Liberty

CHAPTER SIX

“Here’s the first copy of the magazine, Mr. Corrigan,” the secretary said gleefully. She handed him a magazine. “A courier brought it directly from New York.”

“Thank you, Miss Hargrove.”

Thayer Michael Corrigan was riding a stationary bicycle. He placed the magazine on the stand on top of The Wall Street Journal and examined the cover likeness. Looks good, he thought. For an old fart, you aren’t half-bad.

He kept riding as he scanned the cover story. He had already seen most of it, of course, traded back and forth as e-mail. The reporter wanted to ensure he had his facts right, he said, “standard procedure.” Corrigan snorted. Preapproval of cover stories was the only way that the magazine could ensure that captains of industry would continue to grant interviews for future cover stories. No one wanted to be sandbagged by some scribbler out to make a name for himself.

Yep, the story was the one he had seen, with only minor editing changes. He used the towel to wipe his face and settled down to serious riding.

The view out the corner office windows was of a duck pond teeming with birds. The groundskeeper fed the ducks and swans every morning to keep them there. The shrubbery around the pond was manicured in the Japanese style, very arty. And labor-intensive. All in all, the scene made a nice statement about Corrigan Engineering, Inc., “Building a Better World” as the slogan under the logo proclaimed.

Thayer Michael Corrigan had started out forty-six years ago with a contract to inspect New England railroad bridges. When people asked about the old days, he liked to talk about those bridges, about wading through the trash and poison ivy, jumping out of the way of passing trains. He had talked about those days for the magazine reporter, who had devoted a long paragraph to that humble beginning.

He didn’t tell the reporter that he would probably still be inspecting railroad bridges if he hadn’t had a chance meeting two years later with a man in Cambridge. He had never talked about that meeting with anyone.

As he stared at the duck pond, he remembered. The acquaintance began casually enough, and ripened rather quickly into a friendship. Dinners here and there, cigars and whiskey afterward. The man’s name was Herbert Schwimmer. He too, he said, was a consulting engineer. Or so Corrigan believed for several years. He was ten or fifteen years older than Corrigan, had a nice accent, and said his parents came to this country from Europe before the war.

One evening Schwimmer made the observation that in the post-World War II era American companies were the technological star cores, the place where research and engineering, competition and the possibility of profits fused old materials into new things that had never before existed. These places, Schwimmer said, were the wealth generators in the age of capitalism.

Somehow, Corrigan couldn’t remember exactly how, the subject of industrial espionage came up in their conversation. “You understand,” Schwimmer said, “that industrial secrets are impossible to keep. People talk shop to lovers and friends, they leave the company for a competitor, patents are infringed, competitors spy on their rivals and do reverse engineering … Yet there is a time, a brief window, when knowledge has value, when it can be converted to gold.”

Weeks later Herbert Schwimmer confided that he was a broker in intellectual property. “I am not interested in the atomic secret,” he said with a grin. “Nor do I deal in political intelligence. I wouldn’t pay a nickel for the latest war plan. I need products that I can sell to other companies.”

“Where?”

“Here and in Europe. Everyone guards their secrets and buys those of the competition. Of course, the value of intellectual property decreases over time, and one must know the market.”

Today Corrigan’s reverie was broken by the buzz of the intercom. “Your wife is on the telephone, Mr. Corrigan. Line two.”

Corrigan pushed a button to put his wife on the speaker. He kept pedaling.

“Yes, dear.”

“Congratulations on the story. Power, no less.”

“You’ve seen a copy?”

“A friend in New York faxed me a copy of the cover. A good likeness.”

“They got me, I think.”

“Oh, Mrs. Everett from the symphony is in the other room. It’s the annual fund drive. I was thinking of giving them a hundred. Is that okay with you?”

“Fine,” said Thayer Michael Corrigan.

She discussed their dinner plans, then said good-bye.

Corrigan looked at his watch. Ten more minutes. As he wiped his face his thoughts returned to Schwimmer and his business proposition. It hadn’t come out all at once, of course, but in dribs and drabs over the course of six or eight weeks. Actually, he had been the one who asked Schwimmer what secrets he wanted.

