"That's what we got from people in Washington-good people. That they're just private detectives. I don't know, it doesn't add up." There was another long silence and finally he said, "I can't imagine it would be Whitemark. Big corporations can be ruthless, but we don't have gunmen hanging around. I'm afraid it might be the federal people. When we checked on these private detectives, we heard they'd had some trouble with the government in the past. Remember?"
"Yeah, I remember something like that."
"So maybe somebody's got them on a string. It would be a way of. killing somebody without official involvement."
"But why would they come after us?"
There was another moment of silence, and he said, in a cooler voice, "It's very hard to think. Very hard. But suppose they figured out what happened at Whitemark and talked to each other, and said, 'If we arrest these people, the publicity could set off a whole rash of these things. Like a rash of jet hijackings.' If there is some kind of murder squad in the CIA or the NSA, they might have decided that this was the most expedient way to solve the problem."
"Jesus," I said. I thought about the people I'd known in the Strategic Operations Group. A few were killers, plain and simple. They were career military men, Special Forces, and some held rank, but at heart, they were gunmen. If an intelligence agency needed a couple of shooters, they'd know where to find them. And private investigation was just the kind of job that attracted former company cowboys.
"Where are you?" Dillon asked. I looked around, but there were no street signs. "I don't know. Standing at a 7-Eleven on a street corner. We have to stay out of sight for a while and then head out to the airport in time to find Maggie."
"No. Don't do that. They may very well be looking for you at the airport. I'll call Maggie in the air. We have a business code we use for open phones, when we're negotiating deals, and I can warn her off. She'll call me from National, and I'll tell her what happened and turn her right back around. There won't be anything you can do for her. I'll arrange for extra security and talk to Mr. Anshiser about what to do next."
"So what about us?"
"If we can get a line on who it is, we might be able to work some kind of a deal. Can you call back here later?"
"Yeah. We'll get out of town. Find someplace we can hide out for a couple of days until we figure out what's happened."
"What about your friend? The one who was shot?"
"There's nothing we can do about that," I said. "There's no way he could still be alive."
"All right, we can leave that for now. Had you finished wiping the apartment?"
"Yes."
"Good. And you still have your car?"
"Yes."
"If they're federal or have federal sponsors they may put out a watch for your car. They won't have done it yet, though, if they thought they would catch you at the apartment. And if they're an assassination team, they're illegal; it might take them a while to get everything set. Can you hold on there just a minute?"
"Yes."
His phone receiver hit the desktop, and I scanned the street for the red Buick with the dark windows. Nothing. Cars coming and going, some of them red, but nothing that looked like the Buick.
"Okay, are you still there?"
"Yes."
"I'm looking at a road atlas. I would recommend that you take Highway Fifty east through Annapolis, cross the bay, then head north through Wilmington and into New Jersey. I'm not up-to-speed on police procedure, but as I understand it, watch bulletins usually go out on a state-by-state basis. That's the shortest distance that will get you out of all the states surrounding Maryland-Virginia. You can be in New Jersey in less than three hours."
"That sounds good," I said. "We'll call you when we find a place." Dillon had pulled himself together. He sounded like an intelligence officer giving a briefing: calm, detached, certain. But then, he wasn't being hunted. And he hadn't known Dace.
"Get as far away as you can. The closer you get to New York, the less attention the local police should pay to routine watch bulletins. They've got other problems."
"Okay."
"Call back here in six hours. I should know something then."
LuEllen was lying in the backseat of the car. She wasn't weeping; she was absolutely still, her arm thrown across her eyes, her breathing shallow and quick, as though she had been injured.
"You okay?"
"I'm fucked," she said. "Just drive."
I went back into the 7-Eleven, bought a map, a pack of donuts, and a Styrofoam cooler that I stocked with ice and two six-packs of Coke. In the car, I traced out the course Dillon had recommended, and five minutes later we were on the way.
We caught the evening rush going out of town; the trip was a nightmare of stop-and-go. We saw state troopers twice; both times they were involved in clearing fender-benders. LuEllen lay in the backseat for an hour before climbing into the front. Her eyes were red and sunken, but there were no tears.
"There's no chance he's alive, is there?"
"No. They shot him three times going in. If he was still alive, they would have shot him again before they left."
"Who were they?"
"We don't know. Dillon's trying to figure it out. We'll call him from Camden."
"Think they'll come after us?" she asked.
"Probably. I'll be the main target, but you've seen their faces. We'd better stick together until we find out. If they haven't made you, you'd best get on a plane to Duluth and lie low for a while."
