Under Siege

CHAPTER TEN

Jake Grafton had no more than walked through the door Wednesday evening when the telephone rang. Callie answered it. After exchanging pleasant greetings with whomever was on the other end, she offered the instrument to Jake. “It’s for you.”

“Hello.”

“Captain Grafton, this is Jack Yocke, Washington Post.”

“Hi.”

“Sorry to bother you at home, but we just got a story from a stringer in South America that perhaps you can help me with. It seems that the U.S. Army sent some people to Colombia and they shot it out with Chano Aldana’s bodyguards and arrested him. Apparently there were some Colombian police along, but the word we get is that it was a U.S. Army operation all the way.”

“Why do you think I can help you with that story?” Callie was standing there watching him, futilely trying to push her hair back off her forehead. She must really like this jerk, though Jake hadn’t the foggiest idea why.

“I’ve been doing some checking,” Yocke said, “since I saw you at Aldana’s arraignment. Apparently you’re the senior officer in the antidrug operations section of the Joint Staff. So this little matter had to cross your desk.”

“You haven’t answered my question, Mr. Yocke. Why do you think I can help you with your story?”

“You’re saying you won’t?”

“Mr. Yocke, I drink coffee in the morning and go to lunch every day. Everything else I do at my office is classified. I cannot help you.” Callie frowned. Jake turned his back on her. “I suggest you try the Pentagon’s public information office.”

“Do you have that number handy, Captain?”

“Try the phone book.” Jake cradled the receiver without saying good-bye.

“Jake, that was rude.”

“Oh, Callie!”

“Well, it was.”

“That damned kid calls me at home and asks me to give him classified information? Bullshit! You tell him the next time he’s conjugating some verbs for you that he had better never pull this stunt on me again or I’ll rearrange his nose the next time I meet him.”

“I’m sure he didn’t know the information was classified,” Callie said, but she was talking to herself. Her husband was on his way to the bedroom.

Well, she told herself, Jake was right. A reporter should know better. Yocke’s young. He’ll learn. And fast, if he spends much time around Jake.

That evening when Harrison Ronald arrived at Freeman McNally’s house for work, Ike Randolph met him at the door.

“Freeman wants to see you.”

Ike grinned. It was more of a sneer, Harrison thought, and he had seen it before, whenever someone was about to lose a pound of flesh. Ike enjoyed the smell of fear.

In spite of himself, Harrison Ronald felt his heart accelerate. For some reason his armpits were instantly wet.

Ike patted him down. That was routine, but this evening Ike was more thorough than usual — on purpose, no doubt.

Ike Randolph, convicted armed robber, convicted child rapist — you had to have the milk of human kindness oozing from your pores to like Ike. He had, Harrison knew, grown up in the same cesspool that spawned Freeman. Mom McNally had fed them both and paid bail when they got arrested for shoplifting and, later, stripping cars. She hadn’t had the money to bail them out when they were caught mugging tourists. Ike had had the gun and taken the felony fall; Freeman had pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. Yet after his plea Freeman spent ten more days in jail while Ike walked on probation. The two of them still liked to laugh about that when they were drinking.

Several years later a judge decided to let Ike do a little time after a six-year-old girl required surgery on her vagina and uterus following Ike’s attentions. He had had a couple of minor possession convictions since — nothing serious.

This evening Ike gave Harrison a little shove after he finished frisking him.

“Hey!”

“Shut up, motherfuck! Go on. Freeman’s waiting.”

McNally was sitting on a sofa in the living room at the back of the house. Both his brothers were there too. Ike closed the door behind them.

“Called you this morning,” Freeman said.

Harrison Ronald concentrated on managing his face. Look innocent!

“Where were you?”

“Out. I do that every now and then.”

“Don’t gimme no sass, Z. I don’t take sass from nobody.”

“Hey, Freeman. I just went out to get some tail.”

“What’s her name?” This from the eldest of the brothers, Ruben. He was the accountant.

