Authors: Stephen Coonts
When Yocke resumed his seat, he said, “Ott, you’re going to burn yourself out.”
The older man spotted something in the document he wanted to change. He punched keys for a moment. When he finished he muttered, “Too sentimental?”
“Nobody cares about black crackheads. Nobody gives a damn if they go to prison or starve to death or slaughter each other. You know that, Ott.”
“I’ll have to work some more on this. My job is to make people give a damn.” Yocke left the columnist’s cubicle and went to his desk out in the newsroom. He found a notebook to scribble in amid the loose paper on his desk and got on the phone to the ontgomery County police. Perhaps they had made some on the beltway killing.
Jack Yocke had two murders of his own to write about, whether anyone gave a damn about the victims or not.
After all the guests had left, Toad Tarkington was washing dishes in the Graftons’ kitchen when Amy came in and posed self-consciously where he could see her. She had applied some eyeshadow and lipstick at some point in the evening, Toad noted with surprise. He consciously suppressed a grin. This past year she had been shooting up, developing in all the right places. She was only a few inches shorter than Callie. comLittle past your bedtime, isn’t it?”
“Oh, Toad, don’t be so parental. I’m a teenager now, you know.” “Almost.”
“Near enough-was
“Grab a towel and dry some of these things.” Amy did as requested.
“Nice party, huh?” she said as she finished the punch bowl and put it away.
“Yeah.”
“Is Rita coming for Christmas?”
“I hope so.” Rita, Toad’s wife, was a navy test pilot. Just now she was out in Nevada testing the first of the Navy’s new A-12 stealth attack planes. Both Toad and Rita held the rank of lieutenant. “Depends on the flight test schedule, of course,” Toad added glumly. “Do you love Rita?” Amy asked softly.
Toad Tarkington knew trouble when it slapped him in the face. His gaze ripped from the dishes and settled on the young girl leaning against the counter and facing him self-consciously, her weight balanced on one leg and her eyes demurely lowered. He cleared his throat. “Why do you ask?” “Well,” she said softly, flashing her lashes, “you’re only fifteen years older than I am, and I’ll be eighteen in five years, and …” She ran out of steam.
Toad Tarkington got a nice chunk of his lower lip between his teeth and bit hard.
He took his hands from the water and dried them on a towel. “Listen, little one. You’ve still got a lot of growing left to do. You’ll meet Mr. Right someday. Maybe in five years or when you’re in college. You’ve got to take life at its natural pace. But you’ll meet him. He’s out there right now, hoping that someday he’ll meet you. And when you finally find him he won’t be fifteen years older than you are.” She examined his eyes.
A blush began at her neck and worked its way up her face as tears welled up. “You’re laughing at me.”
“No no no, Amy. I know what it cost you to bring this subject up.” He reached out and cradled her cheek in his palm. “But I love Rita very much.”
She bit the inside of her mouth, which made her lips contort.
“Believe me, the guy for you is out there. When you finally meet him, you’ll know. And he’ll know. He’ll look straight into your heart and see the warm, wonderful human being there, and he’ll fall madly in love with you. You wait and see.”
“Wait? Life just seems so …soforever!” Her despair was palpable.
“Yeah,” Toad said. “And teenagers live in the now. You’ll be an adult the day you know in your gut that the future is as real as today is. Understand?” He heard a noise. Jake Grafton was lounging against the door jam. Jake held out his hands. Amy took them.
He kissed her forehead. “I think it’s time for you to hit the sack. Tell Toad good night.”
She paused at the door and looked back. Her eyes were still shiny. “Good night, Toad.”
“Good night, Amy Carol.”
Both men stood silently until they heard Amy’s bedroom door click shut.
“She’s really growing fast,” Toad said.
“Too fast,” said Jake Grafton, and he hunted in the refridge for a beer, which he tossed to Toad, then took another for himself.
Ten minutes later Callie joined them in the living room. The men were deep into a discussion of the Gorbachev revolution and the centrifugal forces pulling the Soviet Union apart. “What will the world be like after the dust settles?” Callie asked. “Will the world be a safer place or less so?”
