Part Three The Hunter

Chapter Eighteen California — Illinois: 29 September

1

He said his goodbyes to Amy and Billy and the Meuths; he carried the suitcase down to the car and put it in the back seat and walked off beyond earshot with Jan and Ronny.

Because of the boy they were both holding back a great deal. Ronny shook his hand gravely. Mathieson fought back the impulse to embrace him: Ronny would hate it in front of the others.

“I want you to take damn good care of your mother. Don’t sass her.”

He took Jan in his arms. “It’s going to work, you know. Things are going to be all right.”

“Sure.” She kissed him. He was startled by the ferocity with which she clenched him against her as if she could draw strength from him.

Ronny said, “You still look lousy in that moustache. It makes you look like Zachary Scott.”

“What have you got against Zachary Scott?”

“He’s dead,” Ronny said and turned away.

“I’m not dead, Ronny. Listen to me.”

The boy turned reluctantly.

“Are you listening?”

“Sure I am.”

“Put a little trust in your old man. I’m going to pin these bastards like butterflies. They’ll never touch us again. I want you to stop feeling sorry for yourself. If you don’t, you’ll feel like a damn fool afterward — all that sour worry for nothing. Understand me?”

“I just don’t want you to get hurt. You don’t even have a gun.”

“Guns don’t answer any questions, Ron.”

“Who’s asking questions? They just want to kill us.”

“They won’t get the chance. Believe that.”

“All right.”

“I mean it now.”

But the boy wasn’t convinced and he couldn’t think of any way to reassure him.

Jan said, “You’ll miss your plane.” It was the next thing to a whisper.

He kissed her again, trying to mean it. Then he walked away from them to the car.

Vasquez got in behind the wheel.

Homer held the passenger door. Mathieson shook his hand. “I’ll see you in Washington.”

“And me in little old New York,” Roger said. “Ride easy, old horse.”

“You know this is going to work,” Mathieson said.

“Damn right I do.” Roger smiled a little; of them all Roger was the one who had no reservations.

“Take care now, old horse.”

Vasquez drove him down past the paddock fence. Behind them Jan and Ronny stood in the driveway waving.

They rolled very fast down the gravel track. The dust lifted high and their passage exploded birds out of the trees. Vasquez said, “I’ll have four men down here by tonight to keep watch. Don’t alarm yourself over their safety. No one will get through to them. If there’s an attempt my men have orders to use their weapons.”

“If there’s no other choice.”

“There won’t be if Pastor’s men come here again. They’ll come only if they know they’ve got the right place. But I still believe they’re safest here. Pastor has already searched it — he’ll have no reason to come back.”

“I hope you’re right.”

Vasquez slowed for the turning into the county road. “You’re one of the most closely guarded people I’ve ever met. Have you always been remote or is it something that’s happened since these attacks began?”

“You’re a great one to talk.”

“I haven’t got a marriage to save.”

Mathieson closed his eyes. Vasquez’s smugness made him want to snarl. “You’ve got a wife.”

“In name,” Vasquez said. “We don’t share premises. You’re evading the point.”

“I don’t need two-penny psychoanalysis from you.”

“You’re frightened. It’s understandable. But aren’t you confusing the source of your fears? It’s not your friends or your wife you need to fear.”

2

When the flight was called he left Vasquez and went along to the boarding gate, being careful to stay in the center of the crowd, neither first nor last.

The plane was not crowded; to his relief the seat next to his was empty. Stewardesses went down the aisle looking at passengers’ seat belts and offering magazines and headphones. At takeoff he felt a belly-churning sensation when the wheels thudded up into their sockets while the plane still seemed only inches off the ground. Then they were climbing steeply and he relaxed his grip on the arms of the seat.

He spent the three hours neither sleeping nor reading; he stared at the clouds and worked out pieces of the scheme in his mind. But anxious thoughts about Jan kept distracting him.

At O’Hare he took the first taxi in the rank. He was empty-handed; the bag was checked through and he had four hours between planes.

The taxi dropped him at the John Hancock tower. It was a chill bleak day, the heavy overcast scudding quickly overhead, pedestrians chasing their hats in the Chicago winds.

He went into the tower and cruised through the basement arcade of shops, making an aimless circuit, emerging from the side entrance and crossing briskly to the hotel garage opposite; he hired a nondescript small car there and drove it down Lake Shore Drive to the Loop.

He was not particularly well acquainted with Chicago but he knew the main landmarks and found his way without difficulty to his destination. He had arrived early for the meeting in order to see who went into the hotel. He recognized no one until he saw Bradleigh step out of a taxi and walk inside, hatless and ruddy, the tails of his open topcoat flapping in the gray wind.

He gave Bradleigh a five-minute lead, saw nothing that alarmed him, got out of the car, locked it and crossed the street just as rain began to slant onto the pavement. By the time he reached the hotel it was pouring.

Bradleigh was in the bar at a side table, cigarette smoke trailing from his mouth and nostrils. Mathieson went straight to him but Bradleigh’s glance passed over him twice without recognition until he was within three paces; then Bradleigh beamed, humor in the gentle eyes: “I didn’t recognize you.”

“That’s good.” He pulled the chair out and sat down.

“It’s not just the hair and the moustache. You move differently. Have you lost weight?”

“Redistributed it.”

“You look ten years younger.”

“I’m in a little bit of a hurry, Glenn. Can we let that suffice for the amenities?”

“Do you want a drink?”

“No. I’d like to know what you’ve found out — how things are going, if anywhere.”

“That’s a little brusque, isn’t it?”

“I haven’t got much time.”

“I’m beginning to wonder who’s doing a favor for whom by coming here.”

“Glenn, you still owe me a debt. I’m not letting you off the hook.” For the first time in months he was making a contact that might be noticed — he was exposing himself and it made him nervous.

Bradleigh smiled reassuringly. “Don’t worry. I took all the standard measures and then some. We’re not being watched.”

“Not unless someone found out about this appointment.”

“No one did. Count on it.” The ritual lighting of a fresh filter tip; then Bradleigh said, “We’ve picked up a few tidbits on C. K. Gillespie. We’ll be ready to nail him before long. When we do we expect him to sing.”

“How long before you pounce?”

“A week, ten days. It depends on developments. If he doesn’t let a few more things slip where our bugs can pick them up, we’ll use what we’ve got and grab him anyway. We’ve got leads on at least four men who probably were involved in the Los Angeles business and the Oklahoma shooting—”

“Including Deffeldorf and Tyrone?”

Bradleigh’s jaw dropped. “Where did you get those names?”

“A Ouija board.”

“Have you been playing at amateur sleuth?”

“No.”

“Then I don’t get—”

“Just out of curiosity, who are the other two you’re investigating? Aside from Tyrone and Deffeldorf?”

“A motorcycle freak named Ortiz and a friend of his by the name of Tony Senno.”

“Angelinos?”

“From the area, yes. Burbank.”

“Have you got hard evidence?”

“We’re building a pretty good case.”

“I hope you make it stick.”

“We will. We’re taking our time, we want to make sure it’s airtight before we make the grab. The biggest break was Ortiz’s rifle. We found it where he ditched it in a street trash can. He’d broken it down into components but we got enough to prove it’s the rifle that fired at you — and the serial numbers that trace it back to Ortiz.”

“Fingerprints?”

“No. Nobody’s that stupid. It’s mainly circumstantial at the moment but we’re convinced they’re the right men. We’ll take all four of them simultaneously. Then we’ll work on them individually. Whichever one cracks, that’s the one we’ll use to pin the other three to the wall. OK, that’s the good news. The bad news, of course, is that there’s no chance any of them will ever be able to lead us back to Frank Pastor in a way that would stand up in court.”

“We knew that before.”

Bradleigh shook his head. “I get my nocturnal emissions from dreaming that someday I’ll find enough rope around Pastor’s neck to hang him with.”

“Have you got anything at all on Pastor or Ezio Martin or George Ramiro?”

“I don’t — Where’d you get Ramiro’s name?”

“It’s a talkative Ouija board.”

“I don’t know if I’m obliged to give you every scrap that I’ve got.”

“It’s damn well the least you can give me, Glenn.”

Bradleigh showed his discomfiture. “Well as you know we’ve been bugging Gillespie every way from Sunday. Mostly he talks with Ezio Martin and mostly they do their talking in Martin’s office in Manhattan. It’s fully equipped — for example with an electronic jammer. All we get is static.”

“But you do have those bits and pieces.”

“Yes. For one thing, we’re not the only ones who’ve been bugging Gillespie.”

“No?”

“There are three sets of microphones in his office and his apartment. One set, each, is ours.”

“And the other two?”

“We think Gillespie installed one set himself. The Nixon syndrome — the compulsion to record his own crimes for posterity. In case he ever has to go back and find out what actually happened. These people deal in lies all the time. Sometimes they need to check back, find out what lies they told somebody so that they can remember to stick to the story the next time they meet the same person.”

“I see. And the third set?”

“We think it’s Ezio Martin. We think maybe Ezio’s getting a little jealous. Maybe he bugged Gillespie to try and get something on him so he can discredit Gillespie with Pastor. Martin would love to drive a wedge between them.”

“That makes sense.”

“Anyway we know the bugs aren’t another government agency.”

“Any evidence stronger than guesswork?”

“Yes. Fairly strong evidence. But I’d rather not divulge it.”

“Just out of curiosity, if Gillespie happened across the two sets of microphones in his office — the ones he didn’t plant himself — could he tell the difference between yours and Martin’s? Would he know one bug was official and one wasn’t?”

“He might, if he knew what to look for.”

“Namely?”

“Why are you pumping me about it?”

“If I’m ever bugged,” Mathieson lied, “I’d like to know how to tell whether it’s official or private.”

“There’s no way to tell for sure. Gillespie’s an easy obvious case. The next one might not be.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“Hell, it’s simple enough. Ezio’s equipment is wireless. He’s got the best stuff money can buy — voice-activated miniature transmitters. Somewhere in the neighborhood there’ll be a small receiving set and a cassette recorder attached to it. The recorder doesn’t start running until somebody starts talking. It’s not the most reliable system but it’s the most practical, especially for an organization that doesn’t have unlimited man-hours to spend on monitoring. But we prefer the old-fashioned wire, ourselves. A wire isn’t subject to interference by radio-jamming equipment. The reception isn’t affected by static in the air or neon lights in the vicinity. Anyhow that’s the difference and it’s easy enough to spot. The official microphones have wires attached to them. The other stuff — the mikes we think are Ezio Martin’s — they don’t have any wires on them.”

“What about the bugs you said he planted on himself?”

“They’re wired right into his own tape recorders in the desk drawers. They’re activated by switches hidden under the desks.”

“What about the phones?”

“We tapped the incoming lines. The other outfit puts bugs in the receivers. As a matter of fact that’s where most of Ezio’s mikes are — in the phones. It’s as good a place to hide them as any.” Bradleigh smiled vaguely. “I wish we’d been able to get wires into Ezio Martin’s offices in New York. All we’ve been able to use has been bugs sewn into the buttons of Gillespie’s clothes and they’ve been wiped out by jammers whenever he goes inside. If we could get wires into Ezio’s office we’d probably get enough on them to put them all away for consecutive five-hundred-year prison terms.”

“Tell me what else you’ve found out.”

“This may come as a shock to you, old buddy, but a lot of things don’t have the remotest thing to do with you.”

“Anything that has to do with Frank Pastor has to do with me. The more I know about him, the better I can keep out of his way.”

“You’re clutching at straws.”

“Let me be the judge of that.”

“I’m sorry. It just isn’t included in the price of your ticket.”

“My ticket came pretty high, Glenn. For instance when you people put my face and the Paul Baxter name out on a national FBI bulletin. Did you think that wouldn’t get back to Pastor?”

“It wasn’t my doing. I put a stop to it as fast as I humanly could. Who’s been feeding you all this information about Deffeldorf and Tyrone and Ramiro and the FBI bulletin? Did you hire a private security outfit?”

“No,” he lied. He had to put Bradleigh at ease and it had to be plausible. “Pastor found out I was off your hook and he decided I might get in touch with my old friends. He staked some of them out. We made the mistake of phoning one of them. His phone was tapped. Pastor’s hoodlums started putting pressure on my friend, so my friend did some inquiring — he wanted to find out who was harassing him. He’s a man with contacts in Los Angeles — big executives who have access to police officials. He found out about Deffeldorf and the FBI bulletin and all that. He told me about it — from a pay phone, of course.”

“What friend was this?”

“He’s out of it now. They’ve been leaving him alone. I don’t want him interrogated by your people — I don’t want him dragged back into it.”

Bradleigh tapped his cigarette on the tabletop and lighted it. “What name are you going under?”

“Try another one.”

Bradleigh smiled, evidently without wanting to. “Anything you need?”

“Information.”

“About what?”

“Anything you’ve got.”

Bradleigh said, “There’s nothing you’d find useful. We’re talking about the results of a secret investigation that’s still in progress. It’s got to stay secret until we blow the whistle.”

“It’s been nice talking to you, Glenn. Thanks for coming on such short notice. I’ll be in touch.”

Chapter Nineteen Washington, D.C.: 2–4 October

1

He spent two hours with Homer sitting in the parked Cadillac at a meter opposite the nine-story office building, Homer had the various photographs arranged on the seat between them — Gillespie, his junior partner, the two secretaries, the clerk and the receptionist.

At 4:30 the clerk appeared with a briefcase and walked to the corner to wait for a bus. Homer said, “Probably an errand to do on his way home. At this hour he won’t be coming back.”

“Let’s hope.”

In the next forty minutes people emerged from the building in knots and they scanned faces carefully. Mathieson checked off the receptionist and, at two minutes past five, the two secretaries. At 5:10 Homer stiffened. “There he is.”

Mathieson watched C. K. Gillespie walk away toward the parking garage at the end of the block. The heels of Gillespie’s polished Italian shoes threw back brisk hard echoes. Mathieson studied him keenly: You could tell a great deal about a man by his walk. Gillespie strutted: a tense man, alert, arrogant.

Mathieson said, “It’s suite seven-one-six.”

“What kind of locks?”

“Just one, the original equipment. Eaton Yale and Towne. Standard unit. He wouldn’t keep anything incriminating in the office. But there could be a burglar alarm.”

“According to our preliminary work-up there’s only one alarm circuit in the building — jewelry outfit on the third floor.” Homer checked his notes. “Twenty-four-hour doorman service. After six you have to sign in when you enter the building. That’s why we’ve got to go in sometime in the next half hour.”

“I’d feel more comfortable after dark.”

“That’s just instinct. Actually we’re less conspicuous now, while there are still a lot of people in the building.”

A red Thunderbird with Gillespie at the wheel rolled out of the parking garage and Mathieson watched it dwindle into the Connecticut Avenue traffic.

“That leaves one unaccounted for,” Mathieson said.

They waited until 5:40. He was restless. “Where’s the junior partner?”

“Maybe he’s working late. Maybe he wasn’t in the office today at all.”

“If he’s working late we’ve had it.”

“Then we come back tomorrow afternoon, that’s all.” Homer looked at his watch. “We’d better go in.”

“I’m not crazy about it.”

“The office door has a frosted glass pane. If there’s a light on inside we’ll back off and try again tomorrow.”

Mathieson lifted the attaché case from the back seat. They walked into the lobby, two gray-suited businessmen arriving for an after-hours appointment. The doorman was engulfed in the stream of people pouring from the elevators and flooding across to the doors; he hardly glanced at the two arrivals. When one elevator emptied itself Mathieson and Homer stepped in.

They had the cage to themselves on the way to the seventh floor. Mathieson opened the case and pawed through the half-dozen rings of keys. “Yale, but which one?”

“Probably that one.” Homer singled out a master key.

Mathieson took it off the ring and put the rest of the Yale ring in his pocket. A single key was less conspicuous than a bulky ring of them. If the first key didn’t work he’d have to bring out the ring.

Gillespie’s door was the last on the left at the end of a forty-foot corridor. They passed two secretaries and an executive going home for the night; the executive nodded politely as they passed him.

Homer slowed the pace. Mathieson glanced over his shoulder. The secretaries and the executive were waiting for the elevator.

Sotto voce Mathieson said, “We can’t just stand here.”

There was no light behind the frosted glass. Mathieson tried the knob; it was locked. His palm slipped on the brass — he wiped the sweat off against the front of his suit jacket and jabbed the key into the lock.

Homer laughed loudly. “You should’ve seen old Charlie’s face when the decision came down.”

The key wouldn’t turn.

Behind them the elevator doors opened. The three people disappeared into the cage.

He twisted the key but it wouldn’t turn. He stepped back and reached into his pocket.

“Wait a minute,” Homer said. “Let me have a try.” He jiggled the master key and after a moment Mathieson heard the tumblers click. He made a face and looked over his shoulder. The corridor was empty.

They slipped inside. Homer pushed the door shut behind him. From this point forward they would not talk: The microphones were alive.

Homer moved swiftly across the reception foyer. Mathieson glanced at the switchboard to see if any lines were lighted. There was no sign of life in the place but in his mind he rehearsed a nervous explanation designed to bluff an exit if anyone appeared.

Homer was halfway down the length of the partitioned hall by the time Mathieson followed him through. Quickly they checked out the four rooms. Two side offices, a law library and filing room combined, and the big corner office — Gillespie’s lair. There was no one.

The safe was in the law library; that was where he caught up with Homer. It was a floor model, a Mosler, probably three-quarters of a ton in weight — it stood four feet high; there were two combination dials. Homer glanced at the safe, then at Mathieson and shook his head. Nobody but a top professional box man could hope to get into it without using a torch — and that would undoubtedly destroy the contents.

With gloves on their fingers they went quickly through the file drawers — looking mainly for files on Pastor, Martin, and the various names Mathieson had used. The only result was a thin folder on Ezio Martin; it contained nothing useful — a handful of Xeroxes of bills, receipts and canceled checks and copies of two real estate contracts.

He hadn’t expected anything but it might have turned up a tidbit; he wasn’t disappointed by the failure. They went into the corner office and Mathieson crossed toward the windows to draw the blinds but Homer shook his head violently at him and Mathieson, belatedly comprehending, withdrew without touching the cords. The drawing of blinds could be noticed from outside the building: It would have been a blunder. I’m still a novice. The realization alarmed him.

They took screwdrivers from the attaché case and began to prowl in search of microphones.

He was still sweating: forehead, palms, crotch. The plan had seemed simple when he’d formulated it but he was seeing holes in it now — all the things that might go wrong. Suppose Gillespie forgot something and returned to the office to get it? The search was taking far too long...

The wireless bug was easy; it was in the handset of one of the two phones on the desk. That was Ezio Martin’s mike and after he had pointed it out to Homer he put the phone back together with the bug intact; he’d need to have that one function properly.

Homer found Bradleigh’s mike when he began unscrewing the faceplates of the electric wall plug receptacles. The wires disappeared back into the baseboard, going through holes that had already been cut for the building’s electric power lines. There was enough slack. Homer drew a short loop of wire out of the receptacle and went to work with the wire cutters and splicing materials from the attaché case.

Mathieson watched him. Homer’s fingers were deft inside the thin cloth gloves. He spliced the new wire onto the cut ends of the microphone wiring; he ran it down out of sight behind the metal baseboard heat shield and threaded it around the room in that fashion to the molding by the office door. He mounted the miniature toggle at the edge of the baseboard just inside the door. You wouldn’t notice it unless you knew what to look for; it was a thin plastic contact switch and blended neatly with the baseboard and might have been an insignificant piece of the heating apparatus. He made sure it was in the “On” position and screwed it down firmly. Then he stuffed the original wiring back into the base receptacle and screwed the faceplate into place. The bug was now functioning as it had functioned before; but a nudge of a man’s heel against the newly installed switch by the door would disconnect it and another nudge would switch it on again.

They resumed the search. There was another wireless bug in the junior partner’s office and a second wired mike in the receptionist’s foyer; they left these intact. At 7:10 they began to go through Gillespie’s desk drawers and at 7:30 they gave it up and left the office. Homer locked the door and they put the Yale keys back in the attaché case and walked toward the elevator. “We’ll have to sign out, of course. Dream up a plausible name. We were visiting the Johnson Greeting Card Company.”

They waited for the elevator to come. Mathieson said, “Thanks. That was a beautiful job.”

“You going to tell me how it’s supposed to work?”

“Afterward.”

“Why not now?”

Mathieson said, “Maybe I’m just paranoid. A secret’s only a secret as long as one person knows it. But you can see how it’s going to work — you wired it yourself.”

“All I can see is, you expect something to be said in that office, and you want it heard by Ezio Martin but not by federal agents. I don’t get much out of that.”

“Are you sure? Think about it.”

They went down and signed out; they walked to the car and got in. Homer put the key in the ignition but didn’t turn it; he was scowling. Finally he shook his head. “No. I don’t get to first base.”

“Good. If you can’t figure it out then Bradleigh won’t figure it out either. He’ll know his bug’s been tampered with, but he won’t know why.”

“Sometimes you’re a pain in the ass, you know that?”

“I hope I am,” Mathieson said.

2

He made the phone call at 10:30 in the morning from a pay phone in the lobby of the Hay Adams. “Is Mr. Gillespie in?”

“Who’s calling please?”

“This is Walter Benson. From Oklahoma.”

“I’ll see if he’s in...”

He waited, nervously impatient. He’d rehearsed it endlessly.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Gillespie?”

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“I gave your secretary the name Walter Benson.”

“I know you did. Who are you?”

“Actually my name is Robert Zeck but it won’t mean anything to you — I’m sure you haven’t heard of me.” He made his voice a fruity tenor, lilting and supercilious. “I happen to have come across some items I believe would interest you.”

“Yes?”

“Let me mention three names to you. Edward Merle. John Fusco. Philip Draper.”

“Never heard of them. What’s this all—”

“Naturally you haven’t heard of them. I really rather dislike telephones, I’m sure you understand — perhaps I could drop by your office for a little chat?”

“Where are you?”

“Not far from your office. I can be there in half an hour.”

“I’ll be here.”

He went into the coffee shop and dawdled over a cup of tea and a newspaper: partly to calm his nerves and partly because it wouldn’t hurt Gillespie to stew a while. Then he went into the men’s room and inspected his disguise in the mirror. It was nothing radical. The padding under his newly bought suit added the appearance of twenty pounds to his weight. The cotton wads between upper gums and cheeks broadened his face. The bleach — a rinse that could be washed out immediately — made his hair and moustache a dirty tawny blond. The glasses with black plastic frames lent pedantic seriousness and further obscured the rectangular structure of his face. Finally there were the rings — six gaudy big rings on the fingers of both hands. The sort of thing that would be remembered at the expense of other detail. The suit was an ill-cut gray pinstripe, the tie was something with dreary red-and-black diagonal stripes. The overall appearance was that of a weary civil servant.

At five minutes to eleven he left the hotel and walked to the taxi rank.

3

When he left the elevator on the seventh floor he pressed his elbow in against the hard weight of the .38 under his jacket. If the scheme worked he wouldn’t need it, but Gillespie was unpredictable and it might take a show of arms.

The receptionist took him back through the partition and he trailed along as though he hadn’t seen the place before. She showed him into the corner office and disengaged herself while Gillespie rose to his feet.

Gillespie was taller than he’d thought.

“Mr. Zeck.” The voice and eyes were guarded.

An attack of nerves stopped him just inside the door. He cleared his throat and pushed his voice into the higher register. “Nice office. Very nice, yes.” He bobbed his eyes around the room, feigned a minor loss of equilibrium and pressed the side of his shoe firmly against the switch that disconnected Bradleigh’s microphone.

He pushed the door shut and stepped forward, contriving a nervous smile.

“What’s this all about?”

“Let’s be circumspect.” He stared whimsically through his glasses at a point a yard above Gillespie’s head. “You’re really quite well fixed here, aren’t you.”

Gillespie sidestepped to sit down and the movement brought his feet in view under the desk: He was wearing platform shoes. That explained it. Yesterday on the street Mathieson had seen him only at a distance. A short man who wanted to be tall.

Mathieson flashed a courteous unconvincing smile. He felt no pity at all: He’d thought he might but Gillespie’s sharp arrogant face made such an emotion impossible. He felt a sort of pleasure. “Robert Zeck is not my name, of course.”

“I’m busy, Mr. Zeck.”

“I won’t take long. May I sit down?”

Gillespie jerked his head toward a chair. Mathieson lowered himself and crossed his legs and flashed an unconvincing smile. “As you know, the bureaucracy works in mysterious ways its blunders to perform. Somehow even the most secret of secrets has a way of being filed away in quintuplicate. I came across your name recently on a printout from a government computer.”

“My name?”

“In connection with certain reports turned in by the Witness Security Program office.”

If Gillespie was surprised he didn’t show it. “Do you work for the government?”

“It doesn’t matter who I work for. At the moment I’m working for myself — that’s all you need to know. I may be working for you, for that matter.”

“For me?”

“I’m doing you a service, Mr. Gillespie. The printout had to do with confidential informants — CIs as we call them.”

“I don’t see what that’s got to do with me.”

“Normally the identities of CIs aren’t put in writing. The identity of the informant usually is a private matter between him and his contact. Now and then in an excess of bureaucratic zeal the government agent makes the mistake of reporting not only the information but its source.”

“I’m losing patience fast, Mr. Zeck.”

“I doubt that. I’ve got you over a barrel.”

Gillespie’s laugh was a cruel snort.

