Frankie Aguirre and Art Jefferson - 03 - Simple Simon

by Ryne Douglas Pearson

  The call he was making would bring that to an end. That was a hope tinged by regret.

  One ring sounded, seeming louder than any he could recall before, and in the car Simon’s head was down, bobbing gently, the strange dark color of his hair lifting more pangs from low in Art’s gut. Maybe it could have been different. Maybe he could have prevented all this from happening. Maybe Simon Lynch could have had a good life, his own life, if only Art had seen more sooner. Had made the right connections.

  Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

  Ring number two passed, and as the third ring sounded, without taking his eyes off Simon, art pressed the number five, creating an annoying, sputtering jingle wrapped around a low howl in his ear, like a hundred mosquitoes vying for a choice vein above the lobe.

  Someone answered as the abrasive tone faded.

  “Yes?”

  “I want to talk to Pritchard.”

  It could not be called silence that followed, more a hum absent depth, but that lasted only a minute.

  “I’m glad you called.”

  “You said I would,” Art reminded him. “I’m ready to give him to you.”

  Now the absence of sound was substantive, suggestive of thought. After a moment Pritchard said, “Do you remember what Simon built on the dresser?”

  “Yes,” Art answered, his eyes angling down at the receiver, noting something in the way Pritchard spoke, in the preciseness, as if he’d expected this call and had committed what had to be said to memory. A recitation that, still, seemed lacking of substance, like slow water gliding over a smooth rock as a wispy thin sheen. Maybe it was his way. Maybe this was as hard for him as it was for Art.

  “You’ve been, I take it.”

  “I have,” Art confirmed.

  “The area people usually gather is closed.”

  “I’ve heard.” Being remodeled, Art knew from the papers, the Skydeck Observatory had been closed for weeks.

  “Can you get there?”

  An odd place to present Simon to those who would—and Art still had trouble keeping the cynic down so that he could believe—give him a new life. But this was their call. “When?”

  “Nine tomorrow evening.”

  “I can do that.”

  “Good then.”

  “Wait,” Art said. It was their call on place and time, but he did have one condition. He gave it to Pritchard not as a request.

  “I guess we’ll have to manage that.”

  “I guess you will.”

  “Tomorrow, Agent Jefferson,” Pritchard said, then hung up.

  Art put the phone back in its cradle and adjusted the baseball cap on his head, looking to the car and the small figure in the passenger seat. A little more than a day and Simon would be gone. He’d hardly known the kid at all.

  * * *

  Pritchard did not get up from the chair after hanging up. He sat as Sanders watched him, waiting for some words of direction, but after an awkwardly long time the younger man cleared his throat.

  “You’ve been like this ever since you met Jefferson.”

  “How’s ‘this’?”

  “Contemplative,” Sanders explained. “Excessively.”

  “Well, Mr. Sanders, you are one boldly observant young man.” And a correct one at that, Pritchard knew.

  “What is it?”

  “Something that Jefferson said.” Pritchard lifted a dead cigar from the pedestal ashtray next to his chair and slid it between his teeth. “This innocent is different. People will still want him. They’ll still look.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We’ll have to arrange for special handling. It can’t happen as Jefferson thinks it will.”

  Sanders face belied his ignorance of Pritchard’s point.

  “Sanders, I want you to leak the information to the opposition,” Pritchard directed.

  The whites of Sander’s eyes grew around the dark centers until they looked like plates of alabaster china with dollops of thick gravy in the middle of each. “But that means they’ll know. They can stop it. I don’t understand, sir. I don’t—”

  Pritchard lifted a hand. “Having people looking for the innocent won’t do. There has to be an absolute resolution.”

  Sanders understood somewhat now. Exposure. It would mean the end of what they were, what they represented. But what was Mr. Pritchard thinking? How would alerting the opposition prevent that?

  How was the question that Pritchard, former army Ranger, drill instructor, jump master at Fort Bragg, had been agonizing over through two sleepless nights, and two endless days. How to achieve an absolute resolution.

  The answer he came up with was spawned by an old adage concerning absolutes or certainties. Death and taxes, he recalled. One was of no use to him. The other was Simon Lynch’s only hope.

  As long as Art Jefferson behaved as Pritchard believed he would. If he did not, the hope for one would become the fate of both.

  “This is what I expect to happen,” Pritchard began.

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Bait

  Bob Lomax tossed his jacket to the coat tree just inside his office as he arrived and sneered at his desk.

  “Sir?” an agent said through the still-open door behind the SAC.

  “Yeah?” Lomax inquired without turning.

  “This arrived by courier,” the agent said, and when the SAC turned to cast a wary eye upon the bulky package he added, “I had it fluoroscoped.”

