by Blake Banner
“It is largely up to you,” she said. “He has a house in Pacific Palisades, Corona del Mar, overlooking the ocean. Security is very high-tech, cutting edge, as you’d imagine, and from what we have been able to ascertain he has both dogs and armed guards on the premises. You should also be aware that he has his wife and two children with him.”
I cut a creamy slice of Stilton and balanced it on a dry cracker. “Children?”
“A boy of fifteen and a twelve-year-old girl. They both go to boarding school, but they come home for the weekends.”
I grunted and popped the cracker in my mouth. “What about the wife?”
“We don’t know much about her. Apparently she drinks a lot and spends most of her time by the pool. She’s about twenty years younger than him, used to be a model, now losing her looks and after a couple of hushed up affairs seems to be under twenty-four-hour guard.”
“Not much use. How about affairs, lovers, friends…?”
“Again, not much. He is known to have call girls visit the house, but never the same one twice, and they are rigorously checked by his bodyguards.” She sipped her cognac, frowned and made an “mmh…” sound. “There is one potential contact in that general area. Her name is Sheila Newton. She is his personal assistant at the Los Angeles offices of the foundation. She’s pretty and spends a lot of time with him, day and night. Ostensibly they are working, and I have to say we have no evidence at all that they are having an affair, or that she knows what kind of stuff he is into. We assume both, but we don’t know.”
“I take it we have photographs.”
“Will you take the job?”
“I told you already I will.”
“I’ll get the file to you first thing in the morning.”
“I’m especially interested in Sheila Newton. She might be the weak link in his armor.”
“I’ll send you profiles on him—obviously—her, the kids, the wife, and his security team. They are about as good as you can get in the private sector. We also have plans and satellite photographs of the house and up-to-date information on his security system.” She paused to sip her brandy, let it linger a moment and swallowed. “It’s tight, as tight as you’d expect from a man in his position, who also deals in weapons worldwide.”
I nodded and spoke absently, half to myself, as I cut into the cheese.
“Maybe I’ll have to draw him out.”
“That’s fine, the brigadier was very clear on this point. The planning and execution of the mission is yours, unequivocally, in every way except for one detail.”
I scowled with the cheese halfway to my mouth. “And what’s that?”
“It has to look like an accident.”
“Shit!” I swore under my breath. “It’s not enough that the hit is untraceable?”
“No. He was categorical and I agree with him. Cavendish is too high profile and he has too many powerful connections, establishment and criminal. His murder would trigger not one but several investigations, most of them unofficial, and that is attention we really do not need right now. He has to go, but it has to be convincing as an accident.”
I sighed. “OK, I see that. Fine, send me the stuff and I’ll get started tomorrow.”
She held up her glass and I tapped it with mine. As I sipped she paused and smiled.
“Hey,” she said, “we spoke for a full half hour without you being a pain in the ass. It was nice.” I drew breath and she held up a finger. “Don’t spoil it by being a smartass now.”
She sipped, still smiling over the edge of her glass. I sighed, smiling too, feeling mellow with the wine and the whisky.
“You’re right. It was nice.” I laughed softly. “Leaving aside what we were discussing, it was nice not to be sniping at each other.” I gave my head a small shake and looked into my glass like I might find an answer in there. “I don’t know why we do it.”
There was a warm, amused challenge in her smile now. “Is this where we become honest and open up to each other?”
I didn’t answer straight away. “Would that be such a bad thing?”
She laughed suddenly, and it was a sweet sound. Suddenly I was not seeing the colonel, but a beautiful, elegant woman who was also intelligent and eloquent. Her laughter subsided but her smile remained. “Next thing you’ll be ordering salad and preaching the benefits of vegan living.”
“Vegan? Wasn’t that a planet on Star Trek?”
She ignored the facetious question. “I’m serious, Harry. Am I seeing a real, sensitive person under that rock-hard, macho exterior? Don’t get me wrong, I’d consider it a privilege.”