Mathieson kept his voice pitched high. “A few months ago you extorted information from a secretary in the Witness Security office. She gave you the current names and addresses of four men — Merle, Benson, Fusco and Draper. You passed that information on to your clients, Frank Pastor and Ezio Martin.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“The Witness Security office discovered the leak. The secretary was taken into custody and persuaded to talk. Naturally she gave them your name.”

“She lied, then.”

“Why? Because you’d never told her your real name? It happens she took the precaution of noting down the license number of that red Thunderbird of yours. Then she identified your photograph. You know we’d get this done a lot faster if you’d stop interrupting me with pointless denials.”

“Say what you came to say.”

“The next step is an assumption, I admit. I can’t prove it but I assume you must have realized how risky your situation was. As soon as you got the information from the secretary and passed it on to your clients, you became a member of a conspiracy. An accessory to attempted murder.”

“That’s a crock. I never—”

“Well you may have had some other reason, I admit that. If so, I don’t know what it was. In any case I do know what happened. You had to protect yourself in case anything went wrong. Something did go wrong, of course — the secretary was arrested and she incriminated you. But you’d already prepared for that. You’d already made a clandestine contact with government agents.”

“I what?

“It’s all on the computer printout, Mr. Gillespie. You made a deal with the government — you talked. Information in return for your own immunity. That explains why you haven’t been arrested, of course.”

“You’re out of your mind.” Gillespie’s voice climbed.

“You said that before.” Mathieson smiled imperturbably. Inside he felt a chilled satisfaction: It was working. Gillespie had taken the hook. “The state of my sanity is beside the point.”

“You’re not going to—”

“I’m going to talk and you’re going to listen. You gave information to the government. Tipped off by you, the government was able to hide three of the four intended victims before Frank Pastor’s killers could reach them. How else could the government have acted so fast, if you hadn’t given them advance warning? They didn’t even arrest the secretary until several days later. The information couldn’t have come from her. It came from you.”

“The hell it did. There was an attack on Benson and they put two and two together, that’s all. Nobody tipped them to anything.”

“I see where you’d have to take that position. But it won’t hold up.”

“I’ve never contacted anybody in that office. I never gave information about anything to anybody. I don’t know where you got—”

“Your information was too late to protect Benson but it gave them time to hide the other three men. Now the field agents file weekly reports on these cases. One of those reports drew my attention. I happened to retrieve it in a batch of printouts that had to do with a computer audit. I saw the report and the significance of it was obvious. It states that you came forward privately to a government agent and told him the whole story. You’re pinned like a butterfly, you know.”

“You’re stark raving bananas.”

“Look at it this way. If that report should ever be shown to Frank Pastor or Ezio Martin, what do you suppose would happen to you?”

“Wait a minute. There’s no such report and you know it.”

“Not now there isn’t. I agree. I erased your name from the memory bank of the computer. I substituted the phrase ‘confidential informant’ wherever your name appeared in the printout of that report. Do you understand now?”

“I understand that you’re a—”

“I’ve still got two tapes of the original printout. One copy is in my possession. I don’t have it here with me but I can lay my hands on it. The second copy is in a sealed envelope in the custody of a disinterested party. He has instructions to mail the tape to Frank Pastor if anything should happen to me.”

“What kind of slimy game is this? What are you—”

“To put it simply, blackmail.”

“You bastard.”

“I’ve got evidence that can destroy you, Gillespie. If I put it in Pastor’s hands you’re a dead man. I’m willing to sell you the evidence. It’s a simple straightforward proposition.”

“It’s a fucking lie. I never informed on—”

“The computer says you did. Computers don’t lie. Now shall we discuss terms?”

“I’m not discussing anything.”

“That’s shortsighted.”

“The whole thing’s a fucking lie.”

“Why should the agency lie about it?”

Gillespie squinted shrewdly at him. “You’re one of them.”

“One of what?”

“Corcoran and Bradleigh. One of that outfit.”

“The Witness Security Program? No, I’m afraid not. Not my department at all.”

“Sure you are. They sent you up here with this load of shit. It was supposed to scare me into spilling my guts.”

“If you doubt the tape exists I’ll be happy to make a copy of it and send it to you.”

“If there’s a tape it’s a phony. It doesn’t prove a thing.”

“Let’s go over this again. First, if you didn’t inform, then how did the government know Merle and Fusco and Draper were in danger? Second, since the secretary implicated you months ago, why weren’t you arrested? Your freedom alone is persuasive evidence that the tape isn’t a fake.”

“It’s a fucking frame. I don’t know whose idea this was, but by God—”

“The tapes will cost you one hundred thousand dollars. In cash. Small unmarked untraceable currency. Random serial numbers. When the money’s in my hands I’ll deliver both copies of the tape to you. Otherwise I send one copy to Frank Pastor and one copy to Ezio Martin.”

Mathieson stood up. He moved quickly to the door.

Gillespie slowly rose from his chair. He stared at Mathieson with no expression at all on his sharp features. Mathieson turned brightly, pressing his foot against the switch, activating Bradleigh’s microphone. “I’ll be in touch in a day or two. Think it over and let me know how you want to proceed. It’s up to you. I have every confidence you’ll do the right thing.”

Gillespie didn’t say a word. Mathieson opened the door, went through it and pulled it shut behind him.

By the time he reached the elevator he was shaking badly and the sweat burst from his pores, but he had a savage sense of triumph.

Chapter Twenty Washington, D.C.: 4 October

1

Gillespie stewed for half an hour. The receptionist announced the arrival of a client; Gillespie said, “I’ve got to make a call. You’ll have to ask him to wait.” Then he picked up the private line. He put the coded card into the phone and let it dial for him.

“Bellamy Security, may I help you?”

“C. K. Gillespie. Let me talk to Ernie.”

“I’ll see if he’s in, Mr. Gillespie.”

“You do that. It’s important, honey.”

“Yes, sir. Hold on a minute please.”

In a moment she was back: “I have Mr. Guffin for you now.”

Ernie’s voice was coarse; you kept wishing he’d clear his throat. “Get off the line, Mary Lou.” Gillespie heard the click. “What can I do for you, counselor?”

“There was a man in my office about thirty-five minutes ago. Gave his name as Robert Zeck. Some kind of government computer technician — says he does audits on computerized files.”

“What do you want about him?”

“Robert Zeck’s a phony name. I want to find out who he is.”

“Anything to go on?”

“Blond hair. Blond moustache, no beard. Maybe five feet eleven but he’s stooped, he might be six one if he stood up straight. A hundred and ninety, two hundred pounds. Wears glasses with black frames and big rings on most of his fingers.”

“What was he wearing?”

“Gray suit, pinstripe. Not expensive. Off the peg. Desk type — junior-grade bureaucrat. He may be a fag, the way he talks.”

“Computer auditor. They’re a fairly rare breed, counselor. Shouldn’t take too long.”

“I’ve got his voice on tape if you want it.”

“First we’ll try the physical description. If we have to trot around with a cassette asking people do they recognize this voice, it could take forever.”

“Anyway I’d have to edit the tape before you used it.”

“Yeah. What’s your beef with him?”

“Just find him, all right?”

“Do my best, counselor.”

“Do it fast. Spend all the money you have to.”

“OK. You want daily reports?”

“Daily reports shit, Ernie, I want him turned up this afternoon.”

“Sure you do. I’ll call you when I get something. It may be today, it may be next week. You know how these things go.”

“Push it, Ernie.”

He cradled the phone and ran fingers back through his hair. “Shit.”

Then he reached for the intercom. “Send him in now.”

The rest of the morning was hell. His temper kept rising; he couldn’t concentrate on the work. At lunchtime he stayed in the office in case Ernie should call back. By two o’clock he was pacing the office. He went to the interphone: “That four o’clock appointment. Call him and cancel it if you can — make it Monday.”

“You’re going out?”

“No.” He switched it off.

He rewound the tape and played it back. It didn’t tell him anything new. He took the spool off and put a fresh one on the machine; he put the tape in his pocket. This thing could be dynamite.

At three he couldn’t stand it. He rang Bellamy’s. “Where the hell’s Ernie Guffin?”

“Why he’s in his office, Mr. Gillespie. I’ll connect you right away.”

“Counselor?”

“Ernie, where the hell are you? I give you a dead-simple job and I don’t hear a—”

“He’s not an auditor, counselor. We got that in two hours flat. He might be a computer technician, service type, programmer, anything. We’ve had to widen the thing and it’s likely to take a while. I’m sorry but that’s the way it is. All I can tell you, I’ll call you the minute we turn up anything.”

When he hung up he scowled at the telephone. Not an auditor. Who the hell was the guy, then?

He waited until six but there was no call. He got the red car out of the garage and headed home but he realized he hadn’t had lunch — his stomach was growling; he stopped in a Chinese place and ate a quick meal without tasting it.

When he drove up the avenue toward his apartment house he saw them sitting in a green hardtop right across the street from the entrance. He recognized the driver right away — the man had brought messages from Ezio Martin a few times.

They hadn’t seen him; he was sure of it. He turned off a block early and went back through side streets toward the center of the city. He was shaking.

He pulled over and parked. It was a slum street off Fourteenth Street Northwest. He ignored the black kids playing on the sidewalk. He had to think. He slid down in the seat and leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes but that wasn’t any good. He started it up again and drove aimlessly.

They were waiting for him. What for? An innocent message? Perhaps. Two of them in the car. It didn’t take two men to deliver a message.

Dynamite blows up in my office and nine hours later two guys are waiting for me.

The office. The answer had to be there.

He found a meter on the street; it was after seven and he didn’t have to put a dime into it; he signed in at the security man’s ledger and went up to the seventh floor knowing what he would find and hoping he wouldn’t find it.

In his office he tore things apart methodically. He wasn’t expert but he had a feeling he’d know it when he saw it. He opened the drawers and felt their bottoms. He got down flat on his back and inspected the undersides of the furniture. He unscrewed light bulbs. Then he took the desk radio apart. He inspected his own tape recorder to make sure no extra wires led away from it. Then it occurred to him to check the telephones. He started unscrewing mouthpieces and earpieces. Nothing there; he unscrewed the bottoms and opened the phones up.

He found it taped to the plastic inside the second phone. It looked a little like the kind of flat disk battery he used in his electric wristwatch but it had tiny grille holes and he knew what that meant.

He sagged back into the swivel chair. That was it, then. Ezio. It had to be Ezio. The two men in the green hardtop — he could figure out their instructions without much difficulty.

Ezio, he thought again. The computer auditor — Robert Zeck — Ezio had sent him. A plant, to give Ezio something on tape he could take to Frank. Ezio had always hated him. And Frank would buy it. And there was no way on earth he could talk Frank out of it.

He got up slowly and walked out of the office.

Chapter Twenty-One New York City: 5 October

1

Mathieson looked down through the window at the Forty-fourth Street traffic. It was thick with empty taxis coming east from Times Square after having dropped their fares in time for the 7:30 curtains. The panes were coated with an oily grime of soot.

Behind him Diego Vasquez said, “You’ve left him a few choices.”

“Not many.”

“He may even try to pay you the blackmail money.”

Roger said, “That’d be fine and dandy by me.”

Mathieson said, “I hope he does.”

“I doubt he’ll have time,” Vasquez said. “Ezio Martin was taping the whole conversation. The minute he listens to the tape, you may as well have killed Gillespie.”

Mathieson turned away from the window. “Is that what you think?”

“Certainly. You’re making artificial distinctions.”

“I think you’re wrong. Gillespie’s quick enough — he’ll make a run for it. He’s an opportunist. He’ll see he’s got only one way out.”

“Only one?”

“I think so. He’ll go to Glenn Bradleigh.”

Vasquez smiled slowly. “If you’re right that’s a nice irony.”

“He’ll have to turn the bag upside down and shake it, otherwise it wouldn’t be worth Bradleigh’s while to give him immunity and protection.”

Roger said, “By the time Gillespie stops talking there’ll be enough raw meat on the floor to feed a dozen grand juries.”

Vasquez took a ball-point pen from his pocket and played with it, clicking it. “Maybe — maybe. It may cause some trouble for Pastor and company. But it won’t solve our problem. It doesn’t cancel the threat. Oh, don’t think I’m not impressed.”

Vasquez sat with his legs crossed, his shoes polished, his tie neatly knotted; he looked as old-fashioned as the hotel room. It had been designed by Stanford White. “It may put Pastor off balance — then again it may only influence them to tighten security.”

“That’s what I want them to do. I want them to know what it feels like to know they’re under attack. Not knowing where or when it’s going to hit them next.”

Vasquez clicked the pen. “Waste of time. They’re already paranoid, by definition.”

“I want them to know I’m coming.”

Roger had a slow chilled smile that had thrown fear into a hundred movie villains. He drawled softly, “Now you’re talkin’, old horse.”

A leather briefcase leaned against the base of Vasquez’s chair where he’d dropped it. Vasquez opened it. “You asked for the file on George Ramiro — I assume he’s your next target.”

“Yes. Because he’s dangerous. We don’t want him behind us when we move on Pastor and Martin. What have we got on him?”

“Not a great deal. You can’t expect to flush him as easily as you did Gillespie.”

“No. Gillespie made it easy.”

“Ramiro’s not a bright man. In fact his brainlessness may make it harder to attack him. You can’t be subtle with him.”

“Will you stop clicking that pen?”

“Sorry.” Vasquez put the pen away and opened the file folder in his lap. He set the photographs aside and scanned the typewritten pages. “Has a license — it must have cost him at least seven thousand dollars — to carry a Colt Python revolver, caliber three fifty-seven Magnum.”

“A Magnum? I’ll bear that in mind,” Mathieson said dryly.

Vasquez flipped a page. “Seems to patronize one call girl with some regularity...”

“Name and address?”

“They’re here but it wouldn’t be a worthwhile angle of approach.”

“Why not?” Roger said drowsily. “Catch him with his pants down.”

“Your jokes are bad.” Vasquez returned to Mathieson. “Catch him and do what? You’re determined not to kill him.”

Roger said, “We could have him worked over by experts. Break a few arms and legs.”

“No. If he’s beaten up he’ll only call in six friends to get even for him. No. He’s got to be taken right out of the game. The way Gillespie was.”

“Tall order. Very tall,” Vasquez observed.

“He can be framed,” Mathieson said. “Anybody can.” He looked at his watch. “I’ve got to go. I’ll be back in an hour.”

2

When he returned to the hotel from his errand he found Homer in the room with Vasquez and Roger. Mathieson hung his coat in the hall closet and rubbed his hands together.

Roger said, “Right. Us Californians get thin-blooded. I’m still not thawed.”

Vasquez didn’t rise from his chair. “Homer’s been talking to Nick D’Alesio.”

“The reporter?”

“The same,” Homer said. “Very interesting guy. He knows the New York mobs as well as anybody alive outside the mobs themselves.”

Mathieson opened one of the ginger ales on the room-service tray. He scooped a handful of ice cubes into a glass. “What did you find out?”

“First you ought to know what I had to give him in trade. Detectives and reporters — we’re all in the same business, you know. Information.”

“So?”

“I gave him a nice scoop. Told him how the Benson shooting in Oklahoma and the bomb attack on your house in California were connected.”

Mathieson looked at him sharply. “How much did you tell him?”

“I didn’t tell him anything that Pastor doesn’t already know. Relax. I didn’t say anything about Gillespie. The only time your name was mentioned was in connection with the explosion in Sherman Oaks and the sniper on the motorcycle. It’s a bit of news that hasn’t been reported anywhere else. He’ll have to attribute it to an informed source or something like that. I told him he couldn’t use my name.”

Vasquez said, “But don’t be surprised if you see the name Edward Merle in the newspapers tomorrow. They’ll probably go back into the morgue files to dig up a summary of your testimony against Pastor.”

Mathieson said wryly, “I always like to see my name in the papers. OK, what did you get in return?”

“A lot of detail about Pastor and Martin. I’ll type up my notes in the morning.”

“What about George Ramiro?”

“A little. Not very much. He’s not a complicated sort. Too stupid to be devious.”

Roger said, “He got many friends?”

“Not many. Mostly he cares about showing off his new Cadillac and smoking Cuban cigars and driving his big power boat around Long Island Sound. A typical suburban citizen.”

“He and his wife live on the same premises with the Pastors?”

“Yes. Three sets of premises. In Manhattan they’re in the Park Avenue building, same floor. Next door apartment. In Brooklyn it’s a semidetached, one of those big old Victorian houses that go for a quarter of a million nowadays. The Ramiros have the top floor. Summers they all go out on Long Island. The Ramiros live in the gatehouse.”

“Well we’re not concerned with what they do in the summertime.”

Vasquez said, “Perhaps what we need to know is who his enemies are.”

“He’s rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. It might be a long list.”

“I’m talking about serious enemies,” Mathieson said.

“D’Alesio didn’t mention anything specific. Ramiro’s not too well liked — but mortal enemies? No, I pass.”

“We may have to do some excavating,” Vasquez said.

Mathieson shook his head. “Take too much time.”

Vasquez said, “We’ve got to find an opening, haven’t we. If it takes time then it takes time.”

“If we can’t find one we’ll make one.”

“How?”

Mathieson poured more ginger ale. “He’s a man who’s obviously done a few things that must make him nervous in the middle of the night.”

Roger said, “You’d spend half of forever rooting them out.”

“We don’t need to. All we need is the assumption that something exists that might cause trouble for him if word of it leaked out to other hoodlums. Something that might even turn Frank Pastor against him.”

Homer said, “He seems to be reasonably loyal. Anyway he’s married into the family. He wouldn’t pull anything that would make Pastor come down hard on him.”

“Somewhere along the line he’s probably slipped a little off the top for himself,” Mathieson said. “That’s all it needs — just the wedge of something that could make him feel guilty. Or nervous. Anyhow we’ll want an update on Ramiro’s movements. Find his patterns — then we’ll move.”

Mathieson swabbed his dry throat with ginger ale; he was trying not to think about Jan, the way she’d sounded on the phone when he’d called her. He tried to force her out of his mind. “Roger, how’d you get into the hotel without being recognized?”

“Fake beard and motorcycle shades.”

Homer said, “His own mother wouldn’t know him. He looks like a forty-year-old hippie.”

“As long as he doesn’t talk,” Vasquez said. “The voice is a dead giveaway.”

Mathieson said, “Anything you can do about that? Fake an English accent or anything?”

“I reckon not. It’s the only way I know how to talk.”

“I thought you were an actor.”

“Old horse, I never said I was.” But then Roger screwed up his outdoor eyes in concentration. “But oi suppews oi moight be able to troy. It’s me dewty, innit?”

“That’s the worst Cary Grant imitation I ever heard,” Homer said.

Mathieson said, “But it didn’t sound like Roger Gilfillan, did it. Can you sustain that accent?”

“If oi must, old chep, but I should think it could become bloody tiahsome.” Roger lapsed into prairie twang. “What you fixin’ to have me do?”

“We’re going to need some movie equipment. Sixteen millimeter, I’d think.”

“Silent or sound?”

“Sound. Preferably sound-on-film. We won’t want to have to monkey around with a separate tape-recording system.”

“What’s it for?”

“We’ll get to that,” Mathieson said. “What we need is a sound camera, a microphone, color film — the new fast kind that can be used indoors under ordinary artificial light. We’ll need a projector and a screen. Now we’ll want the most compact equipment that’s available. Oh, and a tripod camera mount.”

“What kind of lenses?”

“A normal zoom should do it. We don’t need telephoto.”

“How fast you want it?”

“No hurry. We’ve got other things to take care of first.”

“Old horse, that ain’t much of a chore. Anybody could do it.”

“I’ve watched you on the set, Roger. The other actors play poker and swap lies. You hang around the cameramen and the sound engineers every chance you get. You’re probably more of an expert than they are by now. This equipment has got to work well and it’s got to be manned by a professional. You’re in charge of it.”

Vasquez said, “What’s the next step?”

“Glenn Bradleigh,” Mathieson said.

Chapter Twenty-Two New York City: 7 October

1

Anna was late getting back to the Park Avenue apartment. In her euphoria she nearly forgot to pay the taxi driver. The doorman’s surly face changed when he opened the door for her: She decided it must be the infectiousness of her radiance. It was the first time she’d ever seen a real smile on his face.

She stopped on the curb and looked up. It was one of those rare evenings: the sky autumn-clear, the Park Avenue glass towers sharply etched against the blue. Dry and cool and beautiful.

After a solitary elevator ride she arrived at the apartment and rang the bell; her key wouldn’t work — the police bar would be in place. She glanced up at the lens of the closed-circuit camera.

It wasn’t Frank who opened the door; it was Sandy, her hair in curlers, belted into a terrycloth robe. “Hi.”

“Hi yourself. How’s school?”

“You always ask me that.” Sandy closed the door and slammed the police bar across it and went toward the hallway that went back to the girls’ rooms. “And I always say the same thing. It was all right. It was school. What can you say about school?”

“Dad home?”

“In there.” Sandy pointed toward the study. The door was closed.

“Alone?”

“Ezio’s here.” She made a face. “I’m watching the Star Trek rerun and I’ve got to get back under the dryer, OK?”

“Get it combed out in time for dinner.”

“Sure, sure.” Sandy disappeared on the run.

She knocked. When she heard Frank’s voice she went in.

Ezio gave her a glance and a nod; he didn’t rise from his chair. Frank was at the desk. She went around it and kissed him.

Frank said, “You’re in a good mood.”

“I’m glad you noticed. You two look like the building just fell down around your ankles.”

“It did. Gillespie hasn’t turned up.”

She went toward the recliner chair, peeling off her gloves. “He’s scared. He’s hiding somewhere.”

“Scared for sure,” Ezio said. “He didn’t even go home for his toothbrush that night.”

The jammer’s light glowed red. The plastic cover was on the pool table and Ezio’s topcoat was thrown across it. She put her gloves neatly in her lap. Narrow bands of sunlight fell through the Venetian blinds of the south window.

Frank told her, “Ernie Guffin still hasn’t got a make on—”

“Ernie who?”

“The detective in Washington,” Ezio explained. “He still hasn’t got a make on Robert Zeck. Nobody meets the description. We told you all this before, Anna.”

“There’s been a lot going on,” she said.

Ezio turned toward Frank. “You listen to the tape again?”

“Three times.”

“So what do you think?”

“Anna thinks Zeck’s a federal.”

Ezio blinked. “And what do you think?”

“It’s as good a guess as any. If Zeck didn’t get that stuff off a computer like he said he did, then where’d he get it? He had to get it officially. And that makes him a fed.”

“Beats shit out of me,” Ezio said.

“Mind your language.” Frank said it gently. Anna covered a smile with her hand; Frank winked at her.

Frank said, “C.K. probably found the microphones, he found out the office was bugged. He figures you had him bugged, Ezio, he knows I must have heard the tape. That’s why he disappeared. He’s afraid maybe I’ll believe this Zeck stuff.”

“You mean you don’t believe it?”

“I don’t know. I’ll tell you this much. If C.K.’s straight with us and if he uses his head, what he’ll do, he’ll think it over and then he’ll come to me. He’s putting himself in my hands because he knows I’m a fair guy and I’ll give him a hearing and all that baloney. He comes in, he shows a white flag, he tells me Zeck was lying. Then he says, ‘Look, Frank, here’s how we prove who’s telling the truth. This guy Zeck, he’ll come back to my office or he’ll telephone and tell me how to deliver that hundred kay, the payoff money.’ That’s when we set a trap and we grab Zeck when he comes for the money. We find out the truth from Zeck and that lets C.K. off the hook. That’s what C.K. will do if he’s using his head.”

Ezio said, “That’s supposing Charlie’s been on the level with us.”

Anna said, “Even if he has, I wouldn’t count on him doing that. He knows how we work. He’s not going to take the chance of walking in here. He’s never had much courage.”

Ezio said, “That’s for sure. Plenty of brains and oily as hell but no guts at all, you ask me.”

Frank said, “Anna’s got something there. If he’s too scared to come to us there’s only one other place he could go.”

She said, “That’s what worries me.”

“You mean the feds,” Ezio said. “Spill his guts.”

“It could put us in a very tough place. He knows a lot.”

“He’s a lawyer,” Ezio pointed out. “He can’t spill confidential information.”

“Can’t he? Who’s going to stop him?”

“Even if he does, they can’t use anything in court. Privileged communications.”

Anna said, “He could tell them what rocks to start looking under. That could be trouble enough.”

“I think,” Frank said, “I think we pay attention to what Anna says here, Ezio. I think maybe you ought to sort things out and see what tracks we can start covering. Anything that C.K. had a piece of, anything he could tie us to. You may have to burn some papers and things. It may force us to cancel some deals.”

“We’ve sweated these things out before,” Ezio said. “I guess we can do it again this time. But I’d rather cancel Charlie Gillespie, myself.”

“If you can find him. But you haven’t been finding people too well lately.”

“We’re working hard on that, Frank, you know we are.”

“Then show me some results.”

“We’re looking for needles in haystacks.”

Frank brooded at the desk top. “I know you are.”

2

They watched a half hour of the Carson show and then Frank reached for the remote switch on the bedside table and turned it off. “Too many goddamn commercials.”

She stretched and smiled drowsily. Frank rubbed the skin on top of his head; then he placed both hands over it and leaned back against the pillows. “I’ve got trouble you know.”

“We’ll get through it. We always have.”

“Big trouble. Word gets around that you’re losing your grip, that’s the biggest trouble you can have. Too many things slipping through my fingers, Anna. First Merle and those others. Now this C. K. Gillespie mess.”

His head swiveled under his hands. He looked down at her.

“We’re alive, Frank. We’ve got a lot of good things.”

“That could end real sudden. Word gets around, old Frank Pastor spent too much time in the slammer, he got softened up, he’s lost his edge. They start moving in on you like hyenas. You start that kind of a fight, you don’t win it.”

