“But you’re thinking about it,” Valerie said as she studied the man.
Gary didn’t answer right away. “I’m thinking about it,” he said distractedly. “What’s option four?”
Valerie shrugged. “A flare in the dark, but not exclusive of the U.N. idea.” She leaned in close. “Let me call my chief of staff. She’s tough, a veteran of the worst Washington can throw at you, and I’d trust her with my children’s lives.”
She hesitated, suddenly overcome by the emotion the last part of the statement raised in her.
“Let me call her. If nothing else, she can begin countering any press or inferences without revealing anything about where we are. I know her like a sister, she can do it.”
The lawyer was quiet for a long time. He stared at the brightly painted floor and doodled on a new pad. Finally,
after having analyzed it from all possible perspectives, he nodded.
“We’ll try it. But only on my terms.”
Two hours later they were ready.
A digital timer sat next to a telephone. A recorder was attached to the phone, and pads had been laid out for Valerie and Gary, who would listen on an earpiece wired into the phone.
“The call’s being shunted through a series of forwards,” Gary explained as Valerie reviewed the notes she’d made for her call. “It’ll go to my office, then to a place I have on Fire Island. From there it’ll be transferred to a safe line in Los Angeles, then to a Baltimore bar that does favors for us. From Maryland it’ll go to your office.”
Valerie shook her head. “I don’t understand the twentieth century.”
“Neither do I,” he said as he entered a code on the telephone’s keypad. “Which is why I pay Ma Bell for this service.”
“Unbelievable.” She took a deep breath. “What do I dial?”
“Just your office’s general number,” the lawyer warned. “No direct lines or dedicated numbers, they’re too easy to trace. Go through the general switchboard and don’t stay on longer than four minutes.”
Valerie began dialing.
“The Honorable Valerie Alvarez,” New York, Twenty-third District. How may we help you?
Gary took the receiver. “Barbara Krusiec,” please.
“Who shall I say is calling in reference to what?”
“My name’s Darrow, and I’m calling in reference to—he read a note Valerie passed him—“a mortgage application Ms. Krusiec has filed with our company.”
“One moment, please.”
Two minutes later Krusiec answered the phone and Gary started the timer.
“Mr. Darrow, this isn’t a real good time. I can only give
you a couple of minutes. So I hope you have some good news for me,” she said lightly.
“Barb,” Valerie said quickly, “it’s me.”
“Valerie! Shit! Where are you?”
“Calm down and listen.” Valerie carefully read from her prepared, timed script. “Tell me what you know.”
There was a too long silence on the other end. When Krusiec spoke again, it was in a near whisper. “FBI has been at your house, at two of the field offices. Very low-key, but with warrants and attitude.”
“What are they looking for?”
“Won’t say, but whatever it is, it must be bad. Where are you? What’s happening?”
Valerie watched the timer roll. “Any press inquiries?”
“Nothing specific, but building interest.” A brief silence. “Tell me where you are. If you’re in trouble, I’ll come and get you.”
Valerie smiled at the commitment in her best friend/ assistant’s voice.
“Look, things are going to start breaking and we’re going to need to start getting our story out fast.” Valerie skipped the next notes and proceeded to the circled paragraph in her notes. “I’m being set up to take the fall in a conspiracy that’s going to make Watergate look smalltime. It involves—”
“Maybe you shouldn’t be talking like this,” her assistant/friend cut her off.
“It’s our best shot. You’ll need to call a press conference or something, but that’s getting ahead of ourselves.” Valerie was skimming over the next part, thinking how best to synopsize everything she had to tell the other woman.
“No,” Krusiec said flatly.
“What was that?”
Krusiec’s voice came through filled with dark concern. “If you whisper one word of what’s happened, Drake will be dead before the press conference is over, you know that.”
Valerie stiffened. “What? Have they contacted—”
“Listen. They say you need to come in, deliver the reports on Pei, and finish your questioning.”
“My God.” Valerie couldn’t catch her breath or control her heartbeats. “They
did
contact you! What did they say about Cathy and—”
“Valerie. Listen. They don’t want to hurt anyone. They say everything that happened before was a mistake and they can make it right. But only if you come in. I have assurances from the highest levels on that.”
