Without Remorse

CHAPTER 34

Stalking

'We missed something, Em,' Douglas announced at eight-ten in the morning.

'What was it this time?' Ryan asked. Missing something wasn't exactly a new happening in their business.

'How they knew she was in Pittsburgh. I called that Sergeant Meyer, had 'em check the long-distance charges on the house phone. None, not a single outgoing call for the last month.'

The detective lieutenant stubbed out his cigarette. 'You have to assume that our friend Henry knew where she was from. He had two girls get loose from him, he probably took the time to ask where they were from. You're right,' Ryan said after a second's thought. 'He probably assumed she was dead.'

'Who knew she was there?'

'The people who took her there. They sure as hell didn't tell anyone.'

'Kelly?'

'Found out yesterday over at Hopkins, he was out of the country.'

'Oh, really? Where?'

'The nurse, O'Toole, she says she knows but she isn't allowed to say, whatever the hell that means.' He paused. 'Back to Pittsburgh.'

'The story is, Sergeant Meyer's dad is a preacher. He was counseling the girl and told his son a little of what he knew. Okay. The sergeant goes up the chain to his captain. The Captain knows Frank Allen, and the sarge calls him for advice on who's running the case. Frank refers him to us. Meyer didn't talk to anybody else.' Douglas lit up one of his own. 'So how did the info get to our friends?'

This was entirely normal, but not particularly comfortable. Now both men thought that they had a breaking case. This was happening, it was breaking open. Not unusually, things were now happening too fast for the analytical process that was necessary to make sense of it all.

'As we've thought all along, they have somebody inside.'

'Frank?' Douglas asked. 'He's never been connected with any of the cases. He doesn't even have access to the information that our friends would need.' Which was true. The Helen Waters case had started in the Western District with one of Allen's junior detectives, but the Chief had turned it over to Ryan and Douglas almost immediately because of the degree of violence involved. 'I suppose you could call this progress, Em. Now we're sure. There has to be a leak inside the Department.'

'What other good news do we have?'

The State Police only had three helicopters, all Bell Jet Rangers, and were still learning how to make use of them. Getting one was not the most trivial of exercises, but the Captain running Barracks 'V' was a senior man who ran a quiet county - this was less a matter of his competence than of the nature of his area, but police hierarchies tend to place stock in results, however obtained. The helicopter arrived on the barracks helicopter pad at a quarter to nine. Captain Ernest Joy and Trooper 1/c Freeland were waiting. Neither had taken a helicopter ride before, and both were a little nervous when they saw how small the aircraft was. They always look smaller close up, and smaller still on the inside. Mainly used for Medevac missions, the aircraft had a pilot and a paramedic, both of whom were gun-toting State Police officers in sporty flight suits that went well, they thought, with their shoulder holsters and aviator shades. The standard safety lecture took a total of ninety seconds, delivered so quickly as to be incomprehensible. The ground-pounders strapped in, and the helicopter spooled up. The pilot decided against jazzing up the ride. The senior man was a captain, after all, and cleaning vomit out of the back was a drag.

'Where to?' he asked over the intercom.

'Bloodsworth Island,' Captain Joy told him.

'Roger that,' the pilot replied as he thought an aviator ought, turning southeast and lowering the nose. It didn't take long.

The world looks different from above, and the first time people go up in helicopters the reaction is always the same. The takeoff, rather like jerking aloft in an amusement-park cable-car ride, is initially startling, but then the fascination begins. The world transformed itself before the eyes of both officers, and it was as though it all suddenly made sense. They could see the roads and the forms all laid out like a map. Freeland grasped it first. Knowing his territory as he did, he instantly saw that his mental picture of it was flawed; his idea of how things really were was not quite right. He was only a thousand feet above it, a linear distance his car traversed in seconds, but this perspective was new, and he immediately started learning from it.

'That's where I found her,' he told the Captain over the intercom.

'Long way from where we're going. Yoa think she walked that far?'

