He listened.
“Look, let me get through another twenty-four hours here. Let’s let our deal work. Give it another twenty-four…”
Howard clenched his teeth. Payton was talking to someone. He was, no doubt, getting advice from all the experts sitting behind their desks. They had no idea. They had read Strand’s files, and they thought he was a character in a screenplay that they could just manipulate from where they sat, make him do this, make him do that. Harry Strand was the last person in the world you could manipulate, and they didn’t have a clue about that. He had tried to tell them. He had gone over it and over it with them at Camp Peary. Yeah, yeah, they would say, but we’ve got to get him to…
“Fine, then,” Howard said, his throat tight with anger. “I’ll get back to you after I talk to her again.”
He listened.
“No,” he said, “I haven’t heard anything.”
He wanted to say, I told you so, but he didn’t.
After the disconnect he stormed out of the communications room, leaving his pencil and pad and coffee sitting on the countertop. He was so pissed he didn’t give a shit.
When Strand was out of town Meret Spier lived in his home until he returned. This was an arrangement that suited her enormously. Not only was Strand’s place larger than her West-heimer condo, but it was just plain fun to be in a grand house, and she could “go to the office” dressed any way she wanted. When she knew there were to be no deliveries or appointments, she often didn’t bother putting on makeup, didn’t bother with her hair, and, sometimes, didn’t bother to dress in anything other than her underwear.
But Strand’s absence didn’t mean she didn’t have to work. When he traveled he constantly called on collectors, visited dealers, and prowled galleries; and his curiosity about the art he encountered was wide-ranging and insatiable. It was not unusual for him to call her two or three times a day to ask her to look up something in his library, whether he was in San Francisco or New York or Geneva or Madrid or Warsaw. As far as Strand was concerned, the only time zone on earth was the one he was in.
So, given the fact that she was on call twenty-four hours a day for weeks at a time while Strand was traveling, Meret decided that going to work in her underwear was a justified perk.
After Meret’s initial astonishment at Strand’s sudden developing relationship with Mara Song, she hardly had time to adjust to it before Strand was planning to follow up on the unfinished business with Aldo Chiappini and Denise Yarrow, energetically planning the trips to San Francisco and then to Rome.
In the two years Meret had known Harry Strand—she had been working for him only ten months when Romy died—she had come to admire him immensely.
Strand had dealt with the sudden disaster no differently than grieving men had always dealt with it, sometimes stoically, sometimes nearly childlike in his helplessness, sometimes pathological in his hopelessness. Since Meret had nothing to compare it to, she didn’t know if Strand’s behavior was what she should have expected. She knew only that it was a painful thing to watch as he passed through all the gates and passageways that opened and closed for him on his journey back from Romy’s death.
What surprised Meret most of all, and what endeared Strand to her, was that he was as concerned for her as for himself. She had never been close to anyone who had died: though she had known Romy only ten months, the two women had worked practically in the same room for all that time, and she had grown fond of Romy’s brightness and intelligence and affectionate nature. They had become very close in a short period of time.
Moreover, Meret had only narrowly missed being in the car with Romy. They had invited Meret to spend the weekend with them at their beach house near Galveston Island, and the two women had planned to drive out Thursday night, taking Friday off for a long weekend, and set the place in order before Strand’s arrival late Friday. At the last minute Meret had decided to take her own car and run some errands first. They had decided that Romy should go on and Meret would follow shortly. Meret had found Romy’s Land Rover in the tidewater stream. Death, such an alien idea to her in her youth, had stepped right in front of her face, so close that she could almost smell its breath.
Strand knew what a dreadful experience this had been for her and took especial care to help her absorb its impact. His response was simply and naturally to treat Meret as family, as Romy’s sister. He talked with her a lot and nursed her emotions through those early awkward weeks when the void that is death’s wake seemed so brutal in its banality. One evening when they had worked late—Strand worked ferociously in those early months—and she was lingering before going home, he asked her if she would like to stay for dinner.
