The VCR whined as the tape moved forward. When his father appeared on the screen, Cole stopped the tape. For thirty seconds he studied Jim Egan’s face, unaware of anything except the man on the screen in front of him. Finally he shook his head and pressed the rewind button. When the tape was fully rewound, Cole removed it from the VCR and replaced it in its unmarked black plastic case.
In 1964 Life had paid Abraham Zapruder $250,000 for his film of the assassination. What would the media pay today for something that provided not only another graphic view of the assassination but, more important, proof that the killing shot had come from the grassy knoll? What would they pay for proof that a conspiracy had existed? At least a few million, Cole was willing to wager. Maybe more. Maybe much more.
Suddenly his hands began to shake. This was the answer to his problems—and his prayers.
As Cole reached to shut off the television, out of the corner of his eye he noticed the doorknob silently rotating. The tiny hairs on the back of his neck rose straight up and his head snapped toward the door. It sounded strange, but on the way back from Chase, he had felt as if he were being followed.
The knob turned all the way to the right, then the latch rattled against the metal frame of the lock as the person outside pushed. But the door didn’t open because it was secured from the inside.
“Hello,” Cole called out hoarsely. He suddenly realized how many people would want to see this tape played publicly—and, more important, that a few might not. That those few might take extreme measures to suppress what he now possessed. “I’m working on a presentation. Could you come back later?”
“It’s the cleaning service,” a woman replied in a thick Eastern European accent.
Cole checked his watch. It was only five-twenty. Typically the cleaning people didn’t make their rounds until much later, at least not on the trading floor.
“It will only take a short while to vacuum the carpet,” the woman persisted. “That’s all I need to do in there.”
Cole hesitated. “All right, just a second.”
A moment later he moved silently across the carpet to the door. Holding his breath, he pressed his ear to it and listened intently. Then he stepped back, unlocked the door and swung it open.
Just outside, a dark-haired woman stood beside a large plastic trash container. It coasted atop tiny rollers so she could easily move it with her on her rounds. As Cole stepped through the doorway, she plunged her hand under the top few sheets of wastepaper in the trash container, then looked behind her toward sounds coming from down the hallway. Then she whipped back around to face Cole.
He saw her eyes fix on the black videocassette case in his hand—and saw, too, the glint of what might have been a pistol barrel barely protruding from beneath the wastepaper.
Four young men, chuckling loudly, rounded a corner thirty feet from the screening room. They were traders from the corporate bond desk. Cole raised a hand to them. “Hello, gentlemen,” he said calmly.
“Hey, Egan,” the man at the front of the pack answered. He was carrying a videocassette case as well.
Cole nodded at it. “What’s that?”
The man held up the cassette case. “There’s a bachelor party for one of the guys on the desk this Friday night, and we need to prescreen some of the entertainment.” He seemed unabashed, though the others milling behind him smiled sheepishly at the admission that they were about to view a porn flick. “Want to watch?”
“No, thanks.” Cole brushed past them and headed for the stairwell.
The trader holding the flick turned to the cleaning woman. “How about you, honey? Want to see it with us?”
The woman didn’t respond as she watched Cole yank the stairwell door open.
Instead of climbing the stairs back up to the trading floor, Cole headed down, taking the steps two and three at a time. He had to get out of here right now. He leaped four steps onto a landing and slammed into the cinderblock wall. Hardly noticing the pain shooting through his left shoulder, he pushed off and kept going. Maybe he was just being paranoid. Maybe that hadn’t been a gun in the trash container beside the cleaning woman. But at this moment it seemed far better to let his imagination run wild—and survive.
At the ground floor Cole stopped as he was about to shove open the fire door leading from the stairwell into the main lobby of the Gilchrist Building. He reached forward, then pulled his hand away, as if the metal handle were electrically charged. The woman upstairs might be working with people who were right outside this door, people she could have alerted by now. He took a step back and wiped his forehead, uncertain of his next move. The stairs went down no farther. There was no basement access through which he could slip out of the building unnoticed. He glanced up. He could return to one of the upper floors and try to call the police, surrounding himself with coworkers to keep enemies at bay. There would certainly still be people around.
But who was he kidding? The tape he had watched in the screening room would ignite a national firestorm and probably a new investigation into the Kennedy assassination. If someone wanted to suppress the tape badly enough, she might not care about killing a few people in the process. That was why he had darted away from the traders outside the screening room upstairs. The cleaning woman might not have hesitated at taking them all out if it meant getting her hands on the tape. And what was he going to tell the police anyway? That a cleaning woman with a thick accent and a gun was chasing him? New York City cops would laugh at him.
A door banged open several floors up and he heard footsteps descending the stairs rapidly. There was only one choice. Cole slammed open the door and burst into the high-ceilinged lobby.