“You don’t know her.”

Freeman stood up and approached Ford, who was still trying to decide if he should break McNally’s arm and use him for a shield when Freeman slapped him. “You weren’t at your pad last Wednesday either. You’re gonna tell me the truth, bro, or I’m gonna unscrew your head and shit in it. What’s her name?”

This appeared to be an excellent time to look scared, and Harrison did so. It was ridiculously easy. The fear was boiling. “Her name’s Ruthola and she’s married. We got this little thing going. I sneak over on Wednesday morning when the kid’s at day care. Honest, Freeman, it’s just a piece of ass.”

Freeman grunted and examined Ford’s eyes. Ford forced himself to meet his gaze. McNally’s deep brown eyes looked almost black. The urge to attack was almost overpowering: Harrison flexed his hands as he fought it back.

“Call her.”

“Christ, her ol’ man might be home.”

“So this’ll be the end of a good thing. A piece of ass ain’t worth your life, is it?”

“Not to me.”

“Call her.”

Freeman McNally picked up the phone on the table by the couch and motioned to the one on the other side of the room. Ford lifted the indicated instrument from its cradle and dialed.

It rang on the other end. Once. Twice. Three times. Harrison held his breath.

“Hello.” It was a woman’s voice.

“Ruthola, this is Sammy.”

Silence. At that instant Harrison Ronald Ford knew he was a dead man. A chill surged through him. Then her voice came in a hiss. “Why’d you call? You promised you wouldn’t!”

“Hey, babe, I won’t be able to make it next week. Gonna be out of town. Just wanted you to know.”

“Oh, honey, don’t call me when he’s home!” The words just poured out. “You promised! Call me tomorrow at ten, lover.” She hung up.

Harrison Ronald cradled the phone. He felt a powerful urge to urinate.

Freeman snickered once. He rubbed his fingers through his hair while everyone in the room watched. “She a nice piece?” he said, finally, the corners of his lips twitching perceptibly.

Harrison tried to shrug nonchalantly. The shrug was more of a nervous jerk.

“Where’s her ol’ man work?”

Ford’s stomach was threatening to heave. This, he decided, would be a good place for the truth. He got it out: “He’s FBI.”

They stared at him with their mouths open, frozen. Harrison tried another grin, which came out, he thought, like a clown leering.

“You stupid—” Ike roared from behind him. “Of all the—”

Freeman giggled. Then he laughed. The others began laughing. The laughter rose to a roar. Freeman McNally held his sides and pounded his thigh.

Harrison turned slowly. Even Ike was laughing. Harrison Ronald joined in. The relief was so great he felt a twinge of hysteria. The tears rolled down his cheeks as his diaphragm flapped uncontrollably.

Eight months ago, when Hooper had told him that someday he might need an alibi and introduced him to Ruthola, he hadn’t anticipated it would be like this, hadn’t understood that he would be so taut he almost twanged.

Ruthola Barnes, wife of Special Agent Ziggy Barnes, she had known. “I’ve done this before,” she told him then. “Trust me. Just say you’re Sammy and talk to me like we just got out of bed, like we’re both still naked and standing in the kitchen making coffee. I’ll do the rest.”

That was eight months ago. He hadn’t seen her since. Yet when he needed her, she was there.

Ah, Ziggy Barnes, you are a lucky, lucky man.

The key to success for a trial lawyer lies in preparation, and no one did it better than Thanos Liarakos. Thursday morning he began to submerge himself in the reams and reams of witness interrogation transcripts that were spewing from the prosecutor’s office just as fast as the folks over there could run an industrial-size copy machine.

There were going to be a lot of transcripts, tens of thousands of pages, the prosecutor had told the judge. The people answering the questions were drug dealers, wholesalers, smugglers — pilots, guards, boat crewmen, drivers, lookouts, and so on — people from every nook and cranny of the drug business. At some point in their interrogation by police or FBI or DEA they were asked where they got the drug, when, how much, and of course, from whom.