'No, sir.' But it wasn't that far from the water, was it? Perhaps two miles away, they saw the old dock of a farm up for sale, and that was less than five miles from where they were heading, scarcely two minutes' flying time. The Chesapeake Bay was a wide blue band now, under the morning haze. To the northwest was the large expanse of Patuxent River Naval Air Test Center, and they could both see aircraft flying there - a matter of concern to the pilot, who kept a wary eye out for low-flying aircraft. The Navy jocks liked to smoke in low.

'Straight ahead,' he said. The paramedic pointed so that the passengers would know where straight-ahead was.

'Sure looks different from up here,' Freeland said, a boy's wonder in his voice. 'I fish around there. From the surface it just looks like marshes.'

But it didn't now. From a thousand feet it looked like islands at first, connected by site and grass, but islands for all that. As they got closer, the islands took on regular shapes, lozengelike at first, and then with the fine lines of ships, grown over, surrounded by grass and reeds.

'Jeez, there's a bunch of 'em,' the pilot observed. He'd rarely flown down here, and then mostly at night with accident cases.

'World War One,' the Captain said. 'My father said they're leftovers from the war; the ones the Germans didn't get.'

'What exactly are we looking for?'

'Not sure, maybe a boat. We picked up a druggie yesterday,' the Captain explained. 'Said there was a lab in there, and three dead people.'

'No shit? A drug lab in there?'

'That's what the lady said,' Freeland confirmed, learning something else. As forbidding as it looked from the surface, there were channels in here. Probably a hell of a good place to go crabbing. From the deck of his fishing boat, it looked like one massive island, but not from up here. Wasn't that interesting?

'Got a flash down this way.' The paramedic pointed the pilot over to the right. 'Off glass or something.'

'Let's check it out.' The stick went right and down a little as he brought the Jet Ranger down. 'Yeah, I got a boat by those three.'

'Check it out,' the paramedic ordered with a grin.

'You got it.' It would be a chance to do some real flying. A former Huey driver from the 1st Air Cav, he loved being able to play with his aircraft. Anyone could fly straight and level, after all. He circled the place first, checking winds, then lowered his collective a little, easing the chopper down to about two hundred feet.

'Call it an eighteen-footer,' Freeland said, and they could see the white nylon line that held it fast to the remains of the ship.

'Lower,' the Captain commanded. In a few seconds they were fifty feet over the deck of the derelict. The boat was empty. There was a beer cooler, and some other stuff piled up in the back, but nothing else. The aircraft jerked as a couple of birds flew out of the ruined superstructure of the ship. The pilot instinctively maneuvered to avoid them. One crow sucked into his engine intake could make them a permanent part of this man-made swamp.

'Whoever owns that boat sure isn't real interested in us,' he said over the intercom. In the back, Freeland mimed three shots with his hand. The Captain nodded.

'I think you may be right, Ben.' To the pilot: 'Can you mark the exact position on a map?'

'Right.' He considered the possibility of going into a low hover and dropping them off on the deck. Simple enough if they had been back in the Cav, it looked too dangerous for this situation. The paramedic pulled out a chart and made the appropriate notations. 'Seen what you need?'

'Yeah, head back.'

Twenty minutes later, Captain Joy was on the phone.

'Coast Guard, Thomas Point.'

'This is Captain Joy, State Police. We need a little help,' He explained on for a few minutes.

'Take about ninety minutes,' Warrant Officer English told him.

'That'd be fine.'

Kelly called a Yellow Cab, which picked him up at the marina entrance. Hie first stop of the day was a rather disreputable business establishment called Kolonel Klunker, where he rented a 1959 Volkswagen, prepaying it for a month, with no mileage charge.

'Tnank you, Mr Aiello,' the man said to a smiling Kelly, who was using the ID from a man who no longer needed it. He drove the car back to the marina and started unloading the things he needed. Nobody paid much attention, and in fifteen minutes the Beetle was gone.

