Free The Informant by Thomas Perry

pistol from inside the coat of the man he had just killed and the loaded spare magazine with it. Then he left through the French doors, closing them behind him. The sound of the alarm was muffled immediately, almost silenced by the closed-up and well-insulated brick house. But he wanted to be gone in case he had missed something and some unnoticed backup to the system had transmitted the message that there had been a break-in. He found an open trash can two blocks away and dropped his crowbar into it, with the magnet stuck to it.
    He made it to the hotel, got into his car, and drove. He was tired, but he drove from Long Island to New Jersey, and checked into a hotel near Trenton. The night had been a disappointment. Five days had passed since the attack in Britain, and Frank Tosca was still alive.

7
    ON MONDAY MORNING at six A.M. Elizabeth walked into her office at the Justice Department. She wanted to spend the two hours before anyone else arrived getting caught up on the mail Geoff had left for her. The two hours before the phones started ringing would give her a chance to learn what she had missed and to find out what had been done about it so far. Deputy Assistant Hunsecker was acting as though disagreeing with him were a moral failing, and he'd given her the only administrative punishment she'd ever had. She wanted and needed to keep her job.
    She had decided over the weekend that she would pretend to herself that it wasn't a great injustice that she was on the verge of being fired from her job after twenty years with the department. She'd worked in the bureaucracy long enough to know that allowing herself to nurse a grievance would eventually make staying at this job impossible. The only appropriate thing to do now was to pay attention to her work and do the best job she could.
    She unloaded her briefcase on the desk and stopped. Her in-box had already been piled with files and memos when she'd left on Wednesday. Now it was empty. The other box was empty too, which was where she put papers that needed to be filed. Had Geoff filed everything? She recalled one of the files that had been in the box on Wednesday. It was a file she had made ten years ago about the expenses involved in centralizing the information obtained on organized crime wiretaps. Since another set of centralizations was coming, she wanted to refresh her memory of what was involved and how much it had cost the last time. She went to the correct filing cabinet, opened the drawer, and found the red card she had placed between two other files when she had taken that one so she could replace it easily.
    She remembered a couple of other files and checked for them. None of them had been returned to the cabinets. They were simply gone. As she continued her search, she tried to delay the slowly growing conviction that this was Hunsecker's work. She looked around in Geoffrey's space for signs of whatever must have come in for her since Wednesday afternoon. There were no reports, no memos, no inquiries, not even a phone message. She went back to her office to see if anything had been stored in the locked file drawer in the left side of her desk.
    At seven, Geoff came in. He was carrying the briefcase that he seemed to bring primarily to hold his snacks and newspapers. "Good morning, Elizabeth. Get through the exile okay?"
    "It wasn't as bad as I'd feared or as good as I'd hoped. Have a good weekend?"
    "Sure." He finished putting away his things, then said, "What's wrong?"
    "I can't seem to find anything. I expected quite a pile of mail and stuff. Where is it?"
    He came into her office and looked at her desk. "I had all of it right here and in order on Friday afternoon." He pointed at an empty space. "Right here."
    "You didn't leave anything in the pile that was classified or sensitive, did you?"
    "No," he said. "Everything like that is locked up in the reading-room safe."
    She shrugged. "Then it probably isn't important. But I'll let you know when I find out what