I leaned forward, with my elbows on the table, and had another look into my whisky. There was still no answer in there. I drew breath, watched her eyebrows climb and gave a small laugh of my own.
“I was about to give you a smartass answer, but changed my mind. To be perfectly honest, Jane, I don’t know. Supposing there was a real, sensitive person underneath this exterior, I couldn’t do this job if I acknowledged it. I can be honest, I can be serious.” I shrugged. “I have to be, to survive. But getting in touch with my feminine side? Sandals and vegan shoes…?”
I paused because the expression on her face said she was enjoying what I was saying. She laughed.
“Harry, I have to confess something. I think you are primitive, primal, uncivilized and some kind of a monster. Sometimes you drive me to distraction and I want to lock you away somewhere. But,” she frowned among her smile, “but I like you. I like the fact that you are the way you are. And I think I like it because there is a part of me that is the same. I suppress it…”
“The way I suppress my sensitivity.”
“Yes.” She nodded. “And my upbringing and my education and my training all mean I can never express that side of myself. But I see it manifest in you. And I guess I like that.”
She was leaning forward. Our hands were bare inches away from each other. Her face, also close, was bathed in amber candlelight.
“Is that why we snipe all the time?” I asked. “Because we see in each other the risk of having to open up?”
“Is it a risk, Harry?”
“Well,” I gave a short, quiet laugh, “right now I am talking in a way I don’t think I have ever talked in my life.”
“Never? Not even with all those women you bed when you travel around the world?”
“Never, Jane. Especially not to them.” She made a pensive face but I didn’t let her answer. “How about you? Are you at risk of becoming primal and primitive, uncivilized and some kind of monster?”
Her eyebrow arched. “Would you like that?”
“I think I might. Would you?”
Suddenly her expression was serious. The air changed and there was an undefined, exhilarating danger in the air. I felt a thump in my chest and my belly burned.
“Yes,” she said. “I would.”
Her fingers touched my hand. I signaled the waiter for the check. We didn’t speak as we collected our coats and stepped out into the night. The breeze was cold and made me shudder. I opened the passenger door of the TVR and helped her in, then I climbed in behind the wheel. I sat for a moment looking out at the lights of 6th Avenue, then turned to look at her. I could see her chest rising and falling. She wouldn’t look at me.
I said, “You want a nightcap at my place?”
She still wouldn’t look at me. “Yes,” she said.
Again the burning jolt in my gut, but as I reached for the starter she put her hand on mine.
“But I can’t, Harry. It was fun and it was exciting, more than you know. But you are a dangerous man, in too many ways. Know that I want to…” She closed her eyes. “But you had better take me back to my hotel. I’m sorry.”
I sighed, then made a feeble attempt at a smile. “Yeah, me too.”
* * *
Next morning I rose at five, showered and dressed. At six the colonel’s file arrived by private courier, containing, as well as all the information she had promised
me, the keys to an apartment in Santa Monica; and by seven I was on my way to Los Angeles. I crossed the George Washington Bridge and picked up the I-80 past Fort Lee, at Exit 69. Then I settled in to listening to the Eagles and Led Zeppelin while burning up the blacktop and breaking the speed limit wherever I could.
At a little before nine AM I stopped at the Dutch Pantry, in Clearfield, to have a breakfast of two eggs, bacon, toast and a bucket of black coffee, seated by a plate-glass window with panoramic views of McDonald’s and the Clearfield Shawville Highway. I was reading the file and mopping up the last of the egg yolk when my cell rang.
“Yeah.”
“Harry.” It was the brigadier. He sounded like a man trying hard not to sound worried. “You on your way?”
“Yeah, what can I do for you?”
“I gather you saw Jane last night.”
“Sure, I told her everything was OK.” I waited, he said nothing. “What’s the problem, sir?”
“I haven’t heard from her.”
A strange coldness settled over my head and face.
“I picked her up from her hotel at seven thirty. We went to Keens, had dinner and I drove her back to her hotel at shortly before one.”