Liarakos’ associates had spent the last two days going over this pile and placing small squares of yellow sticky paper at every passage that they thought might be of interest. The difficulty, of course, was that at this stage of trial preparation the prosecutor still had not decided on a list of witnesses. So a lot of the material being read by the defense attorneys would be superfluous, unless Liarakos wanted to try to subpoena a witness himself and introduce testimony he hoped would be exculpatory.

Exculpatory, a nifty little word that meant confuse the hell out of the jurors.

Confusion and deceit were at the very heart of the trial process. The theory that comfortable law professors and appellate judges liked to cite stated that in the thrust and parry of adversarial combat — somehow, for reasons only a psychiatrist would find of interest, these legal thinkers still believed in medieval trial by combat — the truth would be revealed. Revealed to whom was a question never addressed. Perhaps it was best for everyone that the philosophical questions were left to mystics and the tactics and ethics to the trial lawyers. “The American legal system isn’t going to be reformed anytime soon, so we’re stuck with it”—Thanos Liarakos had made this remark on several occasions to young associates appalled at their first journey into the morass.

The meat of the defense lawyer’s job was to ensure that the truth revealed in the courtroom melodrama was in the best interests of his client. Thanos Liarakos was very good at that.

He had already come to the conclusion that the point of his attack had to be on the jury’s perception of Chano Aldana. He had assumed all along that the prosecution had sufficient evidence to convince any twelve men and women that Chano Aldana was imbedded to his eyes in the drug-smuggling business. Yet there was more to it than that. The whole thrust of the government’s case was that Aldana was the kingpin of the entire Medellín cartel, some Latin American ogre who bought men’s souls and terrorized and murdered those he couldn’t buy. Liarakos wanted the jury to believe that the prosecutor, William C. Bader, had to prove that Aldana was the devil incarnate or they could not convict.

Everything Liarakos did or said at trial would be designed to force the jury to the question, Is Chano Aldana the personification of evil? Is this man sitting here with us today Adolf Hitler’s insane bastard? Is this slightly overweight gentleman in the sports coat from Sears the spiritual heir of Ivan the Terrible? If Liarakos could induce the jury to raise the bar high enough, the prosecutor’s evidence would fall short.

Liarakos’ primary asset was Aldana himself. He looked so average, so normal. He would be dressed appropriately. He would smile in the right places and look sad in the right places. And regardless of the testimony of the prosecution’s witnesses, Chano Aldana would continue to look like an underdog. Even the sheer weight and number of the prosecution’s witnesses would be turned against the government — Liarakos would ask, After all these years, after all the money spent and hundreds — nay, thousands — of people questioned, is this all the government has? Is this all?

The difficulty was going to be controlling Aldana. He appeared to be pathologically adverse to taking direction from anyone and he had all the charm of a rabid dog. Yet there must be a way….

He was musing along these lines when Judith Lewis, his chief assistant, brought in another stack of transcripts festooned with yellow stickies.

She put the pile on his credenza, then sat down. When Liarakos looked up, she said, “I don’t think they’ve got it.”

“Explain.”

“If this sample of transcripts is representative of the government’s evidence, they don’t have enough to get a conviction. Most of this stuff is inadmissible hearsay. They might get it into evidence if we were stupid enough to make Aldana’s character an issue, but not otherwise. In this whole pile there is not one possible witness who had direct contact with Aldana.”

“They must have better stuff. They just haven’t given it to us yet.”

“No, sir. I’ll bet you any sum I can raise they don’t have it.” She swallowed hard. “Chano Aldana is going to walk.”

Liarakos examined her face carefully. “That’s our job, Judith. We’re trying to get him acquitted.”

“But he’s guilty!”

“Who says?”

“Oh, don’t give me that crap. He’s guilty as Cain.” She crossed her legs and turned her head toward the window.

“He isn’t guilty until the jury says he is.”