In his usual manner he made her sit down and visit with him while he quickly made omelets and toast, which he served with apricot jam. It was the first of what became a once-a-week tradition with them, usually on Friday nights. Strand cooked, and sometimes Meret helped him, though mostly it was Strand’s dinner, simple and sometimes offbeat. But it was the conversation that nourished them. During these meals Meret began to realize that Strand and Romy had had a rather more exotic life than she had first believed, from hints he dropped into the conversation, from references that he never followed up on. Once or twice she had asked him about them, but he was always evasive and dismissive. There were, Meret came to believe, dark places in Strand’s past, and in Romy’s, too. Without his saying so, Meret understood that there were closed doors on the far side of their yesterdays, and she was not welcome to approach them.
The small jet taxied onto a private strip of tarmac at Hobby Airport and proceeded toward a nest of isolated hangars, its night-lights winking from its wingtips and undercarriage, throwing smears of ruby and sapphire onto the wet pavement. The doors of one of the hangars glided open, and the aircraft entered into a clean, bright open space where a dark Cherokee was waiting.
He had been studying Houston city maps for two weeks. He knew it as well as his own neighborhood in Mexico City. The door of the sleek jet folded down, and he descended to the floor of the hangar and walked briskly to the Cherokee. He opened the door and got in. The wallet was on the car seat. He opened it, confirmed the identification he had required, Texas driver’s license, insurance cards, credit cards. He put the wallet in his inside suit coat pocket, buckled his seat belt, and drove out of the hangar. He had seen no one in the hangar, and no one had seen him. In his rearview mirror he saw the hangar doors slide closed behind him.
The late night traffic was sparse. He quickly found his way to the Gulf Freeway and headed northeast into the city. The Cherokee was fine. He knew where everything was. He had one exactly like it, down to every detail, waiting for him wherever he worked.
When the skyscrapers were looming over him, sparkling like pyrite, he turned south on the Southwest Freeway and then very shortly exited on Main. Soon he was turning onto Bissonnet. He picked up the telephone and dialed a number.
“Hello?”
“I am just turning onto Bissonnet.” His accent was very slight.
“We’re the blue Four Runner a block past the house.”
“Everything is in place?”
“Two upstairs in number three.”
He visualized the number three bedroom.
After turning off Bissonnet, he drove the Cherokee down the narrow lane without hesitation, dousing his headlights just before he approached the house. He pulled into the driveway, stopped under the porte cochere, and cut the engine. It was a quiet engine, with a customized muffler, softer than a sigh.
He opened the glove compartment of the car and took out a small automatic handgun with a short, blunt silencer permanently attached to the barrel. He checked the clip of hollow-point bullets and put the gun into his coat pocket. From the floor in front of the passenger seat he picked up an aluminum, vinyl-wrapped canister designed to look like a small fire extinguisher.
The alarm system had already been deactivated by the team in the Four Runner, so he had no hesitation about unlocking the door with the key on the ring. He set the canister on the floor just inside the door and took off his shoes. He moved quickly and carefully through the dining room and kitchen to the pantry, where he found the breaker box for the electricity. He threw the switch and then pulled the fuses just for good measure. He could not afford an electrical glitch. He went back through the rooms to the foyer and picked up the canister. Carrying it in one hand, the automatic in the other, he started up the stairs. He couldn’t even hear himself moving.
Once on the second-floor landing he quietly put down the canister and moved ahead with deliberation, walking briskly through the second-floor halls to the number three bedroom. The door was open. He stepped inside and went up to the bed. They were both naked, asleep, the girl curled in her boyfriend’s arms. She was a pretty girl, blond and busty. He looked at her a moment, then shot her in the right temple. He shot her boyfriend before he could even stir out of his sleep at the sound of the silencer. He shot them both again, twice, in the head. The hollow-points made a mess, but he never had to wonder about the results.
He quickly retrieved the canister and returned to the bedroom. He opened the nozzle, released the lock, pointed the nozzle at the bed, and pressed the trigger. With a loud
whoosh
a broad stream of jet fuel shot out. He sprayed the bodies liberally and then hosed down the room, the highly pressurized canister enabling him to saturate the bodies and the room in only a moment. He sprayed the other upstairs rooms as well.
