The Plan

by Stephen Cannell

  "Lucinda called Penny at the house in Jersey two days ago."

  "He must have a Pin Tel."

  "A what?"

  "A gadget the phone company developed to catch people who are making threatening phone calls. If he's got one, he'd get a printout of the number she was calling from. It's not much of a trick to get the address." Then Kaz added, "I guess I don't have to tell you not to call him again unless you wanna decorate the inside of a pine box."

  "Listen, Kaz, I want to be part of this."

  Kaz said nothing, so Ryan forged ahead.

  "Mickey's already tried to kill me three times. As long as I'm a target, I might as well go ahead and get a uniform."

  Kaz really didn't want to work with amateurs, but he couldn't say that to Ryan. "Cole and I are working on something. Get some place where you won't draw a crow d a nd lay low. Is that a cell?" "yeah."

  "Okay, gimme the number and stay out of sight. If I need any help, I'll call."

  Ryan gave him the cell-phone number and they ended the conversation.

  After he hung up, Ryan and Lucinda held hands in the cockpit of the ketch as the day turned slowly to dusk. The sun sat on the horizon like an orange cue ball on frothy green felt. It slowly sank from view and then they were in a strange murky twilight, the boat shooting down the sides of the following sea. For almost a minute, the color of the ocean and the sky were an identical shade of dusky gray. Where sky and water met, there was no horizon. It created a strange vertigo, as if the small sailboat were in a colorless vortex, a small shifting platform in a world of invisible, coursing currents.

  Then night fell and the moon lit the ocean as they, once again, slipped silently away, heading toward Mexico.

  They finally arrived at a protected cove in Mexican waters about six miles south of Ensenada. It was nine-thirty in the morning when they dropped anchor. With sleep still in her eyes, Lucinda got the sail down, gathered it in, and lashed it to the boom with a line. Then they sat in the cockpit and drank coffee. Lucinda turned on the radio for some music to lighten the mood, and while they listened to the distant sounds from a San Diego station, they admired the beautiful, but barren, Mexican coast.

  At ten o'clock, the radio station announced what most of the world already knew-Haze Richards had won the California Democratic primary. He would control the national convention scheduled in Denver.

  Ryan shut off the radio, then got his crutches and moved forward on the deck of the boat.

  "Where are you going?" Lucinda asked.

  "I'm going to get this leg in shape."

  She watched as he stretched out and hooked his right leg under his left heel and started doing leg lifts, using the right leg to help. He was sweating and grimacing with pain. He did ten reps, counted to twenty, and did ten more. Over and over, he repeated the exercises.

  He had no strength in the leg and after a while, Lucinda could watch no longer and went below. In the small cabin, she could still hear the thumps as his heel hit the deck. She had seen the mangled leg up close. She knew that most of his muscle had been lost.

  Up on deck, under the Mexican sun, Ryan continued his leg raises. Sweat was rolling off him, but his mind was miles away. He was back at Stanford University on the practice field in the shadow of Maples Pavillion. He was nineteen years old, lying on the ground in his practice uniform doing grass drills with the backs and ends. He could hear the fitness coach, Zoran Petrovich, screaming at them with his German accent, Lass go. Come on ya lazy pussies, two, free, fo'. . two, free, fo'. .

  Ryan struggled with his damaged leg, trying to lift it, using less and less help from the right until he couldn't lift it at all.

  Lass go, ya pussies. . A bunch a' fooking Frauleins. . Yah?

  In his thoughts, he was back in time. He was young and healthy. There was no fear of defeat-only open fields and touchdowns stretched before him.

  Come on, let's go. . One, two, free, fo'. .

  He had always been at his best on game day. He wasn't going to give up. He wasn't going to let Mickey win. . not after coming this far.

  Chapter 55

  HEALING

  Six hundred miles south of the border, they found a sheltered bay listed on the map as Magdalena. They anchored in the cove.

  May turned into June, and June became July.

  They found a world without worry. Ryan worked out twice a day for almost two hours, concentrating not only on his leg, but the rest of his body as well, building muscles long left unused. Lucinda cooked and swam and sunned herself in the nude on the forward deck. At night, they made love under the stars.