“You can believe that if it makes you feel any better, but I don’t. He’s taken credit for arranging the murders of at least three Colombian presidential candidates. I spent thirty minutes with the man yesterday.” She sat silently for a moment recalling the meeting, then shuddered. “He did it,” she said. “He had them killed, like they were cockroaches.”

“Colombia didn’t choose to try him for murder, Judith. Colombia extradited him to the United States. We’re not defending him from a murder charge.”

“Colombia couldn’t try him. Get serious! In 1985 forty-five leftist guerrillas drove an armored car into the basement of the Colombian Palace of Justice. They held the place for a day and executed all the justices. Aldana hired them. Over a hundred people died — were murdered — that day. Try Aldana in Colombia? My God, wake up! Listen to yourself!”

“Judith, you don’t know he did that! We’re lawyers. Even if he committed a thousand crimes, he isn’t guilty until a jury convicts him.”

“Semantics,” Judith Lewis muttered contemptuously. “I spent my childhood learning the difference between good and bad, and now, all grown up and wearing two-hundred-dollar dresses, with an expensive education, I sit here listening to you argue that evil is all in the label. Bullshit! Fucking bullshit! I know Chano Aldana is guilty as charged on every count in the American indictment, and on probably another two thousand counts that haven’t been charged. He is a dope smuggler, a terrorist, an extortionist, a man killer, a murderer of women and unborn babies. He deserves to roast in the hottest fire in hell.”

“Only if the government can prove it,” Thanos Liarakos pleaded. “Only if the jury says the government proved it.”

“The government hasn’t got it.”

“Then they shouldn’t have indicted him.”

“I quit,” she said simply.

She walked for the door, opened it, and passed through. She left the door standing open.

Liarakos sat for a moment thinking about what she had just said. Then he went after her. She was in her office putting on her coat. “Ms. Lewis, would you come back to my office, please, and discuss this matter further?”

Wearing her coat, she followed him past the secretary’s workstation and, when he stood aside, preceded him into his office. He closed the door and faced her.

“What do you mean you quit?”

“I quit. That’s plain English. It’s exactly what I mean.”

“Do you mean you wish to work on some other case or perhaps for another partner?”

“No. I mean I quit this firm. I quit the legal profession. I quit! I am through trying to be a lawyer. I don’t have the stomach for it.”

She brushed past him. She paused at the door. “You can mail my last check to the Salvation Army. There’s nothing in my office I want to come back for.”

“Take a few days off and think this over. You spent three years in law school and three years in practice. That’s six years of your life.”

“No. I know you’re doing what you think is right. But I don’t think it’s right. I don’t want to think it’s right.”

“Judith—”

“No, Mr. Liarakos. I’m not going to squander another minute of my life arguing about a dope dealer’s constitutional rights. I’m not going to touch another dollar earned by helping a dope dealer escape justice. No.”

This time when she left he didn’t go after her.

He sat in his chair and stared at the transcripts.

A ball glove wrapped around a scruffy baseball lay on the credenza. He pulled on the glove and tossed the ball into it. The impact of the ball meeting the leather made a satisfying “thock” which tingled his hand. The thumb of the glove was sweat stained. He had habitually raked it across his forehead to wipe away the perspiration. He did that now, enjoying the cool smoothness of the leather, then placed the glove back on the polished mahogany.

He kept a bottle of old scotch in the bottom drawer of his desk. He got it out and poured a shot into an empty coffee cup.

He was pouring a second when the phone rang.

“Yes.”

“There’s a lady on the phone calling from California. She won’t give her name. Says it’s a personal matter.”

“My wife?”

“No, sir. I know her voice.”

“I’ll take the call.”

The phone clicked.

“Hello,” he said. “This is Thanos Liarakos.”

“Mr. Liarakos, this is Karen Allison with the California Clinic?”

“Yes.”

“Your wife apparently left the clinic during the night, Mr. Liarakos. We can’t find her on the grounds. She took her suitcase with her.”

