Silence

by Thomas Perry

  He continued with their walk, and then spent the afternoon walking through the shops with her. He watched her closely all day, waiting for her to resume their conversation, but she did not do it. Once, as they were walking on the street far from other pedestrians, he said, “Ann?”

  “I’m not Ann anymore.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I have no choice right now. I have to be Wendy.”

  While she pretended to shop to keep him from interrogating her, Till used the time to think about the other part of the problem. He had to keep her alive. When they came back to their rooms in the hotel, he waited until she was in the other room and then used his cell phone. He dialed a number he knew very well, then said, “Sergeant Poliakoff, please.”

  30

  PAUL INCHED the rental car along the freeway in the heavy traffic toward the cluster of tall buildings downtown. It was only four o’clock, but it seemed that rush hour started earlier and earlier. Paul turned his head away from the road in front of him and looked at Sylvie. She was quiet today. He wished that the reason she was not giving him an argument was that she understood the uncomfortable situation he was in, and not because she was thinking of all the ways he had disappointed her. He was almost sure that she was saving up the complete list of his offenses and trying out in her mind different ways of saying them so they would inflict the maximum pain. It was possible—even easy—for Paul to ignore the opinions of most people, but he was vulnerable to Sylvie. After being on the most intimate terms with a woman for fifteen years, it was difficult for a man to tell himself she didn’t know much about him.

  He tried to distract her, to get her to think about the present, the things they had to accomplish. “At least we’ve had a chance to stop at home and get some sleep. We’re coming rested and prepared. This could even turn out to be easy.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m not blaming you for this. You’ll still get laid.”

  He laughed, more relieved than amused. She could be uncomfortably perceptive about the ridiculousness of the relationship between men and women. He tried to make the feeling of affection grow. “Well, I’m sorry anyway. It’s not what I would have chosen to do. I’d like to be taking you to the airport to get on the plane to Madrid—that Air France/Delta flight that leaves around dinnertime.”

  She stared at him in silence for a couple of seconds. “I know.”

  “Maybe we can do it as soon as this is over.”

  “Maybe we’ll have to.”

  “Don’t worry. The situation may not be good, but we’re good.”

  She said carefully, “I’ll do my best to make this whole thing end the way it’s supposed to. But after this, we’ll have to be more careful what we agree to do, and for whom.”

  “We will. This is a special case. Densmore—”

  “Is what I’m worried about,” she said sharply. “I understand how we got into the position of having to finish this job for him. But the thing to remember is that he didn’t tell us the truth.”

  “He’s paying us twice the original price.”

  “He’s making us do something we don’t want to do.” She stared at Paul again, her eyes not moving from his face. “Isn’t he?”

  Paul saw the trap and was almost grateful to her for placing it in the open where he could see it. “Well, yeah.”

  “I’m not going to be Densmore’s underling.”

  “When this job is done and we collect our pay, it will be the last thing we do for Densmore.”

  “I hope so.”

  “It will be.” He knew from her tone that she would remember and hold him to it. He didn’t like losing Densmore, who had been the perfect middleman for eight years. Densmore had kept the clients at a distance from Paul and Sylvie, collected their money, and kept them frightened so that none of them had ever talked to the police. It was a shame to have to lose Densmore, but Sylvie had a point. Densmore had begun to presume too much. This time he had told the client who Paul and Sylvie were. His excuse was that this was a client who would never talk to the police under any circumstances. But the long-standing arrangement was not that the client wouldn’t talk, it was that the client couldn’t, because he didn’t know anything.

  Paul drove along Temple Street past the fortresslike structure of Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral and then the Superior Court building. He could see the gleaming stainless-steel curves of the Disney Concert Hall. “All right. Here it comes,” he said. “That building coming up is 210 West Temple. The offices of the Assistant DAs working on this case are upstairs, but what we want to study are the approaches and openings.”

  “I am.” Sylvie looked carefully at everything she could see from the car. It was difficult to assess the security of a building like this one, because the whole neighborhood was part of the court complex. The court buildings were full of bailiffs and marshals and deputy sheriffs. There were guards in all the lobbies to be sure nobody came in armed, but there were probably other security people who weren’t visible. The biggest danger would be that there were so many armed cops coming and going on various kinds of legal business in a normal day, a lot of them in plainclothes. The building slid by her window, and Paul turned at the next corner.

  She could see the twenty-story white rectangle of the New Otani Hotel a block away. It was a feature of the downtown skyline. Downtown was a difficult place to do the kind of business that Paul and Sylvie did. During the day it was lively, and there were lots of pedestrians around the courthouse complex, the cathedral, the Museum of Modern Art, the Disney Concert Hall, the plaza outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. But an hour after the evening’s events, very few people remained. The big hotels—the Biltmore, the Bonaventure, the Otani—were full, but no life spilled out into the surrounding blocks. People parked underground or in structures, so there weren’t even many cars on the streets. Few people lived down here. There were a few new condominiums and a lot of talk about building lofts in old buildings, but she had not seen any change yet.