Before a pale Valerie could respond, Gary reached out and slammed his hand down on the receiver button.
“So much for your options,” he mumbled as Valerie clawed at him to move his hand.
“Goddammit! Let me talk to her! She’s talked to them! Damn you!” She desperately tried to pry the lawyer’s hand off the disconnect switch, only to be restrained by one of Gary’s gunmen.
“It’s okay,” he said to the man who released the furious woman. He removed his hand. “Call her. Go ahead, go to her … and you and your children can die together,” he said in a cold but somehow reasonable tone.
“What?”
He looked her in the eyes, his own reflecting absolute certainty. “She’s in it with them.”
“No! Not Barbara, you don’t know her!”
The lawyer’s only response was to rewind the tape and play back the conversation.
“God in Heaven,” Valerie barely whispered when it stopped. “My God in Heaven.”
In a midtown Manhattan office building, Canvas put down the headphones that he’d used to listen to a replay of the conversation. He glanced down at his few notes, made a couple more, then looked up at the others in the room.
“Options, gentlemen,” he said shortly.
“Not enough time for a meaningful trace,” one said. “But the call did come from the continental United States.”
“VSA showed high stress, but general truthfulness in her voice,” another added.
“Wonderful,” Canvas sighed. “She didn’t say shit that was helpful, but she meant every word.” He exhaled, as if he was trying to rid himself of the two problems that had kept him awake for over fifty hours so far.
Problem one: killing a member of the United States Congress—whether they could make it look like an accident or not—would draw the most intense heat possible. FBI, local cops, maybe a Justice Department task force and congressional investigators. Particularly now that his hands were tied by the floated traitor story. If the FBI believed Valerie a traitor, they would assume that those she worked for had killed her.
And redouble their efforts to expose them by solving the killing.
Canvas had argued for over an hour with the German that Beijing’s order was impractical, unwieldy, and—frankly—insane. But the man had simply replied that these new orders came directly from Beijing and were unchallengeable. Valerie and Xenos were to be killed.
Which led to problem number two.
He’d had one opportunity to kill Xenos Filotimo, when he’d been suspended from the ceiling beam, beaten and half conscious. That he hadn’t done it then was more a matter of reason and options. Valerie couldn’t be touched in any meaningful way; actually killing her children was a final—unwithdrawable—option that would only serve to harden her attitudes. But forcing her to witness Xeno’s torture had been a reasonable alternative. Which had led to Canvas missing his chance.
And he doubted if he would ever get as inviting an opportunity.
Even if—and that was strict conjecture—Xenos chose to uninvolve himself in anything further, he wasn’t stupid. He would be aware of a potential threat against him. And that awareness—combined with his natural talents and learned abilities—would make him a deeply difficult, to say nothing of lethal, target.
Canvas had demanded an additional million dollars for the two killings.
The first half had been deposited within a half hour.
Which left him in this small office in New York City running out of time and guesses. In a few weeks his talents would be needed in another, even more critical phase of the Apple Blossom morass. And he would be forced to have second-stringers going after his old colleague.
Canvas shook his head as he thought about the men he would lose then.
“Somebody offer a suggestion,” he said in an irritated voice.
The room remained quiet.
He stood, walking out on the small balcony, staring down Broadway with all the people moving along it, sublimely happy in their ordinary lives. Lives he both envied and despised.
“Mr. Collins?”
“Yes, boss?” One of the men came out to the edge of the balcony.
“Increase surveillance to third-level contacts of the subjects. Reports from all teams every fifteen minutes.”
“Right away.” The man returned to the office and picked up a phone.
“Mr. Lambeth?”
“Here, Guv.”
“Let’s start making some guesses.”
The man behind him silently pulled out a pad and waited.
“If it was me,” Canvas said in a faraway voice as he tried to picture himself in the van whose photos he’d so closely studied, “I’d limit my exposure. Drive an erratic, random course—doubling back and all—for, oh, say an hour at forty-five miles an hour.”
His aide began making notes.