“Yes,” he said.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Liarakos. We did what we could.”

“Yes,” he said, and gently cradled the telephone.

On Friday morning Henry Charon drove to Baltimore to find a pay telephone. He parked at a mall and located a bank of three phones near the men’s room. Since he was early, he ate lunch in the food court, lingered over coffee, then strolled the mall from end to end. Finally, with five minutes to go, he walked to the pay phones and waited. A woman was busy explaining to her husband why the new sheets on sale were a bargain. She hung up a minute before the hour and walked away briskly, apparently the winner of the budget battle. She had glanced at Charon once, for no more than a second, and had not looked at him again.

Charon dialed. The number he was calling, according to Tassone, was a pay phone in Pittsburgh. The area code—412—was right, anyway. Charon had checked. When the operator came on the line he fed in quarters from a ten-dollar roll.

Tassone answered on the second ring. “Yes.”

“You got my shipment?”

“Yes. Where and when?”

“Truck stop at Breezewood, Pennsylvania. Tomorrow at three.”

“Got it.” The connection broke.

Charon walked out of the mall and got in the car. Before he started it he carefully studied a map, then folded it neatly and stuck it above the visor.

Four hours later in Philadelphia he bought a ticket for tomorrow’s seven-fourteen bus to Pittsburgh. He ate dinner in a fast-food restaurant, then drove around north Philly until he found a cheap motel, where he paid cash.

He was up at five a.m. He parked the car at a twenty-four-hour garage a half block from the bus station and was in the waiting room thirty minutes early.

The bus left right on the minute. Charon’s luggage consisted only of a backpack, which rested on the seat beside him. There were eleven passengers. Charon sat near the back of the bus where the driver couldn’t see him in his mirror.

Two seats forward, on the other side of the aisle, sat a couple that lit a marijuana cigarette thirty minutes into the trip, just after the bus had reached cruising speed on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The odor was sickly sweet and heavy. Charon cracked his window and waited for the driver to see the obvious smoke cloud and stop the bus. The bus never stopped. After a second cigarette the man and woman drifted off to sleep.

Henry Charon watched the countryside pass and wondered what it would be like to hunt it.

Four people got off the bus at Harrisburg and three got on. The couple across the aisle lit more marijuana. One of the new passengers cursed, which drew laughter from the smokers. The bus driver ignored the whole affair.

The driver pulled into the bus parking area at the Breezewood truck stop a little after noon. He announced a thirty-minute lunch stop, then darted down the stairs and headed for the restaurant. Most of the passengers trailed after him.

Taking his backpack, Henry Charon went to the men’s room in the truckers’ section of the building. He found a stall, dropped his trousers, and settled in. When he came out an hour later the bus was gone.

Charon bought a newspaper, then went into the restaurant and asked for a menu and a booth by the windows.

Senator Bob Cherry had the reputation of being an old-time politician. Now in his early seventies, he had been a U.S. naval aviator during World War II and had shot down seven Japanese planes. After the war and law school, Bob Cherry had gone into politics. He had served four years in the Florida legislature, four years in the United States House of Representatives, and then run for the Senate. He had been there ever since.

Tall, gaunt, with piercing eyes and a gravel voice, he mastered the rules of the world’s most exclusive gentlemen’s club and set out to make it his own. He had. He had passed up chances to run for majority leader and whip: he preferred to lend his support to others, more ambitious than he and perhaps less wise, and use his influence to dictate who sat on the various committees that accomplished the work of the Senate. As chairman of the Government Oversight Committee and patron of the party leaders the power he wielded was enormous. Cabinet officers invited him to breakfast, presidents invited him to lunch, and every socialite in Washington invited him to dinner. When Bob Cherry wanted something, he usually got it.

His wife had died ten years ago, and ever since he had had a succession of tall, shapely secretaries. Each lasted about two years. His current helper was approximately twenty-six and was a former Miss Georgia.

