Requiem For a Glass Heart Read Free Page B

undercover operations, she was expected to understand the realities of the job. Both Tavio’s colleagues in the DEA and her own fellow agents expected her not to pry into the particularities of operational issues. Once again, it came with the turf; you accepted the fact that there were secrets that always would remain secrets.
    But something was eating at Griffin, something more than burnout.
    “When I talked with Steve Lund, he told me they didn’t know what went wrong in Salerno, that they still don’t know,” she said.
    “Oh, Christ! Steve Lund. Guy’s more useless than …”
    “Then they do know.”
    “They know more than they told you, honey, but they don’t know
anything.”
    “I don’t understand that, Griffin.”
    “Look. You know the big story.” Pause. “They know the small story.” Pause. “I know the tiny story.” Pause. “And Tavio, well, he knows the tiny, tiny story.” With his elbow resting on the table, he raised his hand in front of his face and showed her his forefinger and thumb squeezed tightly together. “The least little scrap of it,” he said, and his blue-green eyes squinted at her over the tops of his fingers.
    In the simplicity of his inebriation, Griffin Younger had just summed up every undercover operation that used deeply embedded agents. At some point only the man deepest in understood everything, and it wasn’t a rare thing for him to keep some part of it stored forever in that small percentage of himself that he never shared with anyone.
    “So tell me the tiny story you know,” Cate said flatly.
    The big story—the one she knew—was that Griffin and Tavio had been working undercover on a single drug-trafficking case for almost two years. It had started small in Houston, grew larger in Colombia, and became enormous, drawing in other agencies, when it moved to Italy, where it merged into a drugs-and-arms operation utilizing the infamous “Balkan route” along which two thirds of the burgeoning worldwide heroin trade reached its Western European destinations. The case, of course, had been convoluted. While Tavio had burrowed deeper and deeper, Griffin’s role had played out. He was disengaged and installed in Rome to become Tavio’s case agent.
    For nearly seven months the only communications Cate had from Tavio were through DEA back channels, and they had been rare. A call from an agent who was “out” and had seen Tavio in Brindisi.
He sends his love
, A cup of coffee with an agent who had just returned from Milan, where he had shared a meal with Tavio in the Galleria.
Tavio sends his love.
A voice she had never heard before, a DEA cryptographer at three o’clock in the morning.
Tavio sends his love.
The DEAwas a small family. Everybody knew and everybody cared.
Tavio sends his love.
    And then one day when she arrived at the office she found her squad supervisor and the DEA’s Steve Lund waiting for her. Lund was visibly shaken but managed to get through the sketchy account of Tavio’s death with as little bureaucratic fuss as possible. Gate remembered the sudden pungent taste that had burst into her mouth from somewhere back behind her sinuses, and she remembered that her first thought had been a mental image of Tavio’s body in the Salerno morgue, an image that had proved to be eerily accurate when she actually saw him there, with her own eyes, twenty-two hours later. She had insisted on bringing back his body herself.
    It happened—not that often, yet often enough for her to know that she had to accept it without outrage, without suspicions that there had been an egregious miscarriage of responsibilities that had cost Tavio his life. She had accepted Lund’s explanation, and she had accepted the account she had read in the inquiry files months later, when Lund was kind enough to let her see them when she asked. Because she was an FBI agent, she had been allowed access to more information than normally would have been given to a civilian wife. Aside from