Two months later Corrigan sold his first secret to Schwimmer. He went looking for it. He was the low bidder for a consulting contract for a division of a company building radars. He couldn’t get into the lab, of course; he was hired to help with the structural design of a new building. He spent his spare moments mining the trash. Fortunately he wasn’t caught. His excavations yielded blueprints and technical notes that he used to write a coherent summary of a new radar design. Schwimmer paid him $10,000 for the summary. Personally mining the trash was a huge risk, one he never took again. From that day forth he bribed garbage collectors. Thayer Michael Corrigan was on his way.

The intercom buzzed again. “Your wife again, sir.”

“Yes, Lauren.”

“I’m sorry to bother you, T. M. Everett says Rebecca DuPont gave the symphony two hundred. I knew you thought it important …”

“Give them a quarter million.”

Corrigan pedaled on, thinking about his wife. She was modeling in New York when he met her at a party five years ago. God, she was gorgeous. She wasn’t one of those half-starved, flat-chested fashion horses, but a model for women’s fitness magazines. How to get great abs, lose cellulite, sculpt the buns, that kind of thing. She was really built. And she was thirty-five years younger than he was and loved to fuck, so he did a half hour on the damned stationary bike every day. And popped the little blue pills. She didn’t know about the pills, and he wasn’t about to tell her. Thank God for little blue pills.

Of course, Schwimmer wouldn’t have been interested in the formula for blue pills. Back then he had wanted leading-edge high-tech stuff in aviation, radar, computers, sonars, the space program. Corrigan had founded a company and recruited engineers and was making serious money when he finally realized Schwimmer was after the information for the Soviets. He braced him on it. Yes, he was KGB.

But there was little risk, Schwimmer insisted. The FBI was looking for spies in the political arena and in government laboratories. “I told you I am not after the atomic secret, and I don’t give a damn what Washington is plotting.” Of course not. The Soviets had other sources for that information. The real question, Corrigan realized, was who was going to earn the money providing the industrial secrets that Schwimmer and his colleagues were going to get in any event, from someone. They would buy the information they wanted or some liberal half-wit would pass it to them gratis for ideological reasons. Schwimmer was absolutely right, the stuff was valuable and impossible to keep secret. Corrigan decided that he wanted the money.

Today on the exercise bicycle he grinned to himself. He had made the right decision. He had built a large consulting firm that did business all over the world. The most profitable division was the smallest, industrial secrets, and it had made him filthy rich. The cover of Power magazine, no less!

Sure, there had been problems through the years. He hired men who solved those kinds of problems and he paid them very well, more money than they could ever have made doing anything else.

Schwimmer was long gone. Other contacts had come and gone, and the money kept flowing. Business had boomed during the Reagan years, when American industry led the world into space and the computer age had dawned. Stealth airplanes, quiet submarines, guided weapons, networkcentric warfare, space-based sensors, encryption technology, the Soviets had paid top dollar for all of it. Ironically, they couldn’t use even a small portion of what he sold them — they lacked the industrial capacity. Thayer Michael Corrigan had enjoyed that delicious irony.

Then the Soviet Union imploded, and money from the new Russia had dried up.

The bicycle beeped at him. One more minute. He increased the pace, worked the pedals as fast as he could. At the end of the minute the machine beeped again and he slowed down, pedaled slowly during the cooling-off period.

The world changed in 1991. Now it was changing again. The age of terrorism was here, and once again there was big money to be made. Security was the top-dollar commodity now and the American government was the customer. Thank you, Osama bin Laden, you stupid rag-head fanatic, plotting mass murder in your mud hut. You are going to make me a billionaire!

He got off the bicycle, wiped his face and hands, and picked up the magazine. He examined the cover art closely. It was a good likeness. He pushed a button on the intercom for his executive assistant.

“Frank, call Power magazine. Tell them I want to buy the portrait they used for the cover. Get it framed for the reception area.”

“Yes, Mr. Corrigan. Right away.”

Alderson, West Virginia, was a sleepy coal town tucked between two steep, wooded hillsides with a gorgeous river, the Greenbrier, running through it. Tommy Carmellini parked on the main street on the north side of the river, got out of his car, and stretched. He was several inches over six feet tall and wore a baggy light sports coat and trousers that didn’t quite fit. In an age when men picked clothes to show off their physiques, Tommy Carmellini’s clothes hid his wide shoulders, long, ropy muscles, and washboard stomach. Cut an inch or so too long, his sleeves partially obscured the massive wrists, oversize veins, and superstrong fingers that years of rock climbing had developed.

