Time to Kill

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘They might go for it,’ conceded Bell, reluctantly.

  ‘That’s what I think,’ said Mason, with the benefit of having read Glynis Needham’s email.

  ‘I’ll give it a shot,’ accepted the lawyer. ‘But if they reject it you want me to go ahead with the claim?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Mason. ‘Then they’ll know we’re serious.’

  ‘And still might settle?’ smiled Bell.

  ‘And will settle,’ insisted Mason. It felt good to be in total control, ahead of everyone else’s thinking.

  ‘You’ve decided upon California?’ said Glynis Needham. As usual she was wearing a mannishly cut trouser suit

  ‘I’ve decided to take the trip and see what it’s like,’ qualified Mason.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tonight, arriving tomorrow,’ said Mason. ‘San Francisco. That’s where the computer industry is, in Silicon Valley.’

  The woman shook her head. ‘There are reporting restrictions governing your parole and I’m responsible for them. I can’t have you wandering about the country, not knowing where you are.’

  Mason felt a lurch of uncertainty. ‘I just told you where I’m going to be. And you told me you’ve already been in touch with people out there. You know my record, for Christ’s sake! You know I’m not going to risk anything by going AWOL … do anything stupid.’

  ‘Don’t get spiky,’ the woman warned at once.

  ‘I’m not getting spiky,’ refuted Mason. ‘I’ve told you all along, from the day you picked me up outside the prison, what I was thinking of doing. Suddenly you’re objecting.’

  ‘I’m not objecting. I’m reminding you of your parole conditions.’

  ‘I’ll make contact with whoever I’ve got to connect with as soon as I get there. All I need is a name and a contact number.’

  ‘You’re asking for a lot of trust.’

  ‘I earned a lot of trust, over fifteen years. And even more when I was given the chance to run by that asshole guard Howitt.’

  ‘We should have worked it out together. I need an address, to know where you’re going to be. Beverley needs to know.’

  ‘Beverley?’ queried Mason, almost too late.

  ‘Beverley Littlejohn. She’s the parole officer I’ve spoken to, who’s going to look after you.’

  ‘So speak to her again, now. She gets me somewhere to stay, that’s where I’ll be while I look around. From where I’ll make contact, the moment I get there.’

  ‘We should have worked it out before now,’ persisted the woman.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me before now?’ She’d been lax and she knew it, Mason guessed. As long as he judged it carefully he could go on playing hardball, pressuring her.

  ‘I thought you were dealing with the compensation.’

  ‘Which I am and which is quite separate from anything between you and I. We discussed that already.’ He hoped the pinpricks of colour that came to her face were embarrassment, not anger. To ease it, if it were – as well as maintaining the pressure – he said, ‘My lawyer is writing to the penitentiary, maybe the Pennsylvania prison authorities, too. I don’t need to be here while that’s going on. What I need to do is get myself settled. Which is what I am trying to do. All I need is somewhere to stay, if you need to know before I leave.’

  ‘I’m going to take a chance with you, Jack. I shouldn’t but I will because of your record and because you deserve the trust. I’m going to tell Beverley that you’re coming but if you don’t make contact by tomorrow I’m going to set off alarms and you’ll be back in White Deer before the weekend’s over.’

  It was the only threat she could make, Mason accepted. ‘You know that won’t happen.’

  ‘You make sure it doesn’t.’

  It only took thirty minutes and a telephone call each way between Washington DC and the Califomian parole office in San Francisco to fix a hotel at the bottom of Nob Hill which Mason reminded Glynis Needham he could afford from his mother’s inheritance. Mason’s satisfaction at knowing she was pissed off by the ease of it all was tempered by the thought that she might now rely more upon telephone than by the email to which he had unimpeded access.

  He made Reagan airport in time for an earlier shuttle than he’d intended but didn’t this time isolate the two police officers to whom he’d surrendered. He got into Manhattan just as smoothly and waved to Helene Balanda at the Chase Manhattan bank on his way to the securities desk. Mason was recognized there, too, although there was still the insistence upon the necessary identification formalities.

  Ever since he’d downloaded the Trojan Horse and set up the ghost server accesses, Mason had carried them with him at all times, even when he’d jogged, and there was a lift of relief when he finally put them into the Adam Peterson deposit box. He hesitated, looking down at the hoarded money, thinking that he was shortly collecting from the girl upstairs the Visa card that was going to be automatically settled each month from his supplemented account. Mason counted out another £10,000 to divide, part in cash to take with him, the remainder just under the legal amount to deposit in the account.

  ‘How’s it going, settling back after such a long time away, Mr Peterson?’ asked Helene Balanda when he reached her desk.

  ‘Like starting a new life,’ said Mason, handing over the cash and deposit slip in return for his new banking and charging facilities. Which was exactly what he was doing, thought Mason, about to start a new life as a new person. The farm boy whose name and identity he was taking would have probably never imagined there was so much money in the entire world. One day he might even put flowers on the kid’s grave.

