CHAPTER ONE



1984



On the Saturday before his retirement party Frank Marshall's wife, Clare, told him he looked tired and urged him to take a nap instead of going fishing. He decided to ignore her and waited until she went to show a three-bedroom ranch to a couple from Spokane before leaving a note and changing into his fishing shirt, a tattered chamois button-up with torn pockets and fish scales fused to the fabric. It had rained for three straight days and as Frank loaded his rod and tackle box into the car the sun warmed the damp pavement and the air filled with the rich smell of earthworms soft boiling in shallow sidewalk puddles.

He drove out of town until he came to the abandoned haul road that led down to the small mountain lake where he kept an aluminum johnboat and a lawn chair chained around a tree trunk. A few other men fished the lake and sometimes he'd run into one of them coming or going and they'd exchange words in the glib and crafty manner of all fishermen--a bit of misinformation about what the fish were biting on, followed by a quick exit wink and tip of the cap. He fished to get away and so the truly good days were the ones when he had the lake all to himself and he could fish and drift without any of the petty competition that arose from the sight of another man hauling in fish left and right.

Frank had reached mandatory retirement after twenty years as an FBI agent and six before that as a deputy in the sheriff's department, a make-do job he'd taken after an abortive stab at grad school. Although happy with the retirement package offered by the Bureau, he found himself increasingly bothered by the fact that the Bureau and its massive bureaucracy had done nothing to prepare him for what came next--the end of his career, or what the other agents referred to as being put out to pasture with the civies.

During his career he'd traveled to Quantico dozens of times for training seminars on hostage negot...