After working the kinks out, Carmellini went into a small grocery store. He bought a cold can of soda pop and stepped back out on the sidewalk to drink it. The river was wide here, flowing along in the summer heat under the shade of huge oaks and maples. Several boys were fishing along the banks. A couple of them eyed his car curiously — you didn’t see many old red Mercedes coupes parked in coal country.

When Tommy finished the soda he went back into the store. He was the only customer. He asked the female clerk, “Where’s the women’s prison?”

“Cross the river on the bridge, honey, and stay on the highway. It’s a ways down the river, but there’s signs. You can’t miss it.”

“Okay.”

“You here to visit someone?”

“My mom. She’s got a few more years left to do.”

He ditched the can in the trash by the door and walked back to the car.

The visitors’ room at the prison was divided by a table that ran from wall to wall. The prisoners and visitors were separated by a wall of bulletproof glass that ran the length of the table. Carmellini was the only visitor. He took the middle of five seats. The place smelled of disinfectant. Massive walls, puke green paint, tiny windows, the bars, the vast silence … the hopelessness of it washed over Tommy Carmellini.

When the guard brought Zelda Hudson into the room he was stunned at the change in her appearance. She wore no makeup at all, her dark hair was cropped just below her ears, and her beltless prison shift hung on her like a sack. She looked years older than he remembered her.

She took a seat opposite him and stared at him through the glass without a flicker of interest.

“Name’s Carmellini,” he said into the, intercom mike after the guard left the room and they were alone.

“I recognize you.”

“Was sort of surprised when you pleaded guilty without making a deal with Justice.” Zelda had masterminded the theft of USS America last year. After she was indicted by a grand jury she pleaded guilty at the arraignment, which left the media aghast at her effrontery, cheating them out of a show trial.

“I don’t know what you want, Carmellini, but I’ve told you people everything I have to say.”

“Well, I was in the neighborhood, just thought I’d drop in and say hi.”

“Right.”

“So you got what, about thirty years to do before you’re eligible for parole?”

“So you read newspapers.”

“Not really. You know how death penalty cases are — fame and fortune. You and Hillary Clinton were on the cover of the supermarket tabloids every time I bought beer.”

“I hope you kept a scrapbook.”

He tugged at an earlobe. “You always did have a difficult personality, as I recall.”

“Listen, Carmellini. You helped put me here. Oh, I know, I fucked up and all that, but you shoved me into this hellhole. Say what you came to say and hit the road.”

“How’d you like to get out of here, Zelda?”

She didn’t even look at him.

“I’m here to offer you a job. If you take it, you’re outta here.”

She snorted in derision. “Who do I have to kill?”

“Nothing messy required,” Carmellini said. “I work for an agency of the United States government, and we happen to have an opening for a person of your talents.”

Her eyes were on his now. “What agency?”

“Don’t get cute. It doesn’t become you.”

“Last year you were CIA. Still with them?”

“Yes.”

“I conspired with murderers and thieves to steal a submarine. I pleaded guilty to thirty-seven felonies, Carmellini! They didn’t charge me with espionage, but I’m guilty of that, too. The only thing I haven’t done is have sex with a farm animal like you. Why in God’s name does the CIA want me?”

“You’re good with computers.”

“That’s not exactly a rare skill.”

“A lot of people play basketball, but there’s only one Michael Jordan.”

She was incredulous. “You’re offering me a job in the CIA? When I get out in thirty years, or is this something I can do from my cell?”

“Osama bin Laden changed the world. Your skills are in demand. You’ll sign the security agreements, get the building pass and green paycheck. Keep your nose clean and you’ll have a new life. You can rent an apartment, buy a car on time, get in debt to your eyes — it’s the American way, baby.’Course, if you cheat or screw up, you’ll ride the magic carpet right back here to Alderson. We won’t do parole or probation or any of that to get you out, so there won’t have to be a hearing to put you back in — we’ll just call the federal marshals and they’ll whisk you back to the joint before you can kiss your ass good-bye. Don’t know if we can get you the same cell — you might have to take whatever they have available.”