Kelly took the opportunity to drive through the area he'd be hunting, checking traffic patterns. It was agreeably vacant, a part of the city he'd never visited before, off a bleak industrial thoroughfare called O'Donnell Street, a place where nobody lived and few would want to. The air was laden with the smells of various chemicals, few of them pleasant. Not as busy as it once had been, many of the buildings in the district looked unused. More to the point, there was much open ground here, many buildings separated from one another by flat areas of bare dirt which trucks used for a convenient place to reverse direction. No kids playing sandlot ball, not a single house in sight, and because of that, not a single police car to be seen. Rather a clever ploy on the part of his enemies, Kelly thought, at least from one perspective. The place he was interested in was a single freestanding building with a half-destroyed sign over the entrance. The back of it was just a blank wall. There were only three doors, and though they were on two different walls, all could be observed from a single point, and to Kelly's rear was another vacant building, a tall concrete structure with plenty of broken windows. His initial reconnaissance complete, Kelly headed north.

Oreza was heading south. He'd already been partway there, conducting a routine patrol and wondering why the hell the Coast Guard didn't start up a ministration farther down on the Eastern Shore, or maybe by Cove Point Light, where there was an existing station for the guys who spent their waking hours, if any, making sure the light bulb at the top of the tower worked. That wasn't especially demanding duty to Oreza's mind, though it was probably all right for the kid who ran the place. His wife had just delivered twins, after all, and the Coast Guard was a family-oriented branch of the military.

He was letting one of his junior seamen do the driving, enjoying the morning, standing outside the cramped wheelhouse, drinking some of his home-brewed coffee.

'Radio,'one of the crewmen said.

Oreza went inside and took the microphone. 'Four-One Alfa here.'

'Four- One Alfa, this is English at Thomas Base. Your pickup is at a dock at Dame's Choice. You'll see cop car there. Got an ETA?'

'Call it twenty or twenty-five, Mr E.'

'Roger that. Out.'

'Come left,' Oreza said, looking at his chart. The water looked plenty deep. 'One-six-five.'

'One- six-five, aye.'

Xantha was more or less sober, though weak. Her dark skin had a gray pallor to it, and she complained of a splitting headache that analgesics had scarcely touched. She was aware that she was under arrest now, and that her rap sheet had arrived on teletype. She was also canny enough to have requested the presence of a lawyer. Strangely, this had not bothered the police very much.

'My client,' the attorney said, 'is willing to cooperate.' The agreement had taken all of ten minutes to strike. If she was telling the truth, and if she was not involved in a major felony, the possession charge against her would be dropped, subject to her enrollment in a treatment program. It was as good a deal as anyone had offered Xantha Matthews in some years. It was immediately appearent why this was true.

'They was gonna kill me!' she said, remembering it all now that she was outside the influence of the barbiturates, and now that her attorney gave her permission to speak.

'Who's "they"?' Captain Joy asked.

'They dead. He killed '?m, the white boy, shot 'em dead. An' he left the drugs, whole shitload of 'em.'

'Tell us about the white man,' Joy asked, with a look to Freeland that ought to have been disbelieving but was not.

'Big dude, like him' - she pointed to Freeland - 'but he face all green like a leaf. He blindfold me af'er he took me down, then he put me on that pier an' tol' me to catch a bus or somethin'.'

'How do you know he was white?'

'Wrists was white. Hands was green, but not up here, like,' she said, indicating on her own arms. 'He wear green clothes with stripes on 'em, like a soldier, carry a big.45.I was asleep when he shoot, that wake me up, see? Make me get dress, take me away, drop me off, he boat just go away.'

'What kind of boat?'

'Big white one, tall, like, big, like thirty feet lon'.'

'Xantha, how do you know they were going to kill you?'

'White boy say so, he show me the things in the boat, the little one.'

'What do you mean?'

'Fishnet shit, like, and cement blocks. He say they tell him they do it before.'

The lawyer decided it was his turn to speak. 'Gentlemen, my client has information about what may be a major criminal operation. She may require protection, and in return for her assistance, we would like to have state funding for her treatment.'

'Counselor,' Joy replied quietly, 'if this is what it sounds like, I'll fund it out of my own budget. May I suggest, sir, that we keep her in our lockup for the time being? For her own safety, the need for which seems quite apparent, sir.' The State Police captain had been negotiating with lawyers for years, and had started sounding like one, Freeland thought.

'The food here is fo' shit!' Xantha said, her eyes closed in pain.

