bennett’s death and understanding what it had done to Quincannon. Boggs was not a man who generally yielded to personal feelings — the Service came first and foremost in his life — but he made allowances in this instance, out of a combination of loyalty, friendship, and pity. Quincannon did not really care one way or the other. He walled out Boggs and Boggs’ attitude as he walled out everything and everyone else: using pain for bricks and alcohol for mortar.
    In the bottom drawer of his desk were a number of maps of the Western states and territories. He found the one for Idaho and spread it open. Silver City was in the southwestern corner of the state, in the Owyhee Mountains where the barren, unsettled corners of Oregon and Idaho met the equally barren Nevada desert — a silver-mining town