Author's note: Shorter chapter than usual, mostly to get two key plot points out of the way. May or may not have a new chapter tomorrow; will then take the rest of the week off for other projects. Thanks as always for reading!

September 23, 1975

Washington, DC

"Perry, don't let's go over this again."

"Stan, please, I know the Senator's attending the hearings today..."

"You're already on thin ice for missing so many days last week."

"I told you that was important investigative staff work..."

"Jesus, Peridot, you're not a spy or a reporter, you're a staffer. And one, I might remind you, who's on very thin ice right now."

"Please! All you and the Senator let me do is answer and make phone calls..."

"That's a huge part of working for a Senator."

"But it's not what you do!"

"I have seniority."

"We have pages who can do that stuff!"

"Not very well, apparently. Now, if you'll excuse me, Perry..."

And with that exchange, Peridot rushed back to her desk and groaned into her desk. She wondered how much longer she could stay in this job without losing her mind.

Part of her couldn't wait to get home and check her messages, to see if Pearl had decided to follow up and go forward with testifying or at least privately telling her story. It would yield a lot more dividends than...

She picked up a note left on her desk. It read:

"Peridot -

"Anna Glass of Ocean Town is one of our biggest contributors. It is her 72nd birthday! Please call her at..."

Peridot didn't bother reading the rest of the message. She put her head down and sighed again.

As if on cue, her telephone rang.

"Senator Dewey's office, Peridot speaking," she said in a defeated voice.

"This is Lapis Lazuli," a now-familiar voice came across the line.

Peridot instantly bolted upright in her seat.

"Ms. Lazuli," she said, still stumbling over the pronunciation. "What an unexpected..."

"Listen, they're watching me and I'm pretty sure they're listening to me, too. I'm calling you from a pay phone in Chester."

"Hold on, hold on," Peridot said, standing up and grabbing a pencil. "Who is watching you, exactly?"

"I don't know exactly," Lapis said. "But I can guess. I got mixed up in some...really mixed up things, as you probably know, and...I don't think we should talk over the phone. Can't be sure that you aren't bugged, either."

Peridot hadn't thought about that, and felt a pang of fear. Which she brushed off. Who would be crazy enough to tap a congressman's phone?

"Is there anywhere we can meet?" Lapis continued.

"Umm, sure," Peridot said, deciding to hell with Senator Dewey and Stan and the other clods keeping her down.

"You're up in...Chester is Pennsylvania, right?"

"I'm headed south," Lapis said. "We'll need to meet somewhere near DC. Somewhere you can protect me. Or at least...help me protect myself."

Finally, her fear and seriousness registered with Peridot.

"Listen, I'll need to call you back..."

"There's no time, and, like, how are you gonna keep in touch anyway? It's not like you know what phones I'm gonna be at on a given day or anything."

Peridot sighed and leaned forward, closing her eyes, rubbing her temples. What could she do?

She wondered, fleetingly, whether to call the police or the FBI. Whether to talk with the Senator to arrange protection with the US Marshals. And somehow, she thought about Pearl. Though really, what could Pearl do to help?

No, it was time to take charge.

"Okay, Ms. Lazuli," she said in her most officious voice. "There is a Hilton in Georgetown you can stay at. Buy a room under my name. Peridot Khoury, P-E-R-I-D-O-T, K-H-O-U-R-Y. Tell them that I work for Senator Dewey and that I will pay for your room. Call my home number when you reach there and I will come meet you as soon as I can. We will talk and figure out what to do from there."

A long pause on the other end. Peridot thought she heard traffic passing by, feared that her contact might have hung up or run away or been waylaid.

"Ms. Lazuli?" she asked.

Finally, a long sigh came.

"Okay," Lapis said.

Then she hung up, leaving Peridot with a thousand questions and a million fears.


Garden City, GA

Mr. SCHWARZ, counsel: "...So that whatever recommendations you made with respect to illegal opening of the mail, or burglary, or surreptitious entry, were ones you believe represented the views of the entire intelligence community with the exceptions of the footnotes of Mr. Hoover himself; is that right?"