We stopped once at a fast-food place in Delaware. LuEllen said she had to call Duluth, and she used a phone on the wall of the restaurant while I sat in the car and ate a soggy cheeseburger.
"I got the name of a guy in Philadelphia," she said.
"For what?"
"In case you want to buy a gun. No questions."
A few minutes after eight o'clock, going north out of Wilmington, I spotted a chain electronics store in a strip shopping center and pulled in.
"Supplies," I told LuEllen. I ransacked the store's telephone and home-furnishings departments, bought a few general electronics tools, a power drill, drill bits, and a stapler, paid $160, and threw the sack in the backseat of the car.
"Now. Where's this guy with the gun?" I asked.
The guy with the gun lived in a suburb of Philadelphia, a place with small lawns and aluminum-sided ramblers and a maple tree in the center of each front yard. We found his house after twenty minutes of searching. He met us at the door.
"Mr. Drexel?" asked LuEllen.
"Yes. You must be Miss Carlson?"
"Yes. Weenie called about us. This is a friend."
"Come in," he said. He was a solemn type, tall and bespectacled, with a ruddy outdoorsman's complexion. He was dressed from the L. L. Bean catalog, with a blue pin-striped oxford cloth shirt and cotton slacks with cargo pockets on the sides. His wife and teenage daughter were watching a movie on television in the living room. The woman said "Hello," but the girl ignored us. We followed Drexel down a short flight of stairs into the basement.
The basement contained a neat, well-equipped woodworking shop and a couple of metal-cutting machines. A full-size unfinished airplane wing hung on one wall.
"Building a plane," Drexel said laconically. "Finish it in a year or so." He led the way to an upright cabinet in one corner.
"Now. What exactly did you have in mind?" he asked.
"I haven't handled a handgun since I was in the Army," I said.
He arched one eyebrow and opened the cabinet. The top was filled with long weapons, M16s and AK47s. The bottom contained drawers filled with shorter arms. He opened a drawer and pulled out two bundles wrapped in oiled paper.
"In that case, and depending on your requirements, I would suggest one of these two weapons," he said. The first looked like it had been made in a high school metal shop, all rough edges and bent, black steel.
"This is a MAC- 10. A great favorite with drug smugglers, I understand." He handed it to me. "It's simple to operate, and this model is fully automatic. A submachine gun, if you will." He turned to LuEllen. "You pull the trigger, and a stream of bullets comes out for as long as you hold down the trigger, or until you run out of ammo. I have sixteen- and thirty-shot custom clips for it."
The gun felt big and awkward in my hand. I held it up and sighted down the length of the shop. The front sight wavered in front of me.
"You really wouldn't want to shoot it like that," he said. "Hold it closer to the body, so you can brace your elbow." He showed me.
"What else do you have?"
"Ah. This one. You may be more familiar with it." He unwrapped the second bundle and showed me a.45 Colt, identical to the one I'd qualified with in the Army.
"What do you think?" I asked LuEllen.
She shook her head. "I don't know about guns."
"If I might recommend." Drexel sounded like a wine waiter dealing with a couple of first-time drinkers. "If you need something for immediate self-protection, and don't have time for practice-I got the impression from Mr. Weenie that this was the case-then I'd recommend the MAC-10. Even the rankest amateur can do amazing damage with it, though it is a bit more expensive."
I took it, and he ran me through its operation. He also sold me one thirty- and two sixteen-round clips for the gun, already loaded.
"And for the lady?" he asked.
"Uh, I don't think I want anything," LuEllen said, looking at me anxiously.
"Let me show you this one," he said. He reached back into one of his drawers and pulled out a hand-sized, double-barreled derringer.
"A.32 H amp;R magnum. Very safe, and very simple to operate. You should use it only in the most extreme circumstances, of course. In this caliber, at five yards, you could actually miss your target. At two yards, or two feet, it's quite effective."
LuEllen looked at the tiny gun for a moment, glanced at me, looked back at Drexel, and nodded. "I'll take it," she said.
"Make sure you pull the trigger with your index finger. It's so small that there's a temptation to use your middle finger and lay your index finger along the barrel. But if your finger overlaps, it's going to catch a lot of muzzle blast. Okay?"
LuEllen nodded uncertainly.
"Just pull the trigger with your trigger finger," he said, smiling.
The two guns cost us twenty-five hundred dollars. We rewrapped them in the oiled paper and went back out to the car, the wife nodding pleasantly as we tramped through the living room again.
"If you need anything else," Drexel said as we got in the car, "don't hesitate to call."
