by Thomas Perry
The room across the hall belonged to a girl. It seemed the girl was a bit older than the boy because she had abandoned any pretense of order, as though she used the room primarily as a closet. Some of the clothes that were thrown on the floor had the tags still on them, and they seemed to be women's sizes. There were dozens of photographs and clippings on the wall, but it was too dark to make out any images.
The last of the six rooms was a baby's, with a crib and mobiles hanging above it with little winged angels. Along one wall were a changing table with a foot-high cross mounted above it, a dresser, and a set of shelves that held diapers, little outfits, and supplies. Three children's rooms, but so far no master suite.
At the end of the hall, what he found was not a wall, but a door. He was almost certain that what he wanted was behind it. But if Tosca was smart enough to know that he was coming, then he was smart enough to make better use of the information than by just leaving. It was possible that what Tosca had done was set up a booby trap. It might be something as simple as a spring gun or as complicated as an ambush. The most likely place for either was behind that door.
He stood where he was and listened for a minute, then for another. He heard nothing, so he turned around and began to move along the corridor the way he had come. He passed the six bedrooms, reached the end of the hall where there was a turn, and stepped around it into the living room.
He passed into the dining room, looked through the window, and saw that he had misinterpreted something he'd seen. When he had seen the side of a building through the window in the boy's bedroom, he had thought he was looking at the neighbors' house. But it wasn't another building. It was part of this one, a wing he hadn't searched. It ran along the left side of the house and created an enclosed courtyard about fifteen feet wide and fifty feet long, so the family bedrooms looked out on a quiet, private space. The other wing was little more than a walkway, with no doors in it. There was only one curved portal that led through the wing to the other side so a gardener could slip into the enclosure, rake the leaves, and depart without ever entering the house. Tosca's suite windows could only be seen from within the courtyard, and there was no door or window across from his suite. It would be impossible to fire a round into the suite from the other wing.
Schaeffer went back to the boy's room, closed the door, put his magnet on the sill to keep the alarm from tripping, opened the sash, and climbed out. He remained still in the courtyard for a long time, listening and leaning his back against the outside of the house to feel any vibration from movement inside. Then he moved ahead past the girl's room and the baby's room, and reached a pair of French doors. He leaned close and peered in, then withdrew his head without moving his feet.
There were three men in the room, and all he had was a lock-blade knife and a two-foot crowbar. He played with the crowbar for a few seconds, swinging it, twirling it, and letting it slide through his hand and stop so he could feel the weight and balance. It was thick and heavy, with a crook at one end to gain leverage for prying. But the crook gave that end a bit of extra weight, so he held the other end to swing it.
He reached for the handle of the French doors, pushed, but found it locked. He withdrew his hand and peered inside. One man was asleep on the bed with his shoes off, one curled up on the small couch across the room, and one upright in a chair nodding off. Schaeffer could see a shotgun lying on the coffee table in front of him.
They were obviously prepared for the one thing that they thought might happen—that a man would come into the house, walk down the hallway, and enter the suite through the door. Only one man had to be awake to hear him walk down the hallway and try to enter the suite. The one on duty would yell and open fire, and the other two would jump to their feet and add unnecessary shots.
He would make things go a bit differently. He would appear to be in two places simultaneously. He picked up a couple of smooth Chinese river stones from the garden, climbed back through the window in the son's room, closed it, and took his magnet, then went to the baby's room. He placed the magnet, leaned out into the courtyard, and threw his first rock at the French doors, and the other right away at the opening in the courtyard, bouncing the stone so it sounded like someone running away.
The French doors swung open and the man with the shotgun ran along the courtyard to the arched portal, trying to get a shot at the intruder. Schaeffer stationed himself just inside the doorway of the baby's room and listened for sounds from the hallway. In a moment, the door of the master suite swung open and the two men who had been asleep ran up the hallway, trying to get around to the front of the house to head off the imaginary man their companion was chasing.
Schaeffer waited for the first man to pass his doorway, then stepped into the hall, already swinging his crowbar. His swing caught the second man just above his brow and knocked him backward onto the floor, unconscious. Schaeffer ducked back into the cover of the baby's room and used his crowbar to drag the man's pistol along the floor into his waiting hand.
The fallen man's companion was already near the end of the hall, but he had heard the sound of the crowbar blow and his companion's collapse to the floor. He fired twice, pointlessly, at the baby's room doorway.
Inside the baby's room, Schaeffer slipped out the window into the courtyard, aimed the gun in through the open window at the doorway, and removed his magnet from the sill. The alarm began to ring.
The man in the hallway, thinking Schaeffer had opened the window to escape, ran into the room, hoping to catch him in midclimb. Schaeffer fired twice into the surprised man's chest and watched him fall. Schaeffer climbed back in, closed the baby's room window, and hurried down the hallway to the master suite. He waited just inside the French doors that led to the courtyard.
The man with the shotgun had seen no intruder, but had heard the four shots and the alarm, so he ran back through the courtyard toward the master suite. As he burst into the suite with his shotgun ready, Schaeffer put his first shot into the man's right temple. He died before he could take a second step, and sprawled forward onto the floor.