'We'll take care of that, too,' Joy promised her.

'I think she needs some medical help,' the lawyer noted. 'How can she get it here?'

'Doctor Paige will be here right after lunch to see her. Counselor, your client is in no condition to look after herself now. All charges against her are dropped pending verification of her story. You'll get everything you want, in return for her cooperation. I can't do any more than that.'

'My client agrees to your conditions and suggestions,' the lawyer said without consulting her. The county would even pay his fee. Besides, he felt as though he might be doing the world a good deed. It was quite a change from getting drunk drivers off.

'There's a shower that way. Why not get her cleaned up? You may also wish to get her some decent things to wear. Give us the bill.'

'A pleasure doing business with you. Captain Joy,' he said as the barracks commander left for Freeland's car.

'Ben, you really fell into something. You handled her real nice. I won't forget. Now show me how fast this beast goes.'

'You got it, Cap'n.' Freeland engaged the lights before passing seventy. They made it to the dock just as the Coast Guard turned out of the main channel.

The man wore lieutenant's bars - though he called himself a captain - and Oreza saluted him as he came aboard. Both police officers were given life jackets to wear because Coast Guard regulations required them on small boats, and then Joy showed him the chart.

'Think you can get in there?'

'No, but our launch can. What gives?'

'A possible triple homicide, possible drug involvement. We overflew the area this morning. There's a fishing boat right here.'

Oreza nodded as impassively as possible and took the wheel himself, pushing the throttles to the stops. It was a bare five miles to the graveyard - that was how Oreza thought of it - and he plotted his approach as carefully as possible.

'No closer? The tide's in,' Freeland said.

'That's the problem. Place like this, you go it at low water so's in case you beach you can float off. From here on we use the launch.' Wheels were turning in his mind while his crewmen got the fourteen-foot launch deployed. Months earlier, that stormy night with lieutenant Charon from Baltimore, a possible drug deal that he'd expected to take place somewhere on the Bay. Some real serious guys, he'd told Portagee. Oreza already wondered if there might be a connection.

They motored in, powered by a ten-horse outboard. The quartermaster took note of the tidal flow, following what appeared to be a channel that meandered generally in the direction indicated by their marked-up chart. It was quiet in here, and Oreza remembered his tour of duty for Operation market time, the Coast Guard's effort to assist the Navy in Vietnam. He'd spent time with the brown-water guys, running Swift boats manufactured right in Annapolis by the Trumpy Yard. It was so similar, the tall grass that could, and often did, conceal people with guns. He wondered if they might be facing something similar soon. The cops were fingering their revolvers, and Oreza asked himself, too late, why he hadn't brought a Colt with him. Not that he knew how to use it. His next thought was that this would have been a good place to have Kelly with him. He wasn't quite sure what the story was on Kelly, but he suspected the man was one of the SEALs, with whom he'd worked briefly in the Mekong Delta. Sure as hell he'd gotten that Navy Cross for something, and the tattoo on his arm wasn't there by accident.

'Well, damn,' Oreza breathed. 'Looks like a Starcraft sixteen... no, more like eighteen.' He lifted his portable radio. 'Four-One Alpha, this is Oreza.'

'Reading you, Portagee.'

'We got the boat, right where they said. Stand by.'

'Roger.'

Suddenly things got very tense indeed. The two cops exchanged a look, wondering why they hadn't brought more people out. Oreza eased his launch right up to the Starcraft. The cops got aboard gingerly.

Freeland pointed to the back. Joy nodded. There were six cement blocks and a rolled-up section of nylon netting. Xantha hadn't lied about that. There was also a rope ladder going up. Joy went first, his revolver in his right hand. Oreza just watched as Freeland followed. Once they got to the deck, the men wrapped both hands around their handguns and headed for the superstructure, disappearing from view for what seemed like an hour, but in reality was only four minutes. Some birds scattered aloft. When Joy came back, his revolver wasn't visible.

'We have three bodies up here, and a hell of a large quantity of what looks like heroin. Call your boat, have them tell my barracks that we need crime lab. Sailor, you just started running a ferry service.'