Teeming with commuters headed toward taxis, trains and buses, the lobby was a swirling mass of mostly indistinguishable humanity rushing home after a long day. However, Cole managed to pick one face out of the crowd immediately. The man was dodging clusters of people, fifty feet away at most, heading directly toward him, his gaze locked on Cole even as he avoided the human obstacles. Cole recognized the man as one of the people seated in the reception area this afternoon as he had rushed out to claim the envelope containing the note and his father’s death certificate and the key to the safe-deposit box. A man who had seemed engrossed in the Wall Street Journal while Anita joked about having initials tattooed on a very private part of her anatomy. A big man, easily six-four and broad, with fair skin, rosy cheeks, a young-looking face—except for the deep crow’s feet around his eyes and the corners of his mouth—and a wispy shock of curly blond, almost yellow, hair.
Cole turned and bolted through the lobby, plowing into and knocking over a young woman as he glanced back at the blond man, who was gaining ground. The contents of the woman’s bag spilled onto the marble floor and she screamed angrily, but Cole kept going. As he squeezed through the door to the outside on the heels of another man, cold November night air rushed at his face and inside his shirt. Without a coat, it was freezing. He glanced left and right, vapor pouring from his mouth and nose, then sprinted south on Fifth Avenue past the Chase branch from which he had collected the tape earlier, dodging people as he ran. At Forty-second Street he pushed through the crowd waiting for the light to change and threw himself blindly into six lanes of rush-hour traffic.
A bus driver spotted Cole at the last second. He yanked the bus’s huge steering wheel to the right and slammed on its brakes. The bus skidded over several traffic signs and a fire hydrant as the crowd on the corner tumbled out of the way.
Cole dove to the pavement and rolled across the blacktop to the double yellow line in the middle of the wide street. He heard the roar made by the water surging out of the hydrant against the undercarriage of the bus, and the screams of pedestrians as they were hit by the torrent forced violently out from beneath the vehicle, but he didn’t look back. He didn’t have time. The shrill sound of a car horn bore down on him, and he scrambled to his feet and
jumped instinctively, clutching the cassette against his chest as he bounced off a taxi’s hood and windshield and slammed heavily to the pavement again. Another oncoming car veered away and smashed into a truck to avoid hitting him. He struggled to his knees, dazed, and looked back across the intersection. The blond man had vanished.
Cole shook off the effects of the impact and headed down Fifth Avenue once more. As people scattered from his path, he searched frantically for policemen, but there were none. Though he hadn’t seen the blond man across the intersection, he still sensed the pursuer’s presence. Cole glanced left, right—and suddenly had a plan.
He swerved sharp right and sprinted up the steps of the main branch of the New York Public Library. It was an impressive structure, two blocks long and several stories high, its wide front steps flanked by a pair of imposing stone lions. He bolted between them and past several people lugging bags of books, then slowed as he moved through the revolving door. The guard to the left of the door eyed him suspiciously, but Cole didn’t hesitate. He swerved right again and climbed the steps to the second floor two at a time. At the spot where the wide stairway turned ninety degrees left, he glanced back down at the door, but there was still no sign of the blond man.
Cole trotted across the second-floor hallway to the stairs leading to the third story and began to climb again. At the top of the steps he walked quickly ahead, turned right into the Bill Blass Public Catalogue Room, then proceeded directly through it and into the library’s main reading room. It was the size of a basketball court, filled with hundreds of people seated at long wooden tables and immersed in resource material.
A musty smell from thousands of ancient volumes crowding the walls reached Cole’s nostrils. He hesitated for a second to scan the mammoth space, but didn’t linger long in the entrance. He moved quickly to the west wall, knelt down, pulled several atlases from the bottom shelf, placed the cassette case against the back of the bookcase, replaced the atlases and walked calmly away. He found an open seat near the middle of the room and sat down in the spindly wooden chair. He hadn’t taken his eyes from the entrance for more than a few seconds since entering the large room, not even as he had hidden the tape behind the atlases, and the blond man hadn’t appeared.
A young woman studying a faded New York Times glanced up, went back to her paper, and then looked up again. Cole was acutely aware of the perspiration pouring down his face and the thin streak of blood staining one arm of his white shirt.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” he said without taking his eyes from the door. “I recently graduated from law school, and the bar exam is coming up. I’m just a little tense.”
The young woman smiled nervously, as if unsure what to make of the out-of-breath young man with the sweat-streaked face and the bloodstained shirt. Finally she picked up the archive copy of the Times as well as her book bag and walked away. She was new to the city and had been warned that it was full of lunatics.
Cole gazed at the door. There was still no sign of the blond man. His eyes flashed to the spot in the stacks where he had hidden the tape, then back to the door. Still no blond man.
Cole leaned over, hiding his arm beneath the table, removed the onyx cuff link, pulled the torn shirt sleeve up above the gash and inspected the wound quickly. It was nothing serious. He rolled the shirt sleeve back down and, wrapping his fingers firmly around the shredded material, applied direct pressure. Two to three minutes of this and the blood should coagulate.