Schaeffer pulled the pistol from inside the coat of the man he had just killed and the loaded spare magazine with it. Then he left through the French doors, closing them behind him. The sound of the alarm was muffled immediately, almost silenced by the closed-up and well-insulated brick house. But he wanted to be gone in case he had missed something and some unnoticed backup to the system had transmitted the message that there had been a break-in. He found an open trash can two blocks away and dropped his crowbar into it, with the magnet stuck to it.
He made it to the hotel, got into his car, and drove. He was tired, but he drove from Long Island to New Jersey, and checked into a hotel near Trenton. The night had been a disappointment. Five days had passed since the attack in Britain, and Frank Tosca was still alive.
7
ON MONDAY MORNING at six A.M. Elizabeth walked into her office at the Justice Department. She wanted to spend the two hours before anyone else arrived getting caught up on the mail Geoff had left for her. The two hours before the phones started ringing would give her a chance to learn what she had missed and to find out what had been done about it so far. Deputy Assistant Hunsecker was acting as though disagreeing with him were a moral failing, and he'd given her the only administrative punishment she'd ever had. She wanted and needed to keep her job.
She had decided over the weekend that she would pretend to herself that it wasn't a great injustice that she was on the verge of being fired from her job after twenty years with the department. She'd worked in the bureaucracy long enough to know that allowing herself to nurse a grievance would eventually make staying at this job impossible. The only appropriate thing to do now was to pay attention to her work and do the best job she could.
She unloaded her briefcase on the desk and stopped. Her in-box had already been piled with files and memos when she'd left on Wednesday. Now it was empty. The other box was empty too, which was where she put papers that neede
d to be filed. Had Geoff filed everything? She recalled one of the files that had been in the box on Wednesday. It was a file she had made ten years ago about the expenses involved in centralizing the information obtained on organized crime wiretaps. Since another set of centralizations was coming, she wanted to refresh her memory of what was involved and how much it had cost the last time. She went to the correct filing cabinet, opened the drawer, and found the red card she had placed between two other files when she had taken that one so she could replace it easily.
She remembered a couple of other files and checked for them. None of them had been returned to the cabinets. They were simply gone. As she continued her search, she tried to delay the slowly growing conviction that this was Hunsecker's work. She looked around in Geoffrey's space for signs of whatever must have come in for her since Wednesday afternoon. There were no reports, no memos, no inquiries, not even a phone message. She went back to her office to see if anything had been stored in the locked file drawer in the left side of her desk.
At seven, Geoff came in. He was carrying the briefcase that he seemed to bring primarily to hold his snacks and newspapers. "Good morning, Elizabeth. Get through the exile okay?"
"It wasn't as bad as I'd feared or as good as I'd hoped. Have a good weekend?"
"Sure." He finished putting away his things, then said, "What's wrong?"
"I can't seem to find anything. I expected quite a pile of mail and stuff. Where is it?"
He came into her office and looked at her desk. "I had all of it right here and in order on Friday afternoon." He pointed at an empty space. "Right here."
"You didn't leave anything in the pile that was classified or sensitive, did you?"
"No," he said. "Everything like that is locked up in the reading-room safe."
She shrugged. "Then it probably isn't important. But I'll let you know when I find out what became of it." She went into her office and closed the door. It had occurred to her that having someone remove the files for her current cases was exactly what would probably happen if she were fired. Maybe Hunsecker had used her two-day suspension to get the AG's office to approve the firing. Maybe that was what the suspension had been for.
One of the buttons on her telephone lit up, then began to blink as Geoffrey put the caller on hold. She picked up the phone and hit the button. "Waring."
"This is Dale Hunsecker. I'm waiting."
She steeled herself for what she had to say. "If what you're waiting for is an apology, I know I owe you one. What happened last week was a misunderstanding that I allowed to happen. I wasn't ignoring your orders when I requested that surveillance on Frank Tosca. Conditions had changed, and I had new information that made it an emergency. I should have called you to explain before I did anything. I'm sorry."
"Well," he said. "I have to say that I'm pleasantly surprised. I expected you to say 'I told you so.'"
"About what? Don't tell me Tosca has been killed."
"No. As soon as the surveillance was lifted, Tosca took his family and slipped away. Right now we don't know where he is. He left three men in his house, apparently to guard it. They were murdered on Thursday night. Their bodies were found in various parts of the house."
"How were they killed?"
"Let's see." He seemed to be perusing something. "Two shot, one bludgeoned to death."
"Do you know where the one who was bludgeoned was found?"
"Aah, I don't see that information in this report. It does say he was unarmed."
"Of course. The killer must have gone there without a gun. He killed one and used that man's gun to kill the others."
"He would do that? He'd go to the house of a Mafia capo without bringing a gun?"
"I'm guessing that he did. He was here in Washington and probably flew to New York, so he couldn't have taken a weapon with him or he'd have been stopped at airport security. He must have arrived in Tosca's neighborhood after the FBI surveillance ended, and moved in. He's been doing this for a long time. I've been told by informants that he hasn't done anything but kill people since he was about fifteen."