She put her elbows on the counter in front of her and lowered her face into her hands. After a long minute it occurred to Carmellini that she might be crying.

“Hey,” he said into the intercom mike. “Hey. Just say yes.”

She straightened. Her eyes were as dry as his. “So I give you assholes a good education and you say what the hell and call the marshals. That the way it’ll go down?”

Carmellini shrugged. “This Christmas I’ll send you a canary. You can become the bird woman of Alderson.”

“What guarantee do I have that you’ll play fair?”

“None.”

“I love it when you sweet-talk me.”

“How’s the pasta here? I heard they do really good mac and cheese in these federal crypts.”

“Of course, the newspapers will never learn that I’m out.”

“We’ll have to give you a new identity,” Carmellini admitted. “I thought you made a good Sarah Houston, so I had them use that name on the birth certificate, driver’s license, all of that. We used the computer on your photo, dyed your hair and reshaped it. I’ll bet you always wanted to be a blonde.”

“One condition,” she said. “You have to get Zip Vance out.” Zip had helped her steal the submarine. He also pleaded guilty at the arraignment.

Tommy Carmellini scrutinized her face. “You don’t have a lot of chips left to throw on the table, lady.”

“I don’t care how you do it. If you get me out, you must get him out of prison, too. Or no deal.”

“I’ll bet you don’t get a lot of job offers here in the joint. What if I say no?”

She rose from her chair and headed for the door. She was about to knock on it to call the guard when Carmellini said into the intercom, “Funny, Vance also refused the job unless we got you out.”

She turned, stared at him.

“I think the fool is in love with you, Sarah Houston.”

She rubbed her face with her hands, then muttered, almost inaudibly, “That’s his problem.” She took a deep breath, then came back to the chair opposite him.

“You can really do this?”

“I’ve got low friends in high places.”

“Zip, too?”

Tommy Carmellini nodded affirmatively. “This is how it’ll go down. A few days from now the prison will get standard transfer orders saying you’re going to a federal country-club joint for white-collar scumbags. The following day two real, honest-to-God federal marshals will show up to take you there. They’ll have all the proper papers, signed and sealed and genuine as hell. The marshals will bring you to Washington instead. Don’t tell anyone anything. And this conversation never took place.”

She didn’t say anything.

“See you in Washington,” he said, walked to the door, and knocked.

In the corridor outside the visiting room, Tommy Carmellini told the female guard, “I need to see the warden.”

The guard was bored, overweight, and surly. “Hey, I know you’re some kind of federal officer, but the warden makes appointments and all.”

“Why don’t you take me to talk to his secretary?”

The guard decided maybe that was okay. She led the way.

The secretary wanted to know if Carmellini had an appointment. It took five minutes for him to get in to see the warden.

The warden’s name was Gruzik, according to the sign on his desk. He didn’t get out of his chair or offer to shake hands. Carmellini produced an envelope from his inside pocket and passed it across the desk. Inside the envelope was a letter from the director of the Bureau of Prisons. Carmellini watched Gruzik’s face as he read the letter, which instructed him to call the director immediately. Gruzik picked up the telephone and punched buttons.

When he hung up the telephone he looked at Carmellini with interest. “Who are you, anyway?”

“Nobody you want to know. Give me the audiotape you made of my visit with Zelda Hudson and forget you ever saw me. And I want the page I signed in the visitors’ log.”

“We don’t tape conversations between—”

“Don’t give me that shit. You heard the director. ‘Full cooperation.’ I want the tape and the log.”

In two minutes he had the tape in his hand, a cassette. Three minutes later the visitors’ log came into the room. Carmellini ripped out the page he had signed, folded it neatly, and put it in his shirt pocket. “I’m going to listen to this tape on the way to Washington,” he told the warden. “It had better be the right one.”

“The guard said it was,” the warden said sourly.

“I notice you have video cameras in the visitors’ waiting area, in the corridors, and outside this office. I want the tapes. All of them.”

That took three more minutes. While they were waiting Carmellini reached across the desk and snagged the letter on Bureau of Prisons stationery. “Might as well take this, too.”

