by Jake Needham
Tay was just messing with Claire, of course. He had no intention of buying any kind of a car, and certainly not an American one. On the other hand, there was something about the Mustang. Maybe he ought to at least think about it a little before he blew off the idea completely.
The Mustang was a bit on the small and intimate side, but there were a lot of worse things, Tay thought, than being trapped in a small and intimate car with Claire. As long as he didn’t stumble into some unexpected way to make a fool out of himself, it was an arrangement that held real possibilities.
Tay had never been very good with women. Maybe it was mostly a matter of proximity and practice. He hadn’t been around that many women in his life, at least not at close quarters such as the Mustang provided, so he hadn’t had much experience in trying to figure out how not to come across as a complete meatball on those occasions when he did get up close with them. So here he was now, sitting less than an arm’s length away from a genuinely attractive and interesting woman, and his customary feelings of apprehension were bubbling away energetically right beneath the surface.
In spite of his nervousness, however, things seemed to be working out okay so far. Here he and Claire were, right next to each other, and they were carrying on a perfectly normal conversation and behaving like old and intimate friends. Well… intimate, he supposed, if you used the word in its very broadest sense, of course.
Maybe it was the car that was making all this feel so normal. Maybe if he had bought a Mustang twenty years ago, he would be a different man today.
Probably not.
Claire was much too young for him. He completely understood that. Still, for just a moment, Tay felt himself wishing he were a younger and better-looking man. For just a moment, he wanted to be everything other than what he was. The folly of age spared no one, he realized, not even him.
Oh Lord, Tay thought to himself, don’t let me turn into an old fool here.
Then the feeling passed as quickly as it had appeared. Wanting something you couldn’t have, and trying to be something you could never be, were a way of life for some people. Tay just wasn’t one of them.
They drove south on the George Washington Parkway past Arlington Cemetery and turned off into a bland-looking neighborhood where the streets were lined with undistinguished medium-size apartment buildings, all of which looked more or less alike to Tay.
“Rebecca Sternwood’s apartment building is up here on the left,” Claire said.
She scooped her iPhone up off the Mustang’s console, glanced at it out of the corner of her eye, and tapped an icon with her thumb.
“Her car is in the garage at her apartment building so she’s still probably at home. We don’t have any information to suggest that she rides with anyone else or uses public transportation.”
“And your phone just told you all that?”
Claire handed the phone to Tay. He looked down at the screen and saw a map with a blinking green dot on it.
“Tracker. Woods put it on her car last night.”
Where would Americans be without their toys?
That was what Tay thought, but he kept it to himself. He just nodded and put Rebecca’s phone back down on the console.
“That’s her building there,” Claire said, pointing through the windshield.
The building she indicated was new-looking, five stories tall and constructed of red brick with large black-framed windows divided into small panes. The effect was to make it look vaguely like some industrial warehouse which had been reclaimed and turned into apartments for high-salaried young urban professionals.
The building’s main entrance was at the exact center of its front, but it didn’t look like a building where many of the residents came and went on foot. Like most Americans, Tay guessed, they drove themselves wherever they went in automobiles, frequently quite large ones. The real action would be the residents coming and going through the garage. He wondered where it was.
“The garage entrance is on the next cross street,” Claire said just then, almost as if she were reading his mind. “Look off to the right.”
Sure enough, Tay looked to the right and saw a white Mercedes sedan drive up a ramp from what was obviously an underground garage and turn away from them.
The neighborhood didn’t look promising as a place to take the woman unaware. He wouldn’t be surprised if she never set foot on the streets here at all. They were utilitarian passageways for automobiles, not centers of urban life like the streets in his neighborhood in Singapore. He doubted anyone spent any more time on them than they absolutely had to.
“Can we do a couple of loops through the neighborhood?” Tay asked, “just to get an idea of how she probably lives around here.”
But Tay was just being thorough. He could see already.
Rebecca Sternwood didn’t live around here. Nobody lived around here. It was one of those American neighborhoods in which upper middle-income workers were warehoused, but in which very little real, actual living was done.
They drove the streets around the building for ten minutes or so, but Tay saw nothing to cause him to change his mind.
Maybe he ought to just walk up to her apartment and ring the doorbell. After all, the simplest approach to a problem was usually the best. Complicated, well planned undertakings frequently ended up biting you in the ass. It was the simple plans that worked.
“Where’s her office from here?” Tay asked.
“Everybody always thinks of Langley, Virginia, when they think of the CIA, but the Agency has expanded so much since 9/11 that now it’s spread all over this area in dozens of different buildings. Rebecca Sternwood’s office is in a building on Richmond Highway, close to Reagan Airport. The area’s called Crystal City.”
“Is that close to here?”
“Maybe fifteen minutes south.”
“So, she just gets into her car in the garage of her apartment building every morning and drives fifteen minutes south to her office, then she drives fifteen minutes back home every evening. Does she ever go anywhere else?”
