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“What if it pisses you off?”
“I’ll deal with it.”
“By shooting me in the foot?”
Rapp shook his head. “Only if you lie to me. So you decided to go to work for him . . .” Rapp made a rolling motion with his hand, telling him to pick up the story.
“It started out pretty simple. He wanted me to bug an office. I didn’t even know who the guy was.”
Rapp knew immediately that it was a lie. He pointed the gun at Johnson’s bandaged foot and said, “Fight it.”
“All right,” he said quickly, “I knew who he was, but I’d never met him.”
“Go on.”
“His name is Thomas Lewis. He’s a shrink. He’s kind of the go-to therapist for the bigwigs on the seventh floor. Has a practice out by Tyson’s Corner.”
“I’m familiar with him.”
“Well . . . we bugged his office.”
“That’s real classy.”
“I wasn’t calling the shots. I was merely following orders.”
“Like me,” Rapp said. “The president wants me to kill you, so who am I to question him. I should probably just kill you right now and get it over with.”
“Please let me explain. I thought it was a little underhanded.”
“But you also thought it was brilliant.”
Johnson hesitated and then said, “Kind of.”
“So how’d you do it?” Rapp asked.
“I set up a passive system in a nearby office and started recording. I’d go back to the place every couple of weeks to check on the equipment, but it was pretty much handled off-site. The recordings were uploaded to a server every day. I’d put them on a disk and hand them over.”
“Did you ever listen to any?”
Johnson started to say no, but caught himself. “A few, but not many.”
“Seriously.”
“Yeah. It might sound interesting, but it’s boring as hell.”
“How many copies?” Rapp asked casually.
“I gave one to Adams and the other one is up on the secure server.”
Rapp nodded and picked up the bottle of painkillers. He popped the top and took out two pills. He held them in front of Johnson and said, “You know Marcus Dumond?”
“Yes,” Johnson snorted. “He’s a disrespectful little shit.”
“Not really. Just seems that way because he’s so much smarter than the rest of us. At any rate he was telling me the other day that he has a new software program that can tell how many times something has been copied. Now Marcus is at your office right now. If I call him up and ask him to find out how many times this stuff was copied and he comes back with something other than two . . . well . . . let’s just say you and I will be finished. So think real hard. How many copies did you make?”
Johnson thought about it for a long moment and then said, “Three. I think there are actually three copies.”
Rapp set the pills on the table and slid the bottle of water over. “Good answer.” Rapp watched as Johnson popped the pills in his mouth and took a swig of water. “That office you leased?”