'Sir, fish-and-game has better boats for this. Want me to call them to support you?'

'Good idea. You might want to circle around this area some. The water looks pretty clear, and she told us that they've dumped some bodies hereabouts. See the stuff in the fishing boat?' Oreza looked, noticing the fishnet and blocks for the first time.

Jesus. "That's how you do it. Okay, I'll motor around.' Which he did, after making his radio call.

'Hi, Sandy.'

'John! Where are you?'

'My place in town.'

'There was a policeman in to see us yesterday. They're looking for you.'

'Oh?' Kelly's eyes narrowed as he chewed on his sandwich.

'He said you should come in and talk to him, that it's better if you do it right away.'

'That's nice of him,' Kelly observed with a chuckle.

'What are you going to do?'

'You don't want to know, Sandy.'

'You sure?'

'Yes, I'm sure.'

'Please, John, please think it through.'

'I have, Sandy. Honest. It'll be okay. Thanks for the information.'

'Something wrong?' another nurse asked after she hung up.

'No,' Sandy replied, and her friend knew it was a lie.

Hmm. Kelly finished off his Coke. That confirmed his suspicion about Oreza's little visit. So things were getting complicated now, but they'd been pretty complicated the week before, too. He headed off to the bedroom, almost there when there came a knock at the door. That startled him rather badly, but he had to answer it. He'd opened windows to air the apartment out, and it was plain that someone was here. He took a deep breath and opened the door.

'Wondered where you were, Mr Murphy,' the manager said, much to Kelly's relief.

'Well, two weeks of work in the Midwest and a week's vacation down in Florida,' he lied with a relaxed smile.

'You didn't get much of a tan.'

An embarrassed grin. 'Spent a lot of my time inside.' The manager thought that was pretty good.

'Good for you, well, just wanted to see if everything was okay.'

'No problems here,' Kelly assured the man, closing the door before he could ask anything else. He needed a nap. It seemed that all of his work was at night. It was like being on the other side of the world, Kelly told himself, lying down on his lumpy bed.

It was a hot day at the zoo. Better to have met in the panda enclosure. It was crowded with people who wanted to gawk at this wonderful goodwill gift from the People's Republic of China - Chinese Communists to Ritter. The place was air conditioned and comfortable, but intelligence officers usually were uncomfortable in places like that, and so today he was strolling by the remarkably large area that contained the Galapagos tortoises, or turtles - Ritter didn't know the difference, if there was one. Why they needed so large an area, he didn't know either. Certainly it seemed expansive for a creature that moved at roughly the speed of a glacier.

'Hello, Bob.' 'Charles' was now an unnecessary subterfuge, though Voloshin had initiated the call - right to Ritter's desk, to show how clever he was. It worked both ways in the intelligence business. In the case of a call initiated by the Russians, the code name was 'Bill.'

'Hello, Sergey.' Ritter pointed to the reptiles. 'Kind of reminds you of the way our governments work, doesn't it?'

'Not my part of it.' The Russian sipped at his soft drink. 'Nor yours.'

'Okay, what's the word from Moscow?'

'You forgot to tell me something.'

'What's that?'

'That you have a Vietnamese officer also.'

'Why should that concern you?' Ritter asked lightly, clearly concealing his annoyance that Voloshin knew this, as his interlocutor could see.

'It is a complication. Moscow doesn't know yet.'

'Then don't tell them,' Ritter suggested. 'It is, as you say, a complication. I assure you that your allies don't know.'

'How can that be?' the Russian demanded.

'Sergey, do you reveal methods?' Ritter replied, ending that phase of the discussion. This part of the game had to be played very carefully indeed, and for more than one reason. 'Look, General, you don't like the little bastards any more than'we do, right?'

'They are our fraternal socialist allies.'

'Yes, and we have bulwarks of democracy all over Latin America, too. Did you come here for a quick course in political philosophy?'

'The nice thing about enemies is that you know where they stand. This is not always true of friends,' Voloshin admitted. That also explained the comfort level of his government with the current American president. A bastard, perhaps, but a known bastard. And, no, Voloshin admitted - to himself - he had little use for the Vietnamese. The real action was in Europe. Always had been. Always would be. That was where the course of history had been set for centuries, and nothing was going to change that.