“According to the intelligence we have, she stops for breakfast a couple of mornings every week at an IHOP near here.”
“What in the world is that?”
“You don’t have IHOP’s in Singapore?”
“I hop? What in God’s name are you talking about?”
“Not I hop, IHOP. It’s an acronym. International House of Pancakes. It’s a sort of diner. But they don’t call it International House of Pancakes anymore. They just call it IHOP. I guess they thought that sounded better.”
“How could anyone be dumb enough to think that?”
Tay knew that if he lived to be a hundred he would never understand Americans. IHOP? Good God.
“You want to check it out?” Claire asked.
“How could I possibly resist going to see a place named I hop?”
The IHOP turned out to be a bland looking one-story structure set at the front of a Target Store parking lot. The walls were whitewashed concrete, and blue canvas awnings shaded each of the large windows providing diners a view of very little other than cars scattered over a parking lot. The main entrance was capped by an out-of-proportion tower with a blue peaked roof that made the whole building look as if it had been drawn by a child.
“Let’s drive all the way around it,” Tay suggested. “Maybe there’s another entrance on the other side.”
There wasn’t. There was a dumpster with a metal door next to it that appeared to provide access to the kitchen, but there was no other entrance.
They drove back to the front, parked, and looked around.
“Is the parking lot always this empty?” Tay asked Claire.
“I don’t know. Probably more or less. It’s a pretty big lot.”
“Then we could approach her when she parks her car without anyone else around,” Tay said. “I like it.”
“Inside might work better.”
Tay peered doubtfully at the building, but he couldn’t
see into it very well from where they were.
“If she thinks other people are listening to us,” he said, “that will affect what she says. Out here in the parking lot she’ll know that we’re not being overheard.”
“But she might feel conspicuous standing here talking to you and that won’t help either.”
Tay still looked doubtful.
“Maybe the place won’t be crowded when she gets here,” Claire said. “Let’s go in and look around.”
Inside, the IHOP was a lot bigger than it looked. Two double lines of booths upholstered in brown plastic were laid out in an L-shape around a kitchen and service area. There must have been sixty or more of them in all and only a dozen were occupied.
“Let’s sit down,” Claire said. “I’m hungry.”
“I don’t like pancakes.”
“They have all sorts of stuff, not just pancakes. Come on.”
Claire walked a short distance down the row of booths closest to the windows and slid into one well away from any of the other customers. Tay sat opposite her and picked up one of the plastic-coated menus lying on the table. It was illustrated with impossibly colorful pictures of all sorts of very American-looking food and was so lengthy that Tay was still turning the pages when a young black woman wearing a blue apron came over to their booth.
“Welcome to IHOP,” she announced, and her warm and apparently genuine smile made the phrase come across as less automatic than it probably was. “Can I get you something to drink?”
“Coffee for me,” Claire said.
The waitress looked at Tay.
“I’ll have a coffee, too,” he said.
That caused her to smile some more.
“I love your accent, honey. Where you from?”
“I’m from Singapore.”
The woman’s face took on a look of puzzlement. “Where?”
“Singapore. It’s near…”
Tay looked at Claire for help.
“It’s near China,” Claire finished.
“It is?” Tay asked.
Now the waitress looked thoroughly baffled.
“Well, wherever it is, you sure got a cute accent, honey. You all ready to order?”
Tay’s mouth opened in astonishment as Claire ordered something she called a Rooty Tooty Fresh and Fruity.
“You just made that up,” he said to her.
“No, really. It’s on the menu. Pancakes with fruit.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It’s real good, honey,” the waitress put in. “Really. You ought to try it.”
Claire was grinning so hugely that Tay thought her face might be in danger of cracking.
“I’ll just have plain pancakes,” Tay said. “With bacon, please.”
“I thought you didn’t like pancakes,” Claire said.
Tay just grunted. He knew he had said that, but the truth was he didn’t actually remember ever eating any pancakes before, although of course he knew what they were.
“Okay,” the waitress said. “Then that’s one stack of pancakes with bacon, and one Rooty Tooty Fresh and Fruity. Coffee coming up right away.”
“Near China?” Tay asked when the waitress had gone.
“That’s the easiest way to explain it. Most Americans think Asia is China and nowhere else in Asia amounts to anything.”
“They’re pretty much right about that,” Tay grumbled.
The food came so quickly that Tay couldn’t believe it. He might not be too fond of most things American, but he had to give Americans their due. Most everything worked better in America than anyplace else in the world.
Tay and Claire chatted inconsequentially while they ate. It had been a while since Tay had eaten a meal alone with a beautiful woman and he had to admit he was rather enjoying it. He had forgotten how much pleasure a warm, melodious voice and a gentle, companionable smile added to even the simplest of meals. The pancakes tasted better than he expected, too.
At the same time Tay was eating and taking pleasure in Claire’s company, however, he was doing his job, too. He was watching and taking careful note of the pattern of activity in the dining room.