“She said nothing to you which in retrospect…”
I shook my head like he could see me. “No, nothing.”
“I should have heard from her by now. This is a little worrying.” That was his English understatement and then some.
“What do you want me to do?”
“No, nothing.”
“You want me to come back and look for her?”
“No, Harry, we have people especially trained for that kind of thing. She may well simply have slept in. Continue as arranged. I’ll be in touch if there are developments.”
He hung up and I sat for a while, feeling numb. Sometimes you feel you have to do something, but the best thing you can do is let somebody else do it for you. Because they are going to do it better and faster than you could. When it affects somebody you care about, that’s tough.
I drained my coffee and went out to my car, telling myself the brigadier was probably the most competent man I knew. If he had people especially trained in tracking and recovery, they would get the job done. Even so, it was about all I could do to turn the machine west and keep going.
It was a forty-hour drive, though in the TVR I did it in a little under thirty-five, and I stopped twice at roadside motels to get four hours’ sleep, before driving on. I eventually made it to LA at five AM, forty-three hours out from Manhattan, stiff and in need of a shower and a good sleep.
Cobra had provided me with an apartment on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica. It was in a 1930s block, with broad plate-glass windows and big, bold terraces overlooking the ocean, the kind of place where Philip Marlowe might have shed his trilby and his pipe, to growl at some dangerous dame.
I parked out front, let myself in to a sage-green foyer with twee brass lamps and a mahogany desk where, in the good old days, there would have been a porter in a sage green coat, and rode the elevator three floors to apartment 4B.
There was a large, broad living room with a couple of calico sofas and armchairs beside the sliding-glass doors that gave onto the terrace, and a dining area with an antique, Castilian sideboard and a comprehensive bar. The kitchen was separate, with a huge, well-stocked fridge, and down a short passage off the dining area there were a study and two bedrooms.
I unpacked my bags, had a shower and then fell into bed for a good four hours’ sleep. I awoke at ten, had another shower and made myself a generous plate of bacon, eggs, sausages, mushrooms and toast, with a pot of freshly ground, very black, caffeine-rich coffee. I carried it to the terrace and was about to sit and eat when the doorbell rang. Nobody knew I was there, so I was interested. I went and opened the door.
There was a man of about fifty, tall, with very short graying hair and an immaculate United States Air Force uniform. He removed his hat and said, “Good morning.”
I nodded once. “Good morning…”
“Are you Harry Bauer?”
“Yes, who are you…” I flicked my eyes over his uniform. “…Colonel?”
“I am Colonel James Armitage, United States Air Force. May I speak with you, Mr. Bauer?”
I frowned at him. “Probably, but I think I’d like to know what it’s about first, Colonel. I can’t imagine what the United States Air Force would want to talk to me about, and I am also very curious as to how you knew I was here. I live in New York and I arrived just a few hours ago.”
He sighed. “It’s better we talk inside, Mr. Bauer. I’m here looking for Colonel Jane Harris. It seems you were the last person to see her.”
I stood back and let him in, closed the door behind him. I gestured toward the terrace. “I was about to have breakfast. You want some coffee?”
“Sure, thanks.”
He followed me out to the terrace and sat opposite me at the table. I poured him a cup and he winced as he sipped it. I cut into my eggs and bacon.
“Colonel, before I answer any questions of yours, I’d like to know first of all, why you are looking for Jane. What has happened to her? And I’d also like to know what makes you say I was the last person to see her.”
“Colonel Jane Harris has disappeared. The last record we have of her, she was dining at Keens, in New York. We questioned staff there and they said she was dining with Harry Bauer, a regular. You paid by American Express, the same card with which you paid for gas on your way to LA. A call to the DMV told us you drove a TVR Griffith, latest model. Nice car, but conspicuous. We caught up with you at your last pit stop and followed you in this morning. You arrived at five-o-eight.”