'Call it an unconfirmed report, check up on it, maybe? Delay? Please, General, the stakes here are too high for that. If anything happens to those men, I promise you, we will produce your officer. The Pentagon knows, Sergey, and they want those men back, and they don't care a rat-fuck about detente.' The profanity showed what Ritter really thought.

'Do you? Does your Directorate?'

'It sure will make life a lot more predictable. Where were you in '62, Sergey?' Ritter asked - knowing and wondering what he'd say.

'In Bonn, as you know, watching your forces go on alert because Nikita Sergeyevich decided to play his foolish game.' Which had been contrary to KGB and Foreign Ministry advice, as both men knew.

'We're never going to be friends, but even enemies can agree to rules for the game. Isn't that what this is about?'

A judicious man, Voloshin thought, which pleased him. It made for predictable behavior, and that above all things was what the Russians wanted of the Americans. 'You are persuasive, Bob. You assure me that our allies do not know their man is missing?'

'Positive. My offer for you to meet your man is still open,' he added.

'Without reciprocal rights?' Voloshin tried.

'For that I need permission from upstairs. I can try if you ask me to, but that also would be something of a complication.' He dumped his empty drink cup in a bin.

'I ask.' Voloshin wanted that made clear.

'Very well. I'll call you. And in return?'

'In return I will consider your request.' Voloshin walked off without another word.

Gotcha! Ritter thought, heading towards where his car was parked. He'd played a careful but inventive game. There were three possible leaks on boxwood green. He'd visited each of them. To one he'd said that they actually had gotten a prisoner out, who had died of wounds. To another, that the Russian was badly wounded and might not survive. But Ritter had saved his best piece of bait for the most likely leak. Now he knew. That narrowed it to four suspects. Roger MacKenzie, that prep-school-reject aide, and two secretaries. This was really an FBI job, but he didn't want any additional complications, and an espionage investigation of the Office of the President of the United States was about as complicated as things could be. Back in his car, he decided to meet with a friend in the Directorate of Science and Technology. Ritter had a great deal of respect for Voloshin. A clever man, a very careful, methodical man, he'd run agents all over Western Europe before being assigned to the Washington rezidentura. He'd keep his word, and to make sure he didn't get into any trouble about it, he'd play everything strictly by the exacting rules of his parent agency. Ritter was gambling big on that. Pull this one off in addition to the other coup in the works, and how much higher might he rise? Better yet, he'd be earning his way up, not some fair-haired political payoff, but the son of a Texas Ranger who'd waited tables to get his degree at Baylor. Something Sergey would have appreciated, in good Marxist-Leninist fashion, Ritter told himself, pulling onto Connecticut Avenue. Working-class kid makes good.

It was an unusual way to gather information, something he'd never done before, and pleasant enough that he might even get used to it. He sat at a corner booth in Mama Maria's, working slowly through his second course - thank you, no wine, I'm driving. Dressed in his CIA suit, well-groomed and sporting a new businesslike haircut, he enjoyed the looks of a few unattached women, and a waitress who positively doted on him, especially with his good manners. The excellence of the food explained the crowded room, and the crowding explained why it was a convenient place for Tony Piaggi and Henry Tucker to meet here. Mike Aiello had been very forthcoming about that. Mama Maria's was, in fact, owned by the Piaggi family, now in its third generation of providing food and other, less legal, services to the local community, dating back to Prohibition. The owner was a bon vivant, greeting favored customers, guiding them to their places with Old World hospitality. Snappy dresser, too, Kelly saw, recording his face and build, gestures and mannerisms, as he ate through his calamari. A black man came in, dressed in a nicely cut suit. He looked like he knew the place, smiling at the hostess and waiting a few seconds for his reward, and Kelly's.