“This could work if it’s no more crowded than this,” he said when they had refilled their coffee cups from the carafe the waitress had left them. “She comes here all the time so she’ll be comfortable and off guard. If there’s no one sitting in the booths on either side of us or directly across the aisle, we’re not going to be overheard.”
“If it’s too crowded, we always have the parking lot as a backup.”
“How often does she eat here?” Tay asked.
“The intelligence profile says she has breakfast here once or twice a week.”
Tay peered at the empty plate smeared with syrup on which his stack of pancakes had been served.
“If it was any more often than that, she’d probably be the size of a small house,” he sighed. “Do we know the last time she was here?”
“That’s not in the profile. I can ask.”
“Don’t bother. Whenever it was, either we’re going to get lucky or we’re not. Let’s give it a couple of days. If she hasn’t turned up by then, we’ll just walk right up to the door of her apartment and knock on it.”
“Works for me.”
But they didn’t have to go to her apartment and knock on the door.
Because they were lucky.
The very next morning, Rebecca Sternwood left her apartment just before eight o’clock. Tay and Claire watched her car roll out of the underground garage and followed her as she drove straight to the IHOP, parked out front, and went inside for breakfast.
She didn’t have the slightest inkling that the life she had so carefully built for herself was all but over.
Chapter Thirty-Five
“Miss Sternwood?”
When Rebecca Sternwood looked up, Tay’s first thought was how interesting looking she was. He had caught glimpses of her in the Pattaya surveillance videos, of course, and he had surmised she was an attractive woman, but he wasn’t entirely prepared for how arresting her appearance actually was now that she was right in front of him.
She had a high forehead with sculptured brows, and her shiny black hair was pulled back tightly against her head and wrapped into a tight bun at the back. Her complexion was so pale that her oval face, accented by high, wide cheekbones and ending in an oddly square, mannish-looking chin, appeared nearly translucent.
But it was her eyes that drew most of Tay’s attention. Big, almond-shaped eyes that were more green than brown and were scattered with golden flecks. They were a cat’s eyes, and they utterly riveted him.
She wore a dark blue blazer cut wide on her shoulders and under it a white turtleneck that appeared to be cashmere. It was an expensive look, one well suited to a woman who looked just as expensive.
Attractive women in Tay’s experience knew they were attractive and were accustomed to using their attractiveness to manipulate the people they dealt with, the men in particular, of course. He was supposed to put her off balance, not the other way around, so it wouldn’t do for Rebecca Sternwood to dismiss him as a typical male seeking her attention and approval before he had even spoken a word to her. What Tay wanted was to plant in her a tiny seed of unease as to what this was all about, so as he stood there beside the booth looking down at her he worked to keep his face completely still and his eyes utterly empty. He wondered if he succeeded.
Rebecca Sternwood looked back at him, her face as empty as he hoped his was, and pursed her lips slightly, either trying to remember who he was or striking a pose that was supposed to demonstrate that she was doing her best to remember. After a moment, she leaned forward against the table on her forearms and nudged her coffee cup slightly to one side. When she finally spoke, it was in a voice that was low pitched and throaty. Tay wondered if she was a smoker.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m terrible with faces. You’ll have to remind me who you are.”
Tay doubted s
he was terrible with faces. He really did.
He sat down in the booth directly opposite her and mirrored her posture of leaning forward on the table with folded arms.
“We’ve never met,” he said.
“Whoever you are then, you’re very rude. I didn’t invite you to sit here.”
Tay liked her voice, particularly its slightly husky tone. The sound of it made him think of Lauren Bacall in some old black and white film he had seen once on late night television, although he couldn’t come up with the name of the film right off the top of his head.
“I thought you would prefer to have this conversation away from your office,” Tay said, “but I’m happy to go there if you prefer. You’re in Crystal City, aren’t you? Or, here’s an idea, maybe you could reserve a conference room at Langley and we could have our conversation there. That would save you a trip to explain everything to your superiors when we’re done talking.”
She was good. Tay had to give her that. She never even blinked at his demonstration that he not only knew who she was but he also knew that she worked for the CIA and even where her office was. She just looked back at him and smiled and frowned at the same time.
“Who are you?”
“I’m Inspector Samuel Tay.”
“Inspector? You’re some kind of policeman?”
“I’m an investigator for Interpol.”
She nodded slightly and seemed to think about that.
“Do you have identification?” she asked.
Tay removed the leather badge case that the Conductor had given him from his inside jacket pocket, opened it, and placed it on the table in front of her. Her eyes went first to the gold badge that said INTERPOL OFFICER and then to the identification card with his picture that identified him as a Criminal Intelligence Officer. Without unfolding her arms, she pulled the badge case toward her with one finger. She appeared to study the identification card with some care, but she did not pick it up. After a few moments, Tay reached over, closed the badge case, and put it back in his pocket.
Had she bought the Interpol scam? He supposed he would find out soon enough now.