Canvas closed his eyes as he continued to travel in his cerebral van. “Then no more than another hour on back roads, staying off the highways.” Too exposed. No. Just local routes and highways, speeds under fifty.
“I don’t change cars, might be seen. No house—residential neighborhoods have too many eyes. I’m looking for a business. But…”
His lips moved silently as he began to drop into the deep meditation of the professional assassin/planner/spy that he was at his core. “How far have I come?”
Lambeth quickly did the math. “Seventy-two and a half miles.”
“How far is Port Jefferson from Manhattan?”
The aide checked notes on his clipboard. “Fifty-six miles as the crow flies. Ninety the most direct practical route.”
Canvas smiled; a small thing but triumphant nonetheless. He spun around and hurried into the office, circling Long Island on a wall map.
“He’s still on the island,” he said with psychic certainty. “I want a complete search of all abandoned commercial structures. Anything over, say, one thousand square feet—they’ll need to keep the van out of sight. No residences nearby, still structurally intact, off the main roads.”
“Boss,” one of his aides said as he looked at the map of the large, sprawling island of over a million people, “that’s one Hell of a lot of ground to cover.”
Canvas crossed out the western and eastern ends of the island.
“Queens is too dense, too crowded, and that’s where he knows we operated earlier. Everything east of Twin Forks is too isolated. People would notice too many things they shouldn’t.” He crossed out other areas. “Forget the Hamptons, Oyster Bay, Northport. All of the North and South Shores from the Nassau/Suffolk County line east. Too many environmental laws for the kind of structure we’re going to need to still be standing.”
He looked at his whittled-down map. “Stay middle island, Suffolk County line east to Twin Forks. He’ll be there.”
The aide shook his head. “Still…”
Canvas handed him a phone. “So, get help.” And he returned to the balcony to breathe in the life of the city.
To picture two deaths on an island.
As night fell over Happy s, activity began to increase. Gary brought in “some guys I know”; four big men, bikers. All heavily tattooed and armed. The doctor arrived, changed Xenos’s bandages, and remedicated the semiconscious man. Gary made calls.
Valerie slept, or tried to.
“I’m not happy, the doctor said as he came over to the improvised operations center.”
“Take a number, Valerie growled as she reluctantly got up.”
The doctor looked questioningly at Gary, who shrugged.
“What’s wrong? the attorney asked without really wanting to know.”
“He’s running a fever, probably an infection from the collapsed lung. He’s still in a lot of pain, maybe from a pinched disk. And I’m worried about the swelling around his left eye.”
Gary glanced over at the coroner’s table where the nurse was sponge bathing a barely aware Xenos. “What do you want to do?”
“Hospital out of the question?”
“Afraid so.”
The doctor thought for a minute. “I’ve pumped him full of antibiotics and painkillers, lanced the eye twice. But he needs an ophthalmic surgeon, a good ortho man, maybe a neurologist. Unless you get him better care than I can give, well, I can’t guarantee that the man won’t be crippled for life.” He paused ominously. “Or worse.”
“And?”
“Can I at least get him to an X-ray unit at Mather or Saint Charles?”
Gary walked the man back to his patient. “We’ll see, Frank. Just keep on with what you can for the moment and we’ll see what we can do about the rest. Okay?”
The doctor sighed and returned to work.
Gary walked back to Valerie without ever looking at the mangled man on the table.
“I hate to admit this,” she said rather sheepishly, “but I’d sort of forgotten all about him.”
Gary busied himself with some notes. “You’ve got a right to be a little distracted right now.”
Valerie realized that she hadn’t seen the lawyer’s trademark grin for a great many hours. “You’re at risk now too. Aren’t you?”
He nodded grimly. “I admit that this is the toughest deal I’ve ever been involved with.” He looked up at her. “But it keeps life interesting, wouldn’t you say?” And the smile returned.
“Movement in the lot!” one of the bikers yelled out. “And it
ain’t
cops.”
Gary grabbed Valerie and forced her under the table with him. One of the other bikers came over to them, standing between them and the door with his Ingram machine pistol at the ready. Another stood by the prone Xenos.
“In the building,” an accented voice called out after an endless minute. “I’m a friend.”