She received a carefully thought-out reply from Toad and a sincere “I don’t know” from her husband.
She expected Jake’s answer. Through the years she had found him a man ready to admit what he didn’t know. One of his great strengths was a complete lack of pretense. After years of association with academics, Callie found Jake a breath of fresh air. He knew who he was and what he was, and to his everlasting credit he never tried to be anything else.
As she sat watching him tonight, a smile spread across her face. “Not to change the subject, Captain,” Toad Tarkington said, “but is it true you’re now the senior officer in one of the Joint Staff divisions?”
“Alas, it’s true,” Jake admitted. “I get to decide who opens the mail and makes the coffee.”
Toad chuckled. After almost two years in Washington, he knew only too well how close to the truth that comment was. “Well, you know that Rita is out in Nevada flying the first production A-1 2. She’s going to be pretty busy with that for a year or so, and they have a Test Pilot School-graduate bombardier flying with her. So I’m sort of the gofer in the A-12 shop now.”
Jake nodded and Callie said something polite.
“What I was thinking,” Toad continued, “was that maybe I could get a transfer over to your shop. If I’m going to make coffee and run errands, why not over at your place? Maybe get an X in the joint staff tour box.”
“Hmmm.”
“What d’ya think, sir?”
“Well, you’re too junior.”
“Oh, Jake,” Callie murmured. Toad flashed her a grin.
“Really, Callie, he is too junior. I don’t think they have any billets for lieutenants on the Joint Staff. It’s a very senior position.”
“Then it needs some younger people,” she told her husband. “You make it sound like a retirement home, full of fuddy-duddies and senior golfers.”
“I am not a fuddy-duddy,” Jake Grafton told her archly. “I know, dear. I didn’t mean to imply that you were.” She winked at Toad and he laughed.
The lieutenant rose from the couch, said his good-byes, and after promising to tell Rita the Graftons said hello, departed.
“Realy, Jake,” Callie said, “you should see if he could transfer to the Joint Staff.”
“Be better for his career if he cut his shore tour short and went back to sea in an F-14 squadron.”
“Toad knows that. He just thinks very highly of you and wants to work nearby. That’s quite a compliment.”
“I know that.” A smile spread across Jake Grafton’s face. “The ol’ Horny Toad. He’s a good kid.”
Henry Charon stood leaning against an abandoned grocery store in northeast Washington and watched the black teenagers in the middle of the street hawk crack to the drivers of the vehicles streaming by. Some of the drivers stopped and made purchases, some didn’t. The drivers were white and black, men and women, mostly young or middleaged. Knots of young black men stood on the corners scrutinizing traffic, inspecting the pedestrians, and keeping a wary eye on Charon. The wind whipped trash down the street and made the cold cut through Charon’s clothes. Yet he was dressed more heavily than most of the crack dealers, who stayed in continual motion to keep warm. Somewhere a boom box was blasting hard rock.
He had been there no more than five minutes when a tall, youngster detached himself from the group on the across the street and skipped through the cars toward him. “Hey, man.”
“Hey,” said Henry Charon.
“Hey, man, you gonna buy this sidewalk?”
“Just watching.”
“Want some product?”
Charon shook his head. Four of the teenagers on the corner were staring at him. One of them sat down by a garbage can and reached behind it, his eyes glued to Charon and his interrogator. Charon would have bet a thousand dollars against a nickel that there was a loaded weapon behind that garbage can.
“A fucking tourist!” the skinny kid said with-disgust. “Take a hike, honkey. You don’t wanta get caught under the wheels of commerce.”
“I’m curious. How do you know I’m not a cop?”
“You no cop, man. You ain’t got the look. You some little booger tourist from nowhere-ville. Now I’m tired of your jive, honkey. You got ten seconds to sun hiking back to honkey-town or you’ll have to carry your balls home in your hand. You dig?”
“I dig.” Henry Charon turned and started walking.
The intersection two blocks south was covered with steel plates and timbers. Under the street, construction was continuing on a new subway tunnel.
Using his flashlight, Charon looked for the entrance. He found it, closed with a sheet of plywood. He had it off in seconds.
