Rasputin's Shadow Read Free Page B

misguided deed, but the depraved sicko who’d actually handled the dirty work—a CIA agent by the name of Reed Corrigan—was still out there.
    Even by spook standards, this Corrigan had to be seriously depraved. And as a badged federal agent, it was my sworn duty to make sure his depravity never darkened anyone else’s life. Preferably by choking the life out of him with my bare hands. Slowly.
    Not Bureau standard operating procedure, by the way.
    Problem was, I couldn’t track him down. And the fact that my previous boss, Tom Janssen, was not the guy sitting here in his old office on the twenty-sixth floor of Federal Plaza and facing me from behind that big desk wasn’t helping either.
    Janssen I could count on.
    This guy—the new assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York field office, Ron Gallo—well, let’s just say that in his case, the ADIC acronym that came with the job was a really nice fit.
    “You need to drop this, Reilly,” my new boss was insisting. “Let it go. Move on.”
    “‘Move on’?” I shot back. “After what they did?” I managed to avoid spewing out what I really wanted to say and, instead, settled for: “Would you?”
    Gallo took in a stiff breath, then gave me an even more exasperated stare as he let it seep back out, slowly. “Let it go. You got Navarro. Corliss is dead. Case closed. You’re just wasting your time—and ours. If the Agency doesn’t want one of their own to be found, you’re not going to find him. Besides, even if you did—what then? Without Corliss around to back you up, what proof have you got?”
    He gave me his signature deadpan, patronizing look, and much as I hated to admit it, the ADIC had a point. I didn’t have much to press my case. Sure, Corliss had told me he’d reached out to Corrigan to get it done. But Corliss was dead. As was Munro, his wingman in that whole sick affair. Which meant that even if I ever did manage to break through the CIA’s impenetrable omertà and actually get my hands on the spectral Mr. Corrigan, in strictly legal terms, it would be my word against his.
    “Get back to work,” he ordered me. “The kind we pay you for. It’s not like you don’t have enough on your plate, is it?”
    I tapped his desk hard with two fingers. “I’m not dropping this.”
    He shrugged back. “Suit yourself—long as it’s on your own dime.”
    Like I said re: the custom-tailored acronym.
    I left his office in a funk and, given that it was almost eleven and I hadn’t yet had breakfast, I decided it would be a good time to get some fresh air and smother my frustrations in a sandwich and a coffee from my favorite four-wheeled restaurant. It was a crisp October morning in lower Manhattan, with a clear sky and a brisk little breeze whistling in through the concrete canyons all around me. Within ten minutes, I was sitting on a bench outside City Hall with a bacon-and-fontina omelet roll in one hand, a steaming cup in the other, and a whole lot of unanswered questions on my mind.
    To tell you the truth, I wasn’t really worried about the legalities involved. I had to find him first, him and the shrink or shrinks who’d messed with Alex’s mind. It wasn’t just out of my need for justice and, yes, revenge. It was for Alex’s sake.
    As we’d done earlier this morning, we’d been taking Alex to see a child psychologist once a week since we all got back from California. The shrink, Stacey Ross, was good. Tess—Tess Chaykin, my live-in paramour, the fearless archaeologist-turned-bestselling-novelist I’d been with for five years—had taken her daughter, Kim, to see Stacey after that notorious night at the Met, the night of the Templar raid that Tess and Kim had witnessed firsthand. Kim had been nine at the time, and what she’d seen there had, understandably, affected her. Stacey had, according to Tess, done wonders for Kim, and we needed those wonders now. But Stacey needed to know what they’d done to Alex to figure out how to