It turned out there were four videotapes. Carmellini put the audiocassette in his jacket pocket and carried the tapes in his hands. Before he left he said to the warden, “I want to make sure you’re crystal clear on the situation. If you or anyone on your staff mentions my name, my visit, or this conversation with anyone at all and we hear about it, you’ll be looking for another job. And there won’t be a corrections facility in the country that will hire you, not even to peel potatoes. That’s a promise.”

He closed the door carefully behind him.

After his shower, Thayer Michael Corrigan dressed in a dark power suit and red tie before he began the rounds of appointments and meetings that filled his days as the head of a large organization. When the schedule permitted, he and his executive assistant tackled the in-basket.

Yet in this mountain of paper that crossed his desk, not a scrap hinted at anything illegal. Naturally Corrigan never saw stolen documents of any kind, nor did he handle money. Other people procured and paid for documents and delivered them to the buyers. Money in payment came through various foreign consulting contracts. The head of the accounting department made sure the money came and went in innocuous ways and was properly accounted for. He didn’t know why payments were made or money received — and didn’t want to know, because he was paid twice as much as he would have been at any other company in New England. With stock options and bonuses, he was a rich man getting richer, and he liked it like that.

The only man Corrigan routinely dealt with who knew what was really going on was Karl Luck. He had two or three private audiences with Corrigan every day. A former CIA agent, Luck, too, was rich and becoming richer, although money didn’t motivate him. He loved the action.

As usual, today he was waiting when Corrigan finished dressing in the private apartment beside the corner office. One of his duties was to sweep Corrigan’s offices for bugs. He did a thorough job every morning before anyone came to work, then used a small unit for a spot check before he and Corrigan discussed anything. He was stowing the device in its case when Corrigan came through the door from the apartment.

“Morning, Karl.”

“Good morning, sir.”

“What do you hear from Dutch?”

“There was a firefight last night near the warehouse where the weapons are parked. Tonight”—he glanced at his watch while he mentally calculated the time difference—“actually about two hours from now, the weapons will be transported to the dock and loaded.”

“Tell me about the firefight.”

“A rival militant group. The news of the warheads’ presence has spread like wildfire. We knew it would. There was no way to keep that secret.”

“Why are the weapons still there? They should have been on that ship days ago.”

“Problems getting the ship loaded and cleared for sea. Bribes were paid, but we could only push so far.”

“The Egyptian?”

“Zuair is primed and ready. He’s going to smite the infidels.”

“Problems?”

“None right now.”

“This has to go right. No screwups.”

“There won’t be any.”

“Fine.”

Karl Luck left the office. Corrigan watched the door close, then smiled. Luck’s name was misleading. He was effective because he didn’t believe in luck; he made his own.

Corrigan didn’t believe in luck either. He had made his fortune by ensuring that chance events couldn’t ruin him. Get good people, pay them well, and back them to the hilt. That was the formula he gave to the Power reporter. Amazingly enough, it really worked … most of the time. Random chance and human weakness were always present in human affairs and occasionally created problems. One had to attack the problems ruthlessly and without remorse. Thayer Michael Corrigan and Karl Luck were very good at that. He didn’t mention that to the reporter, though.

Mohammed Mohammed was another man who didn’t believe in luck. He had been entrusted with the leadership of an attack upon America because he was smart and a meticulous planner who left nothing to chance. Too many holy warriors, in his opinion, believed that since Allah was on their side, they would succeed. Inshallah, “God willing,” was their creed, the blueprint for their lives. What they forgot was that the forces of evil were everywhere, eternally at war with the forces of Allah. It must be so, he reasoned, or Earth would be a paradise where Allah ruled. It wasn’t.

No. Victory goes to those who earn it. Allah had arranged the universe that way. Mohammed Mohammed intended to earn his ticket to paradise.

This afternoon at the Liquid Sunshine Citrus Warehouse in Florida he paused in his task of loading crates of oranges onto pallets to watch the forklifts zipping around the building. He had been unable to operate a forklift yet, and he must learn how.

