Arkin followed him in to see a large table covered with an extremely detailed Z-scale model train set. Two sets of tracks went in and out of tunnels, roughly circling a picture-perfect miniature of a New England coastal town, complete with buildings, houses, crossing signals, a water tower, trees, cars, pedestrians, a small harbor, moored sailboats, even a tiny dog running on the beach. A tiny sign on the main road into town read "Welcome to Bar Harbor, Maine."
"Killick is a model train geek?" Morrison said. "The director of operations of DCI?"
"We're learning all kinds of interesting things today."
"It's like finding out that the commandant of the Marine Corps is into knitting sweaters for cats."
"But what makes this truly weird is the fact that there are no trains in Bar Harbor. It's on an island," Arkin said, picking up what looked like a mailbox key from the top of a small desk in the corner of the room. "Why don't you go downstairs to check his mail while I get started here?"
Arkin started with the desk, going through each of the three drawers, taking his time given that Killick was long gone and they didn't expect their search to be interrupted. But nothing jumped out at him as being relevant. Pens, pencils, a tiny stapler, chewing gum, postage stamps, paperclips, correction fluid, cable bills, paycheck stubs, medical insurance statements of benefits, instructions for how to use the remote control for his flat-screen television, a local phone number scribbled on a Hooters bar napkin marked with a kiss in a tasteless shade of bright pink lipstick.
"Want me to run down that phone number?" Morrison said as he came up behind him.
"No."
"You sure?"
"I can tell you from long experience that Killick has a taste for trashy women."
"Trashy women who like model trains. Still, a Hooters napkin with a kiss on it? Could just be good espionage tradecraft. Seems like a perfect way to make an important phone number look irrelevant."
"Rest assured, it's just a number for some displaced cracker he tried to pick up."
"Are you ever wrong?"
Arkin pretended to think. "Actually, I thought I was wrong once. But I was wrong."
"Suit yourself. There's nothing worthwhile in his mail. It's literally all junk advertisements and so forth, aside from a cable bill and a postcard reminding him it's time to schedule a tooth cleaning with his dentist."
"Thanks."
"How about I go through his kitchen?"
"That would be helpful," Arkin said, turning his attention to the contents of a short two-level shelving unit standing against the wall perpendicular to the desk. It appeared to contain nothing more than books and bound booklets. Most of the booklets were instruction manuals from law enforcement training courses at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Brunswick, Georgia. The books ran the gamut, from a dictionary to a barbeque cookbook to a guide to fishing the Florida Keys. As he went through them on the desktop, a small red and white paperback caught his eye. It was The Denial of Death, by Dr. Ernest Becker. He knew right away that he'd seen it before—in Petrović's creepy art gallery in Vancouver. Right before he got shot. He flipped through it, finding numerous underlined passages just like he'd found in Petrović's copy. Passages concerning how anxiety over the concept of mortality—of death—drives men to evil deeds. His interest piqued, given that he'd now found the same book in the premises of two different members of the Priest's group, Arkin flipped it over to read the back cover. It had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974. The author had been a professor of cultural anthropology at Simon Fraser, San Francisco State, and the University of California at Berkeley. "A brave work of electrifying intelligence and passion, optimistic and revolutionary, destined to endure," according to The New York Times Book Review. "It is hard to over-estimate the importance of this book," said the Chicago Sun-Times. Clearly the book had made quite an impression on the Priest's group. Though perhaps not in quite the same positive, philanthropic sense its author and reviewers may have anticipated. Arkin pocketed it for later reading, along with a small sequel by Professor Becker called Escape from Evil. He didn't figure that the books would help him find Killick and Sheffield. But they might help him better understand the group and its motives.
At one end of the bottom shelf, Arkin saw a bowl half-full of loose change. Killick probably tossed the change from his pockets in there every now and then until the bowl filled, then took it to one of those change sorting machines often found in grocery stores and traded it out for cash. Just in case anything might be hidden under the coins, Arkin dumped the bowl onto the desktop. As he expected, there was nothing in the bowl but coins. But as he swept them back into the bowl with the edge of his hand, he noticed two that were unusual. They weren't quarters, dimes, nickels, or pennies. One was a small, octagonal, gold-colored coin that had 5 pesos stamped on one side. The other was larger, circular, and consisted of two different metals—a round center of gold-colored metal fused to a surrounding ring of silver-colored metal. On one side was stamped 500 pesos, and on the other side, the words Republica de Chile.
