Balance of Power

ELE VEN

In a stark motel room just off a highway interchange outside of Hartford, Sarah waited for her caller.

His rules were strict and unbending. Sarah must come alone. She must take a room in this motel. She must wait until he came. She could not know his name, or anything about him.

Apprehensive, she looked about the depressing rectangle—cheap pastoral art; a spindly fake brass lamp; an aqua bedspread; one dirty window with a view of the parking lot. Her caller had insisted that she take a smoking room, and the bedcover reeked of cigarettes. She wondered whether he would need a smoke after slitting her throat and raping her. Instead of a gun there was pepper spray in her purse.

When the telephone rang, she started.

"Are you alone?" the reedy voice inquired.

"Yes."

"I'm in the lobby. But they won't give me your room number."

Sarah felt her flesh crawl. "Two-oh-three."

There was a click as he hung up.

It would be all too easy, Sarah thought. A predator prowling the Internet had found their web site and, drawn to Sarah by the Tierney case, decided to lure her by posing as a tipster. His rules—designed to suggest excessive caution—were a cover for sexual pathology, or perhaps an antiabortion fanatic. She had never felt so vulnerable.

When the quiet knock came at last, Sarah put the pepper spray in the pocket of her suit coat. Slowly, she cracked open the door.

He was perhaps fifty—slight and fairly short, his red thinning hair streaked with silver. The skin drawn tight over his face had a shiny, scalded look and his blue eyes were sharp and wary. "Are you alone?" he asked again.

Wordless, Sarah backed inside.

He was carrying a battered briefcase. In a flash of black humor, Sarah wondered if that was where he kept the Lexington P-2.

"Why all the secrecy?" she demanded.

Softly, he closed the door behind them. She barely heard the latch.

With a mute gesture, Sarah directed him to the Swedish modern chair she had moved to the corner farthest from the door. He hesitated, resistant, before perching on its edge. Only then did Sarah sit at the end of the bed, saying, "You didn't answer my question."

To her alarm, his lips formed a dissociated smile which did not display his teeth. "Long ago, Sarah, I learned that people can't be trusted. That includes my superiors at Lexington."

"You know who I am," Sarah persisted. "I've done exactly what you asked—however foolish that may be."

Comprehension entered his piercing eyes. "You think maybe I'm some sort of pervert."

"No. Maybe a particular sort of pervert."

This elicited a harsh, disturbing laugh. "Look," Sarah said with the force of apprehension, "I promise to play it straight with you. But I'm not staying another minute without knowing who you are."

The mirthless smile returned. Softly, he answered, "I'm Norman Conn."

His tone carried an assertion of his significance. Searching her memory, Sarah struggled to recall whether she had seen the name. Then the numbing hours spent sifting through worthless files in Lexington's warehouse yielded their first useful scrap of knowledge.

"You're in quality control."

"The manager," Conn amended. "My department also processes trace requests for crime guns."

This was real, Sarah knew at once. She felt herself release a breath. "Why did you call me?"

He gave her a withering look of amusement. "You don't remember Vietnam, do you? Do you even know anyone who served?"

Whatever this question signified, Sarah sensed that he expected candor. "Not well," she acknowledged. "Somehow my father got out of the draft. He doesn't talk about that much."

This time the smile held a sour hint of bitterness and moral superiority. "Neither do I, Sarah. But I've had thirty-five years to think about it."

His repetition of her name made Sarah uneasy. And yet it hinted at a certain intimacy; were she patient, he would deign to tell his story. She was suddenly sure that this was indispensable to their transaction. "The war?" she asked.

"The deaths."

There was nothing to say. Silent, Sarah tried to convey an empathic patience for what surely must be difficult to express.

"I was in the infantry," Conn said abruptly. "One morning I was walking point. In twelve days I was going home, and they still had me rooting for land mines." The smile twitched. "I missed one.

"Three men were mangled beyond help. But it took Boynton—the black guy—two hours to die." A film moistened his eyes, and his smile betrayed an effort of will. "In the movies, he always told me, the black guy dies first."

For Sarah, this last detail invested the banal sparseness of Conn's account with the echo of a long-ago psychic explosion. But the glimmer of empathy did little to ease her fear that he might be unstable, or that his view of reality was skewed by guilt, the distrust of authority bred by having become flotsam in a senseless war.

"If what you know can help us," she admonished, "we'll have to list you as a trial witness. Not only would your employers know, but they'd take your deposition. Secrecy's not an option."

Conn's gaze was implacable, almost contemptuous. "I was nineteen," he said. "Ever since, I've wished I could go back and save three lives. Now I've got a second chance, even if I never know how many lives, or whose."

For the first time, Sarah acknowledged the briefcase at his feet. "What's in there?" she inquired.

Reaching for the cigarettes in his shirt pocket, Conn's eyes bored into hers. "The documents they told me to destroy."

* * *

Alone in the motel room, Sarah called Lara Kilcannon on her private line. She felt exhausted. The brown briefcase lay beside her on the bed.

"I'm glad you called," Lara said without preface. "I've got something to tell you. We need to find the person who sold John Bowden the P-2, correct?"

Lara seemed so intent that Sarah decided to defer her discovery, however important. "To start," she answered. "Ultimately, we need to prove that Bowden bought it because of Lexington's ad."

Lara was briefly silent. "There may be more to it than that. Let me tell you where to look."