  Weeks passed and their only connection with the world was the ship-to-shore radio and the occasional Mexican lobster boat that came into the cove looking for fresh beds. Twice a week, they called Kaz and Cole, who'd had no luck finding David Robb. Kaz said he'd worn out his welcome at the Justice Department and could no longer even get a visitor's pass. They both sounded tired and frustrated.

  Atmospheric conditions allowed them to pick up a San Diego all-news radio station one evening in late June and they learned that Haze Richards had gone to Europe and was discussing world events with heads of state. He returned to the United States the third week in July for the Democratic National Convention, which neither Ryan nor Lucinda saw because they were out of TV reception. Kaz told them about it on the cell phone.

  "This fucking guy. . You should have heard him. He's gonna make America work, my ass. He'll make it work for that bunch of oil cans in the mob. UBC said he was the candidate of the nineties, the Roosevelt of a new era. I was so depressed, I wanted to shoot myself."

  After the convention, Haze had picked Senator Ben Savage from California as his running mate, then went back to Europe where he had his picture taken with Arab kings and Balkan presidents. Kaz passed the events along to them. He seemed to get more desperate with each call. To Ryan, it all had become distant-part of something he'd left way behind.

  In two months, Ryan had strengthened his leg enough to be able to take short, hesitant steps without crutches. The leg felt spindly and strange under him.

  One afternoon, Ryan and Lucinda had taken the Avon to shore. It was warm and they seldom wore any clothes. They were alone in the secluded cove. It was their Eden. All the darkness in their lives, all the shadows were washed away by the ocean, then burned away by the blazing sun. They had taken beach towels and food and the small rail barbecue off the Linda, Ryan was determined to walk the length of the beach. Lucinda looked at him, smiling as he fell out of the boat, twenty yards from shore, and started swimming. His stroke was graceful and his kick getting stronger. She had removed the stitches two months before. Ryan had turned a deep shade of brown, except for the angry red line that marked Dr. Jazz's stitching and cut a diagonal stripe across his leg.

  She watched him as he pulled himself out of the water, tan and muscular, his blond hair long and almost white from the sun. She beached the boat and he helped her pull it up. Then she took the towel and ran to the end of the beach.

  "Where you going?"

  "You can have me if you can get me," she teased.

  He chased after her on his bad leg, having difficulty in the sand. She moved backward, laughing. Finally, she threw the towel at him and he caught it and lunged at her, going down hard in the sand. She thought he might be hurt so she ran to him, naked and brown from a month in the sun. He grabbed her leg and pulled her down beside him and they hugged each other.

  "God, I love you," she whispered in his ear.

  "I don't know why," he said honestly.

  She kissed him on the mouth, and then he was kissing her body, her nipples erect with the heat of passion. Both found release once he was inside her. They longed to have more of each other. The penetration of mind and body couldn't seem to fill the ache of love. She pledged herself to him and was prepared to give up her life for him. He vowed no harm would ever come to her and would die before losing her. They marveled at the intensity of their feelings.

&nb
sp; "I wish this would never end," she said.

  "The memory never will."

  That night, they unwrapped the last two steaks from the boat freezer and cooked them over the metal barbecue on the beach. Because there was no town in which to buy groceries, from now on they would live off of the dwindling supply of canned goods aboard, and the lobster and fish that they caught by hand.

  After dinner, Ryan and Lucinda lay in the sand holding hands and thought back to the first time they had met, when Ryan had been invited to the Alos' house for Thanksgiving.

  "You came through the door and I fell in love with you. How can that be?" she said. "I was only seven years old. It's as if God said to me, this is the one."

  Ryan talked about Matt.

  "The worst part is all the things that I wanted to do with him." Ryan was looking up at the stars and wondering if Matt could hear him. 'Things that will never happen. They're losses that I can't get over because they live in my imagination and change as I do."

  Ryan thanked her for making the shadow dreams go away. . Thanked her for explaining Terrance's drowning to him. . For taking that darkness out of his life.