“Then do something spectacular to take their minds off it. To convince them you’re still the top.”

“Like what?”

She said, “I was in the doctor’s office, in the waiting room. I was reading the Sunday Times. You know in the main news section they have that follow-up column about—”

“What were you doing in a doctor’s office?”

“Finding out about the tests.”

“So you’ve been home six hours and you haven’t told me yet?”

“The mood you’ve been in—”

“Anna, quit sneaking around behind me. What did the son of a bitch tell you?”

“He told me I’m pregnant.”

“Jesus fucking H. Christ.”

3

He romped up out of the bed and stood with his arms akimbo and his face thrust out toward her and a mock-ferocious scowl. “She comes home, she spends the whole night grinning the place up like she swallowed the canary, she doesn’t say a fucking word to the old man about it. Jesus fucking H. Christ. You’re going to have a kid?”

We’re going to have a kid.”

“I’ll be a son of a bitch.” He stared at her. He didn’t even blink.

He held the pose so long that her eyes widened with fear. “Frank, you’re not sore at me. We talked about it months ago and you agreed I could go off the pill. You said you wanted a son. Don’t be angry with—”

“Crazy little woman. You crazy woman.” He put one knee on the bed and pulled her up and engulfed her, laughing in his throat.

“Damn you, Frank.” Her voice was muffled against his chest.

He searched her face. “He didn’t say anything about complications or anything?”

“Not a word.”

“Well a man my age—”

“Men twice your age become fathers.”

“A kid — did he say it’s a boy?”

“It’s too early.”

“I thought they had ways.”

“We’ll have to wait a little while longer. The baby’s not due till May.”

“Son of a bitch.” He bounded off the bed, looking for his slippers. “Celebrate,” he said; then he stopped. “Can you drink? I mean—”

“I want a great big Scotch on the rocks.”

“You got it.” He went.

They didn’t switch on lights in the living room; a soft glow came in from the buildings across the avenue. She watched Frank settle down with his feet on the coffee table. He reached for his drink. “To your very good health, little Anna — the both of you.”

She lifted her glass. “Frank Junior.”

“Yeah.” He was delighted. “Frank Junior.”

“And confusion to our enemies.” She drank ceremoniously. She coughed on the Scotch and put the glass down. “I was telling you about the follow-up column in the Times. There was a squib about some of those radicals the FBI arrested a few years ago, the ones who broke into some FBI office and stole their files and put them on a bonfire?”

“I read about that in the slammer.”

“C.K. blackmailed that secretary to get the files on Merle and the other three men. You wanted those four because they were the witnesses against you.”

She saw it when he made the connection. His eyes changed. “Well now... well now.”

“Eleven, twelve hundred names and addresses in those files,” she said. “We make a joke out of the whole Justice Department. We make chaos all over the country. We show them who’s running what. Nobody ever again will work up the nerve to testify.”

Frank took his feet off the table. “And for a little bonus, yeah, we collect the new files on those four gentlemen.” He got to his feet and spread his arms wide. “Anna, I love you.”

Chapter Twenty-Three New York City: 10–16 October

1

He called Bradleigh from a phone booth in Grand Central Station. “How’s it going, Glenn?”

Bradleigh was cool. “Where are you?”

“What difference does that make?”

“You’re supposed to be acting like a good boy. Staying out of trouble.”

“I’m not in any trouble. I’m calling because I’m curious, that’s all. Any developments?”

“Curious. Are you. Well our friend Gillespie walked in.”

“Walked in?”

“Just like that. Came in here with a fairly wild story...” Bradleigh went on talking.

A girl outside the phone booth was staring at him. He realized he was grinning like an imbecile. He turned away. “I wonder what got into him.”

“Do you?”

“You’re a bit chilly for a man who’s just scored a triumph.”

“I’ll tell you something, Fred. One of our bugs had been tampered with. In Gillespie’s office.”

“Oh?”

“We lost the transmission on his conversation with that computer blackmailer I mentioned.”

“You’re not making much sense, Glenn. You’ll have to go a little slower.”

“How much do you know about electronics?”

“About enough to change a light bulb when I have to. Why?”

“Whoever set Gillespie up knew about the microphones in his office.”

“So?”

“You knew about them.”

“I suppose I did. You did mention it to me. Has Gillespie dropped some goodies?”

“Enough to keep the FBI busy for about ten years, I imagine. We’re still extracting it, still collating. It’ll be a while before we’re sure what we’ve got but it’s a rich vein. It’s all unsupported for now, of course. But it’s the biggest break we’ve had since Joe Valachi turned inside out.”

“Congratulations. Maybe it’ll give you enough to nail Frank Pastor again.”

“Sure — in five years or so after his lawyers exhaust all their delaying tactics and Pastor runs out of public officials to buy.”

“You sound jaded.”

“Well it’s a little outside my bag you know. I just protect them. Interrogation is the FBI’s job. I’d like to see Pastor put away but right now I’m not too happy about the idea of having to nursemaid C. K. Gillespie. He’s not my favorite sort of client.”

“Look on it as penance.”

“Why the phone call?”

“Maybe I’ve been doing a little investigating on my own, Glenn.”

“You damn fool. You bloody idiot. If you—”

“Pipe down. You’re looking a gift horse in the mouth.”

“What gift horse?”

“Who do you think gave Gillespie to you?”

“So it was you.”

“I’m the computer programmer.”

“You bastard.”

“I’m taking them apart, Glenn...”

“Oh you stupid bastard. You’ve gone bananas.”

“... by the seams.” He couldn’t help the tight little smile. “And I may have some good news pretty soon for Benson and Fusco and Draper.”

“What kind of news?”

“I’d rather give it to them personally.”

“Nothing doing. No addresses, no phone numbers.”

“I’m not asking for addresses or phone numbers. You’re in touch with them, aren’t you?”

“Maybe.”

“You can get a phone number to each of them. That’s all I’m asking.”

“Shit.”

“It’ll be a pay phone. No bugs. No traces.”

“How can I trust you now?”

“Am I going to sell them out, Glenn? Use your head. I only want to talk to them. They call me from anywhere they like — in pay phones five hundred miles from wherever they live. I’ll send you a check to pay their expenses if you want. Just have them call me.”

“You’ve got to give me more than this to go on.”

“I can’t. Not now. Later.”

Bradleigh said, “What the hell do you think you can accomplish? You can get yourself killed, that’s all.”

“I could do that just by standing still and waiting for them to find me. Come on, Glenn, come on.”

“What about Jan and Ronny? What about—”

“They’re safe. They’re fine.”

He heard the exhalation of Bradleigh’s breath. “Maybe I’ll see what I can do. I’ll ask them if they want to talk to you.”

“Tell them it could save their bacon. Tell them: it could mean they’ll be able to come out of hiding.”

“In a pig’s eye.”

“Who gave you Gillespie?”

“That was a fluke but don’t rub it in.”

“It wasn’t a fluke, Glenn.”

After a pause Bradleigh said, “I don’t know you at all, do I?”

“I’m not a bad fellow.”

“You’re a fucking lunatic.”

Mathieson said cheerfully, “I’ll see you.”

2

Ramiro was a big heavy dark cigar-chewing jowly sour-faced man at the wheel of an overshined twelve-thousand-dollar automobile. It slid in at the curb and Mathieson watched Ramiro get out, turning the fur collar of his coat up against the drizzle.

The passenger emerged from the far side of Ramiro’s car — a short truncheon of a man with vanishing gray wisps of hair and a rigid coin-slot mouth.

“Vince Damico,” Homer muttered by way of identification. “Manages the restaurant-linen supply business.”

From the front seat of the rented Plymouth they watched Ramiro and Damico go into the restaurant.

“They eat here every Wednesday?”

“And then they go upstairs and play poker.”

“It’s a gambling joint?”

“No, just a friendly poker game. Lou Tonelli runs the restaurant. He hosts the game every week.”

“Funny neighborhood for it. We’re only a few blocks from City Hall and the courthouses.”

“Well it’s still the Italian neighborhood, you know.”

Traffic squeezed through the narrow street and pedestrians hurried by, topcoated under umbrellas. Mathieson said, “We’re likely to be here for hours.”

“That’s what stakeouts amount to. The thrill and adventure of detective work.”

The rain frosted the windshield but he didn’t switch on the wipers; it would have been a giveaway. He could see the restaurant well enough. ANGELO’S — Fine Italian Food. It looked expensive.

He had never been an easy victim to boredom but it was a bleak night, autumnally cold; he thrust his hands into the pockets of his topcoat and reminded himself to buy a pair of gloves.

“Vasquez wanted to be in on this, didn’t he?”

“Did he say so?”

“It was a feeling I got,” Mathieson said.

“He’d have liked it. But no way. Too much chance Ramiro might recognize him.”

“Does Ramiro know him?”

“A lot of people recognize him. Not as recognizable as Roger Gilfillan, maybe, but a lot of people do spot him.”

“I’m surprised he exposes himself to all the publicity. I’d think it would be a handicap in such a confidential business.”

“Times like this, maybe. But it’s celebrity that sells popcorn. Vasquez is the best-known private detective in the world. That’s what brings the clients in. It’s what brought you in.” Homer ruminated over his slice of cold pizza. “It’s you I’m worried about. Ramiro’s never met you but he must have seen your photograph.”

“I’m nine years older than those photographs. Don’t you think the disguise works?”

“It’s the same disguise you used with Gillespie, without the glasses. I don’t know — I guess it’ll fool him. He’ll have no reason to think of connecting us with Edward Merle. I guess it’s not much of a risk. But I don’t like taking any risks at all when I don’t have to.”

“Homer, there was no way I could wait somewhere else. I’ve got to be in on this — I want to see his face.”

“I can understand that. But you let me do the talking, understand? You must be the silent menace. Concentrate on looking like a killer.”

“What does a killer look like?”

“Silence is the main thing. Don’t say a single word. It’ll shake him up more than anything else would. Keep your hand on the gun in your pocket.”

“Don’t worry about that. I haven’t forgotten he carries a Magnum.”

“Well we’ll have to take care of that before we do anything else, won’t we.”

3

Finally they came out of the restaurant — Ramiro and Damico. It was half past one in the morning; the rain had stopped and a cold mist flowed through the empty street. A third man came out into the street and there was some conversation among the three; then the third man embraced Damico, turned and pumped Ramiro’s arm in a politician’s handshake, left hand on Ramiro’s elbow.

“Lou Tonelli,” Homer said. “He’s the ward boss down here, among other things.”

Tonelli went back into the restaurant. Ramiro and Damico climbed into the Cadillac Fleetwood and after a moment its tailpipe spouted white steam.

For three blocks Homer followed without lights; then the Cadillac turned uptown on the Bowery and Homer switched on the headlights when he fed the Plymouth into the traffic. Mathieson observed how he interposed several cars between himself and the Cadillac without getting caught behind traffic lights; it looked easy but it wasn’t.

Ramiro went west on Thirteenth Street, dropped Damico on University Place and went uptown again. “All right,” Homer said. “He’s not going home — that’s what we needed to know. We’ve got him. He’s heading for the call girl. Forty-sixth between First and Second. Now all we’ve got to do is get there first.” He swung off Madison Avenue and they barreled across Twenty-sixth street, jouncing in the chuckholes, running an amber light and then the tag end of a red one; Homer went squealing into Third Avenue precariously and chased the staggered traffic lights northward.

There was no traffic; they made it to Forty-fifth on the single light and Homer wheeled left into the side street opposite the United Nations Building; he parked swiftly in front of a loading bay. No Parking. “So we get a ticket. They won’t tow it away this time of night. Come on, let’s move.”

Mathieson got out and turned toward the corner. Homer was retrieving something from the car — it looked like a plastic bottle of detergent fluid; and he had the styrofoam coffee cup. They went quickly around the corner. Homer was pouring liquid into the cup. He tossed the detergent bottle into the mesh waste can on the corner and they strode north to Forty-sixth Street.

Mathieson said, “What’s in the cup?”

“Window cleaner. Ammonia. Less drastic than acid but it does the job.” They went around the corner. “Good. He’s not here yet. It’s that second awning — the girl’s got an apartment on the seventeenth floor.”

“We go in?”

“No, there’s a doorman. We wait for him outside.”

They posted themselves on the curb just short of the awning where they were not within the doorman’s angle of view. “Which way will he come from?”

“No telling. Depends where he finds a parking space.” Homer held the styrofoam cup casually. Two friends saying good-night after an evening on the town, sobering up with a cup of takeout coffee. “Keep your hand in your pocket and your mouth shut. Use the gun if you have to — he won’t hesitate.”

He curled his hand around the .38 in his pocket. “We’re not here to do any shooting, Homer.”

“Sometimes something goes wrong. Just stay loose and be ready to — heads up, here he is.”

The big Fleetwood growled along the street seeking a place to park. There wasn’t any; the car disappeared around the corner, moving slowly.

“He’ll find a space somewhere. Take it easy — don’t get jumpy now, for God’s sake.”

Mathieson looked both ways. There was no one on the street. Above them numerous windows were still alight. Up at the farther intersection a woman with a heavy shopping bag walked across on Second Avenue. Eddies of mist curled like steam on the wet black surface of the street. The canvas awning dripped.

A taxi cruised past, empty, dome-signal alight; it paused hopefully but Homer shook his head and the taxi drove on. Then a pedestrian appeared at the corner of First Avenue and turned into the street, coming toward them — wide shoulders, heavy bulk, coat flapping: George Ramiro.

Homer said, “We’re having a conversation, OK? I just told you a joke. You’re a little drunk.”

Mathieson uttered a sharp bark of laughter. It sounded unconvincing to him but he said, “Hey that’s a pretty good one,” his voice sounding too loud and too forced. He turned without hurry, facing Homer, his shoulder to the approaching pedestrian. He could see Ramiro out of the corner of his eye — walking steadily, unafraid, unalarmed; but his right hand stayed in his coat pocket and with it, Mathieson knew, there had to be the .357 Magnum.

As Ramiro approached, Homer gestured with the coffee cup. “So I says to him, ‘Billy, the day she takes her pants down for you is the day whales start flying.’”

Ramiro was three paces away and Homer turned abruptly. “George? Hey, that you, George?”

It brought Ramiro’s head around and that was when Homer flung the contents of the styrofoam cup in his face.

4

When the ammonia hit his eyes Ramiro brought both hands to his face and cried out, lurching back against the brick wall. Homer was on top of him instantly, dropping the cup, pinning Ramiro to the wall. Mathieson darted in; fumbled in Ramiro’s coat pocket; found the Magnum and relieved him of it. It took no more than three seconds. He slipped the Magnum into his own pocket and Homer was pressing a handkerchief into Ramiro’s hand. “Here, wipe yourself off.”

Ramiro whimpered and clawed at his face. Blinded and in excruciating pain he was completely without fight. Homer batted Ramiro’s arms away and wiped his eyes with the handkerchief. “Come on, it’s only a little window cleaner.”

“What the hell—”

“Grab an arm,” Homer said.

Supporting Ramiro like a drunk between them they walked him toward the corner. He was in enough pain to disable him. They walked him around the corner and the Cadillac was just up the block.

They propped him against the back door of the car. “Keys,” Homer said. Mathieson went into Ramiro’s pockets again.

Ramiro was getting his breath. “I can’t see...”

“Take it easy, George, you’ll be all right in a minute.”

Mathieson unlocked the car door and reached inside to pull up the knob of the back door. They got it open and shoved Ramiro into the back seat. Mathieson got into the front seat and took out the Magnum and held it against the headrest, casually aimed at Ramiro’s belly.

Homer pushed Ramiro across the seat and got in beside him. The doors chunked shut.

The UN street lamps were bright; they threw reflected illumination against Ramiro’s features. He clutched the handkerchief and scrubbed at his eyes. “Jesus I’m blind — I can’t see. You fuckin’ bastards.”

Homer said, “I’m going to put some drops in your eyes; it won’t hurt you. Hold your head back now.”

“Fuckin’ bastards.” But he was still in terrible pain and he didn’t fight it when Homer shoved his head back and squeezed fluid from the little plastic bottle into the inside corners of his eyes.

“Now blink. Wash them out.”

Ramiro straightened slowly, blinking like a fish. He squinted, watery-eyed, trying to hold them open, lids fluttering like moths’ wings.

“Settle down, George, just take it easy. We’ll wait while you get your wind.”

“Jesus. Jesus God that hurts. Oh God you son of a bitches.”

“Just let them wash themselves out now, that’s a good boy.”

The inside of the car smelled of the stale sweat of habitual garlic eaters. Ramiro’s breath was like the panting of an overheated dog. Mathieson shifted his grip on the heavy Magnum. If it were fired inside the car it would deafen them all. He had no intention of firing it but it made an impressive prop — especially to Ramiro who doubtless had seen the results it could effect.

Ramiro threw his head back along the rear-window platform. He took in a deep breath that swelled his chest and stomach; he let it out and shook his head violently as if to clear it. He wiped at his eyes again and began to peer narrowly through his trembling inflamed lids. “Yeah. OK, OK. I still can’t see too good.”

“It’ll come back.”

“What the hell you guys want?”

Homer said, “It could have been acid, George. It was supposed to be acid.”

“Supposed to be.” Ramiro still wasn’t tracking too well.

“Put your hands in your lap and keep them there. It won’t do your eyes any good to keep rubbing them.”

“Aagh.” Ramiro clawed at his face again.

Homer batted his arms down. “Now keep them in your lap. Do as you’re told, George. You might live a little longer.”

Ramiro blinked at the Magnum. Mathieson curled his thumb over its hammer and drew it back slowly. The series of sharp clicks seemed very loud.

“Jesus. Take it easy with that thing.”

“You paying attention now, George?”

“What the fuck do you want?”

Mathieson showed him a slow cold smile. The gun in his hand was trained motionlessly on Ramiro.

Homer said, “You listening now?”

“I’m listening. Who the fuck are you guys? Do I know you?”

“No. We’re imported. You don’t know us.”

“Imported by who? For what?”

“To waste you, George.”

“To what?”

“A job of work. A hit, you know how it goes.”

“Me?”

“You’re George Ramiro, ain’t you?”

“You must have the wrong George Ramiro, man.”

“No, I guess not. It’s supposed to be an acid job, George.”

“What the fuck for?”

“Don’t ask me.”

“Who’s paying you guys?”

“Even if we knew that, we’d hardly tell you. Would we.”

“Well what the fuck do you want?”

“A few kays. Money, man. You know.”

Ramiro’s face was screwed up; he kept trying to look at them but his eyes kept squinting shut.

“See if you can follow this, George. You listening to me?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“The man gives us a down payment on you. You follow?”

“Yeah—”

“We finish the job, we’re supposed to get another five kay. Between us. Twenty-five hundred apiece. Capish?”

“I hear you.”

“There’s talk you’re a pretty rich guy, George.”

“I ain’t poor.”

“No, I wouldn’t think so. What’d this car set you back? And that boat out on the Island — fifty-two-foot power cruiser, right? Now a guy like you, comes from some foreign country someplace, he probably don’t trust banks a whole lot. Probably keeps a good stash someplace. In cash. I’m right, George?”

“What do you want from me?”

“Well, here’s the thing. George, you’re worth five kay to us dead. Now we figure maybe you want to tell us how much you’re worth to us alive.”

“Huh?”

“Maybe you scratch up enough cash, George, we let you live. You understand what I’m saying?”

Ramiro peered at him through the slits of his swollen eyes. In his lap his square fingers were at war. He had been in pain; now he was afraid. Mathieson could smell the rank sweat of it.

Homer said, “We’re offering you a rare opportunity, George. All we’re asking in return is a little grease. We’re asking for your help, see?”

“You got a strange way of asking.” Ramiro glanced at the Magnum.

Homer reached out suddenly, grabbed the middle finger of Ramiro’s hand and bent it back hard. Ramiro shouted and reared back in pain, clutching his hand protectively.

Mathieson moved the revolver slightly — just enough movement to draw Ramiro’s eye. When Ramiro looked balefully at him, Mathieson smiled.

Homer picked at his scalp and studied his fingernail. “You see how it is, George.”

“How much you want?”

“Twenty-five kay.”

“Twenty-five thousand dollars?”

“Apiece, George. Each. Per person. Capish? Adds up to fifty kay if you got a slow head for figures. Fifty kay, George. You think your life’s worth that much?”

“Where the fuck you think I’m going to lay my hands on fifty thousand cash this time of night?”

“You got a stash, ain’t you?”

“Well I—”

“You take us to the stash, George. Easy.”

“And I hand it over to you and then you turn me loose? Yeah, sure.”

“George, we might be lying about that. We might knock over your stash and then waste you anyway. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it.” Homer turned his cold smile toward Mathieson. “You see, Al, you see how he’s thinking.”

Mathieson neither smiled nor spoke. He dropped the muzzle of the Magnum half an inch and centered it on Ramiro’s heart.

Ramiro swallowed spasmically. Homer said, “The thing you can know for sure is we’ll waste you right here if you don’t turn the stash. You die here for certain or you take a chance we’re straight. What do you want, George?”

“Look, how do I know—”

“George, I’ll spell it out crystal clear. Now you pay attention. Al and me, we’re supposed to come into town tomorrow night and waste you with acid and a knife. That’s what the contract says. Tomorrow night. So we got into New York a day, two days earlier than we’re supposed to. We noodged around a little, we find out George Ramiro’s a big important rich guy. We can use a side profit on this deal. You see how it goes? What we do, we go with you to your stash tonight. We take our fifty kay. Anything over fifty kay you got in that stash, that’s yours to keep. You take it with you. We all three of us go straight from your stash to the John F. Kennedy Airport. You following this, George?”

“I hear you talking.”

“We don’t care where you go. Just so it’s a long way out of this country. Europe, Africa, Hong Kong. That’s up to you. You pick your spot, you buy the ticket. You got a passport?”

“Yeah.”

“With your stash?”

“Where else?”

“OK, OK. We walk you to the airplane and we watch you take off. Then tomorrow night Al and me, we pretend like we’ve just arrived, you know, in New York to take care of this contract on you, and we ask around and we find out, Jesus Christ, the guy left town. So we snoop around a little, we play private eye, we find out you bought a ticket to Europe. We report back to our contact. I mean the man didn’t pay us to go all the way to Europe or Africa or Hong Kong, did he.”

“What man? Who’s the man?”

“Somebody very high up. That’s all we know. Now maybe the man tells us the contract is off, or maybe the man hires somebody else to chase you around Europe, or maybe the man pays us extra bread to go find you and waste you. I can’t say what’ll happen, George. It’ll be up to you to keep your head down because God knows who might come looking for you. We ain’t writing guarantees on you — this ain’t the Prudential Life Insurance Company. We’re just giving you a head start.”

“I see that.”

“For fifty kay.”

“I ain’t got no fifty kay in my stash.”

“What’ve you got in it?”

Ramiro rubbed his eyes and finally said with infinite disgust, “Short of forty. About thirty-eight five.”

“Thirty-eight five. Al, what do you say?”

Mathieson lifted one shoulder — a shrug of contempt.

“I think maybe Al wants to waste you, George.”

“Then go ahead and shoot. I knew it wasn’t my night. Took a bath in poker. You want to turn my pockets out? I got maybe fifty dollars left.”

“Thirty-eight five, that’s a funny number. How come, George?”

“I figured I’d build it up to forty and leave it at that. I had to borrow fifteen centuries from it last week for something.”

“Al, what do you say we settle for thirty-five kay. We leave the man thirty-five hundred for his airplane ticket and expenses. What do you say?”

Mathieson repeated the shrug. The adrenaline was pumping through him, making him shake; he kept the Magnum braced against the headrest so Ramiro wouldn’t see the tremor.

“That’s the deal, George. You want it?”

“For thirty-five thousand dollars I ought to at least get a name. One name. Who put out this contract?”

“It’s not for you to make terms, George. It’s for you to accept them.”

“Yeah I know. But you guys seem to be in a mood to do favors tonight. I just figured, you know.”

“The contract came down through channels, George. That’s all we know.”

“Yeah, all right, but what channels?”

“The same channels that put paper on those guys in Oklahoma and California. The same guy on the phone who called Deffeldorf and Tyrone. More than that I can’t tell you because more than that I don’t know. You figure that’s worth your thirty-five kay?”

Ramiro kept blinking. His eyes were filled with tears. It didn’t mean anything; they’d been that way ever since they’d got into the car; but Mathieson thought he could see the ponderous slow brain working behind the ravaged face. Ramiro said bitterly, “Oh Jesus H. Christ. What the fuck. What the fuck did I do?”

“You stepped on somebody’s sore corn, I guess.”

Mathieson wiggled the Magnum. It was his entire contribution to the discussion but it drew Ramiro’s attention.

“I got a wife, what about my wife?”

“You got your life, George. You worry about that first.”

“But I—”

“Maybe two, three months go by and the heat cools. Maybe then you call your wife on the transoceanic cable and you arrange for her to come join you somewhere. How’s that sound?”

Ramiro bit his lower lip. “Can I just call’ her, tell her she shouldn’t worry?”

That was when Mathieson knew they had him hooked.

Homer said, “Think, George, use your head. No phone calls. You can understand that, can’t you?”

Mathieson wiggled the Magnum again. Homer said, “Now where’s the stash?”

“I guess I ain’t got much to lose.”

“I guess you don’t.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah, well those are the breaks sometimes, George. You could’ve been dead, you know. You still can be if you try anything humorous.” He glanced at Mathieson and winked. “And with your own piece at that. Nice piece of iron. What do you use for target practice, George? Six-inch armor plate?”