  Lomax took the package in hand and judged by the shape and heft that it contained about half a ream of material. “From who?”

  “The stamp is Fort Meade.”

  A lightness lifted Lomax’s chin, and he turned for his desk, the agent closing the door as he left. Once seated, Lomax drew the sharp edge of his letter opener under the envelope’s flap and, trusting that the package being fluoroscoped meant there wasn’t anything to worry about, removed the contents, just about what he’d guessed in amount. He gave a cursory look inside the empty envelope for any stragglers, then turned his attention to the stack of pages. A thick rubber band held them together.

  On top there was a letter, addressed to him, on plain paper.

  Agent Lomax,

  You will know once you read the enclosed material that a crime has been committed. I was party to it, but am by no means at its heart. This concerns an effort to discredit Agent Art Jefferson, through means too incredible to mention, or to document. What I can tell you about are those who conceived this, and in particular about a man named Rothchild. You would know him as Kirby Gant.

  Gant? The name was familiar, but Lomax recalled after a moment that the Kirby Gant he knew of was dead, sleeping with the fishes somewhere if his memory was right. So how could this concern him?

  Forty minutes later, after scanning less than half of what an early morning courier had brought him, Special Agent in Charge Bob Lomax was on the phone with the office of United States Attorney Angelo Breem, demanding a meeting within the hour.

  * * *

  The house in which Nelson Van Horn lived was empty, as it was each morning at this time, and so when the phone rang it was left to a staple of modern life to answer.

  “Hi, this is Nels, I can’t come to the phone right now, so if you’ll leave your name and number I’ll get back to you as soon as I can…”

  BEEP.

  “Hello, I’m relaying a message. Tonight, at nine, the Skydeck Observatory. Bring what you have.”

  The line clicked off, the dial tone echoed in the house, then silence.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, Rothchild double clicked an icon on his computer screen and played an intercepted telephone call for Kudrow.

  “Who was that?” Kudrow asked.

  “Jefferson is getting edgy,” Rothchild theorized. “He’s afraid to even have his voice heard now. Tired, paranoid is my guess. Getting weak. So he gives someone a few bucks to read that into a phone somewhere.”

  “Where did the call originate?”

&
nbsp; “Near O’Hare,” Rothchild answered. “Tonight, nine o’clock. And how convenient—the Skydeck is closed for redecorating. Boo-hoo.”

  “Van Horn will be there,” Kudrow commented.

  “A cripple and a retard,” Rothchild observed. “Not much in the way of resistance added to Jefferson.”

  “There’s liable to be shooting just like at the apartment,” Kudrow posited. “They’ll lock the place down tight. A hundred and three floors is a long way from an exit.”

  “It’s one floor from one,” Rothchild said, pointing upward with a straight finger. “A helipad on the roof.”

  That would mean acquiring transport, and putting people atop one of the tallest buildings in the world. “What about security?”

  Rothchild leaned back, hands laced together behind his head. “At nine on the dot the elevators will suddenly stop working. Security is on the first floor at that hour. That’s a long walk up.”

  “What about the cameras?”

  “Glitches come in pairs,” Rothchild replied with smug certainty. He loved this, and it showed. Almost better than sex. “Plus, did you see the Chicago forecast for tonight? Fog a rollin’ in from the Lake. No one will see a thing. It’s up to the roof and away they go.”

  The end. Finally. Kudrow had tasted it for days, bitter when close and then snatched away, sweet now in expectation. Resolution. This entire episode needed to be over.

  “Arrange it,” Kudrow said, nodding to Rothchild as he left, though he might have spit upon the man if his powers of observation could reach into the very near future.

  * * *

  “They took the bait,” Sanders told Mr. Pritchard, almost surprised that he was doing so. “How did you know?”

  “Desire, Sanders.” Pritchard clipped the end of a fresh cigar and took his time lighting it. “It makes desperate people predictable.” He puffed five times, long and slow, before taking the roll of heavenly, aromatic leaves from his lips. “Are we ready to intercede?”

  “We are.”

  Pritchard replaced the cigar between his teeth and put his feet up on the coffee table. It was all up to Jefferson now.

  * * *

  After an interminable hour watching Angelo Breem peruse the documents at a leisurely pace, Bob Lomax stood from the couch where he’d sat in forced silence and brought a wide, flat hand down on the pages under the U.S. Attorney’s nose.

  “Dammit, Breem, what is it going to be?”

  Breem stared at the hand until Lomax removed it, then his eyes came up. They were no longer bright with self assurance. “This looks real.”

  “For God’s sake, man, what else would it be? Who has any reason to make that all up?”