Today, at lunch, T. Jefferson Brody had trouble keeping his eyes off her. He wasn’t trying very hard. He knew Bob Cherry well enough to know that the old goat got a kick out of younger men drooling down the cleavage of the sweet piece who was screwing him afternoon and night. So T. Jefferson Brody, diplomat that he was, ogled Miss Tina Jordan appreciatively. When she walked across the dining room on her way to the ladies’, he made a point of admiring her shapely ass as it swayed deliciously from side to side.

Brody sighed wistfully. “She’s something else.”

“That she is,” Bob Cherry agreed with a tight grin. “What’s on your mind, Jefferson?”

Brody took a check from his inside jacket pocket and passed it to the senator. It was for five thousand dollars. “A donation to your voter-registration PAC.”

Cherry stared at the check. “The FM Development Corporation. Never heard of ’em.”

“They’re nationwide. Build shopping centers and stuff all over. They’ve contributed to your PAC before.”

“Oh. Forgot. And they say the memory is the first thing to go.” Cherry folded the check and slipped it into a pocket. “Well, thank you and FM Development. Any donation on behalf of good government is deeply appreciated.”

“What’s the government going to do about foreign aid to Russia?”

Cherry took a sip of his wine, then said, “Probably arrange tax credits for corporations that do joint ventures with the Soviets. Something like that. American business could teach the Russians a lot, provide capital, management expertise, inventory control, and so on. Our companies wouldn’t have to make much of a profit, if any, with tax credits as an incentive. It might work pretty well.” He went on, detailing some of the proposals.

Jefferson Brody didn’t pay much attention. He was thinking about PACs — political action committees. PACs were a glaring loophole that had survived the latest get-naked-and-honest bloodletting over election reform. Members of Congress could have private war chests with which they could pretty much do as they pleased as long as the money wasn’t spent for direct reelection efforts. So the war chests were for voter-registration efforts, political education of constituents, presidential exploratory efforts, that kind of thing.

The niftiest thing about the noncampaign PACs though, and Brody felt his chest expand as he contemplated the genius of the guy who had thought of this, was that the elected person could put wife, son, daughter, and two or three girlfriends on the PAC payroll, thereby supplementing the family income. He could also use the donated loot to pay his own expenses if those expenses were related, in even a vague, hazy way, to the purposes of the PAC.

Consequently congressional PACs were slush funds, pure and simple. In private the politicians scrambled desperately to avoid the hardship of trying to make ends meet on a salary four times larger than the average American’s, while in public they orated endlessly about all they had done to improve the lot of those said average working stiffs. Harsh and heavy, they told their constituents, were the burdens of public service.

Not that T. Jefferson Brody was put off by the hypocrisy of many politicians — Brody would have recoiled in horror at the mere thought of trying to survive on ninety thousand dollars a year. On the contrary, their greed was a real plus. Some needy soul on Capitol Hill always had a hand out. And T. Jefferson Brody was making a fine living counseling clients to fill those empty palms.

As Miss Tina Jordan returned from the powder room, Brody glanced at his watch. He had a dinner engagement this evening with another senator, Hiram Duquesne, who wanted a campaign contribution. Hiram was one of those lucky dogs who had gotten into office before January 8, 1980, so by law when he retired he could pocket all the campaign contributions he had received over the years and hadn’t spent. Needless to say, with the most recent election only six weeks past and Duquesne once again a winner, he was still soliciting. Luckily FM Development had a campaign contribution PAC to help those pre-1980 incumbents, the Hiram Duquesnes of the world, who wanted their golden years to be truly golden.

Bob Cherry was in that blessed group, too, Brody remembered with a start. No doubt he would have Miss Jordan call him next week and remind him of that fact. Brody had that to look forward to. He glanced again at his watch. He was going to have to get back to the office and transfer some funds before he delivered Duquesne’s check.