The next stop was the airport. I left the car in the long-term parking lot, rented a nondescript Dodge, and transferred the luggage. We were an hour north of Philadelphia before I spotted the right kind of hotel-a long, low, L-shaped place, inexpensive, with two dozen cars distributed up and down its length. I told the desk clerk that my secretary and I wanted adjoining rooms, but without connecting doors.
"I've got divorce proceedings going," I said, trying out a sheepish grin. "I don't want people to think, you know."
He knew, and he wasn't interested.
LuEllen was dazed and heavy-eyed from the stress. "We have to keep going another half hour or so, and then we can get some sleep," I said.
We unloaded the box of electronics supplies in my room. The first item was a compact motion detector-a burglar alarm. I mounted it behind the door, at ankle level. Then I made a few simple changes in the telephone wall outlet. Next, using the power drill I'd bought, I drilled a neat hole through the wall into LuEllen's room, and ran two lines through.
The first line was hooked into the motion detector. If my door opened, the detector would buzz us in LuEllen's room. The second line would allow me to make and take calls in LuEllen's room from my phone. The stapler made the job neat. All the wiring ran under the edge of the carpet, along the baseboards. Even a maid shouldn't notice the changes.
"If it's the CIA or NSA, they could be monitoring everything Anshiser's got. If they trace us, it'll give us a break," I said.
We left the car one space down from LuEllen's room, in front of another room where the lights were on, and carried our suitcases, the portable, and our cash reserve down to LuEllen's.
What?
Can fast check Anshiser house lines for trace?
Yes. 30 minutes.
Need money?
No. Put terminal on receive.
LuEllen had collapsed on the bed and was out, breathing jerkily with an occasional moan, but asleep. I was crumbling when Bobby's call came in, and the terminal automatically answered.
Lines clean.
Thanx.
"Maggie's not back yet, but she's okay. I turned her around at National and talked to her in the air not more than an hour ago. We still don't know what happened," Dillon said. "It's hard to ask the right questions without admitting your guilt."
"What if they don't know what we're talking about?"
"Then we'll have to look into other possibilities. It could be Whitemark, but that doesn't seem likely. Mr. Anshiser was wondering if it might have something to do with the nature of the place you were staying? Some kind of prostitution-related activity, a mistake, just like we thought the first time?"
"That's bullshit," I said. "You don't kill somebody to get the goods on him for a divorce. They knew who we were and they were there to kill us."
"Yes, that's what I think," Dillon said. "Maggie should be back almost anytime. She wants to talk to you. Can you give me a number?"
"Yeah." I gave him the motel's phone number and my own room extension. "Have her call as soon as she gets in."
LuEllen groaned again and said "Dace?" and started to wake up. "Shh," I whispered, "go back to sleep." She frowned and muttered something, but went quiet again, I turned out the light, took off my shoes, and put my head on the pillow, feeling her breathing next to me. That's all I knew until the phone rang.
The phone sounded like a distant dentist's drill. I'd wrapped it in a heavy synthetic blanket to muffle the ringing, and now I couldn't find it. I twisted off the bed and floundered around for a minute in the darkness and finally stepped on it.
"What?" said LuEllen.
"I got it."
The receiver came free and I said, "Yeah?"
"Kidd? This is Maggie."
"Jesus. You okay?"
"Yes. I just got back. I talked to Dillon and we'll start talking to people in Washington in the morning. But we've got another problem. Something happened to Rudy. He collapsed. He's on his way to the medical center. The ambulance just left."
"A stroke? A heart attack? What?"
"No, no, he started spouting gibberish, babbling. It could be nervous exhaustion, a breakdown, they don't know. I'll let you know when we hear."
"Okay."
"Tell me what happened at the apartment."
I told her in a few words, and she asked if we were sure that Dace was dead.
"If they weren't shooting blanks. Ratface shot him three times from a range of about two feet."
LuEllen grabbed me by the arm; I half turned, and then I heard it: the soft buzz of the alarm. The door in my room had been opened.
"Ah, shit," I said.
"What? What's going on?" Maggie asked.
"Somebody's outside. I gotta call the cops. Talk to you later," I said, and hung up.
LuEllen crawled across to the single window and peeked out through a gap between the heavy fiberglass curtain and the windowsill.
"Don't move the curtain," I said. I fumbled the MAC-10 out of the open suitcase, cocked it, and crawled over beside her.
"There's nobody out there," she said. The alarm continued to burp. "You think. wait a minute. Wait a minute."
I looked out over her head. We couldn't see much, but a man in a dark raincoat stepped onto the sidewalk outside my room.
