by Thomas Perry
“How do you know that?”
“There’s no time. Look at those ETAs.”
“I’ll get the FBI on the phone.”
* * *
Elizabeth watched Richardson through the open door of his office. It was the third time he had been on the telephone with the FBI agent. He held his ballpoint pen over a yellow legal pad, at first poised to write something down, then just gripping it like a knife, clicking the button on the end of it nervously, retracting and extending the tip over and over as he listened.
She waited at her old desk and tried to avoid the bad luck by watching the first group of ambitious GS-7’s and −9’s coming in to work early, each expecting to be the first, seeing her and looking puzzled, then seeing Richardson’s door open and looking disappointed. She had been like them once, and it mortified her now, but at the time it hadn’t been ambition. She just hadn’t known enough history. They had still called it the Organized Crime Task Force in those days, behaving as though they had been brought together to cope with an emergency that would go away if they worked harder than the Mafia. That was before she had learned enough to realize that criminal conspiracy was the natural state of affairs in all civilized countries. People who worked for the Justice Department had to be in it for the long haul.
But then Richardson was on his feet and out of his office, and the expression on his face was enough. “No hits,” he said. “Dallas is seventy-one years old, and both Chicagos are military personnel. L.A. is already on the ground and the FBI doesn’t even have its team there yet. I’m sorry.”
Elizabeth shook her head. “It’s not too late. He’s got to be in the L.A. airport, or near it, trying to get out. He doesn’t have another reservation. Don’t we even have a birdwatcher in a major airport like that?”
“We don’t have a picture or a description or anything else. Nobody’s ever seen him. What are they supposed to do?”
“He’ll be getting on another flight. Try the name. It might not be any good now; next time he can call himself Rufus T. Firefly if he feels like it. But there’s got to be a way to stop him before he gets on another plane. It will be a one-way ticket bought for cash in the airport since his plane landed.”
“I don’t know,” said Richardson. “This is getting thinner and thinner.”
“Please,” said Elizabeth. “This is closer than we ever got ten years ago.”
Jack Hamp was sitting in the coffee shop overlooking Runway 23 with four engine mechanics from United when the crew chief happened to notice that the light on his beeper was blinking. It didn’t blink often, so he didn’t look at it often. He wasn’t under the illusion that if there was an emergency they would think to warn him, so a month after he had gotten this assignment he had opened it up and cut the wire from the relay to the little speaker.
Jack Hamp had managed to retire from the Los Angeles Police Department after twenty years and gotten a job as what he had thought was a Justice Department field investigator. At the moment the job didn’t involve much investigating. He was supposed to loiter in the L.A. airport and watch the huge amorphous, anonymous crush of people getting on and off airplanes to see if he could spot any of the fifty or so men and women that the Justice Department was giving special attention to at any given moment. Most of the time, when somebody like that was coming through, Hamp would have the reservation in advance, and all he would have to do was to pass by the gate to see him step aboard, then report what he had seen: “Subject Vincent Toscanzio. At 13:53 subject boarded TWA flight 921 for Chicago, ETA 7:53 P.M. Was accompanied by two male Caucasians listed as Harold Carver, positive I.D. Joseph Vortici, and Paul Smith, probable I.D. Frederick Moltare.” It all went into the hopper for some analyst to sort out in Washington.
The rest of the time he fished the crowds for Special Surprise Guests nobody had known were out and about. He had no vanity, and he was good at looking like something other than a federal cop. He was six feet three and lanky, with pale blue eyes, long blond hair and a mustache. He looked like the aging cowboy he probably would have been if he hadn’t been optimistic enough to join the marines twenty-five years ago and accidentally seen a few big cities. He usually went to a gate when a crowded flight from a major departure point was unloading. He would stand a little back from the gauntlet of moms and pops scrutinizing the file of passengers to see Junior a second earlier. He would carry an object—maybe a magazine, maybe only sunglasses or a set of car keys—but never a cup of coffee, because that was what people drank when they were on duty. And like the moms and pops, Jack Hamp would stare at each face for a moment right in the eyes, because he too was hoping to recognize someone.
