He heard a noise. Jake Grafton was lounging against the doorjamb. 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 refrigerator 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-12. 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 staff.”
“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.
“Really, 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 middle-aged. 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, skinny youngster detached himself from the group on the corner 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 start 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.
Tassone 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 Tassone burned it and crumbled the ashes and dribbled them
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 Charon, living was the challenge. Death will come for the quick and the bold, the slow and the careful, the wise and 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.
After checking the area with his flashlight, Henry Charon squirmed through the gaping crack, which was lined with stones at odd angles. He was now in a room with a dirt floor and walls of old brick. The ceiling was a concrete slab. Above that, Charon had concluded after an afternoon of discreet pacing, was dirt and an asphalt basketball court.
This basement was at least a century old. The house which had stood above it had apparently been demolished thirty or forty years ago during a spasm of enthusiasm for urban renewal. The ceiling slab had not been poured here: the edges were not mated to the brick walls in any way. No doubt the demolition contractor had thought it cheaper to just cover the hole rather than pay to haul in dirt to fill it.
There was no way out of this room except through the subway tunnel. That was the bad news. The good news was that the subway tunnel was the only entrance. A man would be reasonably safe here for a short while if he could get in without being observed.
Air entered this subterranean vault from several cracks in the brick walls and around the large stones that choked the opening through which coal had once probably been dumped into the basement. Charon suspected that nearby were other basements, other century-old ruins of nineteenth-century Washington, and the dark air passages were used by rats to go back and forth.
He checked the supplies he had brought here on two evenings last week, on his last trip to Washington. Canned food, a sterno stove, a first-aid kit, two gallons of water, three blankets, and two flashlights with extra D-cell batteries. It was all here, apparently undisturbed. He examined one of the blankets more carefully with his flashlight. A rat had apparently decided it would make a good nest. He shook out the blanket and refolded it.
He picked up a handful of dirt from the floor and sifted it through his fingers. It was dry, the consistency of dust. That was good. This would not be a safe place to be if water in any quantity ever came in.
Charon turned off the flashlight and sat in the darkness near the exit hole, listening. The sounds of traffic on the street twenty to thirty feet over his head were always there. Faint but audible. There was another sound too, of such low frequency as almost to be felt rather than heard. He eased his head out into the tunnel for a look, then crawled out. Now he heard it, a faint rumble. It seemed to be coming down the tunnel.
Standing in the subway tunnel he reinspected the hole with the flash. He wanted to leave no obvious evidence that anyone had been in there. Satisfied, he walked south as the rumbling noise faded again to silence. Not total silence, of course. He could still hear the street sounds from the world above.
If Tassone just wanted George Bush assassinated, that would be a large enough challenge to satisfy anyone, Henry Charon mused as he walked along. Make the hit, ride out the manhunt that would immediately follow, then leave Washington several weeks later for the ranch. Sit at the ranch for several years enduring the agony of waiting for the FBI to come driving up the road, and hoping they never came.
But Bush was merely the first name on the list. The other five, they would have to be killed after the presidential hit. That was the rub. The sequence was dictated by logic. If he first shot the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, or the attorney general, the Secret Service would surround Bush with a security curtain that one man could not hope to penetrate. So Bush had to be the first target.
That sequence inevitably created an escape problem of extraordinary complexity. He had to move in spite of the dragnet and find his targets. And escape without revealing his identity. Again and again.
Could it be done? Could he do it?
He glimpsed light ahead and doused the flashlight. Two hundred yards of careful walking brought him to a steel mesh. Here the new tunnel joined an existing one. He stood in the darkness and waited.
Yes. Here comes the rumble again, much louder, swelling and growing, rushing toward him.
He stood watching as a subway train rushed by with a roar, the passengers plainly visible in the windows, standing, sitting, reading, talking to each other. And as fast as the train had come, it was gone, the sound fading.
Henry Charon extracted a subway map from his hip pocket and consulted it in the dim glow of the flashlight. He traced the lines and looked again at the layout of the system, committing the routes to memory. The avenues and streets and subway lines, they had to be as familiar to him as the ridges and mesas of the Sangre de Cristos.
With the map back in his pocket, he examined the steel fence carefully and the padlocked mesh door in the middle of it. He could cut that lock if he had to. A Yale. He would buy one just like it, just in case.
It felt strange here in this tunnel, walking through the darkness with just the glow of the flashlight and the smell of earth in his nostrils. In fifteen minutes he arrived at the cavern that would someday be a subway station and picked his way around and through the scaffolding. He found the opening to the outside world, kicked the plywood off, then reset it.
It was chilly on the street. After buttoning his coat, Henry Charon walked along absorbing the sights and sounds, looking, examining the terrain yet again, searching for cover, committing everything to memory.
Could it be done? Could he do it?
Even if he pulled it off, did eve
rything absolutely right and fate had no nasty little surprises for him—like a cop at an unexpected place or a tourist snapping pictures at the wrong time—Tassone and his unknown masters were still the weak links.
Who did Tassone work for? How many people in Tassone’s organization knew of the New Mexico hitter, Tassone’s trips, the cash in the suitcases? Were any of these people government informers? Would they become so in the future? Were any of them alcoholics or drug addicts? Would someone whisper to a mistress, brag at a bar?
All who knew the identity of the assassin of the President of the United States were serious threats for as long as they lived. They would always carry this immense, valuable secret. If they were ever arrested or threatened, the immense, valuable secret could always be sold or traded.
The project tempted Henry Charon. The preparations, the anticipation that would grow and grow, the kill, the chase afterward, just thinking of these things made him feel vigorously alive, like the first glimpse of a bull elk against a far ridge on a clear, frosty morning. Yet the unknown, faceless ones could ruin him at any time. If he successfully escaped he would have to live with the possibility of betrayal all the rest of his life.
Yet you had to weigh everything, and the hunt was what really mattered.
Henry Charon walked on, thinking again of the hunt and how it would be.
CHAPTER FOUR
ON Sunday, T. Jefferson Brody woke up alone in his king-sized bed in his five-bedroom, four-bathroom, $1.6 million mansion in Kenwood. After a long hot shower, he shaved and dressed in gray wool slacks and a tweed sports coat that had set him back half a grand.
Ten minutes later he eased the Mercedes from the three-car garage and thumbed the garage-door controller as he backed down the drive.
T. Jefferson Brody should have felt good this morning. Friday he had deposited another fat legal fee in his Washington bank and shuffled another equally fat fee off to the Netherlands Antilles on the first leg of an electronic journey to Switzerland. He had done some calculations on an envelope last night, then burned the envelope. The sums he had managed to squirrel away were significant in any man’s league: he had over four million dollars in cash here in the States on which he had paid income taxes and six million in Switzerland on which he hadn’t. That plus the house (half paid for) and the cars, antiques, and art (cash on the barrelhead) gave him a nice, tidy little fortune. T. Jefferson was doing all right for himself.
05.Under Siege v5 Page 6