"Got him," Arkin said, emerging from the spare bedroom.
"What is it?"
"Chilean mon—" He stopped mid-statement, something in one of the framed photographs catching his eye as he entered the living room. It was the picture of Killick standing in the middle of the line of Native American-looking women. Each of the women, dressed in simple black dresses, wore an elaborate silver necklace of some sort, each bearing a large upper and semi-triangular lower plate attached via three chains of flat silver links. Most of them had what looked like a mirror image of birds facing each other etched on the upper plate. However, one of the necklaces bore the feature that had caught Arkin's eye. A design. It was on the woman standing to Killick's left. Etched onto the upper silver plate of her necklace, it was a symbol comprised of paired diamond shapes within larger diamond shapes, enclosed by thick zig-zagging lines. It was the same symbol he had seen on Lily Bryant's rug.
"What did you say?" Morrison asked.
"Chilean money," Arkin muttered, his eyes still transfixed by the photo. "Come look at this."
Morrison came over and joined him in examining the photo. "What of it? Killick has an Indian fetish?"
"Do you have any idea what that symbol is?" Arkin asked, pointing it out.
"Not a clue."
"Any idea what tribe this is?"
"I don't know. Maybe Navajo or Hopi. Zuni. Apache. Something southwestern. Maybe a Mexican tribe."
"Have you ever seen necklaces like these?"
Morrison squinted at looked more closely. "I don't think so. Why?"
Arkin told him about Lily's rug.
"You think it means that she has some connection to the Priest's group," Morrison said.
"Or at least some knowledge of it."
"Should we go put her on the rack?"
Arkin stood quiet for a moment, thinking. "I don't know. Needless to say, we can't compel her to talk by any legal means."
"Sure we can."
"By any legal means."
"Well. Bit of a gray area, that. Anyway, you're already a fugitive. And I'm already an accomplice. Whether or not something is technically legal isn't such a huge concern if you ask me."
"Please."
"If it'd make you feel better, we could run our enhanced interrogation plan by that former attorney general guy—what's his name—John Ashcroft. See if it's kosher."
"And then what? Drop her down a hole? Let her run off and alert Sheffield that two renegade vigilante knuckleheads are following his trail to Chile? Spook the quarry? Flush him a second time, and then have no viable leads that we could use to ever find him again?"
"So now what?"
"Now we go to Valparaiso, Chile," Arkin said, taking a close-up photo of the silver necklace in the picture with Killick and the Native American-looking women. "Can you get the time off?"
"I'm feeling sick again. A medium-term illness coming on. I'm thinking it's malaria or amoebic dysentery. C
an you believe it?"
"No. But will your superiors?"
"They love me. Anyway, they'll be doing me a favor if they caught me fibbing and fired me. I'd just go to work as a horse breaker."
NINETEEN
They booked their flights separately, Arkin using his stolen passport and fraudulent credit card. Morrison departed two days ahead, planning—for what it was worth—to scout the old colonial Chilean port city of Valparaiso. To get the lay of the land.
Arkin's smartphone chirped as he sat in a departure lounge at Washington-Dulles International Airport. He had a new email. He opened it to discover that it was from a researcher at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. The text was comprised of a detailed description of the diamond pattern he'd seen on the silver necklace in Killick's photo and on Lily Bryant's rug. He'd sent the photo he took to Morrison who, in-turn, had tracked down the appropriate expert at the Smithsonian through a friend of a friend. According to the expert, the silver necklace was a trapelacucha—a popular and traditional form of jewelry among the Mapuche. The Mapuche were an indigenous tribe of southwestern Argentina and south-central Chile. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, their vast lands ran from the Aconcagua River—north of the capital city of Santiago—nearly 700 miles south to the Chiloé Archipelago. Another vanished empire.