Piaggi looked up and headed to the front, stopping only briefly to shake hands with someone on the way. He did the same with the black man, then led him back past Kelly's table, and up the back stairs to where the private rooms were. No particular notice was taken. There were other black couples in the restaurant, treated the same as everyone else. But those others did honest work, Kelly was sure. He turned his thoughts away from his distraction. Sothat's??nr? Tucker. That's theonewho killed Pom. He didn't look like a monster. Monsters rarely did. To Kelly he looked like a target, and his particulars went into Kelly's memory, alongside Tony Piaggi's. He was surprised when he looked down and saw that the fork in his hands was bent.

'What's the problem?' Piaggi asked upstairs. He poured each of them a glass of Chianti, good host that he was, but as soon as the door had closed, Henry's face started telling him something.

'They haven't come back.'

'Phil, Mike, and Burt?'

'Yes!' Henry snarled, meaning, no.

'Okay, settle down. How much stuff did they have?'

'Twenty kees of pure, man. This was supposed to take care of me and Philly, and New York for a while.'

'Lot of stuff, Henry.' Tony nodded. 'Maybe it just took them a while, okay?'

'Shoulda been back by now.'

'Look, Phil and Mike are new, probably clumsy, like Eddie and me were out first time - hell, Henry, that was only five kees, remember?'

'I allowed for that,' he said, wondering if he'd really be right about that or not.

'Henry,' Tony said, sipping his wine and trying to appear calm and reasonable, 'look, okay? Why are you getting excited? We've taken care of all the problems, right?'

'Something's wrong, man.'

'What?'

'I don't know.'

'Want to get a boat and go down there to see?'

Tucker shook his head.'Takes too long.'

'The meet with the other guys isn't for three days. Be cool. They're probably on their way here now.'

Piaggi thought he understood Tucker's sudden case of the shakes. Now it was big-time. Twenty kilograms of pure translated into a huge quantity of street drugs, and selling it already diluted and packaged made for sufficient convenience to their customers that they were for the first time paying top dollar. This was the really big score that Tucker had been working towards for several years. Just assembling all the cash to pay for it was a major undertaking. It was an understandable case of nerves.

'Tony, what if it wasn't Eddie at all?'

Exasperation: 'You're the one who said it had to be, remember?'

Tucker couldn't pursue that. He'd merely wanted an excuse to eliminate the man as an unnecessary complication. His anxiety was partly what Tony thought it was, but something else, too. The things that had happened earlier in the summer, the things that had just started for no reason, then stopped with no reason - he had told himself that they were Eddie Morello's doing. He'd managed to convince himself of that, but only because he had wanted to believe it. Somewhere else the little voice that had brought him this far had told him otherwise, and now the voice was back, and there was no Eddie to be the focus for his anxiety and anger. A streetwise man who'd gotten this far through the complex equation of brain and guts and instinct, he trusted that last quality most. Now it was telling him things that he didn't understand, couldn't reason out. Tony was right. It could just be a matter of clumsiness in the processing. That was one reason they were setting their lab up in east Baltimore. They could afford that now, with experience behind them and a viable front business setting up in the coming week. So he drank his wine and settled down, the rich, red alcohol soothing his abraded instincts.

'Give 'em until tomorrow.'

'So how was it?' the man at the wheel asked. An hour north of Bloodsworth Island, he figured he'd waited long enough to ask the silent petty officer who stood beside him. After all, they just stood by and waited.

'They fed a guy to the fuckin' crabs!' Oreza told them. 'They took like two square yards of net and weighted it down with blocks, and just sunk his ass - practically nothing left but the damned bones!' The police lab people were still discussing how to recover the body, for all he knew. Oreza was certain it was a sight he'd take years to forget, the skull just lying there, the bones still dressed, moving because of the water currents... or maybe some crabs inside. He hadn't cared to look that closely.

'Heavy shit, man,' the helmsman agreed.

'You know who it is?'

'What d'ya mean, Portagee?'

'Back in May, when we had that Charon guy aboard - the day-sailer with the candystripe main, that's who it was, I'll bet ya.'

'Oh, yeah. You could be right on that one, boss.'