He managed to pick out a few interesting faces each month, and this probably made his reports worth sending, but he didn’t much like the assignment. He suspected he had gotten it because the Department wanted him on the payroll, but didn’t have a clear idea what to do with him on a day-to-day basis. He was young to be a retired cop—forty-six—but he was too old and uneducated to be on the Upward Trail with the rest of the Boy Scouts.
The Justice Department had put him through a refresher course in investigative techniques of the sort he had given to ten or twelve litters of rookie cops over the years, an orientation for federal employees that he had used to compile a list of whose calls he could ignore, and a little practice in shooting holes in cardboard cutouts that looked like the villains in a comic book. Then they had sent him back to L.A.
Hamp walked with a barely perceptible limp as he got up and made his way to the pay telephone at the other end of the concourse. The man who had put the hole in his left thigh eight years ago had taken a little of the femur with it, and he sometimes felt the stainless-steel pin. He dialed the number quickly. “This is Hamp,” he said.
The man on the other end was somebody he had never talked to before, but Hamp knew Richardson’s name. It was one of the ones he couldn’t ignore.
Ackerman walked to the Hong Kong Airlines desk. The man behind the counter was Chinese, but he had an engraved name-plate on his jacket that read MR. SULLIVAN. His English accent made Ackerman homesick for Schaeffer’s life. “May I help you, sir?”
“You have a flight to Hong Kong in twenty minutes,” he said. “Do you have any seats left?”
Mr. Sullivan clicked some keys on his computer. “I’m sorry, sir. It’s fully booked. We have another at four-seventeen.”
Ackerman hesitated. Hong Kong was okay, because he could go back through British customs after a week without raising any eyebrows. If he flew back through New York, there would be watchers in the airport, and he might never make it out. He decided that waiting was the smaller risk. “I’ll take it.”
“May I have your passport, please?”
Ackerman plucked it from his coat pocket and handed it to Mr. Sullivan, who glanced at it and set it aside for a moment.
“How will you be paying for that, sir?”
“Cash.”
“Fine,” said Mr. Sullivan. “Let me just confirm that it’s still available.” He pressed three numbers on his telephone and began to speak in Chinese. Ackerman glanced around at the people lining up behind him and setting their luggage down. As he turned back, his eyes caught something peculiar. At the far end of the counter there was another man speaking into a telephone in Chinese. It was the cadence that caught his attention. When Mr. Sullivan talked, the other man stopped, and then Mr. Sullivan said something and the other man glanced in his direction. Ackerman watched the man until the two hung up almost simultaneously. He stood at the counter while Mr. Sullivan made out the ticket, copying his name from his passport, and then he walked away.
He knew it was possible that Mr. Sullivan was only calling his supervisor to check on that reservation. It might even be that two conversations followed approximately the same course, ended at the same time, and had nothing to do with each other. But it might also be that two men who worked for Hong Kong Airlines had just made a year’s salary. He had been away a long time. T
en years ago the Balacontano family could steal the cargoes off wide-body planes in the middle of JFK and truck them out. It wasn’t hard to believe that by now they could search passenger lists for the right alias.
He walked to Gate 28, where he was to board the flight for Hong Kong, then walked along the concourse until he found the right place to sit. It was two gates away, at Gate 26. The seat he wanted was occupied, but a lot of flights were going to leave before he needed it. He used the time to buy a ticket for the four-thirty plane to Albuquerque, and then sat in a coffee shop where he could watch people coming through the metal detectors that guarded the concourse, until he realized that watching was pointless. They didn’t have to send faces he knew; somehow they had found out what name he was using. And they wouldn’t be clumsy enough to get stopped by a metal detector. The gun would be concealed inside another steel object or, more likely, was already here.
He returned to Gate 26 and began his vigil with the idea that nothing would happen until they announced that his plane was boarding.
