The Informant Read Online Free Page A

making up for a dull career by getting very rich.
    She steered her mind around the inevitable comparison. She had begun as a data analyst in this same building more than twenty years ago. She had repeatedly, reliably done something that none of the political appointees had ever done: she had solved crimes and put the people who had committed them in prison. She had caused three crime families to fall into decline because of lack of leadership, then stood by to convict the followers as they made foolish mistakes and then turned informant to save themselves.
    She couldn't claim she had not been rewarded. She was the highest ranking civil servant in the Organized Crime and Racketeering section. She had also had a personal life. She had met FBI agent James Hart during her first year, fallen in love with him, married, and had two beautiful children. He had died a slow, agonizing death from lung cancer just before their eighth anniversary, and if it hadn't been for the children, she might have chosen to die with him. It sometimes occurred to her that she was still in mourning. She still thought about him each morning, each night before she slept, and several times during the day. But over the past couple of years she had stopped picturing him only at the end, when he'd looked like a tormented skeleton. When he would come into her mind now, he was a tall, handsome FBI agent in his dark suit. She would think of him early in the morning while it was still dark and nobody else was awake, and she would think,
At least I had that. I had love.
Her time at Justice had brought her other things too—a modest, steady income to raise and educate her two children, a sense of purpose.
    She didn't hate Hunsecker. She was just disappointed in him. She knew that if by some fluke he lasted long enough to understand his job, he would wish he had another chance at this day. Yes, arresting a young, frighteningly effective crime boss at the instigation of a killer was sure to gratify the killer. That was regrettable. But what the killer was trying to get them to do happened to be their job. It was why they came into this office each day.
    She stared out the office window. She had slowly, over twenty years, moved from a shared desk in a windowless basement computer room that was freezing all the time, all the way to a pleasant office on the fifth floor, where at least her window gave a view of Pennsylvania Avenue and a corner of the neighboring J. Edgar Hoover Building. Her rise had been a long, unceasing effort. It had required enduring the periods when the administration in charge was ineffectual, fanatical, and paranoid, or unable to focus on anything but the next election. Her special part of the Justice Department remained pretty much the way it had been when Attorney General Robert Kennedy had founded it in the early 1960s. Politics could sometimes have a terrible effect on the efforts of the Justice Department, but there had been no political faction in those years that didn't at least profess to be opposed to organized crime and racketeering, so the nonsense from above was barely audible in her section.
    What had bothered her was the regular infusion every four years of political appointees at the top of the system. During her time, there had been at least three attorneys general who had, at best, rudimentary knowledge of the law, and two who had never practiced law at all. Only one had ever had any experience in the sort of crime fighting that included conducting investigations of actual criminals and convicting them of crimes, but it wasn't recent and he wasn't very good at it. The AG's hired underlings were no better qualified. The lawyers who were really good at criminal law were too rich and too busy to consider taking a government job.
    Elizabeth finished reading and initialing the memos and reports that her people had submitted during the afternoon, wrote a query in the margin of the last one, put them all in the outgoing office mail, and