There was no resistance left in Ramiro. “Look, suppose the man finds out you crossed him. The man that put out the contract on me.”

“He won’t find out, will he, George.” Homer tapped Ramiro’s sore finger. It jerked away and Homer smiled. “Where’s the stash?”

Ramiro pursed his mouth and blew air through his lips. “Shit. It’s right here.”

“Here?”

“Where I go, this car goes. I want my stash where I can get it in a hurry, right? It stays in the car.”

“Here? In the car for Christ’s sake? You never heard of a Cadillac Fleetwood getting ripped off, George? You’re that stupid?”

“Look, why do you care if I’m stupid or not? Shit, the organizations know whose car this is, they know the license plates. The amateurs, shit, anybody busts into this car without the right key, he gets a faceful of cyanide gas.”

Homer grinned at Mathieson. “It’s a good thing we used the man’s own key, ain’t it, Al.”

“Ain’t nobody going to fuck with George Ramiro’s car,” Ramiro said, but it was only a faint dying echo of bluster. “Anyway the stash, nobody ever finds the stash. I welded it myself. Nobody’d ever spot it.”

“Where is it?”

Ramiro’s raw eyes swiveled painfully toward the Magnum. “Shit. I open it and you kill me.”

“It’s your choice, George.”

Ramiro didn’t speak. Homer said, “Now we know it’s in the car we could spend the next two years taking this car apart screw by screw. We know it’s in the car but we ain’t wasted you yet, have we? That ought to mean something.”

Totally deflated Ramiro jerked his head reluctantly toward the dashboard. “Under the radio. The whole thing. You look close, you’ll see two keyholes. Takes two Schlage keys to get into it.”

“Let’s see them.”

“My shirt pocket.”

Homer fished in it. Mathieson watched him extract two small brass keys and bounce them in his palm.

“Take it easy when you open it up. Everything falls out on the floor it’ll take you all night to get it picked up and sorted out. You slide it out easy, it comes right out like a drawer.”

Homer passed Mathieson the keys and took the Magnum from him. “Open it up, Al.”

Mathieson turned around in the seat and found the keyholes low in the metal of the dashboard, deep in shadow. He turned both locks and looked for a handle. In the back seat Ramiro said, “You leave the key in the lock. You pull with the key until it comes open enough to grab the edge.”

He reinserted one of the keys and pulled and it slid easily toward him — an entire section of the underside of the dash.

The drawer was irregularly shaped, crowded with canvas money packets. There was an empty money belt, a passport in a wallet, a leather zipper case filled with shaving gear and toiletries and an old-fashioned pineapple hand grenade.

He made sure the pin was secured to the grenade handle. It wasn’t a booby trap. If it had been we’d all be sky-high.

He looked behind him. Ramiro sat rigid with his eyes squeezed shut and his fists locked on his knees, white-knuckled. If he was going to die it would come now — that was what Ramiro had to be thinking.

Homer said, “Let’s go to the airport, Al.”

5

Through the observation panes he watched the 747 taxi away from the ramp. Homer’s narrow mouth was stretched back to the point of splitting. “Bon voyage, George.”

They walked down the stairs. Homer said, “You were beautiful. You had me scared. That wild thing in your eyes.”

“That was terror.” Mathieson laughed with him.

Vasquez met them on the way out of the building. “On his way?”

“He’ll keep running for a year before he stops to think,” Homer said.

“Ingenious again, Mr. Merle.”

Homer said, “Especially the part where we convinced him it was Pastor and Martin who put out the contract on him. That guarantees he’ll never get in touch with them.”

Mathieson said, “Maybe. Sooner or later he’ll stop and figure out he may have been conned. But by that time we’ll be done with this.”

In the parking lot they transferred Ramiro’s $35,000 and the rest of his goods into a suitcase. Mathieson pushed the homemade drawer shut and locked it with both keys. He locked the Cadillac and they walked across the lot to Vasquez’s car. Mathieson put the suitcase in the back seat. “At any rate this will cover our expenses.”

Vasquez got behind the wheel and they drove out of the lot. “In due course his car will be discovered. Evidently abandoned. A cursory investigation will disclose that Ramiro bought a ticket to Lisbon and flew there today. The police doubtless will report this information back to Frank Pastor. Pastor will assume that Ramiro absconded, the result of some transgression. Suspicion is all those people need — proof of malfeasance isn’t required. Ramiro is acting suspiciously, therefore Ramiro must be dealt with. A genuine contract will be put out. You realized that from the outset, I presume?”

“It won’t happen.”

“Why won’t it?”

“Because it will be a long time before that car is noticed. People leave their cars at airports for weeks on end — even on those twenty-four-hour lots. By the time Ramiro is traced to Portugal he’ll have a month’s jump on them at least. They may go after him but it’ll be a cold trail unless Ramiro does something idiotic.”

“Like sending for his wife, perhaps?”

“He knows he’s on the run. He knows he’s got to hide. It’s more chance than they gave me.” Mathieson felt a sour bile of anger in his throat. “He’ll spend the rest of his life on the run. All right, it was my doing. Do you think I was wrong?”

“I think you may have inspired his murder, in the long run. I think you’ve stepped over that invisible line you’re so scrupulous about.”

“No. That’s like blaming Hiroshima for positioning itself under the Bomb. All I’ve done is conned one man into running for his life. If another man ends up killing him, it’s not on my conscience — it’s their own doing.”

“I thoroughly agree. But it marks a shift in your position.”

“I don’t see any shift.”

“Put it this way. What has George Ramiro ever done to you?”

“He has existed,” Mathieson said, “and that’s enough.”

Chapter Twenty-Four Washington, D.C.: 21 October

1

The fall colors in Rock Creek Park were stunning. Mathieson watched them shimmer in the wind.

The wind muffled the sound of Homer’s approach; Mathieson didn’t know he was there until he felt weight behind him. He turned in alarm.

Homer grinned at him. “Old Indian Joe.”

“Scared half the life out of me.”

“Just practicing,” Homer said. “He’s coming.” He pointed off through the trees, down the path.

“Alone?”

“Yes.”

“All right.”

Homer said, “He’s probably wired for sound.”

“If he is it’ll be a recorder, not a transmitter. He’s going against company policy by meeting me.”

“He says he is. Maybe it’s true.”

“I know him, Homer.”

“I just don’t trust these guys.” Homer turned back into the woods. “I’ll be watching.” He patted the revolver under his tweed jacket.

Mathieson crossed the path and sat down on the bench.

Above him Bradleigh appeared. He came down the slope with his hands in the pockets of his topcoat. He stood above Mathieson for a moment and then turned around and sat down at the far end of the bench. “I never recognize you anymore. Somebody’s been giving you makeup treatments.”

“I’m rehearsing for the remake of Man of a Thousand Faces,” Mathieson said. “You look a little peaked, Glenn.”

“I’ve been losing too much sleep.”

“Not on my account, I hope.”

“Yes, on your account. Now what’s all the mystery?”

“Are you carrying a wire?”

“Just a recorder.”

“Mind if I see it?”

“Suppose I do?” Bradleigh kept his hands in his pockets.

“I don’t want to be taped, Glenn. This is private.”

“It doesn’t look like anybody’s ever taped you. Christ and I thought I knew you, once upon a time.” But he went inside his lapels and pulled out a flat little recorder and held it up in plain sight while he switched it off. He put it down on the bench between them.

“I hope that’s the only one you’re carrying.”

“No, I’ve got eighteen others distributed about my person. You want to tell me why I’m here?”

“George Ramiro’s gone, did you know that?”

“Gone?”

“Left the country last week.”

“Where?”

“It doesn’t matter. He’s on the run. He’ll never be back.”

Bradleigh studied him as if he were something on the marquee placard of a freak show. “Your doing, I take it? First Gillespie, now Ramiro.”

“That’s right.”

“You’ve got a reason for telling me this.”

Mathieson glanced idly up through the woods. He couldn’t see Homer anywhere but he knew Homer was there.

He said, “The point should be obvious enough. I’ve taken two of them out of the game and put one of them in the government’s hands eager to give up every scrap of information he’s got.”

“You’re saying you’ve proved you’re capable of doing things we’ve failed to do.”

“That’s right, Glenn. And in return I want a favor.”

“We’ll see.”

“I expect you to say, ‘Name it.’”

“Come off it,” Bradleigh said. “I don’t sign blank checks like that.”

A group of riders went by, cantering. Mathieson said, “Did you talk to Benson and the other two?”

“I talked to them.”

“And?”

“They want to know more about what you want to talk to them about.”

“All they need to do is call me and find out.”

“For them to go to a phone is a big risk.”

“Talk them into it.”

“That the favor you’re asking?”

“Part of it. You can tell them to call me, Glenn. Don’t ask. Tell them.” He took the slip of paper out of his pocket and wedged it under a corner of the tape recorder to keep the wind from picking it up. “That’s three phone numbers. They’re all pay phones in New York. Beside each phone number I’ve written a date and a time. One for Benson, one for Fusco and one for Draper.”

Bradleigh pulled the paper out and read it and put it in his pocket. “I’ll see.”

“You’ll tell them to make those calls, Glenn.”

“They don’t have to take orders from me, you know that.”

“You can be persuasive.”

“I’ll try. The way you’re going about this, I’m not sure I even owe you that much. You’re not even giving me a scrap to go on.”

Mathieson said, “What I’m doing is counterattacking. That ought to be obvious enough.”

“You can’t get them all.”

“I don’t have to. All I have to do is neutralize Frank Pastor. If I force him into a position where he’s got to leave me alone, then he’s got to pass the word down to his troops and his friends to keep their hands off me.”

“I don’t see how you hope to accomplish that by picking off small fry like Gillespie and Ramiro.”

“That’s just to put him off balance, make him nervous. I need him nervous.”

“You’re out of your mind. You know that, of course.”

“I’m not under your protection anymore. If I’m wiped out it won’t be on your conscience.”

“I wish I saw it that way.” Bradleigh sighed with exasperation.

“I’m doing a favor for Benson and Fusco and Draper. I want to let them in on this. It won’t put them in any more danger than they’re already in. Pastor hasn’t found me — he won’t find them either. And if it works it gets all four of us off the hook. And our families.”

Bradleigh said, “What if I refuse to cooperate with you?”

“I can pull a few things.”

“Feeling your oats, aren’t you. But Pastor’s a lot tougher to crack than penny-ante types like Gillespie and Ramiro.”

“I know that, Glenn. I had to start somewhere. Call it practice.”

“What is it you want, then?”

“One or two of them may want to come to New York after I’ve talked to them. Maybe all three of them.”

“Benson, Fus—”

“Right. I want them protected.”

“You mean you want me to keep them away from New York?”

“Just the contrary. I want them in New York if they’re willing to come. I want their help.”

“Of all the incredible balls—”

“I’m not going to force them to do anything. But if they want to come, I want them protected every step of the way. Even if it means you have to send Caruso and Cuernavan and ten other people out there to escort them. Even if it means you have to charter a private executive jet.”

Bradleigh exploded. “It’s out of the question, of course. We can’t give support to any cockeyed private schemes. I told you you were out of your mind. This proves it. To even ask for—”

“Well, it’s more than just a casual request, Glenn.”

Bradleigh sighed again. “It figured there’d be teeth in it.”

“I’d rather keep it on the level of favors between friends.”

“Would you.”

“I don’t want to put a gun to your head.”

Bradleigh said, “I guess you don’t have to spell it out. All it would take would be a word from you in the FBI director’s ear. That after I blew you twice to Pastor you went out on your own and handed us C. K. Gillespie on a platter. I’d be out on my ass. I’d probably deserve it, too.”

“Then don’t force me to threaten you with it. Come on, Glenn, I don’t want to be the instrument of your disgrace and you don’t want it either. I’m not going to the FBI or anybody else.”

“If that’s a promise then your threat just sprang a leak.”

“It’s not a threat. It’s a favor. I’m asking one in return.”

“Jesus, you’re a devious son of a bitch.”

“The only thing I’m putting pressure on is your conscience.”

“You bastard.”

“Then you’ll arrange it all.”

Bradleigh didn’t reply, But his quick angry nod was as good as a promise.

Mathieson stood up. “Tell them to call me.”

“Sure, sure.” Bradleigh didn’t look at him. He reached out for the cassette recorder and shoved it inside his coat. Then he rammed his hands into his pockets. “I always hate the fall. Makes me know winter’s coming on.”

“Can spring be far behind?”

“Jesus. Get out of here with your fucking platitudes.” He still didn’t look up. After a moment Mathieson stepped forward, made a fist, nudged his shoulder with it and then walked away up the hill. Homer picked him up beyond Bradleigh’s view and they walked on through the park to the car.

Chapter Twenty-Five New York City: 23 October

1

It was a high-priced private school that occupied three interconnected brownstones on Eighty-ninth Street between Fifth and Madison avenues. The neighborhood suggested old wealth. Trim blonde matrons in Diors and Givenchys went heel-clipping along under their umbrellas. In better weather you’d see nurses wheeling infants in perambulators to and from Central Park. The only black face was that of the occasional supermarket delivery boy on his box-fronted tricycle.

Mathieson and Roger Gilfillan sat in the car. They were parked at a hydrant in front of a narrow stone house with discreet small bronze plaques on its wrought-iron gate advertising the presence of two MDs who were probably psychoanalysts. That conclusion had been reached after the first half day on the stakeout when it became apparent that only two patients arrived in each hour.

None of them took any notice of the Plymouth with its two occupants parked at the same fire hydrant day after day.

Every few hours a police car would cruise past but they were never asked to move on. Had the car been unoccupied it probably would have been towed away.

Each morning the gray Mercedes arrived and discharged its two passengers. They would join the throng trooping into the school. Each afternoon promptly at half past three the Mercedes drew up and the two passengers came from the school and got in. Now it was 2:45 P.M. and raining.

The older girl was Sandra — fourteen, a bit on the plump side, ample of bosom: athletic and attractive but she would be matronly in ten years’ time. She had a round face, almost cherubic, surrounded by a frizzy explosion of dark hair. Her sister Nora, twelve years old, was slender, pubescent, tall for her age. She wore her dark hair long and straight and it framed a piquant triangular face with extraordinarily large eyes.

There were always two men in the Mercedes that delivered and collected them.

The driver was a chauffeur who went by the name of Lloyd Belmont.

The bodyguard was Gregory Cestone, a large hard man whose face reminded Mathieson of a lunar landscape. It was a disquietingly immobile face that had been badly burned.

Belmont and Cestone in the Mercedes were due to appear in forty-five minutes. Roger shot his cuff over his watch. “Reckon I’ll go over to Madison and use the little boy’s room while there’s time. You want to go first?”

“No, I’m all right. Pick up a pack of Life Savers or something, will you? I feel peckish.”

Roger walked away in the rain and disappeared around the corner.

It was stuffy in the car and Mathieson rolled the window down. A fine spray of rain drifted against his face. It came across the park off the Hudson estuary and carried the tang of sea salt.

If we cart only bring this off. He had set Monday as the target date because if Gregory Cestone didn’t lead them to a connection by Friday evening it would still leave them the weekend to find another source. Right now Vasquez and Homer would be shadowing Cestone; they would drop the baton here at half past three; Mathieson and Roger would pick it up.

But the Mercedes was early.

In the side mirror he saw it come into the street from Madison. It drew up slightly behind him, stopping in front of the school; its horn tooted three times. In the intersection Mathieson saw Vasquez’s brown Cadillac slide slowly by — it couldn’t turn into the street because it would have had to squeeze past the double-parked Mercedes and that would have given Cestone and Belmont a close look at Vasquez.

Mathieson reached out as if to adjust the side mirror. It was the signal to Vasquez that he was picking up the relay. There was nothing else he could do. From that distance Vasquez would have no way of seeing there weren’t two men in the Plymouth but it couldn’t be helped.

He saw no sign of Roger on the sidewalk.

The two girls came down the steps. Cestone held the rear door open for them. Sandra carried an umbrella; she folded it as they got into the car. Cestone got back into the car and Belmont moved the Mercedes away.

It came past at a crawl and when it was dead abreast Cestone abruptly looked point-blank into Mathieson’s face.

Mathieson felt the stab of panic. He bluffed: looked at his watch, looked in the rearview mirror, made a face as if awaiting a date who hadn’t shown up on time. He was sure it wasn’t convincing.

The Mercedes rolled on. Inside it Cestone twisted his face close to the rain-mottled window, staring back at Mathieson.

It dwindled toward the far corner. Mathieson turned the key and started the engine. He began to back up. Then he saw Roger running forward along the curb. Roger dived into the car grinning.

Up ahead the Mercedes was at the end of the block waiting for the signal to change.

Mathieson could no longer see Cestone’s rigid face. Was he looking back past the girls through the rear window? The rain made it impossible to tell. Had he seen Roger get into the car or had he turned to face front by then?

“Maybe we blew it,” Mathieson said.

“Hell, old horse, take the chance. Reckon we got nothing to lose.”

When the signal changed the Mercedes made the left into Fifth Avenue and Mathieson let it go out of sight before he pulled away from the hydrant; the tires squealed and he turned left through the light just as it changed.

At the far end of the block the staggered signal went green and the cars began to surge away but he was only half a block behind the Mercedes.

“This could backfire.”

Roger said, “Supposin’ we just see what happens.”

“If there’s any talking I’ll do it. You hide behind your beard and keep your mouth shut.”

“Yes sir, General sir.”

“Don’t make a joke out of it, Roger.”

“Just hankering for a gun in my pocket about now.”

“Just as well you haven’t got one — you won’t be tempted to wave it around.” There was no point carrying guns around New York; if you were caught with one in your pocket it could cost you ten years.

The cars knotted up, crowding past the snag of buses in front of the Metropolitan Museum; afterward it was an easy run in light traffic down into the lower Sixties and Mathieson let the Mercedes stretch its lead to three blocks. A bus arrogantly shouldered in front of him; for a moment he lost sight of the quarry. He crowded a small car aside and went out past the bus in time to see the Mercedes swing east on Fifty-sixth.

“Taking the girls home early? Why?”

He squirted between taxis and looked for openings but the light went red at Fifty-seventh and he had to wait it out.

“Goddamn it.” Homer wouldn’t have got caught that way.

But he kept going when the traffic began to move; he pried through the pedestrians at the turn and had a glimpse of the Mercedes two blocks away, snarled in crosstown traffic, its right-hand light flashing for a turn into Park Avenue.

“Sure enough,” Roger said, “taking them home.”

By the time Mathieson inched through the intersection the Mercedes had pulled up, the doorman had it open and Cestone was out on the curb. A group of adolescent girls converged on the canopied doorway and Cestone produced a small gift-wrapped box from his pocket and handed it to Nora Pastor: The girl beamed up at Cestone and went running inside with her sister and the five or six friends. Mathieson thought back, printed the dossier on the screen of his mind: Nora Pastor, b. 23 Oct. 1963, NYC (Women’s Hosp), dtr. Frank & Carola Pastor.

It was her birthday — that explained it.

The traffic carried them abreast the Mercedes. In the rain they couldn’t see much; Cestone was getting back into the car. The flow pushed Mathieson on by.

Behind them the Mercedes pulled out into the avenue. “What now?” If he pulled over immediately and let it go by they’d certainly notice.

Obligingly the Mercedes went over to the far lane and its signal-flasher started up a block and a half short of the next available left turn at Fifty-second; Mathieson had time to get there first and swing into the pass between the islands. The light was with them and they got across into the side street while the Mercedes was still bottled in Park Avenue.

He went down half the length of the block and pulled up ahead of a heavy double-parked truck; he backed up until he was nearly against its front bumper. Then he waited, half hidden there. He switched off the wipers.

The Mercedes was the first car through and it went by at a good clip. Roger said, “Go.” Four cars followed it and Mathieson pulled out behind them. The Mercedes left him behind at the Lexington Avenue light but he made it up at Third. He kept the four cars between them. One of them turned south at Second Avenue; the others trailed the Mercedes east as far as First Avenue where everything turned left. Within a few blocks of here they had waylaid George Ramiro a few nights ago. Now he followed the Mercedes uptown and it coasted unhurriedly with the traffic and he had no difficulty keeping his position half concealed in the stop-and-go East Side tangle.

Roger said, “Take it easy now. Don’t spook ’em.”

At Ninety-sixth Street it went out into the FDR Drive and they trailed it north in a coagulation of traffic toward the Triboro Bridge. Roger said, “Maybe you ought to tell me one more time where this is supposed to get us.”

“If we get the stuff from Cestone’s connection then Pastor will know it’s the real thing — not a bluff.”

“You can buy the real thing on any street corner around here. I hear tell it comes in brand-name packages these days.”

The Mercedes led them across the Triboro and down the Grand Central Parkway. Heading for what? An airport?

But it went right past La Guardia and left the parkway at Northern Boulevard. He had a harder time keeping up now because he didn’t know this section. Fortunately the Mercedes was in no hurry.

Roger said mildly, “Those two boys ain’t hardly wet behind the ears no more, old horse.”

“I know.” He took Roger’s meaning: By now Belmont and Cestone probably knew they were being followed.

“Wild-goose chase maybe,” Roger said; “They could be just funnin’ with us.”

“They’ll want to find out who we are and what we’re up to. Otherwise they’d have ditched us before this.”

“Meanin’?”

“Meaning they won’t just stop and blaze away at us. They’ll want to ask questions.”

“Figure we got answers that’ll satisfy them?”

“Well I hope so, Roger, because if we don’t we could be in a little trouble.”

“That’s real comforting.”

The quarry led them into a dreary endless commerce of used-car lots and franchise service shops, fast-food diners and cut-rate haberdasheries. Bayside, Queens.

A left turn at — what? He searched for the street sign: They’d need to know their way back.

Bell Boulevard. The sign was half hidden. He followed along, two blocks behind the squat gray limousine. They were twenty miles from midtown Manhattan; the area looked like the broken-down hub of an upstate industrial town. A corner of his mind was bemused by the realization that this was still New York City — a part that didn’t exist outside the minds of the people who inhabited it.

It was nearly four o’clock. The rain was intractable. The wipers batted noisily, keeping tempo to the chug of his pulse.

Roger said, “If push comes to shove, you distract ’em and I’ll rush ’em.”

“Other way around, Roger. It’s my party.”

Fat women browsed under the awnings of open-front vegetable shops, waving flies off the fruit, squeezing things experimentally.

“You hear me?”

“All right, old horse, I hear you.”

Just ahead of them a bright yellow car pulled out of a parking space. He almost collided with it. His tires skidded on the oil-wet paving. The car, something from a drag strip, made an ear-shattering roar and slithered wildly away, spewing a wake that sheeted across Mathieson’s windshield and blinded him. Roger grunted: “Weasel.”

When the wipers cleared it away he had a glimpse of the Mercedes turning right.

The yellow racer veered away, leaving a scalloped set of tracks in the wet. Mathieson slowed when he approached the intersection where the Mercedes had turned. A warehouse on the near corner; an abandoned five-and-ten on the other, its windows exed with the white paint of condemnation. He made the turn.

Right ahead of him the street bent out of sight around a forty-five-degree turn.

He accelerated a little. This might be what they had been waiting for.

There was no curb: The street skirted close by a heavy brick corner of the looming warehouse. He had to twist the wheel hard through the abruptly narrowing gap.

The paving was chuckholed and muddy. In front of him the street petered out: a morass and a cul-de-sac against a high mesh fence. Rain coursed down past the fence — he had a vague gray-green impression of earth falling away: an old embankment, a railroad cut or canal or highway.

There was no sign of the Mercedes.

Roger had time to say, “Hoo boy. They’ve done this before, old horse — they had this set up.”

Because there must have been a Dead End sign at the corner back there and they must have had it removed.

Behind him in the mirror as he stopped the car he saw the gray bulk of the Mercedes ooze out of an opening in the brick wall and position itself crosswise in the neck of the alley. Like a stopper, bottling them in.

“Boxed like sheep,” Roger said contemptuously. “Shee-yit.”

Cestone and Belmont came walking forward in the rain.

He looked at Roger. Roger lifted his eyebrows. “Might as well, old horse.”

They got out of the car to meet it.

2

Bleakly he watched the gun in Belmont’s hand. Cestone looked them up and down, nothing in his face moving except his eyes. Cestone had his hatless head lowered against the rain and his hands in his coat pockets.

The two men stopped three paces away. Roger edged away from Mathieson. He saw Belmont’s lip twitch — in amusement? Belmont kept wiping water off his forehead with his free hand.

Cestone never touched his face. Possibly the nerves were gone.

“What you people want with us?” Cestone’s voice was petulant and high-pitched. Behind him the Mercedes blocked the entire width of the only exit. Its wipers flapped steadily.

“I want to talk to you,” Mathieson said.

“Me? I don’t know you, man. Who are you? What you want then?” Cestone’s speech had curious rhythms: It was almost Jamaican.

“A little business.”

“You had to shadow us all afternoon? Why don’t you just come to me and say, Gregory, I want to talk a little business? Why don’t you just do that?”

“I’m doing it now,” Mathieson pointed out.

“What kind of business, man?”

“We want to make a connection.”

Cestone uttered a sound that might have been a laugh. It chilled Mathieson because the face displayed nothing at all.

“What kind of stupid cops are you?”

“No cops.” Mathieson held both hands out from his sides, palms out. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Roger take his hands out of his pockets, empty.

“No cops. Look, we figured we’d follow you to your man and make our own connection with him afterward. That’s all. We’re from out of town, see? Your name’s the only name we know.”

