As she began to climb, Faith started feeling severely claustrophobic. And, because she had lost her bearings, she was becoming queasy. Now would be such a perfect time to lose the contents of her stomach, little though it was.
She moved her hands and feet slowly as she went up. Then, gaining confidence, she started to pick up her pace. That was a mistake because her foot missed a rung, she slipped and her chin painfully clipped one of the rungs. But then Lee’s strong arm was round her in an instant, holding her up. She took a moment to steady herself, tried to ignore the pain in her chin and kept climbing until she felt the ceiling above her head and then stopped.
Lee was still on the rung right below her. Then he suddenly moved up on the same rung she was on, his legs on either side of hers so that her legs were pinched between his. He leaned against her with increasing force, and she wasn’t sure what he was trying to do. It was becoming painful to breathe with her chest pushed up hard against the ladder rungs. For one terrifying moment she thought he had lured her in here to rape her. Suddenly a blast of light hit her from above and he moved away from her. She looked up, blinking rapidly. The view of the blue sky was so wonderful after the terror of the darkness that she felt like screaming in relief.
“Go up and onto the roof, but keep low. As low as you can,” Lee whispered urgently into her ear.
She went up and through, dropping to her belly and looking around. The roof of the old building was flat, with a gravel and tar base. Bulky old heating units and newer air-conditioning machinery dotted the roof in various places. They made for good hiding places and Faith slid over and squatted next to the nearest one.
Lee was still on the ladder. He listened intently and then checked his watch. The guy would be at his door right about now. He would buzz, wait for Lee to answer. They had thirty seconds at most before the guy realized no one was coming to the door. It would be nice to have a little more time than that, and also a way to draw in the other forces Lee knew were out there. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and hit a speed-dial number.
When the person answered, he said, “Mrs. Carter, it’s Lee Adams. Listen to me, I want you to let Max out in the hallway. Right, I know I just dropped him off. I know he’ll head up to my apartment. That’s what I want. I, uh, I forgot to give him a shot he needs. Please hurry, I really need to get out of here.”
He pocketed the phone and pushed the bags up and out, then he hoisted himself through the opening and closed the hatch behind him. He scanned the roof and spotted Faith. Grabbing the bags, he slid over to her.
“Okay, we got a little time.”
Down below they heard a dog start to bark loudly and Lee smiled. “Follow me.” Squatting low, they made their way to the edge of the roof. The building attached to Lee’s was a little shorter so that the roof was about five feet lower. Lee motioned for Faith to take his hands. She did so and he lowered her over the edge, holding tightly until her feet touched the roof. As soon as Lee joined her, they both heard shouts coming from Lee’s building.
“Okay, they’ve made their all-out assault. They’ll go through the door and that’ll trip the alarm. I don’t have a call-back option with the alarm company, so there’s no delay in sending the cops. A few minutes and it’ll be a big mess.”
“What do we do in the meantime?” Faith asked.
“Three more buildings and then down the fire escape. Move!”
Five minutes later they were running through a back alley and then out onto another quiet suburban street flanked by a number of low-rise apartment buildings. The street was lined on both sides with parked cars. In the background Faith could hear the thump of a tennis ball being hit. She could make out a tennis court surrounded by several tall pine trees in a small park across from the apartment buildings.
She watched as Lee eyed a line of cars parked at the curb. Then he jogged across to the park area and bent down. When he straightened up, he was holding a tennis ball—one of many that had landed there from years of errant shots on the court. He walked back over to Faith. She could see that he was working a hole in the tennis ball with his pocketknife.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Go up on the sidewalk and walk as calmly as you can. And keep your eyes open.”
“Lee—”
“Just do it, Faith!”
She spun around and went up on the sidewalk, paralleling his movements as he walked on the other side of the parked cars, his eyes scanning each of the vehicles. He finally stopped at a new-looking luxury model.
“See anybody watching us?” Lee asked.
Faith shook her head.
He walked over to the car and held the tennis ball against the key lock, the hole in the ball facing the lock’s opening.