The expert noted that the trapelacucha necklace in the photograph was unusual in that instead of having the usual twin bird symbol etched into the upper plate, it featured a diamond motif symbol known as a "nge-nge," which was a Mapuche term for "eyes that are windows to the soul."
Arkin sat pondering this new information as passengers gathered for his flight. For one thing, it meant that Lily probably had some sort of connection to or at least knowledge of the Priest's group. But how far did it go, exactly? Had her brother founded the group, moved to Chile, and then sent her the Mapuche rug as a gift at some point before he died? At the very least, then, she'd known that her brother hadn't died on the Mississippi River in 1974, but had instead run off to Canada and then South America. But did her knowledge or involvement go further than that? Should he call off his trip to Chile in order to find out? No. Morrison was already down there. Plus, Arkin knew the group had a connection to the Valparaiso fax number. He also knew it was only a matter of time before William Cassady of Seattle realized that someone had stolen his I.D. and alerted the authorities, thereby rendering Arkin's passport and credit card useless. No, he'd go to Chile while he still could. He could always come back at a later date to deal with Lily.
TWENTY
Out of an abundance of caution and hoping to make it difficult for anyone to trace his movements, Arkin took a circuitous route south. He flew from Washington, D.C. to Mexico City. From there, he paid cash for a long-haul bus ticket to the small city of Tapachula, down near the border with Guatemala. There, as he'd hoped, he was able to pay cash for his next flight, and avoid using his Cassady identity altogether, by giving the ticketing agent an extra $20 worth of pesos to issue his ticket to Chile in the name of Hector Juarez. No airline or bus service would have any record of a William Cassady travelling any farther than Mexico City. From Tapachula, he took a regional flight—on a new Bombardier turboprop—to Guatemala City. There, he remained in the terminal to avoid having to go through customs, then caught his continuing flight to Bogota, Columbia, and, at long last, Santiago, Chile.
TWENTY-ONE
"You must pay a fee," the Chilean customs officer said.
"Pardon?" Arkin asked. Mindful of the numerous security cameras, he was wearing a baseball cap low across his forehead, doing his best to keep his face hidden.
"You must pay a fee," she repeated in stiff, sharply annunciated English, as though it were a memorized phrase comprising her entire knowledge of the language.
"A fee?"
The officer, her hair up in a tight bun, sighed in frustration as she pointed to a booth on the far side of the entrance hall that Arkin had passed without noticing, off to the side of the main customs queue. He took deep breaths and blinked his eyes repeatedly as he made his way there, trying to clear his gummed eyes and shake off the fatigue of his restless red-eye flight. Arriving at the proper queue, he asked an American backpack-wielding girl what the fee was about.
"It's a reciprocity fee. It's like a $130."
"Do they take credit cards?"
"I don’t know."
Arkin cursed himself for not reading the travel tips sections of the Chile guidebooks he studied in Seattle bookstores while plotting his route south. He was down to $62 in cash, which he'd hoped to use on bus fare to his rendezvous with Morrison. A customs entry fee was such a trivial thing. Yet it could be his undoing. How could he have been so stupid? Plus, he'd now have to use the Cassady credit card, wrecking his efforts to obscure his trail from anyone who might have ready access to credit card data. His arrival in Chile could still be tracked through his use of the Cassady passport. But foreign customs entry data was often a lot harder to get hold of than American credit card data.
"Do you take credit cards?" he asked as he at last reached the counter.
"Si."
The clerk swiped his William Cassady Visa card. Arkin heard a beep. The clerk swiped it again, then waited. And Arkin waited, watching the clerk’s eyes. What was happening? Arkin couldn’t see the screen of the card reader, but wouldn’t have been able to read the Spanish even if he could. Several seconds went by. Was something wrong? The clerk was still focused on the reader, waiting. Then, another beep.
"Sir, the card no, ah, no accept."
Oh, shit. Could the existence of the fraudulent card have been discovered this quickly? Unlikely. Maybe it was just a security policy of the issuing bank to block overseas transactions without prior notice of planned travel from the cardholder. He should have called to tell them he would be travelling abroad. Another silly error with potentially disastrous consequences. But the cause of the decline hardly mattered now. He turned the credit card over to view the customer service number. But it was a futile gesture. He knew perfectly well that his cheap cell phone wouldn't work in South America.
