Jack Ryan, Books 7-12 by Tom Clancy

Beringer letter, blown up in the copying process. Murray read through the pages slowly while Dr. Golden watched his face for reaction.
    “Holy shit,” Dan breathed while the waiter hovered twenty feet away, thinking his guests were a reporter and a source, as was hardly uncommon in Washington. “Where’s the original?”
    “In my office. I was very careful handling it,” Golden told him.
    That made Murray smile. The monogrammed paper was an immediate help. In addition, paper was especially good at holding fingerprints, especially if kept tucked away in a cool, dry place, as such letters usually were. The Senate aide in question would have been fingerprinted as part of her security-clearance process, which meant the likely author of this document could be positively identified. The papers gave time, place, events, and also announced her desire to die. Sad as it was, it made this document something akin to a dying declaration, therefore, arguably, admissible in federal district court as evidentiary material in a criminal case. The defense attorney would object—they always did—and the objection would be overruled—it always was—and the jury members would hear every word, leaning forward as they always did to catch the voice from the grave. Except in this case it wouldn’t be a jury, at least not at first.
    Murray didn’t like anything about rape cases. As a man and a cop, he viewed that class of criminal with special contempt. It was a smudge on his own manhood that someone could commit such a cowardly, foul act. More professionally disturbing was the troublesome fact that rape cases so often came down to one person’s word against another’s. Like most investigative cops, Murray distrusted all manner of eyewitness testimony. People were poor observers—it was that simple—and rape victims, crushed by the experience, often made poor witnesses, their testimony further attacked by the defense counsel. Forensic evidence, on the other hand, was something you could prove, it was incontrovertible. Murray loved that sort of evidence.
    “Is it enough to begin a criminal investigation?”
    Murray looked up and spoke quietly: “Yes, ma’am.”
    “And who he is—”
    “My current job—well, I’m sort of the street-version of the executive assistant to Bill Shaw. You don’t know Bill, do you?”
    “Only by reputation.”
    “It’s all true,” Murray assured her. “We were class-mates at Quantico, and we broke in the same way, in the same place, doing the same thing. A crime is a crime, and we’re cops, and that’s the name of the song, Clarice.”
    But even as his mouth proclaimed the creed of his agency, his mind was saying, Holy shit. There was a great big political dimension to this one. The President didn’t need the trouble. Well, who ever needed this sort of thing? For goddamned sure, Barbara Linders and Lisa Beringer didn’t need to be raped by someone they’d trusted. But the real bottom line was simple: thirty years earlier, Daniel E. Murray had graduated from the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia, had raised his right hand to the sky and sworn an oath to God. There were gray areas. There always would be. A good agent had to use his judgment, know which laws could be bent, and how far. But not this far, and not this law. Bill Shaw was of the same cut. Blessed by fate to occupy a position as apolitical as an office in Washington, D.C., could be, Shaw had built his reputation on integrity, and was too old to change. A case like this would start in his seventh-floor office.
    “I have to ask, is this for-real?”
    “My best professional judgment is that my patient is telling the truth in every detail.”
    “Will she testify?”
    “Yes.”
    “Your evaluation of the letter?”
    “Also quite genuine, psychologically speaking.” Murray already knew that from his own experience, but someone—first he, then other agents, and ultimately a jury—needed to hear it from a pro.
    “Now what?” the