  Breem wanted to say Jefferson did, but even if that were true there was no way that one FBI agent on the run could arrange this. Jefferson actually seemed inconsequential now. A different thought had caught his fancy, like a bright shiny dime gleaming in contrast with a stale old penny.

  And he was not the only one to see the dime. Lomax had even polished it up just to hold it out to him. “You want a name, Breem? This is your ticket to that.”

  It was more than a ticket to that, Breem could see. Some things were big. Some were mountainous. This was fucking Everest with stairs carved into its side and arrows pointing him to the top. He’d be a fool not to make the climb.

  Screw Jefferson, he thought. Screw Fiorello. Let the minnows be.

  Angelo Breem had himself a shark.

  * * *

  A few dabs of makeup had toned down the bright coloring of the wet scar on her cheek, but it would not go away completely. That was fine. Let it be a reminder.

  Keiko loaded two weapons into her purse, identical Mini-Uzis like the one she’d tried to waste Jefferson with in the apartment. And two pistols. And plenty of ammunition for them all.

  But from her back pocket she removed her instrument of choice, the straight razor, and opened it to see the light glint off the blade as she twisted it in the air.

  “Close enough, Joe,” Keiko said to the razor. “Maybe shoot you in the legs to slow you down, then…” Wheesh. Wheesh. Wheesh. She sliced the blade through the air and clicked it shut in one snappy motion, then slid it back into the back pocket of her jeans. She reached up and touched the welt on her cheek. It was warm. Like blood.

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Hunt and Peck

  A two year old Dodge pickup was Rothchild’s car of choice, though it wasn’t registered to him, or to anyone that actually existed for that matter. It was registered to a name. A silly name. How far one could get on a string of letters, he often thought.

  In the afternoon, as the workday ended, and with the weekend just one more day away, Rothchild left his subterranean lair with a satisfaction that buoyed his step and actually made him smile at the main lobby receptionist and found his clean black pickup waiting in the close lot where he always parked it. He climbed in, started the throaty engine, and backed into the traffic aisle without looking. If he hit something, so what? Today was a day not for worries. It was a day to mark in his mental record books. His biggest challenge completed. His biggest scheme brought to a successful end.

  There was a bottle of champagne he’d saved for something like this, he remembered as he moved past the guard posts, through the serpentine drive, and onto the roads of Fort Meade. Yes, a bottle of bubbly, as the ever so cosmopolitan characters in the movies used to call it. Bubbly and a babe. He had the former. The latter he could rent.

  Leaving Meade proper, he thought of what kind of babe he’d like this night. One of the top heavy ones for some raucous titty fucking, or an A cup waif who he could maneuver around the bed like some female Gumby doll.

  Choices, choices. Maybe both. Yeah. Both. He could handle that, and he could certainly arrange it.

  Driving with one hand draped over the top of the steering wheel, Rothchild lost himself in a daydream of the possibilities, thinking of little else, and never noticing the four cars that took turns tailing him both back and front.

  * * *

  It was an old Royal that he’d dug out of a storage closet, something so archaic that he was surprised it was even allowed in the Chocolate Box. But it was, the glorious old machine that Brad Folger placed on the blotter on his desk after locking his door.

  He drew a breath in, held it, and rolled a sheet of paper into the machine, exhaling as he pecked at the sticky keys with one finger of each hand. Yes, it was old, it was slow, it was an implement of inefficiency. But there was one thing it had over its modern counterparts: a total lack of wires.

  Brad Folger wanted this last bit of information to be available to no one, until the time came. When he finished he put it in an envelope with instructions, and wrote Pedanski’s name on the outside.

  It was not a suicide note. At least not his.

  * * *

  The amazing thing about being where one wasn’t supposed to be was that most people didn’t give a damn who was where as long as no one was making a fuss. Art knew that from years of having to pull information from witnesses like teeth, things that one would think the person must have seen, but, oh well, they didn’t think it too strange the man had a rifle in one hand as he walked down the street.

  Getting on the service elevator in the maintenance garage had been exceedingly easy. It was after five, leaving just a few workers milling around, and all the effort it took was putting two hardhats on his and Simon’s heads and waiting until a few backs were turned to the corridor leading to the elevators.

  Art never had any illusions about trying for the lobby elevators. They would be crowded with people. People who watched the news and might notice a big black guy and a scrawny white kid together, even if they didn’t match the photos, his from his Bureau file, Simon’s ripped from a frame in his dead parents’ home.

  But a couple of hardhats, however odd, would be par for the course in a building where some renovation was being done. Although Simon’s less than macho posture, head dipped, could
have drawn a curious eye, it did not. Luck? Timing? Art didn’t care. Once on the elevator, an express to the top twenty floors, he pressed 103 and let out a breath as the doors slid shut.