"So he would arrive unarmed and see three armed men, and say, 'Great, they're at my mercy'? I don't see it."
"He didn't want to kill three men. He wanted Tosca. I think he arrived, determined that someone was in the house, and assumed it was Tosca. You have to realize that they wanted him to think that. They wouldn't have been there to protect the parakeet. They were there to ambush him."
"So he went through with it and killed them all. I still find it difficult to understand why he'd do that."
"People who kill for a living aren't exactly normal. They don't think the way we do, and they don't all think alike. This one is unusual. He was brought up to do it, and he knows instantly how to kill each opponent without having to stop and think. If he hadn't killed each person he's come up against, he'd be dead. This happened Friday?"
"Thursday night."
"Then we've got to find Tosca right away."
"Why Tosca?"
"Because that's who the killer was looking for on Thursday night. Unless Tosca's dead, he's still searching. If we want him, we'll have to be where Tosca is."
8
EDDIE MASTREWSKI HAD always had his own philosophy. "Killing is just one of a lot of things people ought to do for themselves, but end up paying somebody else to do for them. They pay some pimp to provide a woman who will go to bed with them, and they buy a fancy car and hire somebody to drive it for them. That's no way to live, but their mistake is a fortune for people like us. Do your own killing, drive your own car, find your own girls."
He started the boy in the trade by taking him along on jobs. On the first job, the target was a man who was difficult to approach. He spent his days in a corner office on the tenth floor of a well-guarded office building. There were surveillance cameras, sign-in sheets, calls made to verify appointments before anybody was permitted to go to the elevator. On the tenth floor, all the people in the reception areas, cubicles, and hallways stood between the elevator and the target. When he left work, he walked a hundred yards with a couple of colleagues and went down with thousands of people into a subway. When he came out at his stop, he was a hundred yards from his high-security apartment. The only times to get him were the walk to the subway or his walk from it. When the day came, the boy wore a baseball cap and carried his outfielder's glove. He and Eddie joined the crowd on the sidewalk and came up behind the man. Eddie reached into the boy's glove, pulled out a small pistol fitted with a silencer, shot the man twice behind the ear, and put the pistol back in the glove. The man fell onto the sidewalk, Eddie grabbed the boy and stepped around the body, as though shielding him from the sight of the man dying of a heart attack on the street. Other bystanders stepped between the boy and the dreadful spectacle, trying to get their bodies in his line of sight while others knelt beside the body. In less than a minute Eddie and the boy were down the steps to the platform and getting on the subway train.
The boy found that after a while there were very few jobs that seemed difficult to him. Most of the time it was like turning off a light. Eddie would walk up to the side window of a car stopped in traffic, pull out a pistol, fire a shot into the driver's head, and walk on. Or he would knock on an apartment door, wait until he saw the peephole turn dark because the man inside had his eye up to it, and then fire through the door into the man's chest.
"Learn your trade," Eddie said. "You do that and you'll always have the edge. You'll be luring people out into the night when your eyes are used to the dark and theirs aren't. Plan a job for days, but do it in seconds. The guy should be dead before he has the time to figure out if he should be scared or not. You walk into a store or a restaurant to get somebody, you're like an egg in a frying pan. If you take too much time, you heat up and burn. Do it fast and get out."
By the time he was sixteen, he had acquired the discipline and the skills. He had also picked up Eddie's philosophy. Eddie had said, "Everybody dies. It's just a questi
on of timing, and whether the one who gets paid for it is you or a bunch of doctors. It might as well be you."
After all these years, the essentials of killing had not changed. He needed to kill Tosca, and if Tosca wasn't at his house in Glen Cove, the next place to look was his house in Canada. From New Jersey he drove to Rochester, New York, and found a hotel near the airport. He had always liked staying in hotels like this because they were full of men exactly like the one he was pretending to be. They were businessmen, most of them in sales, visiting their clients on regular rounds. But an increasing number of them were entrepreneurs trying to get some fledgling enterprise a loan from a bank or license some bit of software from another company. Sometimes when he was having a meal in a mediocre restaurant in an airport hotel, he would be seated near a table of five or six of them, all smiling and chuckling through the flop sweat as they tried to sell each other things. There would always be one or two so young that they looked unaccustomed to wearing suits. But there would also be a man a generation older who might be a district manager or an owner, depending on the size of the company.
When he had first started working long-distance hits, he had looked just like one of the young ones—a bit skinny and awkward. Now he looked like the older one, the boss who knew the way these trips worked. The older man knew that his side wasn't going to go home with everything they came for, but also knew the company could live without it. The older man was usually a little calmer, less eager.
He cultivated the appearance, watching the businessmen to be sure he got it right. Now at half of these business lunches there would be at least one laptop computer on the table. That night he decided that he should buy a laptop and carry it around with him. It was a small concession that would cement his identity as a business traveler. The next morning he drove to a computer store and bought one, signed on to the hotel's wireless system, and searched for news articles about the Balacontano family