Mr. HUSTON, witness: "Yes."

Mr. SCHWARZ: "Now you did recommend, did you not, that the United States should commence, in your view commence, as you understood it, commence or recommence the illegal opening of mail; is that correct?

Mr. HUSTON: "Yes. My understanding, from my contacts with the Bureau and through the working committee, was that in the past, this had been a technique that been employed, particularly on matters relating to espionage..."

Rick Capuano grunted with frustration, watching the hearings unspool on his television. He didn't know who annoyed him more; the young counsel, Fritz Schwarz, with his shaggy bowl cut comb-over and self-righteousness, or Tom Charles Huston, the quiet, quavering Nixon aide in the thick glasses and the ill-fitting suit.

They're all the same jackasses, he muttered to himself, sauteing some sausage in a pan on his stove. Nothing's changed. And this is all penny ante bullshit, anyway. Who cares about opening mail?

Mr. SCHWARZ: "...You also advocated that the United States should commence, or recommence, to commit burglaries, to acquire valuable intelligence information; is that correct?"

Mr. HUSTON: "Yes. I was told that the Bureau had undertaken black bag jobs for a number of years - up to 1966. That it had been successful and valuable...And they felt that this was something, again given the revolutionary climate, they thought they needed to have the authority to do."

Imagine what these bastards would do with all the secrets *I* could tell them, Capuano thought, pouring the sausage onto a plate with pasta. Little Schwarz would shit himself with terror. And Senator Church, that parboiled blowhard, would probably get down on his knees and cry.

Of course, Capuano had made it virtually impossible for them to ask about those secrets. The moment he received a phone call from one of Church's congressional staff, he packed his bags and hightailed to Georgia, leaving his phone disconnected, his mail slot filled with notices and subpoenas that he never intended to answer. Not that Garden City, a suburb right outside Savannah, was especially off the map, but it was as good a place to hide as any until the heat died down.

He was just about to sit down and eat when he received a knock on the door. He hesitated a moment, then grabbed a handgun off the table - he had about a dozen or so strewn about, paranoid as he was. He looked through the peephole and saw a familiar face through the door. He smiled warily, then opened it.

"Didn't expect to see you here," Capuano groaned.

"It wasn't easy finding you," Jasper said. And Capuano, reassured by the sight of an old acquaintance, let her in.

"These damn congress creeps are sticking their noses into everything! They've got this poor schmuck on television spilling his guts out about every little thing Tricky Dicky asked him to do. Surprised he doesn't have Nixon's brand of toilet paper memorized for him. Might have wiped his ass once or twice in the White House.

"Nobody's gonna care about this in a few weeks," Jasper assured him. "Everything's gonna blow over."

"Sure, but until then I've gotta careful," Capuano said, putting his gun down and sitting in front of his plate. He offered Jasper a seat, but she declined, instead drifting over to the kitchen sink.

Mr. HUSTON: "...Senator, I really was peripherally concerned with antiwar demonstrations. What I was concerned about was the 40,00 bombings that took place in one year. What I was concerned about was the 39 police officers were killed in sniping incidents..."

"Couldn't you have found a better place to hide than this rat hole?" she asked, running a finger along the filthy counter top.

"Nobody's gonna look for you in a rat hole," Capuano laughed. "First thing I figured. If I was living the high life in some casino, they'd have the Marshals and the FBI on me before you could switch the dial on the TV."

"Fair enough," Jasper said, positioning herself directly behind the mobster as he ate.

"You want anything?" Capuano asked. "Think I burned this sausage...and these noodles are fucking watery. Never learned to cook. My one flaw."

"You're telling me you made shit and you ask me to eat it?" Jasper asked.

"Fair enough," Capuano said.

Jasper stood there silently for a moment, watching her friend eat, the sound of his sloppy chewing drowning out the television. Her thoughts turned in her head as she pondered her mission.