Faith looked at him as if he were insane. “What are you doing?”
In response, he slammed his fist against the tennis ball, driving all the air out of the ball and into the key lock. Faith watched in amazement as all four door locks popped open.
“How did you do that?”
“Get in.”
Lee slid into the car, and Faith did the same.
He poked his head under the steering column and found the wires he needed.
“You can’t hot-wire these new cars. The technology—” Faith stopped talking when the car started.
Lee sat up, put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. He looked at Faith. “What?”
“All right, so how did the tennis ball unlock the car?”
“I’ve got my professional secrets.”
* * *
While Lee waited in the car with his eyes sharply on the lookout, Faith entered her bank, explained what she wanted to the assistant manager and managed to sign her name, all without falling over in a dead faint.
Steady, girl, one step at a time.
Fortunately, she knew the man.
The assistant manager looked curiously at her new appearance.
“Midlife crisis,” she said, responding to his stare. “Decided to go for the youthful, streamlined look.”
“It’s very becoming, Ms. Lockhart,” he said gallantly.
She closely watched him as he took her key, inserted it and the bank’s duplicate key into the lock and pulled out her box. They left the vault and he set the box inside the private booth across from the vault reserved for safe-deposit box tenants. As he walked away, Faith continued to watch him.
Was he one of them? Was he going to slip away and call the police or the FBI or whoever was running around killing people? Instead he sat down at his desk, opened a white bag, extracted a glazed donut and proceeded to devour it.
Satisfied for the moment, Faith closed and locked the door. She opened the box and stared at the contents for a moment. Then she swept it all into her bag and closed the box. The young man put the safe-deposit box back in the vault and Faith walked out as calmly as she could.
Back in the car, Faith and Lee headed down Interstate 395, where they exited on to the GW Parkway and headed south to Reagan National Airport. Going against the morning rush hour, they made good time.
Faith looked over at Lee, who stared straight ahead, lost in thought.
“You did really well back there,” she said.
“Actually, we cut it closer than I would have liked.” He paused and shook his head. “I’m really worried about Max, as stupid as that sounds under the circumstances.”
“It doesn’t sound stupid.”
“Max and I have been together a long time. For years it’s been only me and that old dog.”
“I doubt they would have done anything to him with all those people around.”
“Yeah, you’d like to think so, wouldn’t you? But the fact is if they’ll kill a man, a dog doesn’t have a chance.”
“I’m sorry you had to do that for me.”
He sat up straight. “Well, a dog is still a dog, Faith. And we’ve got other things to worry about, don’t we?”
Faith found herself nodding. “Yes.”
“I guess my magnet trick didn’t work so well. They must have identified me through the video. Still, that was awfully fast.” He shook his head, his expression a mix of admiration and fear. “Like scary fast.”
Faith felt her spirits sink. If Lee was scared, at what level of sheer terror should she be operating? “Not very encouraging, is it?” she said.
“I might be a little better prepared if you tell me what’s going on.”
After the man’s heroics, Faith found herself wanting to confide in him. But then the phone call from Buchanan came flashing back, ringing in her ears, like the shots last night.
“When we get to North Carolina, we’ll have it all out.
Both
sides,” Faith said.
Thornhill replaced the phone receiver and looked around his office, a disturbed expression on his face. His men had found the nest empty, and one of them had even been bitten by a dog. There had been reports of a man and woman running down the street. This was all just a little too much. Thornhill was a patient man, used to working on projects for many years, but still, there were limits to what he could tolerate. His men had listened to the message Buchanan had left on Lee’s answering machine. They had taken the tape and played it back for Thornhill over his secure phone line.
“So you’ve hired a private investigator, Danny,” Thornhill muttered to himself. “You’ll pay for that one.” He nodded thoughtfully. “I’ll make you pay.”
The police had responded to the burglar alarm, but when Thornhill’s men had flashed official-looking IDs they had quickly backed off. Legally, the CIA had no authority to operate within the United States. Thus, Thornhill’s team routinely carried several types of identification and would select one depending on who confronted them.