“That’s a load of shit, man.”

“It’s the truth.”

“You don’t look like no junkies.”

“It’s for somebody else.”

“Sure it is.”

Belmont showed his teeth. “Who?” It was the first word he’d spoken.

“What’s the difference?” Mathieson said. “You wouldn’t know her. We’re both from out West.”

Cestone said, “I don’t buy this, man.”

“Please listen to me. Either we’re cops or we’re not. If we’re cops you don’t want to shoot us — you’d get heat all over you. If we’re not cops then we’re telling the truth. What have you got to lose? Either way you’re going to have to let us out of here.”

“Man, I don’t have to let you do nothing. I can leave you here all shot to pieces. Nobody ever knows it was Cestone.”

“If we’re cops then the rest of the cops know who we’re shadowing. But then if we’re cops we wouldn’t travel alone, would we. We’d be wired — there’d be a radio truck out there on Bell Boulevard listening to this conversation and they’ve heard your voices and your name.”

“I didn’t see no radio truck,” Belmont said.

Cestone glanced at him. “I think we rough them up a little, teach them about tailing people.”

Mathieson said, “Take it easy. We haven’t done anything to you. We only want to talk.”

“You annoy me, man.”

“I wasn’t trying to—”

Belmont scowled. “Wait a minute, Gregory.”

“What, man?”

“Wait a minute... wait a minute. I know him.”

“Who?”

“He’s changed his face a little. I ain’t seen him in years. But the voice — yeah, it’s him. Merle. Eddie Merle, the lawyer. Gregory, there’s a contract out on him.”

3

Right now had to be their move because Cestone was still absorbing the slow process of the chauffeur’s recognition and both men were in the grip of surprise.

Mathieson flashed a glance at Roger and saw the muscles tense under Roger’s coat.

Do the unexpected. At least it may throw their aim off. Homer’s voice echoed in his recollection.

Roger was diving away — back toward the car — and Belmont’s gun instinctively turned that way and it gave Mathieson room to move.

Two long sudden strides put him right between them.

His left hand had been outraised. He snapped it down against Belmont’s revolver. Deflected the weapon. Made a grab for Belmont’s wrist — and missed.

Still turning: wheeling, staying in motion, mingling, circling. Alarm had propelled Cestone backward and he had his automatic out very fast but he couldn’t fire because Mathieson kept moving and spinning, his grip fastened on Belmont’s sleeve — Cestone couldn’t shoot without risking Belmont; and then Roger was all over Cestone, a bear hug from behind, locking Cestone’s arms down.

Wrist lock, Mr. Merle, and don’t ever be dainty — these people don’t hand out second chances. Use both hands. Use them hard.

Still wheeling, he clapped his right hand over Belmont’s fist, revolver and all. Left hand on the elbow. Stop, whip the knee up, smash Belmont’s arm down against it. Fulcrum-pivot. Like cracking a stick of kindling across an upraised knee.

The bones were tough; Belmont’s forearm did not snap, but he heard the grunt and saw the pain in Belmont’s eyes and felt the revolver hit his own knee when it fell from Belmont’s numbed hand.

Don’t turn loose too fast. A little hurt’s no guarantee you’ve taken the fight out of the man. Or the man out of the fight.

Rain in his eyes — hard to see. He flung Belmont in front of him, whirling close behind the man, hanging on to the injured arm with his right fist, twisting it up behind the man’s back. Belmont cried out at last. Mathieson hooked his left arm around the neck, around the windpipe, pulling the head back against his chest. Using Belmont as a shield against Cestone’s gun because things were uncertain in the downpour, he couldn’t tell who had the upper hand there.

Belmont tried to struggle. Mathieson twisted the bruised arm. Belmont screamed — a raucous terrible noise.

Cestone was big; Roger was on his back but Cestone broke loose and Mathieson saw him lift the automatic — Cestone was going to shoot, right across the top of Belmont’s shoulder.

Mathieson put his knee in Belmont’s back and shoved him against Cestone.

Collision. Cestone’s feet slid on the mud; he went over on his back. Belmont fell on top of him. Roger was getting to his feet, sliding in the muck, scrambling. Mathieson walked right in. Cestone’s arms had gone out behind him to break his fall; he was pushing Belmont off him, looking for a gun; Mathieson found the automatic and kicked out, full force, right foot. From the feel of it he couldn’t tell whether he’d kicked the gun or the hand but it was all the same: The automatic slithered away.

But he’d lost his own footing on the slick. He fell on his side and bruised his hip against his pocketful of coins.

It was right against his nose — the revolver that Belmont had dropped.

He got one knee under him and thrust the revolver out at arm’s length. “All right.”

Roger was standing up — casual, a grin behind the beard, eyes flashing: enjoying this.

Cestone was half erect. He straightened slowly, feet spaced wide. The immobility of his face was horrifying.

Belmont crawled around in the mud in a circle, moaning, moving like a half-crushed beetle. Roger kicked him in the rump. Mathieson said, “On your feet, you’re not hurt.”

Belmont kept whimpering and crawling. Mathieson said mildly, “I kicked the automatic away. You won’t find it.”

Belmont let out a sigh of disgust and got to his feet.

Cestone had come up from hands and knees. His fists had been in mud and Mathieson should have thought of that. He detected it too late. Cestone flung the mud in his face.

He threw up his left hand. Not in time: The muck of gravel and soaked earth stung his face, blinding him.

He fell back, unbalanced, slipping; down hard on his rump. Kept his grip on the revolver; desperately raked mud out of his eyes. In one instant’s flash he felt bitter irony: the ammonia in George Ramiro’s eyes — it was a kind of justice.

He heard a whack of fist on flesh. Eyes on fire he stepped back and to one side. If one of them grabbed for the gun now...

The slurp of shoes in mud; another scuffle, another fist fell. He swung the gun savagely back and forth in front of him and kept clawing at his eyes with his left hand. He squeezed his cheeks up, squinted tight and tried to peer through the caked lids.

A shadow wavered in the blurred translucence of his vision: diminishing, fading — he began to hear the running footfalls.

One of them was running away.

He cleared his eyes enough to see Cestone leap over the front corner of the Mercedes and run past the brick corner.

Belmont swung a wild blow at Roger; it whistled past Roger and Mathieson saw him move in to strike but Roger’s foot slipped an inch and it threw him off just enough. Belmont wheeled away and ran.

Roger stood in a fury. “Shoot the son of a bitch.”

But Mathieson let him go.

Roger spread his feet apart for support and propped his arms akimbo. “Shee-yit.”

Mathieson turned angrily and threw the revolver with a pitcher’s might, soaring it above the mesh fence, down into the embankment cut.

Roger started laughing. “Look at us. Couple of tar babies.”

Too enraged to speak, Mathieson walked to the Mercedes. The engine was still running. He backed it into the doorway and took the keys with him when he got out; he threw the keys far out into the mud pond. He walked right past Roger and got into their own car. Backing and switching, he reversed the car carefully, wheels spinning in the mud. When he drew up beside Roger he leaned across and pushed the door open. “Get in, damn it.”

Roger got in, coated with mud. “You got to admit it’s funny. Two big heroes making asshole fools out of theirselves.”

“Goddamnit.”

“Hey, old horse, gentle down. Look here, we hurt them more’n they hurt us. Mexican standoff at worst but I think maybe we won the fight on points.”

“Points. Aagh. We lost Cestone, we lost his connection. We blew it, Roger.”

“Ain’t nothing can’t be got at from some other angle, old horse. It’s not as if we blew the whole enchilada or anything.”

“I guess I’m just feeling like a stupid fool. If we pull anything that clumsy again we may get our heads handed to us.”

Trembling badly he put it in gear and eased through the passage to the boulevard.

4

“You’re both lucky to be alive.” Vasquez was angry. “What was it, sheer bravado? Now they know who you are, they know you’re in New York. You’ve brought us a great deal of trouble.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Don’t be a stubborn fool. Of course you have. They know they’re under attack now. They didn’t know it before. It makes all the difference. They’ll batten everything down.”

Homer sat on the bed with a sour smile on his small mouth. He watched Mathieson and Roger scrape the mud from their coats. After a moment Homer stood up. “Better give me your car keys.”

“What for?”

“Got to assume Cestone got a make on the license plate. I’ll turn the car in and go to some other rental outfit and get another one.”

“And that’s one more thing,” Vasquez said. “On the rental voucher we used the address of this hotel. We’ll have to move. Now — tonight.”

“All right, we’ll move.”

Roger gave up trying to repair his coat. He stood up. “I’m headin’ for the showers. Clean clothes. Then I’ll pack and join you gents. First things first.”

“We’ll call you when we’re ready,” Vasquez said.

Roger left. Mathieson threw his coat aside. “You’re overreacting, Diego. I’m surprised. Sooner or later Pastor had to find out who was after him. If it hadn’t happened this way I’d have told him myself.”

“You should have waited. Our job’s become much harder now. We may not reach him at all.”

“We’ll reach him. What’s really on your mind?”

Vasquez had the bureau drawer open. He was slapping stacks of folded clothing into the suitcase. Abruptly he stopped, turned and faced Mathieson. The anger was still flashing in his eyes.

Mathieson prompted him: “Well?”

“You employed the services of my firm. You gave us an assignment, albeit unique, that I have done my best to carry out, and now you seem to wish to persist in getting in the way of it.”

“Don’t be silly. I only—”

“You very nearly blew it. You may in fact have blown it. And yet you insist on keeping me in the dark about the most vital part of your scheme.”

“And you resent that. Is that what this is about?”

“It raises the question who’s in command here.”

“I am. We settled that a long time ago.”

“Not quite,” Vasquez said. “You’re my client, not my commander. When you employ the services of a firm such as mine, it’s understood that tactical decisions and methodology are my perquisites. I’m the professional here.”

“Do you want to withdraw?”

“I want to know what’s in your mind, as a first step. I want to know why you wanted to trace Gregory Cestone to his heroin connection. I want to know what importance a shabby drug peddler can have in your scheme. I don’t intend to proceed without that knowledge.”

Mathieson opened the second drawer and transferred the underwear into the suitcase. He went into the bathroom, gathered his toiletries, dumped the armload into the suitcase, bagged his dirty shoes in plastic and put them on top. It was an untidy job and he had to sit on the suitcase to close it. He brought out the second bag and opened it — it was half filled with packets of Ramiro’s money, the hand grenade from Ramiro’s car, the kit of tools and the makeup kit that he’d used. He stripped off his suit and crumpled it into the suitcase and shut it. He went back to the closet and got into his remaining suit and his clean shoes.

Finally he set both bags by the door and turned to face Vasquez. The detective stood between the bureau and the window, one shoulder propped against the wall, tapping a pencil against his teeth like a professor waiting impatiently for a student to respond with the right answer to a complicated classroom question.

Mathieson said, “Has it occurred to you that I may have kept you in the dark for your own protection?”

“Against what?”

“Against the possibility of your being charged with complicity in a serious legal offense.”

“I’ve already conspired with you in the commission of several criminal acts.”

“Those aren’t likely to be reported — and even if they were they’re relatively trivial. You’d never go to trial for any part you’ve played up to now. Maybe the worst you could face would be a charge of conspiracy to commit extortion, but there’d never be enough hard evidence to put you in serious trouble.”

“And now you’re contemplating something more dangerous.”

“If it goes wrong,” Mathieson said, “I could be had up for a capital felony charge. I don’t want you dragged into that.”

“What capital felony? Murder?”

“No. We’ve already discussed that.”

“Kidnapping?”

He hesitated. “Yes. If it goes wrong.”

Vasquez shook his head — an expression of disbelief. “You amaze me. You draw the line at a simple killing, yet you don’t turn a hair at the prospect of kidnapping, which can be the vilest of human sins.”

“I will not kill. It’s that simple.”

“You’re absurd, Mr. Merle. Absurd.”

“That’s your opinion. Are you willing to proceed, knowing we may get involved in that kind of risk?”

“Certainly. If I know the nature of the scheme and if in my judgment it has an appropriate chance to succeed. Unlike you, Mr. Merle, I don’t draw artificial lines. I’ve never quite understood people who did. I’ve known dope dealers who drew the line at rape. I’ve known killers who drew the line at dealing drugs. I’ve never understood any of them. Once one crosses the line of morality any further distinctions are arbitrary and capricious.”

“You’re a fundamentalist.”

“A meaningless label. I distinguish between good and evil. I think I do so far more realistically than you do.”

“A moralist who’s cheerfully willing to indulge in extortion, fraud, illegal entry, kidnapping and God knows what other offenses.”

“Offenses against what, Mr. Merle? Against evil men. I justify my existence by jousting with evil. But I’ve never defrauded an innocent man or extorted anything from an honest citizen.”

“Robin Hood, are you?”

“I’m Diego Vasquez, Mr. Merle. Perhaps I make my own legend but I certainly don’t model myself on others’.”

“You’re extraordinary, you know that?”

“Are you going to tell me what your scheme is so that I may evaluate it?”

“I suppose I’ll have to, won’t I. All right. You may as well sit down.”

Chapter Twenty-Six New York City: 24 October

1

The building was emptying out. When the last stragglers had disappeared Ezio locked the door of the office and returned through the anteroom to his desk. He picked up the phone and punched ten digits.

“Ordway Enterprises.”

“Ezio Martin. Mr. Ordway in?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Ezio. That you?”

“Me. Turn on your scrambler,” Ezio said.

“Just a minute...”

Ezio opened the drawer and switched on his scrambler. “OK, you hear me?”

“Good enough.” Ordway’s voice was distorted now.

“That order I placed yesterday morning. You got anything yet?”

“Working on it, Ezio. It takes a little time, it’s a complicated order.”

“I’m waiting for Mr. Pastor in my office now, that’s why I called. Thought I’d give him the latest.”

“We ought to have a crew for you in maybe forty-eight hours.”

“Clean?”

“Squeaky clean. That’s what you asked for.”

“Mr. Pastor’s going to appreciate that.”

Ordway said, “I don’t suppose you want to tell me anything at all, do you?”

“Out of bounds right now. You’ll make a nice profit on it, though. Mind telling me who you’re sending us?”

“Well we haven’t got them yet, Ezio. But two of the men we’re trying to get, they’re a couple of soldiers. I mean real army soldiers, they were out in Vietnam. Officers, Green Berets. No police records at all. Squeaky clean.”

“But their fingerprints would be on file.”

“Hell, anybody’s fingerprints are on file, Ezio. So they wear gloves, whatever it is. These guys are into demolitions, communications, you name it.”

“We’re not expecting to invade a Vietcong village,” Ezio said. “I’m not sure it’s a bright idea. The operation we’ve got in mind, it needs to be real quiet. This doesn’t want demolitions types, it wants second-story types.”

“These are good men, Ezio. They ran some shit into the country for us from Nam. They did it efficient and quiet. These are not loud guys.”

“I told you I wanted three men.”

“The third guy, I was thinking maybe Tony Senno up in Burbank.”

“No. Definitely out.”

“Why?”

“Because we’ve used him before. I told you, nobody we’ve ever used before. Senno drove the car for Deffeldorf, right?”

“Then I’ll cancel him, get you somebody else. No sweat, Ezio.”

“You don’t mention our names to whoever it is, you understand that. They’re not going to know who they’re working for. You’ll call me back when they’re ready to take off.”

“Today’s Friday. I’ll probably send them out Sunday on a plane. Where do I reach you?”

“It’ll have to be here, the office, because I’ve got the scrambler here. I’ll come in around noon, that’s nine in the morning your time, you call me here then.”

“Fine. So long, Ezio.”

Ten minutes later Frank arrived. He tossed his coat and hat on the couch and shot his cuffs. “So?”

Ezio told him about his conversation with Ordway.

“Fine, fine. What about the schedule?”

“Everybody arrives in New York by Sunday night.”

“Assembly point?”

“Midnight Sunday, one of the piers in Brooklyn. It’ll be empty — no ships in, no cargoes waiting. We slipped the watchman a few bucks, he won’t see anything.”

“That’s fine, Ezio.”

“Who briefs them?”

“You do. Buy some longshoreman’s clothes, wear a stocking over your face, don’t talk unless you have to. Rent a typewriter and have the instructions typed up, pass it around, make sure they understand. If they ask questions you answer them with a pencil, you write the answer down in block letters so they can’t figure the handwriting, you let them read it and then you burn it.”

“Down payments?”

“Two thousand a man. The other eight thousand each when they bring us the files.”

“You worked out a plan for the drop or do you want me to take care of that?”

“Use a truck. They drive it to a given point, you pick it up there. You personally. Nobody else is in on this, Ezio.”

“Right.”

“Keep it that way.”

“I pay them off when I pick up the truck, then.”

“Yes. Treat them square, this is a hard job for them.”

“Got you,” Ezio said.

2

She put down five tiles and scored it. Frank rotated the board and scowled.

She said, “What now? Another seven-letter word?”

“No. How do you spell ‘harass’?”

“One are, two esses.”

“No good.” He lapsed into silent contemplation.

She said, “How long will it take them to do it, Frank?”

“How long will it take who to do what?”

“The files.”

“No telling.” He rearranged tiles on his rack. “First they’ll have to scout the place, every inch. Find out what the security setup is. How many people work there weekends and nights. Bringing in one guy from Minneapolis who used to install alarm systems — he’s supposed to figure out a way across whatever they’ve got but it may take equipment and time. You can’t pull off anything this big overnight. And they’ve got to get away clean — it means working out complicated maneuvers, trucks inside trucks, diversions, all that kind of crap. It’s a Goddamn military operation.”

“But it can be done. I’m sure it can.”

“Anything can be done,” he said. “Once they pull it off there’s going to be all hell breaks loose. You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to put the stuff in the mail.”

“In the mail?”

He was smiling. “Sure. Bust it up in little packages, wrap it up in plain brown paper, mail, them out from all kinds of little branch post offices to guys all over the country who got testified against. Then we sit back and watch it all hit the fan. The government hasn’t got enough agents to cover all of them at once. Eleven hundred witnesses? Eight, nine hundred of them be dead by the time the federals start catching up. And the first four are going to be Merle, Benson, Draper and Fusco.”

“If they still have a file on Merle.”

“There’s that. But it doesn’t bother me anymore. We miss Merle, OK, we miss one man. But we make our point, that’s the important thing.”

“Then you still think Gregory was mistaken.”

“Sure, the both of them. Couldn’t have been Merle. What’s Merle want with a junkie connection? It doesn’t make any sense. It was just some cop trying to run a bluff. Couple of clumsy cops running a poor tail, they got caught, they had to dream up some story.”

“But Belmont said he recognized him.”

“He backed off, you know. It’s been nearly ten years. Ezio took him over the photographs again and Belmont admitted he wasn’t sure, it was just a resemblance. I mean I’d love to think we had Merle right in our own backyard but things just don’t work out that easy. Forget it. We’ll find Merle — we’ll find him in San Diego County, I’ll bet you on that.”

“I never bet with you, Frank, I always lose.”

“The hell you do.” He grinned at her. “But that’s the right thing to say.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven New York City: 24–31 October

1

Mathieson returned to the hotel in a severe depression. When he walked into the suite he found Vasquez and Homer going through real estate ads in the Times. Roger was fiddling with the Arriflex camera, checking its lens settings against the recommendations on the film pack. Roger looked up; it was clear that one glance at Mathieson’s face told him the answer to the question in his mind; he didn’t speak but Homer voiced it: “How’re they doing?”

“Fine... fine.”

Vasquez was cold. “She’s still upset. Very well — she’d have needed to be superhuman.”

“Don’t we all.”

“Don’t take on like that, old horse.”

“Amy’s all right. A little itchy. The boys are raising some hell.”

“Expected that,” Roger said. “You et?”

He had to think. “No.”

“Then go down and get yourself around some grub. Might improve your disposition some.”

Without arguing he went downstairs, debating the dining rooms, settled on the coffee shop. Afterward he had a drink in one of the bars, a double, and felt slightly mellowed when he returned to the suite. Roger inspected him critically. “My turn to call tomorrow. I hope it don’t have the same effect on me.”

“Hell, Roger, you’ve got the best marriage in the world.”

“Always tend to agree when people tell me that. Strange thing is, it’s true.”

Vasquez folded the newspaper and put it away. “Mr. Merle, you didn’t honestly expect your marriage to survive this. It would be imbecilic to blame its failure solely on these experiences.”

“I don’t need undercutting — not from my wife and certainly not from you.”

“You do, however, need a clear mind. You’ve half-persuaded yourself that if you were to give up your quixotic quest, even at this late date, you’d have a chance of recovering your marriage. You’ve convinced yourself somehow that it’s an either-or situation — that you can have Pastor or you can have your wife, but you can’t have both. It’s idiotic. If you accede to these irrational pressures you’ll surely lose both of them.”

Roger said, “I hate to say this but I agree with the man.”

Acidly Mathieson turned to Homer. “What about you? Nobody seems to have asked your opinion.”

“Haven’t got one, Mr. Merle. I don’t mess in other people’s private lives. Done enough messing in my own. I’ve got a back trail littered with ex-wives — three of them.”

Roger said, “I never knew that.”

Neither did Mathieson but it wasn’t enough of a surprise to distract him. He said savagely, “Nobody said anything about giving anything up. Have I even hinted I ever thought about quitting?”

“That’s beside the point,” Vasquez said. “You’ve created a talisman — the superstitious belief that if you succeed against Pastor it will cost you your marriage. I’m bringing it out in the open now because I believe it’s the kind of superstition that may become a trip wire. Whatever happens to your marriage, it will not be the result of anything that occurs here. The two matters are completely unrelated. You must admit it — without reservation. Otherwise we’re in peril.”

“You may be right. I may have been putting it to myself like that. I don’t know. I haven’t been able to think clearly about it.”

“Then do so now.” Vasquez left his chair and stood looking down at Homer. “I’ve been thinking that perhaps you should leave us, Homer.”

“What?”

“Return to Los Angeles. There are tasks waiting at the home office. Things have piled up during my inexcusable absence.”

“You’ve never thrown me off a case in the middle.”

“There are things that will transpire here, things you don’t need to participate in. Please don’t be whimsically gallant. I need you more at the home office than here.”

Mathieson’s rage shifted toward the available target: “Is that the thanks he gets? At least Homer deserves to be in at the finish.”

“Please stay out of this, Mr. Merle. Homer knows nothing of your plans. If we exposed the scheme to him he would find it anathema. It would go against every principle in him. But he would insist on backing us to the hilt out of his loyalty to me. I don’t wish to confront him with that dilemma.”

Homer was on his feet. “Talk to me, not about me.”

“I’ve done so. You have your instructions.”

“It must be something that stinks pretty awful. I’ve gone a long way down a lot of roads with you. Where did you change? I didn’t spot it. Where’d you all of a sudden park your values, Diego?”

“I never had a shot at evil so large before.”

“And all of a sudden it’s the end that justifies the means?”

“The means are, to say the least, appropriate.”

Abruptly Homer turned to Mathieson. “We’ve had fun so far. Does it have to go sour now?”

“I was never playing for fun, Homer.”

“That’s too bad. You play the game better than anybody I know outside of Diego.” He turned back to Vasquez. “I’m not going.”

“Don’t presume to—”

“Diego, I’m not going. You want to fire me, then fire me. I imagine Mr. Merle will put me on the payroll.”

Mathieson said, “If that’s what you want.”

Vasquez turned away. “It’s a bloody mutiny.”

“No,” Homer said. “Just a touch of insubordination. You’ve never hired lackeys — what do you expect?”

“I’m rather touched, Homer.”

“Is that sarcasm?”

“No. It’s the simple truth.”

“Then I stay.”

“I’d prefer you didn’t.”

“Your exception is noted.”

“Very well.” Capitulating, Vasquez sat down again. But distaste was ground into his features. He scrutinized Mathieson. “It’s reprehensible. Despicable.”

“Think of an alternative.”

“Easily. Kill them.”

“No. I won’t do that.”

“You’re a terrible man, Mr. Merle.”

“Then clear out.”

“You couldn’t possibly handle it alone. It will be supremely difficult for four of us.”

“Then why did you try to send Homer away?”

“For exactly the reasons I gave. I don’t lie about such things.”

“If you’re so reluctant you may only be a burden to me.”

“I’ll carry my share of the weight — and the guilt.” Vasquez lifted his coat off the back of the chair. “There’s little sense wasting time. Let’s find a dealer.”

“How? I blew it with Cestone — he never led us to the connection.”

“Cestone’s connection is not the only source in New York. I made several calls while you were on the line to California.”

“And you found a connection just by making a few phone calls?”

“I’ve been in my profession a great many years...”

Roger said, “I take it you got names.”

“Names and likely places where we can look for the bearers of those names. You have your revolver?”

“Yes.”

“Very well. Follow my lead and don’t speak unless you must.”

“I’m becoming an expert at looking sinister.” Mathieson didn’t smile at all. “Do you know how to use the stuff?”

Vasquez hesitated. Something happened in him — an emotion had been provoked. He turned away. “Oddly enough yes, I do.”

“I wish we’d found Cestone’s connection.”

“Why?”

“It would have been neater. Using Pastor’s own heroin.”

“Heroin is all the same. The vein can’t tell whose it was.”

“Just the same, I’m going to tell Pastor that it was his own dope.”