"They're confused," I whispered. "They don't know what to do." The dark shape moved away, and I crawled back to the telephone and dialed 911.
"Is this an emergency?"
"Goddamned right it is. I'm the night clerk at the Knight's Ease Motel and there are two guys with fuckin' machine guns out in the parking lot. Jesus Christ. I gotta go. " And I slammed the phone down.
"Think they'll send somebody?"
"Oh yeah. And if they're good Jersey cops, they'll come in with the sirens screaming. That's in case there really are guys with machine guns. It'll give them a chance to get away."
We huddled below the window, listening, the MAC-10 ready. If the hunters were talking to the night clerk, he might tell them about my "secretary." So we waited in the dark until we heard the siren and then risked another look. A few seconds later, two men crossed the parking lot and got into a big red Buick with dark windows.
"That's them," LuEllen breathed. Ratface was wearing a tan gabardine trench coat that looked two sizes too big for him. The other guy was a barrel-chested pug in a cheap double-knit suit. He moved with the easy grace of an aging heavyweight fighter.
"Yeah." The car pulled away, and we watched it all the way to the freeway entrance. When the phone rang again, LuEllen started across the room. I grabbed her ankle. "Don't," I said. It rang thirty times before it stopped. By then the cops were in the parking lot.
We left the hotel twenty minutes later on the heels of the cops, hustling the luggage and the computer into the car. We didn't bother to drop off the keys, but left them with a ten-dollar bill on a bureau. I did clean up the phone and alarm wires, leaving nothing behind but a nearly invisible half-inch hole in the wall.
"We need some sleep before we can think," I said. "We'll head back through Philadelphia and grab a motel somewhere on the other side."
"We're not worried about federal cops anymore?" From the corner of my eye, I could feel her studying my face.
"No."
"You figured it out?" she asked.
"Some of it."
"I'm glad I didn't have to tell you. That was no coincidence, the phone call coming at exactly the same time as those two goons. Maggie fingered us."
"There's more to it than that," I said.
She thought for a minute, then nodded. "That rat-faced guy. He got here in an hour and a half."
"With the car," I said. "The car was the one I saw in Washington. Dillon routed them right along with us. They must have driven up to Philadelphia, then waited for us to call. He told me to call in six hours, which would tell them about how far we'd get."
"But Jesus Christ, Kidd, what are they doing?"
"I don't know."
"Maybe Anshiser cut a deal with the feds."
"I don't think so. The feds wouldn't be interested in knocking off the small guys and letting the big ones go. They'd do it the other way around, if anything. Net the big fish."
"Jesus," she said. "Maggie. Remember her in the Japanese baths, kidding you about burning your balls off? I thought she'd never stop laughing. She was a friend. I thought you two guys were developing into something."
"I thought so too."
"And Dace is dead."
We drove into the Philadelphia airport and retrieved my car. Before we left, I called Bobby from a phone booth, using the portable.
What?
Need everything you can find on Hellwolf/Whitemark and Sunfire/Anshiser. Crash jobs, full-time. Flat fee $10,000. Need feeds every few hours.
Leave terminal on answer.
Leaving the airport, we turned back west. The appearance of the two hoods and the inevitable conclusion about Maggie kept me awake. I drove all the way through to Gettysburg, where we checked into the biggest motel we could find.
I put LuEllen to bed, called Bobby, and took the first dump of information on Anshiser and Sunfire. LuEllen slept most of the day, woke up long enough to eat, and went back down for the night. I was beat-up but drove into town and bought another printer so I could dump incoming files to paper. Late in the day, Bobby was calling every hour, and the stuff was coming faster and faster. Most of it was useless: lightweight business-magazine stuff, public biographies. I'd seen some of it during the first run-through, before taking the job.
On the second day, a rainstorm came through from the west. It killed a spell of late September heat and replaced it with autumn. The rain left the park grounds dark and somber. I walked LuEllen along Cemetery Ridge, pointing out the path of Pickett's Charge.
"It doesn't look so hard; it's not hardly a hill," she said.
"It didn't have to be. The crest was just high enough to hide the federals and give them some cover during the preparatory barrage. The Southerners thought the cannonading had done a lot more damage than it had. But they came up the hill into a hornet's nest. The high tide of the Confederacy. The South was defeated that week. Lee was turned around here, and out West, Grant was taking Vicksburg. What a time."
We'd gone out to the battlefield during a break in the rain, but now it was sweeping in again, a thin, gray wall coming down from Seminary Ridge, across the peach orchard, obscuring the Roundtops, and up the hill. We turned our backs on it, retreated to the car.