The interior resembled a wet, dark, dripping cavern. Henry Charon felt his way along, inspecting the overhead when he wasn’t looking for a place to put his feet. The tunnel continued ahead and behind him as far as he could see.
He began walking south, stepping over construction material and dodging the occasional low-hanging electrical wire. He inspected the sides of the tunnel and the overhead,
looking for the ventilator shafts he knew would have to be there. He found three.
It was warmer here than it had been on the street. There was no wind, though a match revealed the air was flowing gently back in the direction from which he had come. Actually quite pleasant. Charon unbuttoned his coat and continued walking.
In several places the workmen had rigged forms to pour the concrete floor. The precast concrete shells were already in place on the arched top and sides of the tunnel, probably installed as the tunnel was dug.
After what he judged to be four hundred yards or so of travel, he came to a giant enlarged cavern. His flashlight beam looked puny as it examined the pillars and construction debris. When finished, this would no doubt be a subway station. Another tunnel came in on a lower level. Charon descended a ladder and walked away in the new direction.
This was his third exploratory trip to Washington in the past four weeks and the second time he had been in these tunnels. If the construction crews were making progress, it was not readily visible to Charon’s untutored eye. Tasson had visited him a month ago at the ranch in New Mexico, and he had had a list. Six names. Six men in Washington he had wanted killed. Was it feasible? Would Charon be interested? Charon had looked at the list.
“George Bush?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re asking me to kill the President of the United States?”
“No. I’m asking you if it can be done. If you say yes, I’ll ask you if you’re interested. If you say yes, I’ll ask you how much. If all those questions are decided to the satisfaction of everyone involved, then we will decide whether or not to proceed, and when.”
“These other names-all of them?”
“As many as possible. Obviously, the more you get, the more we’ll pay.”
Charon had studied the names on the list, then watched as
burned it and crumbled the ashes and dribbled out onto the wind.
“I’ll think about it.”
So after three trips to Washington, what did he think?
It was feasible to kill the President, of course. The President was an elected officeholder and had to appear in public from time to time. The best personal security system in the world could not protect a working politician from a determined, committed assassin. All the security apparatus could do was minimize the possibility that an amateur might succeed and increase the level of difficulty for a professional.
The real problem would come afterward. Charon had no illusions on that score. Successful or not, the assassin would be the object of the most intensive manhunt in American history. Every hand would be against him. Anyone found to have knowingly aided the assassin would be ruthlessly destroyed-financially and professionally and in every other way. In addition, accused conspirators would face the death penalty if the government could get a conviction, and God knows, the prosecutors would pull out all the stops. Before the hit the assassin would be on his own. Afterward he would be a pariah. For the assassin to walk away from the scene of the crime would not be too difficult, with some careful planning, but as the full investigative resources of the federal government were engaged, the net would become more and more difficult to evade. The longer the killer remained at large, the greater the efforts of the hunters.
Yes, it would be a hunt, a hunt for a rabid wolf.
As Henry Charon saw it, therein lay the challenge. He had spent his life stalking game in the wild mountain places and, these last few years, in the wild city places. Occasionally a deer or elk or cougar had successfully eluded him and those moments made the kills sweeter. After assassinating the President, he would be the quarry. If he could do the unexpected, stay one jump ahead of those who hunted him, the chase would be-ah, the chase would be sublime, his grandest adventure.
And if he lost and his hunters won, so be it. Nothing lives forever. For the mountain lion and the bull elk and Henry Cbaron, living was the challenge. Death will come for the quick and the bold, the slow and the care 11 the wise an the foolish, each and every one.
Death is easy. Except for a moment or two of pain, death has no terrors for those who are willing to face life. Henry Charon’s acceptance of the biologically inevitable was not an intellectual exercise for a philosophy class, but subconscious, ingrained. He had killed too often to fear it.
Now he reached that place in the tunnel he had found on his last visit. It was in a long, gentle curve, halfway up the wall. As he had been walking along he had momentarily felt a puff of cooler air. Investigation had revealed a narrow, oblong gap just wide enough for a wiry man to wriggle through. On the other side was an ancient basement, the dark home of rats and insects.