The foreman was a Mexican, fat and balding. Most of the workers were Mexicans and chattered to each other in Spanish, of which Mohammed spoke not a word. Although he and the Mexicans barely spoke English, that was the language they conversed in. Sometimes he couldn’t understand the other workers or the foreman, nor they him. Mohammed had suggested to the foreman that perhaps he could learn to drive a forklift so he would know how if another forklift operator were ever needed. The foreman seemed to understand, yet an invitation to climb onto one and learn the levers hadn’t happened yet.

He was going to need a forklift to get the bomb out of its shipping container and into a truck. It would already be on a pallet, but he couldn’t risk dropping it. He needed to practice ahead of time.

Timing. Everything depended on timing. After the late shift left work, Mohammed and his men would load the bomb aboard the truck, then fill it with crates of citrus bound for Washington, D.C. The next morning when the truck pulled out, they would follow it, kill the driver at a rest or fuel stop, and steal the truck.

A fine plan it had seemed when they had discussed it in Cairo, God knows. Load the bomb into a truck, drive it to Washington, and detonate it in the heart of the city. They would die instantly of course, and immediately be ushered into Paradise.

Everyone died eventually. That was an immutable fact, the one certainty in our uncertain existence. To earn Paradise as a martyr in Allah’s war on the infidels was infinitely better than waiting to die of old age and trusting all to Allah’s infinite mercy. Allah Akbar! Still, some people went to Paradise and some didn’t; everyone knew that! Why take the chance? And why wait? Paradise was there now.

Mohammed picked up another crate and carefully placed it in the stack. Here in Florida, he mused, the plan seemed much more complicated than it had in Cairo. First there was the timetable. Until the bomb arrived, nothing could be done. Once it was here, they could not wait. The container must be emptied, and they must be on their way before anyone became suspicious.

Mohammed knew how to drive an eighteen-wheeler. He even had a commercial driver’s license in his pocket. Not in his name of course, but the Americans couldn’t tell one Arab from another. Displaying the license would be sufficient.

Waiting was the weak point of the plan. Being put under surveillance by the authorities or arrested would of course cause the mission to fail — and the best place in the United States for the team to live, work, and fit in during those weeks was Broward County in south Florida, among all the other people from all over the planet who flooded this place. Here the local people would be the least suspicious, here the team had its best chance of remaining anonymous, unknown to the American FBI.

Mohammed knew about the FBI. The men and women of that agency were hunting him and others like him. So were other arms of the federal government. That was the danger he and his three team members faced daily.

As usual in terror operations, there was a timetable. The attack would be most effective if it could be coordinated with others. Of other planned attacks Mohammed knew nothing, but he knew there must be others, because the people in Cairo had given him the date.

Yet he could not go until the weapon arrived, and when it did, he must act quickly, regardless of the date. Regrettable, but there was no help for it.

He was wiping the sweat from his brow when he saw the foreman approaching, walking quickly. He paused.

The man pointed at an idling forklift. “You, Mohammed, drive it today. Learn the levers. Today Ramon teach you. Ramon very good forklift operator. Learn good.”

Mohammed nodded and flashed his teeth. Americans like to show their teeth. He showed the foreman his several times and went trotting toward the forklift, where Ramon was standing.

“Ah, Ramon, the foreman said—”

“Sí. Yes, yes. Into the seat.” Mohammed climbed into the seat and began his first lesson in operating a forklift. He was very attentive. This was another rung on the ladder leading to Paradise.

When he reached the interstate that led east, 1-64, just north of the town of Lewisburg, Tommy Carmellini didn’t make the turn. He continued along the two-lane asphalt that led northeast up the Greenbrier River Valley. Low mountains covered with green forest lay to the right and left.

As he drove his thoughts were on Archie Foster and Norv Lalouette. They had probably planted the bugs in his apartment. Whoever did it had undoubtedly searched it first. If Arch and Norv had found the silenced Ruger .22, they would have had the evidence to send him up for life. Of course, they didn’t find it — the silencer was in the mud on the bottom of the Potomac River, the barrel of the pistol was buried in Maryland, the action in Virginia, and the handle in North Carolina.

Arch and Norv or their friends had bugged the apartment, then dropped the bomb. Now, Carmellini thought, they were probably listening to see how he handled it.