  Fourteen

  The hotel was called the Halcyon Bay, although it wasn’t possible to see the harbour from his sixth-floor room, but at least Mason could make out the upper super-structure of the Golden Gate Bridge. The hotel was better than Mason had expected but he still preferred Washington’s Guest Quarters. As he’d promised Glynis Needham, he immediately telephoned the new parole officer to report his arrival. Beverley Litttlejohn responded at once to her direct line and gave him the San Francisco address and said she expected him at three. She had the details of four advertised vacancies at three separate computer firms in Silicon Valley and another across the bridge in Oaklands. Mason said he was looking forward to their meeting, which he was, curious to discover if she’d already made preliminary enquiries on his behalf and if there were any obvious sexual similarities between her and Glynis Needham.

  Mason had slept sufficiently on the overnight flight from Washington DC to embark upon his mentally prepared schedule directly after unpacking, showering and setting his intrusion traps for when he left his room. There had been a lot of psychological indicators to show Glynis Needham’s anger at Mason obviously outsmarting her in her own fiefdom, aside from the tightness with which she had relayed to the Californian parole officer his wish for an hotel rather than an hostel: ‘he has a substantial financial inheritance’. The most obvious was her repeated, threatening insistences to the woman at the other end of the telephone that if there was no immediate contact upon his San Francisco arrival she’d at once initiate a disappearance alert.

  Which had established a time frame in which Mason, still anxious that the two women might switch from email to telephone communication, knew he had to work. From his laptop Mason entered the ghost servers of both, as well as his hacked in Trojan Horses, once more from memory. He didn’t have to wait long. Within ten minutes of his speaking to her, Beverley Littlejohn’s message to Washington was intercepted by his barriers. Beverley provided not only the precise time of Mason’s call but its duration. She wrote of the computer industry vacancies she had already assembled and added that she was looking forward to the afternoon meeting ‘with my first spook and spy’. Mason let the intercepted message continue unchanged to its intended recipient. The Washington parole officer’s equally prompt reply showed the woman’s continuing irritation. Glynis Needham warned of Mason’s remarkably quick adjustme
nt from an institutionalized environment, to which his inherited financial independence obviously greatly contributed, and warned against Beverley Littlejohn being ‘snowed by bullshit’. Mason wasn’t ever to be allowed to forget his continued freedom depended upon him observing every parole condition and restriction. Mason very briefly considered editing the note but decided against doing so, passing it on untouched, relieved that both had reverted to email.

  It took Mason a further hour to install a ghost server into Patrick Bell’s already known and therefore accessible main frame, using his surname and words ‘penitentiary’ and ‘White Deer’ as the activating triggers. He found nothing new when he rode his already installed Trojan Horse into his existing file on the lawyer’s computer.

  On a San Francisco tourist street map he’d picked up on his way through the airport, Mason discovered that the address that Beverley Littlejohn had given for their meeting was conveniently just off Union Square, which gave him almost three hours to spare. He caught a trolley car up and over Nob Hill, staying on until its harbour terminal and then leisurely wandered the length of the pier, choosing a seafood restaurant at random for king prawns and Napa Valley Chablis, buying peppermints and breath fresheners from a kiosk as he continued on to take any smell from his breath. At the pier end he stood gazing out towards Alcatraz, remembering the penitentiary folklore of escapes, despite official insistences that none ever succeeded, that persisted in White Deer even when he’d arrived more than twenty years after Alcatraz’s closure. He’d go on a tourist visit, Mason decided, see how it compared to White Deer, which was considered a modern federal penitentiary. He had to find some way to fill the time before disappearing as all the prisoners who’d ever tried to escape were supposed to have disappeared in the currents of the bay, their bodies never found.

  Beverley Littlejohn didn’t bear any butch resemblance to her Washington colleague. The powder-blue V-necked sweater showed an enticing valley to explore and the darker blue tight skirt – short enough to confirm legs that went on forever – didn’t show underwear lines to suggest she was wearing anything more substantial than a thong. She was full lipped – blowing lips was Mason’s instinctive thought – and the blonde hair looped close to her shoulders. She was, in every way and appearance, exactly the type of woman upon whom Mason had preyed, and he thought that if she were gay mankind had been cheated. He might have failed with the 6th Avenue hooker – an admission he’d studiously exorcised from his mind – but he was sure he wouldn’t have had any problems with Beverley, given the chance. It could still be a jerk-off fantasy, which was all he could achieve at the moment and only then with a porn offering on the computer screen to help. He really did have a lot still to plan and put in place but it was important as well to get himself properly laid; Beverley Littlejohn’s unexpected attractiveness was an unnecessary – even unwelcomed – reminder of what he could no longer do but desperately wanted to do, had to be able to do, to restore his overly long suppressed manhood. He had to be able to get it up again, like he’d always been able to, whenever he’d wanted to, however he’d wanted to. He couldn’t – wouldn’t – become a dead-dick cripple. He was going to get everything back; everything and more.

  Aware from the emails of what had passed between the two women – ‘I can’t wait to meet my first spook and spy’ – Mason determinedly set out to undermine whatever adverse preconceptions Glynis Needham might have implanted in Beverley Littlejohn’s mind, just as determinedly testing to establish that the dossier that the woman had on the desk between them contained all his records that Glynis Needham had promised to exchange.