Still, he didn’t want to rush Bob Cherry and his piece. He suggested dessert and Cherry accepted. Miss Jordan sipped a cup of cappuccino while the senator ate cheesecake and Brody admired the scenery.

When the luncheon bill came, Brody expertly palmed it. Cherry pretended he hadn’t seen it.

After an hour Henry Charon got up, paid his bill at the truck stop’s restaurant — it was a lot less than Brody had just put on his gold plastic — and went to the gift shop-convenience store. He spent twenty minutes there, then another twenty in the men’s room. By a quarter to three he was once again seated in a booth by the windows in the restaurant. So at five minutes before three p.m. he saw the van pull in and Tassone get out. He stood beside the truck and pulled off a pair of driving gloves while he looked around. He stuck the gloves in his pocket and walked toward the building.

Tassone came into the restaurant right on the hour. He looked around casually and came over to Charon’s booth in the corner.

“Hi.”

“Want some coffee?” Charon muttered.

“Yeah.” When the waitress came over Tassone ordered.

“It’s all there.”

“All of it?”

“Everything.”

Henry Charon nodded and again scanned the parking area.

“So how many people know about this?” Charon asked after Tassone’s coffee came and the waitress departed.

“Well, it took some doing to get what you wanted. Obviously, the people that supplied it know I took delivery. But they aren’t going to be shooting their mouths off. Most of this stuff is hot and they were paid well.”

“Who else?”

“The guy fronting the dough. He knows.”

“And all the people working for him?”

“Don’t make me laugh. He and I know, but nobody else. And believe me, I’m not about to tell you who he is. Another thing, after you get the bread, you won’t see me again. If you’re entitled to any more money under our deal, someone else will deliver it.”

“I don’t want to see you again.”

“You might as well know this too: Tassone ain’t my real name.”

A flicker of a grin crossed Charon’s lips. He watched the other man sip his coffee.

Charon passed a yellow slip of paper across the table. “You’ll need this to get the truck back. Wednesday of next week. At a garage in Philadelphia.” He gave Tassone the address.

“The money? When and where.”

“My place in New Mexico. A week from today. Just you.”

“I understand.” Tassone sighed. “You really think you can do this?”

“Yeah.”

“When? My guy wants to know.”

“When I’m ready. Not before.” Tassone started to speak but Charon continued: “He won’t have to wait too long.”

The truck wore Pennsylvania commercial plates. Charon drove out of the parking area and followed the signs toward I-70 east. The truck was new — only 326 miles on the odometer — and almost full of gas. Charon wore his own driving gloves. Twenty-five miles after leaving Breezewood he crossed into Maryland.

He kept the truck at fifty-five miles per hour where he could. Laboring up the low mountain east of Hagerstown the best he could do was thirty-five in the right-hand lane. Crossing the crest he kept the transmission in third gear to keep the brakes from overheating.

At Frederick he took I-270 toward Washington. Traffic was light and he rolled right along in the right lane.

The storage place he had rented was in northeast Washington. Charon’s worst moment came as he backed the truck between the narrow buildings and nicked the corner of one. He inspected the damage — negligible, thank God — and tried it again. This time he got the truck right up to the open garage door of the storage bin he had rented last week.

The extra key on the ring fit the lock on the back of the truck. Charon unloaded the vehicle carefully but quickly. It wasn’t until he had the garage door down that he stood and took inventory.

Four handguns, rifles, ammo, medical supplies, food, canned water, clothes, and those green boxes with U.S. Army stenciled all over them. Charon opened each box and inspected the contents. He went through all the other items, examining everything.

Thirty minutes later he got into the truck and maneuvered it carefully out of the alley between the storage buildings.

It was going well, he decided. Everything was there, just as it should be. Getting everything done in time and in sequence, that was the difficulty. Still, it was do-able. Now to get this truck to Philly and pick up the car.

Henry Charon grinned as he came off the entrance ramp onto I-95 north. This was going to be his best hunt ever.