2

The trivial things always ruin a schedule and in this case it was the tedious matter of the hideout. In the end they had to settle on something farther from the city than they’d anticipated — a broker’s summer home on Culver Lake near the Water Gap in northwest New Jersey; it was nearly a two-hour run from the city and that made for a dangerously long period in transit but it couldn’t be helped because they’d already used up four days in the search and it was the first suitable property they’d found. It was isolated; there were no close neighbors. Vasquez took it on a month’s rental at an exorbitant price; they posed as businessmen looking for a quiet place to hold a series of high-echelon management conferences. The house was furnished, it was sturdy, and the owner thoughtfully had prepared it against break-ins by installing heavy bars over the ground-floor windows. They also would serve to keep a prisoner in.

Vasquez made only one change in the house. In a hardware store he bought a heavy dead-bolt lock and installed it on the corridor door of the downstairs guest bedroom. It could not be opened from either side of the door without a key. Two keys were provided with the lock. Mathieson kept them both.

It was Wednesday night when the four of them left to return to Manhattan but there was still one chore to do en route. In a sleeping Leonia street they unscrewed the license plates of a parked car and drove several blocks and stopped again to remove their rent-a-car’s New York plates; they put the stolen Jersey plates on the car, stowed the New York plates in the trunk and drove on across the George Washington Bridge. It would be a little while before the owner of the Leonia car would notice the absence of his license plates; by the time he reported them stolen — if he reported it at all — the plates would be in a trash can somewhere.

Vasquez had never worked in New York before and Mathieson was baffled by the number of people there who seemed to owe favors to someone who, in turn, owed Vasquez a favor. They had an absurdly easy time making the heroin buy; Vasquez judged the price exorbitant but paid it without balking — it was, after all, George Ramiro’s money.

Now it was a pharmacist on West Seventy-second Street who provided, at a price but without prescription, a phial of sodium pentothal and a large bottle of chloral hydrate capsules and two cartons each of which contained forty-eight disposable syringes.

By midnight they were back at the hotel. Mathieson unlocked the door to his room. Vasquez walked on toward his own room, then stopped and looked back at him. “You’re convinced this is the only way.”

“Can you think of another?”

“One, but we’ve already been through that.”

“Nothing else?”

“Nothing else comes to mind. Variations on the same sort of scheme — all of them equally reprehensible.”

“There aren’t any clean ways of dealing with vermin.”

Vasquez said, “Get some sleep. We’ll check out of here in the morning.”

3

Friday was the day scheduled for the calls — Halloween.

The first was due at two in the afternoon; the phone was in a booth in the Plaza Hotel; he was in the booth at eight minutes to two, pretending to be talking into the phone. Then the woman in the fur stole found another booth and Mathieson put the receiver back on the hook and waited for it to ring.

Two o’clock came and went. At five minutes past the hour he decided Benson wasn’t going to call. Bradleigh had made a mistake somewhere — put on too little pressure or perhaps too much. But he’d give it another ten minutes.

It rang at 2:12.

“You’re still there. Sorry. We had busy circuits. This really Edward Merle? Talk to me, let me hear your voice.”

“It’s me, Walter. It’s been a long time but I don’t think my voice has changed much.”

“Been a lot of blood passed under the bridge, hasn’t there.” Benson’s voice hadn’t changed either: precise, thin, prissy. He’d been a bookkeeper in a numbers operation in Brooklyn but he hadn’t been born there; his voice still had the Midwest in it. Of course he’d been living in Oklahoma for eight years.

Benson went right on — he’d always been filled with chatter. “How’s that lovely wife of yours? How’ve you all been doing?”

“We’re just fine, Walter. Look, I don’t think we should spend more time on this line than we have to.”

“It’s secure at both ends. You’re in a phone booth, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So am I. But then I’m paying for the call so I suppose we’d better keep it short. I’m not exactly rolling in money these days.”

“Walter, did Glenn Bradleigh give you any idea what this is about?”

“Very vague. Very vague. Enough to make it sound interesting. He said you were trying to pull something that might force the boys to leave us alone. He didn’t say any more than that but he said it often enough that I got curious. That’s why I’m here.”

“I think we’ve rigged up a foolproof trap,” Mathieson said. “It’ll take your help to spring it.”

“Well now wait a minute, just what does that include?”

“About one day of your time. That’s all. I’ll want you to fly to a place — not New York, it’ll be Pennsylvania. Fly there, I’ll meet you. We’ll need you for about three hours. Then we’ll take you back to the airport. I have no interest in knowing where you’re coming from or where you go from there.”

“Very mysterious. I don’t like mysteries much.”

“I can’t tell you exactly what it involves until you agree to come in with us.”

“Who’s ‘us’?”

“I have some associates working with me. No names, Walter.”

“They know my name, don’t they?”

“Walter Benson is the only name they know. I have no idea what name you’re using now and neither do they. This has nothing to do with Bradleigh’s office. It’s a private matter between the four of us and the people who’ve been trying to find us. There won’t be any publicity.”

“Well Bradleigh did say this was something you’d cooked up yourself. He said he wasn’t taking any responsibility, just relaying a message.”

“That was the truth.”

“This three hours you want out of my life. What’s the risk?”

“No more risk than you’d stand by traveling anywhere.”

“The way things are, that’s pretty risky by itself.”

“Bradleigh has agreed to provide a private plane. He’ll fly you in and out. There won’t be any airline reservations on the record.”

“It sounds pretty cute but I’m leery. You can understand that. Can’t you tell me anything at all about what I’ll be expected to do?”

“Mainly wait around while we focus a movie camera,” Mathieson said. “I need you on a few feet of film that we’re going to show to the other side. Now if you’ve made any changes in your appearance, I’d like you to be ready to change back to your old self as much as you can — we’ll want them to recognize you as the old Walter Benson. I don’t know what you look like now so I can’t suggest what it may require. Hair dye, a wig, a shave, whatever.”

“I’m ten years older and twenty pounds heavier. I can’t exactly strip that away overnight.”

“Just so you feel they’ll recognize you.”

“What do we do in this home movie? Thumb our noses at the camera?”

“Something like that.”

“If I didn’t know you I’d think this was some kind of very bad practical joke.”

“Believe me it isn’t.”

“No, you aren’t the type. But you haven’t convinced me it’s in my interests to go along with it.”

“It’s got a damn good chance of getting them off our backs permanently, Walter. And if it doesn’t work you haven’t lost anything. I’m paying all expenses.”

He could hear Benson breathing into the phone through his mouth. The man was very nervous. “When would this be?”

“Next Sunday. Nine days from now. Nine November. You come in the morning, you go out the same afternoon. I don’t know how far away you are but you should be able to do the whole trip the same day, or break it up if you prefer. That’s between you and Bradleigh — he’s handling the travel arrangements. All I’m concerned with is that you show up at the Scranton-Wilkes-Barre airport at twelve noon on Sunday the ninth.”

“Wait a minute, I’m writing it down. Scranton-Wilkes-Barre, nine November Sunday, twelve noon. You’ll be there in person?”

“That’s right. You’ll recognize me.”

“What about Draper and John Fusco, you talked to them?”

“Not yet. They’re due to call this afternoon.”

“Be like old home week,” Benson said without audible enthusiasm. “Look, level with me, you really think this has a chance?”

“A damn good chance. When you get there I’ll tell you.”

“How soon will we know whether it’s worked or not?”

“Six weeks maybe.” Mathieson gripped the handle of the booth’s door. He closed his eyes. “How about it — you think you’ll make it, Walter?”

“I’ve been running my ass off, I got shot in the back, I’m still hiding like some hermit out here. Why the hell not. I’ll be there.”

When he hung up and left the booth Mathieson was smiling. The other two would be easier: He’d be able to tell them Benson had already agreed to it. That would carry weight with them.

4

Fusco was no trouble: Fusco had always been a fighter. It was Draper who gave him a few bad minutes but finally he brought Draper around with the promise of security.

He had arranged to take the three calls in lobby booths in the three luxury hotels clustered around Fifth Avenue and Central Park South — the Plaza, the Pierre and the Sherry-Netherland — and afterward he walked to the St. Regis to make his fourth call; there was no reason to walk the extra blocks — there were ample public telephones — but it suited his sense of compositional balance. He realized that Vasquez was right: He was making talismans out of everything, the way a child was careful never to step on a crack in the sidewalk.

The call from the St. Regis was to Bradleigh’s office. Bradleigh wasn’t there. He was expected Monday.

Mathieson tried Bradleigh’s home phone. He got an answering machine. Mathieson identified himself, said he would call back Saturday evening at six.

Chapter Twenty-Eight New Jersey — New York: 1–6 November

1

He drove to the lake house and let himself in. Vasquez and Homer were in New York for the day doing surveillance on Pastor and his family. Mathieson found Roger in the house fiddling with lamps, taking experimental footage with the Arriflex. The living room had a cathedral ceiling and high glass doors across the length of one wall: They gave a view of most of the lake.

Roger was bundled in sweater and jacket. “My feet are colder’n a witch’s tittie.”

“Try a bucket of hot water.”

“You talk like my grandma. You get Bradleigh all right?”

“It’s all set. Any trouble with the camera?”

“No. Go set in that chair, let me take a bead on you and run a few frames, we’ll see how the lighting works out.”

Mathieson sat down with the Times and let Roger photograph him from various angles, moving the tripod clumsily around the room and zooming the lens in and out. Mathieson said, “You’ve got both black-and-white and color, right?”

“Right. High-speed color, the new stuff. Otherwise we’d need klieg lights all over the place.”

“These two kinds of film, they’re compatible? I mean they can be spliced together?”

“Sure. Same sprockets, same sound-on-film tracks. We use the same splicer on everything. It’d go easier with a Movieola but it would’ve cost a fortune and I couldn’t find one to rent. We’ll make out with what we’ve got.”

“You’ve got a week to practice. Get it right.”

“Old horse, time I get through with this even old Jack Ford would be proud of me.”

“Or rolling over in his grave.” Mathieson put the newspaper down. “It’s time we wrote the script for the first piece of film.”

“You write the script, old horse, I’ll direct it.”

“We’ll both write it. It’s got to be right.”

“Go ahead. I’ll take a peek over your shoulder now and then.”

“We’ve got four days,” Mathieson said. “Thursday, as they say in the vernacular, the snatch goes down.”

“Why Thursday in particular?”

“Because it’s her birthday.”

2

She let her mind drift; under the dryer she neither read nor spoke. Alexandre returned after forty-five minutes and lifted the cone off her head and removed the curlers and began to brush her hair out. “Glorious,” he intoned with professional cheer. “Madam is a vision.”

She inspected herself critically in the mirrors. “It’s nice, Alexandre. A really fine job.”

“Thank you. I’m thrilled that madam is pleased.”

He helped her into her full-length suede coat. She gave him a smile that seemed to brighten his day; he went to the door and held it for her.

It was another of those crystal fall days and she blinked when the brightness hit her eyes; she found the sunglasses in her handbag and put them on.

The limousine was not at the curb; there were no parking spaces. She looked at her watch: 11:40. She’d told Belmont to pick her up at a quarter to twelve. She looked down the length of Madison and didn’t see it anywhere; probably he was waiting double-parked in a side street — Belmont was always punctual, it was what he was paid for. She window-shopped antiques and paintings for a few minutes, not really looking at them. She was still thinking about the child. Frank Junior. She still heard Frank’s laughter last night: Let’s hope the kid has your looks and your brains. She caught her own smile in the window’s reflection — and behind it she saw the long Mercedes draw up.

She crossed the curb toward it; Belmont was just getting out, starting to come around the car to open the door for her; people straggled by along the sidewalk, topcoated against the chill; two men were coming toward her, deep in animated conversation, and she hurried briskly across their path toward the car. She stepped off the curb between two parked cars and suddenly the two men crowded against her.

“Anna — Anna Pastor, isn’t it?”

The voice was vaguely familiar and she turned with a polite hesitant half-smile. Belmont came around the back of the limousine and she glanced at him. Then she froze. It wasn’t Belmont.

The man who had spoken was reaching amiably for her arm. Something glinted in his hand. She drew back instinctively but his companion moved in closer and when she took a backward step she felt hard fists grip her by both arms from behind: the man who wasn’t Belmont.

She opened her mouth but the taller man, the bearded one, said in a low voice, “Honey, I wouldn’t do that was I you. You could get hurt real bad.”

In a terrified confusion she glanced down. The man who had spoken first — the one with the moustache and glasses — had a firm grip on her right arm and now for the first time she saw the syringe clearly.

There was no time to react, no time for anything. The needle plunged into the soft web of skin between her thumb and forefinger. All three men held her tightly: She couldn’t move. The bearded man loomed, screening her from the curb. A bus went by with a swishing roar, filling the air with a noxious stink. The man behind her had something against her mouth — a handkerchief, she thought dispassionately. To keep me from screaming. It all went so fast...

They were pushing her into the car. She kept waiting for a shout of discovery from the people crowding past on the sidewalk.

She found herself in the back seat between the two tall men. The man in the chauffeur’s uniform got in behind the wheel. The doors shut, sealing her off from the world.

She cleared her throat. “What was in that needle?”

The man with the moustache said, “Sodium pentothal. It won’t hurt you. You’ll go to sleep for a while.”

The voice: Finally she recognized it. She turned and stared in horror at the man with the moustache.

“Merle.”

“Just take it easy, Mrs. Pastor. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

The bearded man said, “Move it on out, driver.”

“I don’t see the boss’s car.”

“Probably hung up in traffic. Get going — he’ll catch us up.”

The limousine eased out into the knotted traffic. Anna tried to reach the door. Merle gripped her arm — surprisingly gentle; he forced her back in the seat between them. “Easy now.”

Her head swam. “My God this stuff works fast.” By the time she spoke the last of the six words her tongue was thick. She tried to rouse herself, to stay awake. In five seconds she gave up the struggle and plunged into darkness.

3

She awoke with a sensation of having been asleep for a very long time. But they were still in the car, still moving. She seemed unable to open her eyes. She could hear and understand but her body was still asleep. She listened to their voices.

“Transfer point coming up.”

“She should come around in a minute. That stuff wears off fast.”

“Gave me a turn, old horse. Right out there in front of God and everybody. But nobody raised an eyebrow.”

“It’s all a matter of plausibility. People see it happen in broad daylight on a crowded avenue, they can’t believe it’s a real abduction. Everything moving so fast, it looked as if she’d had a fainting spell, that’s all. She was too surprised to put up a fight — we counted on that.”

“Likely fight like a bobcat when she comes to. You get that needle ready, old horse.”

“It’s all set when we need it.”

The car rolled to a stop. Her eyelids fluttered. She felt the car sway — someone getting out. Voices outside — the chauffeur and an unfamiliar voice:

“Anybody behind us?”

“No. But someone may have noted the license number. Have you made sure of fingerprints?”

“We’re all wearing these plastic gloves. Haven’t touched the car anywhere bare-handed.”

“Fine. Leave it here then. Let’s go.”

They were pulling her out, sliding her across the seat. She tried to resist it but the muscles were sluggish. She opened her eyes: They wouldn’t focus. The sunglasses had slipped down on her nose; the daylight was painful.

They hustled her across a few yards of pavement. She had a vague impression of shopping center and parking lot. They lifted her into the back seat of another car. She licked her dry lips.

“She’s awake.”

“It’ll be a few minutes before she starts tracking properly.”

Doors slamming; once again she was between Merle and the bearded man. Hazily she saw the other two men in the front seat. The car began to move.

Merle said, “Can you understand me, Mrs. Pastor?”

“Yes.” A croak: She cleared her throat and tried again. “Yes.”

“If you’ve had time to think about it you can understand that I’ve got no interest in hurting you. Quite the opposite. You’re only of use to me alive. So please don’t fear for your safety.”

“Where’s Belmont?” She slurred the words and felt angry with herself: so little control.

“Waiting in his limousine to pick you up at Saks Fifth Avenue at twelve-thirty. That was the message we gave him.”

“But the car—”

“That wasn’t your limousine, Mrs. Pastor. We hired it from a livery leasing outfit.”

“I don’t know what you expect to prove by this,” she said. “You’ll all be killed, you know that. If it takes the rest of Frank’s life and every penny he’s got.”

The bearded man patted her knee. “Ma’am, don’t fret yourself none, just relax and enjoy the ride.”

The man in the front seat said, “Give her the shot, Mr. Merle. She’s not to know where we’re going.”

She tried to fight it but it was no use: She went under again.

4

It was a small bedroom, cheerfully decorated with print wallpaper. The double bed had a good hard mattress. The first thing she noticed was the bars on the windows. Through the glass she could see trees, almost bare of leaves now except for a few tall pines.

She turned her head on the pillow. A man sat on a chair near the door. The door was closed; there was a large brass lock on it that appeared new.

The man’s face was deep in shadow until he reached up to switch on the lamp on the table beside him. Edward Merle.

“You’re in a house in the country. I suppose you can see that for yourself. You’ve been asleep for about two hours.”

“Two hours?”

“It was a different drug this time. Chloral hydrate. You’ll probably want to sleep several more hours to get it out of your system. The only thing that’s keeping you awake now is anxiety.”

“You know everything, do you?”

Merle didn’t reply.

“Where do you think this is going to get you?”

“I intend to get free of your husband and his pack of animals, Mrs. Pastor. You’re the instrument of that freedom.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“Maybe. Would you like coffee? Anything to eat?”

“No.”

“Don’t be stubborn. You’re probably thirsty — drugs do that, of course. There’s a plastic pitcher of ice water on the bedside table there, if you didn’t notice it. If you want anything at any time, just knock on the door. One of us will be outside at all times.”

“How considerate.”

“We’re not going to harm you. I want you to understand that. We may want to sedate you now and then, merely to benefit our own freedom of movement at certain times. Don’t be alarmed when you see hypodermic needles. It’s more humane than tying you up and putting a gag in your mouth.”

“How long do you intend to keep me here?”

“As long as it takes to convince Frank Pastor.”

“Convince him of what?”

“That he’s vulnerable.” Merle stood up. “You’d better try to sleep it off now.”

He left the room; she heard the lock slam home. She tried to think but drowsiness overcame her.

Chapter Twenty-Nine New York City: 6–7 November

1

Frank was a passionate man but Ezio had never seen him in such a towering rage.

The guests had come and waited and gone; the party had been limp and awkward without its guest of honor. Now the children had been sent to their rooms, Ezio’s wife and Ramiro’s were in the kitchen putting loads into the dishwasher, Belmont and Gregory Cestone were in the front room awaiting orders and Ezio sat locked in the study watching Frank pace back and forth like something in a zoo cage, darting savage glances toward the telephone as if willing it to ring.

“Let’s go over it one more time.”

“Frank, we’ve been over it a hundred times.”

“Get Belmont in here.”

“What for? We know everything he knows.”

“Maybe he forgot something.”

“We pumped him half a dozen times. There’s nothing wrong with his memory.”

“Get him in here.”

Ezio got up and went to the door. He crooked a finger at Belmont. Cestone sat near the door looking at the monitor screen. There were two men in the hallway, standing there. No one else; the elevator doors were shut. Ezio said, “Gregory, see if those two guys want some coffee or anything.”

Cestone went out through the foyer. Ezio returned to the study and closed the door. Frank was talking to Belmont: “I want to go over it again. Maybe you’ll remember something else.”

“I’m sure willing to try, Mr. Pastor.”

“I know you are. All right. You dropped her at the beauty parlor at ten-fifteen, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“She told you to come back and pick her up in an hour and a half.”

“Right.”

“You got back when?”

“About eleven-thirty. I parked at Fifty-third right at the corner. At a hydrant. I figured at a quarter to twelve I’d pull out around the corner and pick her up.”

“You were just sitting there parked at the hydrant, reading the Daily News, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And this guy walked over and tapped on the car window.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you actually see him come out of the beauty parlor?”

“No. He came from that direction.”

“Describe the guy again.”

“Small guy. Kind of wiry, you know, but he looked like he had muscles. Built like an acrobat, sort of.”

“Clean shaven?”

“Yeah. Dark hair, kind of narrow face, little tiny mouth. I never saw him before.”

“What about the clothes? You said he was wearing a dark suit.”

“Black. No topcoat or anything. Just the black suit. I think he had a colored shirt on, yellow or pink or something. He was wearing a tie — I couldn’t say what color.”

“What about his voice?”

“I didn’t notice anything unusual about it. He didn’t have an accent or anything. He talked clear, like a radio announcer, you know, the guys that get all the accent rubbed out of their voices in broadcasting school.”

“Tell me again what he said.”

“He said he was just coming outside, a lady in there asked him to pass a message to me, she said she wanted to pick up something at Saks and she felt like a walk, and would I pick her up at Saks at twelve-thirty.”

“Before you said he asked if it was Mrs. Pastor’s car.”

“That’s right, he asked me that first. And he said the reason she asked him to deliver the message she was under the hair dryer and couldn’t come out.”

“Can you remember any of his exact words?”

“I don’t think so, I’m no good at that kind of thing. I’m sorry, Mr. Pastor. I’m doing my best.”

Ezio said, “We know you are. Nobody’s blaming you.”

Frank was scratching the top of his head through the toupee. “Why don’t we hear from them?”

“Trying to make us nervous,” Ezio said. “Sometimes they do that. They snatch the wife and let the husband spend the night alone, missing her. Then they make the call in the morning. Don’t be surprised if we don’t hear until morning.”

He saw the rage in Frank and he added quickly, “Listen, it’s an occupational hazard. Guys in our business, they know we won’t go to the cops. But you think about all the snatches you heard about people in our business. They usually handle the victim with a lot of care and they don’t hold you up for an arm and a leg. That Galleone kid, what was his name, they took him three-four years ago, somebody out in Kansas City. They called Galleone, they told him to drop twenty kay in small bills. He made the drop, they delivered the kid safe and sound. They don’t mess up the merchandise and they don’t ask for too much money because they know that would bring the whole organization down on them... That’s all this is, Frank. Tomorrow night, Saturday morning, I bet you she’s home right here in perfect health. You want to try and take it easy.”

“I don’t think you’re reading it right, Ezio.”

“It’s not professionals, Frank. Professionals don’t kidnap people in the first place because the odds are wrong. In the second place nobody in the business is going to mess with Frank Pastor’s wife. So it’s a bunch of amateurs, maybe longhair kids or something, they want some quick money.”

“This guy that decoyed Belmont away from the beauty shop wasn’t any longhair kid.”

“So maybe they’re a bunch of middle-class middle-age businessmen that fell on hard times. Somebody he’s in trouble. I don’t know who they are but I’ll bet you they’re not professionals. It’s not some rival guy trying to put any kind of pressure on you. That leaves amateurs. Amateurs get scared, they don’t want trouble, they take the ransom and give her back safe.”

“Amateurs get scared, they start killing. You know that as well as I do. Don’t try to soft-soap me with reassuring lies, Ezio. I don’t need that crap.”

“I still say they’re not going to hurt Anna. Nobody’s that stupid.”

“I hope to God you’re right.”

2

It wasn’t a phone call. It was a small package, marked Personal, delivered by hand messenger at eleven-fifteen Friday morning.

Ezio signed for the package. Behind him in the foyer Frank said, “That’s probably it.”

“Sure.”

Frank said to the messenger, “What’s the name of your outfit?”

“MRDS. Midtown Rapid Delivery Service.

“Where’d you pick the package up?”

“Forty-second Street Library. The main reading room.” The messenger was an old man without teeth; his jaw chopped up and down like a marionette’s when he talked.

Frank went into his pocket and took out his roll. He peeled off a twenty. “Describe the man who gave it to you.”

The old man gaped at the money. “Well I don’t know as I noticed him all that much. Young man, he was. Not a kid, you know, but young. A little younger than you, anyway.” He laughed, high-pitched and nervous.

“For twenty bucks you can do a little better than that, old man.” Frank held the bill up a yard from the messenger’s nose.

“Well he was kind of dark, I remember that. Not Negro, a white man but he had dark hair, dark clothes.”

Ezio said, “Black suit?”

“Maybe. I guess it was. Young man, dark hair, that’s it. Not very big. No bigger than me.”

“What kind of voice did he have? How did he sound?”

“Ordinary. Nothing special. He wasn’t no foreigner or anything.”

Ezio said, “Sounds like the same guy.”

Frank pushed the twenty-dollar bill into the old man’s hand and Cestone ushered him out.

They opened the parcel on the pool table. There were two enclosures: a cassette of recording tape and a small gold ring. Frank held the ring up and squinted at the tiny inscription engraved inside it. “Anna’s wedding ring all right.”

“Got a recorder to play this tape on?”

“The kids have them. I’ll be right back.”

While Frank was gone Ezio examined the cassette. On Side One it had the words Frank Pastor printed in block letters in pencil. There was nothing written on Side Two. It was an ordinary half-hour cassette; you could buy the brand in any electronics shop.

Frank came into the study carrying a small recorder. They plugged the cassette in and Ezio punched the “start” button. The tape ran silently for a bit; then there was a click and a hollow noise as if the microphone had banged against something when it was picked up.

Ezio clenched his fists and prepared to listen.

3

“This is for Frank Pastor’s ears only. And I suppose Ezio Martin’s if it’s unavoidable.”

Ezio looked up. He couldn’t read Frank’s face.

“I’m sure you recognize my voice, although it’s been a long time since you’ve heard it.”

“I recognize it, Merle.”

“... We’ve invited Mrs. Pastor to spend a vacation with us. She’s a little run-down, I think she needs a holiday.”

“Vicious bastard,” Frank said. He swung roughly away but not before Ezio saw the moisture in his eyes.

“We have a few requests to make of you. They’re simple and you shouldn’t have any trouble following them. You may have thought that your wife had been kidnapped, but that’s not true. She’s taking a vacation, that’s all. Nobody is asking for ransom money or anything of the kind.”

Ezio said, “That’s in case we brought a few friendly cops in.”