  Mason layered charm upon self-effacement, easily slipping into the rarely failed pussy-pounce of the intended conquest at which he’d once been so adept. He stopped just short of taking the flattery too far, sure he was getting the occasional faint flush of response but confirming even more satisfactorily that the file in front of her was his in its entirety and that she’d studied it. Her immediate acceptance of his feigned remorse and serious-faced insistence of how eager he was to reassimilate into a law-abiding society came unquestioned from Beverley – whom he doubted to be more than thirty – with the eye-holding assurance that she’d do everything she could to help if he decided to settle in California.

  ‘Glynis has promised very much the same,’ probed Mason, enjoying himself.

  ‘She takes her job very seriously.’

  ‘As you obviously do,’ Mason continued to compliment.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You know Glynis well?’

  ‘Not well. She lectured at a training seminar I was at. She looked me up later when she came out here on vacation.’

  Could he risk going closer than an inch? Of course not, it would be ridiculous. But hadn’t there been another White Deer folklore – a legend that extended to other penitentiaries in the retelling – of prisoners forming associations with female rehabilitation workers, of women actually being turned on – seeking to marry during imprisonment even – by rapists and murderers on death row, with no chance of reprieve, let alone getting into the sack together?

  ‘You must have got to know each other pretty well if you vacationed together.’

  ‘We didn’t vacation together,’ insisted Beverley, stiffly. ‘She came out on a trip and looked me up. We had dinner a couple of times. A few drinks.’

  Had ‘don’t be snowed by bullshit’ really been irritation? Or potential jealousy? A too long forgotten – and so far impossible to retrieve – feeling warmed through Mason. ‘Still good to have an apartment to use as a base rather than an hotel.’

  ‘Glynis did not use my apartment as a base.’ The denial, the words spaced for emphasis, came with more eye-holding insistence.

  Back off time, judged Mason. ‘I really do appreciate you looking out the job vacancies for me.’

  Beverley’s face relaxed into a half smile. ‘That’s an essential part of the job.’

  ‘I’m very, although sadly, lucky,’ said Mason, the awkwardness intentional, the words halting. ‘My mother, whom I loved very much, left me everything when she died, while I was in prison. It’s not urgent that I get a job right away. I will, of course. I’ve wasted enough of my life already to think of wasting any more.’ Soap-opera dialogue, he thought.

  ‘That’s good to hear.’

  ‘How do I account for the last fifteen years, if I get an interview?’

  ‘The place in Oakland is a computer refurbishing outlet. They’ve taken two guys with prison histories before.’

  ‘For things like I did?’

  The smile came again. ‘You’re a first, for what you did.’

  And could be again, although first in a way she didn’t imagine, he thought. They really were fantastic tits. ‘Oakland’s the obvious. I don’t have transport. I’ll have to work out how to get down to the valley.’

  ‘You make the appointments – all spread over the same day if you can – and I’ll run you there in my car. I need to know you’re genuinely exploring possibilities. It’s one of the conditions.’

  Fuck, thought Mason, who hadn’t intended bothering to apply for any of the vacancies, just officially establish his presence in San Francisco after Washington DC before vanishing from both, leaving each probation official believing he’d settled within the responsibility of the other. ‘I can’t impose upon you like that!’

  ‘It isn’t an imposition. It’s all part of the service.’

  Could he really fantasise about her performing another? he wondered, idly. ‘You’re quite sure?’

  ‘Quite sure.’

  ‘I’ll set things up as soon as I can.’

  ‘What do you think of California so far?’

  ‘I haven’t seen enough of anywhere to decide,’ said Mason, hoping to sound encouraging.

  ‘Maybe there’ll be the chance to see something of the place when we’re driving up and down the coast?’ Beverley suggested.

  He was going to have his head between those gorgeous le
gs, Mason guessed: it was virtually a foregone conclusion, ahead of other conclusions.

  Daniel Slater was glad he hadn’t questioned the lunchtime gin drinking because as far as he was aware – and for which he remained alert – there was no repetition after that one episode. He got the San Jose contractual confirmation four days after despatching his memorandum of agreement, which he judged to be practically by return of post, and began negotiations with his subcontracting installers at once, more immediately having them fit CCTV monitors in the four gallery rooms in which the Worlack work was to be displayed. He also had noise alarms connected to the actual hanging hooks, once their positioning had been agreed with Worlack’s exhibition designer, to sound the moment a canvas was lifted from any of them. Slater devised a secondary, linked system that automatically locked every door and emergency exit. The day before the combined meeting between himself and Ann, Worlack’s designer and the insurance assessor, Slater arranged to have fitted to every hanging chain a miniature sensor that would trigger a separate sound alarm if it passed in front of detector boxes at every door, exit and window.

  At the meeting the designer, a gesticulating man named Chernot, who talked as much with his hands as he did in a thick French accent, said, ‘It is magnificent! Far better than I’ve known in some major galleries, not just here but in Europe, as well.’

  ‘I agree, as far as America is concerned,’ said the assessor.

  Both left personal cards and promised to talk to Slater in the future about other exhibitions. The assessor only imposed a three percent increase on Ann’s temporary additional cover.