  She sat quietly while Paul drove up to the entrance of the New Otani. A bellman appeared with a cart and lifted their luggage onto it, and the parking attendant took their car away. She walked inside with Paul, and sat on a couch in the lobby while he checked in.

  Sylvie had made the reservations using her best secretary voice, and gotten them the special Attorney Rate. The hotel Web site promised them accommodations within walking distance of state and federal courts, “affording your legal team a productive workplace” and “war rooms” that included conference tables, fax machines, workstations, copiers, and shredders. Today Paul was attorney Peter Harkin, and Sylvie was his wife, Sarah Harkin. They were from Charlotte, North Carolina. Peter had a distinguished-looking head of graying hair and a matching mustache, and Sarah had blond hair of the type that was just light enough to look as though its color had a genetic component.

  Sylvie had selected their clothes and wigs to be especially misleading from above, where most surveillance cameras were mounted. Her blond wig was already feeling tight and uncomfortable. It reminded her of a movie Cherie Will had made called Blond-sided. She and three other actresses had all supposedly been cheerleaders who arrived from Texas for the Rose Bowl and missed their team bus. She and two of the others had needed to wear blond wigs, and she had hated it. Whenever Cherie had an idea for a movie, it didn’t matter if it meant actors had to be run over by a truck, as long as it was quick and cheap.

  Sylvie distracted herself by looking at the lobby. The space was large, with lots of long angles and a mezzanine above, all in beige. There was a lounge that consisted of a long marble counter with tables and chairs along both sides of it, and at either end, an enormous arrangement of flowers exploding upward in various tones of bright red.

  Paul stepped away from the front desk and Sylvie joined him on the way to the elevator. She said, “Any problem about the room?”

  He shook his head. Then the bellman caught up with them and they had to wait to speak again. She had specifie
d that the room be on the north side, high enough for a good view of the city. She had not dared to be more specific than that. There were over four hundred rooms in the hotel, so at there were at least eighty that would do.

  They rode the elevator to the fifteenth floor. Paul and Sylvie both followed the bellman, looking down at the carpet as they walked, as though they were trying to be sure their luggage didn’t fall off the bellman’s cart. This kept their faces away from the lenses of the surveillance cameras in the hallway. At their room, the bellman unlocked the door and they had to endure his standard tour. When he began his recitation of the hotel’s amenities, Paul put a bill in his hand and said, “Thanks, but we’ve been here before.” He left.

  Sylvie locked the door, then stood beside it and listened. When she heard the sound of the luggage cart clanking off the carpet onto the bare floor of the elevator, she took off the blond wig, then the hairnet, and shook out her own hair. “Oh, man,” she muttered. “Feel my neck.”

  Paul touched the nape of her neck dutifully. “Sweaty.” He kissed it.

  She shivered. The nape of her neck had always been sensitive, even ticklish. She had been surprised again by the intensity of the feeling. She rubbed the spot with her hand as she watched Paul lift the two heavy suitcases to the bed.

  She waited until he had opened the suitcases, then lifted out the folded clothes and set them on the bed so they would be out of Paul’s way while he removed the two dismantled rifles. He reassembled the first rifle. He had decided to use the .308 Remington Model 7s he had cleaned yesterday. Paul had always said that .308 was the government-certified man-killing caliber because the FBI snipers used .308 rifles. She and Paul were hoping to put only one bullet through one small woman.

  Paul was setting up the spotting scope on the table beside the window. He looked into the eyepiece. “It’s just about perfect,” he said. “I can see the curb, the sidewalk, the front steps, the door, and a hundred feet on either side. I can see in the windows. Take a look.”

  She stepped to the table and took his place. “Great view. There’s a guy sitting on the bus-stop bench, and I can see the crow’s-feet wrinkles by his eyes.” She paused. “Oops. Not now. He’s putting on sunglasses.” She straightened and stepped to the window for an unmagnified look.

  “If you stay back from the window a few feet, you’ll be harder to see.”

  She retreated. He was right, of course, but she wished he had not spoken. That need that men had to assert, to insist, to instruct, was infuriating. She stepped to the bed, unfolded the few clothes they had brought, and hung them in the closet. Then she picked up one of the rifles, raised it to her shoulder, and looked through the scope at the District Attorney’s building. The scope was a new Weaver V16 Classic that was adjustable from four to sixteen power. She settled the crosshairs on the front entrance and decided the scope was just right for this long shot.

  Paul was busy placing the night-vision scope on the other rifle. The nightscope was harder to use, harder to line up, and made everything glow with a green luminescence. They would use the nightscope only if the girl arrived at night, but why on earth wouldn’t she? It would be foolish of her to come any other time, and she would be foolish not to disguise herself. If the police brought her, they would treat her like a protected witness. She would arrive with three big cops, all of them wearing bulletproof vests and oversized jackets. They would surround her and hustle her into the building.