Jack Hamp took his old carry-on bag out of the car and walked back through the front door, up to the metal-detector station where Marlita Gibson gave him a sober nod as she looked through the fluoroscope at the outlines of his Colt .45 1911 automatic and the spare magazines in the pocket beside it. Hamp had a strong desire not to fire it. The 225-grain semiwadcutter hollowpoint ammunition was what he called the “airport load.” It not only mushroomed on impact but expanded. It wasn’t going through any walls if he missed. If he didn’t miss, the recipient was going to find out that Jesus wanted him for a sunbeam. He snatched the bag off the conveyor and walked on. As he strode along the concourse toward Gate 28, he opened the bag and searched for a ticket folder in his collection that said Hong Kong Airlines. When he found it, he stuck it in his coat pocket where it could be seen.
At the gate, he sat down in the smoking area a few yards away from the nearest passenger and lit a cigarette. If the man spotted him first and was any kind of shot, at least he wouldn’t miss Hamp and put a hole in some kid’s head. And this one might be pretty good. From what Richardson had said, he sounded like a genuine badass. As Hamp inhaled the first sweet, cool smoke from his cigarette, he thought about how much worse the last puff always tasted. He kept his eyes on the passing throng, moving from face to face, first studying, then rejecting. He acknowledged that if he was already thinking about how hot and nasty this cigarette was going to get, it probably was time to quit smoking. All the pleasure of it depended on your being able to keep things from yourself.
He was going on the long odds that this Mr. Ackerman was going to be armed. It was highly unlikely that anybody could get on a plane at Kennedy and still be able to reach into his pants at LAX and come up with anything in his hand that he wasn’t born with. But people who killed a lot for money got into the habit of brooding about such things in their spare time, and, more often than you would think, they found ways.
Hamp glanced at the airline desk in front of the gate and noted that Mr. Sullivan was in position. As soon as Mr. Ackerman showed his face, he was going to meet Jack Hamp.
Ackerman saw the tall, thin, melancholy blond man come into the waiting area at Gate 28 and sit down to light a cigarette, and he studied him with special care. He had a worn carry-on bag, and what looked like a Hong Kong Airlines ticket sticking out of his pocket. He was alone. He was doing pretty much what anybody would do in his position, which was to watch the people around him without letting them notice.
But then Mr. Sullivan arrived. He came up to the second floor by climbing an exterior staircase, popped through the door they never let passengers use, and posted himself at the desk near the gate, but he didn’t make any attempt to do anything that could be construed as work. Ackerman wasn’t going anywhere on Hong Kong Airlines today. He decided he had better try to find out exactly what kind of trouble he was in.
Ackerman moved to a seat that put the pillar at Gate 27 between him and Mr. Sullivan at Gate 28, and kept his eyes on the tall blond man. The tall guy was a possibility. He had even managed to sit in the right place, where he had a clear fire zone in front of him and nobody behind him. But how the hell could they have gotten him here so quickly? Peter Mantino would practically have to keep the guy on call in the airport in case somebody he wanted showed up.
That was unlikely. Ackerman still couldn’t decide. The man had carried himself with a certain amount of confidence, as though he had some reason to be sure what was going to happen if he got into a fight, but as though he wasn’t contemplating anything like that at the moment. It was the walk that came back to Ackerman. That was probably what had drawn his attention in the first place. He tried to picture it again, and when the man moved across his line of sight in his memory, he was favoring his left leg slightly. It was just the sort of unconscious change in his stride that two or three pounds of steel stuck on one side of his body might induce. No, the gun would be in the flight bag, where he could put his hand on it without attracting attention.
