Free Deadline by John Dunning Page A

secretary and a girl who answered the phones. The trip gave him time to think. Maybe it was just his imagination, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he had dumped something on Virgil Craig’s back that was giving his old friend trouble. Just outside Forest Hills he gave his mind a rest, and let his thoughts drift into the past for a few minutes. In the seat across from him, a man was reading the New York Daily News, folded over so that Donovan, without straining too hard, could read the headlines on the facing page. A new study had come out. Life expectancy was up again. Seventy-four for women, sixty-eight for men. He could expect to live another seven years, maybe a few more, since he had come this far with no serious problems. Kim, exactly half his age, would probably survive him by thirty-six years. She would live longer after he had died than she had lived already. He would be a brief but, he hoped, important interlude in her crowded life. He wondered how she would remember him in the decades to come. That brought depression, which only compounded the worry of Virgil Craig. Growing old was such hell, and here he was, doing just what he told Virg he never did. Worrying. He hadn’t quite lied to Craig. He seldom worried, but when he did he made up for lost time. He tended to drink and brood about growing old, and think too much about the long-gone past and the too short future.
    He even worried about the Bureau. He had never wanted the goddamn FBI to mean as much to him as it did. He told himself it was just a job. He’d been telling himself that since his first day in his first post. April 1, 1939: a small resident agency near the Indian town of Nowater, somewhere in central Arizona. He had shared a room with an older agent behind the post office. His partner hadn’t been that much older, a few years at most, but already he was disillusioned with the FBI and the building Hoover image. Now Donovan couldn’t remember the guy’s name. He hadn’t lasted long: no one who hated Hoover lasted long in the old days. The things Donovan remembered best about that time were the heated arguments in their room late at night. Even at twenty-two, Donovan was hoeing the hard Bureau line. He remembered yelling at the guy, “For Christ’s sake, Barney, if you hate the Director that much, why don’t you get the hell out?” That was the guy’s name. Barney Southworth. And Barney Southworth had gotten out, a few months later. One morning he had packed his bags and said “Fuck the FBI.” Then he had loaded his car and driven away into the desert.
    Much later Donovan learned of Barney Southworth’s great transgression. Nowater, Arizona, had been used for two things. For young Al Donovan, it was solid training ground. For Barney Southworth, it was Siberia. Southworth had been an up-and-coming agent in the Washington office. A plum assignment. But he had been too impatient, too eager to leapfrog over people and bypass channels. Once he had written to Hoover himself, bypassing his next-in-command, and suddenly Barney Southworth was on the way out. Donovan couldn’t even remember Barney’s face now. Forty years will do that. But his own voice came back at him like an old echo. That line about “the Director.” Had he really said that, or had all the years—all the tens of thousands of hours spent in a job where thinking like that was not only encouraged but commanded—modified what he had actually said? He must have sounded pretty stuffy to a guy who had been around a bit.
    Donovan had been weaned on the book and had never regretted it. In those days the FBI meant something. First there had been the Nazis and the japs to fight, and later on the Commies. Some people believed foreign spies were everywhere, all through the war and into the 1950s. Kids thought he was some kind of superman. Women, when they found out who he was, got that look in their eyes that telegraphed sex. Radio dramas played up the “counterspy” theme,