  Paul’s preparations had been meticulous, partly because he was trying to overcome the jinx that seemed to have followed them in this job. Being careful was also the rational reaction to a risky time and place for killing someone. Sylvie played with the telescopic sight, staring at the silent street so far below her. She placed the crosshairs on the man on the bus bench, but then a bus pulled into her line of fire and obliterated her view. The bus had an advertisement on the side, and she moved the crosshairs to the oversized front tooth of the reclining actress. “Coming August 12,” she said aloud. “Bang.” The bus pulled away and he was still there, sitting on the bench as before. The man was big, with broad shoulders and a suspicion of a belly. He lifted a newspaper and appeared to be reading it. As she watched him, she moved the crosshairs on his body, placing them on the small metal bridge between the lenses of his sunglasses, across his nose, then up to his forehead. From this angle, she could hardly take her eyes off his widow’s peak. The hair jutted down to a point, with shiny receding spaces on either side of it that reflected the late-afternoon sunlight. She said, “Doesn’t that man on the bus bench look like a cop?”

  Paul said, “The guy in the sport coat?”

  “Yes. See him?”

  Paul made a tiny adjustment to the spotting scope. “With this thing I can read his mind. Yeah.” Paul stared at him for a few more seconds. “He could be one. I mean, what the hell is he doing there? Guys like him don’t ride buses, they drive.”

  “Maybe he can’t,” she said. “He’s right outside the DA’s office. Maybe he’s had his license pulled for a DUI.”

  “I don’t know,” said Paul. “Come here and watch him through the spotting scope.”

  She set the rifle down on the couch and stepped to the table beside the window. She looked into the eyepiece. “What are you doing?”

  “I want to get everything ready. Can you see anything on him? A radio, or a bulge in his coat that shouldn’t be there?”

  “How about a big gold badge?” she teased. “Nothing that I can see. He isn’t wearing body armor, because I can see his gut. No earpiece.”

  “Check his shoes.”

  “Good idea.” She overadjusted the elevation of the scope, and he disappeared. She brought the scope back up a bit and studied the man’s shoes. “I don’t think they’re cop shoes. They look more like those walking shoes you have.”

  “Then he’s probably not a cop. Those things cost me three hundred bucks.”

  “You never told me.”

  “An oversight.”

  “Sure. When I spend that much on shoes you sound like you’ve been stabbed.”

  “They’re therapeutic. They prevent plantar fasciitis and shin splints.”

  “Are you ready?”

  “The guns are both lined up and loaded. If that guy down there is the lookout and they come now, we’ll at least get a shot. Keep watching him. If he does anything, it could be the all clear to signal them in.”

  “He’s looking at his watch. Now he’s standing up. He’s walking.” She was quiet for a few seconds. “Nothing else is happening. I guess it’s a false alarm.”

  “Good. Can you still keep watch for a little longer? I want to get the other stuff all ready to go.”

  “Sure.”

  She sat at the table and watched the front of the building. She was aware of Paul moving around in her peripheral vision, taking two folded police uniforms out of their suitcases. He laid them on the bed and examined them. The badge was pinned over the left pocket of each one, the nameplate pinned over the right pocket. Paul set the black leather utility belts beside them. They were bulky, with handcuffs, pepper spray, ammunition clips, sidearm. He put the black shoes on the floor at the foot of the bed. Paul was much neater than she was. She had years ago given up the pretense that she was as neat as he was, and since then concentrated on keeping her things out of his way. “There’s another one,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The guy we were watching left. Now there’s another guy in the same spot. He’s wearing a sport coat, too, and a tie. He’s not sitting. He’s standing.”

  “Let me see.” Paul stood over her and she leaned away from the table so he could look through the spotting scope. “That’s odd. He doesn’t look as though he’s waiting for a bus, either. He’s walking over toward the corner of the building. Now he’s just standing there.”

  “You don’t suppose it’s some kind of national-security thing—protecting the court buildings from terrorists?”

  “I sure as hell hope not, bu
t it could be.” He stared into the spotting scope. “I want to watch this guy for a while. You can take a break.”

  For the rest of the day, one of them was always at the table in front of the window, staring at the front entrance of the District Attorney’s office below. They took two-hour shifts. Every time Sylvie returned to the window, she saw one of the two men in sport coats.

  The men weren’t on duty for longer than an hour, and they moved around, so she could not always find the one on guard immediately. She made a game out of searching. Sometimes the man would be around one corner of the building or the other, just far enough so he could face in a different direction and not appear to be staring at Temple Street. Once he disappeared, but she found him ten minutes later across Temple Street from the building, coming out of the doorway of another building where he had been watching the street from behind the glass doors.

  At six she put on her wig and Sarah Harkin skirt to walk to a restaurant down the street and pick up a takeout dinner. There were five good restaurants in the hotel, but she didn’t want to attract the attention of too many of the Otani Hotel’s guests and staff, so she used a back elevator to get to the street. When she returned, she took the stairs up two flights before she emerged from the stairs and took the elevator the rest of the way.

  During her first evening shift, she used the nightscope sparingly. The bright green glow gave her a headache after a few minutes, and she knew she didn’t need it. A car pulling up in front of the building to let out passengers would be hard to miss.

  Her rest periods were worse than the watch periods. Paul had sunk into his quiet mode, which made him no company at all, and she was afraid that watching television would light up the room and make Paul visible. Her eyes were tired anyway. At ten Paul lengthened the shifts to three hours, so she could sleep.