Then something happened that was so unexpected that Ackerman didn’t admit to himself that he had caught it at first. Four men entered the waiting area at Gate 28 from different directions. They were all well over six feet tall and heavy, and they looked big and fat and white and obvious. They lurked in different parts of the waiting area, but kept glancing at each other to preserve fixed distances, like a team playing zones. Then each of them looked at the tall, thin blond man as though they had been searching for him. From time to time each of them would watch him for a second and then turn away. Even the blond man knew immediately that they were cops. Ackerman studied the man’s reaction. The shooter couldn’t believe it any more than Ackerman could Whatever the shooter was carrying must have been picked up on the X-ray machine or, more likely, somebody had seen him go wherever it was hidden in the airport and stick it in his bag. Now he was going to get arrested.
Ackerman considered the possibility that he might be able to sit patiently until the cops rolled up the shooter, then stroll across to Gate 28, step onto the plane and get out of here. But then one of the cops started to walk toward the smoking area where the shooter was sitting, and the others each in his own time began to move closer. The shooter saw it too, but he didn’t look frightened. He looked angry, which was a very bad sign. It meant that he was at least considering doing something with the gun in his flight bag other than letting them take it and having his lawyer claim the bag wasn’t his. Ackerman couldn’t take the chance of sitting here while the tall guy opened fire. No matter what happened, this wasn’t the way out of Los Angeles. He stood up and turned away, adopting the same purposeful, self-important gait as the men and women nearest to him on the concourse. They all seemed comfortable in the knowledge that airports weren’t about space, but about time. Like them, he didn’t pause anywhere or slow his pace, and he didn’t look back.
Elizabeth dialed her own number and waited four rings before the answering machine kicked in. “Maria,” she said, “it’s me. Please pick up the phone.” After a few seconds, she heard the baby-sitter’s voice.
“Waring residence,” said Maria. If she knew who it was, why did she say that? Elizabeth reluctantly accepted that she would have to explain it again, along with the part about the phone numbers. The line in the office at home was Waring; the one in the bedroom was Hart. Maria had easily understood that Jim’s name was Hart, and that Elizabeth’s name was Hart. But then Elizabeth had gotten overconfident and told her she used the name Waring at work. At first Maria had been suspicious. Did that mean that what Elizabeth did for a living was illegal? No, she was a government lawyer, and Waring had been her name before she was married. What did being married have to do with being a lawyer? Nothing. Then, was being a government lawyer dangerous, like in Colombia? No, not usually.
Then Elizabeth had been subjected to a lengthy cross-examination on precise gradations of risk. When Maria had satisfied herself that nobody was doing anything illegal that would put her i
n jeopardy of deportation, or anything dangerous that would harm the children, she had clearly decided that there was something disreputable going on. Her questions indicated that she suspected that Elizabeth had never been married, and that Hart was a fiction adopted to protect the illegitimate children. Since she loved the children, she could live with this. So where did “Waring residence” come from?
“Maria,” Elizabeth said, “how are the kids?”
“No good.”
“Not good? What’s wrong?” Her heart stopped beating and began to quiver.
“Jimmy wore dirty old sneakers to school.”
“That’s okay. I told him it was all right.” This was a lie, but it was the only way to close the issue. Maria had been educated by nuns who really appeared to have believed that cleanliness was next to godliness, and she was convinced that going to school every day was a privilege to be celebrated in shined shoes, immaculate shirts and pressed trousers. “What about Amanda?”
“She spit up.”
“How much—a little spit-up, like a burp, or a big one? Should I come home?”
“Not too big. Little bit, but then she happy and go to sleep.”
“Did you take her temperature?”
“Yes, normal.”
“Well, thanks, Maria. I’ll call again later. You have the number here, right?”
“I have it.”
“Do you need anything?”
“No. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye.”
Elizabeth stared at the telephone. This was a special taste of hell that somebody had thought up for her. She had wanted children, and from the moment Jimmy had been conceived, she had understood that the term “blessed with children” wasn’t an ironic way of saying it, because it really was how you felt. But there they were, and here she was. She was living the life she had said she would never live. Her children were growing up without seeing her for ten or twelve hours a day while she was out chasing a career she didn’t want. Another woman played with them, dressed them, took Amanda out in the stroller and said the word tree or squirrel to her for the first time.