  "If we survive this, will you marry me?" he finally said.

  She propped herself up on one elbow and looked at him, the moonlight catching the blue in his eyes. "You better believe it, buddy."

  He took Matt's elementary school class ring off his little finger. . It was his most prized possession and it had only cost twenty dollars-a powerful example of how meaningless his climb to wealth and power had really been. He slipped it on her finger and they looked at each other for a long time, celebrating their engagement without words.

  One evening at the end of August, Cole got the call that changed everything. He was just coming through the door of his Georgetown rooming house when the phone rang and a thin-voiced man from the Phoenix Medical Group spoke to him.

  It had been Kaz's idea to check out old-age medical plans in warm-weather states, like Hawaii, Florida, Arizona, and New Mexico. Older people, Kaz said, tended to migrate to warm climates because their skin had gotten thinner and their circulation slower. Something that Cole of course knew, but it was a worthwhile thought when you were down to a few hundred dollars and contemplating the problem of contacting medical insurance plans in fifty states. They were looking for a man who seemed to be out of the system and could very possibly be dead. They had to narrow the search somehow.

  "Is this Mr. Harris with Medicare?" the voice said, with a distant twang.

  "Yes it is."

  "I got your letter and I'm responding about David Robb."

  Kaz had dummied up a letterhead for. Medicare, using the letter canceling his own federal policy as the prototype. They tapped Carson Harris for the two hundred dollars it cost to get letters and envelopes printed. "This is it, Cole. I can't keep loaning you money," his frustrated brother said. So Cole and Kaz hocked their rings and watches.

  Kaz had written a short letter saying that David Robb's account was being reviewed by Medicare, and asking the medical plan to contact them at the enclosed number. They had five hundred copies of the bogus letter printed and sent it off, hoping nobody would notice that the envelope was mailed with a stamp instead of a government franking mark. They'd sent the letter to medical plans in warm-weather states and had received no responses until the call from Phoenix.

  "Is this your home?" the voice inquired.

  "Private extension," Cole said, trying to move the man along.

  "I'm a little confused about your letter. You're doing some kind of check on David Robb. .?"

  "Who's calling, please?"

  "This is Dale Dennison, Southwest Age Benefit Program. We're connected to Medicare and we hold the current policy on Mr. Robb."

  Cole had a pen in his hand and was fumbling in the drawer for a piece of paper. "Just to make sure we're talking about the same Mr. Robb, would you mind giving me his current address?"

  "Our information lists him at the Wild Oaks Retirement Home in Phoenix."

  "Could you give me his age, his underlying carrier and his social security number?" Cole said, figuring it was a possibility this was another David Robb.

  "What is this about?"

  "We're doing a demographic realignment so that the actuarial shift in benefits won't affect the baseline average for sixty-plus men on Medicare drawdowns," Cole said, hoping some elaborate gobbledygook would sufficiently mystify Mr. Dennison so he'd stop asking questions Cole couldn't answer.

  "Oh, I see," the confused voice said on the other end of the line.

  "You were going to give me his age and underlying carrier and his SS number."

  "Uh, right. Well, he's a federal employee on the Blue Cross Plan. . He's eighty-six and his Social Security number is 568-52-2713."

  Kaz got home at eight. He'd been trying to find David Robb through the War Department and had been shut out. He was in a foul mood when he walked in, but when he heard that Cole had succeeded, his mood changed abruptly.

  The retirement home was a low, one-story building on Route 357, the highway that ran through Phoenix.

  Kaz and Cole paid the cab from the airport and went inside. What they found depressed them.

  Wild Oaks was a vegetable garden where old people did a Thorazine shuffle under the prison-guard stares of attendants. Kaz introduced himself to a stout Navajo nurse named Arleen Cloud, who looked at them with open suspicion.

  "I'm Joseph Robb; this is my brother Don. We're David's cousins from Altoona," Kaz said to the woman, who wasn't buying it.

  "Who do you two guys think you're kidding? I've got David Robb's file; he doesn't have any relatives. He's outlived the whole clan."

  " 'Cept for his uncle," Kaz said.

