Free Deadline by John Dunning Page B

and Hoover milked that for all it was worth. The Director had made a personal appearance on the first episode of “This Is Your FBI,” sometime near the end of the war, warning people about the Nazi spies among them. And maybe some Special Agents were after Nazis and Japs, but for Al Donovan the days were filled with tips on cars stolen in Connecticut and driven over state lines. He was in the New York Field Office then, and he chased hot cars, checked out threats against federal officials and occasionally assisted on a bank robbery.
    He had never killed a man. Forty years in a job classified hazardous, in most people’s minds if not in insurance company briefs, and Albert Harlan Donovan had never had to shoot a man.
    Still, the people loved him. It didn’t seem to matter how old he got or how times changed. There was always an enemy to fight, just as there was always a Joe McCarthy to exploit a situation and stir people up. It wasn’t until much later that the looks had changed from respect to suspicion. The last few years, really, what with all the Watergate business and all the dirt about the Director coming out. The new breed of woman didn’t telegraph sex. Maybe it was truly his age, but male ego wouldn’t let him think that. Not completely. He still had all his hair (it was white around the edges now, but so what?), and he kept fit with handball three times a week. He had been told that he looked like a man in his forties. Nobody believed him when he told them how old he really was. Kim hadn’t believed him when they had first met, two years ago. So it wasn’t his age. People just didn’t trust him anymore, not as they did when they thought there were Commies behind every bush. In times like these, when he had had too little sleep and carried the burden of intruding on a friend’s peace of mind, he actually saw a glimmer of truth in Gallup and Harris.
    Donovan’s home was truly his castle. Once inside it, the troubles of the Bureau, and of the world in general, faded into the nothings they were. If one true thing could be said about Albert Harlan Donovan, it would be that he had life by the balls. He had done it all, everything he had wanted. He had security and a good pension coming, a lovely house in the suburbs, a frisky young wife four months pregnant, and dammit, he had his self-respect. No matter what the creeps said about Hoover and his dirty tricks, Al Donovan had always done what he believed in, and done it well. The FBI was something he could believe in, and you don’t write off a lifetime commitment like that too quickly or too easily.
    Donovan had it all. The only thing he didn’t have was time.
    Kim brought him a drink. Far back in the house, something mighty good was cooking for his guests tonight. She was a fantastic cook, this girl-woman he had married.
    And she was perceptive. She saw things, even if she didn’t always understand them. If, as some wit had written, knowledge was a person’s storehouse of fact and intelligence was that person’s key to the storehouse, Kim had built a huge storehouse and was still working on the key. She knew a lot. She absorbed facts and never forgot what she had read or heard. She had been a straight-A student at Syracuse. Straight goddamn A’s, all four years. She constantly amazed Donovan with the charming combination of her knowledge and naiveté.
    “I felt a kick today.” She touched her abdomen, which was just beginning to show.
    Donovan looked skeptical. “Isn’t it a bit early?”
    “All I can tell you was how I felt. How was your day?”
    Then Donovan did a strange thing. He looked her in the face and told her about it. Strange, because he never brought things home, never burdened her with the Bureau. He told her about Walker’s pictures and the funny feeling they gave him in light of his talk with Virgil Craig. Telling her about it took him back to perhaps ten other times when some case had left him feeling this way. When, for reasons he