Cole allowed his head to fall back against the chair but still didn’t remove his gaze from the entrance. Maybe his imagination was indeed playing games with him. A cleaning woman with a gun. A blond man chasing him down Fifth Avenue. The notion that they were after him seemed almost silly, now that he thought about it. He laughed and shook his head, then groaned as he felt a sudden stiffness in his neck. He’d suffered a good deal of pain and probably cost New York City several hundred thousand dollars in damages as a result of that imagination, but the hell with it. He had in his possession a tape of President Kennedy’s assassination—one proving conspiracy—and he controlled history. That justified at least a trace of paranoia. He’d make up the damages to the city after he’d sold his piece of history to the highest bidder. Right after he had taken care of his in-arrears mortgage that Lewis Gebauer had somehow found out about, as well as a few gambling debts he had recently accumulated. There should still be millions left over.
Millions of dollars others would love to get their hands on, too, Cole suddenly realized.
He sat up in the chair. Maybe others had known about this tape and had been waiting years for that Chase safe-deposit box to be opened because they couldn’t access the box themselves. The people at Chase had been very careful and had required a picture identification and a signature from Cole before they would allow him to inspect the contents of the box. Even if others had known about the tape, they wouldn’t have been able to retrieve it if they weren’t named in bank records as individuals with access to the box.
Cole laughed once more. There he went, letting his imagination get the better of him again.
He checked the entrance one last time. Fifteen minutes had elapsed since he’d hidden the tape behind the row of atlases, and still he’d seen nothing suspicious. He took a final look around. Then he rose unsteadily and, without retrieving the tape from its hiding place, limped toward the door. His right ankle had begun to swell as a result of his collision with the taxi at the corner of Fifth and Forty-second.
Five minutes later he had ridden the elevator to the first floor, staggered down the library steps past the lions and hailed a cab.
3
Nicki Anderson was tall and sleek, with silky gold hair that cascaded down her back. Her face was perfect—thin yet sensuous—highlighted by wide emerald eyes, a delicate nose and bee-stung lips. Her skin was fair and unblemished, her body toned but full of soft curves. She was an exquisite product of her Scandinavian bloodlines. Still, in New York City exquisite women were like restaurants or taxis or pigeons—they were everywhere.
Six months ago Nicki had left Duluth, Minnesota, and moved to New York to follow her dream—a modeling career on the fashion runways of Manhattan. It was costing her middle-class parents most of their retirement cache, but they were convinced that Nicki would take the industry by storm and that the resulting cover-girl fame would earn Nicki and them much more than stocks and bonds ever could.
Nicki had presented her portfolio to all the top agencies but had been unceremoniously rejected. She didn’t tell her parents, because even one rejection would have crushed them. Two months ago she had caught on with a smaller agency that was finally beginning to find her work. It had been a difficult road, but through it all she hadn’t lost her smile.
Cole eased onto the bench seat at Emilio’s, a casual, out-of-the-way Upper West Side cafe where he and Nicki could relax. “Hey there,” he said as he sat down. His senses were on alert, eyes constantly scanning the place for anyone who might have followed him from the library.
“Hello, Cole.” Nicki leaned across the small, scratched table, took Cole’s face in her soft palms and kissed him gently on the cheek. She had always greeted Cole this way, even as a child back in Duluth, and he liked it, especially because she wasn’t this way with others. Even with friends, she was reserved.
“You look great,” Cole said approvingly. She wore an oversized sweater and faded jeans. It was an all-American country-girl look he thoroughly enjoyed.
“Thanks.” Her expression turned curious as she sat back in the seat. “What in the world happened to you?”
He glanced down, worried that blood from the cut on his forearm had seeped through the bandage and the dark blue sweater he had purchased on his way from the library. But nothing was visible on the sweater. “What do you mean, ‘what happened?’ ”
“You look like you’ve been through a war. Y
our hair’s all messed up, you’re perspiring and your hands are shaking. I’ve never seen you like this. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he assured her. He wasn’t going to tell her anything about his sprint to the library or the cut on his forearm. There was no reason to alarm her simply because he had allowed his imagination to run wild. Once he had sold the tape, then he’d explain what had happened.
“Just a tough day on Wall Street, huh?” she teased.
“Yeah,” he answered quickly, not really concentrating on what she was saying.
“Oh, come on, Cole,” Nicki pressed. “I know how stressful it can get on the Gilchrist trading floor, but you handle that every day. What happened?”
“A couple of guys tried to mug me on Broadway while I was walking over here. I didn’t want to say anything because I know everybody back in Duluth told you how dangerous New York City is, but it wasn’t a big deal, really.”
“Did they take your suit jacket?” She pointed at his sweater, grinning. Cole always wore suits.
“What? Oh, the sweater.” He forced back a wince as he shifted in the seat. “The heat in the Gilchrist Building went out today for a while. That’s why I’m wearing it,” he lied. “I just forgot to change back to my suit coat when I left.”
“Do you always keep a spare sweater at work?”
“As a matter of fact I do, Agatha Christie.” She was like a pit bull sometimes. Once her curiosity was aroused, she didn’t let things go without a satisfactory explanation. He tried to change the subject. “How was your day?”
The Legacy Page 3