I chewed and watched him for a few seconds, then swallowed and sipped coffee while I thought.
“I picked her up from her hotel at seven thirty. That was, as I am sure you know, the Hyatt, Union Square. We went to Keens, had dinner and chatted, then I drove her back to her hotel at shortly before one. The last I saw of her she was going into the hotel. I assume you’ve spoken to the staff there.”
He nodded. “Of course we have, and nobody remembers her returning. They remember her leaving with you, but nobody remembers her coming back.”
I shook my head. “I parked the car outside the entrance. She got out…”
“You didn’t help her out?”
I smiled. “Did you know the colonel personally?”
“We were acquainted.”
“Then you should know she is not the kind of woman who waits for a man to run around the car and help her out. She got out on her own, closed the door and said goodnight, then crossed the sidewalk and pushed through the door. I left.”
He picked up his cup and examined it, decided against drinking it and set it back down in the saucer.
“Mr. Bauer, would you mind telling me what the nature of your relationship was, with Colonel Harris?”
Three
We had been through it. If I was ever asked to explain how I knew either the brigadier or the colonel, what was I to say? The answers had been scripted, and corroboration had been devised, should it ever be needed, in the form of telephone numbers, addresses and mutual friends.
So I regarded Colonel James Armitage for a moment like I found his question intrusive and impertinent, then sighed heavily. “Jane and I were acquaintances. More recently we had started to develop a friendship. She spends most of her time in Washington, but when she is in New York she visits me and we sometimes go out to dinner.”
“If you’ll forgive me, Mr. Bauer, I can’t help wondering if your relationship wasn’t a little more than just friends. Or, more precisely, whether you wanted it to be more. Your departure, not to say flight, from New York to Los Angeles seems to have been very abrupt and sudden, and precisely on the day Colonel Harris disappeared…”
“Yeah?” I laid down my knife and fork. “Aren’t you reaching a little, Colonel? What was abrupt or sudden about it? Not that it’s any of your damned busin
ess, but I have been planning this visit for a couple of months. Do you know anything about my background, Colonel?”
“Yes, I know that you were in the British Special Air Service. You weren’t exactly drummed out, but they weren’t handing out gold watches, either. And I know that since you left and moved back to New York, you’ve become a very rich man.”
“You know more than that, Colonel. You know that a man with my kind of training and experience would not kidnap or kill a mark like Colonel Harris without first providing himself with a cast-iron alibi, and he sure as hell would not run at five in the morning in a TVR Griffith, use his AMEX and go and stay in a beachfront apartment in Santa Monica, with his car parked right out front.” I raised my hand as he drew breath. “And that is a lot of double bluff, even for a man with my background.”
He sat expressionless for a long moment, as his eyes flicked over my face. Maybe he had a diploma in mentalism, or NLP, and he was trying to calibrate me. Eventually he said, “That had better be true, Mr. Bauer.”
“Or what?”
He didn’t answer so I said:
“If you want to find Colonel Harris, then you had better start by finding out who was in that foyer between twelve midnight and one AM. You’d better also have a good, close look at who was on reception. Because Jane disappeared between the sidewalk on 4th Avenue and the foyer of the Union Square Hyatt. I saw her go in. According to you nobody saw her enter the lobby. So that’s where she disappeared.”
“Are you trying to tell me she disappeared between two sets of sliding glass doors? You think maybe she was beamed onto the Enterprise?”
“Either she was intercepted between those two sets of glass doors, and hustled back out onto the street as I was driving away, or the concierge was engrossed in his cell phone when she walked in. Or the concierge is lying, and he did see her come in and he also saw what happened, but he has been bribed or he is too frightened to talk. They have a security camera on the door, Colonel, I suggest you examine the footage at one forty-five. You’ll see us arrive, you’ll see Jane get out of the car and a moment later you’ll see my car leave. Switch to the footage of the foyer and see if she makes it through the door. I guarantee if you zero in on the glass doors, you’ll see her go through the first door.”
