The Black List Read Online Free PDF Page A

lot of years. He’s—He’s screwed up before, made accounting mistakes, and I think he’s grasping at anything that will get him out of the hole he’s dug.”
    “What sort of accounting mistakes?”
    “Look. I haven’t seen him in maybe two years, so if he actually stole over a million bucks, I doubt he’d call me to confess.”
    “A million?” Griffin asked. “We were told this was some small-time thing.”
    “This is about that money from San Francisco’s showing of From Sticks to Bricks, right?”
    “ Sticks to Bricks ?”
    “The documentary fund-raiser. They’re having one here in D.C. on New Year’s eve. At twenty-five hundred bucks a pop and over five hundred tickets sold, that’s, well, a lot.”
    Enough to get someone killed, Griffin thought.

 
    5
    “What do you mean someone tried to kill Carillo?” Ron Nicholas McNiel III, Griffin’s boss, asked from the doorway, his overcoat draped over one arm. Apparently he was on his way out. Griffin was at his desk, Tex seated in one of the mismatched chairs, his boots propped up on the other.
    “Mistaken identity,” Tex said, then gave him the rundown on what happened. “They thought he was Trip.”
    “The guy you told me was shacking up with Carillo’s wife?”
    “The same.”
    “If,” Griffin said, “we believe this Dorian we just ran down, Trip made off with a lot of money, which would piss off some powerful people. It would explain why someone placed a hit on him.”
    “How much money?”
    “Maybe a million or more.”
    “When I agreed to let you two go out on this, I was under the impression it was a small-time embezzlement case. If I recall your words, Tex, it was ‘in and out.’ As in it wouldn’t take up much time.”
    “It didn’t,” Tex replied. “Couldn’t have been in that dump longer than, what? Five minutes?”
    “Why do I get the feeling you’re going to qualify that with: And yet . . . ?”
    “Because,” Griffin said, “we think Dorian was lying. That guy was afraid of something, and I don’t think it was about Trip being a suspect. There is way more to this than some simple embezzlement case.”
    McNiel eyed the clock on Griffin’s wall. “While I appreciate that we owe Carillo, this sounds like something he needs to step away from, and you need to be done with.”
    “It’s his wife,” Tex said.
    “Soon to be ex, if I’m not mistaken,” McNiel clarified as he put on his coat. “And it’s not her, it’s her boyfriend, or did I misinterpret? Carillo’s walking a thin line if he’s involving himself with this.”
    “He’s not really,” Tex said. “He just wants a little extra intel. And it is Carillo. We can’t just leave him hanging.”
    “You have to throw this at me when I’m on my way out the door to a Senate intelligence meeting?”
    “You’d rather we didn’t tell you?”
    “Sometimes, yes,” McNiel said, digging his keys from his pocket. “Do me a favor. Wrap it up so that Carillo can turn it over to the locals and you can get back to what the government is really paying you to do.” McNiel started out the door but stopped, looked back at them. “Pearson’s going to be at that meeting,” he said, referring to the head of the FBI’s foreign counterintelligence squad. “Please tell me Carillo called the police about the woman he shot in his wife’s house?”
    “Sure he did,” Tex said. “Home invasion.”
    “And they bought it?”
    “No reason not to at this point.”
    “Some days I love my job. This isn’t one of them.” McNiel gave an exasperated sigh. “I’m serious. Wrap it up and get out.”
    McNiel slid into the room as the meeting was called to order. Senator Dorothea Burgess eyed him, saying, “So nice of you to join us, Director McNiel.”
    “Apologies. Conflict in schedules.”
    “More important than something that’s been on your calendar for three months?”
    “The vice president thought so.”
    That shut her up, and he looked for a seat. There were