Sen. CHURCH, Chairman: "...You were asking the President to take action that violated the Federal statute, upon the theory that he had some inherent right to do this. Now since that is such a central question, since it does go to the protection offered American citizens in the fourth amendment to the Constitution, did you take the matter up with the Attorney General of the United States to secure his opinion..."

"How are things in Chicago?" Jasper asked.

"Since Momo got hit this summer, not so good," Capuano said through a mouthful of pasta. "Rosselli's running scared, coz they don't know who did it. Could have been the Commission, could have been...well, our friends."

"That's what I was thinking," Jasper said guiltily, hanging back. "Giancana knew a lot."

"Uh-huh," Capuano said. "Stuff that would make these sniveling cretins' ass hairs stand on end."

"Course, you know a lot too," Jasper said. The room instantly went silent, aside from the murmur of indignant senators on television.

"And so do I," Jasper said after a long, deadly moment. Capuano breathed again at that, and he turned back to his food.

"Some people on the committee are thinking that we killed Kennedy," Jasper said. "Want to hold hearings about it."

"I wish," Capuano grunted.

"We all know you guys wouldn't have the balls to do a thing like that," Jasper snapped.

"And you wouldn't have the brains," Capuano goaded. They both shared a rueful laugh, colleagues teasing each other, long-ago crimes and conspiracies becoming a private joke.

"You know," Capuano said, putting down his plate. "When I first met you - Christ, that was almost 15 years ago - I'll have to admit. I thought, this is a woman getting involved in the rough stuff. What is wrong with this world? She should stay home with her daddy or gimme head in a nightclub. No offense, you understand. But then I saw you take out those fucking beaners in Miami with your bare hands! Never seen a thing like that before in my life."

Jasper smiled wistfully. "Taught you a valuable lesson that night, huh?"

"Then I thought, you must be some kinda she-male or something. Again, no offense - I'm just relating what I thought back then, you know? But no, you're all lady and tough as nails. The meanest broad I ever met. And the sweetest."

"Yeah," Jasper said, moving closer to him, placing a hand on his shoulder, then moving away.

"Yeah," Capuano said again, taking a sip of some cheap dollar-store wine. "Of course, we coulda done a better job getting rid of Fidel, but...well, we can't say we didn't try."

"Not at all," Jasper agreed, pacing across the kitchen anxiously. "Not at all."

"Now you tell me, is the world a better place because we did what we did? Maybe, maybe not. But it's certainly a worse place because we failed. Think of all the beaners down south dying in concentration camps and firing squads and all the fucking mischief that monkey Castro's been getting up to. The Cubans are gonna turn this entire hemisphere red if they stay in business any longer."

"We have friends working on that," Jasper said.

"Getting back in the Castro game, huh?" Capuano said. "Jesus, this wine is foul."

"No, but there are other things...Of course, we hit a bit of a snag."

Jasper took a deep, heavy breath, staring at the floor for a long moment. She whispered a prayer under her breath.

"What's that?" Capuano said.

Jasper balled her fists for a moment, steeling herself. Then she moved across the kitchen, back behind her old acquaintance.

"Two of my operatives got thrown in hospital by some punks in DC," she said. "And a third one's in a bad coma. Might not make it."

"Pity. But if this business has taught me anything, there's no shortage of people who will, erm, do that kind of work for the right price."

She was now so close she hear his breath.

"Yeah," she whispered. A long pause, looking skyward with regret and hesitation. Then down at Capuano's head again.

"Of course, there's another snag," she said. "Project DIAMOND."

"I've heard rumors about that."

"Our friends want us to clean up some messes. Ordinarily they might not care, but with Congress going all moralistic..."

"Don't blame you. Besides, some messes deserve to be cleaned up."

She struck him hard on the back of the neck. His head crashed forward so hard it cracked his dinner plate.

Jasper stood for a moment, staring at his eyes staring in shock and terror across the table. At the wine pouring from his hand onto the floor. At her friend and partner and former lover, now just another name to cross off her list.

After another moment, she sighed and stalked out of the apartment, locking the door behind her.