Downstairs he did the same thing, spraying, just for the hell of it, all the drawings hanging on the walls and giving a good shot into the library. By the time he made it through the other rooms the fumes from the jet fuel were almost unbearable.
He slipped on his shoes and took from his coat pocket a small plastic box the size of a pager. He peeled a piece of paper from an adhesive patch on the box and slapped the box on the wall. He pushed some buttons, and a green digital readout appeared on a screen. At the programmed time the box would produce nothing more than a series of electrical sparks, more than enough to ignite the fog of jet fuel now expanding throughout the house. He gave himself thirty-five minutes. He could almost be back at the airport by then. He would even have them circle the city so he could see the fire. On second thought, with an additional ten minutes he might even be able to see the explosion itself. He changed it to forty-five minutes. By then the fumes would be so dense that even the thought of a spark would set them off.
Carrying the canister, he went out the front door and dutifully locked it behind him.
Harry Strand sat with his back to the stucco wall in a café in Testaccio and stared in stunned silence at the phlegmatic face of Alain Darras. It was midmorning in yet another working-class neighborhood south of the Aventine, and both men were leaning over cups of steaming cappuccino. The front doors of the café were open to the street, where trucks and
motorini
buzzed by like insects swarming in the warm morning sun. The bakery in the front of the café was a popular stop for a fast breakfast, and the tin-covered bar where most of the customers stood while they quickly devoured their espresso and roll had been busy since Strand arrived. But in the rear of the café he and Darras had a table to themselves in relative isolation.
“I told him nothing, of course,” Darras said. “Not even that I had heard from you.”
Strand felt weak and nauseated, as if he had been hit very hard and was struggling to stay conscious.
“They must have known that it was likely you would call me at some point.” He stopped. “I don’t like it that I was the one to tell you.”
It was mind-boggling. What Schrade had done was horrible, incredible.
“Howard knows you’ve come to Rome with a woman. He knows her name.”
Strand’s face must have registered suspicion.
“No, no, they did not get this from me. From the flight information. They have her name from that. That’s what Howard said, anyway. As for me, I couldn’t find anything on her. If she’s working with anyone, I can’t find any trace of it. She doesn’t show up with Schrade. There’s nothing on her anywhere else. I don’t think she is in the business, my friend. Or, if she is, she is very, very new to it.”
Strand processed this. He had never had bad information from Darras. Ever. He was surprised, but it was difficult to believe, even though he wanted more than anything for it to be true. But if he was going to remain sane, he couldn’t go on playing mind games about her. He had to trust the information he was getting. And he had to trust her. Then his mind went right back to the house and the explosion. The two bodies. God, what had he done?
“Of course, Howard wanted information on Mara Song, too,” Darras added.
“You confirmed Howard’s story about the explosion?”
“Yes, Harry, I did. The FBI is already involved. They are interested in the explosives, of course.”
“What was it?”
“They think it was jet fuel. Probably spark ignition.” He paused. “I understand… well, it was very bad. Almost total destruction. As for forensics, there’s almost nothing to work with. The jet fuel… you know, it burns so hot…”
Darras showed no emotion beyond the momentary hesitations. Strand noticed it and was pained.
“Do they have anything else?”
“I don’t know what they have. It’s moving too quickly. My sources are not good on breaking information.”
Strand knew that Darras’s sources were very good indeed, and he wondered if Darras was holding out on him. If he was, why?
He quickly calculated the progress of events. No records would be left. Nothing to start from. He was sure that aside from the fuel residue precious little would remain to guide investigators. They would go back to his old ties in Europe from four years before and start from there. Strand still dealt with some of the same people, though not as many since he’d retired. Those dealers and collectors would not know about Mara Song. The only person who would know about the house in Sallustiano would be Aldo Chiappini, and since he had become Strand’s client after Strand left the FIS, his name would not be in agency records. So they would have to work their way to him through Strand’s other contacts. The world of drawing collectors was a small world. It wouldn’t be long. Strand didn’t have that much time.