  "Which uncle?"

  "Uncle Sam." Kaz pulled his old federal badge and flashed it. "So keep the attitude coming, Nurse Cloud, and I'll drop an obstructing justice charge in your mailbox."

  David Robb had tubes sticking out of every conceivable orifice and one or two that had been created for him-like the one in the center of his neck so a ventilator on a timer could pump oxygen into his lungs at four-minute intervals. He had bed sores and couldn't have weighed a hundred pounds. He was in a private room with one window. The best thing about David Robb were his eyes. They were deep brown and still held the light of intelligence. Kaz moved over to him, pulled up a chair, and sat down.

  "Mr. Robb?" The man looked at him and nodded his head.

  "I'm Solomon Kazorowski; this is Cole Harris." He held up his FBI badge for the man to see. "We need to talk to you about Gavriel Bach. Can you speak?"

  The man nodded, then slowly opened his mouth. "Yes." The word seemed fished up from the bottom of a dusty well.

  "You talked to him in 1971 about Meyer Lansky. You gave him some material. Is that right, sir?"

  Again, David Robb hissed his reply, nodding his head slightly for emphasis.

  "Sir, what did you give him?"

  David Robb looked at them for a long, heartbreaking moment; his withered eyelids blinked across beacons of despair. He licked his lips, but put no moisture on them.

  "Sir. . what was in the suitcase?"

  "Wiretaps," he said in a sandpaper whisper. "Conversations with the underworld."

  "Illegal taps?"

  David Robb nodded his head in response.

  "Sir, do you remember who was on the tapes? Was Joseph Alo on the tapes?"

  The old man looked at them and said nothing. Then he closed his eyes for almost a minute. When he opened them again, he looked at Cole.

  "So long ago. ." The ventilator turned on and hissed and sucked as the accordion pump went up and down in aglass tube, forcing fresh air into the old man's sunken chest.

  "Where are the tapes now?"

  "Gay took the tapes, never returned." He closed his eyes and started to breathe heavily. Kaz and Cole looked across the bed at one another as the old man began to snore. As if to emphasize that the interview was over, the ventilator abruptly
shut itself off.

  "I don't believe this," Kaz said "Two months and all we get is, 'Never returned.' Gavriel Bach is dead."

  "Gavriel Bach was sort of a lone wolf in the Israeli prosecutor's office. I remember that from when I covered the trial. He had that suitcase on the prosecutor's table the day the verdicts were read. He didn't leave it with the justices. I can't see him giving the tapes to the Israelis. Besides, once Meyer's case was over, what use would the Israelis have for any of that stuff? It was about U. S. criminal activity."

  "What're you trying to say?"

  "One of two things happened to them. He kept them or threw them away. You're a cop. Would you ever throw away evidence, regardless of whether you thought you'd ever need it again?"

  "Of course not."

  "So maybe he held on to it. Maybe that suitcase is in an attic someplace."

  "In Israel?" His eyes rolled like an Atlantic City slot. "We're down to our last ten dollars. How the hell we gonna get to Israel?"

  "I'll do the heavy lifting. You work on tactics," Cole said.

  "Oh really?"

  "Isn't Ryan Bolt loaded? Maybe we take him aboard, let him bankroll this pilgrimage."

  "He's a cripple and an amateur."

  "You got a better idea?"

  They left the Wild Oaks Retirement Home and stood outside in the shimmering summer heat while Kaz tried to call Ryan Bolt on Penny Alo's cell phone.

  It was after nine in the evening before he finally got through.

  Chapter 56

  PAPER TRAIL

  Theghost was dressed in a Southern California Gas Company uniform. Over his right shoulder, he carried a canvas bag with a silenced Ruger Mark II and two 10-shot.22-caliber clips. He was wearing latex gloves and a b lue baseball cap. He found the alarm on the side of th e v alley apartment house and jumped it with alligator clips.

  After he had deactivated the alarm box of apartment 4-C, he climbed the stairs and stood in front of the door. He slipped a lock pick into the door and opened it. The doo r c aught at the end of a chain, safety-locked from inside.