They'd let him see it all, just as a courtesy that in retrospect he would as soon have done without, but which at the time had been impossible to avoid. He could not have chickened out in front of cops, since he, too, was a cop of sorts. And so he'd climbed up the ladder after reporting on the body he'd found only fifty yards from the derelict, and seen three more, all lying facedown on the deck of what had probably been the freighter's wardroom, all dead, all shot in the back of the neck, the wounds having been picked at by birds. He'd almost lost control of himself at that realization. The birds had been sensible enough not to pick at the drugs, however.

'I'm talking twenty kilograms - forty-some pounds of the shit - that's what the cops said, anyway. Like, millions of bucks,' Oreza related.

'Always said I was in the wrong business.'

'Jesus, the cops look like they all had hard-ons, 'specially that captain. They'll probably be there all night, way it sounded.'

'Hey,Wally?'

The tape was disappointingly scratchy. That was due to the old phone lines, the technician explained. Nothing he could do about that. The switch box in the building dated back to when Alexander Graham Bell was doing hearing aids.

'Yeah, what is it?' the somewhat uneven voice replied.

'The deal with the Vietnamese officer they got. You sure about that?'

'That's what Roger told me.' Bingo! Ritter thought.

'Where they have him?'

'I guess out at Winchester with the Russian.'

'You're sure?'

'Damned right. It surprised me, too.'

'I wanted to check up on that before - well, you know.'

'Sure thing, man.' With that the line went dead.

'Who is he?' Greer asked.

'Walter Hicks. All the best schools, James - Andover and Brown. Father's a big-time investment banker who pulled a few well-tuned political strings, and look where little Wally ends up.' Ritter tightened his hand into a fist. 'You want to know why those people are still in sender green? That's it, my friend.'

'So what are you going to do about it?'

'I don't know.' Butit won't be legal. The tape wasn't. The tap had been set up without a court order.

'Think it over carefully. Bob,' Greer warned. 'I was there, too, remember?'

'What if Sergey can't get it done fast enough? Then this little fuck gets away with ending the lives of twenty men!'

'I don't like that very much either.'

'I don't like it at all!'

'Treason is still a capital crime. Bob.'

Ritter looked up. 'It's supposed to be.'

Another long day. Oreza found himself envying the first-class who was tending Cove Point Light. At least he had his family with him all the time. Here Oreza was with the brightest little girl in kindergarten and he hardly ever saw her. Maybe he'd take that teaching job at New London after all, Portagee thought, just so that he could have a family life for a year or two. It meant hanging out with children who would someday be officers, but at least they'd learn seamanship the right way.

Mainly he was lonely with his thoughts. His crew was bedding down now in the bunkroom that he should have gone to, but the images haunted him. The crab-man and the three bird-feeders would deny him sleep for hours unless he got it off his conscience... and he had an excuse, didn't he? Oreza rummaged around his desk, finding the card.

'Hello?'

'Lieutenant Charon? This is Quartermaster First Class Oreza, down at Thomas Point.'

'It's kinda late, you know,' Charon pointed out. He'd been caught on his way to bed.

'Remember back in May, looking for that sailboat?'

'Yeah, why?'

'I think maybe we found your man, sir.' Oreza thought he could hear eyeballs click.

'Tell me about it?'

Portagee did, leaving nothing out, and he could feel the horror leaving him, almost as though he were transmitting it over the phone wire. He didn't know that was precisely what he was doing.

'Who's the captain running the case for the troopers?'

'Name's Joy, sir. Somerset County. Know him?'

'No, I don't.'

'Oh, yeah, something else,' Oreza remembered.

'Yeah?' Charon was taking lots of notes.

'You know a Lieutenant Ryan?'

'Yeah, he works downtown, too.'

'He wanted me to check up a guy for him, fellow named Kelly. Oh, yeah! You've seen him, remember?'

'What do you mean?'

'The night we were out after the day-sailer, the guy in the cruiser we saw just before dawn. Lives on an island, not far from Bloodsworth. Anyway, this Ryan guy wanted me to find him for him, okay? He's back, sir, probably up in Baltimore right now. I tried calling, sir, but he was out, and I've been running my ass off all day. Could you pass that one along, please?'

'Sure,' Charon replied, and his brain was working very quickly indeed now.