His office was probably bugged, too. Hoo boy!

They certainly weren’t putting together a case for the FBI, not with illegal searches and listening devices. They wanted something. But what?

No doubt they would let him know in their own sweet time.

Whatever it was, they knew he wouldn’t like it, so they were wrapping him up, strand by strand.

Tommy Carmellini saw a country store ahead and pulled into the parking area. There was a woman in her thirties behind the counter. Carmellini bought a soda pop and left. He tossed the unopened can on the passenger’s seat.

Every little crossroads and village had its country store that sold essential food items, like bread, beer, and soda pop. Five miles farther up the road was another store, this one with a gas pump in front. Carmellini went inside. A man in his fifties sat on a stool behind the counter.

Carmellini bought a pop and leaned against the counter to drink it. “Pretty country around here.”

“Yep. Lived here all my life. Nothing like it. Pretty and peaceful. Quiet-like, not like over in those big cities.”

“Friend of mine has a cabin on one of these mountains and has invited me over for deer season. Are there many deer around here?”

“I hope to shoot.” The man launched into a story about the hunters who came for the deer, which were plentiful as rabbits, he said. “People hit’em all the time with their cars. You see’em dead along every road — cars kill more deer than hunters. Never been as many deer as now.”

“I need a rifle if I’m going to hunt,” Carmellini remarked at an appropriate time. “I’ve been thinking about an old thirty-thirty Winchester.”

“Them’s good guns, so they are. Had one for years. Gave it to my boy. Can’t go wrong with one of them.’Course some folks like scope sights and you can’t put one on a Winchester without a special mount and all that. Like scopes myself since my eyes ain’t what they used to be.”

“Know anyone around here who might have a thirty-thirty for sale?”

“Well, no, I don’t. Any gun store would have one though.”

“I’ll keep my eye out for one,” Carmellini said, smiled broadly, and said good-bye.

At the next store Carmellini went through the conversation again. Nope, no rifle like that for sale around here.

At the third one Carmellini struck pay dirt. The proprietor was at least fifty pounds overweight, with a scraggly beard. He said, “Heck yeah, I’ve got an old Model Ninety-Four thirty-thirty over to the house. Don’t use it no more. I might sell it if the price was right. Now this one ain’t no collector’s item like those pre-sixty-fours. No, sir. I bought it from a neighbor when I got out of the army. Ain’t much to look at, but she shoots good.”

“I don’t want to spend much money for a rifle,” Carmellini said, shaking his head. “Going to try hunting, might not like it. And that would be my only use for a rifle. I would have to be able to sell it later for about what I have in it.”

“Know how you feel,” the proprietor said. He held out his hand. “Name’s Fred.”

“I’m Bob,” said Tommy Carmellini, and shook.

“Got the rifle over to the house.” Fred jerked his thumb. “Come on over and I’ll show it to you. We’ll lock up the store for a while.”

Carmellini waited on the porch of the house, which was right beside the store, while Fred went inside. In minutes he was back, rifle in hand.

The Winchester had apparently spent much of its life collecting dings and scratches in a pickup truck and had rarely if ever been oiled. Rust had eaten at the finish in a variety of places, although not too badly. With a twenty-inch barrel, the little lever-action rifle was compact and handy.

“Just needs a little oil,” Fred said. “and that rust will come right off. Sharp little gun.”

“Can we shoot it?”

“Got some shells.” Fred produced four cartridges from his pocket. “Shoots good. Just shoot at the roof of the doghouse over there. Ol’ Buck died last winter, ain’t gonna get another dog. No, sir! Hard seeing them go.”

The doghouse was about forty yards away. Carmellini raised the rifle, lined up the sights, and squeezed one off. Worked the lever, fired again, for four shots. The four holes in the roof could be covered by a pie plate.

“Not bad,” Fred said. “Offhand like that and all. Little practice and you’ll be okay.”

“How much?”

“Two hundred.”

Carmellini shook his head sadly. “I was afraid of that. Too pricey. With this rust, one-fifty.”

They went back to the store while they dickered. Carmellini ended up paying $200 cash for the rifle, a well-used gun case, two boxes of shells, and a can of gun oil. He put his purchases in the trunk of the Mercedes and drove away.