"I was supposed to be in Mexico today," LuEllen said as we went back to the motel. She stared out the window, and tears trickled down her cheeks. I couldn't think of anything to say. We rode back to the beat of the windshield wipers and the sound of wet pavement hissing under the wheels.
Another lengthy file was waiting at the motel. I dumped it to the printer and started working through it. Ten minutes later I found it.
"That's funny." I sat up on the bed.
"What?"
I looked at the source of the article I was reading: one of the popular science magazines.
"I've seen a couple of references to a guidance system called Snagger. For the Hellwolf."
"So?"
"So it sounds a hell of a lot like the String system. But I haven't seen anything about String."
WHAT?
Need word search on all files, references: String and Snagger.
It took about six hours to accumulate, but when we had done it, the facts were clear enough.
"Anshiser never had the String system. Whitemark developed the Snagger. Same thing, essentially. Anshiser didn't have a clue. Then, six months ago, when preliminary design studies were due, word got out that Whitemark was onto something big. Anshiser didn't have anything to compare with it."
"So Anshiser stole it from Whitemark, not the other way around?"
"Looks like it. They desperately needed time to understand Snagger and do a knock-off for their own plane. That's where we came in. That whole routine they did in Chicago was an act. Jesus! I bought the whole thing!"
LuEllen sat hunched on the bed, her hair hanging limp down the sides of her face, her face wrinkled in thought. Eventually she shook her head and looked up.
"So?"
"So?"
"Yeah. So what?" she said. "So they conned us into doing a job on Whitemark. What difference does it make? If they'd told you the truth and offered you two million to take down Whitemark, you probably would have said 'yes' anyway. They lied, but that's no reason to start shooting at us. We're no more likely to go to the cops now than if they were telling the truth."
"Maybe not. But it makes what we did a lot more serious, especially for Anshiser. If Whitemark had stolen the String system and Anshiser could prove it, it might have cost Whitemark the contract. Or a lawsuit so big that winning the contract would have been meaningless. But if Anshiser stole Snagger and then wrecked Whitemark to slow them down so they could do a knock-off, and if Whitemark could prove it.
"Then Anshiser is ruined. Absolutely."
"And if Anshiser had hired the job done by a group of outsiders, and one of them was a newspaper guy with a reputation for busting defense industries, and another one was a thief whose name he didn't even know.
"It might make sense to get rid of them permanently," LuEllen concluded.
We both thought about it for a minute.
"Where did they get the gunmen?" she asked.
I shrugged. "Anshiser is a defense industry. They know all kinds of people. They probably found a couple of ex-Special Forces guys looking for a little cash."
"And then you've got a couple of guys who know the story and have killed people because of it," LuEllen objected. "I don't know. It sounds weak."
"They wouldn't have to tell those guys the whole story, just point them at the targets," I said. "I can't think of any other rationale."
The motel room had two single beds. When we went to sleep that night, LuEllen suddenly said in the dark, "I'd like to come over and sleep with you, but, like, no sex. I just want to sleep with somebody."
"Come on." She snuggled in against me, and we whispered back and forth for a while, and then she drifted away. Her body warmth under the blanket reminded me of Maggie, like a black patch on my mind. I was dozing off when the computer alarm sounded, and I rolled out of bed to look.
Something weird.
What?
Been in newspaper clip files, gone way back. Anshiser old man was in German mob.
What?
Chicago had German mob. Like Mafia. Anshiser father convicted in 1910 extortion, two years in prison, charged 1914 murder and extortion, not guilty. No more charges but mentioned in stories as accountant for German mob. Don't know what that is yet, keep digging?
Look for stuff on Anshiser and associates.
Already got most of it.
Got access to criminal intelligence data banks, FBI?
No. Tried once. Maximum protection.
How about NCIC?
Easy access if got codes. Need codes.
Who got codes?
I find. Call back later. Want mob clips now?
He dumped the clips to the computer. There weren't many of them, but there was enough information to suggest that Anshiser's father was a major crime figure. Exactly what he did was unclear from the clips. I had just finished reading the clips when Bobby called again. He had a name.
When LuEllen woke the next morning, she smiled, a small tentative smile, the first one I'd seen since the shooting.
"I don't know how to break it to you," I said.
"What happened?" she asked, quickly serious.
"We've got to hit another house. We need some more codes." I told her about the background on Anshiser's father. "We need to get into some crime intelligence files. Bobby found a guy for us. He goes into the NCIC-the National Crime Information Center-from his home computer."
"Uh, is this guy.
"Yeah. He's a cop."