The patrolmen had been sent off with instructions to bury deeply all that they had seen. Still, Thornhill didn’t like it. It was all too close to the edge. There were holes there, ways for people to gain an advantage over him.
He went to the window and looked outside. It was a beautiful fall day, the colors starting to turn. As he studied the pleasing foliage, he primed his pipe, but unfortunately that was all he could do. CIA headquarters was a nonsmoking building. The deputy director had a balcony outside his office where Thornhill could sit and smoke, but it was not the same. During the Cold War, the CIA offices had been as foggy as steam baths. Tobacco helped one think, Thornhill believed. It was a minor thing, yet it symbolized all that had gone wrong with the place.
In Thornhill’s opinion, the CIA’s downfall had accelerated in 1994 with the Aldrich Ames debacle. Thornhill still winced every time he thought of the former CIA counterintelligence officer being arrested for spying for the Soviets and later the Russians. And of course, as fate would have it, the FBI had broken the case. After that, the president had issued a directive ordering an FBI agent to be made a permanent employee of the CIA. From then on, this FBI agent oversaw the agency’s counterespionage efforts and had access to all CIA files. An FBI agent on the premises! His nose in all their secrets! Not to be outdone by the executive branch, the idiotic Congress had followed with a law requiring all government agencies, including the CIA, to notify the FBI whenever there was evidence that classified information might have been improperly disclosed to foreign powers. The result: The CIA took all the risk and gave the prize to the FBI. Thornhill seethed. It was a direct usurpation of the CIA’s mission.
Thornhill’s rage was building. The CIA could no longer even put people under surveillance or wiretap. If it had suspicions of someone, it had to go to the FBI and request surveillance, electronic or otherwise. If electronic surveillance was desired, then the FBI had to go to FISC, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and obtain authorization. The CIA couldn’t even approach FISC on its own. It had to have its hand held by Big Brother. Everything was stacked in the FBI’s favor.
Thornhill’s thoughts went into a tailspin as he reminded himself that the shackles on the CIA weren’t just domestic; the Agency had to get authorization from the president before commencing any covert operations overseas. The congressional oversight committees had to be told of any such operations in a timely fashion. And with the world of espionage becoming more and more complicated, the CIA and FBI found themselves continually running into each other over jurisdictional squabbles, use of witnesses and informants and the like. Though it was supposed to be a domestic agency only, the FBI, in reality, did considerable work abroad, where it focused on antiterrorism and anti-drug operations, including the collection and analysis of information. Again, that hit right at the CIA’s home turf.
Was it any wonder Thornhill hated his federal counterparts? Like a cancer, the bastards were everywhere. And to drive the nail a little farther into the CIA’s coffin, a former FBI agent now headed up the Center for CIA Security, which conducted internal background checks on all current and prospective personnel. And all CIA employees had to file annual financial disclosure forms that were damn well exhaustive in their content requirements.
Before he suffered a stroke thinking any more on this sore subject, Thornhill forced himself to turn his attention to other matters. If Buchanan had hired this PI person to follow Lockhart, then he very well could have been the man at the cottage last night and the person who had shot Serov. There had been permanent nerve damage to the man’s arm from the gunshot wound, and Thornhill had ordered the Russian to be finished off. A hired killer who could no longer hold a weapon steady enough to kill would look for other ways to make money and could pose a small threat. It was Serov’s own fault, and if there was one thing Thornhill demanded from his people, it was accountability.
So this Lee Adams was now in the mix of things, he mused. Thornhill had already ordered a complete background search on the man. In these days of computerized files, he would have a full dossier in half an hour, if not sooner. Thornhill did have Adams’s file on Faith Lockhart; his men had taken that from the apartment. The notes showed that the man was thorough, logical in his approach to investigation. That was both good and bad for Thornhill’s purposes. Adams had also given Thornhill’s men the slip. That was not an easy thing to do. On the good side, if Adams was logical, he should be amenable to a reasonable offer, meaning one that would allow him to live.