Free Even Steven by John Gilstrap Page A

among the matted leaves and black mulch. Now it teemed with people, fifteen experts, all of whom knew their jobs better than anyone else on earth, and all of whom reported directly to him. After such an expert beginning, it wasn’t fair that Russell Coates would be allowed to just step in and steal all the glory.
    Simply put, Coates was too old, too cranky, and too burned-out to be doing this stuff anymore. He’d already disgraced himself once, for God’s sake. After that snafu in Atlanta, Tim couldn’t figure out whose dick Coates must have sucked to keep his job at all, let alone to get himself assigned as a supervisory agent in charge of a field office. But that was the Bureau for you, sometimes brutal and sometimes gentle, but always in defiance of logic.
    For Tim’s part, the real crisis swirled around what effect working as second fiddle to a confirmed fuckup might have on his own career. This was all that Tim had ever wanted to do—what had driven him to perform in college so he could get into law school. All of it had been training for the Bureau, and now that he was here, he hated like hell to think it could all go away at the hands of a boss who clearly disliked him. Funny how that works. You get assigned to work for a man who doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground, and then it’s the incompetent one who gets to write the performance evaluation.
    Tim couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t stand Coates’s folksy ways and his casual dress, and he couldn’t stand the way Coates always put him down in front of subordinates. Discipline required a solid chain of command, and the strength of that chain was tested every single day by every other agent who was trying to make something of himself. With his snide little comments, and his refusal to let Tim do his job without interference, Russell Coates tried to poke a hole a day into the rising balloon of Tim’s career, and there wasn’t a thing in the world that he could do about it.
    Somehow, there had to be a way to make the people who counted understand how helpless he was, bathed in Coates’s shadow. One way or another, he needed to create an opportunity to shine brighter than that shadow; so brightly that the shadow would disappear, and the powers that be would see him as the future of the Bureau—the FBI as it was supposed to be.
    In the meantime, he had to put up the good front; to give the appearance of support for the boss he couldn’t stand, even as he created new ways to aim shots below the waterline. With luck, if everything worked out the way it should, everyone would see that Coates just was not up to the task anymore. If only by comparison, then, Tim’s light would burn its brightest.
    But these things took time. Frankly, he’d hoped that Coates would decide to sleep through this investigation and give him a shot at solving it himself. He’d even considered not notifying him, even though Coates was back in the country, but to do that would have been to invite a fusillade of criticism on himself. The Bureau understood and even supported the fact that everyone’s advance came at the expense of someone else, but the rules of engagement punished any combatant whose agenda was too obvious.
    That was okay. He’d been out here in hell for eight months so far, leaving only sixteen more before he could move on. He just wanted to make damned sure that his next move was up and over. He’d had enough of this lateral-transfer shit. He wanted the glory and he wanted the power, and he didn’t much care if everyone knew it. The ones who claimed lesser ambitions were either useless burnouts like Coates, or they were just plain lying. In any case, it wasn’t Tim’s style to hide his feelings.
    He checked his watch and shifted his feet. Typical of Coates, the half-hour arrival he’d promised was already running ten minutes late, and Tim had yet to see any sign of an approach. It couldn’t possibly be much longer, even if the old fart was using a