"I don’t have cash. Is there a wire transfer—uh, is there a—"
The issue caught him off guard. His tired mind spun. His face felt hot. His heart pounded in his ears. He looked all around as if searching for an escape route.
"Sir?" said the girl with the backpack. "I can loan you the money to pay the difference."
Arkin exhaled. "Bless you. I can call my credit card company from a payphone as soon as we clear customs, and then draw cash from a bank machine to pay you back. And I’ll buy you any cocktail you want as a thank you gift."
"Just one? I'm kidding. No worries," she said, smiling as she handed him a wad of cash. "You can get me that Chilean cocktail, the pisco sour."
"You got it."
His reciprocity fee paid, Arkin made his way back to the passport control queue. Standing there, he began to worry anew, wondering if Chilean customs was linked up to RMAL, or any of the other new, post-9/11 international movement alert systems. If they were linked to any of the international systems, the customs officer would only have to scan the passport’s barcode, or simply key in the passport number, to access a full set of data on Cassady, along with an enlarged full-color photo. Did he really look enough like Cassady to pull this off? He didn’t know.
Then he worried that Cassady might already have discovered that his passport was missing and reported its loss to the State Department. He even worried—though the possibility seemed ridiculously remote—that Cassady himself might be wanted by Interpol. What wretched luck that would be.
"Norteamericano?" the kind-faced customs officer asked as Arkin walked up to his booth.
"Yes. Si."
"Passport, please."
Sure enough, the man scanned the barcode on the back page of Cassady’s passport, then looked up at the computer screen that was turned just too far for Arkin to see. The officer furrowed his eyebrows, gave Ar
kin a glance, then resumed his examination of whatever was on the screen. A few seconds later, he picked up his telephone, pressed a pre-programmed button, and muttered something into the receiver. All Arkin could make out was, "Si, si." He hung up, looked up at Arkin with an obviously forced smile, and said, "Momento, señor."
Arkin stiffened, but didn’t panic. After the reciprocity fee scare, his senses were in overdrive, his mind kicked up to a heighted level of function and awareness that he used to call "combat mode" back in the days of his recon and counterintelligence work. In this state of mind, his thoughts seemed to speed up while the world around him slowed down. He was better able to think, to prepare, to act quickly.
Had they somehow figured out that nobody named William Cassady had been on the flight from Bogota? Were they expecting to see a passport in the name of Hector Juarez? He couldn't imagine their customs security was that quick or tight. Then again, anything was possible. Whatever the case, it was obvious there was going to be trouble. Perhaps he didn’t look enough like Cassady to fool this official. Perhaps the passport was somehow compromised.
In due course, Arkin saw two uniformed customs officers, each with holstered side-arms, emerge from an unmarked door in a far wall and make a beeline for him. They would probably take him back through the same doorway. He could try to run for it, but the exit to the terminal was still a good distance down a crowded corridor, and there were too many people around who could play good Samaritan and try to trip him up. No—as long as they didn’t try to cuff him on the spot, he’d wait for a better opportunity.
"Sir, would you come with me, please?" asked one of them, taking the Cassady passport from the other officer. At a bulky 6-foot, he was the larger of the two who'd come from the unmarked door.
"Is there a problem?"
"Come with me, please, sir."
Arkin wasn’t about to push his luck demanding an explanation. If he made a scene, it would give them all the more reason to cuff him. And both officers were carrying what looked like Peerless model P010 handcuffs. He nodded, and followed the larger officer toward the unmarked door, while the second officer followed behind, too close for good escort technique. Passing though the doorway, Arkin was pleased to see a long, dimly-lit, windowless passageway that made a 90-degree turn at its end. As soon as the door closed behind them, Arkin threw a vicious elbow into the trailing officer’s nose, dropping him to the ground. The sound of the strike got the big, lead officer turning for a look. But before he could come around to effectively defend himself, Arkin hit the side of the officer's neck with his forearm. The officer fell to the floor, unconscious. Arkin turned to see the trailing officer also unconscious, flat on his back and bloody, but hopefully not fatally injured.
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