Frank said irritably, “Shut up,” and because they’d missed a few words he pushed the “stop” button and rewound the tape slightly. Then he started the machine again.

“... vacation, that’s all. Nobody is asking for ransom money or anything of the kind. Your wife is in perfectly good health, she’s just a little tired. The rest should do her good. The only thing that could endanger her health, and the health of the baby, would be an attack on her or the place where she’s resting. I’m sure you understand what that means.

“We don’t know yet how long Anna will choose to stay here. That’s up to her, of course. It depends on how well she responds to therapeutic treatment.

“She doesn’t want you to worry, but I think you should. We’ll be in touch at fairly regular intervals. Expect to hear from us again in a week or so. In the meantime, as I said before, we have a few simple requests and recommendations.

“First, it would be unwise for you to issue an alarm. Mrs. Pastor doesn’t need excitement right now. It could be injurious to her. Please don’t make any efforts to find her, or to find us. We’d hear about them and we’d act accordingly.

“Second, we’d like you to equip yourself with a motion-picture projector. It should be a sixteen millimeter sound-on-film projector, the standard kind that uses magnetic sound-reproduction and has a single row of sprockets rather than a double row. You’ll need this equipment in the next week or two because Mrs. Pastor will be sending you some movie film.

“Third, Mrs. Pastor feels that you should stop hunting for me and for Mr. Benson, Mr. Fusco and Mr. Draper. She said that unless you call off the search immediately, you may not see her again. Ever. She’s quite serious about this.

“Fourth, all communications from Mrs. Pastor and from me and my associates will be in the form of messenger-delivered tapes and films. Therefore there is no need for you to install expensive taps and tracing equipment on your telephones. We won’t be using telephones.

“Possibly this experience will be good for you. It may teach you what it’s like to be frantically concerned for the life and well-being of your wife and your child.”

4

Ezio expected him to explode but Frank only ran the tape back to the beginning and listened to it again. Then he made his way to the leather chair and sank into it.

Ezio said, “The guy’s gone psycho.”

“Looks like it.”

“What do you want to do, Frank?”

“Think.”

“You want me to go?”

“No.”

Ezio rewound the tape and stood awkwardly with his hands in his pockets waiting for Frank to speak.

After a while Frank said, “Well we can call off those people in San Diego County, at least.”

“It’s for sure he’s not down there,” Ezio agreed. “What about the other three?”

“He’s trying to make us think the four of them are in this together. I’m having a little trouble swallowing that. I think he just wants to make himself look more formidable than he is.”

“Formidable enough. He’s got Anna.”

“He won’t keep her forever. And he won’t kill her because if he did that he’d know nothing would stop us pulling him apart a hair at a time.” Frank examined his fingernails bleakly. “The movie projector thing, that’s what worries me. What kind of home movies does this nut want to show us?”

“I don’t know, Frank.”

“He’s got her someplace around here. Maybe right here in the city. He didn’t have time, to take her very far, and he’s got at least one guy with him who decoyed Belmont yesterday and delivered this tape to the messenger this morning. They’re right around here someplace.”

“Fifteen million people right around here, Frank.”

“You don’t have to give me population figures.”

Ezio said, “What about the Virginia operation? Those guys are already down there casing it. Do we call the whole thing off on account of this business with Anna?”

“Hell no. We don’t call anything off except San Diego.”

“He’s acting like he’s got connections, Frank. Like he’s got ears in places where they can hear things. Maybe we ought to call off the memos on Fusco and Draper and Benson.”

“All right. For the time being. Call them off.”

“You want to set anything up to start looking for Anna?”

“No. I don’t want to take the chance of him getting wind of anything like that.”

“He’s gone nutty, Frank. How can we trust him to keep her alive?”

“He may be nutty but he was never stupid. He knows if he kills her he kills himself.”

“Maybe he’s aiming for that. Maybe he doesn’t mind going down if he can hurt you doing it.”

“He’d have killed her already if it was that way.”

“Maybe he has.”

“I don’t think so. If he had, why string us along with tapes and movie projectors?”

“To buy himself time to get away.”

“There wouldn’t be any point in it, Ezio. He’s not that crazy. If he was just out to kill Anna to get revenge on me, he’d have killed her and left the body around where we’d find it.” Frank got out of the chair and crossed to the table. He put his finger on the tape recorder. “But I still can’t figure out what he’s up to. He must think he’s going to accomplish something but I can’t see what it is.”

“Me neither. But what are you going to do right now?”

“Nothing,” Frank said. “Sit it out. Wait for the next one. What the hell else can we do? He’s got us over a barrel right now. It won’t last forever but that’s the way it is right now.” Frank pushed the button again.

Chapter Thirty Pennsylvania — New Jersey: 7–9 November

1

Friday morning Mathieson drove west with Homer, out Interstate 80 across the Delaware River into the Poconos. They checked out the airport at Scranton — Wilkes-Barre and then drove deeper into the hills through Hazleton, looking for back roads, exploring them for half the day until they found what they sought.

It no longer had a name. At one time it had been a small community; there were a dozen derelict houses, none of them much more than a shack, and along the curving ungraded road stood three large structures that had been barns and possibly a local general store. It was the remains of a coal pocket; the coal had been worked out and the miners had moved on, most of them toward Appalachia; it had been abandoned at least fifty years. The depressed hills of northern Pennsylvania were littered with burnt-out diggings and deserted hamlets. Lying outside the attractive tourist belt of the Poconos and far beyond commuters’ radius of New York and Philadelphia, they attracted no interest and stood untended to rot.

The shacks had low stone foundations and plank-board walls; no clapboards, no shingles. Only one of them still had a roof — a patchwork of corrugated rusty metal and frayed tar paper. Homer explored it with his revolver out: There was a possibility of snakes.

The floor was rammed earth covered by the splintered remains of a few rotted floorboards. The window openings had been boarded up long ago; light seeped through the cracks and fell through the open doorways of the two rooms.

“It’ll do,” Mathieson said. He marked its position on the road map and they got back in the car to drive back.

They timed the drive to the airport. Just under an hour.

He examined the map and found a route from the ghost town straight across forest and farm land to the banks of the Delaware south of Easton. That would be their return route.

They took another reconnoiter around the airport. The general-aviation hangar was set well back from the commercial terminal and there was a separate entrance from the highway.

“We’ll meet them right at the plane. Drive the car out on the runway.”

“Sure,” Homer said. “Nobody gets a look at faces that way.”

“The security measures may be a little extreme,” Mathieson said, “but I’ll feel safer.”

“So will I.”

“That about wraps it up then. Let’s go home.”

2

Roger opened the door; evidently he’d been alerted by the crunch of their tires on the gravel; Mathieson glimpsed the revolver before Roger put it away under his pullover.

“Everything check out over there?”

“Everything checks out.” Roger locked the door behind them. Mathieson hung his coat on a peg by the door and went directly down the hall to the bedroom. He turned both locks and glanced behind him — Roger was watching from the end of the hall; his glance slid away and he moved out of sight toward the kitchen.

Troubled by Roger’s expression, Mathieson pushed the door open and stepped into the bedroom.

She was sitting in the chair watching him. She hadn’t been reading or watching television or smoking or fidgeting; she’d simply been sitting there. The hate in her eyes was almost corporeal.

He shut the door behind him and shot the lock home. “Good evening, Mrs. Pastor.”

3

When Mathieson came into the kitchen Vasquez glanced up at him and then went back to examining the interior of the coffeepot as if he were a shaman consulting a pot of mystic entrails. Finally he set the pot back on the hot red ring of the electric stove. “I take it the reconnaissance was a success.”

“It looks good, better than we hoped. We can go over the maps later.”

Homer said, “How’s the lady?”

“She wants to kill somebody. Preferably me.”

“There’s a big surprise,” Roger said.

Vasquez put the lid on the pot. “I went into the village and made several telephone calls. There doesn’t seem to have been the slightest rustle on any grapevine, except that apparently Pastor has obeyed instructions to the extent that his hunters have been recalled from the San Diego area.”

Roger said, “Takes the heat off our kids and womenfolk.”

“It’s what we hoped for,” Mathieson said, “for openers.”

The water began to bubble. Vasquez spooned coffee into it. “In any event it seems quite certain the police haven’t been alerted. It’s something of a relief to have one’s anticipations confirmed.”

Roger said, “Hadn’t we ought to get some chow down the lady?”

Mathieson sat down at the kitchen table. “She claims she’s not hungry. We’ll make dinner a little later.”

“Reckon she’s too groggy to eat. You keep her shot full of that sleeping stuff, it’s likely to do a lot of harm to that kid she’s carrying. But I guess you know that.”

“She’s been sedated only when I wasn’t here. And I don’t expect to make any more excursions.”

“You know we could have looked after her fine, old horse, without the mickey finns.”

“Nobody goes in that room except me,” Mathieson said. “I keep the keys. That was the understanding from the beginning.”

He pressed the point. “I want it clear with all of you. I’m the only one she has contact with. It’s for your sakes — things could still go sour.”

“Sour?” Vasquez took down cups and saucers. “It’s already gone far past that.” He glanced up at the clock. “We really should get some nourishment and liquids into her, walk her around, let her exercise for an hour before you give her the next fix.”

4

The Lear Jet touched down. When the door opened and the steps came down Mathieson already had the station wagon in motion. He drew up at the foot of the steps and got out.

Caruso and Cuernavan stood in the plane’s open doorway surveying the airfield.

Mathieson smiled. “It’s secure. Nobody knew you were coming. How are you fellows? Nice to see you.”

“Didn’t recognize you at first,” Caruso said. He came down the steps and shook hands. “You all alone?”

“I’m the only one whose face you’re going to see.”

Caruso looked up over his shoulder. Cuernavan nodded; he stayed put at the top of the stairs. Caruso ducked to look under the belly of the plane, examining everything in sight. He walked around the station wagon, opened a door and inspected the interior. When he backed out and closed the door he turned to Mathieson. “You see how it is. I’ll need to talk to your wife and son now.”

“That’s part of the arrangement. There’s a pay phone in the hangar. I’ll drive you over.”

Caruso said to Cuernavan, “Hang on, we’ll be back in a minute.” Mathieson waited while he got into the car; then he drove across the macadam and put it in park. The phone was in a booth outside the building. “Wait in the car until I’ve dialed the number.”

“OK. Glenn Bradleigh told us to play along.”

He put his pocketful of coins on the shelf beneath the phone, dialed the number direct and obeyed the operator’s instructions by inserting nearly half a pound of quarters. Mrs. Meuth answered the phone: “Yes, sir, they’re here waiting for your call. I’ll put them right on.”

Jan sounded cheerful. “Well here you are, right on time again.” It had a false echo.

“Caruso’s here with me.”

“Tell me how you are, at least.”

He smiled for Caruso’s benefit. “I’m fine. We’re on the homestretch and everything’s working beautifully.”

“You sound strung up.”

“Nervous. Can’t be helped,” he said. “It’s a tricky day today — a lot of intricate business. Ronny there?”

“I’ll put him on.”

“Hey, Dad...”

“How’re you making it, Ron?”

“Oh we’re OK, everything’s OK. You going to be finished pretty soon now?”

“A week ought to do it. Then we’re going to rebuild the house on Beverly Glen and things will be just like they always were.”

“I got bucked off yesterday. You’d think I’d know better by now. I got a real black eye, you wouldn’t believe the shiner.”

“Everybody gets bucked off now and then, I guess. You and Billy still hitting the books?”

“Well she makes up these exams, you know, like the College Boards or something. It’s a lot tougher than we figured it’d be.”

“You’ll make it.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“How’s your mom?”

“Kind of bored. You know.”

“I know. It’s hard on her. But it’ll be over very soon. Put your mother on again, will you?”

“Dad—”

“Yes?”

“Nothing. I kind of miss you, that’s all.”

“I miss you too, Ron.”

“Here, hang on a minute.”

Jan came on the line; Mathieson said, “I’m going to put Caruso on. He wants to make sure you’re both all right. Answer any questions he asks but don’t tell him where you are.”

“Yes, I understand.”

“It’s right down to the wire. We’re almost there with this thing. One week — that’s the timetable.”

“I hope so, Fred. I hope so. Good luck.”

There was a click; a woman said, “Your three minutes are up, sir.”

He plugged money into the phone and beckoned to Caruso. Jan said, “When will you call again?”

“Make it Wednesday at six. I may have more to report by then. Here’s Caruso.”

He handed the receiver over. Caruso gave him an apologetic glance and Mathieson walked back around the station wagon and got in. Through the window he watched Caruso but the man’s face told him very little. Caruso was patient and thorough, asking brief questions, listening carefully to the answers: probably listening more to the tone than to the content. It was obvious when Ronny took over the phone; Caruso began to smile broadly and became more animated talking to the boy. Mathieson saw him scoop up some of the coins he’d left on the shelf and put them in the phone. The conversation went on at length; evidently Caruso was talking with Jan again; finally he cradled the phone and got into the car.

Mathieson said, “All right?”

“Yes. Nobody’s holding a gun on them. You understand why we had to do this. We had to make sure.”

“Pastor hasn’t got a lever on me, you know. It’s the other way around.” Mathieson drove back out toward the plane.

“What kind of lever?”

“Take my word for it, you don’t want to know that.”

“If it works I’m in favor, whatever it is.” He drew up at the foot of the stairs and Caruso got out and made a hand signal to Cuernavan. “OK, bring them out.”

5

They had changed as one expected men to change after an interval of more than eight years. Benson’s shoulders had rounded, he’d lost a lot of hair on top, he’d developed a paunch and he squinted through his glasses. Draper had always been cadaverous and he’d put on no weight, but the years had engraved deep brackets around his mouth and had crosshatched his skin as if he’d been using a rabbit-wire screen for a pillow. John Fusco was still the same squat hard fireplug of a man but his kinky hair had gone gray and he had scars on his face that hadn’t been there before.

They’d never had anything in common except their testimony against Frank Pastor. Benson had been a bookkeeper in one of Pastor’s operations and had seen Pastor on the premises two or three times when illegal money had changed hands. Draper had been a gopher in Ezio Martin’s office; he was the one who had gone to the bank that day and withdrawn the cash and delivered it to Pastor — the cash that Pastor had put into a white envelope and handed to the judge in the courthouse men’s room. John Fusco had been an enforcer, George Ramiro’s aide-de-camp; he’d been nailed in a truck hijacking and had testified against Pastor in return for immunity from prosecution on the hijacking charge. None of their evidence had been crucial to the case but it had contributed: Defense attorneys had tried to discredit the three men but the weight of their testimony, coupled with Mathieson’s, had been enough to convince the jury.

Mathieson had no idea what Fusco or Draper had been doing since he’d last seen them in the courtroom. He knew that Benson had been managing a store in Oklahoma. They were four strangers thrown together by a common enemy.

Driving down narrow roads through the Pennsylvania mountains he briefed them to the extent that the situation required:

“We’re putting pressure on him. Part of the pressure consists of informing him that the odds against him are high. The more people we can show him on our side, the more impressive we look and the more convincing our operation becomes. We want him to think there are so many people in this thing that he couldn’t possibly reach all of us before some of us strike back. I can’t fill in too many details today.

“When we’ve had the films developed and edited we’ll prepare copies of all the important materials and have a complete set delivered to each one of you through Glenn Bradleigh’s office. I’d suggest you each make independent arrangements with someone you trust — maybe a lawyer — to put the tapes and films in safekeeping with a letter of instructions to be opened in the event anything happens to you. That part will be up to you, of course. That’s how I’m handling it myself and it’s always the most sensible method of protecting yourself against retaliation from people like Pastor. Now you’d better not ask me what it’s in retaliation for. You’ll be finding that out for yourselves.

“What we’re going to do today is gather our group in front of a movie camera. There’ll be the four of us and three other men who’ve been working with me. Two of the men you’re going to meet will be wearing stocking masks at all times. You’ll never find out who they are. That’s to give us insurance against Pastor trying to put pressure on any of you to identify all the members of the group. Pastor himself will never find out who those two men are. Therefore he’ll never know where the attack comes from, if he tries anything against the rest of us.

“That sums up the highlights. I’ll try to answer questions if you’ve got them.”

6

When he drove the station wagon into the ghost town he saw the glint of the lens in the window of the shack at the top of the slope. He had a glimpse of Anna Pastor’s dark hair framed in the window as well. Roger was up there, working the zoom lens, holding Anna Pastor in the foreground of the picture while in the background he focused on the station wagon as its four occupants emerged. Vasquez and Homer, unrecognizable in stocking masks, emerged from one of the tumbledown structures and joined Mathieson by the car.

“Two of my associates. There’s no need for names. These are Mr. Benson, Mr. Draper and Mr. Fusco.” He turned and lifted an arm in signal to Roger; then he walked up the hill and entered the cabin, leaving the five men on the road below.

Roger picked up the camera on its tripod. “Now I go down and take group shots and two-shots while they mingle, right?”

“Right. I’ll be down in a minute.”

Roger carried the Arriflex out. Mathieson turned his attention to Anna Pastor.

Her arms were tied behind her and her legs were roped to the chair. Mathieson walked past her and pulled the improvised shutter across the window; he didn’t want her to be seen or recognized by the visitors.

“We’re ten miles from the nearest house,” he said. “I’m not going to put a gag in your mouth because nobody would hear you if you screamed. Nobody except my own people. We’re having a little convention, as you may have gathered.”

“To celebrate your funeral, I imagine.”

“There’s only one door and we’ll be watching it from outside. I can give you another shot or leave you tied to the chair. Which do you prefer?”

“I’ve had enough drugs pumped into me to last ten years. If you’re giving me a choice I’ll stay like this.”

“It’ll be an hour or two. Then we head home.”

“Home,” she said. Even in the dimness her eyes burned.

“Take it easy, Mrs. Pastor. If those three men knew you were here you might not get out of this shack alive. After what your husband’s done to them they’d probably be happy to take you apart bone by bone. You’d be well advised to keep absolutely quiet up here until they’ve gone.”

She didn’t speak to him again. After a moment he left the shack and walked down the hill. Roger was moving around with the camera, telling people where to stand and what to do. It was apparent that the newcomers were baffled: He was disguising his voice and they had not quite recognized him behind the beard but his presence, as always, was commanding.

As Mathieson approached he saw the camera swing toward him. He looked straight into the lens and felt atavistic rage; he hoped it showed.

Homer was distributing coffee in plastic containers. His face under the stocking mask looked weirdly distorted. Mathieson took a cup of coffee and sipped it; he looked up and found the tripod-mounted camera panning past him and he contrived a grim smile for it before it went past.

Roger locked the camera in position, left it running and stepped around in front of it, showing only his back to the camera but adding his bodily presence to the group’s number. Then he backed out of range and returned to the camera and picked it up to carry it down the hill and take a group shot from another angle.

Benson said, “You mean this is all you want from us? Just some film of us standing around drinking coffee?”

“It’ll do the job,” Mathieson said.

John Fusco snorted. “You’re a little crazy if you think Frank Pastor’s going to get scared out of his shoes just by seeing some movies of the four of us together. He was never scared of us before. Why should he start now?”

“Because we never organized ourselves against him before. We were always solitary targets. I want to convince him we’re unified against him.”

He went across to the porch of one of the half-decomposed buildings and picked up the stack of placards. While he carried them back to the group he saw Roger setting up the camera above the road. It wasn’t cranking.

He put the placards down. “I doubt any of you has much experience with cue cards but we’ve got a few lines for each of you to read. You’ll be on camera while you talk but I want to rehearse these performances before we put them on film. It’ll have the best effect if it doesn’t look like you’re reading the lines. Try to be as natural as you can. If you can’t get your mouth around the wording, put it in your own words. All right, let’s start with Walter.”

Chapter Thirty-One New Jersey: 10–14 November

1

He sat huddled by the boathouse on the pier, the cold wind shot sprays of foam off the lake into his face; he sat with his arms wrapped around his knees and did not move when he heard the car enter the driveway.

He heard the front door slam. Homer bringing in the groceries. Mathieson didn’t stir.

The sun filtered weakly through a brittle haze. Pointed reflections ran along the surface of the water. All around the lake the trees were stark and bare. On the far shore a boy rode his bicycle along the road. There was no other sign of life.

It was a while before he was disturbed. He heard the glass doors slide open and someone’s footsteps on the path.

“Time to feed Mrs. Pastor, I believe.” Vasquez.

He didn’t move.

Vasquez’s hand fell on his shoulder. “Come on, get up. You’ll catch pneumonia.”

He shook the hand off.

“Don’t be silly, Mr. Merle.”

When he still didn’t look up Vasquez sat down beside him. “Having second thoughts, are you?”

“Everybody’s entitled to a mood now and then.”

“You’re a thousand miles past the point where you could have turned back, if that’s what you’re contemplating. Think of your own wife — what will happen to her if you don’t carry it through. Your own child as well.”

“I had no idea she’d be pregnant, Diego.” His speech sounded rusty in his own ears: slow, painful, searching for words. “An innocent unborn child. It’s harder to sink lower than that.”

“I’m sure Genghis Khan was innocent in the womb.”

“Don’t patronize me with ad-lib aphorisms.”

“Come on, Mr. Merle, it’s time to take her supper to her before it gets cold. Or give me the key and I’ll be waiter tonight.”

“No. I’m the only one who goes in there.”

“As you wish.”

He got to his feet; suddenly he was very cold. He began to shiver.

2

He rubbed his eyes and watched the mixture cook up on the stove. When it was heated he drew it up carefully into the syringe. He switched off the heat.

He felt the others’ eyes on him when he carried the syringe through the hallway, holding it up ahead of him like a uniformed doctor. With his free hand he turned the keys in the locks; then he went into the room, careful not to brush anything with the needle.

She rolled over on the bed and stared at him. Her eyes were utterly blank.

3

On his way into the living room he paused by the thermostat. It was on its highest setting. He rubbed his hands together and buttoned his sweater all the way up.

Vasquez looked up from his crossword puzzle. “Another day or two and you should be able to begin withholding the drug until she begins to need it. It shouldn’t take very long before she’s convinced beyond all doubt that she cannot survive without having the injection at regular intervals. You’ll have to impress the mythology on her.”

Roger said, “What mythology?”

“Drug addiction is in large part psychological, you know.”

Roger looked at Homer across the checkerboard. “What’s he talking about now?”

Vasquez said, “Those stories you’ve heard about addicts dying from cold-turkey withdrawal are largely hokum. Of all the deaths attributed to heroin, virtually none has been caused by withdrawal. It’s a painful process to be sure but rarely a deadly one. It isn’t the physical need for the drug that controls the victim — it’s the mind. The mind becomes convinced that survival is impossible without the drug. If she weren’t aware it was heroin that was being injected into her veins, she’d realize only that she felt sick in the absence of injections. She’d feel terrible but she wouldn’t know why. Given enough time, her sickness would pass. She’d return to normal health and never entertain the desire for another shot of heroin — because she’d never know it was what she’d been receiving in the first place. Do any of you understand what I’m saying?”

Mathieson said, “I always understood it was a physical addiction.”

“To a great extent it is. But the mind needs to be aware of it. The human mind is the great betrayer.”

Homer cleared his throat. “Can’t we talk about something else?”

“No. We must be clear on this. We cannot flinch from it. This thing must be done in such a way that her knowledge of absolute need becomes the overriding factor in her life. We must continually reinforce her conviction that she has become a hopelessly addicted slave to whom the withholding of her regular injection would be unthinkably agonizing.”

Mathieson sat down. Vasquez stared at him. “By letting her go a bit too long between shots you will let her feel the touch of withdrawal anguish. Merely a taste of it. You cannot make the final move until you’ve accomplished that.”

Mathieson rubbed his face with both palms.

Vasquez’s voice softened. “Actually I’d worry more if you weren’t having such a strong reaction to these events. If you took them in stride I’d have to put you in the same category of subhuman existence to which verminous cretins like Frank Pastor belong.”

Mathieson let his hands fall onto the arms of the chair and leaned his head back against the cushion. “Roger, we’ll want to film some close-ups tomorrow of the scabs on her arms. The needle tracks.”

Chapter Thirty-Two New York City: 16 November

1

This time the messenger was a retarded youth with a club foot; there was no information in him. Ezio signed for the package and Cestone escorted the limping messenger to the elevators.

It contained a single reel of 16mm film. Ezio set up the projector on the pool table and unrolled the screen against the book shelves. Frank shut the door and turned off the lights. Enough illumination came through the closed Venetian blinds to thread the projector. Ezio set up the speaker box and plugged in the wires.

Frank said brutally, “Enjoy the show, folks.”

It began with a close-up of Anna. Apparently she was sitting in a chair; the frame showed only her shoulders and head. She looked contemptuously toward the camera and then away.

It was in color with good resolution: very professional. But Anna’s movement, her turn away from the camera, was sluggish and her eyes looked dull. She looked doped, Ezio thought. He glanced at Frank to see whether the same thought had occurred to him but Frank stared unblinkingly at the screen and the quiet anger in his face registered no change; he had been in a deadly calm for ten days now — running things with chilly precision but an utter absence of visible feeling. It was a state in which Ezio had never seen him before.

The image of Anna remained on the screen for several seconds in complete silence; there was only the grind of the projector and the hum of the speaker. Ezio was about to check the sound system when abruptly Edward Merle’s voice boomed, filling the room.

“She is, as you see, quite alive.”

There was a sudden cut: a daylight close-up of Merle, looking into the camera. Ezio felt Frank stiffen. He reached for the volume knob and turned it down a bit.

