THE LAST PILL

Michael Leonard Brown watched the end of his life on a hotel television.

The presidential suite on the fourteenth floor had cost him four thousand dollars a night, and from its windows he could see the whole of the Public Garden, the swan boats tied up at their dock, the gold dome of the State House catching the morning light. He saw none of it. He sat on the edge of the bed in a white hotel robe, two hundred and fifty pounds of him sunk into the mattress, and stared at the screen.

At the screen, and at the woman on it.

She was beautiful. He would give her that. Small and pale and fierce, with green eyes that looked straight through the camera and into his room. She spoke his name the way a prosecutor speaks a defendant’s name, slowly, so that the jury would remember it.

Michael Leonard Brown.

Then his photograph. Then his companies, one after another, the shells he had spent twenty years building so that his name would never appear on anything. Securities Enterprises, Inc. Trust Mutual. A dozen others he had nearly forgotten himself. A glowing diagram spread across the screen, a web of names and lines, and at its center, where every line led, was his face.

The Web of Corruption.

He did not move for a long time.

At nine-fifteen, he called Epstein.

The phone in the New York office rang eleven times. No one answered. He called Epstein’s apartment on Park Avenue, and a recording told him the number was no longer in service. He called the car phone, the beach house in the Hamptons, the private line Epstein kept for emergencies, the one Brown had paid for himself.

Nothing.

At nine-forty, he called the bank in the Caymans.

The voice on the other end was polite and Caribbean and very sorry. The account had been closed. All of the accounts had been closed. The funds had been transferred, on the instructions of the authorized signatory, over the course of the past three weeks.

“Which signatory?” Brown said.

A pause. A rustle of paper.

“Mr. Gregory Epstein, sir.”

Brown set the phone down very gently in its cradle. Then he picked up the whole apparatus, cord and all, and threw it through the screen of the television.

The glass burst. Sparks. A thin curl of smoke. Somewhere beneath the smoke, very faintly, Rachel Tullier’s voice kept talking, until it crackled and stopped.

The pills were in a small leather case on the marble counter of the bathroom. Ms. Anderson had packed them, as she always did, one for the morning and one for the night, each in its own little compartment, labeled in her neat handwriting.

He opened the case and looked at them.

For eleven years, those small white tablets had stood between him and the thing that lived at the bottom of his mind. The doctors had a name for it. Brown had his own. When he was a boy he had called it the water, because that was where it had first come up, on a hot August afternoon in the backyard in Greenwich, with his mother’s hands in his hair and her voice in his ear, telling him what a disappointment he was.

He had held her under until she stopped moving.

And then, for the first time in his life, he had felt calm.

The pills gave him a smaller, duller version of that calm, every day, without anyone having to drown. It had seemed like a fair trade. Without them, he would not have built anything. He would have been just another angry fat man with a temper, in a prison or a grave.

He tipped the morning pill into his palm and looked at it.

Then he turned on the tap and let the water carry it down the drain. The evening pill followed.

He watched the water swirl in the white basin until it was clear.

He knew it would take time. It always had, the few times he had stopped before. A day, sometimes two, before the medication drained out of him and the water rose. He did not need two days. He did not need the water. He needed only to stop pretending.

He dressed with care. A charcoal suit. A white shirt. A tie the color of dried blood that Ms. Anderson had chosen for him in London. He shaved, slowly, and looked at himself in the mirror while he did it, and he found that he was not afraid. He was not even angry anymore. The anger had gone somewhere very deep and very still, the way a shark goes still before it turns.

Everything had been taken from him. His companies. His money. His name. By a mediocre in-house lawyer who used to fetch his files, and by a woman with green eyes reading words off a teleprompter.

And by whoever had given her the story.

He thought about that for a moment, and then he set it aside. There would be time for the source later. There were people for that kind of work. There always had been.

But not for her.

He wanted to do her himself.

From the leather briefcase at the foot of the bed, he took out the small silver pistol he had carried for twenty years and had never once fired. It had been a gift from a man in Miami who was now dead. He fitted the long silencer to the barrel, the way the man had shown him, and turned the weapon over in his hands. It was lighter than he remembered.

Then he opened the slim black address book that went everywhere with him and ran his thick finger down a column of names until he found the one he wanted.

A security guard. Night shift and day shift at the NBC studios on Soldiers Field Road. Two hundred dollars a month, every month, for six years, in exchange for an occasional look at the studio schedules and an occasional unlocked door. Brown had bought him years ago, along with a hundred others like him, the way another man might buy insurance. Small men. Cheap men. Men who had never in their lives expected to be asked for anything that mattered.

The guard’s name had been on Rachel Tullier’s list that morning. Brown had seen it scroll across the screen, along with the modest monthly figure beside it.

He dialed the number on the suite’s other phone.

The guard answered on the second ring, and when he heard who it was, his voice went thin and high with fear.

“Mr. Brown, sir, I swear to God I didn’t tell her anything. I don’t know how she got my name. I’ve been sick all morning, they’re going to fire me, they’re going to—”

“Listen to me,” Brown said softly. “Is she doing another report today?”

“Noon. At noon, sir. Live.”

“Then at eleven-thirty you will open the rear door, and you will let me in, and you will show me where to stand. And afterward, I promise you, no one will ever ask you about your name again.”

There was a long silence on the line.

“Yes, sir,” the guard said.

At eleven o’clock, Michael Leonard Brown walked out through the lobby of the hotel, past the doormen and the flower arrangements and the bellhops who did not recognize him, because they had not yet looked up at the televisions above the bar.

His driver was waiting at the curb with the engine running. Brown climbed into the back seat of the black Lincoln, set the briefcase on his knees, and gave the address.

As the car pulled away into the late-morning traffic, he leaned back against the leather and closed his eyes.

For the first time in many years, he felt the water rising.

With it came the old calm, the kind he remembered from the pool.