As the car accelerated away from the curb, Gage glanced out of the window at the line of just-arrived passengers standing in the taxi queue, shielding their eyes against the rising sun, stark and brilliant in a blue sky that had been unmasked by the overnight passing of a January blizzard.

“I shouldn’t be doing this,” Abrams said. “If the press finds out, I’ll look like an utter lunatic.”

“I’m not sure they’re paying attention to Michael Hennessy anymore,” Gage said, looking over. “He was at the center of only a single news cycle. It was pretty small in diameter and it’s already a week old.”

The only coverage of Hennessy’s death that Gage had found was a local story in Metro Marseilles and in Hennessy’s hometown paper: Former FBI agent found dead. Suicide suspected.

In the Albany Times Union, the special agent in charge had referred to Hennessy’s life as a train wreck that they’d been helpless to stop. It seemed to Gage that he wasn’t at all grief-stricken by the tragedy. His tone had suggested a kind of relief, as though a disturbing episode for Hennessy, for the Bureau, and perhaps for Hennessy’s family, had come to an end.

Abrams mumbled what sounded to Gage like lines from a poem as they drove from the airport grounds and onto the Van Wyck Expressway toward Manhattan.

“Was that intended for me?” Gage asked.

Abrams half smiled and repeated the words. Gage recognized their source in the Old Testament:

“I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you… So they took up Jonah, and cast him forth into the sea.”

“Which means that you don’t believe Michael Hennessy killed himself,” Gage said.

Abrams shook his head. “No one works as hard as he did to convince me to meet with him, only to devise a creative way to do himself in.”