“She’ll stay alive if you do certain things. First, you’re to cancel immediately the contract on my life and my family. I want you to spread the word where everybody hears it. I want it to be heard where it will be reported back to me. In addition, you will similarly cancel the contracts on these three men: Walter Benson.”

Another cut: Benson was there, looking into the camera, showing his teeth — in defiance.

“... John Fusco.”

Fusco, his hair gone gray, his eyes hidden in shadow, his jaw squared in determination.

“... Paul Draper.”

Draper’s fine hair moved slowly in the breeze like seaweed. He stared blankly at them from the screen.

Ezio heard Frank murmur, “So they’re in this together.”

There was another tight shot of Anna; another setting — it looked like a bedroom; Ezio saw a barred window at the edge of the frame. She was sitting on the edge of the bed. The camera moved and the image jerked: The camera was being hand-held and perhaps this was a different photographer’s work; the resolution was less clear. Anna got up and walked slowly to the window and the camera followed her, panning across the room. It was as if she had been told to stand up and walk to the window; she obeyed listlessly. At the window she was in silhouette. The camera zoomed forward slowly until her torso’s outline filled the frame. Just before it went to black there was an abrupt cut to a close-up of an arm.

“You’ll notice the punctures in the flesh above the vein. These are the tracks of mainline needles.” The voice was harsh and cold.

The camera drew back, tipping upward; Anna’s face came into the picture. So it wasn’t a fake; that was really her own arm.

“At the moment her maintenance dose has been increased steadily to five nickel bags per day.”

Ezio gripped his head in both hands. Jesus.

Abruptly Walter Benson was on the screen. He talked straight into the camera. Ezio had no trouble recognizing the reedy voice. “I’ve got a bullet in my back from your contract. It won’t happen again, and we’re going to tell you why.”

Cut: Now it was Draper, speaking with slow gravity. “There are more of us than you can ever handle. We want you to know that.”

And then Fusco. “We’ve had it, Pastor. One more move against any of us...”

Cut to Merle: “... and we all come down on you like a ton of bricks. That’s a promise.”

Now there was a repeat of the opening shot; Anna, head and shoulders, first looking into the camera and then, as if in woozy disgust, looking away. The camera moved up slightly and began to zoom forward through the window beyond her; it kept her head steadily in the frame in the lower corner but she went gradually out of focus as the image went out through the window and picked up a scene of abandoned shacks, barren gray earth, rock-studded hills beyond. At the foot of the slope the camera discovered a knot of men milling slowly about. The lens zoomed forward to high telephoto resolution. Ezio counted five men in the picture: He recognized three of them; the other two were not in focus.

There was a cut that disoriented him momentarily; the camera seemed to be prying its way through a group of people, pushing foreground figures away to the sides, finding more people beyond. Draper looked at the camera and made an obscene gesture. Fusco made a fist. Benson, with an ironic twist to his mouth, lifted a plastic cup toward the camera as if in toast, and then drank. Merle was coming down the slope from a cabin above them; the camera focused on him until he moved into the group. In the background two other figures moved in and out of the view — Ezio realized they were wearing stockings over their heads. Both of them wore pullover sweaters, dark slacks, dark shoes and leather gloves. Six so far, he thought. Then the camera steadied and a seventh man appeared at one side of the frame. He did not face it; Ezio had an impression of bulk, a full reddish beard, long unkempt hair. The man milled among the others, keeping his back to the camera, and soon went out of sight to one side.

The camera cut to another view of the group, taken from a point slightly above them; Merle’s voice startled Ezio from the speaker. “These are a few of our group. There are others. You’ll notice that you can’t recognize three of the people you’ve seen in these pictures. Remember that. These three are close friends of ours. They’ve joined us to fight you. You don’t know who they are, and therefore you can’t reach them before they reach you.”

Close-up of Merle; behind him nothing but a blank off-white plaster wall. Talking directly into the camera.

“We’ve grown into a sizable force. You’re not dealing with helpless individuals anymore. We took your wife to prove a point. You’re vulnerable. You’re just as vulnerable as we are. Your wife and your unborn child are at our mercy. We’ve made a hopeless heroin addict out of her in a matter of weeks, with carefully controlled increasing doses. We can do a lot worse than that if you force it.”

Anna’s face appeared. She was sitting in the front seat of a car. It was a close-up; not enough of the car was visible to determine its make or design. The picture had been taken from outside the car, looking in through the open window. She wasn’t looking at the camera. She reached up and ran her hand through her hair, dragging it back from her face. Ezio noticed abstractedly that her hair needed washing.

Merle’s voice droned on: “You’ll hear from us in a little while. You’ll receive instructions. Obey them.”

Another shot of Anna: a reverse of an earlier shot, Ezio saw. From Anna’s face the camera moved down to her arm; it zoomed in tight on the scabs and open sores. Then the screen went bright with a reprise of the downhill shot of Benson and the others; the camera drew back — it was the same shot as the opening frame, in reverse — through the window to a close-up of Anna in the chair; she was looking away and then she turned to face the camera and the screen went motionless, freezing frame on her as she stared into the lens. Now Ezio saw the fear and appeal in her eyes.

The screen went white; the film flapped through to its end.

2

Ezio didn’t speak. He rewound the film to its beginning and threaded the projector and left it set up that way in case Frank wanted to look at it again.

Frank showed no inclination to review it. He sat in the leather chair with his fingers steepled below his chin.

Ezio opened the blinds. The light made him squint. He stood by the window waiting for Frank to speak. Outside it was snowing.

But it was the telephone that broke the silence.

Merle, he thought. He crossed the room, glancing at Frank; Frank didn’t even look up. Ezio picked up the receiver. “Yes?”

“It’s Belmont, Mr. Martin. I need to talk to you.”

“Where are you?”

“Down at your office. Something’s come up.”

“To do with Mrs. Pastor?”

“No. Something else. That other matter, down around Washington.”

“Can it wait?”

“It could but I don’t think it ought to. It’s pretty bad news.”

“I’ll get to a pay phone and call you back. Wait there.” He hung up.

Frank lifted his face slowly.

“I’ve got to go out for a few minutes.”

Frank nodded.

3

When he returned with snow on his coat Frank was still in the chair; he appeared not to have moved at all. But he looked up alertly. “Well?”

“Bad news from Washington. Very bad. They had to abort the raid on those files.”

“Why?”

“Because there aren’t any files any more.”

Frank gave him a sour look. He didn’t flare up; he only sighed. “Par.”

“What?”

“Par for the course,” Frank said. “Everything else goes rotten, I should’ve known this would fall apart too. What happened to the files?”

“They put them in code and fed the code into a computer bank. Only three or four people alive have the code. Corcoran, Bradleigh, one or two others high up in the department. Nobody can retrieve the information without the key code. So there’s no way we can get at them any more.”

Frank nodded. “They probably put that in motion as soon as they found out we’d been getting files from the Janowicz woman.”

“They must have. It’d take them quite a while to program the whole thing into computers, let alone code it.”

“You’ll have to pay those men off and send them home.”

“I know,” Ezio said. “I wish I had some good news for you for a change.”

Frank’s mouth twisted into a half-smile. “What’s left, Ezio? Just what the fucking hell is left?”

4

When the phone rang again Ezio picked it up expecting nothing.

Without preamble the voice said, “Put Frank Pastor on.”

Ezio held the receiver out toward Frank. “Him.”

Frank took it. “Yeah, I know who it is. Talk.” Then he looked up at Ezio and mouthed the word paper and snapped his fingers. Ezio handed him the notebook and pencil from the desk. Frank wrote something down. “All right. Ten minutes,” he said and hung up the phone. He tore the paper off the pad and rammed it into his pocket, getting to his feet. “Wants to call me back at a pay phone.”

“Smart. He figures this one’s tapped.”

“Let’s go. Might as well find out how much it’s going to cost me.”

Chapter Thirty-Three New York-New Jersey: 16 November

1

Mathieson checked his watch.

Time. He put the dime in and dialed.

Pastor was there on the first ring. “All right. Talk to me, you bastard.”

“Instructions. Are you listening?”

“You’re dead, Merle.”

“No. If I die Anna dies. Get that through your head.”

“I’m listening.”

“I want you to meet me. Alone. No wires, no bugs and no guns.”

“When?”

“One hour.”

“Where?”

“The southbound service area on the Palisades Parkway in Englewood Cliffs.”

“I can’t go to New Jersey.”

“You’ll have to.”

“And go back inside for five years on violation of parole?”

“That’s your problem. You’ll have to go up the parkway from the George Washington Bridge and make a U-turn at the Palisade Avenue exit and come back along the southbound lane to the service area. One hour from now — one o’clock. Alone. No outriders, no passengers, no microphones, no tape recorders and no guns. Play it my way or you’ll never see Anna again and your child will never be born.”

2

He drove back across the bridge into Fort Lee and parked in the motel lot. Vasquez evidently had been watching from the window — he came outside immediately. Mathieson said, “Picked your spot?”

“Phone booth right across the street.”

Mathieson looked that way. It was on the apron of an Exxon station. “Too close. He may spot you.”

“It doesn’t matter. His wife has seen my face a hundred times. My only real protection is your protection.” Vasquez drew a slip of paper from his pocket. “This is the number of that telephone across the street. Just in case. And here’s something else.” He pulled a bulky paper bag out of his coat pocket. “Keep it wrapped up until you’re safely hidden inside the car.”

“What is it?”

“George Ramiro’s three fifty-seven Magnum.”

“I don’t want it.”

“I know you don’t; but will you humor me?”

He tossed the bag into the car. “All right. But I think Pastor will play it straight.”

“You can’t predict what these creatures may do. It’s best to take every precaution. It’s fifteen minutes to one, Mr. Merle. You’d better be on your way.”

3

It was an oppressive gray day. The bare trees were limp, heavy with wet snow. Wind stirred at the upper branches and white pillows fell with plopping crunches. He stepped across the curb and went through the trees — a little copse of them that masked the town streets from the parkway.

He walked through the trees until he had a good view of the service area — the station a bit to his right, the gasoline-pump islands dead ahead, cars entering the area from his left. By his watch it was 12:53.

Waiting laid a frost on his nerves; it mingled with the dreary chill in the damp air. The snow had quit falling but there was the threat of more. Cars on the service area apron had ground the stuff into filthy slush. He waited just within the trees, motionless in the shadows.

It was a white Continental streaked with filth from its drive. It pulled past the pumps and parked against the corner of the repair station. Frank Pastor, his nose tucked inside the upturned collar of his coat, stepped out of the car and stood there trying to spot Mathieson. The small round face was just the same — neat, almost distinguished, hardly a hoodlum’s countenance. Perhaps it was the air of unruffled self-confidence that had made him a leader; or perhaps leadership had created the air. In either case he was inevitably a man arrogant with power and that was a quality which could be used against him.

A sudden attack of nerves: He imagined someone was coming after him, running through the trees in deadly silence — he looked all around, terror-stricken. There was no one.

He stepped out into the bitter wind, holding the heavy .357 Magnum in his coat pocket.

Then Pastor turned and the expression in his eyes electrified the skin of Mathieson’s spine. Pastor’s cold animal stare triggered all Mathieson’s warning systems but he kept walking.

“You cocksucking motherfucker.” Pastor spat the words out as if they were insects that had flown into his mouth. But he removed his hands from his pockets, empty and ungloved. A vein rose and throbbed above his eyebrow, embossed by rage. “It’s your game. What’s the next move?”

“You come with me.”

Without waiting for a reply he turned on his heel and strode away, following his own tracks back through the woods. He could hear Pastor behind him, treading heavily in the wet.

“Get in.” He took the wheel of the Pinto and when Pastor got in beside him he threw it in reverse and backed into another parked car and left a little red glass in the road when he pulled away from the curb.

Pastor did not ask questions; he did not speak at all. He stared straight ahead, his mouth pressed tight as if to contain the threat of an outburst.

Mathieson parked the car in the slot in front of the motel room door. He unlocked it and went in ahead of Pastor. His enemy entered the room boldly behind him, wearing an expression of contempt as if to indicate that he didn’t care whether it was a trap.

“Strip down to your shirt-sleeves.”

“What for?”

“I want to find out if you’re bugged.”

“I’m not.”

“Want me to take your word for that?”

Pastor got out of his coat and threw it on the bed. He tossed his jacket on top of it and stepped back. He was unarmed. Inside his shirt he seemed surprisingly thin; he looked as brittle as a dead sapling.

Mathieson went through the coat and jacket carefully with especially close attention to the buttons. There were no microphones that he could find. He found nothing other than Pastor’s wallet; it contained nothing that interested him.

“Empty out your pockets. Let me have your belt.”

He proceeded methodically with everything including the shoes and shirt buttons and even the zipper of the trousers. When he was satisfied he tossed the shirt and slacks back to Pastor. “You can put them back on.”

Pastor got dressed without saying a word. Then he posted himself in the middle of the room, hands at his sides. “How many copies of that movie are there?”

“Quite a few. Benson has one. Fusco, Draper, each of the other three men you saw in the various shots.” Mathieson went to the window and looked out along the motel lot. Across the street he vaguely made out the shadow of a man inside the phone booth on the Exxon apron — Vasquez.

“You may have worked out some clever kind of trap for me,” Mathieson said. “If so, I think you should know that we’ve got your wife near here and if I don’t telephone at specific intervals to let them know I’m all right, she’ll be taken away to a place where you’ll never get her back.”

“There’s no trap. What’s your price?”

Mathieson studied him for a long time. There was no satisfaction in it but he detected the bitterness of defeat in his enemy. Finally Mathieson said, by way of a test, “You’re too calm to suit me.”

Pastor made a quarter turn on the carpet to face him squarely. His voice was utterly without tone. “I made up my mind I’d play your game. Whatever it takes to get Anna back. You want to kill me, then you’ll kill me. No gimmicks, no cross, no tricks. I came here to find out the price. You’ve got me over the barrel, all right, I’ve played the game before. Quit shitting me — quit wasting time. What’s the price?”

“Freedom.”

“You already got that.”

“Only as long as I’ve got your wife. The real price is our freedom after you get her back.”

“You’ve got the floor.”

“We hooked her on heroin, Pastor. Your heroin, from one of your own pushers. We hooked her bad. She’s a falling-down freaked-out hopeless helpless junkie. She needs smack so bad she’d cut herself open and put her insides on exhibit if it would buy her a fix.”

In his coat pocket he gripped the Magnum but Pastor didn’t move off his stance. He blinked several times and looked at the floor.

Mathieson said, “You’ve seen some of the members of my group. On the film. There are others you’ve never seen. Do you get the point of all this?”

“Suppose you spell it out.”

“We can reach you, Pastor. You’re not impregnable. If they can assassinate presidents then people like you can be reached just as easily. Now I know about your laws of revenge. I know you can put up with the idea of an enemy who wants to kill you. What you can’t put up with is the knowledge that if anything ever happens to me or Paul Draper or John Fusco or Walter Benson, then the target for all the survivors will be not merely you personally but your wife and your two daughters and your child who’s about to be born. That’s my edge, Pastor, and that’s why we took your wife and made a junkie out of her. We did it to prove we could do it. To prove we can do it again if you force us to. All it takes is one bullet, aimed at any of us, and the rest of us will tear your family apart limb from limb. That’s the pact we’ve made among us. That’s what you’ve got to know.”

For a moment Pastor closed his eyes. Then they snapped open. “Suppose you get run over by a bus that has nothing to do with me?”

“That’s your hard luck.” Mathieson watched him warily — tried to see what was going on behind the eyes.

“Merle, everybody’s got to die.”

“I’m not offering you a way out. I’m offering you time. You can have your family as long as the four of us and our families stay alive. That’s all I’m promising. With some luck it might be twenty or thirty years. It’s more than you ever offered us.”

Pastor’s face gleamed unhealthily. He rubbed his thumb across the pads of his fingers. “When do I get her back?”

“When you see my point.”

“Hell, I see your point, Merle.”

Pastor’s face gave away nothing — not anger, not even contempt. It was too easy. Mathieson felt the need to provoke a reaction: He needed to know he’d struck bedrock. He said, “You might like to know I was the one who put Gillespie and George Ramiro out of the way.”

“Did you.”

“Don’t you care?”

“You’ll never know what I care about. What is it, Merle, you want to see me grovel? That what you want, the satisfaction? Look, you played the game and you won it. I haven’t got any surprises up my sleeve, I’m not a magician. I don’t like the way this turned out but all right, Anna’s hooked on smack, there’s worse things, I’ll just get her unhooked. All right, the game’s over, you won it, now you want to stand around here and gloat over it, is that what you want?”

“I want to know I’m free of you. Now and forever. Wherever I go, whatever I choose to do. That’s what I want.”

“Merle, I’d kill you in half a second. I’ll hate you to my last breath and my grandchildren will grow up hating you and yours. And someday they’ll come for their revenge. But then you knew that before. You said it yourself — all you’re trying to buy is some time. All right, you’ve bought the time. I’ll see you around, maybe, in twenty or thirty years. In the meantime you got what you want — you’re free of me.”

Mathieson stared at him. Slowly he took it out of his pocket: the .357 Magnum. “I should have killed you after all.”

“You want to do it, do it now, get it over with.”

“George Ramiro’s gun. I could leave it here next to your corpse and they’d pin it on Ramiro.”

“You won’t use it.”

“What makes you think I won’t?”

“Because you had too much fun setting this up,” Pastor said. “Because I’m going to spend the next twenty years eating my guts out hating you and that’s why you set this whole fucking stinking thing up and you don’t figure to throw it all over for one lousy quick shot at me.”

Mathieson put the gun back in his pocket. Dismally he turned to the door. “Wait here. In a few minutes you’ll get a phone call telling you where to pick her up.”

“Sure,” Pastor said. “Good-bye, Merle.”

Mathieson walked out.

4

He got into the car and drove out of the motel. He drove two blocks and stopped in a shopping center and used the sidewalk phone. He dipped into his pocket for the number Vasquez had given him.

“Me.”

Vasquez said, “Roger and Homer are just getting into their car. They’re backing out now.”

“Pastor still inside the other room?”

“Yes. Here comes the car. I’ll go now. Give us three minutes or so. You’re in the shopping center?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t call him until you see us drive into sight.”

He broke the connection and waited patiently.

When the car rolled into the parking area he looked at it long enough to make sure all three men were in it. Then he dialed the number of the motel and said, “Mr. Johnson, please, Room Ten.”

Pastor answered the phone. “Yeah.”

“It’s Merle.”

“Go ahead.”

“One thing first. I lied about the heroin.”

“Come again?”

“We didn’t hook her on anything. The tracks on her arms are from a harmless glucose solution. She’s in perfectly good health. No addiction.”

“What the fuck are you trying to prove, Merle?”

“That we can do it to you if we have to. Any time at all. Remember it, Pastor. Write it high in letters of fire and never forget it.”

“Where is she?”

“Upstairs above you. Room Twenty-two. The door’s unlocked. You’ll find her inside, tied to a chair.”

He hung up and left the booth.

Chapter Thirty-Four Southern California: 17 November

1

They gathered around the long table at seven: Vasquez remarked that there was an irresistible human proclivity to solemnize transitional events with rites of food and drink. He expounded on the biological reasons for such traditions. His thesis followed its nose inevitably into movieography. Roger sighed when Vasquez resolutely began to catalog film scenes that supported his point.

Mrs. Meuth tramped noisily in and out. Billy Gilfillan and Ronny fell to giggling. Vasquez had picked something heroic to play on the stereo; the volume was low but it sounded like a movie sound-track score — something by Steiner or Tiomkin. The steaks were blood rare and Mathieson found himself eating with unexpected gusto. He looked up once and caught Homer leering at him in amusement.

Amy kept glancing slyly toward Roger beside her; his face was a study in attempted gravity but now and then a corner of his mouth would twitch — she was teasing him under the table with ribald glee while she kept her innocent attention on Vasquez and his monologue.

It wasn’t pomposity. Vasquez was setting them at ease. It was an evening for which they had prepared through the hard uncertain months; now it had come and Vasquez, sensitive to their awkwardness, was guiding them through it with gentle distraction. Mathieson found it a remarkable performance.

Jan sat beside him pecking at her food. When he caught her eye she would smile tentatively. She’d had very little to say in the hours since they’d met at the airport. He had not known what to expect and therefore he had been prepared for anything. She had put warmth into the first greeting; the rest of the day had passed gingerly as if they were agreed un-spokenly to suspend everything and rediscover each other like acquaintances meeting for the first time after a long separation.

He had shaved off the moustache and tried to wash the dye from his hair; it was the best he could do until it grew out but he wanted as much as possible to resume his identity — Fred Mathieson’s identity: Edward Merle had achieved the justification that had completed his being; now it was up to Fred Mathieson to complete his own.

But the estrangement was still with them. A day’s celebratory truce meant nothing. In Jan’s hesitant smiles he saw possibility but not conclusion. It depends, he thought, it depends. Listening to the drone of Vasquez’s voice he reached for the wine, caught Homer’s eye and contrived a smile.

After dinner they drifted into the big front room. The two boys stuck close, aching for reports of adventure; Homer entertained them with an edited account that made heroes of Roger and Mathieson. Roger chose his customary place on the Queen Anne chair with Amy on the carpet beside him. Jan was listening to Homer’s recital; she glanced quizzically at Mathieson; he managed to laugh, deprecating Homer’s version. She lifted her face to him and he tasted her kiss; her eyes were open. He couldn’t determine what was in them — whether it was simply relief or something more.

Vasquez touched his arm. It startled him: Vasquez ordinarily avoided physical contact.

“May I have him for a minute?”

Jan smiled. “Of course.”

“A word, if you don’t mind.” And Vasquez went toward the French doors.

Outside the house he followed Vasquez across the driveway. Vasquez kept walking until he reached the paddock fence. He hooked his elbows on it and craned his head back to peer at the sky. It was cool but not cold; a few clouds scudded across the stars and there was a three-quarter moon on the rise, its shadow-pittings startlingly visible. “Quite a beautiful evening. That’s fitting, I think.”

“Yes.” Mathieson was mystified.

“Something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

“Go ahead. Ask.”

“I fail to understand why you chose not to inform any of us that the doses you were administering to Mrs. Pastor were not the real drug.”

“If I could convince you three then I could convince Pastor. It had to be absolutely believable. There couldn’t be any doubt in his mind that I was capable of it.”

“But you weren’t capable of it. He knows that now.”

“No. I’d have done it if I’d had to. I didn’t have to. Pastor understands that.”

Vasquez said, “Then that explains it.”

“Explains what?”

“The thing that’s troubling you. You’d have done it if you’d had to — that’s what you just told me. You’ve discovered what you’re capable of. It alarms you.”

“Maybe.”

“Mr. Mathieson. Fred, if I may. You were a good man when you began this. You’ve made yourself into something of a sinner — you’ve committed offenses against your own moral code. Extortion, fraud, blackmail, kidnapping, dire threats. But insofar as I can see you’ve done irreparable damage to no one. Those who’ve been damaged — like Gillespie and Ramiro — have done the harm to themselves. All you did was trigger their fears.”

“Is this the Confessional?”

“At this moment from the look of you and from the sound of your voice I should say you’re not merely a preternaturally weary man; you’re a man experiencing a profound emptiness — a sense of guilt and anticlimax. You feel you may have destroyed yourself along with your enemy — you may have brought yourself down nearly to his level in your search for retribution and freedom from the enslavement of fear.”

Mathieson rested his forearm along the top of the fence. “You enjoy exposition too much,” he murmured. “Have you ever had an unexpressed thought?”

“You need reassurance. You feel everything is a shambles. You’ve won what ought to be a victory and yet you’re uncertain. You’re concerned about your marriage. All the things you’ve put out of your mind during the past months. Your future weighs on you. You can’t picture yourself going back to an office and dickering over meaningless details in dispassionate contracts. You can’t picture yourself living a quiet life of contentment in a suburban house with two cars and swimming pool and boredom heavy on your hands.”

“This mind-reading act — what are you using? Palmistry or a crystal ball?”

“Neither. Let’s try cards. Let’s put them face up on the table. I believe you’re missing a vital discovery.”

“Am I.”

“You feel you’ve a burnt-out life — that anything henceforth must be anticlimax.”

“Go on.”

“You’ve given up your soul for freedom, in a sense. To regain your soul — your raison d’être — it’s my feeling you have no choice but to put your freedom back on the line.”

“What?”

“Nothing less will satisfy your need to justify your continued existence.”

Mathieson watched him with passionate desperation. “Tell me...”

“You’ve tasted the hunt,” Vasquez said. “Haven’t you?”

He stood up straighter. “I’m beginning to see.”

“You’ve savored the chase.” Vasquez’s voice dropped with a resolute intensity. “You’ll be satisfied with nothing else, ever again. You’ve trapped yourself — an exquisite trap. You may hate it. But you’ve demonstrated the most incredible talent for the chase that it’s ever been my experience to observe. You’re a master. You’re the best hunter I’ve ever met. And you do not kill. You’re unique.”

Mathieson inhaled until his chest was filled. He threw his head back and emptied it out. The oxygen made him giddy. He watched a cloud put a brief haze around the moon. “What’s your offer, Diego?”

“There are other Frank Pastors. For you and for me.”

“Yes.”

“Full partnership,” Vasquez said.

He was looking up toward the house. He saw the French doors open, saw Jan’s inquiring silhouette.

Vasquez said, “Salvation for both of us — that’s what it could be.”

Mathieson pushed himself away from the fence and began to walk up toward the house. In the doorway Jan’s silhouette turned — she’d spotted him. He walked toward her.

Behind him Vasquez spoke quietly. “What will it be, then?”

“I don’t know.”

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